Abstract

I invite conference attendees to a discussion of ideas presented in a ‘graphic paper’ addressing themes of emergence between wholes and parts as these relate to our comprehension of what the world must be like for our understanding of it to make sense. The comic book form is used in the paper for its inherent emergent qualities. The relationship between images, dialogue, panels, gutters, page composition and narrative elements, holistically make this form archetypal in addressing the themes of the paper and the conference. The challenge of the graphic paper, which explores bronze as a metaphor in defining the holistic properties that emerge from the joining of tin and copper, is to assess the consequences of synthesising the ideas of emergence in the writings of both Deleuze and Jung. In Deleuze’s collaboration with Felix Guattari, their writing points to the emergent properties within art as containing the ability to reterritorialize our relations with the world. ‘What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression …Can this becoming, this emergence, be called art?’ And in Jung’s formation of the Transcendent Function ‘which creates a transition from one attitude to another’ as the engine of individuation, where a third thing emerges from this process, ‘a changed situation’, ‘a new attitude’, through a dialogue between conscious and unconscious. Alongside Jung and Deleuze the graphic paper will add to this crucible, ideas from Critical Realist Roy Bhaskar and Assemblage theorist Manuel DeLanda Philosophy and simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason as both of these thinkers present ways of appreciating ‘generative mechanisms’ as a way of adding to our understanding of reality without ever claiming to have knowledge of things in themselves Critique of Pure Reason. The claim of the graphic paper is that these four Realist thinkers present a movement beyond the constraints of positivism’s ‘epistemic fallacy’, postmodernism’s solipsistic ‘linguistic turn’, and clears a path for what Robert M. Pirsig terms Dynamic Quality, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality.