Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Absence
Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
Awareness
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
Books and Reading
The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.
Complacency
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his "competence." Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Giving
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Past
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
Truth
Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
"Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art." Paul Va1ery, PIECES SUR L'ART, Le Conquete de l'ubiquite
PREFACE
When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itseld The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than halfa century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery--concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.
I
In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor's speech. Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film. The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last century. These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valery pointed up in this sentence: "Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign." Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations--the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film--have had on art in its traditional form.
II
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical--and, of course, not only technical--reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.
The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus--namely, its authenticity--is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aura" and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most palpable in the great historical films. It extends to ever new positions. In 1927 Abel Gance exclaimed enthusiastically:
"Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate." Presumably without intending it, he issued an invitation to a far-reaching liquidation."
III
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However far-reaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times. They did not attempt--and, perhaps, saw no way--to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and repro-ducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose "sense of the universal equality of things" has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
“The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment.” the technology of reproduction of image and sound substituted photography and cinema for the traditional forms of art such as painting and theater, thus providing the masses with a new vocabulary for communication of politics and ideologies. Today, following another technological leap into the realm of electromagnetic reproduction, we are to ask a similar question: How do the dialect of virtual imagery and the idiom of electronic art modify the syntax of our -by now- traditional form of art, the cinema?
One is best equipped to project the trajectory of the present state of the new media into the future of cinematic discourse using the tools of history. , I will draw attention to parallels between early cinema and the one which is promised by the advent of the new image technologies; and then, following the path of early cinema’s evolution into the narrative form
I have adopted the term hypercinema in order to refer to the formal aspects of a cinema which is equipped by 1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene 2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine and 3) an interface which allows individual interaction with the narrative.
The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema. As we become increasingly accustomed to artificially created virtual realities, cinema's apparently chaotic present recalls in many aspects its origins about a century ago.” the recurrence of this historical cycle opens up a non-linear conception of the past from which the “shards of a future discarded or disavowed” can be discovered.
The historical precursors of cybercinema can be traced back to exhibition techniques such as Panorama, Fantasmagoria and Kinetoscope. The core resemblance between these image techniques and cybercinema rests not only in the principle mechanisms of their operation but also in the reasons for which they have come to exist, as well as the ways they attempt to hide or display the fantasy.
Panorama was invented in 1787 by an Irish painter, Robert Barker, who thought of reproducing a painting on a cylinder encircling the viewer. By overcoming the difficulties of achieving the right perspective, and of mounting and lighting such large pictures, Barker produced a panoramic image of London and patented his invention in 1792.
[5] Panorama changed “the web of relations between things” in the image and “conveyed a new image of the world,” where the single vanishing point of the baroque observer was substituted by a ‘democratized’ point of view, that of the observer; a mobile point of view based on the viewer’s decision to choose the part to which he/she would pay greatest attentionThe panoramic scene intersects the virtual reality of the cybercinema to the extent that it engages the viewer actively. the observer is not placed in front of the image, but surrounded by it, occupying an imaginary space inside the image, “an image which is intended to resemble as closely as possible the experience of being surrounded by or being inside nature in reality.”
In contrast to painting, panorama did not address an individual, but a large number of spectators who could simultaneously observe very different scenes of a panorama. By denying the full view of the image at once Panorama forced an increased level of the spectator's attention The DVD release of the movie allows the viewer to view each frame at a time and in doing so to edit the movie sequentially, as he/she desires. Just as Panorama multiplied the perspective and changed the web of relations between the objects of an image, hypercinema multiplies the objects of the viewer’s gaze and allows a non-sequential access to the web of relations between the elements of a plot. Interactive hypercinema and Panorama both invoke the notion of a mobilized and active gaze.
The magic lantern has been long christened as one of the fore fathers of cinema and the gothic horror of Fantasmagoria has been carried over in the form of the horror genre (with the aid of special effects technologies). The history of Fantasmagoria in the age of Enlightenment, however, parallels cybercinema in its ability to advertise itself as scientific, rational and at the same time astounding
“I pretend to be neither priest nor magician; I have no wish to deceive you; but I know how to astonish you.” Today’s creators of computer-generated special effects resemble the optics specialists of the Enlightenment era. The purveyors of magical illusions learned that attributing their tricks to explainable scientific processes did not make them any less astounding, because the visual illusion still loomed before the viewer, however demystified by rational knowledge that illusion might be.” The computer-aided cineastes of today also do not seek to hide the elaborate scientific and technological tricks of their trade from the spectators; on the contrary, the very devices of image making and effect generation are now a source of entertainment in their own right.
Although the demystification of the source of shadows and sounds removed the magic lantern technology from the hands of priests and black magic charlatans, it did not stop haunting the imagination of spectators. . However, the invention of Fantasmagoria generated a new pictorial lexicon for artistic and creative expression; one which has since evolved into our current fantasy genre. Similarly, the computer technologies that constitute cybercinema are capable of expanding the horizon of narrated image beyond the boundaries available to celluloid film and optical cameras.
