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Already well established in his painting and drawing practice, Paul Klee’s seminar of 1920–21 at the Bauhaus served as the test site for his “theory of line.” The seminar exists as lecture notes, the introduction to which is reproduced here in the first half of the excerpt. Klee would develop his proposals over the course of the academic year, resulting in a compact manual pub-lished in 1925 as the Pedagogical Sketchbook. Empowered by vitalist, sensual forces of a world undergoing constant motion, flow, and vibration, Klee’s line is simply a point in dynamis: it goes for a walk, meets other lines, interacts, things happen, and a whole world of shape-forming forces, textures, and sounds emerges. The second excerpt charts the physical and aesthetic genesis and con-stant evolution of form, a whole kinematics that builds the cosmogrammatic basis for what Klee would call bildnerisches Denken. Klee’s line is not only a practical tool of the imagination; it is the agent of a poetic pedagogy of becoming, within which lines generate forces, which in turn shape the texture of the cosmos by fashioning harmony, rhythm, color, music, scale, and weight. Erich Hörl sees Klee’s ontogenetic method as being closely related to a critique of

Paul KleeTheory of Pictorial Formation [Bildnerische Formlehre] (1921)

“Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre,” in Günther Regel (ed.), Paul Klee Kunst-Lehre. Aufsätze, Vorträge, Rezensionen und Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre. Leipzig: Reclam, 1987, pp. 92–100 (excerpt)

Pedagogical Sketchbook [Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch] (1925)

Hans M. Wingler (ed.), Paul Klee: Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1997, sketches I.1.–I.5, III.37–III.39

Erich Hörl Variations on Klee’s Cosmographic Method

of nirvā ·na pass to the machinic realm, or to the mineral, and perhaps pass away entirely from the realm of rational organic life? And what would this mean for the next Buddha? The commencement of the Suryamandalan period has already opened up the question of where in the solar system the next Buddha might appear. But what form will he, she, or it take? Will the next Buddha, like the last, be born in the realm of hnau, or in a different loka? If the Commission was correct in suggesting that during the Great Bardo of the Second Axial Age the Earth passed not only into a postplanetary state but one in which its becoming would be ruled by technology, is the Earth’s age of humanity giving way to an age of machine gods — of asuras and devas? Might the next Buddha appear in the realm of inorganic organized matter, or in that of pure organization? From the vantage point of the twenty-second century, such questions can remain only a matter of speculation.

The author would like to thank Brian Black, Nigel Clark, John Carter McKnight, Douglas Osto and Kim Stanley Robinson for their fact-checking and fantasy-checking, and Judith Forshaw for her deft copyediting.

Editorial note: The “Commission’s surprising negative response” mentioned on page 150 can be found in the forthcoming publication: Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne and Christophe Bonneuil (eds.), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, to be published by Routledge in 2015.

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hylomorphism, an Aristotelian concept that conceives being as a static compound of matter and form. Instead, he argues, Klee’s investigations intensely labor toward a new cosmopolitics, taking the ever-changing mélange of human and nonhuman into account. Klee’s critical position directly inspires a tradition of thinking about genesis by such figures as Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, a thinking that includes, rather than refuses, an ecology of technics and media.

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was a German-Swiss painter and graphic designer. The son of a music teacher and a singer, Klee would maintain an appre-ciation of music alongside his training in the fine arts. From 1920 to 1931 he taught at the German Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, where he developed his deep interest in color and art theory. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, Klee briefly taught in Düsseldorf before emigrating to Switzerland, where, in exile, he composed his extensive theoretical writings. His philosophical understanding of form, along with his avant-garde practice, established him as one of the twentieth century’s most important artists.

Erich Hörl is Professor of Media Culture at the Institute of the Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. He is also the senior researcher at Leuphana’s Digital Culture Research Lab (DCRL). Between 2007 and 2014 he was head of the Bochum Colloquium for Media Studies (bkm). His current research interests concern the development of a general ecology of media and technology as well as a critique of the process of cyberneticization of all life forms and modes of existence since around 1950. Among his publications are Die technologische Bedingung: Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt (Suhrkamp, 2011, as contributing editor).

