56/ Deleuze Studies Camp 2015: New Material Practices and A Life

What If: From Formal Logic to Material Inference

Marc Boumeester and Andrej Radman

WORKSHOP

1 Introduction

We are proverbially good at tracing the primary or predicative properties such as lengths, heights and depths. Take a ruler, take an object and juxtapose them. What we need to learn is how to map relational properties. An example of such an impredicative property is the Occlusion Edge (OE) where the conditions and the conditioned are determined at one and the same time. Occlusion is expressed by one’s relation with another object (like a primary property) and actualised in one’s relation with another object (unlike a primary property). This puzzle has continued to elude us across three centuries. Primary and relational properties are two different yet complementary concepts sustaining two different yet complementary causalities.

Gibson considered OE as his most radical discovery. It plays a key role in articulating his theses on the direct perception of the environment and the perceptional persistence. If the concept is fully grasped, then Gibson’s more heralded concept of Affordance becomes less opaque. Famously, ecological perception takes relations to be as real as objects (relata). The realism referred to is the pragmatic realism closely allied to William James’s radical empiricism and Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. Furthermore, relations (as higher order facts) are not only real, they can also be really perceived. It is a reality that is subject to scrutiny, i.e. indefinite differentiation. It unfolds in experience, but does not sit behind experience.

2 Assignment

James gave us the ‘problem’ and Gibson may be said to offer one possible ‘solution’: We perceive OE as the locus of transformation. Better still, we perceive it as the very transformation because the boundary between the actual and the virtual is porous. Therefore, our proposal is to engage the participants in OE mapping:

1) Use smart phones to take photos;

2) Take no more than 3 photos to capture the transformation

     (out-of-field);

3) The series is to be converted into a looped GIF;

4) Present your GIF

     (prescribed format as enabling constraint).
                4a) Title

                4b) Author(s)

                4c) Caption (50 words maximum)

The purpose is to attune the participants to the capacities of the intensive spatium beyond the mere extensive space properties. The exercise will comprise a cartography of the ‘thick present’ replete with tendencies that are probed, discovered and scrutinised in movement, as an entanglement of proprio- and per-ception (prehension). The ultimate goal is to promote relational ontology and OE is the perfect example that defies the law of excluded middle, being neither subjective nor objective. The task is simple (limited) yet profound (in terms of philosophical implications). If we succeed in proving that relations can be directly perceived (via OE), we will map an affect or an immanent way of accounting for the real by way of producing, recording and consuming vectorial signs (Spinozism).

3 Example

For example, take three static images of a frame within a frame defined not by outlines but by two superimposed textured surfaces (patterned, as they usually are in the environment). Let us now imagine that the surfaces start looming (as a result of forward locomotion), as revealed by the continuous transformation of the pattern (self-induced optical flow) within and without the inner frame:

a) If the rate of change of the inner and outer patterns

     is the same, the frames are flush (co-planear);

b) If the rate of change of the inner pattern is faster,

     it is a protruding obstacle (in front);

c) If the rate of change of the inner pattern is slower,

     it is a recessed opening (behind) which affords

     ‘walk-through-ability’.

(Source: Carello and Turvey, The Ecological Approach to Perception)

Perception is conceived of as an activity. What is perceived cannot be thought of as analogous to a static image or form (fallacy of retinalism). Though perspectives change, it is the invariants over time which determine perception. Gibson points out that images in that sense are not even necessary for thought, or for perception for that matter. This fact is clearly demonstrated by the perception of occlusion, where there is awareness of something in the environment yet there is no qualitative content of ‘being occluded’.

Frames or sections are not coordinates; they belong to compounds of sensations whose faces, whose interfaces, they constitute. But however extendable the system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe [...] (Deleuze and Guattari, WiP?: 187).

In Deleuze’s sense, OE is a singular concept (not universal) because it is related to variables that determine its mutations, a multiplicity (M). Accordingly, OE is our royal road to M. To our mind, if one manages to produce M via an ‘anomalous’ GIF with a single frame, the result will be a ‘crystal image’, defined as the hinge between the implicit and explicit order. In other words, one expresses the infinite in the finite, a reference to that which is ‘neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present’ (Deleuze, C1:16).