The extension of narrative possibilities by means of digital technology may be the most trivial topic for theorization but not the most prevalent one. The most revolutionary aspect of cybercinema and that which differentiates it from traditional cinema is not narrative, but the apparatus of image making On the other hand, cybercinema does not have its root in the physics of optics, nor in photorecording of reality, but rather in creating discrete images of objects and bringing them to life through animation.
Cinema was not conceived as a recorder of reality, or an art of audiovisual narrative, nor did it aim for collective spectatorship in its beginnings. Proto-cinematic techniques of the 19th century, such as the Phenakistiscope, the Thaumatrope, the Zootrope, the Praxinoscope, and the Choreutoscope, created ‘moving pictures’ by manual animation of hand painted images.[15] It was the ease of photographic re-production of the image and the coherence of mechanically generated movement, along with the ability of film to project the reality of the modern age, that pushed animation into the periphery of motion pictures, reserving the manual manipulation of the image for the creation of special effects. “[t]he opposition between the styles of animation and cinema [that] defined the culture of the moving image in the twentieth century.” As”[a]nimation foregrounds its artificial character, openly admitting that its images are mere representations.” The graphic visual language of animation is in opposition to the indexical and photographic idiom of film, with its discrete and crudely rendered movement of characters against a stationary and detailed background standing in contrast to the uniform sampling of motion by a film camera. Animation’s construction of space from separate layers of image as opposed to different lengths of lenses are characteristics that led digital cinema as “a particular case of animation which uses live action footage [only] as one of its many elements.”
Similar to the animated images of the 19th century, computer generated motion pictures are constructed individually, and the spatial and temporal coherence or discordance of the action in them is a function of the artist’s ability -or desire- to interpolate the matrices of the image(s) with details. On the one hand, he creates the virtual reality of the “, depictions of God, and temporality distorted events, as did Barker's panorama and Robertson's Fantasmagoria. He also inserts enough digital noise to draw attention to the limitations of the operator and the apparatus, as did the animators of the Kinetoscopes.
Another striking similarity rests in the genesis of these fantasy-making technologies. it was primarily the scientific interest of the French Physiologist, Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) that led to the birth of ‘instant’ photography, which made the transition from animation to cinema possible. Marey was interested in the mechanical recording of an individual’s blood circulation. In 1880 he met with Eadward Muybridge, who was commissioned by Stanford university to provide photographic evidence for horses’ locomotion. In advancing Muybridge’s technology of recording animal motion, Marey invented a clocked photographic mechanism so that when the shutter was tripped it made twelve exposures of 1/72nd of a second each. He used this device to record the changes in the shape of birds wings during flight in relation to air resistance, thus making a significant contribution to the knowledge of aerodynamics. Similarly, the age of space exploration, the fascination with genetics of life, and the medical demand for a view of internal images of body’s anatomy and function have necessitated an increase in computer speeds which is beyond any mechanical imagination, while the exponential increase in the computer’s capacity to hold and process information is beyond the imaginable perception of the human brain. It is ironic that as science demystifies the secrets which haunt our imaginations, ‘entertainment’ fills in the gap of the departing God. Science shed a light of ‘optics’ on superstitious fears of the spectators of Fantasmagoria, but the movie theater became the new Mecca of capitalist/Marxist/fascist/feminist gods. And now that science is making modest progress in replicating the physics and physiology of human cognition and conscience, we have embarked on a fantasy ride along artificial intelligence. . In fact, the most significant outcome of appropriation of science by entertainment is not the production of more fascinating fantasies, but more realistic fictions.
”It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical,” “[i]t is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and perverse “the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers... to the producers” and thus, “the products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.”
While the indexical nature of a film image increases the believability of the photo-realistically captured scene, the awareness of a digitizing apparatus creates a distance between the screen and the spectator which he/she can fill according to his/her own individuality. Furthermore, the relative access to the technological means of digital image production, even if small in scale and capacity, demystifies the almightiness of the studios behind hypercinematic production and bring miniature studios to the personal computers of the general publicwould] usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy.”[23] Thus, digital reproduction of works of art raises a similar dichotomy to the one Benjamin associated with the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. On the one hand, the loss of authenticity of the image . On the other hand, by bringing the technology to the reach of the contemporary masses it emancipates the ‘cinem-art’ from its “parasitic dependence” on the “cult” of institutions such as studio systems. Now the question to ask is, how -if at all- would the technology of digital reproduction enhance or modify the politics of cinema? How would it regress or progress the composition of “public spheres”? How does it morph the norms of cognitive experience and how does that mark the faces of culture and society? As Miriam Hansen argues, the persistence of early exhibition practices in the 19th century provided the conditions for an industrial-commercial public sphere which depended on peripheral social groups, and by catering to this public (working class, women, immigrants), cinema functioned “as a matrix of challenging social positions of identity and otherness and as a catalyst for new forms of community and solidarity.”[24] She proposes that today the global electronic media culture stands at a similar juncture, in its ability to form a new matrix of identities, by means of “reproducing itself through ceaseless diversifications.”
