Gil on rhythm, exfoliation and abstract form

Bodily movement puts a continuous space into a certain form: "The body "lives" in space, but not like a sphere with a closed continuous surface. On the contrary, its movements, limbs, and organs determine that it has singular relations with things in space, relations that are individually integrated ... These relations imply exfoliations of the space of the body ... Relations to a tree, a prey, a star, an enemy, a loved object, or desired nourishment set into motion certain privileged organs inducing precise spaces of the body. Exfoliation is the essential way the body "turns onto" things, onto objective space, onto living things. Here there is a type of communication that is always present, but only makes itself really visible in pathological or magical experiences ... Between the body (and the organs in use) and the thing is established a connection that immediately affects the form and space of the body; between the one and the other a privileged spatial relation emerges that defines the space uniting them as "near" or "far," resistant, thick, wavy, vertiginous, smooth, prickly."
The space of the body is composed of a multiplicity of these exfoliations, which create volumes, polymorphous spaces, leaves, and which on their turn presuppose a series of relations with things. "The space of the body is made of plates, exfoliations, surfaces, and volumes that underpin the perception of things. These spaces "contain" the relations of the body to things, insofar as they are integrated in the body itself and insofar as they are translated among themselves."

Each exfoliation is connectable to others, according to the laws of a mechanism, allowing a translation and a production of symbolic substitutions. Two leaves of space can become contiguous (as in a dream, or a metaphor), while the body 'moves without any problem' from the one to the other.
Because the body space is made up of exfoliations, the relations of the body to things are inscribed in forms, not the perceived forms of objects but the form of the spaces that support those relations. Analogy or opposition are therefore only given in the forms of the space of the body, before becoming thought as concepts.
With its malleable biological, anatomical and sensori-motor structure, the body acts thus like a de-coder, allowing for symbolic thought (codification and de-codification): "The exfoliations of the space of the body, as abstract forms, integrate the information coming from a perceivable body and make possible its translation into a different object belonging to a different sensual sphere."

Exfoliations are thus the objects of a topological study of bodily space. "The forms that the spaces of the body take are not perceivable forms." This formal constitution of body space integrates information (about the body's relations) at a high level of abstraction, at an energetic level, and creates concrete configurations after 'abstract figures of relations', forms of relations between forms, or abstract forms. This abstract form, or figure, is not to be intended as a gestalt, because it appears as the result of a disappearance of the form as figure.

The rhythm of a form is the articulation of its implied time, i.e. of its process of appearance. The rhythm of plastic forms introduces time into space. The space of the body, like the surface of a canvas, is a 'rhythming' space, a space which rhythms the things that are on it. If the body molds space (as a canvas), exfoliation (like a painting) is carried out according to a certain rhythm, the rhythm of emergence of the form.

With its de-coding action, the abstract form allows to move from one figure to the other, from one posture to the other, from one sound to the other, and this continuous passage (and re-emergence) constitutes rhythm.

"This exfoliation is a rhytmed space that results from two forms being placed in an energy-based relationship." For this process to happen, the elimination of superfluous and unnecessary detail (de-coding, abstraction, de-stratification) is fundamental, in order to realise a direct connection between the body and an object, point of space or inanimate thing, through an exfoliation of the space of the body. A de-squamation is necessary for exfoliation to take place.

"The infralanguage is the abstract body. We have seen that it translates codes or contexts. In the same way that an abstract posture allows the passage from one point to another, the abstract body, capable of elaborating abstract rhythms or figures from different contexts, allows the translation of one context into another. And this, in an even easier way than the condensation of energy on an exfoliated surface, brings about the extreme abstraction of form."

"Gil, using the term exfoliation, describes the way in which 'the body opens into the spaces it can occupy or articulate with'. Through exfoliations the body is diversified as a volume in perpetual state of disintegration and reconstitution." (Murphy)

On Deleuze, sensation and rhythm

Painting can escape figurativity in two different ways: through abstraction (the 'pure' form) or the 'figural' (extraction and isolation of the figure).

Figurative painting (representation) implies a relation between images, a narrative relation between different illustrative figures, a story. Isolation breaks with representation, avoids illustration and liberates the figure. The only 'nexus' between figures is intense.

The surface of the canvas is virtually covered with various cliches which have to be broken.

On Henri Bergson, movement and time

"The line one measures is immobile, time is mobility. The line is made, it is complete; time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything to happen. The measuring of time never deals with duration as duration; what is counted is only a certain number of extremities of intervals, or moments, in short, virtual halts in time."
Science (geometry, mathematics, physics) cannot be concerned with the interval, and even when dealing with a passing time, it has to treat it as if it had already passed. This happens because its task is to extract from the material world that which can be repeated and calculated, and therefore which is not in a state of flow. Duration is what one can only feel, a continuity which is never unity nor multiplicity but whose "continuous phases penetrate one another", intensively differentiated by "the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty". A movement that is change in itself. "Let us say then, that in duration, considered as a creative evolution, there is perpetual creation of possibility, and not only of reality."

