There is, on the one hand, the earth’s flesh, i.e. the multiplicity of movements, images, sounds, and sensations that compose it, by which all earthly beings enter in communication with one another emitting and receiving signs; that is to say, a dynamic multiplicity which is, furthermore, permanently accompanied by thought – a thought that is embodied and hence in perpetual movement: a “kinetic bodily logos,” as Maxine Sheet’s-Johnstone calls it, “that comes with the creature’s being the animate form it is,” since
each creature […] is quintessentially suited, and in multiple ways, to the life it lives. [Yet] [n]ot only is there an existential fit with respect to its physical and living body – what might roughly be described as a fit between its anatomical and animate form […] – but an existential fit obtains between the organism and its environing world, a fit that is kinetically expressed. [Moreover] [e]ach species of animate form is kinetically suited to the life it lives by way of an intelligence that is of the very nature of the form itself, an intelligence that is plaited into its very tissues and expressed in the sensible ways in which it lives its life.(*)
Such different embodied lives and their corresponding embodied intelligences amount to a multiplicity of existential perspectives which, put together, form the many sides of what we are willing to call semiotic prism thus made of many communicating faces and their manyfold intersections, and in which humans partake like any other earthly being.
But there is also, in addition to the earth’s semiotic prism, something else which, albeit belonging in the earth, exceeds the earth’s flesh – a detached thought that does not exactly follow the movements and sensations of the earth’s flesh even if it is dependent on these, and that is therefore different from the action-oriented thought by which a jaguar realises the X-we-call-bird standing before it is edible whereas the Y-next-to-it-we-call-rock is not – but we can put ourselves in the jaguar’s position and take the jaguar’s role in the example, since we partake in kinetic thought not less than a jaguar or a fish or a plant when we run, swim, or dance (like the Codariocalyx motorius does).
It is within this second type of thought that, properly speaking, “meaning” is produced – or, at the very least, a second-order-, non-immediate- and non-embodied, type of meaning, different from the first-order type of meaning produced by our embodied kinetic thought.
An example of the latter could be: “The-wave-comes-my-direction-it’s-too-high-for-me-to-jump-it-but-I-can-duck-dive-it.”
As for the non-immediate- and non-embodied type of meaning characteristic of what we have called “detached thought,” perhaps the best way to illustrate it is to briefly examine one of Balthus’s paintings (on whom see also here and here); or, more exactly, our encounter – or anyone’s – with Balthus’s famous first large painting: The Street (1933), which was included in the artist’s earliest solo exhibition in Paris in 1934 and is now at the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA):
What do we see in it? In principle, people on an old Parisian street (rue Bourbon-le-Château). But if we were to merely “enumerate” and “describe” such people (a worker dressed in white carrying a beam, a blonde girl with a pink coat and a green hat playing with a net-less racket and a ball, etc.) we would simply narrate what there is before us, and then it would matter little whether we are before one of Balthus’s paintings or before the objects (a pile of books, a pencil case, etc.) laying right now on our desk.
On its part, any information about the painting supplied by an audio guide like those most museums and art galleries offer nowadays to the visitor would distract us from “encountering” the painting face to face, or, put otherwise, it would fill up our ears with an unnecessary noise (when and where did Balthus paint what we see, which technique did he use, how was this painting of his included in his first solo exhibition in Paris, how was his work received, etc.) that would make it impossible for us to meditate on what we see so as to “apprehend” that which, to evoke Deleuze again, transcends the “state of things” portrayed in the painting, i.e. that which will only make itself “present” to us if we move towards it as that which is to be “sensed” and “thought” in the painting beyond what we “perceive” with the senses (a worker carrying a beam, a girl playing with a racket and a ball, etc.).
For, on the other hand, and unlike, say, the painters linked to what was called in Germany in the 1920s “New Objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit) as a reaction against Expressionism, Balthus is anything but a painter of the objectual or the objective – thus his closeness to the Surrealists. Balthus “paints not to represent the appearance of the world, but to reach the interior,” to “penetrate” a “secret domain,” writes Lance Esplund; and he adds: “his pictures – like dreams – are journeys unto themselves.” Or, as Balthus himself put it: “Painting is [for me] something both embodied and spiritualized. It’s a way of attaining the soul through the body.”
But what stands as the “soul” here? If we watch the painting attentively, we will discover in it something “uncanny,” as the MoMa’s 2009 label says: the figures are rendered “frozen mid-movement,” and this has the effect of making of “a crowded street […] an uncanny site of mental isolation.” In other words, the street is not experienced by the characters we find on it as any other street (in Paris or elsewhere) would be naturally experienced: each character is absorbed in its own world, which produces in the viewer the impression that they are either emotionally isolated from one another – to stress the oft-unacknowledged depths of inner life or to evince inter-subjective indifference as a modern malaise, one cannot be sure about Balthus’s purpose thereof – or that they belong in the same place but not in the same time – for the life of a street is made out of many asynchronous events which, framed together in a trans-temporal picture, would evidently repel each other like the equally-charged poles of two magnets.
Now, it is this “uncanniness” that gives meaning to the painting – or, bluntly put, what Balthus paints in it. It can only be apprehended at a glance, albeit not at first sight, as, after a first approach to the painting, the viewer will likely see in it nothing more than people on a street (a worker carrying a beam, a girl playing with a racket and a ball, etc.). But then, on a second or third or fourth approach, something else will, so to speak, come out of the painting and capture the viewer’s attention and impose itself onto the viewer’s sight as a formerly-unseen vision, like the three-dimensional image of any stereogram; a vision that, accordingly, can only be defined as an event in the same way that the time in which it happens can only be defined as now. Yet that suddenly-detached vision will allow the viewer to put together in a new way what s/he previously saw: not anymore a collection of more-or-less recognisable figures, but a series of mysteriously self-absorbed subjective characters infinitely distant from one another despite sharing the same scenario or a few isolated crystals of space-time oddly gathered in a single locus they could have never simultaneously shared.
(*) Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Exeter and Charlottesville (VA): Imprint Academic, 2009), p. 59.
(**) Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward and Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2013).