Ripples From Palm Springs: Companion Essay

By Marco Pini

The footnote to any exploration of Deleuze should be that no work is finished, that creation of the new is consistent, the process of becoming is unyielding. It looks at nature, the flower, the palm tree, growing, existing in a flux of creative evolution, and our role as designers or just human beings, is to understand that universal process, and follow along with it.

This project takes my previous essay ‘Ghost Tropics’ which looked at the development and understanding of tropicality, how its procession from the indiginous to a plastic fantasy through twisted colonial narratives, reflects the rhizomatic and deterritorialization of modern concepts. The churn and buzz of images, signifiers, concepts around ‘the tropical’ and me trying to map the development into the pink plastic lawn flamingos and tiki modernism we have today. But what i realised through analysis of these techno poetics, is that an analysis, and attempt to grasp the movement of these ideas, is simply a waterslide into the machine itself. I am not analysing ‘the tropics’ i am analysing the processes of analysis, which in itself exponentially becomes a process. It is a spiral, a ripple, a fold. 

As with much of Deleuze, his concepts can go by many terms, each with their own difference (a keystone in his theories, nothing is repeated, everything evolves and all concepts are linked and contained within another). Chaos can be viewed as and within metastability, drunkenness, infinite speed with which every form taking shape vanishes (Plotnistsky, 2006). Linkages can be seen as a fold, a ripple, becoming, crystallization, Deterritorialization, each describes the process that goes into everything, even the formation of this sentence, this essay, his own theory. There is a playfulness to the definition and confusion of the terms, it can seem daunting, waffley or overwhelming how fast the overlaps form, almost creating new avenues within its ontological language in real time. This is the satisfaction for me with his work, it plays out like music, whilst still remaining an airtight self fulfilling philosophy, that seeps into all things. But this is because his philosophy is all things, unlike other works which look at epistemology, logic, reason- Deleuze looks to nature, how the world we live in is formed naturally, what are the patterns. It seems obvious, but little philosophy touched on scientific and ecological patterns to explain the discursive web of life. 

The role as a designer is, in some ways, a benefit to this chaos is our role to process and map this. We sketch- explaining a concept by outlining its parts. We work in a diagramatic process which Zdebik describes as ‘a physical state or system being moved into incorporeal abstract trails, and reconfigured into another system, whilst retaining memory of its function. We are creating in real time, Derrida’s spectrality, connecting to his theory of trace. As Derrida explains:

 ‘trace is not only the disappearance of origin, it means the origin did not even disappear. That it was never constituted except reciprocally by non origin. The trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.’

What this is suggesting, is that in the role of mapping, we are connecting with the axiom of concept, the outlines, the key information needed to understand a concept. We are getting to the trace of the image. This relates especially to the work of Batia Suter, whos archival, photographic and curatorial assemblages are the main inspiration for this project. Her piece ‘Surface Series’ contains hundreds of aerial photographs of landscape, surfaces, some natural, some original. She develops an unconscious visual narrative through the development of image to image, and we start to lose sight of what we are actually looking at. We ask ourselves, what is manmade and what is natural? But most importantly, what is the relation between the images that we are seeing and why does it make sense?

Suters work can be seen as a visual essay, it is a conversation and explanation of existence. It is a process, both for her and for the viewer. It is a push and pull between Form and Matter, entering the flow of diagrammatic abstraction, concerned with the connectivity between image and meaning. Essays are assemblages of other assemblages, you quote theorist’s theories, which quote other theories exponentially. But the essay is only a trace of a cognitive and real world function- the collection of narratives, intrigues, your own personal window. The tracing generates the same through an analogous repetition, but a map shows new possibilities, a map is a function of generation, whilst bearing no resemblance to what is generated (Zbedbik, 2012). 

For Ripples from Palm Springs i took the exponential notion of process, used its difference and repetition to reprocess previous work. My concept was to look back on my essay ‘Ghost Tropics’ and present it visually, with the system of representation itself adding to the concepts. The visual assembly came last, the first 3 months were collecting imagery and reading more on Deleuze to inform the process, specifically uncovering the concept of The Fold and his ideas on Topology, 3d space and geology. I would work by taking a section of my essay and following the procession of imagery and natural cognitive linkages that came about through this discovery. I would liken it to going on a Wikipedia wormhole, finding strange connections. I found many wonderfully weird societies, groups, conspiracy theories, mainly looking at natural wonders, geoglyphs on mountains and ancient civilisations. One of the most striking was a site called ‘The Haunted Shoreline’ which matches things found on the Sussex beaches with occult imagery and folklore. This would trigger in my mind another direction, i might see a rock with a face in it, and remember the Mars Man Pareidolia, trusting the process consistantly. Once collected in a database, i grouped the images in loose assemblages, subconsciously either matching due to visual repetitions or conceptual alliances. 

