Towards The Construction Of Another World; Illusion As A Creative Practice
Nikolas Kolonias
Our world, much like Plato’s world, remains spilled and broken; a world full of
phantasms, reflections, representations and endless simulations that continuously
calculate; mechanically reproducing everything under their own logic of control. These
are the realities of the digitized machines that simulate and drive the accelerated rhythms
of post-Fordist condition of digital-capitalism. This is the post-modern social territory
that our current phase of capitalism produced; a territory that ‘organises knowledge,
affect, and other intellectual skills as a production force to be exploited.’1 But how can
we break this subjectivity produced through our constant interaction with these screens.
How can we compose a subjectivity outside the frenetic speeds of digitalism in order to
create a simulacrum that overturns today’s world? How to break and how to compose
when we are imprisoned within our human-all-too human cage of fears and clichés, our
self obsessed egoisms and its organic thought?
The post-modern world is surrounded by illusions, techno-virtual movements and
programmed acts. These are not abstract confusions or just external ideas but rather
thought's actions and constructions. But, are these illusions just a negative force that
hallucinates the brain [the readymade], and constructs the doxa of opinions and
in/dividual truths? Or they can be turned into a ‘creative’ act [will to power] that will
force us to think a new? It seems, that illusions arise from the plane of consciousness
itself. Antonin Artaud in his writings on Mexico he argues that ‘the plane of
consciousness’, or what the Indians called Ciguri, produces hallucinations, illusions that
are creative, constructive and liberating like the art of poetry. In these terms, the notion of
illusion or the false must be understood as something that is not static, that is not the
opposite of the true, that is not something negative and mostly that has nothing to do with
negation. But I feel that something is false in the previous sentence. Because we have to
“define” -if there is still a need for definition- the notion of the false without any previous
1
Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter: 2009: p.38.
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linguistic tradition that drives us to categorization and open up the gap that exists
between the meanings of true and false. In short, we have to search the notion of false not
as a negation but as an affirmation.
Nietzsche shows us the way to “play” with the traditional notions or dogmas by using a
technique that unveils the false as a will to power, as an intuition, as a principle to create
art, and as a “stasis” of living. For Nietzsche the notion of the false is singular, selfcontained, and is in/folded and un/folded in his writings as a necessity for artistic
creation. The notion of false is an affirmation (that’s why it cannot be considered as a
negation of the true) that produces the differences and at the same time is produced by
them.2 In these terms, difference becomes a mechanism that forces us to understand the
notion of true and false separately and not as a bipolar schema of opposites. Gilles
Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s puts forward this mechanism and sets two principles
regarding art: the first one is the principle of tragedy and the second one the principle of
false.
1. Being False
Art is the illusion of disorientation, the illusion of liberty, the illusion of presence, the
illusion of the sacred, the illusion of Nature. ... Not the painting of Buren, Mosset,
Parmentier or Toroni.... Art is a distraction, art is false. Painting begins with Buren,
Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni.”
Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, 1973
In the following paragraphs we will try to find the connections between art and underling
falsehood. Nietzsche proposes that the art is not a practice that deals with representational
formations (since that the aim of art has to do with tragedy or falsification and not with
As Deleuze writes; “For the speculative element of negation, opposition or
contradiction, Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of
affirmation and enjoyment [jouissance].” (Deleuze 2006:p.9/10)
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reason or truthfulness --- principles of representational art) but is a process via which
experimentation struggles to overcome previous structures (the cliché/the habit) and to
produce the new. The false is a part of this process and inextricably attached to the
mechanism of critique. Before the evolution of the false, we have to practice critique.
Critique here is not a form of representational criticism but an immanent process via
which we evaluate life; of our aesthetic values and ethics. This practice presupposes the
need to escape from the ego centered criticism as an act of opinion and common sense
and to explore critique as a need to create new ways of being – new lines of life- new
ways of existence.