Change is indivisible into different states, which can only be distinguished scientifically.

On Deleuze and Guattari and 'indiscernibility'

It is not as if one transformed itself into the other, but as if something passed from one to the other. This something can only be called a 'sensation'. It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if beasts and people respectively had reached that point always ad infinitum that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This is what we call an affect.

Art itself survives in these zones of indetermination, as soon as the material passes into the sensation ... These are blocs. Painting needs something different from the ability of the painter to trace resemblance between the animal and the human form showing us their transformation: we need the potency of a background which can dissolve forms and impose the existence of a zone where we do not know anymore what is animal and what is human, and where the triumph or the monument of their indistinction delineates itself...

Thought
Whichever its affective tone, the primary characteristic of what is encountered is that it can only be sensed, and therefore it is opposed to recognition. "It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible ... It is imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition." Contingent imperceptibility of the too small or too far for the empirical exercise of the senses, is different from the essentially imperceptible, that which can only be sensed from the point of view of a transcendental exercise of sensibility. Not a simple sensible being, but "free or untamed states of difference in itself; not qualitative opposition within the sensible, but an element which is in itself difference, and creates at once both the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility. This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity only already covered or mediated by the quality to which it gives rise, and at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter."
That which can only be thought is an aleatory point enveloping differentials of thought, designating the highest power of thought, i.e. the unthinkable, or the inability to think empirically. All begins with sensibility: it is always through an intensity that thought comes to us. A violence is communicated from one faculty to another, an Idea: "an impulse, a compulsion to think which passes through all sorts of bifurcations, spreading from the nerves and being communicated to the soul in order to arrive at thought."

Inflection
Exfoliation happens through forlds, or curves. In order for exfoliations and curvatures to become perceptible, the surface has to be de-squamated.
For Deleuze, the ideal genetic element of the variable curvature, or fold, is the inflection. Inflection is the true atom, the elastic point, the (metaphysical) point where the radius 'jumps' from inside to outside. In other words, a line is the path of a point that changes direction at an inlfection (or folding) point. For Deleuze, this is the eternal return of difference, or the differential of thought: the idea.

In The Fold, Deleuze tells us how Paul Klee defined inflection as the genetic element of the active line, showing his affinity with the Baroque and Leibniz, and his opposition to Kandinsky, who was closer to Descartes and based his painting on an idea of rigid angles, rigid points that can only be moved by an external force.
Klee's point is a point of inflection, where the tangent touches and crosses the curve: the point-fold.
Bernard Cache defined this point of inflection as an intrinsic singularity which is not related to a development of coordinates (as extrinsic singularities, maximums and minimums do), and is not high nor low, at the right or the left, in progression or regression, because it is in absence of gravity. It is the pure event of a line or a point, virtuality, ideality to be actualised from the coordinate axes. In itself, it is not in the world yet: for Klee, it was the locus of 'cosmogenesis' (cha-os-mosis), a non-dimensional point between dimensions, an event waiting for an event to happen (point of indiscernibility, Idea?).

Cache classified three possible transformations of inflection:
-the serpentine line, depending on the morphogenetic field underlying the inflection point and on minimal outside influences by other lines: vectorial or symmetric transformations operating according to logical laws, and transforming inflection into a point of regression, or a cuspidal point (twofold, ogiva, circle). Each of these lines are to be considered in the third dimension as sections of planes, or surfaces (From Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology: "The wonderful ability of the serpent to slough its skin and so renew its youth has earned for it throughout the world the character of the master of the mystery of rebirth ... Dwelling in the earth, among the root of trees, frequenting springs, marshes, and water courses, it glides with the motion of waves..")
-projective transformations expressing the projection, on an external space, of internal spaces defined by hidden parameters and variables of potential allowing for infinite variations. This is the type also described by D'Arcy Thompson and Renè Thom, and we can see it in nature as membranes like cells, shells, horns and all surfaces of minimal tension
-lines or planes with infinite variations, or infinitely variable curvatures, fluctutations from fold to fold: a curve crosses an infinite number of angular points and does not have any tangent, enveloping a spongy, cavernous world, more than a line and less than a surface (Mandelbrot's fractals, as non-dimensions). More than a question of determining now a point in-between two points, it is now a matter of always adding a new deviation, transforming every interval into the locus of a new curvature. From fold to fold (rather than from point to point), with contours dissolving and liberating the formal potentials of a material in transformation. The transformation of inflection does not admit symmetry anymore but becomes vortical: "the line effectively folds itself into a spiral differing the inflection in a movement suspended between heaven and earth, that distances or approaches a center of curvature indefinitely, and, any instant "takes its flight or risks to crash upon us."
Turbulences, in this suspended inflection, generate other turbulences, and the spiral follows a fractal model: dissolving its contour, turbulence ends in foam. Inflection becomes vortical, and its variation becomes fluctuating. It is the locus of vortices, sponges, mazes, meanders and labyrinths.

