Access Provided by Goldsmith's College, University Of London at 09/14/11 12:10PM GMT

book reviews
Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. By Elizabeth Grosz. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 127 pp. Cloth $24.00. Elizabeth Groszs 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 books 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 Guattaris 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 specicity 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 ight towards the world of autonomous qualities regulated by sexual selection (54). These, she claims, are qualities that cant 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 nd its artistic exemplar in Aboriginal paintings from the Western Desert. Groszs 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
comparative literature studies, vol. 47, no. 4, 2010. Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

549

550

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

paintings in fact support this neglect of actual art and of Deleuze and Guattaris account of it. Western Desert painting, Grosz gleefully informs us, dees Deleuzes 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 Groszs 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, any bodys guess. Groszs attempts to biologize art and her afrmation 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 Guattaris 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 Groszs 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 of words) in a way that avoids the harsh critique aimed at conceptual art in What Is Philosophy? In fact, much of Deleuzes work in particular deals specically with actual artists, but Grosz chooses not to mention this, favoring instead the sensual morsels of a primitive animal art. Of course Grosz is not obliged to discuss actual artworks, but by not doing so she risks turning art into something entirely disengaged from its own present, let alone a possible future. This would run counter to her claims of seeking ways in which politics and art can be linked (2), or at least it would run counter to arts own efforts in this direction. This is the risk of abandoning Deleuzes own favored method of immanent critique and is perfectly illustrated by Groszs comment that art, like nature, is production for its own sake. (9) This is of course the very rational of art production

BOOK REVIEWS

551

that avant-garde and contemporary art has rejected, meaning that Groszs book seems to afrm, rather than address, this disconnect between Deleuze and Guattari and todays art. If, as Grosz suggests, Deleuze provides us with a way of thinking the same forces as the arts address (89), he does so, I would argue, by rst arriving at an understanding how the arts address these forces. Understanding the animal aspects of this is certainly one step in the process, but in Groszs book the further step of seeing how arts animal expressions construct and destroy arts plane of compositionas the example of the Duchamp reference in the discussion of the refrain suggestsis missing. As a result, we get an image of art that seems to bear little resemblance to any actual art (apart from Western Desert painting, which rather proves the point). Perhaps the reason for this, as Grosz readily admits, is that she has no particular expertise . . . in any art (90). But this does not strike me as an adequate excuse. Rather, this silence about actual art seems to be a symptom of her initial claim that her goal is to develop a nonaesthetic philosophy for art. (2) She explains that this seemingly self-contradictory aim means exploring a philosophical structure of art that is not concerned with art historical or critical questions or with judgments of taste or quality. Instead the book will be concerned with those forces and powers that are common to all the arts and to the regions where these overlap with philosophy. This is the odd thing about Groszs book: its goal of a nonaesthetic philosophy of art is certainly not one shared by Deleuze and Guattari, and yet her book appears to be barely more than an elegant explanation of their work. Stephen Zepke Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. By Ursula K. Heise. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 260 pp. Paper $24.95. Heres an experiment you can try at home. Load up Google Earth on your computer, and use the search function to locate the place where you live. As you zoom into the satellite image, you will soon see an overhead view of your particular living space. If you happen to live in one of those urban areas where the Google Earth camera vans have visited, you may even be able to zoom down to ground level and look at your own home from the outside. Currently,
comparative literature studies, vol. 47, no. 4, 2010. Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.