5th Step Transformation
Although it seems so simple to work only with dots and lines, it leads us into the depths of art, science and philosophy.
We can say that the cultural understanding of the laws of being starts from the idea that everything is constructed by the relations of points (the ancient Greek philosophers called these points atoms). In the Renaissance, this idea became the foundation of the modern world.
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The Book of Painting, ca. 1480
According to the German translation by Heinrich Ludwig, Vienna, 1882“Science is the name given to that intellectual activity which begins with its very first beginnings, and about which nothing else can be found in nature that still constitutes a part of the same knowledge.
This is the case, for example, in (the doctrine of) continuous quantities, namely in the science of geometry. If we begin here with the surface of bodies, we find that it has its origin in the line, the termination of these same surfaces; and we are not yet satisfied with this, for we recognise that the line has its termination in the point, and the point is that beyond which there is nothing smaller.
Thus the point is the first beginning of geometry, and neither in nature nor in the human spirit can anything else exist that could be the beginning of the point.”
For hundreds of years we thought we knew pretty much what a point is and what a line. Although mathematically a point cannot be defined, we consider it irrefutable that every point is to be seen as a coordinate of the code from which the material dimension unfolds. We thought we only had to decipher this code to make the world a perfect place. That was the basic idea of the Enlightenment; that we will be able to control ourselves and the world.
Even before science discovered at the beginning of the 20th century that it is impossible to decipher the basic code, i.e. the smallest part of which the material world is composed (as Heisenberg proves with his uncertainty principle), art discovered that point and line mark an autonomy principle that we have to follow, that we have to abandon ourselves to.
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Swiss-born German artist, 1879 – 1940
In his artistic and didactic work at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee formulated three qualities of the line:
One active, one medial and one passive.
He describes the organically drawn line as active, "which freely passes by". He compares it to a "walk for its own sake, without a destination".
According to his definition, a line becomes medial in the sense of a reference to something else when the moving point returns to its point of departure, thus creating a closed contour that forms a figuration: "In the process of becoming, these figures have a linear character; but when they are finally formed, this linear quality is immediately replaced by the idea of surface".
The passive line results when the viewer does not first perceive a freely drawn line but immediately the geometric construction that forms it.
While scientific had formulated that the basic coding is undetectable, art discovers the reason for this; because the point is always zero: that which we cannot know, the uncertain, the unpredictable.
The points, and from it the lines that must be drawn from one point to another (by following the playful movement of walking without a goal), are the negative double of nothingness.
This is the point where encoding begins, the formulation of the world that becomes true through the use of vowels and consonants which provokes the unfolding of the material world (encoded and constantly recoded in moving lines).
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Russian painter, graphic artist and art theorist who lived and worked mainly in Germany and France, 1866 to 1944
In "Point and Line to Surface", Contribution to the Analysis of the Painterly Elements. Bauhaus Books No. 9, Munich 1926, Kandinsky writes:
"The geometric point is an invisible being. It must therefore be defined as a non-material being. In a material sense, the point resembles a zero.
In this zero, however, various qualities are hidden that are 'human'. In our imagination, this zero - the geometric point - is connected with the highest scarcity, i.e. with the greatest restraint, but which speaks.
Thus, in our imagination, the geometric point is the highest and most single connection of silence and speech."
In the second half of the 20th century, philosophy turned away from the universality principle of logic to recognise that every argument must withstand the multiplicity of nothing minus one, which contains the universe of singularity. The nothing minus one is not to be understood as a reversal of nothing into something, but like the reversal of the nightly constellations into a multitude of black dots on a white sheet: although the nothing became visible, it remains as the ground for all material being insofar as we are unable to say more about it than to know nothing about it. Ludwig Wittgenstein's final conclusion in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
But one question remains to be spoken about: "How is one to act upon it?"
Deleuze and Gauttari answered: "By connecting every point with every other point!"
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Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher, 1925 - 1995 / Félix Guattari, French psychoanalyst, 1930 - 1992
In "Rhizome", the introduction to "A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia." originally published in 1980, Deleuze and Guattari write:
"Any point of a rhizome can and must be connected to any other. The tree or root, on the other hand, is quite different, where a point and an order are fixed.
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[It] is a matter of [the] capture of code, surplus value of code, multiplication of valence, real becoming, wasp becoming of the orchid, orchid becoming of the wasp; each becoming ensures the deterritorialisation of one term and the reterritorialisation of the other; the one and the other becoming concatenate and detach themselves according to a circulation of intensities that drives deterritorialisation ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, but an explosion of two heterogeneous series into the line of flight composed of a common rhizome."
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The many (multiple) must be made: not by continually adding superordinate dimensions, but, on the contrary, quite simply, in all the dimensions at one's disposal: n-1 each time (The one is only a part of the many when it is subtracted from it). Subtract the one when constructing a multiplicity; write n-1."
So when we talk about transformations, we are talking about how we recode the constellations (you could call it the multiplication of the infinite points of a rhizome) to create something out of nothing: a sense out of non-sense, a speaking out of silence, a togetherness out of being alone (alone = n (nothing) -1 = "all in one" minus I, the subject).
Transformations, then, means nothing other than working in one's own way to reconnect the points. Reconnecting the points (i.e. re-coding the coordinates) requires the deconstruction of mind and matter - until nothingness becomes visible.
To do this, each of us must develop our own methods, our own letters, vocabularies, linguistic spaces, so that the figurations we have created ourselves can enter the stage to participate in the Commedia dell' Arte, so that nothingness becomes a beautiful story and the comedy of life becomes true.
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Leonardo Da Vinci, Book of Painting, Nicholas and Son, London, 1835
Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, Albert Langen, Münschen, 1925
Wassily Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, Albert Langen, München, 1926
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, Athlone Press, London, 1990
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1. Introduction: Rhizome, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987