While the mechanical reproduction of works of art in the 19th century opened the elitist cult of art criticism to the general public, the devices of digital (re)production (such as hand-size digital cameras, cheap editing software, and free-ware image processing and simulating applications) have opened the temples of movie production. Just as the masses of the 19th century could hang a copy of a painting on the walls of their living rooms as an icon of their “expression,” the contemporary masses can hold on to the experience of a mini-studio, with the capabilities of miniaturized digital lighting, editing, sound, camera and mise-en-scene. However, cybercinema also stands the risk of being appropriated by the hegemonizing institutions. by shifting the connection between the physical and the symbolic into the realm of the digital, into the realm of simulation, the image practices are simultaneously shifted out of the domain of the artist and into the domain of the administrators, the ‘packagers’ of the image. The ease of information control and meaning, facilitated by computers and software packages that allow digital manipulation of the image, , pose an anti-democratic threat. He sees no merit in the availability of digital image production, pointing out the power of the publishers and distribution institutions which reserve the full right of editing the raw footage, hence turning the filmmaker into “image peasants.”
CINEMA, CAPITAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
by
[1] What is cinema? By posing the infamous question yet again I mean to set forth the task of thinking the development of the concept of cinema and of cinema itself in terms of political economy and social organization.
[2] Cinema is at once a factory for the production of representation *and* an economic form, that is, a site of *economic* production. As factory and as economic system cinema is inscribed in and by the dominant mode of production: specifically, industrial capitalism and its war economy. As a factory of representation. capital Cinema dictates limits to the forms of consciousness that can be represented, but as an economic form inscribed by the larger cultural logic, capital Cinema dictates limits to forms of consciousness If consciousness in late capitalism, generally speaking, functions like (as) cinema—relatively unable to think beyond the exigencies of capital, then it is important to note at the outset that cinema as consciousness is overdetermined by capital *regulation*. Cinema, as money that thinks, fuses the protocols of representation and capitalist production.
This claim remains relatively unproblematic until one takes cinema not only as a form of representation but as consciousness itself. manufactures not just films, but consciousness in general, This consciousness can be shown to be hegemonic if what I call the cinematic mode of production has fully infiltrated our minds and converted them into money that thinks. Such thinking money is money of a special form, not money as a mere medium of exchange but, in short, money as capital. The screenwriter for the studio, like the professor for the university and the citizen for the state must be a source of profit.
the political economy of consciousness and hence of cinema, imperialism is an economic undertaking as well as an ideological and libidinal one, this phrase today remains an incomplete thought. I mean to suggest here that whatever the project of imperialism was, it does not cease in the presence of the fantasy called Postcoloniality. With the globalization of capital it may turn out that economic expansion is presently less a geographical project and more a matter of *capturing* the interstitial activities and times between the already commodified endeavors of bodies. *Every movement and every gesture is potentially productive of value*. I am speaking here of media as cybernetics, of capital expansion positing the body as the new frontier capital cinema regulates perception and therefore certain pathways to the body. It is in this sense that it functions as a kind of discipline and control akin to previous methods of socialization by either civil society or the labor process
The second moment, related yet distinct from the first, is the positing by capital cinema of a value-productive relationship which can be exploited--i.e., a tapping of the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value.
The Cinematic Mode of Production_ proposes a situation and a name for the dominant mode of production during the historical period that begins at the turn of our century and is just now drawing to a close. During this period capitalism and its administrators organize the world more and more like a film: modern commodity production becomes a form of montage. Much as film stock travels along a particular pathway, eventually to produce a film-image, capital travels along its pathways to produce commodities. As in the assembly of films, capital is edited while moving through its various determinations in commodity production. Today, with the convergence of the once separate industries for image and other forms of commodity production we are in a better position than ever before to see the global dynamics of the cinematic mode of production and to reckon some of its consequences.
1) Cinema simultaneously images and enacts the circulation of economic value. It images *the patterns of circulation of economic value itself*
2) This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor. I should emphasize here that all previous forms of capitalized labor remain intact; however, looking as labor represents a tendency towards increasingly abstract instances of the relationship between labor and capital, a new regime of the technological positioning of bodies for the purpose of value extraction. Though this tendency is becoming dominant, which is to say that the relationship between consciousness and the state is more important than ever before, . When a visual medium operates under the strictures of private property, the work done by its consumer can, like ground rent, be capitalized and made to accrue to the proprietor of the medium. In other words, some people make a profit from other people's looking. The ways in which this profit is produced and channeled fundamentally defines the politics of cultural production and the state.