Paul KleeTheory of Pictorial Formation

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Erich HörlVariations on Klee’s Cosmographic Method

Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre [Theory of Pictorial Creation], Paul Klee.

Several important passages in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s seminal A Thousand Plateaus draw directly on Paul Klee’s neo-cosmographic project. “Cosmographic” here refers to the writing of the cosmos (in the strict sense of the term), not merely its descrip-tion (as it is used in medieval and early modern cosmographies).

Klee’s theory of the formation of form, which is deeply inscribed in A Thousand Plateaus, works on the idea of a cosmic, not to say chaosmic, writing as a writing of the cosmos itself, a presentation of processes of becoming and of the cooperation of human and nonhuman agents and forces. The scope of this project is readily apparent in the first few sentences of Klee’s “Infinite Natural History: The Living Forces.” Although Klee begins his reflections with the difference between chaos and cosmos, he immediately — and this is decisive — turns to a space prior to this first marker and contrasts

“complete and utter chaos” with “a locally determined concept [of chaos] relating to the concept of the cosmos.” He goes on to say that “utter chaos can never be put on a scale, but will remain forever unweighable and unmeasurable.”1 And this, irretrievably, situates it prior to the distinction between chaos and cosmos. It is the pre- individual, the source of all emergences, the storehouse of all possibilities. This is the speculative starting point of Klee’s method; for “the grey point” is the “pictorial symbol” of “this ‘non-concept,’” from which all “coming-into-being and passing- away” is to be thought, and from which the writing of the cosmos unfolds.2

The reason to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Klee is that it is crucially relevant for interpreting our own techno- ecological condition. Within a much larger project, Deleuze and Guattari also seek to situate Klee’s theory of art historically and systematically: they ask what subversive meaning it might have to open oneself, or to open oneself once more, to the cosmic. What might it mean to follow the conceptually and theoretical-politically central injunction of Klee’s cosmographic method, namely to “join with the World, or meld with it”?3 For today’s readers, these pages demonstrate the value of lost faith in the world by fundamentally transforming the manner of thinking and the method of which Klee gives us a first inkling. General ecology describes the constitution of different modes of existence in the cybernetic state of nature.

1 Paul Klee, “Infinite Natural History,” in Jürg Spiller (ed.), The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee, tr. Ralph Manheim with Charlotte Weidler and Joyce Wittenborn. London and New York, NY: Lund Humphries and George Wittenborn, 1961, pp. 2–14, here p. 3. This chaosmotic text opens, or at least might aim at, a veritable cosmopolitical project.  “Cosmopolitical,” here, does not refer to Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitanism, but to Isabelle Stengers’ speculative use of the term. Stengers brings the cosmopolitical very close to the politico-ecological question. See her “The Cosmopolitical Question,” in Cosmopolitics II, tr. Robert Bononno. London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 351–62; as well as “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005, pp. 994–1003.

2 Klee, “Infinite Natural History,” p. 3.3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Of the Refrain,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 309 – 50, here p. 311.

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As the result of comprehensive technologization and medialization, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, these modes are swept up in a transversal drift of environmentalization and ecologization from the micro to the macro level.4 From micro-physical entities via organisms to human societies, these different modes of existence are no longer to be thought according to the traditional model (which corresponds to the mechanical state of nature) as separate, isolated, and autonomous entities. Within the framework of an ecology of beings and of acts, instead, they are thought as originarily constituted by an environment, as originarily environmental and subject to an originary environmental condition, as given by “the ecological relation.”5 The project of a general ecology, which must necessarily remain speculative, could benefit from the chaosmotic style of thought that, as we shall see in a moment, has developed thanks to and since Klee. There can be no doubt that what the reception and discussion of Klee in A Thousand Plateaus capture is this strong diagnostic connection. On the one hand, Klee’s great genetic intuition seems to announce the genesis of the new techno-ecological sense that characterizes our current sense- cultural situation. On the other, this sense already seems to traverse Klee’s project, to make him one of its first protagonists in the arts. In any event, Klee’s genetic method, which seeks to capture cosmic forces and processes of formation, can be conceived of as an early answer to the problems raised by this up-and-coming condition.6

