Shock to thought

One of Deleuze’s 'insights', I read, is that thought does not have its origins within itself. It is incited, set in motion, by some traumatic x, some rebuff from the Real which troubles or unseats the settled forms of the Symbolic, some movement which reverberates through thinking without being directly present therein.

That both artistic and conceptual creation issue from a ‘shock’ is a familiar notion, as Deleuze is aware. He mentions Artuad’s essays on the cinema as a “matter of neuro-physiological vibrations, and the image must produce a shock, a nerve-wave which gives rise to thought". & Eisenstein:

“Eisenstein’s argument: if it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it.” &

What Blanchot diagnoses everywhere in literature is particularly clear in cinema: on the one hand, the presence of an unthinkable in thought, which would be both its source and its barrier .

And the motif is repeated in the essay on Francis Bacon. Bacon conceives his own ‘position’ in painting as being little more than the self-consciousness of accident and chance. Accident and chance are here the very ‘outside’ of thought itself, now simply channelled, developed.

The painter makes himself the instrument of the Real. (i.e.., where the real is that which cannot be accommodated by our symbolic organisation – nor by our strategies of imaginary closure.) The Outside, the meaningless and contingent, is allowed access the canvas.

The blank canvas, says Deluze, is pre-occupied with clichés, a delimited range of Possibles inherited from the history of painting but also from the contemporary world. The incursion of chance, like a random bullet, ‘takes out’ some of these pre-existing clichés and opens up a true space for the creative act. Creation is thus dependent on some meaningless intrusion, some inert pre-symbolic detail.

The tension of opposites here: on the one hand, fixed and reified symbolic forms; on the other, a violent meaningless incursion, is also recurrent in Deleuze, no? EG:

The modern Ulysses whose perceptions are clichés and whose affections are labels, in a world of communication that has become marketing and from whom not even Cezanne or Van Gogh can escape. (What is Philosophy?, 149).

Nothing but clichés, clichés everywhere… They are these floating images, these anonymous clichés, which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among others in the world which surrounds him. Physical, optical and auditory clichés and psychic clichés mutually feed on each other.

[…] In Taxi Driver Scorsese makes a catalogue of all the psychic clichés which bustle around in the driver’s head, but at the same time of the optical and sound clichés of the neon-city that he sees filing past along the streets: he himself, after his slaughter, will be the national hero of a day, attaining the state of cliché, without the event being his for all that.

But is not the ‘shock to thought’ a definitively modern idea, and one in need of further historicisation. I think there is much evidence for this, although not of course evidence that could be productively cited and explored in the pages of a weblog.

The image of the modern city in Deleuze’s example’s, above, suggest something of this. In a world thoroughly ‘humanised’, managed and pre-packaged as never before, where symbolic forms - speech and images – seem to circulate anonymously, and are inscribed in every artificial structure and surface of our metropolitan Second Nature, there is at the same time the craving and need for the pre- or non- symbolic, and for that which the Imaginary lures around us cannot begin to imagine.

This, the familiar modernist trope: Cliché, doxa and other symbolic norms on the one hand; on the other, the groping anticipation of the void, the ‘rush’ of the unprecedented, an opening in the tired fabric. And when the fabric is rent, what ‘appears’ can be the pulsions of the body, time in its pure state, or just some vertiginous absence. But one thing is always made clear; such opening can not come from within thought or imagination. Even if thought and imagination have some vague intimation of a limit, the limit can only be made known, or revised, from ‘outer space.’

In the end, then, a familiar interpretative paradox: if the (modern) notion ‘that thought does not have its origins within itself but is prompted by some exteriority’ is true, then this very notion needs to be analysed in terms of the exteriority which prompted it.

And whereas this ‘self-undoing’ quality can be dismissed by the analytically minded as a sign that we have approached the non-sensical and self-refuting, it is perhaps also an indication that we have hit on something so fundamental that it bends language into paralodox.