Michael Lafferty – The Diagram and Manipulated Chance in Painting: Deleuze and Peirce

A/V#9.04 2009 Spring
http://www.actualvirtualjournal.com/2014/11/av9.html

Gilles Deleuze acknowledges his indebtedness to Charles Sanders Peirce throughout his books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Deleuze’s explanation of the cinematic image is based on a development of Peirce’s semiotic theory. Two years earlier in Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation Deleuze makes scant reference to Peirce. This paper argues, however, that Deleuze’s book relies heavily on both Peirce’s concept of the analogical diagram and, in a wider context, on aspects of his metaphysical system.

Deleuze believes the diagram has a crucial role in creativity: it is a way of destroying the cliché inherent in painting. In a note he accepts that his view is based on Peirce’s idea of the diagram as a special and powerful class of icon, but that this reduces the diagram to a similitude of relations. The paper argues that the analogical nature of the diagram is central to Peirce’s thinking and underlies Deleuze’s whole theory of painting. Based on its use of the diagram, Deleuze sees painting as the supreme analogue art.

Deleuze explains that Francis Bacon’s method of painting relies on chance marks, or indeed, on throwing paint at the canvas. Bacon uses what Deleuze calls ‘manipulated chance’ to avoid the lurking cliché. Bacon himself clearly acknowledged the role of accident or chance in his method of painting. The paper argues that Deleuze’s view of accident and chance, a central theory of the book, can be traced to Peirce’s metaphysical system, in particular his concept of tychism or chance-ism. Taking a wider view, it is argued that two underlying features of Peirce’s metaphysical system synechism (the semiotic principle of continuity) and the aforementioned tychism are found in much of Deleuze’s later thinking on art.

Michael Lafferty trained as an architect and artist. He graduated last year with a PhD from the University of Warwick. He studied in the Philosophy Department and his thesis was entitled Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art. He works as an independent scholar. He is currently writing about scale and rhythm in art.

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