January 25, 2010
Benjamin, essays on photography
B’s essays take up the place and function of mediological technology in world-historical change. Alongside transformed modes of human existence (e.g. industrial capitalism) come technically-induced transformations in human perception. It is important for B that these changes be understood not only in quantitative terms but as qualitative epochal shifts. The change instantiated by the mass reproducibility of culture, whether it be works of art or consumer products (which ultimately become rather indistinct), will be the primary object of study here, which B intends to mine for his own revolutionary-messianic political project. The radical reconfigurations of visuality brought about through photography and then film should naturally be followed by social upheaval. In short, this democratization of art demands an egalitarian redistribution of wealth, which, in interbellum Europe, means either fascism (or its “bourgeois imperialist” avatar) or communism.
Distinct from the longstanding reproducibility of art, which ultimately reinforces the identity and authority of the original, the standardization of technological reproduction developing in the late 19th-century tears art irrevocably away from its previous social existence in the service of ritual. What B calls the aura of the work of art—its singularity, its unique existence in time and space, its captivating distance—begins to whither (in tandem with the era’s like alienation of the human being from her labor), and this loss is accompanied by widespread sadness, nostalgia, and continued attempts to revive the object lost (e.g. through early portrait photography, mourning photography, the fascist aestheticization of politics, and finally the cult of the movie star). However, in the final analysis, this loss ought to be celebrated, as reproductive technologies emancipate art from the disciplining “authority of the object,” reveal to society its “optical unconscious,” and put the increasingly significant masses (urbanization, industrialization, collectivization) in touch with new desires for social change.
Freed from ritual, art can finally realize its political potential. Against creative photography, which fails to grasp “human connections” (i.e. social relations and the material conditions of life), B proposes for photography an instructive, experimental, and constructive task. Rather than aspire to become art, photography must seize its opportunity to transform art entirely. The bourgeoisie—predictably, regrettably—clings to the mantra of art for art’s sake, and, as the dominant social contingent behind much of photographic technology’s early development, fails to exploit the “hidden political significance” of its prized perceptual medium. (There are several exceptions that B cites, but their experiments in politicization would largely fail to generate following or recognition; germane here is the case of Atget, whose emptied citiscapes B praises for their ability to make appear what had gone “unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift.” Atget “suck[s] the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.”)
Breaking from the aesthetic-contemplative mode of bourgeois photography, which continually reinscribes the myth of the auratic individual subject, the cinema, with its propensity for forced thought and physical shock, effectuates the radical transformation of the relationship between the masses and art that B retrospectively discerns as the unactualized essence of photographic technology. Where photography, through its nineteenth-century life, had perpetuated more or less consistently the capitalist arch myth of individualism (singularity, uniqueness), film would be made for the masses. Shared affection, constant distraction, heightened attention, and “massive reaction” replace subjective contemplation, as art finally makes good on its task “to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come.” Exploding what remains of aura and tradition, the cinematic apparatus affords us an empathy not with the actors, whose gestures exude nothing of the here and now, but with the camera ; the “celluloid resurrection” of historical figures and events works to “liquidate” dominant cultural heritage by invoking film’s capacity to recall a past that never took place. Once the masses appear (more specifically, once they are granted full-fledged recognition in the cultural sphere), the material conditions of society must change, either through external conquest (fascism) or through the internal redistribution of wealth (communism).
Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality
Foster introduces this collection by differentiating two poles to what is called the visual: on the one hand, vision includes the actual human mechanisms, the more or less raw physicality of sight; on the other, visuality encompasses cultural and historical techniques, understands sight as a social function. The aim of the current text is to elaborate the relation between vision and visuality—that is, between the biological and technological—in order “to thicken modern vision.” Like much of the scholarship done in the field of visual culture at the time (1980s-1990s), Foster articulates the need not to oppose the hegemony of vision altogether but to open up different visualities, different ways of seeing.
The first three essays (Jay, Crary, and Krauss) elaborate a linear history of scopic regimes from the 15th century to the present. Jay’s essay summarizes the various “visual subcultures” of the classical period (though he refers to this era as modern, I prefer Crary’s periodization ) that served as alternatives to the dominant Cartesian perspectivalist regime: flat surface, descriptive painting, for one, and the more radical Baroque techniques defined by tactility, opacity, sublimity, and a surplus of images (resurrected in the 20th century by the “mad vision” of the surrealists).