Let us turn now in detail to the passages from A Thousand Plateaus. Discussing what Deleuze and Guattari call “the refrain” [la ritournelle], the passages are not only opened and sustained by a picture of Klee’s — with Robert Schumann’s piano piece, Träumerei , Klee’s Die Zwitschermaschine [Twittering Machine], which he produces concurrently with the course he teaches in the winter semester of 1921–22, serves as the chapter’s emblem. But also, at the point where music, behavioral biology, plastic art, and autistic cartographic practices meet, and in close proximity to Klee’s cosmographic method, these pages sketch a chaosmotic thinking of forces.7 This thought resituates the human being in a hetero-geneous assemblage of agencies; it develops a new way of describing multiscale cooperation from the micro to the macro level (along the vectors, milieu, rhythm, territory, de- and re-territorialization); and it brings into focus practices of composition, consistency, and consolidation. All of this clearly happens already beyond (and motivated by a doubt of) the Anthropocene illusion, as a transgres-sion of an alleged human monopoly on agency (of whatever kind). While, according to Bruno Latour, the basic, untenable characteristic of the modern constitution lies in its strict separation of human and

nonhuman forces and in monopolizing agency on behalf of human agents — the double practices of hybridization and purification to which Latour has paid so much attention testify to its untenability — my concept of an Anthropocene illusion brings out the central historical momentum that irrevocably dislocates this constitution. The extent to which the human being qua technology turns out to be the central agent of a new age in natural history (which we have ended up calling the Anthropocene) also marks the scope of a veritable explosion of environmental agency. Ultimately, this explosion cuts down to size the human being as agent; it unmasks the illusionary character of what lies behind human technological achievements — namely the monopolization of agency and the priority granted to human agency — and reveals the irreducible variety of all other possible, nonhuman agents that European modernity, in its conceptualization of rationality, has so far forgot-ten if not flatly denied. This, precisely, is the paradox inscribed in the concept Anthropocene. The larger part of what we might call the general ecology of the refrain, which considers the milieus and rhythms of the various modes of existence in the different stratifi-cations of the living and the nonliving and thereby vehemently rejects the Anthropocene illusion, is wrested from Klee’s “cosmic ‘breakaway.’”8 Deleuze and Guattari’s general ecology of the refrain is a direct elaboration and intensification of the radically genetic intuition that characterizes both Klee’s method as a whole and,

4 As early as the 1960s, Serge Moscovici noted the emergence of a new, a cybernetic nature, taking the relay of mechanic nature. In his definition, a state of nature is “a balance of power between human and nonhuman forces,” and, as such, is subject to historicality. Bracketing the difference between technology and nature, Moscovici counters the common conception of a “transformation of the natural world into a tech-nical world” with an “evolution of the natural world itself.” See Serge Moscovici, Essai sur l’histoire humaine de la nature. Paris: Flammarion, 1968, p. 76, p. 34. On my concept of general ecology, see “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology,” in Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke (eds.), The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013, pp. 121–30.

5 On the central concept of the ecological relation, see Edgar Morin, La méthode: La nature de la nature. Paris: Seuil, 1977, pp. 203–10. I am currently working on a study of Morin’s thinking of the ecological relation, which, conceptually, refers only to living organisms, but which I will expand within the framework of a general ecology.