The art animated by these inflections is not anymore an art of structures but of textures, or 'cont-textures' (example of Bernini and his twenty different marbles). Art can thus be said to always follow a Baroque principle, that of a total art, or a unity of the arts, by extension. Every artistic expression tends in this sense to prolong itself, and to realise itself in the successive one, which surpasses it, in a mosaic where each different panel is surpassed by a matter that crosses it. Artistic forms touch and con-fuse themselves at points of indiscernibility, or inflection points, where the form is not yet realised.

On Michael Hardt and 'flesh'

Hardt conceives incarnation as abandonment of something and to something: abandonment of form, emptying out, and abandonment to flesh, taking on materiality. Incarnation is a becoming flesh, a self-emptying as exposure of the flesh (which is formed by consciousness, psychology, cognitivism and phenomenology, or sustained by artistic expression, see Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy) Flesh= percepts, affects, acts of the body as virtual, abstract.

Transcendental form is emptyied and divinity is trasnferred to the material. This abandonment to flesh might seem precarious, weak, but the affirmation of the plenitude of the material is in fact a fullness. Denying any possible exteriority and any possibility of mediation, incarnation reveals transcendental substances as empty, because the transcendental resides in the material itself, as immanent potentiality. Transcendent and immanent are not in opposition (therefore they do not need any mediation), but complementary.
"The surfaces of the world are charged with a powerful intensity. Divinity resides precisely in the boundaries or thresholds of things, at their limits, passionate and exposed, as if surrounding them with a halo." The divine becomes flesh with an electric vitality, and the body becomes divine ("How little we have realized our flesh! We don't even know what flesh can do!") Incarnation here is the moment of the encounter, when the overcoded body is energised (see Gil).

Exposing flesh does not mean to reveal a hidden secret, but it dissolves any possibility of a self, something to hide. Without possessing anything separate to grasp, we become imperceptible. While transgression exceeds a limit and at the same time verifies it (as its accomplished terminus, retrospectively), exposure operates on a positive logic of emanation. The violation of a norm is not primary anymore: negation is only a secondary afterthought.

While torture separates, incarnation and its exposure implies a living of the violence in the flesh, making its pain a mode of intensity and joy.

"Exposed, the passions of the flesh are released from any normative structures or organic functions:" Becoming-flesh becomes a form of forgetting, of the self, of discontinuity.

Pasolini does not use the term 'body', which he relates to the discontinuous and hierarchical functioning of the organs (body as organism), to detachment and consciousness, but he prefers terms such as 'members' or 'limbs', or simply 'flesh', for the vital materiality of existence: flesh for him is matter, passionately charged and intense, but always also intellectual, not opposed to thought and consciosness. In this sense, flesh is the condition of possibility for the qualities of the world, both a foundation and an immanent transcendence, beyond reality-appearance, depth-surface dialectics: a superficial depth.

On Whitehead and occasions of experience

"In either case, whether or no there be conceptual novelty, the subjective forms of the conceptual prehensions constitute the drive of the Universe, whereby each occasion precipitates itself into the future."
"The occasions originate from a common past and their objective immortality operates within a common future. Thus indirectly, via the immanence of the past and the immanence of the future, the occasions are connected."
(different occasions immanent in a common past, which is immortal in them, and makes them reciprocally immanent. But the objective immortality of the past in them is different, and two different occasions derive from different pasts)
Any occasion experiences its past as anticipating a future of which it is part, together with its contemporary environment (immanence of the contemporary world in an occasion, as a 'related'
substratum)
Antecedent environmental factors are also eliminated in the initial phase of a new occasion, as the running stream purifies itself

The very meaning of existence is to be a factor in agency, to make a difference (Plato)

Sense-perception is an abstraction (instinctive intepretation, causal efficacy and presentational immediacy, symbolism)

Higher consciousness about things is perception, inarticulate feeling when attention is dispersed is sensation (prehension).
Though everything is real, not everything is realised in a set of actual occasions.