3) Such a revolutionary method for the extraction of value from the human body has as profound an effect on all aspects of social organization as did the assembly line--it changes the dynamic of sight forever, initiating what can be thought of as a visual economy. cinema may be taken as a model for the many technologies which in effect take the machine off the assembly line and bring it to the body in order to mine it for labor power
[15] As I mentioned, we might imagine for a moment that at a certain point in history the world began to be organized more and more like a film the form of assembly line production easily invokes montage - but the circulation of capital itself may as well be thought of as a kind of cutting Much as film stock is edited as it travels along a particular pathway to eventually produce a film-image, capital travels along its various pathways to produce commodities--it is edited as it moves through its various determinations in assembly line production. Like the screen on which one grasps the movement of cinematic production, capital is the standpoint or frame through which one can see the movement of value, the scene in which emerges a moment in the production process. *Capital provides the frame through which one observes economic movement*. The finished commodity or image (commodity-image) results from a "completed" set of movements. Cinema, then, is already implied by capital circulation
[16] We can trace proto-cinematic technologies even further back in historical time. The standardized production of terra-cotta pots, the Roman minting of coins, the Gutenberg press and the lithograph mentioned by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" could all be taken as early forms of cinemaLike shutter, frame and filmstock, each technology mentioned above repeats a standardized and standardizing act while striking an image that subjugates the eye to a particular and consequential activity. From the recognition of money to the reading of print, these activities place the eye within the discipline of a visual economy which corresponds to the type and speed of the mode of production. With the advent of cinema and the speeding up of individual images to achieve what is called "the persistence of vision" (that is, the illusion of a smooth continuity of movement among individuated images) there was an equally dramatic and corresponding shift in the relation of the eye to economic production. From the historical moment of the viewer circulating before the paintings in a museum to the historical moment of images circulating before the viewer in the movie house, there is an utter transformation of the visual economy, marked not least by the movement from what Benjamin called "aura" to what today postmodern theory calls "simulacra." This movement was accompanied by a changeover from yesterday's ideology to today's spectacle. With the increased speed of its visual circulation, the visible object undergoes a change of state. In apprehending it, the textures and indeed the very properties of consciousness are transformed. travelling at a certain speed (in the form of a nineteenth-century painting in the nineteenth century, for example) has a fetish character or aura. As the image accelerates, the aura undergoes a change of state and becomes simulacrum. Simulacra travel so fast, circulate among so many gazes, that the content (as context, as socio-historical embeddedness) is sheared from the form, making the history of their production ungraspable. Indeed, to a certain extent the category "history" no longer applies to them. The simulacrum has value and nobody knows why.
The Time-Image [25] It is important to think for a moment that cinema is to our period what capital was to Marx's. Of course the parallel is not strict since, if you will allow me to misrepresent both thinkers slightly, Capital is for Marx a matter of development, while Cinema is an ontological condition. Cinema, like capital, is also a relentlessly material practice which can be recapitulated in the movement of concepts ...be seen as a kind of intercutting of cinema and philosophy," given that cinema is a force for the unweaving of existing structures, conceptual and otherwise,
Desire, the animus of movement, is to To release desire (that is, the becoming molecular of the molar, the destratification of the stratified) and to weave by unweaving is precisely the desire. How then but through the debunking of history to keep philosophy from producing a field of stratification, In short, how to keep philosophy from becoming a state form? A consistency that withstands a thousand variations of angle, illumination and content, is here at once the sign of the game of philosophy and its undoing as a state form.
One cannot understand circulation and production without understanding money. One cannot understand money without understanding wage labor. One cannot understand wage labor without understanding necessary labor time and surplus labor time. One cannot understand these without understanding the falling rate of profit and so on until one can see the grand functioning of all aspects of the model, each mutually interactive and as a result mutually defined. The constituent concepts of capital flow into each other to create an image of social totality similar in form to the grand spiral that precisely defined and interactive, create discrete images of a totality that are individuated and non-interdependent. The process of consciousness is unremittingly material but can never be fully conceptualized. The concepts abstracted from the materials that make up a filmic thought arise from the way the elements combine with each other, but then fall away, necessarily positing a world outside. the fact of a beyond: they are sublime. "the three time images all break with indirect representation, but also shatter the empirical continuation of time, the chronological succession, the separation of the before and after. They are thus connected with each other and interpenetrate . . . but allow the distinction of their signs to subsist in a particular work", "It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic, and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a circulalating I am interested in here is the motion of the phrasing. A summary of what came before is already a going after. These are examples of the cut, which as it finishes something off, begins it anew in another key.
Always leaving something behind, always moving on to something else, cut is always, infinitely in between. which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no the time- image is a result of the increase in the number of situations to which we do not know how to respond. For it leads directly to the sublime, and he produces it as such. That the time-image is also a response to the informatics of culture and to informatics itself, " Shock, whether from war, from modern life in the metropolis, or from the profusion of information, that the film within the film is in one way or another a film about the film's economic conditions of possibility. when and if the money form becomes obsolete film will be outmoded, which in a way it is Though Deleuze says disappointingly little about film's direct relation with "a permanent plot, an international conspiracy that conditions it from within," it is clear that for him cinema as forms of thought is locked into a dire struggle with capitalism. The cinema of masterpieces is at once enabled and threatened by the schizophrenia of capital. The criteria of the masterpiece is the schizophrenic relation to hegemony.
[39] "the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money," in cinema "we are giving image for money, giving time for image, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end."
Though one might be tempted to claim that this is not an implicit recognition of the dialectical relationship between cinema and money-- The unthought or the unthinkable that drives the time-image is, the *non-differentiated condition of consciousness--it is that which cannot be made conscious*. For example, the investigation into "what is the thing (the being) called Rosebud" drives _Citizen Kane_, and causes it to deploy for Deleuze what he calls "sheets of past."
[43] cinema to be taken as an enactment of the organizational possibilities of cinema in the discourse of philosophy, then _Cinema_ is within Cinema; it is a film within a film and therefore, *even by his own logic*, a film about money. The philosophical praxis which goes under the name of _Cinema_ is a sign of the world system—a projection in the arena of philosophy of the cinematic mode of production. What remains to be done here is to suggest the role of cinema in political economy.
The money-image
[44] New German Filmmaker Wim Wenders films the cinema as such in his explicitly multinational and hence self-consciously contemporary work, _Until the End of the World_. There, optical machines interfaced with computers and the human sensorium allow the blind to see through the eyes of another person. This other person, the filmmaker, so to speak, must go out to see things and then during the playback of the images remember them with the feelings he had for them in order that the images may pass through his consciousness and into the consciousness of the blind. The filmmaker's role, in a manner a la Vertov and Kino-Eye, is to aid those who, in post-industrial society, cannot see because of their bio-historical restrictions. The filmmaker does not, however, as in Vertov, have to create an image of totality, simply an image rooted to the world by passing through a human and humanizing mind.
[45] But in the late capitalism of _Until the End of the World_, visual representation and the unconscious are portrayed on a convergent course. Furthermore, they are impacted in a third term, the commodity. In a In late capitalism three strands, representation, the new world as it incorporates us.
[48] What do the time machines of H.G. Wells and of the cinema have in common? Is not Wells's late nineteenth-century time machine already a form (in Deleuze's terms) of "post-war" cinema, a device for the utter severing of the sensory-motor link? I am suggesting that the cinema machines this severing, that it is not a mere response to an objective historical situation that can be reified under the sign of the war. Rather, such a severing ought be thought of as a tendency of convergent logics and practices. Antonio Gramsci, recall, in his essay "Americanism and Fordism," predicted the necessary emergence of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type in which sensation and movement are severed from each other.^58^ One must consume such severing to produce it in oneself. After all, like the spectator, the time- craft just sits there utterly motionless as night and day alternate faster and faster, as the solid buildings rise and melt away, and then, still accelerating, as everything goes gray and the sun becomes a pale yellow and finally a red arc racing around the sky. _The Time Machine_'s bleak registration of the infinite extensionality of a time which yields only emptiness and extinction emerges only out of the theory and practice of a scientific rationality which we know that Wells associated with specialization, capitalism and imperialism. The time machine is the consciousness of these formations. In many ways the story of The _Time Machine_ works much like Max Horkheimer's assertion in "The End of Reason" that the concentration camps are the logical result of instrumental rationality.^59^ Rationality to the point of irrationality; Temporality to the point of extinction--these are the trajectories emerging out of a cultural logic which the very form of Deleuze's cultural practice. The labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. It is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else.
[56] One might think of the cinema as an instrument (along with radio, television, telecommunications) that has, without our really noticing, been the harbinger of a new regime for the production and circulation of economic value at a new level of economic practice as well as of economic conceptualization. Aesthetics and philosophy would then be secondary media (access roads) activated by the cinema. Other cinematic attractions, for example, narrative, circus acts, street shows, identity politics and terrorism, imply other cinematic methods for the harnessing of human attention potentially
[58] What if one thought of cinema not so much as a factory for the production of concepts, but as a factory for the production of a consciousness more and more thoroughly commodified, more and more deeply integrated in a world system? In a world organized like cinema, consciousness becomes a screen on which the affects of production are manifest. What if one thought of cinematic technologies, with their ability to burrow into the flesh, as a partial solution to the problem of expansion faced by the full globalization of capital? In a fully globalized situation, capital expands not outward, spatially and geographically, but *into* the body, mining it of value (_Videodrome_). In this schema, television viewers work in a sort of cottage industry performing daily upkeep on their sensoriums as they help to open their bodies to the flow of new commodities. When we come home from work and flip on the tube, our "leisure time" is spent paving new roads. The value produced (yesterday and elsewhere by labor time, but in advanced societies by human attention) accrues to the shareholders of the various media. It is tabulated statistically in what is called ratings and sold to other employers (advertisers) at a market value. But if, for example, we put our eyes elsewhere, or rechannel our viewings into different media, we might build some of the circulating abstractions which make possible medium scale confrontational cultural practice.