6 On the technological culture of sense, see Erich Hörl (ed.), “Die technologische Bedingung,” in Die technologische Bedingung: Beiträge zur Beschreibung der tech-nischen Welt. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 7–53. Generally, Klee plays an important role in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, where he comes up again and again. Cf. Ingo Uhlig,  “Poetologien der Abstraktion: Paul Klee, Gilles Deleuze,” in Claudia Blümle and Armin Schäfer (eds.), Struktur, Figur, Kontur. Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften. Berlin and Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007, pp. 299–315.

7 Fernand Deligny’s autistic children, who draw wandering lines and play a central role in the elaboration of the concept of the refrain, produce almost Kleeian maps of their paths and territories. A look at their maps or at Deligny’s films is all it takes to make the point. See Sandra Alvarez de Toledo (ed.), Cartes et lignes d’Erre / Maps and Wander Lines: Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny 1969–1979. Paris: Arachnéen, 2013.

8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 337.

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beyond that, the cosmopolitical stakes developed and propagated by the concept of art based on this method.

At a crucial point in their analysis, Deleuze and Guattari paraphrase and overwrite a passage from Klee’s 1924 Jena speech on modern art to which they immediately link their own project:

Klee says that one ‘tries convulsively to fly from the earth,’ and that one ‘rises above it . . . powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity.’ He adds that the artist begins by looking around him- or herself, into all the milieus, but does so in order to grasp the trace of creation in the created, of naturing nature in natured nature; then, adopting ‘an earth-bound position’ the artist turns his or her attention to the microscopic, to crystals, molecules, atoms, and particles, not for scientific conformity, but for movement, for nothing but immanent movement; the artist tells him- or herself that this world has had different aspects, will have still others, and that there are already others on other planets; finally, the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces in a ‘work’ [....]9

This harnessing of forces, precisely this apex of artistic activity and paramount expression of a thinking of movement, not only assumes a prominent position as a central motif of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of art, it even becomes a fundamental figure of their cosmic philosophy: “The essential relation is no longer matters–forms (or substances–attributes),” which characterize the core of an enduring Western hylomorphism, but “a direct relation material–forces.”10 Where once we were looking for the great significant form and labored on imprinting it on matter, we now find the modulation of real powers. This ontogenetic point of A Thousand Plateaus is entirely in keeping with Klee’s “school of form school of formation [Formschule Formungsschule],”11 which, as the crossing out in the manuscript highlights, claims to follow the never-to-be-concluded movability of natural processes of creation and begins to take up becoming as the cosmic given par excellence. The artist, Klee writes,

“does not attach such intense importance to natural form as do so many realist critics, because, for him, these final forms are not the real stuff of the process of natural creation. For he places more value on the powers, which do the forming than on the final forms themselves.”12 Echoing Klee’s farewell to hylomorphism, we read in A Thousand Plateaus: “It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces.”13 Even that characteristic of art that is becoming-expressive — which, articulated

in opposition to the despotism of the signifier, is no longer a distinguishing feature of the human being for Deleuze and Guattari and already appears in animal markings of territory — even this characteristic disappears:

A material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly ‘harness’ forces; these forces are necessarily forces of the Cosmos. There is no longer a matter that finds its corre-sponding principle of intelligibility in form. […] Matters of expression are superseded by a material of capture. The forces to be captured are no longer those of the earth, which still constitute a great expressive Form, but the forces of an immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos.14

The great skepticism toward form that ultimately concerns the Earth as well is not based exclusively on Gestalt psychology, with which Klee has been associated time and again. It is to be situated on the same level as the critique of hylomorphism by Martin Heidegger and, even more so, Gilbert Simondon, who, a few years after Klee, captured the historical urgency of this re-emergence of the question of form with all desirable clarity. No doubt, this urgency was already at work in Klee.

Heidegger inquires into the origin of the matter–form assemblage, an assemblage that at just this time loses its unques-tioned self-evidence as the great conceptual operator of Western metaphysics. He writes: “[The] interpretation of the thing that […] bases itself on the matter–form structure” is, in principle, “an assault on the thing–being of the thing.”15 And Heidegger does not tarry to lay out the reasons for its “particular dominance”: “This

9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 337. This is a paraphrase of Paul Klee, On Modern Art, tr. Paul Findlay. London: Faber and Faber, 1948, pp. 43–47.