SOURCES

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press [1972] 1983).

Deleuze, Gilles: ‘Spinoza and the Three “Ethics”’ in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, [1993] 1997), pp. 138-151.

Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 1; The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, (1997).

Deleuze, Gilles: Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1994).

Deleuze, Gilles: Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, [1962] 1983).

Gibson J., James: ‘On the new idea of persistence and change and the old ideas that it drives out’ in Reasons for realism: Selected essays of James J. Gibson, ed. by R. Reed & R. Jones (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates [1975] 1982), pp. 393 – 396.

Gibson J., James: ‘The Discovery of the Occluding Edge and Its Implications for Perception’ in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York and London: Taylor & Francis, [1986] 2015), pp. 180-192 (+72-78).

Gibson J., James: ‘The problem of temporal order in stimulation and perception’, Journal of Psychology, 62 (1966a), pp. 141 – 149.

Gibson J., James: The senses considered as perceptual systems (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1966b).

Gibson, Eleonor J.: ‘Has psychology a future?’, Psychological Science, 5 (1994), pp. 69–76.

Kwinter, Sanford: ‘Neuroecology: Notes Toward a Synthesis in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two, ed. by Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), pp. 313-333.

Meillassoux, Quentin: ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory‘ in Collapse 3, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), pp. 63-107.

Peirce, Charles S.: ‘Abduction and induction’ in Philosophical writings of Peirce, ed. by J. Buchler (New York, NY: Dover [1903] 1955), pp. 302- 305.

Radman, Andrej and Deborah Hauptmann, eds.: Asignifying Semiotics: Or How to Paint Pink on Pink, Footprint Vol. 8/1 No. 14 (Delft: Architecture Theory Chair in partnership with Stichting Footprint and Techne Press, 2014) <http://www.footprintjournal.org/issues/show/asignifying-semiotics-or-how-to-paint-pink-on-pink>.

Shaviro, Steven: Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

Stepp, Nigel and Michael T. Turvey: ‘The Muddle of Anticipation’, Ecological Psychology, 27 (2015), pp. 103–126.

Gif(t)s

Title: As a Matter of (Portolan) Fact

Authors: Katie Guinnane, Miriam von Schantz, Jessie Beier

Caption: Portolan, or portulan, charts are navigational maps based on compass directions and estimated distances observed by pilots at sea. As such, they produce the conditions for directionality, while directionality is also produced through them.

***

Title: Temporalities of Fire


Authors: Sideeq Mohammed, Marie Nerland

Caption: There is an experience of uncounted time in watching the fire, a duration, a passive time, which washes over you.

***

Title: D(y)/D(x)

Authors: Andrew Stones, Jasmin Duecker, Lars Bang, Stavros Kousoulas

Caption: Not of points but of lines.

***

Title: Attack

Authors: Iwona Sadowska, Daniel Smith, Roberta Stubs, Marina Fraga, 

Caption: A hole in space, floating like an open mouth. You re-position yourself, and the jaws are attacking. The texture mis-matches the expectation of the form. You re-position yourself again. The Ocluding Edge is somewhere (in)side.

***

Title: Fika

Authors: Annika, Ulla and Jeremy

Caption: Oscillations - Undulations - Variations - - Vibrations --- Relations - - -  Reflection ---   - Diffraction --- Selection:  Interference.

***

Title: Ambrose

Authors: Hélène Frichot, Helen Runting, Julieanna Preston

Caption: Ambrose on the horizon rises up briefly then sinks down in flames. Reintroducing gender laden signifiers into the relata of nautical adventures.

***

Title: Re-Move Me

Authors: Anki Bergtsson, Jonas Mikaels, Jade de Cock, Chotima Ag-ukrikul

Caption: movement, landscape, stillness, shades of green,

texture, shape, surface, 

light, energy, transparency,

***

Title: An Ephemeral Individual

Authors: Ewelina Sokolowska, Citt Williams, Remy Leblanc

Caption: We are playing here with the impression of an "individual", wanting to demonstrate that what it is just a fleeting result of different forces coming together and interacting with each other. What we perceive as an "individual" is always a momentary assemblage of different forces coming together. Movement is the only constant.