Post-structural desiring machines
The role of difference in the Process of Creativity
How might one live, how should one act, how should one live? (The correct one is the first!)
This is the introduction to a series inspired mainly by the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and also by the thoughts of Baruch Espinoza and Henri Bergson.
Creativity as a way of ordering some of the chaos surrounding us is not about finding the truth or discovering things, but introducing new concepts to explain specific problems that define our culture. My photographs depict the aesthetics of the moment uniquely.
As a science lover, I also like to make multiple exposures as they have an inherent motion that describes the function between things. Breaking down into pieces, using superimposed objects, and hiding parts creates differences. From there, new concepts can arise.
I don’t make the images I take; it’s not a process of discovering truths. I buy the negative film, capture real objects in the negative, and process the result. These are created concepts, and the photographer has a relationship with them through his process of creating new ones. The artist intends to give context to allow the picture to make sense through a particular expression, the developed art form.
Then, concept creation goes through a new cycle with the same basic steps, the difference being that the previous information has already been systematized and made its way upward in what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. For the philosopher, this plane lies beneath the creation of concepts, which makes the creation of new concepts even possible. It’s the imminent logic that precedes the concepts themselves, and as for myself, I take those as baby steps. The construction of the plane is performed by the concepts. They pave and populate the plane objectively working to keep its integrity and continuity.
From my perspective, it is something similar to Kandinsky’s triangle. Pure abstraction at work. This is what I believe in a process of creative practice. Creating a large quantity of artwork around the same concepts brings closer conceptual stability, at least to the level where the artist's work can be identified and re-identified every day of the week.
However, this is not achieved by the object that there is. In a post-structuralist view, it’s a representation not of identity but of difference. Because concepts don’t stand alone and we know we don’t have access to the truth, there is no end to the creation process, no perfect work, no unification, and the artist still has no purpose in hiding. The impostor syndrome of perfectionism loses the purpose of existing. The artist publishes at every new plane reached.
Contrary to transcendence, where one believes to have arrived at an objective, where identity or past human experiences are taken as truth, where human subjectivity becomes the ideal, the symbolic plane of immanence moves forward from what was before, growing on the creation of concepts. It’s from difference and not identity that new ideas arise. A new concept is created from the expression of a difference, not in space but in time. The past exists virtually in the plane’s present, and the present actualizes the virtual. The essence is temporal, and that is where the difference is managed. Everyday! Always!
This expressionism is the tool the artists have to actualize the past, to tactilely bring the unknowable to this new concept they are improvising. Bergson notion of time implies that the present mode carries with it the entirety of whatever happened before. The present moment isn’t the daily routine of taking the kids to school, going to work, preparing dinner. This is thinking in terms of transcendence; it is spatial. To be substantial, it is necessary to understand its actuality. Working with this method will produce new possibilities.
An essential consequence of the above is that desire as a form of access to reality is not born from a limitation or some lack. The creative process is positive and multiple; it prefers difference over uniformity and flows over unity. The work to produce creation is nomadic, not sedentary. The social individual is not at all any specific aspect of nature brought about by his parenthood, but nature as a production process. This flow powers the artwork below. When lack is introduced into desire, the discontinuity of this actuality results in dissociation from reality, and fantasy is produced. For Deleuze, this fantasy can be understood as production in the realm of Freud’s father-mother-me triangle.
The desiring machines
Deleuze believes there is no human-nature dichotomy. The former does not live nature as nature but as a process of production. The two are not separated, there exists only a process that produces one within the other and couples the machines together. Desiring-production machines everywhere. The mother’s breast is a machine with milk, and her baby’s mouth is a machine coupled to it. Deleuze philosophy is of the Anti-Aedipus.
As discussed earlier, Freud’s triangle of father-mother-me presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring machines because it takes all the importance to the spatial human experience. When we ought to go inside the Oedipal triangle, what do we find necessary to construct it? It’s not as dynamic as a machine. And more important, aren’t there more important questions?
The creative process is like tinkering. Given a particular desire, the artist creates a machine capable of linking and producing it. And given a specific machine, what can it produce is the question the artist asks. She is not at the center, occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity. The artist is defined by the states she passes through — the tinkering results from sequential forces of attraction and repulsion that create points of disjunction.
So, we are not predefined to do something. Identity is essentially fortuitous, a series of individualities that must be undergone by these violent oscillations of soaring ascents and plunging falls. For this, the ego must have left the center occupied by the machine. It must have reached a level of technical expertise that allows her to spread herself along the entire circumference of the circle, fiercely introducing desire into the mechanism and production into desire.
Creating new concepts in art is like a product that is an offshoot of production. Notably, desiring machines continually breakdown as they run, and at every plane of immanence reached, there is a desiring machine that is not functioning correctly. Artists intend to expose their work to create an immediate explosion. In their way of thinking, destructions never occur as rapidly as they ought to.
Multi-exposure with Lisbon hills in the background is a theme I have explored in previous stories, but I would like to share this new one below. Having only one first plane abolishing the third dimension helps to separate the exposures. Still, the floating stickers add to the overall flow of the image. The flow is not concentric nor has any distinctive direction. It’s shapeless and has no truth! The artwork deconstructs a phone booth with stickers posted in an urban landscape. It’s as good an illusion as any human perception is. In a real way, not a nihilistic way. Because people went by in separate moments and stapled the stickers, that past flow now exists virtually in the capture of that present.
The important thing to retain here is that this must not be confused with a goal in itself or a perpetuation. As in other aspects of society, photographing or sharing a story is production followed by immediate consumption and a recording process. This is the meaning of desiring machines for Deleuze.
My main point for this introduction
Desiring machines are both technical and social. The production process above can make no distinction between the human being and nature. Desire puts both in a single plane without any notable relief. There is no confrontation with nature; the natural essence takes on the difference to find that industry is a production of and by humans, bringing its past virtually into the present. As such, it should be in identity with nature and our shared future. This can only be achieved by using differences to create new concepts. Here and in the stars.
One should stay away from the traditional logic inherent to Plato's shadows. Desire, as such, makes us choose between production and acquisition. From the moment desire is placed on the side of acquisition, it becomes idealistic. The resulting concepts are nihilistic, and we look at desire as primarily a lack. Just as it works in populist politics by exploring the negative within the social field. Without desire-production, it’s just group fantasy. When desire produces, its product is authentic. In the real world, it can make only reality. As desire and product are two separate but connected machines, the artist on the exterior can be nomadic, can be the vagabond. Desire is not a lack; it’s not limiting, it is passion.
The forms of a tree and how its anatomy plays a role in the ecosystem will be a crucial idea in one of the following chapters. That is the punctum of the artwork below.
All images are multi exposures on medium format film 6x7 TX-Pan 400.