10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 342. They understand these as “percepts” whose task it is “to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” in What is Philosophie? tr. Hugh Tomlinson. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 163–200, here p. 183. Cf. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, tr. Daniel W. Smith. London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2003. On the details of this conception of art, see Anne Sauvagnargues, “Kunst als das Einfangen von Kräften,” Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie, vol. 31, nos. 18/19: Ins Offene: Gegenwart: Ästhetik: Theorie (2012), pp. 35–48.

11 Klee, On Modern Art, p. 47 (modified: Klee’s manuscript changes are reproduced in Thomas Kain et al. (eds.), Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag. Jena: Städtische Museen, 1999, p. 65).

12 Klee, On Modern Art, p. 47.13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 329.14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 342–43.15 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art (1935/36),” in Off the Beaten Track,

tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 1–56, here p. 11.

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definition of the thing is derived from an interpretation of the equipmentality of equipment. This being, the piece of equipment, is, in an especial way, close to human representation, since it achieves being through our own manufacture.”16 It is “because, here, productive humanity is itself involved in the way in which a piece of equipment comes into being,” he tells us, that the “matter–form structure […] by which the being of a piece of equipment is first determined readily presents itself as the immediately comprehensi-ble constitution of every being,”17 and that is why it is promoted as the center of metaphysics as such. Heidegger’s legendary interest in Klee’s conception of art is likely to derive from just this point: if Heidegger, as Otto Pöggeler tells us, thought of supplementing his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” with a companion piece that was to take Klee as its starting point, and if he did so after the Second World War and, therefore, at a moment in which the question of technology is becoming for him the central interpreta-tive horizon of modernity’s fundamental attitude and the decisive diagnostic question, then the critique of hylomorphism implicit in Klee is likely to have been the essential point on which Heidegger’s project was to pick up. Yet Heidegger, who celebrates the Earth —and does so precisely in the artwork essay as well — always remained skeptical about the cosmic.18

Yet why did this key metaphysical difference between matter and form, a difference whose genealogy Heidegger begins to uncover, remain unquestioned for so long? Simondon, who was very familiar with Heidegger’s reading from the 1930s, gives concrete shape to the artisanal scene shining through here. More than that, he articulates its historical condition of possibility and makes it the core of a subversive ontogenetic project. In a first step, Simondon refers hylomorphism to its paradigmatic scene, the Ancients’ fabrication of bricks, and he does not fail to point out the blind spot of hylomorphic representations derived from this scene:

There is a hole in hylomorphic representation that makes true mediation disappear […]. The hylomorphic corresponds to the knowledge of someone who remains outside the work-shop and considers only what goes in and what goes out; to know the true hylomorphic relation, it is not even enough to enter the workshop and to work with the craftsman: it would be necessary to penetrate the mold itself to trace the form- taking operation along the different scales of physical reality.19

Crucially — and this is the second step — in a highly technical age, this very scene, which for Simondon inaugurates the primacy of the paradigm of labor for metaphysically conceptualizing and

schematizing being, loses all its plausibility and binding force. What instead increasingly comes to the fore, precisely, are processes of formation and becoming, and specifically because they are never accessible as such, immediately and pure, because they are only accessed mediated by technological experience. These processes now occupy the scene in their irreducible procedurality, their characteristic movement and becoming beyond any distortion and obscuration by the paradigm of labor.20 A “truly hylomorphic relation” of the kind Simondon still speaks, which would provide a full view of the processes of forming, will ultimately turn out to be impossible and disappear completely. All of this happens in exact correspondence to the evolution of technical object cultures. These objects, in turn, become increasingly procedural and relational and accordingly lose their object-ness. They thereby dislocate the traditional hylomorphic schema as such and necessitate a funda-mental redescription of processes of becoming as procedures of individuation on all levels, from the microphysical via the living to the psychic and collective level.21 This far-reaching observation leads Simondon himself to move from ontological to ontogenetic thinking. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, who are among Simondon’s earliest readers, superimpose the genetic methods of both Klee and Simondon, and, as their superimposition of concepts testifies, turn both into antecedents of their cosmo-philosophical project. This also serves, at least implicitly, to mark the context in the history of media and machines in which Klee operates and to which his school of formation and great cosmo-graphic inspiration no doubt already react.