Developed alongside the technologies of telescopy, miscroscopy, and print, the perspectivalist regime—monocular and disembodied—dominated European visuality for centuries. Only with the advent of photography in the 1820s and 30s would we see a radical break in what Crary calls the techniques of observation. His essay describes the collapse of the camera obscura model and the metaphysic of interiority that it had facilitated that would mark the transition from the (veridical) classical to the (nonveridical) modern era of visuality. He links the new scopic regime to the industrial economic demands for specialized labor and specialized sight. Economic modernization “decodes and deterritorializes vision,” which is to say that photographic technology was a necessary condition for industrialized production.
For her part, Krauss takes up where Crary leaves off, recounting the challenges posed in the early 20th century to the dominant modern scopic regime. (Curiously, she doesn’t address the question of cinema, which Crary seems to want us to take up.) It is the rhythm (the “im/pulse”) of movements between self-reflective high modernism and massively reproduced popular culture that ultimately has the power to decompose the formal coherence of modern vision. (We could call this the postmodern, as it coincides all too neatly with the postmodernization of the global economy.) Kraus explicates Lyotard’s notion of a rhythm which is not temporal but figural (in Figure, Discourse), a rhythmic matrix defined as an invisibility beyond intelligibility and anterior to the differentiation of seen and unseen. Like the zootrope, Lyotard’s matrix figures recurrence as the form in which desire remains caught in an irresolvable on/off pulse.
Jameson, Signatures of the Visible
The essays collected here comprise what is in essence an ontological project, albeit one with many qualifiers. First, following Debord’s claim that commodification culminates in the iamge, J claims that any ontology in the postmodern era must be an ontology of the visual, specifically of visual culture. Being, he argues, is visibility. It follows that discussions of power and desire (among other academic watchwords of the day) must be grounded in an understanding of contemporary visuality, which, as J famously suggests, “is essentially pornographic”—which is to say, a collection of man-made image-products to be consumed, possessed, collected, and invested in from a psychical perspective. A final caveat to his ontological method: Being must be grasped as sociohistorically and technologically conditioned rather than as inherent, unchanging, universally human. Particularly noteworthy here is J’s stress on the degree to which films (and the cinematic apparatus itself, I would say) have distinctly marked the lives and works of 20th century intellectuals. This, and his seeming affinity for technological determinism (whose theoretical and explanatory power derives from its ability first, to demystify and elaborate a discourse concerned not with individual works but historical series, and second, to reveal that which lies irretrievably outside the work) betrays a deep mediological thread in his thinking. Any ontology of the visual necessitates a look at the historicity of perceptual apparatuses and technologies of registering the visual.
The long, final essay in this collection takes up the problem of historically (though non-linearly) delineating the aesthetic regimes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism according to the economic basis unique to each. Realism (identified formally by its attitude of representational truth and its affirmation of art), by J’s account, is coterminous with national or local capitalism, taking this new mode of production and its concomitant social relations as the very object of its art (not unlike Italian neo-realism following WWII). Its narrative forms (which most critics overlook or mistakenly conflate with representation) contribute to the creation new subject-positions, new kinds of space and time, new categories of the event and experience, etc. In short, realism—like all aesthetico-mediological modes—produces reality itself anew, in this case as objectively false. Realism collapses into modernism once it discovers its self-reflexive gesture. Modernism (affirmation of art, anti-representational) belongs distinctly to the era of monopoly capitalism. (Photography, J points out, has been modern from the start.) Postmodernism (anti-art, anti-representational), in turn, emerges alongside the multinationalization of market capitalism.
The chronology of film repeats the trajectory from realism to postmodernism at “a more compressed tempo.” Against photography, film’s “deconcealment of Being” is historical rather than existential, which seems to imply for J that film is precisely the aesthetic medium capable of breaking with the late capitalist model. He completes his diagram with an aesthetic mode he finds to be anti-art while striving for truth in representation: the dialectical (which is to say capable of auto-critique, as opposed to the objective) film documentary, for which the production process becomes an event in itself.