[59] Vision becomes a form of work. Bodies become deterritorialized, becoming literally machinic assemblages, cyborgs. The extension of the body through the media, which is to say the extension of the media into the body, raises myriad questions about agency, identity, subjectivity, and labor. Question for the next century: Who (what) will control the pathways in which our attention circulates? Technologies such as cinema and television are machines which take the assembly line out of the space of the factory and put it into the home and the theater and the brain itself, mining the body of the productive value of its time, occupying it on location. The cinema as deterritorialized factory, human attention as deterritorialized labor. Global organization as cinema--the potential cutting and splicing of all aspects of the world to meet the exigencies of flexible accumulation and to develop new affects. Consciousness itself as cinema screen as the necessary excrescence of social organization. Cinema as a paradigm of corporeal calibration. Each body- machine interface may well be potentially productive of value--how else could there have been a Deleuze? for their helpful comments on the manuscript while in progress.
By "reality principle" I mean the set of logics, movie production, produces certain difficulties and culture during a certain historical juncture. Experience and narrative are in decline because of the emergence of rationality as shock and information. See "The Storyteller," in Walter Benjamin, _Illuminations_ (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83-109.
As I have noted elsewhere, during the twentieth century the world is organized more and more like a film; commodity production becomes a form of montage. Commodities, the results of the cutting and editing of materials, transport systems, and labor time take on the status of filmic objects which are then activated in the gaze on the screen of consciousness. The transformation of consciousness, wrought by the cinematic organization of production and the transformed status of objects, is tantamount to consciousness's full-blown commodification.
and Hollywood often praised its own work structure for its efficient mass production of entertaining films." Though I do not disagree with this I am arguing the opposite as well: rather than cinematic production copying Fordism, I would argue that it is an advance over Fordism. Cinematic production uses the practices of Fordism but begins the dematerialization of the commodity form, a tendency which, more than anything else, characterizes the course of economic production during this century. Rather than requiring a State to build the roads that enable the circulation of its commodities, as did Ford, the cinema builds its pathways of circulation directly into the eyes and sensoriums of its viewers. It is the viewers who perform the labor that opens the pathways for new commodities.
In the cinema, the technologies for the organization of production and of the sensorium converge. Film/Capital is cut to produce an image. Today, the convergence of the once separate industries for image production and for other forms of commodity production (in advertising, for example, the image is revealed as the commodity %par excellence%) realizes a new and hybridized form: the image-commodity.
Walter Benjamin, _Illuminations_,
"The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus--changes that are experienced by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present day citizen"
Illuminations_, p. 89.
Benjamin notes in "The Storyteller," the essay from which this citation is taken, that "It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it," (_Illuminations_, p. 89). Storytelling in the essay is pitted against the production of events designed for easy consumption, that is, what Benjamin presciently calls "information." The clash of storytelling and information in this wonderful essay stages the confrontation of two modes of production which also clash in "The Work of Art," the pre-industrial and the modern.
Information, as it turns out, has less use-value outside of the circuits of the market than did storytelling. It is not knowledge really; to function it must remain in channels. It is important here to distinguish between mediation %per se%, as in the mediation of events by a medieval manuscript or the transportation of sugar cane on a barge, Illuminations_, p. 89.
What Benjamin only peripherally perceives about the phenomenon that he dubs aura is that it is an artifact of a visual economy. His perception of it marks a shift in the speed of the circulation of visual economy. The aura, as observed and constructed by Benjamin, is a primordial form of the exchange value of the visual object produced by the systematic circulation of looks, and hence of "images," in an emerging economy of sight. The labor power accreting to the visual object gives it a certain palpable agency; that is why compelling objects look back. In the moment of their looking at us, we encounter the indifference of the value-system to our own being. In the postmodern, objects look back at us with such intensity that they see through us. In their indifference to our individuality is their sublimity.
Benjamin records earlier experiences of this kind of event. Quoting Proust, he transcribes, "Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them," adding, "(The ability it would seem, of returning the gaze.)" As Benjamin notes, "To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return." In his effort to define the auratic he quotes Valery as well: "To say, 'Here I see such and such an object' does not establish an equation between me and the object....In dreams, however, there is an equation. The things I see, see me just as much as I see them"
("On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in _Illuminations_, pp. 188 and 189).
