A Visual Stuttering

Giles Deleuze proposed that language itself can stutter, beginning his essay He Stuttered by stating: “It is no longer the individual who stutters in his speech, it is the writer who stutters in the language system (langue): he causes language as such to stutter”.[1] According to Deleuze, our language system is a stuttering system, and so introduces the idea that philosophy, or a way of thinking, stutters. Kelly Hardcastle-Jones explains that Deleuze’s stuttering critical thinking is characterised by “fits and starts, blocks and flows, heterogeneity, variables and relatively stable constants [and] disequilibrium […]”.[2] 

Examining how the linguistic, critical, and heterogeneous stutter could be metaphorically transformed into a visual stutter, Dorothea Olkowski proposes that a stuttering thought, caused by a buffering language system, can be pictorially revealed as a space without a traditional point of view.[3] She suggests that Deleuze’s stuttering thinking can be visually described as a non-hierarchical space, asserting that:

“Stuttering is what happens when the language system is in motion, in ‘perpetual disequilibrium’, so that the entire system stutters, murmurs, mumbles and breaks up in a heterogeneity of time and space.”[4]

This assertion leads Olkowski to imply that a stuttering system visually disrupts spatiotemporality, creating a “[…] distortion of the hierarchically composed representational image”.[5]

Emboldened by the idea that “the clinical and the critical can inform one another for the sake of expanding a concept’s capacities,”[6] I propose the disruptive nature of a critical and a clinical stutter can aid the understanding of traditional notions in paintings and be used as a methodological creative strategy.[7]

During 2025, my time spent in the studio will be used to investigate this proposal.

Tom Mence. August 2024.

[1] Deleuze, in Boundas & Olkowski (eds), (2018), Gilles Deleuze, p. 23.

[2] Hardcastle-Jones (2014) Deleuze’s “Stuttering”, p. 14.

[3] Hardcastle-Jones defines stuttering as “[…] a movement that affects becomings in language (by decomposing it, deterritorialising it, and pushing it to its non-linguistic limits) which reveal the system in disequilibrium that subtends the Image of Language(/Thought).” Ibid, p. 24.

[4] Olkowski (1999) Gilles Deleuze, p. 14.

[5] Ibid. p. 17.

[6] Kelly Hardcastle-Jones (2014) Deleuze’s “Stuttering”, p. 21.

[7] “It is by lending his body to the world” wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “that the artist changes the world into paintings”. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), The Primary of Perception, edited by James Edie, Northwestern University Press, p. 162.