Jay, Downcast Eyes
A selective intellectual history of 20th-century France, Jay’s book gathers together otherwise disparate philosophers, writers, and artists under the umbrella of what he names “anti-ocularcentrism.” He explains that his is not a critique of vision per se but of visuality, which he defines in terms of specific cultural and historical manifestations of ocular experience. The object of his analysis, he is quick to remind, is a certain discourse on visual culture rather than visual culture itself.
From Plato to Descartes through the Enlightenment, sight has been upheld as the “noblest”—which is to say most refined, most exacting, and most important—of the exteroceptive human faculties. Somewhat ironically, it was only with the rapidly advancing developments in photographic technology during the mid-19th century that a discourse emerged to challenge the hegemony of vision. Though it existed for centuries in the traditional iconoclasms of certain religious communities, this discourse would only find its full voice at the turn of the 20th century, whence it introduced an irreversible rupture in the perspectival scopic regime. A general problematic that reoriented culture towards temporal experience (which was deemed qualitative, as opposed to quantitative spatiality) had become manifest through painting (impressionism), literature (Proust), and philosophy (Bergson), nearly all at once.
Closeness and hapticity are privileged against transcendental perspective. The visual arts, Jay notes, become more tactile in a broad attempt to tap into intersensory (and intersubjective) experience. With the turn to language, especially with structuralism (and Lacan), the efficacy or autonomy of the image is called into question. Even photographs, in Barthes’ formulation, carry within themselves a capacity to disturb that remains wholly invisible. Despite this dominant current of intellectual activity, though, the “specular economy” of capitalist society in France and elsewhere (which Debord claims inverts genuine temporal experience) only increased its hegemony over the course of the century (which perhaps explains why anti-ocularcentrism could be the unifying thread of the sundry group of thinkers that Jay brings together).
Jay is always extremely careful not to make conclusive claims as to the absolute anti-ocularcentrism of any of his subjects. Rather, as he points out (somewhat formulaically) at each chapter’s close, most of the partakers in this discourse leave us, in the final analysis, with an ambiguous stance on the role of visuality in culture. His grand synthesizing method affords him time only for very selective, sometimes reductive readings. (For example, he fails to follow Foucault’s thought from the surveillance societies of modernity to the mathematization of populations that would herald the biopolitical era and the control societies indebted more to information than visualization. Likewise, Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and concomitant elaboration of the “spacing” of written language, which Jay treats only in passing, seem to run somewhat counter to the project of devaluing vision.) Finally, Jay, rather conspicuously, pays scant attention to the historical, political, and technological-mediological circumstances (e.g. industrialization, mechanical reproduction, European imperialism, two world wars) that envelop and engender the discourse that he so lucidly lays out.
Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision
As Arendt has pointed out, sight has been the most widely used metaphor for philosophical thought since the pre-Socratics. Less concerned with the dominance of vision per se that with the hegemony of our cultural history’s visual paradigm, Levin suggests that there is something distinctive about modern (c. 15th century) ocularcentrism that has given pause to philosophers from Descartes to Derrida. Following a (largely continental) intellectual trend that has exploded since Nietzsche’s break from philosophical orthodoxy in the late 19th century, Levin gathers essays that will problematize those ocular discourses, practices, and institutions that continue to dominate western society.
There seem to be two related conclusions that nearly every essay here draws: first, that the anti-ocularcentric philosophers of the 20th century do not seek the destruction of vision but the multiplication of modes of visuality and ways of seeing; second, that a clean break from the ocularcentric tradition of modernity is therefore impossible. We are left with a series of attentive readings that chart various philosophers’ ambivalences toward the faculty of sight and the metaphorics of vision. Nietzsche, for example, subversively deploys visual metaphors to the end of freeing vision from metaphysics; Merleau-Ponty reestablishes ocularcentric thought on corporeal grounds and conceives a dialectical intersubjectivity of gazes; Heidegger offers a strong critique of the enframing tendencies of modern vision (wrought by the technological transformation of life and the reification of the figure-ground structure of human perception), but turns to the pre-Socratics as the source of a new beginning for vision; Derrida deconstructs the link between vision and voice only to constructively posit a non-metaphysical vision organized around metaphorical blind spots; Levinas replaces ocularcentric imperialism, which reduces the other to an object of possession or domination, with an ethics grounded in face-to-face encounter, a more haptic vision; Foucault’s diagrams and charts constitute a diacritical vision to undermine dominant ways of reading and seeing.
