From my artist’s perspective, I believe that an interpretation of Deleuze becomes authentically comprehensive, even if it is not, and is never intended to be immediately comprehensible, through visual expression.
This expression gives ‘rise’ to the Deleuzean ‘ground’ that, in turn, is ‘rising to the surface’ where it ‘acquires autonomous existence’.
In the ground of the Introduction the seed has already been sown, and now, here, in Chapter 1, the radicle now breaks through the testa and the primary shoot and grows towards its culmination into a flower. Eulophia alta achieves actuality through its individuation in a moment - of three - in the history of the philosophical explanation of the univocity of being:
1
Duns Scotus,
the subtle doctor
Penetrating in his manner of thought because he understood being as univocal yet at the same time neutral and ‘indifferent to the distinction between the finite and the infinite, the singular and the universal, the created and the uncreated’.
Duns Scotus
Represents the ‘first moment’ where existence becomes neutralised into the most abstract of concepts applicable to everything that exists.
His concept of haeccity as the properties, qualities, characteristics of each individual that manifests its individuality…
His ‘formal distinction’ - distinctio formalis a parte rei - between different aspects of the same thing, aspects that are indistinct in reality but distinct in definition…
individuation as the ‘ultimate actuality of form’
leads to
2
Spinoza
Denies univocity’s neutrality or indifference and creates it as an object of ‘pure affirmation’, identical with ‘unique, universal and infinite substance’
With Spinoza, univocal being becomes expressive; it becomes an expressive and affirmative proposition
The ground then has become an abstract line that acts ‘directly upon the soul’ and is fed by chiaroscuro where – in the darkness between the ‘undifferentiated abyss’ and the calm surface upon which ‘unconnected determinations’ float, Artaud’s monstrous cruelty of difference is exposed at the precise point where form distinguishes itself from the ground and we realise that because distinction itself is form, the converse - ground distinguishing itself from form – is not possible. This is the precise point at which the determined maintains its essential relation with the undetermined and difference is defined in its ‘maledictory state’.
The project of philosophy of difference then is the rescue of difference from its cruel cruelty by relating determination to determination and creating a coherent medium of organic representation.
Eulophia alta is represented here
Orchidaceae is the largest family of the class of flowering plants: angiosperms
Eulophia (genus) From the Greek: ‘eu’ (well) and ‘lophos’ (plume), referring to the crested ridges of the labellum (lip) in most species. alta (species) Common name: wild coco.
Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself
The hollow in the soul
Difference is (merely?) a predicate in the comprehension of a concept:
Specific difference genus – single and perfect – small in comparison to larger difference – genera – maximal and perfect only in relation to the identity of the undetermined concept – genus.
Aristotlean Logos of species:
alta
speaks with one voice:
univocal
Aristotlean Logos of genera: of which Eulophia remains the undetermined concept:
speaks with many voices:
equivocal
Where the univocity of species in a common genus refers to the equivocity of Being in various genera
each reflects the other
and
A single voice raises the clamour of Being
Being:
Deleuze invokes the repetition of Nietzsche’s eternal return as embodying the univocity of Being. The Eternal Return in which univocal being ‘is not only thought and even affirmed, but effectively realised’.
The eternal return is then ‘being but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back “the same” but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference… Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as “repetition”. Repetition in the eternal return therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of different.
Generic and specific difference achieve complicity in representation
Eulophia alta is represented here – in 4
The ‘necessary quadripartite character of representation … difference ceases to be reflexive and recovers an effectively real concept … to the extent that it designates catastrophes: either breaks of continuity in the sense of resemblances or impassable fissures between analogical structures’
As an artist I see myself as a Deleuzean Nomad. I operate, I practice, in the open space of ‘play’ that contrasts with ‘sedentary space’. I play with imagery, with the relationship between figure and ground, form and concept, and like his demons I ‘leap’ over boundaries that, in being leapt, witness the ‘unsettling difficulties’ that my own practice, my own ‘nomadic distribution’ introduces into the sedentary structures of representation.
EPILOGUE
Eulophia alta is rhizomic with sympodial growth characteristics dictating a lateral growth pattern in which the apical meristem is terminated and either be consumed to make an inflorescence or other determinate structure, or it can be aborted. Growth is continued by a lateral meristem, thus repeating the process and resulting in a stem, which, though appearing to be continuous, is in fact derived from multiple meristems.
A characteristic is an attribute. A characteristic differs from a univocal being in that it may be instantiated, represented, often in multiple beings. Plant, human: intrinsic ethnobotanical relation… The rhizome proliferates.