Klee works relentlessly to reconquer the cosmos, against the traditional hylomorphistic schematizations of an understanding both of being and of art. That is the core of his art and of his theory of art (and this perseverance is probably what so impressed and

16 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 13.17 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 10.18 For an overview, see Otto Pöggeler, “Über die moderne Kunst”: Heidegger und Klee’s

Jenaer Rede von 1924. Erlangen and Jena: Palm & Enke, 1995; a more detailed exposition can be found in his Bild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee und die moderne Kunst. Munich: Fink, 2002.

19 Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon, 2005, p. 46. Cf. Erich Hörl, “Das Arbeitslose der Technik: Zur Destruktion der Ergontologie und Ausarbeitung einer neuen technologischen Sinnkultur bei Heidegger und Simondon,” in Claus Leggewie et al. (eds.), Prometheische Kultur. Wo kommen unsere Energien her? Paderborn: Fink, 2013, pp. 111–36.

20 On the irreducible (technical) mediacy of our living intuition of becoming, cf. Simondon, L’individuation, p. 50.

21 On the marginalization of object-hood, see, for example, Mark B. N. Hansen,  “Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media,” in SubStance, vol. 41, no. 129 (2012), pp. 32–59.

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inspired Deleuze and Guattari). Beyond the direct optical relation between the artist–subject and his object — a relation that only ever repeats, and repeats nothing more than the hylomorphist attitude and the Anthropocene illusion — Klee takes what he calls a new

“non-optical way.” This is not the obsolete Romantic path of a “shared rootedness in the earth,” that is, not a Romantic invocation and transfiguration of the Earth, but — and this, precisely, is what Klee’s radicalism consists in —“the non-optical way through the cosmic commonality that descends from above.”22

“The artist of today is more than an improved camera; he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on earth and a creature within the whole, that is to say, a creature on a star among stars.”23  — Paul Klee

Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre [Theory of Pictorial Creation], Paul Klee.

Klee thus pioneers an ontogenetic-cosmopolitical thinking, in close proximity to media and technics but also still to the sciences that at the time open up to chaosmotic reflections that go beyond their

limited modernist doctrine in their own way (in the work of Edwin Hubble, for example). Many years later, Edgar Morin noted that, having once been rejected by modernity, the ideas of cosmos and chaos make a peculiar return in the age of post-Hubble astronomy. Myth had introduced a dualism of chaos and cosmos, strictly separating a raging protouniverse of wild mixtures and an organized cosmos. What we now understand, Morin writes, is “that cosmo-genesis takes place in and through chaos.”24 And he comments with precision: “But it is not enough to recognize originary chaos. We have to break a mental, epistemic barrier. […] [W]e have to yield to a new evidence. The Genesis has not stopped.”25 Klee, we might say, worked on overcoming just this barrier and opened the way for the new evidence. This marks the site of his artistic and art theoretical/pedagogical intervention with great precision: the artist, he writes,

“permits himself the thought that the process of creation can today hardly be complete and he sees the act of World creation stretch-ing from the past to the future. Genesis eternal!”26

