Thanks again!
Aske

http://www.ted.com/talks/marian_bantjes_intricate_beauty_by_design.html

What’s best is that her very unorthodox way of designing ‘with an artist mind’ has been very successful. A sign of changing times.

Hope you find it interesting,
Gab

I think the reason we are discussing this at all is that the above has already happened.

Artists always had ‘design principles’, such as composition among their skills. Often artists, and I suspect commercially successful ones in particular, are designers with an emotional agenda. On the other hand it’s well known that some old Masters, working on commission, did not particularly like or were emotionally involved in the work they produced, so possibly many artworks revered in our galleries should be demoted to the status of design work…

Of course designers on occasion can be emotionally involved in what they do, and although following a more prosaic agenda, produce something that speaks to the viewers in more than one way, conveying the intended message but also touching their emotions.

All in all it seems that art vs design is really, as you suggest, and it always has been, a continuum rather than a dichotomy.

Nevertheless, I haven’t seen anything in your claims that has really made me reconsider. It is probably fruitful to recapitulate:

1. The plane of immanence was originally a phenomenological concept

2. In the phenomenological use of the plane the ontological/epistemological distinction is a non-issue, because of the immediate coincidence of Being and Thought and the “self-positing” of the plane in the epoche

I think we agree on these two points. But:

3. For Deleuze to cleanse the ‘plane’ of all phenomenological residues, he can either:

a) stick to an epistemological use of the plane (a philosophical yoking of the chaos)

- which he does not do

b) posit an unrepresentable ontological plane distinct from any philosophical conceptualization (this plane would lack any substantial content)

- this, I think, is the position you are holding

or:

4) frame the plane into an auto-positing narrative that Brassier talks about

- in this scenario, I do not at all need for all thought in Deleuze to be conceptual. All I need is the fact that the positing of the so-called ‘epistemological’ plane is an act of conceptual thought

At this point, the argument is simple:

‘b)’ is very problematic (and because of the continuity of conceptual Thought and Being) tends to move towards 4…

And, the issue that raises most problems concerning this is ‘univocity’:

5) The horizontal leveling of Being for Deleuze is, supposedly, a necessary consequences of the banishment of transcendence,

but:

6) that leveling is ‘problematic’ if it is to be presented as a ‘synthesis’ of heterogeneous elements….

7) It is precisely the (im)possibility of this type of synthesis that is the kernel of the criticism, since (when separated from an ‘epistemological’ use) this leveling of chaos is a speculative (and idealizing) gesture

In other words,

8 ) This disjunctive synthesis of the plane is unattainable in a non-phenomenological account, since it relies on a speculative inflation of the pluralist ontology

Why ‘consistency’ in addition to the heterogeneous ‘presentations’ of Being?

In essence, you’re trying to claim that the distinction between the epistemological concept of ‘a’ plane of immanence, and the ontological concept of ‘the’ plane of immanence can’t hold up because ‘the’ plane of immanence needs to be auto-positional or something of the like. The problem is that all these notions of self-positing are introduced in relation to the epistemological concept, i.e., you have to elide the distinction already in order to show that it doesn’t stand up. It sounds fancy, but it’s basically circular.

This is woven together with some claims about the identity of Being and Thought, which Deleuze does indeed endorse to some extent. However, you’re conveniently interpreting thought as ‘conceptual thought’, or what Deleuze gives an account of in WIP. It’s this account of the conceptual which could be described as ‘epistemological’, and thus you reinforce your point about the epistemological and ontological becoming indiscernible in his work. However, this is again just a bad reading.

Thought in Deleuze is something far broader than the conceptual. For Deleuze, there is a sense in which EVERYTHING thinks, insofar as everything is solving problems (i.e., actualising the virtual). The particular, conceptual form of thought that we evince is just one manifestation of this ontological notion, and thus any claims that are specific to the conceptual (such as claims about auto-positionality or what not) are not thereby convertible into ontological claims.

All I can say is that the reading your presenting here seems to be falling over itself to try and find an idealism in Deleuze, and to that end seems to muddle a bunch of different notions from different points in his work that are related in more complex ways.

Now one thing I do have to clarify is a possible objection to Ophuls as the epitome of the perfect crystal image, on basis that his films occasionally include narrators as well. I am thinking in particular of ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’. To counter the objection, my guess is that the Ophuls narrator will always be linked to an element within the film and outside of the body the voice supposedly belongs to. In Letter, for example, Lisa’s voice can be seen as issuing from the letter she wrote Stefan right before her (assumed) death. The crystal remains perfect because even this voice speaking from a seemingly ‘extratemporal vantage point’ is trapped within the confines of the presentess and pastness of the image, by its relation to the filmic object.