Deleuze Comment
Hey all, this is Christina…I’m sure this is going to show up in the wrong section, but c’est la vie, hopefully I can move it later…
In “R as in Resistance” Deleuze is summarized as saying something along the lines of, “… it’s advertising that is presented as philosophy’s true rival since they tell us: we advertisers are inventing concepts”. Having worked in advertising for nearly three years before returning to grad school, this jumped out at me. Admittedly, while creating ads for a global internet portal my biggest concerns had to do with budgets and timelines and how I was possibly going to have time to grab lunch before my next meeting. If I was actually engaging my brain instead of just my account management skills (or my constant concern for food), I was thinking about whether or not a concept was on brand and delivering on the creative brief. In other words, I lived in the little bubble that was my account. Sure, everyone in the industry knows on some level that advertising as an industry has invaded the psyche of every day people to an astounding degree, but I can guarantee you that no individual in the industry feels culpable or thinks about it on a regular basis. If they think of it at all, they realize it’s probably true, but surely, it’s not their work that’s contributing to the problem! The art directors and copywriters consider at the work from an almost purely creative perspective, whereas the account managers see it as a solution to a business problem that needed to be solved. No one in the industry is thinking about how advertising concepts are now so sophisticated and powerful that they may actually be competing with the concepts of philosophers – a scary thought indeed.
Since this section of the course is titled “Histories of the Image”, it might be interesting to consider the image through the history of advertising, in addition to cinema. In the
Also interesting to consider is how the evolution of internet advertising impacts the image. Advertising images are now interactive: we can start, stop, replay, remix or refinish them online. After Yahoo’s last major advertising campaign they posted their three television spots to a microsite and allowed users to create their own versions out of literally dozens of pre-filmed possibilities. What does this new interactivity do to the power of the image? Does it weaken it, allowing consumers some ownership and authority over it? Or, the more cynical view, does it subtly bolster it, by ingratiating the ad image even further into our every day lives and psyches?
Now, an attempt to bring this wild tangent back to Deleuze and Cinema 1… I was struck by the vivid description of how the three types of images, perception, action and affection, are related to one another within the movement-image; Deleuze’s description paints a tangible diagram in my head. I’m wondering how these categories of images exist and have evolved in television advertising. Just as Deleuze relates certain film genres (signs) more strongly to each of the image types, certain industry sectors have appeared appropriated different types of advertising images. Think of car commercials in which the camera neatly moves with the vehicle through winding mountain roads: action-image. Or a “Diamonds are forever” spot that focuses solely on the reaction of a woman receiving a diamond engagement ring: affection-image. Or the commercial for a beauty product, in which we watch a beautiful woman do nothing but flip her hair, newly-dyed blond, over her shoulder: perception-image. Does the move to interactivity – obviously led in part by artists, but importantly when one considers mainstream reach, by advertisers – affect these categories? Do we need a new category(ies) that better captures the human experience/reaction to interaction with images?
March 11th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
You’ll remember that Ranciere pointed out that for all he may be invoked in film studies, Foucault never actually dealt with the cinema. With Deleuze’s “Cinema,” however, we get the next best thing, given that he and Foucault were personal friends and admirers of each other. It’s no coincidence that one of the figures Deleuze spends more time over – Samuel Beckett – was an intellectual idol of Foucault’s, and Deleuze’s frequent references to “limits” seem an obvious parallel to the “limit experiences” that loomed so large in Foucault’s thoughts about literature, discipline, identity, sexuality, etc.
My compliments to Christina, who was able to be genuinely and viscerally moved by Deleuze’s work. For myself, however, this sort of stuff exemplifies why I never went into philosophy – even in early undergraduate years. It deals with abstract and absolute categories which can only be imperfectly reified or illustrated by example, if at all. One knows this sort of thing is essential in science – where it’s simply a matter of going beyond the limits of human senses and perception and having to appreciate invisible-but-real concepts in purely intellectual fashion – but in this sort of philosophy, where it’s all theory dealing with art, society, and other constructions influenced by human emotions, I always feel on even more uncertain ground. In light of this, I was particularly struck by the Einstein/Bergson mismatch which came up in yesterday’s seminar.
