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xv In this book, I set off in pursuit of what on principle it is pointless to pursue and what cannot be conceived, since my object is the nonobject: [that which] is too hazy-indistinct-diffuse-evanescent-con-fused to keep still and isolated.
xxii Because the question of the sketch makes it possible to conceive of the plenitude of the incomplete, to grasp how emptiness is needed for fullness to exert its full effect, I also return to the issues considered in my Treatise on Efficacy, on the effect's conditions of effectiveness and on the desaturation necessary if an effect is to be produced.
p.27 I admit it, I have set off on a rather strange undertaking... I seek to unpack and dissolve the opposition between presence and absence, or life and death, or - and this opposition goes hand in hand with the others and reinforces them - between subject and object.
p.28 Existence... is, in fact, an emergence from the undifferentiated fount.
p.30 Such is the invisibility of the foundational. It does not stem from a different state of reality, from the supersensible real. Rather, at the far edge of the sensible, it is that which, having resorbed all differentiation, is no longer concretely apprehensible and therefore proves to be evanescent.
p.31 That invisibility of the foundational is something so "fine-grained" that, in looking at it, "we no longer perceive it" (or "we do not see it adequately," §35).
p.52 After all, when it comes to the image, power is always at stake. An image's worth lies in its power.
p.52-53 The great image of the tao does not represent, since it then would necessarily have to represent something particular. It cannot even be determined in its capacity to resemble. But by virtue of opening (to the undifferentiated), it remains constantly operative. It does not "target" anything. In its "haziness," it does not accentuate anything precise; it does not aim for any effect. As a result, the effectiveness belonging to it as an image is infinite... Its power lies not in obtaining (it aims for nothing), even less in compelling (it forces nothing) but - like wind - it is composed of steadiness, influence, unassignability, and consequently, inexhaustibility.
p.59 [Picasso] "You don't do a painting, you do studies, you're never done getting there"
p.60 The sketch keeps the work as close as possible to its invention, in the tension of that springing forth.
p.60-61 the sketch requires us to regard it, no longer as a state, a result, but as a moment in a process, the optimal, preeminent moment, something to be kept suspended... the sketch makes us feel the infinite richness of the indefinite, or the fecundity of the beyond and of possibility - in short, what we ordinarily understand as the powers of the virtual.
p.62 The sketch (liniamenta) stage, Pliny tells us, ushers us into the arcana of creation, brings us to the source of the work.
p.64 In any event, classical reason, on the basis of its theory of faculties, attributes the power of the sketch to the imagination... the function that has now fallen to the imagination is projection.
p.65 In short, the sketch is justified because we always perceive only sketchily.
p.66 the reason I look to the Laozi to instruct us about the value of the sketch per se is that the point of view it develops is not that of being and determination but rather of the capacity for arising and obtaining that constitutes the potential at work in the diversity of phenomena and processes (de).
p.66 How is it that efficacy is thus contained upstream? Wherein lies the efficacy of the effect? In exploring that effect structure, the Laozi leads us to verify that there is effectively an effect, not at the stage when the effect is completed, but rather at the stage when the effect is still at work, where it still has more to do (more work, more labor).
p.67-68 How can we feel the effect of any quality whatsoever, of the "whole" for example... when the effect is on display, it gets bogged down. If we begin at the stage of the "partial," however, we can experience all the more completely the advent of the "whole"... Lack produces the future, and when the effect does not have enough of a future before it, the effect necessarily comes undone... In the matter of effects, there are only becoming-effects... More generally, Chinese strategists tell us that, instead of aiming directly and by name, willfully, for a particular effect, we ought to make it possible for the effect to flow of itself from the arrangements we were able to make beforehand, hence to flow indirectly in relation to any giving aim. According to the logic of immanence, we must not aspire to impose the effect, but rather act in such a way that the effect will deploy on its own. We cannot summon the effect to come about, however relentlessly we try. We need to let it come, just as the hole is called to fill up. The effect lies in that calling effect (it lies in that call for effect).
p.68 The strategy, the Laozi tells us, is to keep the effect coming and not let it come about completely. The effect must be sketchy to remain effective. As soon as the effect has come about, has drawn attention to itself, it is lost... the effect... that draws attention to itself no longer has any effect - it is out of date... by attributing the effect to yourself... you make the effect more precarious, which inevitably gives rise to resistance and rivalries, producing a certain countereffect... the effect dries up and loses its effectiveness as soon as it is constituted as a "place" that can be possessed, hence delimited, as soon as it objectively shows off as effect.
[JLJ - Perhaps in strategy we should value "hidden interactions" that are non-obvious ways to create pressure. Our useful effect should (ideally) not show up as a useful effect in our opponent's planning sessions. I have spoken earlier in my notes of "tricks" and "schemes", but perhaps these are merely techniques for effect, which are selected by someone when they are deemed they might work - because they are not obvious.]
p.69 the effect's attachment to itself (it does not "forsake" itself), destroys, by virtue of the effect's self-sufficiency and self-approval, the (infinite) possibility for effect... forsaking the aim of a particular effect - an aim that always circumscribes... lets the effect's fount of immanence operate inexhaustibly, without restriction. The effect that does not show itself as such (as effect) is all the more effective in not being produced (and expended) by name. It remains infinitely implicit and, working upstream, does not allow itself to be lessened by the rigidity and limitations of the concrete.