In that context, the critical question concerning art-work, as explained by Stephen Zepke
in his book “Art as Abstract Machine”, “is not what is it? or what does it mean? but what
is it for me?”3. The question what is it? assumes a metaphysical essence with the object
that represents them. When we stopped perceiving art as representational this question
becomes irrelevant. The question what does it mean? , positions art at a specific plane of
meaning in which the interpretation of its forces are static and permanent. On the other
hand, the question what is it for me? places art within a plane of immanence turning
critique into an ethico-aesthetic paradigm , since what is “for me” is the immanent
condition of art and philosophy: “how we live with”. Here comes another Nietzschean
character the artist-philosopher. The artist-philosopher after his critical act of unveiling
the mask of truth from the world realized that “there is no longer any place for another
world”4. But to “arrive in this new world -which has no other world- we will need a new
sensibility adequate to will to power’s active affects, and a new thought able to revalue
our values. The artist-philosopher will require an entirely new physiology”5.
An entire new body – a new sensation. As Nietzsche writes: “New ears for new music.
New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto
3
Zepke 2005:p.21
ibid
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ibid
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remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner -- to hold together his
strength, his enthusiasm... Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.....”6.
“The world is neither true nor real but living. And the living world is the will to power,
will to falsehood, which is actualized in many different powers. To actualize the will to
falsehood under any power whatever, to actualize the will to power under any quality
whatever, is always to evaluate. To live is to evaluate. There is no truth of the world as it
is thought, no reality of the sensible world, all is evaluation, even and above all the
sensible and the real”
Deleuze 2006
The artist-philosopher is an Nietzschean ‘Overman’ because he/she is the becoming of
man into affirmation. The affirmation is a character that lives in a world that “ is neither
true nor real but living”7. Aiming at living in this world she/he has to evaluate and to
critique as a form of an ‘askesis’8 in order to give birth to a new kind of thought; a whole
new sensation. This new thought will not try to discover mistakes in the solutions but will
try to find the false problems, the false prior to the true, since “there are false solutions
for true problems”. This new kind of thought stops perceiving the impulses in the
6
Nietzsche 1918: p.37
Deleuze 2006: p.174
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Foucault in his late work argues that the term askesis does not denotes a practice of selfdenial, but in its original Greek context it always had a positive and productive meaning
which meant perfecting oneself, developing ones capacities, becoming who one is.
Foucault writes: ‘...this new kind of parrhesiastic game – where the problem is to
confront the truth about yourself – requires what the Greeks called ‘askesis’. Although
our word ‘asceticism’ derives from the Greek word ‘askesis’ (since the meaning of the
word changes as it becomes associated with various Christian practices), for the Greeks
the word does not mean ‘ascetic’, but has a very broad sense denoting any kind of
practical training or exercise. For example, it was a commonplace to say that any kind of
art or technique had to be learned by mathesis and askesis – by theoretical knowledge and
practical training. And, for instance, when Musonius Rufus says that the art of living,
techne tou biou, is like the other arts, i.e., an art which one could not learn only through
theoretical teachings, he is repeating a traditional doctrine. This techne tou biou, this art
of living, demands practice and training: askesis. (Foucault 1983: p.62)
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established manner and invents new connections, new neurons; a new brain. Likewise,
this new sensation is adapted to the perception breaking down common sense. Since the
common sense is produced through the noetic method of dialectic, the new kind of
perception requires a non-dialectical schema, a schema that overcomes the common
coordinates of Euclidean geometry through which we perceive the world, and opens up
perception into a vision, one that curves the space into its topological dimension9. This
kind of new thought presupposes the need of a new empiricism (a superior one, as
Deleuze writes) that tries to re-evaluate the connection between the actual and the virtual,
to draw new lines of flight (such as lines of power of false and will) that open up an
entirely new world.
