PhD Drawings

Each drawing was made whilst translating an early draft of an essay into a presentation (for the Deleuze Conference in Rome 2016, which I attended as a student of Braidotti’s masterclass in Posthumanism and Deleuze). Initially, the drawings were made to aid in overcoming the personal challenge with connecting and translating text into presentation. They then became part of the presentation in order to explain visually what I was talking about.

In these drawings, you will see that I am playing with clichés. In the conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) talk about (science, philosophy and) art as operating between chaos and opinion/cliché:

But if art battles against chaos it is to borrow weapons from it that turns it against opinion, the better to defeat it with tried and tested arms. Because the picture starts out covered in clichés, the painter must confront the chaos and hasten the destructions so as to produce a sensation that defies every opinion and cliché (how many times?). Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos - neither foreseen nor preconceived.[1]

Using clichés as borrowed weapons afforded me a different way of communicating and working through theory, that can, when first confronted, be perplexing.

Now, after the presentation, I am attempting to revise the draft. In this updated draft, I made the decision to keep the drawings in the hope that they too will help the reader throughout.

[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press 1994), 204.

*This blog post has been back-dated for continuity purposes. Drawings and text were originally done in June 2016.