For Deleuze, art is to be thought on the side of production, but without a centralized designer be it God or man

larvalsubjects Says: March 12, 2008 at 8:44 pm

Both Deleuze and Whitehead see being in aesthetic or artistic terms as creations or inventions. This is one of the key claims of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which proposes to united the two sundered halves of the aesthetic. Whitehead sees beauty as a central principle in the production of beings. Shaviro has done truly outstanding (and humbling) work on the intersection of Deleuze and Whitehead which you can find over at The Pinocchio Theory. You might find his article entitled “The Wrenching Duality of the Aesthetic” especially interesting in this connection. These can be found here: http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/articles.html
Remember, one of the key issues at work in these questions is that of immanence. That is, how are we able to think the emergence of order without presupposing design or a maker. This is why I hesitate in response to your remarks about aesthetics (Kant famously argued that Beauty is a trace of design in nature in the Critique of Judgment).

For Deleuze, art is to be thought on the side of production, but without a centralized designer be it God or man. Deleuze is thoroughly Darwinian, in this sense, not because he accepts natural selection as the central mechanism, but because like Darwin he thinks the emergence of forms and order without any form or design preceding these forms and organization. The forms of life, existence, society, art, etc., are thus creations in a quasi-artistic or aesthetic sense. I’ve discussed this quite a bit on the blog in relation to Deleuze.