De-contextualising of the Experience and Re-composing of Sensations: A Deleuzian Reading of the Aesthetics of Abstraction

Abstract

Experiences are ‘actual’ as they are formed of human perception and affection, while the world of sensations verges on the ‘virtual,’ a state of Deleuzian ‘percepts’ and ‘affects.’ Walter Benjamin says that there is something prior to the experience—a world of ever fresh and ever elusive sensations. Abstraction in art is not an attempt to undo an experience and capture the ‘original’ sensation prior to that particular experience, but an attempt to compose sensations elusive of experiences. The world of sensations is the world of nonhuman indeterminations which lies at the source of all human determinations. The move from the actual to the virtual takes the figure back to its “diagram,” in an attempt to preserve its multiplicity prior to the lived actualization, and as such it surpasses the ‘giveness’ of human interest or utility. Abstraction in art and poetry attempts to question the given meanings of the human in order to de-contextualize ‘human’ experiences. In their subliminal semantic silences, abstract works of art and literature try to compose sensations in approximation to the pre-linguistic world of body and its sensations.