I don’t like thinking of myself as the closed-minded type or a philistine. I did soldier through the whole Bergson reading, and was particularly gratified when he spoke, at the bottom of page 63, about how human subjectivity always carries out strategic subtractions whenever it’s exposed to a work of any kind – parsing out of memory the parts that don’t interest it. In the later parts, though, when Deleuze is doing heavy intellectual lifting defining the concepts of a “liqueous” or a “gaseous” perception, my mind kept rebelling – constantly just wanting to slap the label “Dionysean” on the concept and devote more time to directly applying it to the cinema. I respect abstract philosophical rigour, but have little personal appreciation for going through it myself. It’s because of this that my favourite philosopher is Bertrand Russell, who indisputably did a lot of highly complex work in the philosophies of logic, mathematics, and language, but also devoted a lot of time to using the intellectual muscle he’d acquired to write political pamphlets, weigh in on current affairs, and pen short stories. For determinedly middle-brown types like myself, the former lent credibility and weight to the latter. In “Cinema,” however, Deleuze is still a bit far off to the abstract, purely philosophical, side for me to really respond to on an emotional level.
March 11th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
After we disbanded on Monday afternoon, I went and watched Peppermint Candy. For all that we talked in seminar about all the familiar time-warping movies like Memento, what I was most powerfully reminded of was The Lives of Others. The film was a powerful reification of social history around the principle that poor and underdeveloped milieus are also the ones in which the most sincere and heartfelt emotional stories unfold – that affluent and advanced modernity kills the elemental human spirit that makes such things happen, and replaces it with either a bland complacency (as in Lives of Others) or simply an impotent and maladjusted-ness (as in Peppermint Candy). The same point was made by another big Korean film of recent years – Brotherhood – in which the poor and backward Korea (both South and North) of the early 50s is the setting for an emotionally powerful national epic, which the technologically ultra-modern South Korea of today can never hope to grasp. Peppermint Candy was fascinating because it tried to show us the transition actually unfold, rather like a more leisurely version of the 15-year montage sequence in Oldboy.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:30 am
In regards to Deleuze’s concept of the time image and the idea of the recollection image it is very interesting to think about the idea of willing something into being. The article on Deleuze and national identity lays out some really interesting ideas while examining the implications of linear time in the movement image (invisibility of the perception of time) versus fragmentation of time in the time image (awareness of the density of time).
I was thinking about Chris Marker’s La Jetee in relation to the time image. The film plays out the idea of time as circular and posits the possibility of time travel through the concentration on an image of a woman which in the end we discover that the image is both from the past (has already happened) and the future (has yet to happen). It is useful to consider Einstein’s idea of time as a spectrum of circular folds versus Newton’s idea of time a straight line. For the time traveler to reach the past, he must concentrate on an image from his past–making time travel possible only through memory and desire. But the past is not a line that can be accessed by traveling forewords and backwards. Instead, time creates a bubble or loop connected by specific any instant whenevers. This image of the woman he focuses on is as much of a time loop or paradox as the moment where he sees himself die in his childhood. So is it that the image is going to happen because it has already been seen? Did she ever really exist or did the memory create the past reality. Another interesting paradox is how can he live to see himself die in the same moment? How can two identical consciousnesses share the same temporal and spatial plane simultaneously
In Marker’s film it seems the time image is both a tool for travel via perception and consciousness as well as a nihilistic trap—what is willed to happen will happen is equal to what is going to happen is going to happen. Yet at the heart of the use of the image is the man’s great desire for the woman. His success relies in his ability to will an image into existence or more precisely to will himself into a future existence through the perception of an image. This willing into being is only made possible through the focus of human desire and affection. With a strange twist, I thought this might connect to the idea of the molar versus the molecular in that his imagining of the image of the woman in the past does not necessarily predict or suggest her eventual decomposition but rather his own. The idea that we will the past into the present through the image is an important addition to Deleuze’s conception of the time image and the recollection image.
I just wanted to go into this because willing an image into being can be both accidental and intentional. I was just thinking about Cameron’s question about Deleuze and desire (This is treading dangerously close onto the territory of THE SECRET HA HA). If we turn to the films in the article on national history “Run Lola Run” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” it is interesting to see how the idea of desire willing something into being (through the time image) plays out.
