Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (review)

Elizabeth Grosz's fashionably small book Chaos, Territory, Art, Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth is beautifully written. The sentences unfold and caress you like a plume of exhaled smoke, giving the book's emphasis on sexual attraction and the eroticism of sensation a physical force. This is its most compelling aspect, giving the question of gender in her discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's aesthetics a real embodiment. In this sense, her argument is as affectual as it is intellectual, and so explores a way of "doing" philosophy that is both "artistic" and "feminist." Here Grosz combines Deleuze and Guattari with Irigaray, and especially with "her insistence on the sexual specificity and irreducible bodily difference as the very motor of cultural and philosophical production" (2). This combination is developed in the second chapter, where Grosz reads Darwin to show how art "hijacks" the evolutionary demands of survival "through the excessive or nonadaptive detours of sexual selection, sexual taste, and erotic pleasure" (26). As a result, and as she later elaborates, art is a "line of flight towards the world of autonomous qualities regulated by sexual selection" (54). These, she claims, are "qualities that can't be directly capitalised" (54) (a possibly dubious claim in our age of biopolitics) inasmuch as art "is an elaboration of the most primitive and elementary fragments of an ancient animal prehistory" (35). This "primitive" "animal prehistory" will find its artistic exemplar in Aboriginal paintings from the Western Desert.

Grosz's use of Darwin (in the name of Irigaray) is the most original part of her book. The price for this, however, is almost entirely paid by art. Grosz effectively converts "art" into a biological concept and process almost completely detached from actual artworks. Apart from the twelve pages on Western Desert painting from Australia with which the book concludes, there is only cursory mention of artists or artworks, and the Aboriginal paintings in fact support this neglect of "actual art" and of Deleuze and Guattari's account of it. Western Desert painting, Grosz gleefully informs us, "defies" Deleuze's categorization of modern painting in his book on Francis Bacon (90) while at the same time being entirely "contemporary" rather than "a timeless traditional indigenous art form" (92). In this way Western Desert painting is "art" in Grosz's sense, it is uncontained by traditional "Western" or "primitive" art forms and instead stands as an example of her "bioaesthetics." Western desert paintings, she tells us, are "posters of the earth itself" (101), "animal-becomings" (99) that "more clearly" summon a "people to come" "than any other form of art today" (99). While this process culminates, as does the book, in "the (political) overcoming of the present and helps bring a new, rich, and resonating future into being" (103), what this future might actually be is, unfortunately, anybody's guess.

Grosz's attempts to biologize "art" and her affirmation of Western desert painting as an example of this are clearly not "wrong," but they do ignore (and perhaps by implication reject) an important element of Deleuze and Guattari's own work. Deleuze and Guattari do emphasize the animal qualities of aesthetic processes (which are for them living processes), but such qualities attend their "actual" emergence as "art" (of both a Western and "nomadic" persuasion, for Deleuze and Guattari they are not necessarily distinct). For example, they call the birdsong that is one of Grosz's constant themes a "readymade," using the English term to emphasise its connection to Duchamp and the revolution that will come to be called, after the sixties, "contemporary art." This is an intriguing and important moment, as it suggests an alternative genealogy to contemporary artistic practices that is both grounded in the natural functions of the "refrain" but that also might account for the turn away in the sixties from modernist sensation (Deleuze shares Kantian roots with Greenberg; their differences are, Deleuze claims his book on Bacon, "a matter...