1.
In a model that approaches difference as produced by signification, the symmetrical idea (which we can think of here as kind of blank metaphor) precedes the inference of the asymmetrical real, which is achieved, or in the work of art is activated, by means of rupture of differentiation: that is to say by the invention of a frame or ground.
This rupture has a profound consequences for how we consider signification generally as we cannot infer asymmetry without having an ideal symmetry to compare it to. In this schema, the asymmetrical features that comprise metaphors are achieved by various means that relegate the passive to not a productive role but an inscriptive or indexical one: the “passive” is that which is inscribed upon, and legibility, correlation, causation, and inference all unfold accordingly, always in deference to the preexisting, symmetrical idea.
The genesis of meaning is then created by a negative-dialectical process that has profound ethical implications with which we are all familiar; we are free when nothing is impeding our flow; the experience of the (asymmetrical) passage of time occurs because time is forever escaping us; metaphor exists due to deviations from the preexistent ideal, with one idea replacing another in a discrete series of mental images and events, referring backward into the past in terms of causes and origins, and forwards into the future in terms of teleological finitude.
This is a very old empiricist dilemma. Hume presents the problem of causation as immanent to the movement of thought when he observes that “we can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new existence, or new modification of existence, without showing at the same time the impossibility that anything can ever begin to exist without some productive principle”. In other words, we are producing something within the assignation of cause, often involuntarily, that constitutes an image, not a mental image of an object, necessarily, but of the entire world as having a cause, or, if you prefer, of not being without a cause, which is quite different in that it is a negative assignation which has dramatically different consequences for how we think of inference and contingency generally.
It’s is only through this presupposition that one arrives at ontology.
2.
Much has been made of Hume’s persistent return to the consideration of qualities: most notably, and most recently, Harman, Meillassoux, and co. use Hume’s arguments regarding causation in relation to quality as a foil for the positing of an ontology of the object hospitable to affective registers that have ontological significance. However it is possible, and likely more germane considering his convivial tone and lexical gaming, to take Hume too seriously, and in so doing lose what we might, albeit far less sensationally than Harman and Meillassoux, credit Hume with broadly outlining an as of yet finished, and virtuously unrealizable, empiricist project that need never arrive at ontology. This is what Deleuze does with Hume.
Deleuze takes Humes’s discussion of cause to an entirely different level that accounts for the infinite extension and replaces it with something better: he insists the designation of causation conform to the idea of continuous movement. Unlike Hume, there is no privileging of origin in Deleuze; no metaphors using billiard balls or church bells, in Deleuze, causation is but one example of how sense itself is produced. But, and this is a crucial distinction, the indexical relations placed upon the haptic experience of the body has an unintended consequence in term of the subjectivities produced as it also involves the production of a historiographic image of thought that mirrors the past. In this sense the image of thought (and all ontology is an image of thought) creates a “map of the room you are in” (created by unexamined, symmetrical relations) that is philosophy’s, and Art’s, job to disrupt by means of temporal interventions.
In terms of intervention as a sculptural form, it is very much worth our time to be explicit about what it being intervened upon, but also to understand what is being produced by this intervention. Deleuze tells us that when a concept is a concept of a particular, existing thing, the comprehension of that thing has an extension = 1. It is actual, and it is infinite, or, more specifically, it possesses infinite comprehension; it is not immanent to the thing in itself, but it may as well be as it arrives infinitely fast. And we have already seen what is meant by infinite comprehension of the concept in relation to causality in particular: it is what Hume tells us happens upon the (negative) assignation of a productive principle such as cause. It colors everything. It becomes, in the words of sculptor Terry Fox, “a metaphor for the kind of thing that is in front of you all the time.” What is essential to understand in Deleuze is that this perceived infinite exists on the condition of its actuality and not its causation, which is to say, “So long as a material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments”. These moments, which comprise the situations and the qualities of which they are comprised, also create the conditions for the Chronotopic and Mnemonic indexes by which we can then talk about the work of Art, even one that belongs squarely in the past because it is in the pure or ever-present past “…that predicates in the form of moments of concepts are preserved, and have an effect on the subject to which they are attributed. Infinite comprehension thus makes possible remembering and recognition, memory and self-consciousness (even when these two faculties are not themselves infinite.).” The aesthetic experience occurrs afterwards, in the present that is contained the past. This preservation, then, is one side of a surface that appears in relation to the virtual possibilities that populate an activity along with the actualization of the material transformations as they occur (and which are, in terms of the image of thought, ‘in front of you all the time’). The other side of this surface, however, the part that functions as a quasi-ontological process used to establish, in the aesthetic-political area of communication, a refrain that is (mostly) non-discursive. The de facto subject of the work of art becomes the presentation of the specific praedicamenta involved in preserving the work of sculpture confined to a present-that-is-past, a state of perpetual re-enactment, a diagrammatic-image; a schema of reflection and actuality that invokes a Bergsonian logic wherein a bifurcation occurs in the production of time that, on the one hand, remains symmetrical but is also always an asymmetrical contraction of an immanent and infinite past encountered as actual. It was what Guattari with Deleuze will refer to some years later as haecceity, a mode of individuation that is distinct from either a thing or a subject but was unavailable to Art or synthesis. “For if the plane of consistency only has haecceities for content, it also has its own particular semiotic to serve as expression. A plane of content and a plane of expression… Indefinite Article + proper name + infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of expression, correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a semiotic that has freed itself from both formal significances and personal subjectification.” The space of haecceity is virtual but in a very special way. It is a territory defined by its most abstract position, its most deterritorialized component.