In “Run Lola Run” Lola literally screams until time stops ball into the winning slot on the roulette wheel. Her desire to get the money she needs seems to overpower time and space allowing her to manipulate both to her advantage. I say she manipulates both time and space because she learns and unconsciously reflects on past mistakes from previous time images in each revised narrative repetition. The film interestingly tries to pose that we can relive the same moment many times in order to bring out a different outcome (open system) based less on chance and more on personal agency. Yet doesn’t this conflict with the idea of character agency in the movement image? I guess not as the time image becomes the tool that allows the structure a film to dislocate itself from the closed system of Deleuze’s idea of the classical movement image. I suppose the time image allows for possibility of new possibilities or the key to the constant state of becoming that the classical movement image would tend to freeze into a closed set. Is this the liberation we were discussing?
March 12th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
OFF TOPIC
I have been reading Jasbir K.Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Chapter two focuses on Abu Ghraib and looks at the sexual politics surrounding the photos. I just thought some people in class might find it useful.
March 13th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Like Malcolm, I found myself resisting Deleuze frequently. As much as a liberation from the specters of Freud and Marx is appealing in the move to a more abstract, philosophical or even “purer” considerations of space, time and movement, I found myself balking at sifting through pages of terminology and concepts that seemed to have little relevance to movies.
However, I did find myself intrigued yet struggling over one section in particular on pgs 57 – 58:
“Bergson condemns the cinema as an ambiguous ally in a completely different way…
For Bergson, that is to say, the model cannot be natural perception, which does not possess any privilege. The model would be rather a state of things which would constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable…the cinema perhaps has a great advantage: just because it lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon…”
What troubled me here at first glance was the suggestion that cinema lacks a centre – it would seem that the organizing principles of narrative structure and the strict limitations of framing, editing and even the smallness of its temporal base would all suggest that cinema is very anchored indeed.
But if one is making a distinction from the phenomenological school and an emphasis on subjective experience, there would appear to be a kind of ally to be found in what might in other peoples terms be considered-
a) the capacity for an omniscient narration as well as subjective experience, and
b) the degree to which a chair on film is not just any chair but is a specific chair, ie, “things are luminous by themselves”, as is indicated on pg 60.
While I wouldn’t pretend to have a real grasp on what all Deleuze is getting at, the implications seem both to take one deep into observing the limitations of cinema as an apparatus, and the fullness and richness of its capacity to replicate both the world outside and human experience at the same time.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I think for me personally, Deleuze represents one of my biggests issues with respect to theory and criticism. I find that at times, academics and students, force themselves to understand and find meaning in that which is almost meaningless. The fact that very people understand what Delueze is actually saying and the fact that he provides very few examples to back up his ideas to me is problematic. That’s not to say that his ideas are worthless, but I’m always skeptical of this over the top ultra flowery language, is it possible that Deleuze himself isn’t quite sure what he is talking about and that he’s just using his name “Deluze” to signify intelligence, so that there must be something there because its Deleuze and he’s so brilliant, ergo we must figure out what if he is saying if he’s actually saying anything?
The fact that Jones, who is using Deleuze to theorize about national cinema admits that many people don’t quite understand what Delueze is talking about is to me very problematic.
However that being said, Jones does manage to best explain Deleuze’s position on image-movement and image-time and he reconfigures these ideas in a very interesting and I think very usefull way. Jones work is on the same path as Trauma theory, which also has to do with how “we” represent the past (but in this instance the traumatic past). Indeed the time fragmentation seems to signify a sense of trauma, a rip in psychic understanding and cohesiveness.
It would be intersting to apply Deluezes notion to something even more abstract such as the internet, whereby image-time- and space seem to collapse into each other.