The visual assembly was through print outs snaked around the floor of my house, in a rhizomatic non-order, but this was too aborescent, ignoring the vertical plane. I realised the importance of the fold, and natural line of flight of the wind, how the natural is the process itself, and applying order to that process is grating against it. I followed the signs, as lots of the imagery contained the aeolian process, so i would have to present the assemblage as something fluid. The result was clear to me, as i always explain Deleuze through an analogy of the tapestry, the lines of flight weaving through to make a whole, this can create its own topography, its own ripples and folds, naturally brushing images against other images, creating the wormhole.

It is important to also note the troubles going on during this work. The Covid-19 pandemic was an expose of truth and lies, an opening up of the system to look at the wires inside. Virus and spread is spoken about in much of Deleuze’s work, as it is a process into itself. The virus is of course, a horrible agent that can destroy the body, but the fear generated is not about the virus itself but of the system of movement and spread across the world. The reaction is to lock off the linkages, which only helps to bring the perception of this connectivity and our role as part of a surface cartography, where it would otherwise be ignored. This is in some ways, a beneficial realisation, a sadistic dichotomy of education and fear. Virus’ are clearly understandable representations of lines of flight, and they catalyse chaos, multiplicity and generation- a real life philosophical object.

I am in myself, a line of flight, made up of ever complex temporal modulations. When the character of Septimus in Virginia Woolfs’ Mrs Dalloway exalted ‘The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought.’ 

He was not blocking the way, he was the way. The character, who eventually commits suicide as a result of his PTSD from the war, is trying to capture the infinity of natural processes within the fold, but cannot understand his own object in the system. What Deleuze calls Schitzoanalysis, it is an easily overwhelming acceptance of the agent as a thread in a tapestry, rather than the weaver. It is also a natural reaction to trauma, over exposure, which i would somewhat controversially equate to this raw machinegun subjection to content in the modern world. The tapestry is the map in the wind, a system in play and in flux, watching it blow in the air is taking the higher vantage point over the maps process, watching it creative valleys, glaciers, mountains in its folds, fighting against the doom of a horizontal plane.

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References

Buchanan, I. and Lambert, G., 2008. Deleuze And Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.

Marenko, B. and Brassett, J., n.d. Deleuze And Design.

Plotnitsky, A., 2006. Chaosmologies: Quantum Field Theory, Chaos and Thought in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?. Paragraph, 29(2), pp.40-56.

Prominski, M. and Koutroufinis, S., 2009. Folded Landscapes: Deleuze's Concept of the Fold and Its Potential for Contemporary Landscape Architecture. Landscape Journal, 28(2), pp.151-165.

Uroskie, A., 2005. La Jetée en Spirale: Robert Smithson's Stratigraphic Cinema. Grey Room, 19, pp.54-79.

Zdebik, J., 2012. Deleuze And The Diagram. Bloomsbury.

Key Terms

Stratigraphy is a branch of geology concerned with the study of rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification). It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks.

Deterritorialization is the separation of social, cultural and political practices (such as people, objects, languages, or traditions) from a location.The function of deterritorialization is defined as "the movement by which one leaves a territory", also known as a "line of flight." 

Topology - the study of geometrical properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of figures.

Cartography - "mapping," "diagramming," even "meta-modeling", etc.

Schizoanalysis - "rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex", schizoanalysis "will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity"

Heterogenity - Something that is non uniform, the quality or state of being diverse in character or content, opposite of homogeneous (uniform in colour, size, etc)

Discursive/Discursivity - moving from topic to topic without order : rambling gave a discursive lecture discursive prose. Discursive thought is background noise --- it's the rehearsal of the conversation that we had with our boss during the course of the day, or the cat that we need to feed, or the new book we'd like to read

Stratisfication - Stratification is a system or formation of layers, classes, or categories. Stratification is used to describe a particular way of arranging seeds while planting, as well as the geological layers of rocks.

Arborescent (French: arborescent) is a term used by the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari to characterize thinking marked by insistence on totalizing principles, binarism, and dualism. 

Techno-poetics - using computer language