The concept of the aura is the semi-conscious acknowledgement of the work or image as simultaneously If one takes the fetish as an intimation, to the abject individual, of the power of the world system, then it could be said that simulation as spectacle is Cinema 2_, 105. of because the human complex (the collective worker)
Marx thought that the road was built with surplus labor time (surplus value) that was somehow taken out of circulation in its use as road and hence ceased to be capital. Elsewhere, however, it is clear that the roads are necessary for capital circulation, i.e., that they are constituted with what should be necessary labor time. Clearly, surplus labor cannot be necessary labor without forcing the implosion of the labor theory of value since capital is built, that is, realizes a profit, precisely on this split. Marx couldn't decide if roads were profitable or not. By taking cinema, and more generally mass media, as higher forms of the road, some of these problems begin to resolve themselves precisely because of the increase in intensity of circulation and in the increasing frequency of the production of "roads."
As a citation in Howard Rheingold's _Virtual Reality_ says, "Computer programming is just another form of filmmaking." Rheingold describes the generational development of computers as a slow meshing of human intelligence with artificial intelligence, a gradual decreasing of the distance between the mind and the machine. At first one handed punched cards to an operator. Then one could input information oneself. Then there was a switch from base two to primitive code words, and after that more common language and the screen. In the fifth generation (VR) we will be *inside* information, able to fly through information spaces, making simple physical gestures, such as pointing, which will then activate complex computerized functions.
To repeat, such a theory should in no way obscure the plight of workers whose exploitation continues to take on the forms already visible at the beginning of the industrial revolution. As Einstein's equations reduce to Newton's at low velocity, so too ought the attention theory of value reduce to the labor theory of value at low velocities of monetary circulation, that is, at velocities lower than the speed of cinema.
Deterritorialization and the Object: Deleuze across Cinema
I want to talk today about Gilles Deleuze's strategy of deterritorialization and how he uses that operation on semiotics in discussing cinema. First, let me make a few remarks concerning deterritorialization. This is a process of fictionalization, contiguity and bifurcation, similar to deconstruction, that is characterized by discarding neither/or dialectics and synthesis in favor of 'disjunctive syntheses' using the conjunction 'and' to make connections. Put simply, deterritorialization is a multiplicitous impulse of flight from both dialectical synthesis and consolidated aggressions of fight that seek the overthrow of perceived monolithic determinates.
Of course, this is presupposing we do have a structure from which we desire freedom. If we allow ourselves that given, for a moment, then exactly how that freedom is achieved becomes a serious question. Deterritorialization is a move towards a liberation, but a it is a move without the traditional emancipatory 'grand narratives' (see Lyotard) (these would be stories we tell ourselves that hope to establish freedom for the individual subject, such as Psychoanalysis, Marxism or Christianity). For Deleuze, the notion of the agency of an individual subject is highly problematic, if not impossible, but especially when locked within grand narratives. A first step in a critique of these narratives and their relation to the individual is certainly a deconstructive move of looking for what is not being said. But as Derrida has made clear, this is only a first step; he states, 'to remain in this phase [of overturning] is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system... we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new 'concept,' a concept that can no longer be, and could never be, included in the previous regime' (Positions 42).
Deterritorialization is the marking of that interval, but also something more: it is a 'rhizomic' marking (see Thousand 3-25) that is concerned with the production of ideas, rather than a reduction or interpretation. Rhizomic ideas are not interested in origins or results, but in 'betweens,' in the breaking-up of structural organizations by examining the relation of forces creating the structure. Asking the question, 'How does it work?,' rather than 'What does it mean?' rhizomes examine the mechanic connection between things. Positing the question 'How does it work?' does not however (dare I say 'mean'?) a semiotic of signs is nonexistent. The process merely rejects sign/meaning taxonomies in favor of looking at the relation of forces between things.
But let's drift for a while from metatheoritical abstractions to a more concrete example. Deleuze, in his recently translated books, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image considers the possibility of a 'pure semiotics' across cinema. Though these books consider past events in the history of cinema, they are not about the history of cinema. As Deleuze states in Cinema 1, 'This book does not set out to produce a history of the cinema but to isolate certain cinematographic concepts' (ix). In fact, if we were forced to name an object of subjective observation in these volumes it would most certainly not be cinema, but semiotics, or rather the relation between semiotics and cinema. For example Deleuze claims cinema is a composition of pre-linguistic images and pre-signifying signs, which constitute a 'pre-verbal intelligible content' (ix). It is not a universal language, nor is it a primitive language, but is composed of images and signs that come before language. Deleuze goes so far as to say that the images and signs which make up cinema are like a presupposition or necessary correlate 'through which language constructs it own signifying units and operations'Obviously this is no escape from signification, but Deleuze seems to be suggesting that though we have developed semiologies of the Symbolic, what we need is a semiotics of the Imaginary.