But we have to be careful: in the very moment in which the technical-media dispositifs of a new, a third cybernetics — from multiscale sensory networks and algorithmic environments to biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, geotechnologies, and their unchecked fantasies of control — aims equally at engineering living relations, affects, intensities, and thus at modulating natural forces; the moment at which indeed they become cosmotechnologies; the moment media as a whole have turned into “prehensive machines of the un-articulable, un-representable”;27 in that very moment unchecked cosmism (which characterizes Klee’s method, too) has become questionable. And this not only in the terms in which Deleuze and Guattari themselves already put the problem, namely the atomic-molecular-galactic appropriation of the cosmic by

“established powers”28 that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. What I call the third cybernetics is that stage of cyberneticization currently taking place under the conditions of environmental media and technological cultures. It can be described

22 Paul Klee, “Ways of Nature Study,” in The Thinking Eye, pp. 63 – 67, here p. 66 (modified).23 Paul Klee, “Ways of Nature Study,” p. 63.24 Morin, La méthode, p. 57.25 Morin, La méthode, pp. 58 – 59. In Klee, radical-genetic intuition is countered by opinion,

which opposes the disorder of chaos with the order of the cosmos. See, for example, Klee, “Infinite Natural History,” p. 9.

26 Klee, On Modern Art, p. 45.27 Luciana Parisi and Erich Hörl, “Was heißt Medienästhetik? Ein Gespräch über algorith-

mische Ästhetik, automatisches Denken und die postkybernetische Logik der Computation,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, vol. 8 (2013), pp. 35 – 51, here p. 39. Cf. Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Aracheology of Animals and Technology. London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. xxvi.

28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 345.

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as an explosion of environmental agencies. The first cybernetics was mainly concerned with the problem of adaptation and organized around the question of “adaptive behavior.” The main problem of the second cybernetics, which is organized around the question of manipulative behavior, is learning. Both of the earlier cybernetics have a trivial or trivializing idea of the system’s environment, even if the second cybernetics already tends toward an ecological way of thinking and, despite its demand for reducing complexity or trivial-izing the environment, increasingly brings into focus the problem of the environment. But it is not until the third stage that cybernetics becomes environmental in the true sense of the term. Its main problem is controlling and managing behavior, affects, and so on, by means of environmental (media) technologies. In the age of the third cybernetics, even percepts and affects (the arts’ preferred areas of operation, according to Deleuze and Guattari) have lost their chaosmotic innocence (if ever they had anything like it) and have become the space in which powers act — which, of course, only increases the cosmopolitical stakes of the questions this raises. But how, exactly, does the art of modulating real forces relate to the new cybernetic state of nature that today takes shape in such dramatic fashion? Does the third cybernetics perhaps reterritorialize precisely that cosmism of uncontrollable forces that seemed so promisingly to scan the dawn of a new age of deterritorialized matter and pure forces in a wildly spreading, almost cosmic idea of control? How would this neocybernetic formation, which positions the phantasm of control with greater reach and power than ever before and, at least ideally, undertakes to control everything, from affects to clouds, how would such a perfection of Heidegger’s Ge-stell have to be molecularized in turn? Is there to be found anywhere, at this stage of the history of control, a counter- site of the arts, a site even of a new cosmopolitical, perhaps cosmo technological, intervention, beyond an entrepreneurial caste reaching into the cosmic that seeks to turn the cosmopolitical into cosmic management and reduce and limit the chaosmotic to an ultramodernist project?

Deleuze and Guattari have described the difference between “three ‘ages,’ the classical, romantic, and modern (for lack of a better term)” with reference to how they relate to machines. In so doing, they articulate, if only implicitly, the obstacle to any cosmic thinking:

They are assemblages enveloping different Machines, or different relations to the Machine. In a sense, everything we attribute to an age was already present in the preceding age. Forces, for example: it has always been a question of forces, designated either as forces of chaos or forces of the earth. […] The most we can say is that when forces appear as forces

of the earth or of chaos, they are not grasped directly as forces but as reflected in relations between matter and form. Thus it is more a question of thresholds of perception, or thresholds of discernibility belonging to given assemblages. It is only after matter has been sufficiently deterritorialized that it itself emerges as molecular and brings forth pure forces attributable only to the Cosmos. It had been present “for all of time,” but under different perceptual conditions. New conditions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or concluded, presently to rise to the surface.29

What surfaces under today’s neo- or, rather, hypercybernetic conditions of perceptions (if they can still be called that), conditions that have long since begun, in an entirely nonartistic but radically artifactual manner, to register and capture the cosmic? What do our new relationships to the machine, relationships that have begun increasingly to bracket the machine, the technical object, in favor of techno-ecological contexts, allow to surface? Where is Klee’s cosmic question today?