Remarkably, only one essay in the collection addresses in detail aesthetic and media technologies of the 20th century, which no doubt play a large role in determining the scopic regime and the philosophical thought of late (or post-) modernity. Romanyshyn argues that TV consciousness, as it were, “revisions” the eye but, rather than instituting a paradigm shift in visual technique, exaggerates and extends the character and values of modernity’s linear, monadic, and disembodied book consciousness. TV, in other words, symptomatizes the coming end of modernity, but in no way does it open up to an entirely new regime.
Metz, Bazin, Greenberg on the Ontology of Photography
These theorists are less concerned with whether or not photography is or should aspire to the status of “art” than with questions about what constitutes photographic image and how it differentiates itself from other (aesthetic or informatic) modes of representation (Kant would call it a search for the medium’s “transcendentals”). Central to both Bazin and Metz’s respective approaches to these ontological questions are a psychological framework and resolute ascription to the link between photography and death. Bazin identifies man’s desire to preserve life (or the form of life) beyond death, a desire which is satisfied, in European culture, through representational painting. The advent of photography emancipates painting from the psychological demand for imitation and allows it to pursue the more pure aesthetic aims of “true realism”—whereby concreteness and objective referentiality cede to subjective, essential, and spiritual expression. (Greenberg implies a similar emancipation in “Modernist Painting,” which finds in modernism each aesthetic medium exploring its limits and attempting to define what is unique to its specific mediality of and creation of values in the world. ) In the photograph, Bazin claims, the reality of the thing itself is actually transferred to the reproduction: the thing is the model. More than simply representing an object, each photograph is itself another object in the world. Yet insofar as it “embalms time,” insofar as it returns the image to a purely indexical function, photography must be said to represent not the person or thing or place in the image, but precisely the exposure time—the duration of the capture of light.
Drawing heavily on Freud, Metz offers a comparative ontological analysis of photography and film. Photography, as the title of his essay makes rather obvious, corresponds rather neatly with Freud’s theory of the fetish. Private, familial, ripe for lingering contemplation, and irrefutably bourgeois, the photograph offers a dead time and a part object; in short—and it is on this point that Metz’s argument hinges—it points to a lack, an outside, what was. Thus the indexical function overtakes the iconic; the photograph is “a [temporal] cut inside the [visible, i.e. spatialized] referent.” The ontology of the photographic image vis-à-vis the cinematic image is arrived at by mapping the two mediums of reproduction onto Frued’s categories of mourning and melancholia respectively—the former an arrest of time and a presentation of the dead as dead, of a loss but simultaneously a protection against loss (c.f. Bazin); the latter driven by repetition-compulsion and (a presumably unhealthy) artificial resuscitation and reanimation of the dead object (i.e. time).
Greenberg’s short review essay advances a concise program for photography as art. He argues that it should strive to be literary more than pictorial, narratival and historical more than formal and abstract. (He posits the snapshot as the paradigm for photographic art.) Given what’s been said above about photography and time, the fascinating thing about Greenberg’s position is that the very essence of the medium seems to emanate not from individual photographs but from the (spatial and temporal) intervals between photographs.
Stiegler, selected articles on technics and mediatization
One aspect of Stiegler’s work that I find particularly interesting is its consistent critical engagement with political philosophy, updating it for what he names the “hyper-industrial” or “hyper-mediatized” age. In “Teleologics,” for example, he discusses ubiquitous mnemotechnics with an eye toward Deleuze’s “societies of control.” He explains the “new milieu of individuation” ushered in during the late 20th century by the pervasive technical transformation of psychic functions into social apparatuses. This transindivduating process short-circuits interlocution and the collective, cooperative participation in the individuation of oneself and others as well as of the language in which individuation takes place. The mass media forms what Stiegler calls dissociated milieus, which are de-socialized and organized industrially. On the side of production, there is ever more discrete, algorithmic analysis; on the side of spectatorship, there is synthesis, since our viewing pleasure is constituted by the imposition of continuity. Stiegler posits that telecracy indeed threatens to destroy democracy but that it also in fact serves as its very conditions, since “the political” is always a technical-mediological space-time for the citizens under its rule of law. Ultimately, new retentional assemblages carve out the teleological horizons of an unprecedented desire and, most importantly, a new system of care.
