Among Deleuze’s encounters with art, jewellery has certainly never had any particular relevance, if compared to literature, painting, cinema or music. And yet, jewellery-making, and more widely metal arts (metallurgy, smithery, metalworking), appear at a crucial juncture of A Thousand Plateaus. Not only for their relation to nomadism – ‘something lights up in our mind’, Deleuze writes, ‘when we are told that metalworking was the “barbarian” or nomad art par excellence, and when we see these masterpieces of minor art’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 401) – but above all because metal is the pure matter-movement, or matter-flow. Metal, Deleuze says, is ‘neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs’, the ‘conductor of all matter’ (ibid., 411). The ‘first and primary itinerant’, then, is the artisan-metallurgist, who follows the flow of matter. Metal arts let emerge ‘a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism’: a Nonorganic Life (ibid.). For Deleuze, ‘Metal is what forces us to think matter, and it is what forces us to think matter as continuous variation’ (Deleuze 1979), that is, as pure modulation (in Simondon’s sense). Metal and metal arts, then, allow us to break with the form-matter dualism of the hylomorphic model, typically exemplified by moulding techniques. Instead of a succession of forms and variability of matters, metal arts indeed operate a capture of nonorganic forces through a ‘continuous development of form’ and a ‘continuous variation of matter’ (from which also follows, according to Deleuze, the essential relationship between metallurgy and music). In short, the artisan-metallurgist replaces the static relation, form-matter, with the dynamic relation, material-forces, creating properly metallic affects.
