Deleuze

[malgosia askanas]

So my familiarity with D&G basically revolves around some of their
aesthetic writings, such as the Cinema books and the "Refrain" plateau. 
To me, BTW, the _Cinema_ books are the most luminous, beautiful piece
of cinema theory I have ever enountered.  So what I love about these
writings and find productive about them is that they are an attempt
at creating a certain kind of materialist aesthetics -- one which harks
back to William Morris' statement that art is "the expression of pleasure 
in the labour of production" and to Dewey's "Art as Experience".  D&G   
construct their aesthetic theory as a kind of physics, in which things
like "expression", "pleasure" and "production" are posited as objective
material forces acting upon each other in the social space.  In this
framework, there is no possiblity of positing "production" and 
"reception" as separate activities that can be theorized separately;
they are indissolubly bound together into the primitives that the framework
is based on. 

It is my belief that in the ultimate analysis one cannot fruitfully talk 
about art -- what it is, what is should be -- without being able to talk
at one and the same time, in some organic way, _both_ about art as "the 
expression of pleasure in the labour of production" _and_ art as a
bourgeois institution.  But this integration of viewpoints is currently, 
in Western aesthetic discourse, either scarce or non-existent.  I would
be very far from claiming that it is achieved in D+G.  Or rather, I think
it probably _is_ achieved within the total body of D+G's work, but at 
the cost of moving to a hermetically sealed linguistic universe that forbids 
any traffic with what lies outside of it.  This, too, I find interesting:
Must it be so?  I, of course, would like the answer to be "no".  So anyway,
that's _my_ main interest in D+G.


-m