But how can these new senses and new feelings be unlocked? How we can construct
something that has not been sensed? We can achieve it by experimentation, by be false
into our own body, by mutate our own sensations, by creating errors into our ego
centered feelings, by blocking or sabotaging our common sensibility which is formed by
habit… Trying to feel via a body-without-organs10. As Deleuze writes: “The very notion
of the false problem indeed implies that we have to struggle not against simple mistakes
(false solutions), but against something more profound: an illusion that carries us along,
or in which we are immersed, inseparable from our condition.”11
2. Falser than false
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Regarding topology, further point need to be made, as I believe that it can be a very
helpful method in “locating” the false process. Because the false process is traced and
expanded into “non- real” or “non-sensible” spaces as opposed to Euclidean or
commonly perceived spaces. Topology is not dialectic (dialectic is constituted by the
metre of thesis-synthesis-antithesis) because it is not-metric, instead it produces new
coordinates that can be used for the study of a body at different “species of spaces” such
as elastic spaces or curved falsely produced spaces.
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“Without” here is not a negation but an affirmation.
Deleuze 1988: p.131
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The false is concealed. It is hidden-mummified within its productive process. Being false
is not just a discovery of true inside false (if those two notions need still to be conjoined),
but above all for the enjoyment for producing the false and its artistic powers, for this
new kind of logic, for this new perception which is liberated from pre-existing limits and
opens a new topological space; a virtuality in which we feel this new entirely world with
an entirely new physiology. As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote at ‘The Possessed’ “the real
truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you
must always mix in some falsehood with it”12.
The phrase “this new world- which has no other world”13 is not just a call to an utopian
world, but rather it encloses the ethical and the aesthetic condition of Nietzsche and
Deleuze’s philosophy, since the act of living or the artistic creation aims at reaching a
greater, more enjoyable14 vision. The departure towards this new vision presupposes the
will, the will to power (creation), the power to being false which is always a process of
constructing a difference. As a result, the power of false expresses the need to construct a
new man already missing from the typical, dialectical and common narration. In this
sense, being false is a differential intuition via which the artist-philosopher overcame the
antinomy of true and false (beyond good and evil) which according to Spinoza, Nietzsche
and Deleuze are the delusions of a moralistic world-view that oppress the will to power
(creation).
The power of the false is a practice that destroys a representational moralistic world-view
by initiating a method of immanence that passes through different stages: from
affirmation to difference, from critique to evaluation, from new thought to new
physiology, from joy to art. Among these stages the artist-philosopher has to create anew lines of flight in order to draw new paths to subjectivity; a function that must be
actualized through an artistic practice, one that raise new existential territories, a new
12
Dostoevsky 2007: p.230
Zepke 2005: p.21
14 In the Spinozian sense.
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rhythm of life and initiates new sensations as Nietzsche writes “art is worth more than
truth”15; -an artistic project of falsification - ‘At The End Life Needs No Introduction’16
no truths but new songs, new compositions and even an animal’s cry.
References
1. Artaud A. 1976. The Peyote Dance, Straus And Giroux.
2. Deleuze, G. 1988. Bergsonism. Massachusetts: Zone Books.
3. ------ 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. New York: Semiotext(e).
4. ------2006. Nietzsche And Philosophy. London: Continuum International
Publishing Group.
5. Dostoevsky F. 2007, The Possessed (The Devils), Emereo Publishing.
6. Dyer-Witheford And De Peuter 2009, Games Of Empire, University Of
Minnesota Press.
7. Foucault M. 2001 , Fearless Speech, MIT Press.
8. Lippard L. 1973. Six Years: The Dematerialization Of The Art Object From 1966
To 1972, New York: Praeger.
9. Nietzsche F. 1918, The Antichrist , Knopf New York.
10. ---------------.1968, Will To Power , Vintage; 1st edition .
11. Rasdjarmrearnsook A. Artwork Title: ‘At The End Life Needs No Introduction’
2013 , Https://Www.Youtube.Com/Watch?V=1rfd1jsh1hk.
12. Zepke, S. 2005. Art As Abstract Machine. New York: Routledge.
15
16
Nietzsche, 1979: p. 71.
Rasdjarmrearnsook , Artwork Title : ‘At The End Life Needs No Introduction’ (2013)
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