March 16th, 2008 at 4:38 am
Ang, I can sympathize with your concerns about Deleuze and the drawbacks of “high theory.” Even now, as I try to write something coherent about our reading on the movement-image, I’m feeling fogged. And yet, somehow, that’s not stopping me from trying to work with some of Deleuze’s concepts for my paper (!). The way I see it, there is something very concrete and powerful in Deleuze, if one could only get at it. He is working on the classification of new kinds of images, and through this seeks to enhance one’s appreciation of the special images and modes of perception the cinema has introduced to the world. That’s pretty damn cool. The cinematographic image is more than 24 photos (or photogrammes) a second, Deleuze argues; it is an intermediate image as mobile section, with movement as an immediate given (2). What can we take from this? To me, it tells us what we’ve intuited all along as cinema lovers: that great films consist of images that are at once vivid in our minds and impossible to fix in place, because they are constantly moving and transforming. Think about your favorite film; would you want one still image from it to express your love for it? For my part, only mobile sections, opening up on the Whole of a film–or special movements in the camera, specific edits, the in-between of movement-images that get me giddy–could illustrate what makes a film dear to me. This is one of the reasons why I believe the “punctum” of a film is impossible to pin down in a single image. And also a reason why I side with Deleuze in believing desire to be a work of assemblage: what strikes the bottom of my heart or the cellar of my brain in a film, what I desire in it, is not the static image of, to use a personal example, Irene Dunne’s smile in The Awful Truth, but the way it flows unpredictably from the beguiling movements of her performance, and from the equally enchanting movement of the picture as a whole.
Now, that said, what I’m having trouble with in Deleuze (among other things, of course) is that he argues the novelty of the cinema, the creation of the movement-image came about “through montage, the mobile camera and the emancipation of view point . . . [the] shot would then stop being a spatial category and become a temporal one, and the section would no longer be immobile, but mobile” (3). This seems to throw a wrench into my plans to write my paper on the cinema of Tsai Ming-Liang, who hardly ever moves his camera, is very spatially-oriented, mostly employs long-shot, and does not use montage (judging from the handful of films I’ve seen of his). Surely we don’t have to read Deleuze literally when he says that camera movement liberates the movement-image? Isn’t he just saying that the cinema evolved when it moved beyond static one-shot images of trains, sneezes, crowds leaving factories, etc.? After all, movement can take place in a series of static images, as in montage. This, above all, is what I’m taking away from Deleuze: that cinema is not about capturing movement, but about creating it.
I’m also grateful to have read the online summary of the Deleuze interview. It was a total pleasure to listen to Deleuze (I mean, I was simultaneously reading and hearing Deleuze) give his view on various things trivial and significant. It was half opinion, half indisputable truth. His thoughts on friendship will stay with me forever: “If you can’t grasp the small trace of madness in someone, you can’t be their friend. But if you grasp that small point of insanity, ‘démence,’ of someone, the point where they are afraid or even happy, that point of madness is the very source of his/her charm.” I’ve always felt this way about friendship, but Deleuze is the first to put it to me so beautifully. Just to provide you an example of how true this is, a few weeks ago I met someone and within the first thirty seconds of knowing each other she slapped me, to my surprise. Oddly enough, the first that came to me was, “Hey, a new friend!”
March 16th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I’m on board with you Cam. I mean I’ve always read Deleuze as this highly complicated writer of ‘high theory’, but after the ABC primer, I now feel he is one of the most practical writers I’ve ever read. To quote the article: “Everything that he learns, he does so for a particular task.” Is that not the definition of writing about what one is passionate about? I love the fact that he (at least attempts) to move beyond the “talk, talk, talk” and form something concrete from something abstract—just his ability to create astounds me.
I see his writing as rhizomatic. Not everything is to be read literally, but meaning is everywhere in his texts! I mean, I do not agree that one pole of the affect-image is the close-up. However, I do fully agree with so many things he describes about affect, because it is concrete, and it really hits home with me. His texts are so open and provide the ingredients needed for a paper or discussion about movement, time, affect, etc. The great thing is that one sentence can seem contradictory from the previous. I see him as a Beckett-esque writer where one word, or one sentence, can spark a life’s work. I’ve felt this way since I first discovered him last year. When he states that affect has two poles (power and quality), really, there is enough work to be done in just deciphering what power and quality mean in terms of affect; how does he come to this conclusion? Deleuze offers puzzle pieces that we can use to create our own completed puzzle (sorry for the lame metaphor—and isn’t ‘puzzle’ a weird word?).
