Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (The Wellek Library Lectures) by Elizabeth Grosz

Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (The Wellek Library Lectures) Reviews

• 
  Emma Sea

  Tough to rate this, because I plowed through the bits I wasn't particularly interested in (Grosz's thoughts on Darwin's theory of music's origin as a masculine sexual lure) to get to the bit I was interested in: how Aboriginal paintings might be understood through Deleuze's framework of chaos and becoming.
  
  Grosz states that "the common ground for all the arts is the rhythmic, irreducibly durational universe of invisible, inaudible forces whose order isn't experientially discernable and is thus experienced or lived, at best, as chaotic" (p. 86).
  
  Aboriginal paintings, then, are "temporal maps of those ancestral spatial terrains that are distinguishable and significant not for their geographical features but for the life a geography sustains, the practices that it engenders and the movements it requires" (p. 92). Grosz theorises Aboriginal paintings as "haptic effects" that represent "the becoming of the terrain or landscape".
  
  So, this part, wonderful. The chapter on music: just not me. Therefore my rating is only for chapter three. YMMV.
• 
  Elizabeth

  I loved this book. It has made me think about art and life in many new and meaningful ways. I recommend it to anyone--but particularly to artists, musicians, and those with soulful connections to the earth. Also, if you like Gilles Deleuze... and it has prompted me to read more of and about his philosophy. Also, it's available online as a pdf for free--just google it.
• 
  Jomel

  Ngl, it may be an arrogant book that aims to generously explain the definition of art. It is not the most ideal for an academic reading on art, considering it was published in 2008 and overlooks some of the most significant art movements we have had since the 21st century.😭 However, on a personal note, I enjoyed reading this as it further explains my favourite way of experiencing art; to be “touched, engaged, intensified” prior to “read, interpret, decipher” the art. This is my first time reading a text on art by someone with no expertise in the art scene, thus it was insightful. I loved parts of chapter 1 and 3, (especially relations to cosmic forces) not a fond of chapter 2 and relations to sexual selection and some dude name Darwin tho🤢. The writing style can be poetic, complimenting the premise of the text but other times it can be unnecessarily tiring and repetitive to read. There are definitely some handpicked quotes that gave me CHILLS and deep resonant. I already feel my takeaways from this has allowed me to be more aware of my sensory experiences in the process of ideating and executing an artwork. The multiple references to other philosophers has also prompt me to take interest in their stuff. And altho it has it setbacks, I feel it is a reading that can bring forth dialogues/questions in the relationship between art and human, more so in urban and contemporary context. I haven’t read similar readings to make a good judgement, but as of now, I believe it is generally beneficial to both artists and art viewers alike for a start. (the sensitive onez🥺)
  
  
• 
  Rory Mullan

  Really effective introductory text on Deleuzian aesthetics as an alternative to popular concerns with representation and signification. I was really fascinated by Grosz’s presentation of her Deleuzian view that art, science and philosophy are operations that the living perform upon the surface of the universe as chaos to extract some measure of order and stability from it; Grosz strikingly uses the metaphor of a raft upon turbulent waters to illuminate these operations. I wonder if an Adornoan aesthetics of the non-identical could be put into productive, critical dialogue with Grosz’s Deleuzian contention that that the chaos of the universe necessarily exceeds all extractions of order by the living, given Adorno's idea is that it is (nonconceptual) art itself where this remainder is expressed or given voice. I also liked her ascription of human art to the animality of the human being, thus breaking from the idea that art is bound up with the higher humanity of the rational and moral subject of civilisation; Grosz actually weaves some of Darwin’s observations into her development of a case for this view. I was also pleasantly described to see a discussion of some paintings by Indigenous Australians in relation to the Deleuzian notions of art and sensation. A great book!
• 
  madz

