Deleuze on Bacon

Rouzbeh Radjabi

Daniel W. Smith writes, “The Logic of Sensation is perhaps best approached … as a book of philosophical concepts” (p. vii). Furthermore, it should be approached as a rhizome. The term “rhizome” is borrowed from botany, where it describes a root structure that spreads horizontally and can grow shoots or bulbs from any point along its structure. Grass is an example of a rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that concepts are conceived rhizomatically, such that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 7). In The Logic of Sensation, no single concept can be traced throughout the whole and provide a complete picture; rather, each concept is connected to each other concept through multiple pathways, which together map a space approximately in and around the concept of “sensation.” For us, a difficult question is further confounded: where to begin?

Let’s be free spirits and start our journey at the edge of the abyss. Chaos: With Deleuze, as soon as we encounter chaos, we also encounter rhythm and the diagram. He writes, “The Diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm” (Deleuze, p. 83).

In A Thousand Plateaus, we learn that, “What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between…. In this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to” (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 313). We may recognize this “chance” as the chance afforded by Bacon’s free marks (his diagrams), the chance to clear the canvas of figurative clichés and reveal the Figure. “The diagram, the agent of analogical language, acts not as a code but as a modulator” (Deleuze, p. 98), between Figures and clichés, between order and chaos. “The diagram is a possibility of fact -- it is not the Fact itself” (p. 89). Though the cliché is overcome, chaos remains on the canvas and continues to threaten the provisional order; the perpetual fall from order to chaos, the modulation between chaos and order, is rhythm.

Rhythm is always movement in-between, “rising-descending, contraction-dilation, and systolic-diastolic” (Ibid., p. 66). It is “a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all” (Ibid., p. 37). But most importantly, “We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed” (Ibid., p. 39). Deleuze explains that rhythm finds expression in the body beyond the body, in the body without organs.

Deleuze writes, “the body without organs is not defined by the absence of organs, nor is it defined solely by the existence of an indeterminate organ; it is finally defined by the temporary and provisional presence of determinate organs” (Ibid., p. 42). Further, “the body without organs is flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the Forces acting on the body, an “affective athleticism,” a scream-breath” (Ibid., p. 40). Furthermore, “the Figure is the body without organs” (Ibid.).

The Figure is the body without organs. Why would Deleuze invoke such a direct identity between two concepts? The Figure, we should note, is Deleuze’s name for Bacon’s original concept, whereas the body without organs is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, which takes its name from a poem by Artaud (Ibid., p. 39). In effect, Deleuze is “imposing a zone of objective indiscernibility or indeterminability” (Ibid., p. 126) -- an activity he attributes to the diagram -- not only to overcome the difficulty of talking “in one medium (concepts) about the practices of another (percepts)” (Smith, p. xi), but to introduce a possibility of fact attributable to sensation. “The essential point about the diagram,” writes Deleuze, “is that it is made in order for something to emerge from it, and if nothing emerges from it, it fails” (Deleuze, p. 128). But what is this emergent Fact itself? The Figure of sensation, in the flesh? (Afterwards, we may wish to discuss this.)

Let’s pick up again by looking more closely at Bacon’s Figure. The Figure is opposed to figuration, illustration and narration. By isolating the Figure, Bacon is able to paint the sensation as opposed to the sensational -- “to paint the scream more than the horror” (Ibid., p. 34). Bacon disrupts figuration by subjecting the Figure to invisible forces of isolation, deformation, and dissipation, which are made visible by movements between the Figure, the armature/contour/round area/ring, and the surrounding field of color. The first invisible force, the force of isolation, becomes visible as the surrounding fields of color wrap themselves around the contour and the Figure. The forces of deformation “become visible whenever the head shakes off its face, or the body its organism” (Ibid., p. 53). These are forces internal to the Figure made visible by modulations of color, as we shall see. The last force, the force of dissipation, moves from the figure to the field -- a “becoming-imperceptible in which the Figure disappears” (Ibid., p. 25).

The Figure is further distinguished from the surrounding field of color through the use of mixed complementary colors or broken tones, which subject color “to a heating or a firing that rivals ceramics” (Ibid., p. 114). Like other great colorists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, Bacon’s flesh is subject to a modulation of color that effects “a double movement of expansion and contraction” (Ibid., p. 97), heating and cooling, diastole-systole. By moving through the order of the spectrum, color modulation becomes an analogy for movement, a fall, and ultimately sensation.

Just as the rich flow of broken tones gives shape to the Figure’s body, we can see that color attains a completely different regime than it had previously. In the first place, the flow traces millimetrical variations in the body as the content of time, whereas the monochromatic shores or fields were raised to a kind of eternity as the form of time. In the second place, and more important, color-structure gives way to color-force. Each dominant color and each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force on the corresponding zone of the body or head; it immediately renders a force visible. (Ibid., p. 121).

This rendering visible of invisible forces is what allows for the determination of Figures as active, passive, and attendant, for “The fall is precisely the active rhythm” (Ibid., p. 68). The attendant-function is initially attributed to a visible character -- someone who appears to observe the other characters. But this function, once attributed, can move to another figure along the horizontal, defining an attendant-rhythm “that is retrogradable in itself, thus without increase or decrease, without augmentation or diminution” (Ibid., p. 63). The active and passive rhythms, conversely, are vertical and “only retrogradable in relation to each other, each being the retrogradation of the other” (Ibid.). As a consolation and a precaution, Deleuze writes, “There are so many movement’s in Bacon’s paintings that the law of the triptychs can only be a movement of movements” (Ibid., p. 69).

Finally, the flows of broken tones create a sense of volume and space that addresses a haptic sense of vision, “when sight discovers in itself a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its optical function” (Ibid., p. 125). Haptic vision is a view from close up, in which figure and ground occupy the same plane. In this sense, Egyptian bas-relief is addressed to haptic vision, which is why Deleuze considers Bacon’s paintings to be distinctly Egyptian. However, unlike Egyptian bas-relief, which inscribed on the plane the essence of the form through contours, Bacon renders space through color modulation, which was the original invention of the Byzantine mosaic. Deleuze attributes the beginning of modern painting to a rupture in man’s experience of himself -- formerly as essence, presently as an accident. He writes, “Insofar as God was incarnated, crucified, descended, ascended to heaven, and so on, the form or the Figure was no longer rigorously linked to essence, but to what, in principle, is its opposite: the event, or even the changeable, the accident” (Ibid., p. 100).

We have managed to trundle through most of the concepts developed in The Logic of Sensation, though there are certainly many more. At a particular resolution, rhizomatic concepts appear utterly enmeshed in their relations, inextricable from the milieus where they are encountered. But from another vantage (close up or further out), these same concepts seem on the verge of coming loose and flying off in all directions. Returning to any one of the concepts we have been discussing, we could easily begin again, asking “what is it?” What is rhythm? What is haptic vision? What is sensation!? The concepts won’t stay put! They are revealed only in relation to other concepts. With rhizomatics, we are always on the verge of falling into chaos.







Works cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.