Absence, or at least what appears absent from the later viewpoint of the definitely actualized, limited, and rigid effect, is thus an integral part of the effect
p.69-70 If there is "great completion" of what looks to be unfinished, it is because that completion is always at work, responding to various requests, open to various possibilities, having still more work to do without being hindered by "one" particular completion that would flaunt itself. In "seeming to be lacking," the sketch is truly that "great" completion. That is, it works of compossibility and cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of holding back... It prevails ... by virtue of its availability... it is the most effective moment in the process and only "appears" to be lacking.
p.72-73 The sage of the Laozi "does not do," but there is nothing that "is not done." This should also be understood as "in such a way that" there is nothing that "is not done" ...Instead of having to strain or struggle at the level of the figural and the tangible, the sage and the painter do not need to "act." They move upstream from phenomena-figurations and remain on the brink of their actualizations, connected as they are to the fount of the effect
p.77 Any presence that is no longer haunted by its absence gets bogged down, entrenched in itself and, thus isolated, becomes sterile. It reminds us of what Chinese thought has constantly thematized, that there is no activity and, as a result, no possibility of an effect, unless it comes through exchange and interaction.
p.81 as a result of these empty spaces, the room can finally be of use. "Where there is nothing," the Laozi repeats, since this observation is insuperable and its foundation invariable, "there is use (functioning) of the room."
p.89 As a result there is... "animation" - thanks to emptiness, fullness breathes. Because emptiness releases things from the field in order to do its work, things are no longer sterilely shut away within themselves but, thanks to their evasiveness, become expansive
p.106 when the king of Qi asked a painter what is most difficult to paint, his guest replied that it is dogs and horses because they are what human beings "know well," since we have them before our very eyes every day, and that no one can make them completely "the same." Hence the difficulty.
[JLJ - Perhaps this also applies to game playing heuristics - what is difficult for the machine is to reproduce or determine, from a mere formula, what we know well.]
p.109 A long string of anecdotes serving as vignettes shows that images, as emblems, possess a power of realization that, like the images themselves, is phenomenal in nature. Partaking in the play of forces at work in the world and embodying them in their figurations, images naturally influence the course of things and events... These images, condensing forces that would otherwise remain diffuse, and embodying by their mere existence a harmonic coherence, bear within them a regulatory effect that generates order; and they possess power... it is constantly repeated that images... possess the value of warning... In China, then, lying at the heart of the image is not some capacity both representative and cognitive but rather an efficacy.
p.157 we must begin by conceiving contemplation in relation to the gaze, and... first remove it from the flat, nonrigorous idealism where I found it.
p.160 in the background of painting, European thought has continued to privilege sight as the means of access to reality and even considers sight the only way to gain access to it... European reason... could conceive of the sudden and imposing appearance of certainty and of the ultimate and immediate access to truth in no other way than through the organ of sight. Vision serves as a touchstone for the internal operations of truth, and it appears beyond doubt (e-"vidence"), as an optimal or even absolute mode of knowledge. Sight is the most intimate way for us to open ourselves to things and to relate to them (in-"tuition").
p.169 As Chinese thought teaches in general, both in the realm of wisdom and in that of strategy, if conditions are arranged adequately, the effect counted on (but not "aimed for," which is too direct) comes about on its own, as a consequence. That result cannot fail: since the effect is already engaged upstream (of the process), there is no longer any seeking to obtain it, unlike in European notions of finality. All risk vanishes; both expenditure and resistance are eliminated. There is no longer a confrontation.
p.174 What precisely separates the act of grasping the "creation-transformation," whether of the mountain or of the most insignificant thing, from the act of representing them as a visual object? The most insignificant bamboo shoot... contains in itself the entire development of the bamboo's knots and leaves... it already possesses everything at birth... Since reality is made up only of a regulated process, the Chinese tell us, to paint bamboo is not to paint it by inventorying its properties as we grasp them, by examining it perceptually, but to paint the coherent process by virtue of which, even in the most significant of its parts, a stalk of bamboo becomes bamboo... Before casting your gaze on the bamboo, you gather up within yourself, "in your bosom," what constitutes the generative structure of the bamboo. During that process of integration, "seeing" does not make presence rise up, nor does it uncover. Rather, through seeing, a logic of immanence (by virtue of which the bamboo becomes bamboo), which the painter had previously assimilated and brought to maturation, all the while grounding his life force - through relaxation and dissolution of self - in/with what constitutes the bamboo's life force.
p.178 Shitao... The perspective he develops from the opening of his chapter is that of a logic internal to figuration alone, depending only on it, whose aim is to confer a maximum of tension - and, as a result, of effect - on that figuration. Solely through the relationship of opposition-complementarity, which forms a system - "backward/forward, either yin or yang" - each element drawn, in reply to the other, acquires on its own an aspect proper to it
[JLJ - Great, excellent, use this in your paper]
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