Notes on Bernard Cache, Euclidean geometry and topology

"Einstein's theory certainly teaches us that space(-time) is actually "curved" (i.e. not Euclidean) in the presence of a gravitational field, but generally, one perceives this curvature only in the case of bodies moving at speeds close to that of the light."
"Klein would go so far as to define the various geometries by the group of movements which transform geometrical figures without affecting distances nor angles in these figures. This group of movements defines what is called: "metric geometry". Now, if we forget the distances and concentrate on the "shape" of the figures defined by the angles between elements, we come upon a new transformation which is the scaling. Translation, rotation, symmetry and scaling form a wider group of transformations, the group of similitudes which defines Euclidean geometry."
"And finally, if we do away with position properties, and only look at the continuity of the figures and at the order in which their elements are linked together, just as if figures were made of an elastic material which can be stretched and deformed, but not torn, we encounter another group of transformations: the homeographies which define topology."
"Euclidean geoemtry requires more axioms and more structured properties. Projective geometry and topology can be more general only to the extent that they deal with looser transformations and objects. As such topology enables one to focus on fundamental properties from which our Euclidean intuition is distracted by the metric appearances. Because topology doesn't register any difference between a cube and a sphere, it focuses on what is left, order and continuity..."
"One single topological structure has an infinity of Euclidean incarnations, the variations of which are not relevant for topology, about which topology has nothing to say ... Topology cannot be said to be curved because it precedes any assignment of metrical curvature. Because topological structures are often represented with in some ways indefinite curved surfaces, one might think that topology brings free curvature to architecture, but this is a misunderstanding. When mathematicians draw those kind of free surfaces, they mean to indicate that they do not care about the actual shape in which topology can be incarnated ... And, of course, as soon as it comes to actually making a geometrical figure out of a topological structure, we enter into Euclidean geometry; that is, the design of complex curvature is essentially Euclidean."

Notes on Suzanne Langer and presentational symbolism

"Projection" is the process of drawing logical analogies, for example with geometric projection, as the instance of a perfectly faithful representation which, without the knowledge of its rules, appears to be a misrepresentation.

Language transforms relations into objects.

In the physical space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression.

The senses, but also physics and mathematics, have their own symbolic patterns of expression. "The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish." They are 'media of understanding' that make habitual, unconscious abstractions and are capable of complex, simultaneous 'articulations'. The symbolic character of sense-data is abstractable and combinatory. (see the notion of composition in Massumi) While verbal, linguistic definitions are 'general', visual symbolism for example presents specific objects and things, and we have to 'abstract' from them in order to conceive generality, with the help of words. (see Massumi)
Presentational symbolism starts in the peripheral activity of the nervous system. (Gestalt, see Massumi)
Feelings have forms, and become progressively articulated. For example music is one of these forms of emotional articulation.

Notes on William James and the terminus

William James

James defined radical empiricism as a 'mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts', which means that the relations that connect experiences (both conjunctive and disjunctive) are also experienced.

The terminus exists as a concept's idea, an idea in one's mind, and only when this becomes a sensible percept (when movement has stopped), we can say that it has been fulfilled: "The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfilment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end." Before that, we have a purely substitutional, or conceptual world, and we are only 'virtual knowers'. Our experiences are always unterminated perceptually, and "we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path." A differential quotient becomes a substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience is only of variations of rate and direction, living in transitions more than in ends, as an experience of tendency, in advance of the experience that is to terminate it: transitions and terminations are only rarely fulfilled. A knowledge 'in transitu' is a 'pure experience', the present instant, an unqualified actuality undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable. While a thing is permanent and has states, a fact of consciousness is a state. "Since the acquisition of conscious quality on the part of an experience depends upon a context coming to it, it follows that the sum total of all experiences, having no context, can not strictly be called conscious at all. It is a that, an Absolute, a 'pure' experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing."

Project on bodily exfoliation and the point of inflection in sound, dance and painting

In movement, the body molds space and, while so doing, it lo(o)ses its aleatory phenomenological (corporeal and psychic) strata. Its physiological and anatomical structure allows it to form 'abstract figures' of energy (spatialising rhythm) which, at the same time, continuously decompose, or destratify, its architecture of organs and limbs, tissues and cells.

This bodily peeling can be intended in two different ways: as a semiotic de-codification of the surface (skin) and its becoming-flesh (the becoming-flesh of the body is discussed by Michael Hardt in his article "Exposure. Pasolini in the Flesh"), or as the abndonment of phenomenological flesh and the 'abstraction' of the body-matter (Gilles Deleuze discusses the phenomenological and abstract qualities of matter both with Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy?, and on his own in The Logic of Sensation).
But simultaneously, the body's physiological structure (the bio-chemical code and its gaps, the cellular stratification and its cracks-fissures, the anatomic and organic architecture with its dark corridors) is always present in this process.

The abstract, de-stratified body is thus able to elaborate abstract figures in different spatial contexts (see Josè Gil's concept of exfoliation), and to transduce them (see Gil's infralanguage). From the micro-articulations of djing and scratch, to the micro-gestures of movement and dance, and to the micro-strokes of painting and calligraphy, the abstract, exfoliating body shows a process of appearance, a rhythm emerging from the energetic relation between the body and the point of application (between a sound particle, a bodily joint and the tip of a brush).