To conclude, we have to note, at least in passing, that Klee — precisely the Klee reprinted here, the Klee my text accompanies, not just Klee the painter but especially the teacher as well, i.e., the Klee who propounds his theory of the formation of form at the Bauhaus and develops a true pedagogy of becoming that seeks to respond to the technological or cybernetic state of nature just then on the rise — that Klee confesses that the people of the new cosmo-politics, the effort that concerns the community of cooperating forces, is lacking: “We still lack the ultimate power, for: the people are not with us. / But we seek a people. We began over there in the Bauhaus. We began there with a community to which each one of us gave what he had. / More we cannot do.”30 The question of the lacking people, which later was to become so important for Deleuze, which he will take up again and again and which will determine his entire concept of the political, concerns us today, and with great urgency: for we, too, lack a people, provided the people (entirely in keeping with Klee’s genetic method) were constituted heterogenet-ically and minoritarian — that is, something diverse, manifold, which coheres and acquires consistency without ceasing to be heteroge-neous, something without model that reinvents, has to reinvent itself again and again, that projects itself, consists in and yet always misses itself in this projection, that is never present, that will irreducibly fail and will always be in default. What do we seek?

29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 346–47; the first emphasis is mine.30 Klee, On Modern Art, p. 55.

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Thinking he was approaching the end of his life (though managing to later recover from his diagnosis), art historian George Kubler, a leading specialist in Mayan art and archi-tecture at Yale, withdrew to the Italian countryside to articulate a series of timely reflections on the nature of history. The small book that emerged, The Shape of Time, was to go beyond Kubler’s particular special-ization, offering instead a set of timely methodological propositions. Taking up a notion of history that examines “things” in time – from the most useful – tools – to the most useless – art – Kubler sought to address the greater problem of historical change. He would apply models from physics and sig-nal processing in order to understand the delicate relationship of things in time, of the fabric of diachronous communication, transmission, and distribution – signals and their relays – asking how problems emerge and accumulate into sets or series. Pondering the instant of actuality, the here and now, Kubler uses the metaphors of a “lighthouse that goes dark between flashes” or “the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field” to understand the void of our immediate presence, which can only be filled by signals from the past, emerging from the “craft of history” or “earth-clock measurements.” Kubler’s project carries on the work of his beloved teacher, historian Henri Focillon, whose The Life of Forms in Art (1934) was to propose a conceptual revision to art history and the field of material culture, arguing

George KublerThe Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)

London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962, pp. 14–21 (excerpt)

Molly Nesbit George Kubler and the Second Hand

A people that regains faith in the world, in the cosmos, a people that regains the faith of which the domination of the Anthropocene illusion has robbed us.31 An ecological people, perhaps, that pre-cisely would not hang onto the immunopolitical reveries of an unscathed, undamaged Earth and of nature intact, would not bemoan technological uprooting and in opposition strive for striking roots; not a people of the ecologically minded; no people of ecology as a religion; no people from the spirit of counter-technological reaction. Of this, too, Klee reminds us.

Translated from the German by Nils F. Schott.

31 On the people yet missing and on the missing faith in the world, see Gilles Deleuze,  “Control and Becoming: Gilles Deleuze in Conversation with Antonio Negri” (1990), in Negotiations 1972–1990, tr. Martin Joughin. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 169–76, here p. 174; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 345–46; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, tr. Robert Galeta. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 215–23.