Notes on the Deleuzian concepts underpinning the Surface, Series, Signs exhibition title

1. Surface

The surface is where sense, the fourth dimension of the proposition, appears. Deleuze’s analysis of surface is derived from the thinkers of the late Graeco-Roman period, the Stoics. Deleuze characterises the three main epochs of ancient philosophy: the Pre-Socratics, Platonism and Stoicism, according to the level, the elevation on which their thinking operates. Each level creates a different frontier between things and thought, bodies and language, and a different role for sense.

Platonism - the level of the heights. Platonic thought refers things to incorporeal Ideas in the heights, through the exercise of a common sense. Here sense is derived from our faculties of sight, smell, hearing etc. The Platonic frontier is between the universal and the particular, i.e. the property common to everything - difference, countability etc, and the individual as such.

Pre-Socratic - the level of the depths. The Pre-Socratics, the philosophers who precede Platonism, dissolve the surface, they think in terms of the subterranean depths in which bodies and their insides mix, forming a “sub-sense,” an “infra-sense.” The Pre-Socratic frontier is between substance and accident - the core of the thing, i.e. a block of stone, and its characteristics - hard, rough, shiny etc.

Stoicism - the level of the surface. The Stoics establish a new frontier for philosophy, the frontier of the surface between the thing denoted by the proposition and what is expressed within the proposition, i.e. sense.

Deleuze embodies these philosophical epochs in figures from Greek myth. Platonism is embodied in the figure of Apollo, the god of pure individuation, i.e. undivided form. The Pre-Socratics are embodied in the figure of Dionysus, the god of affirmation, understood as one body with many parts. Stoicism is personified in the figure of Hercules, who embodies the Stoics’ battle with the Platonic heights and the Pre-Socratic depths. Hercules exists on the surface of the earth, located between the “infernal abyss” of the depths and the “celestial heights” of the heavens, both of which are populated by monsters. These monsters are the “hell-hound and the celestial hound, the serpent of hell and the serpent of the heavens.” Hercules descends to the depths and ascends to the heights, in order to bring these monsters to the surface, where they are pacified and receive a new sense.

The things of the depths, brought to the surface, are thought of as bodies, whose mixtures create a world of “terror and cruelty.” Deleuze gives the example of the Stoic playwright Seneca, in whose tragedy Thyestes, characters wear poisoned tunics, which burn into the skin, thereby devouring the surface; they continue their work until the wearers’ bodies are dismembered. Platonism is also reordered, it is deprived of the heights, causing its incorporeal Ideas to “fall to the surface,” as a “simple incorporeal effect,” a sound effect, an optical illusion etc.

The Stoic surface is a frontier between what happens and what is said, therefore it has a double sense, which exists in a “continuity of the reverse and the right side;” this is the surface as a möbius strip. It is a line without thickness, if you follow along the surface you will end up where you started from, but on the other side.

Deleuze likens the sense which appears at the surface to “a fogged up window pane on which one can write with one’s finger.”

The Stoic philosopher is neither a Platonic bird of the heights or a Pre-Socratic “being of the caves,” but an animal that is on a level with the surface, “a tick or a louse.” (LS 136)

Derek Hampson

Notes on Deleuze’s concept of Series