In the ABC Primer, Deleuze states that writing pushes “language, the syntax, all the way to a particular limit.” In a sense, that sentence is obvious but also highly intriguing, especially in terms of cinema. It is similar to Jameson’s notion of the ‘prison house of language’, where, when one thinks about it, there is no thought outside our highly constructed language system. I mean, as I am writing this, I am confined to the rules of language. I believe, in some way, the lack of language in cinema is why we are cinema fanatics. I respect Vertov for attempting to create a cinematic language, but, if it is even possible to contemplate, I think this could be disastrous! (at least for me personally). I feel (and it may be a little romantic) that cinema is the purest art form. I am highly interested in cinematic language, yet, the more I think about it, the more I embrace the uncertainty of images. If there can ever be a ‘truth’ in this world, I feel it is cinema because it is an art of possibilities (I know this seems contradictory after my words about the concreteness of Deleuze, but, like cinema, I see his writing as a sea of possibility). Hence my love affair with Tarkovsky, Dryer, and Bresson. A single image in one of these director’s films is the essence of possibility, of openness, of…. ‘truth’, catharsis, life, everything. Images are truly therapeutic.
I also love how Cameron tied Barthes into Deleuze. These two writers fascinate me and make up the bulk of how I understand affect. I absolutely agree that the punctum is found in cinema, but, like Cam said, it is more complex than just an essence found in a single image. The punctum could be the entire film if you wanted (watch ‘Mirror’ and drool over the images—at once beautiful and yet beautiful to the point of blinding us to cinematic conventions such as plot). The fact that Barthes’ writing is so passionate makes it poetic. ‘On Leaving the Cinema’ is like a tragedy. The words he uses to describe visuals, such as ‘biting or wounding’ and how he describes images (although speaking of photography) as containing an essence that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me [us]”, is a concept that comes as close to encapsulating cinema as I can think of.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Personally, the most constructive reading this week was Claire Parnet’s ABC Primer interview with Gilles Deleuze. To agree with Cam, who wrote in his blog that, “It was truly a pleasure to listen to Deleuze give his view on various things trivial and significant,” from friendship and joy to literature and opera. I appreciated the interview as it avoids the theoretical academic jargon which can negatively distance the reader from the theorist. A reader cannot be able to appreciate and identify with a theorist without mildly grasping their ideas. Some theorists have rather simple concepts, but when written they become academically complex. I found that the interview structure was extremely personal and down to earth because it consists of Parnet asking Deleuze his personal thoughts on an array of things. It humanized Deleuze, and in a way reconfigured my notion of him from ‘high theorist’ to a Seinfeldian-like observationalist. This comparison with an observational comedian is not meant to downplay Deleuze, but instead commend him on how lucidly he presents his ideas. This lucidity is apparent in the interview when he defines the notion of desire.
The most stimulating letter in Parnet’s alphabet is D because it sparks up a conversation with Deleuze on desire. Deleuze suggests that desire is not “what people thought it was” and instead “a big ambiguity and a big misunderstanding, or rather a little one.” Since the meaning of desire has become abstract he redefines it by stating, “One never desires something or someone, but rather always desires an aggregate [ensemble].” This means that we do not desire a singular object, but its context, thus everything it represents and is connected to. Deleuze uses the example of one’s desire for alcohol. One does not desire just the object, but the atmosphere in which one drinks (the bar), the inebriated feeling one gets while drinking (being drunk) and the taste of it when it touches one’s tongue.
This notion of desire shifted my thoughts towards understanding one’s desire for an image or moving image. What is the assemblage of parts, or ingredients, which forms one’s desire of a single image? For example, the desire of a photograph. Do we desire the feeling that an image can evoke? Perhaps we desire the discussion an image can provoke? Filmmakers and film enthusiasts most likely desire an image to move and create new images. When looking at a single image, like a photograph, I am constantly enthralled by its context, its history and future, and all of its other elements. Perhaps film tries to fulfill the desire which a single image evokes. Filmmakers, and their apparatuses, turn the image into a moving image and align images side by side to create an illusion of time. However, this fulfillment is temporary because film itself does not cure ones desire for the singular image, it instead creates new desires.