In the first chapter of her book *Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and theFraming of the World, *Elizabeth Grosz spells out an ambitious plan toexplore the ontological origins of art as an attempt to discover whichconcepts drive artistic creation. Grosz, a philosopher by trade, spendssome time defending her discussion of art: “What distinguishes the artsfrom other forms of cultural production are the ways in which artisticproduction merges with, intensifies and eternalizes or monumentalizes,sensation” (4). If, as Grosz argues, sensation is the basis of theexpressive act, then the study of these sensations and the systems fromwhich they arise and to which they give rise transcends aesthetics into therealm of metaphysics. Indeed, Grosz’s entire project can be (and is perhapsbest) viewed, as making clear the distinguishing characteristics of physicaland extraphysical presence while explaining the extension presence beyond,through, and between domains. After all, “Art,” writes Grosz, “enablesmatter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify - toresonate and become more than itself” (4). The artist, in a Gippetto-likedisplay of sheer imaginative desire, wills the inert into motion. That thismotion may not be toward anything in particular is of little consequence toGrosz, who finds that art & nature share a quality of, “excessive anduseless production - production for its own sake…” (9.)
Grosz is not an evolutionary biologist, yet claims that “Art hijackssurvival impulses and transforms them through the vagaries andintensifications posed by sexuality, deranging them
into a new order, a new practice. Art is the sexualization of survival
or, equally, sexuality is the rendering artistic, the exploration of the
excessiveness, of nature” (12). Her justification of the artistic act isbased on an understanding of shared sensations — in isolation, even”sensation as nonorganic life” (9) is meaningless. Hence her preoccupationwith the sexual reproduction as a method of exchange. Thus, “Art is notlinked to some intrinsic relation to one’s own body but exactly theopposite: it is linked to those processes of distancing… that abstractsensation from the body” (12). Here, the Taostic principle warrantsapplication: it hardly seems as through looking at presence is anydifferent than absence. Absence is simply presence displaced, or presenceabsence overcome. The idea that we must commune with the world outside ofour own body requires other bodies. Grosz’s metaphysics, as much as sheattempts to deterritorialize the entire world, requires distinction:”unless it is in some way demarcated, nature itself is incapable of… liftinglife above mere survival” (17).
With this, Grosz’s first chapter leaves behind the grubby, earthy questionof *what* for the ethereal, spiritualized question of *how*. Unlike theuseless or excessive art Grosz , Grosz’s discussion of conceptual framing,realized through a series of architectural examples, seems quitefunctional. Normally this is a critique that can be sidestepped through anexplanation that the author, herself, is not an artist — but in Grosz’scase, given the strength of her pleas that philosophy be seen as a siblingto art, some of the same standards may be applied.
Grosz falls into oversimplification when she explains the, “transitionalpassage from the frame to the screen, a movement of growingdematerialization” (17). Though she mentions that the action of art seemsto occur more and more in the “enfolded second-order constitution of theframe,” Grosz is overeager in her abandonment of the physicality ofcomputing — those bytes and bits are stored in spatiotemporal matter. Thefact that these data are on a hard disk, impossible to see with the nakedeye, adds to a sense of dematerialization, but does not override the lessobvious fact that these data are extant. Her analysis is more successfulwhen she approaches the screen as primarily concerned with “render[ing]visible forces that are themselves invisible” (22). While imagining data tobe invisible, in the same way she imagines the human body’s relationshipwith sensation, may allow for the metaphysical discussion that Grosz wantsto have, she hasn’t done the ground work to convince this reader that thesystems she’s discussing warrant such treatment.
That said, it’s the first chapter. So maybe this is the ground work.