In “The Time of Cinema,” Stiegler describes the grammatization of life by cinema, which, like the grammatization of speech by writing, marks a certain conquest over life, an ability to discover in it a hegemonic normative rule. Further, he opens up the question of the geopolitical ramifications of this cinematic transformation of life. Global cinematization—whose present epoch is somewhere between broadcast television and total digitalization—envelops us the world in the overriding arche-flux of its programmatic time. (Interestingly, this arche-flux seems to impose a continuity and linearity upon the original chronophotographic and then cinematic discretization of life.) Like DVD chapter selections, TiVo, and finally online television, video-on-demand, at the time of Stiegler’s writing (1998), represented hope for the delinearization of this televisual arche-flux. I would argue, however, and with the benefit of some hindsight, that this signals less a solution to the problems of non-participatory transindividuation and more something like the neoliberalization of industrial temporal objects. Control being diffused, and perhaps even self-motivated, but ultimately no less invested in our consumption of time.
One of the crucial points here for Stiegler, and a theme which recurs frequently in his writing, is that the twentieth century is the age of the industrialization of always already exteriorized human memory. In “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis,” for example, he argues that memory has become the dominant element of technological development. More specifically, where industrialization expanded grammatization into the realm of proletarian gesture, the hyperindustrial age of cognitive capitalism marks a generalized proletarianization through the universal discretization of affects and consumer behaviors. (This analysis allows Stiegler in turn to argue that the question of technical memory is always a political question.) Everyday objects—cell phones, GPS services, etc.—increasingly take on the function of memory support. Objective memory, for Stiegler, is what we call knowledge, which is produced, copied, and disseminated through cognitive technologies and temporal industrial objects. Because human life is ex-sistence, it is originarilly coextensive with technicity. This means that a certain inscription of distance (and thus desire) founds are very being, making it possible for us to talk about a “struggle for the politics of memory,” which Stiegler claims as the constitutive motivation for the theory-praxis interventions of his Ars Industrialis group. It seems to me that we can conceive of cinema as engaged in a similar struggle over collective memory, cultural history, and human identity.
Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy
In his overview of Deleuze’s oeuvre, Hardt emphasizes the materialist ontology and constitutive conception of practice against any more intellectualist approach. For Hardt, it is imperative that we understand Deleuze’s positive ontology as working in the service of a positive theory of ethics and social organization. His reading tracks the evolution in Deleuze’s early thought with an eye towards the constitution of radically open democratic society. Through his studies of Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Deleuze develops an anti-Hegelian, affirmationist ontology, the political stakes of which become increasingly refined with each study. Hardt’s central argument is that we can discern the changing demands of Deleuze’s own intellectual project according to the selective trajectory of his historical monographs.
In Bergson, Deleuze finds a new concept of multiplicity that supplants the dialectical unity of the One and the Multiple, which Hardt identifies as essential to the state form of social order. A more natural pluralistic organization must recognize difference as internal to being itself. Bergson’s notions of ontological movement and its domain of duration afford the thought of a unified time or cosmic memory. For his part, Deleuze wants to map this organization of the virtual onto the actual—that is, to extract from it a positive ethics. He thus turns to Nietzsche for an account of the ethical creation of being. To the Spinozist claim that power is the foundational element of being, Nietzsche contributes an evaluation—a means of judging one’s engagement with and deployment of that power. Genuine creation (i.e. “good” actualization) is only possible on the heels of a total, insurrectional critique of established essence. Being, for Nietzsche, must be affirmatively willed as eternal return; ethics precedes ontology insofar as it is a double affirmation of chance and necessity—shattering and gathering—that constitutes a unified being in time (49). The result of Deleuze’s encounter with Nietzsche is a philosophy of joy as philosophy of practice.