  third chapter best chapter
• 
  George

  This is a concise and interesting short book and a lovely introduction to Grosz's style and interests. For the most part it sticks pretty close to being an exposition of Deleuze and Guattari, largely just What is Philosophy, which I think means that Grosz doesn't have a lot of time to present her own claims, although she is a persuasive reader of these two French thinkers. She also describes the book as a synthesis of D&G and Irigaray, but there's very little Irigaray in here – rather, Grosz outlines her Deleuzean conception of the foundational role of sexual difference in the natural history of biological life and its forms and forces through a fairly close reading of Darwin. I felt that it was at times odd to refer so much of this natural history to an admittedly Irigarayan interest in the feminism of sexual difference – that is to say, it was a reading of biological life tout court and in general through the lens of anthropomorphic dimorphism in particular (although to be fair there is scope for this in Darwin's own work) – such that the history of life pivots on the emergence of sexual selection as an excess not captured by natural selection. But that material was still interesting and she undertook the argumentative work of defending Darwin against his devotees, which is always satisfying: Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins all come in for explicit if very brief critique. The concluding reading of Australian Aboriginal painting and its modern history was an unexpected and original highlight of the book, although it emerged somewhat unclearly from a body deeply focused on the artistry of non-human mechanisms of sexual selection.
• 
  Karl Steel

  Impressions follow:
  
  Pretty thin stuff after reading in object-oriented philosophy over the last few days. Via Deleuze, Grosz thinks in binaries: inside/outside, alive/notalive, 'primary forces' and the 'primitive' (which, in a typically psychoanalytic manner, are more revelatory, because earlier), and art as framing 'chaos' (which is out there) (and where neither 'framing' nor 'life' have any of the ethical force that they do in Butler's Frames of War); discussions of music as rhythmic and ordered work only so long as she doesn't discuss any particular music and just brackets off various postmodern, postrhythmic, and postmelodic soundmaking (indeed it's the automatic pop music so disdained by Deleuze that is most rhythmic and refrain-y) (and if she wants to discuss primitive and bodily aesthetics of sensation, EATING would have been a better site for investigation than music); her references to science use Darwin in the same way one might use a philosopher, as a site for thinking, when she might have done better, both in her references to birds and in her many vague references to 'the world', 'the universe', and even the 'vibrations' of sub-atomic particles, to engage with contemporary science. Certainly once we get "down" (if we want to think in these spatial metaphors) to sub-atomic particles, it's no longer suitable to distinguish between life and nonlife.
  
  Useful for a good discussion of Von Uexküll and for the inevitable excess and 'mal-adaption' of sexual attraction, whether in birds, fish, or humans.
• 
  Lucas

  sensational.
• 
  Norah Bowman

  Perfect.
• 
  Meaghen

  Such wild language!
• 
  samantha

  -life elaborates itself thru pleasing/making itself pleasing
  -sensation not in us; we are in it
  -art is becoming-sensation of materiality; transformation of excess into sensation.
  -art needs plane of composition (immersion & disruption of chaos)
  -art= excess
  -1st gesture of art: fabrication of the frame (not exteriorization of the self. it's architecture-art not body-art
  -re phenomenology: sensations are not quite subjective or objective: rather subjective objectivities/ objective subjectivities. sensations as zone of indeterminacy between subject + object. sensing is not reducible to subjects/objects.
  -sensation= affects + percepts
  -affects=man's becoming other
  -percepts= nonhuman landscapes of nature
• 
  Jimmy Brandt

  Interesting book and the subjects and concepts it talks about makes it worth the read.
  But the low rating is due to the fact that it felt poorly written - it's hard to read sentences that go on and on with commas used in a way that a lot of the times makes it really confusing. Sometimes one page could be summarized into one, short, sentence - it feels a bit too pretentious in how it presents it's content.
• 
  Thom

  EDIT (02/26/22): Just found out, a month and a half after reading this, that the author's transphobic. Really removes any interest I'd have in revisiting this as a theoretical text. Don't really have much else to say on it now.
  
  Original review (January 7th 2022):
  
  Thought this was interesting. Hard to give my definitive thoughts since I'm still unpacking a lot of what I read. Picked this up since I've been interested in Deleuze recently, and this has made me want to read more of his work. I've read a few chapters of his writings with Guattari, so while some of the concepts in this book weren't new I thought it was useful to see how their theories are mobilized by others in their writing. Can't say I really wrapped my head around everything going on, but that's part of the joy I get from reading theoretical texts. Had a lot of interesting to say about art, and I could see myself returning to this in the future.
• 
  Chris Hoffman

  This gud