Turning to Spinoza, Deleuze is able to fully develop a concept of difference that is pure, absolute, and in itself—an internal causal dynamic responsible for a singular and remarkable being. Insofar as this difference is primary, we can understand being to be univocal; an ontological commonality thus grounds a political project that goes beyond both Bergson and Nietzsche. Spinozian democracy is rooted in common notions that constitute what Deleuze calls an ontological rupture. Produced by passive affections and imagination, common notions are assemblages of multiple relationships that create new and more powerful relationships or bodies—namely, reason and collaborative practice (99). Spinoza gives us an affirmative, joyful, and fundamentally non-dialectical concept of historical and intellectual progress, whereby society can be properly rendered as multitude. The ultimate product of Deleuze’s apprenticeship is an ethics of being, a practical guide for the expression of power. The good, according to Hardt’s reading, is what aims to become joyful and active—the antagonistic affirmations and the constructions of ontological assemblages that come to constitute radical democracy.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
For all its conceptual density and terminological rigor, Anti-Oedipus presents a fairly straightforward argument concerning the failings of psychoanalysis at the sociopolitical level and the development of an alternative analytical model capable of recouping what has remained hitherto concealed—namely, desire as a positive, productive, and inherently revolutionary mechanism, the irrational in every form of rationality that threatens exploitative social structures and fascistic political arrangements. D&G oppose the psychoanalytical model with an overtly materialist psychiatry and their famous notion of schizoanalysis, for which the unconscious does not signify or represent but rather works and produces machines of desire. The analyst, in turn, seeks not meaning but use, outputting not interpretations but mechanical interventions capable of rupturing the social field. AO is firstly a radical re-theorizing of the unconscious and its objects in a way more conducive to political militancy. Against the Freudian reading, the schizoanalytic unconscious is transcendental (not metaphysical), materialist (not ideological), real (not symbolic), and non-figurative (not imaginary). It does not constrain consciousness but is in fact constrained by it.
Neither vitalist nor mechanistic, the basic ontological claim of AO is that everything is a machine, operating according to flows and breaks, syntheses with and interruptions of other machines. From here they can assess desiring-production and social-production from a depersonalized and world-historical perspective. On the first pass, D&G posit three machines: paranoiac, miraculating, and celibate. The first produces partial objects, the second resonance between those objects; the third—the celibate machine—interrupts reproduction, produces pure intensities, and opens onto a new humanity and a new organism. These three machines, we quickly discover, correspond to the savage territorial machine, the barbaric despotic machine, and the civilized capitalist machine—the three dominant world-historical modes through which desiring-production comes to be made to desire its own repression by means of coding, overcoding, and axiomatization. History moves from the age of cruelty through that of terror to that of the strange couple cynicism-piety. At the end of history is the capitalist machine, which decodes flows and deterritorializes the socius only to conjoin them anew on its immanent field in order to extract a surplus value and perpetuate its growth.
Of critical importance for D&G is that capitalism operates through a schizophrenic process—decoding and recoding, freeing flows only to reign them back in once they reach the machines relative limits. In order to prevent absolute deterritorialization, the capitalist axiomatic must misrepresent its constitutive procedure. Enter Oedipus: the interior limit of capital employed to displace its schizophrenic exterior limit. The Oedipal model is a false image of that which is actually repressed. As a virtual analytic, it obfuscates the real problem of social repression by rerouting desire onto the family, privatizing it, separating it from the infinite machinic connections it has the potential to make, crushing all its political, cultural, and world-historical content. The product of this displacement is the schizophrenic as clinical entity, which appears only after the schizophrenic process is derailed by the very machine that had inaugurated its flight.
Schizoanalysis, to the contrary, aims to reveal the various means of libidinal investment in sociohistorical production. D&G make an important distinction here between preconscious and unconscious revolutionary investments. Unconscious investments in the social oscillate, at the level of delirium, between paranoid and schizophrenic poles, and at the level of the social (as every investment is collective), between segregative and nomadic poles. Where preconscious investment generates subjugated groups who privilege power over desiring-production in their attempt to change the socius through investments in interests and causes, unconscious or libidinal investment generates subject groups whose program-less politics subordinate the socius to pure desire without aim or end. Libidinal revolutionary investment affirms that it is not enough to construct a new social body but that the line of flight must reach the molecular formations of desiring-production so as to free it from the oppressive social productions of the capitalist machine.
A politicized (anti)psychiatry, schizoanalysis undoes axiomatic reterritorializations while liberating deterritorialized flows. As is typical for D(&G), this method draws heavily on examples of art and literature, which employ desiring-production to undermine social-production, to render it indeterminate. At their most experimental, art and literature have the capacity to escape their historical moment (i.e. the capitalist machine that engenders them) by creating chains of deterritorializations that constitute a multiplicity of desiring-machines. By conjoining the revolutionary, artistic, scientific, and analytic machines on the body without organs, the schizoanalyst is able to engineer an escape machine that can cause the entire social field to take flight from itself.
Deleuze, Cinema 2
Cinema 1 left off with the collapse of the sensory-motor schema, in which the movement-image of the classical cinema had been grounded. D offers a number of historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and artistic explanations for the transformation that the medium would undergo in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. Foremost among these is the fact that the spiritual automata engendered by the movement-image had, by the Thirties, been successfully captured by Hitler’s propaganda apparatus. The classical cinema, which, as it turns out, was complicit with state and war from the start, must be transformed so as to realize its power to shock, vibrate, and force thought upon its spectators in a rigorous way (the case of Artaud). Following the devastation of the war, a cinema was needed that would put perception in touch with thought. Cinema 2 is D’s attempt to conceptualize the bifurcation points in the creative evolution of the cinematic medium which would define its modernization. His taxonomy, though, does not treat cinema as a language but as a signaletic material; his is thus a non-linguistic semiotics that refuses to situate cinematic components within a discursive apparatus.
Whereas the classical cinema presented only an indirect image of time, the modern cinema gives us time in its pure state. Topology replaces space, temporality becomes unhinged from movement, crystals are substituted for organic images, narration gains the power of the false and rejects the form of truth that it had previously followed, and characters are no longer agents of action but seers of their own (banal or extreme) optical and sound situations. In this cinema, subjectivity belongs to time itself, and “it is we who are in time” (and memory). In the time-image, which presents simultaneously (and paradoxically) both eternal (and not-necessarily true) past and perpetual (simultaneous but incompossible) presents, montage and shot become fundamentally indistinguishable. Images are not linked by a cut but only relinked in it, placed into a feedback loop with their own pasts. In the classical cinema, the whole was the open; in the modern cinema, the whole is the outside, which is to say that what counts above all else for the latter is the interstice, the difference established between two shots, the forking or differentiation of time, and the infinite potential housed therein. Through the crystalline regime of the modern cinema, we see the actual and virtual sides of an image placed into continual exchange, “indiscernible yet distinct.” Thus D stresses that the cinematographic image does not exist in the present, but instead, as the advent of depth of field made explicit, it probes the depths of the past, all at once. It can be said to offer a different mode of presence—one that disturbs the visible and calls into question the state of things.
For D, there is a greater difference between classical and modern cinema than between the silent era and the talkie. In his explication of the sound-image in the final chapter, he suggests that the “free indirect” use of voice in modern cinema is perhaps closer to the “indirect” voice of silent intertitles than the “direct” voice employed in the classical-era talkie. In the modern cinema, the speech-act turns in on itself in order to become independent of the visual image, which in turn becomes archeological, stratographic, something to be read. Here description is not independent from (and so subordinated to) an object, but replaces the object entirely—which is to say that, through an irrational cut between the visual and sound images, the speech-act becomes immanent. Beyond the sensory-motor collapse, the optical image and the sound image are thus said to be heautonomous, related only by incommensurability and disjunction. (The final result: the audio-visual image.)
The severed link between man and world could only be matched with a cinema that would, by forcing us into a leap of faith, restore belief in this world and in the body prior to its coming into discourse. The thinker engendered by the modern cinema is always a multiplicity (for thought always comes from somewhere else and is always to come) and, like its characters, begins to merge with a people. Thus the political imperative of modern cinema: stop recounting bourgeois fictions and begin to tell stories. Cinema, for D, can be an art for the masses when it fully takes up its story-telling function (realizes its potential to effect collective transindividuation) to “give the false a power which makes it into a memory” (150). Art, especially film art, must always contribute to the invention of a people, which explains why in great political cinema “the people are always what is missing.”
D concludes by reflecting on the future of cinema, its “afterlife,” the yet to be fully explored electronic image that will necessarily either transform or replace the medium entirely. The information-image, he says, must be surpassed, for information, which replaces nature (the media-effect), is dangerous, a debasement, and above all radically ineffective (which is ironically its great power). The final pages open onto What is Philosophy? by justifying good theoretical philosophy as practice and expounding a new model of truth grounded in the creation of the new.