Semiologies concern themselves primarily with a closing down of the signifier, while a pure semiotics would examine the relation between the signifier and images. I hope to show how Deleuze moves out of previous semiologies, by briefly discussing some of the ideas maintained by Roland Barthes concerning cinema. I choose Barthes only as an arbitrary starting point for this discussion. I could have begun with Pierce, Metz, Eco, or Mukarovsky, each offering their own directions in relation to Deleuze's text, but I found interesting the direction Barthes took towards film stills when writing about the cinema, which is the opposite direction of Deleuze's investigation. The point here, however, is to suggest a relational attitude, so that any 'starting' point would be just as useful as another, thus avoiding a cause-and-effect history that implies a logic of progress. Both Deleuze and Barthes' two directions lead to some interesting questions not only about the nature of film, but also about the relation of language to images and the problem of the organizational tendency of semiologies of representation.
Let me drift a bit further . . . The difference between language and imagery as modes of representation, of course has always been in dispute. Twenty-five hundred years ago Plato claimed the plastic arts to be at the lowest level of representation of the ideal Forms, while philosophical discourse could get us very close to those Forms (though language had its problems too, as he pointed out in the Cratylus). At other times, however, images were understood as the thing itself, such as in religious iconography. But regardless of imagery's relative status as representation of Truth, it has always maintained an incommensurability with written and spoken language. Even the mid-sixteenth century Christian theories of Egyptian hieroglyphs did not equate images with discourse. The knowledge hieroglyphs presented was considered outside of discursive reasoning and deliberation (see Burgin 119). In the mid-eighteenth century, Diderot again raised the issue of the relation between images and language by expanding on the idea of the tableau. He insisted that history painting should be a formally unified and concentrated composition that could reveal its meaning in a glance. This suggests that experience of thought which could occur instantly was dramatically different from our experience of language. The obvious conclusion was that there must exist thought outside of discourse (which would run counter to many contemporary textually-based theories). The problem then becomes one of temporality, of the instant versus the linear. Narrative in language maintained a linear sequencing of events whereas painting and later, photography were involved in the presentation of a single moment. Although both could theoretically produce the effects of the sublime and the beautiful, they accomplished this in very different ways.
But at the end of the nineteenth century a new form of representation came onto the horizon-- the cinema. For many this was the perfect marriage of the linear narrative and the momentary image, and in the beginning films tended to be only illustrations of narrative. The resemblance between the sequential montage of events and the syntactical organization of language was inescapable. With the development of synchronized sound the bond between language and cinema grew even stronger. At the same time of the development of cinema we also saw the rise in interest of semiotics as a way of conceptualizing language. Saussure, to take one of the more prominent examples, viewed language as a system of signs and sign-functioning, that is, a relation between the sign and its meaning which was controlled by a specific code. It was of course inevitable that such a way of understanding language would then be applied to cinema. Most certainly there were similarities.
But there was the nagging question of, 'What exactly is the code by which we may come to 'read' an image?' In any semiology, there must be a code which is used to lock down meaning, thereby provisionally eliminating the arbitrary nature of the sign. This code is essential to the creation of meaning (see Eco, A Theory of Semiotics), but could be constructed any number of ways, either culturally, historically, transcendentally, or individually, depending on who one read as the truth. The problem of the code in photography, and later cinema was one of what C. S. Pierce called the 'indexical' nature of the photographic image, that is, that in some way there existed a direct causal relationship or material link between the image and the thing represented. This question of representation is not surprising in a culture that so highly values the sense of sight. It does, after all, seem that the photographic image of a tree is somehow 'closer' to our experience of a tree, than does the image of the word 'tree.'
But the fact that we find the photograph of a tree more 'literal' than the word 'tree' was, for Barthes, an indication of a paradoxical situation, in that though there are certain codes by which we might culturally understand a message in a photograph, there is also another message, the analogical one, or indexical one, for which Barthes claims there is no code. This paradox was manifested in cinema, as well. Barthes contended that within cinema there was an ÒobtuseÓ meaning, a meaning that 'appear[ed] to extend outside culture, knowledge, [or] information' (IMT 55). It was an excess that overflowed beyond the informational and the symbolic levels of meaning; a 'signifier without a signified' (61), which was articulated outside of language, and lay in an area that was 'theoretically locatable but not describable.' This excess also acted as a disruption to the normalized codes of narrative. But what then can one say about that which exists outside language? Barthes wrestled with this dilemma, rest assured he was not at a loss for words. He wrote of a phenomenological, intensely private meaning, which he called the punctum, that was an affect generated by a pure image within a still photograph. The film still for Barthes was also able to evoke this emotional response and it held a privileged place in his study of film. The still was never a sample of the whole, but rather, a quotation, a fragment with a disseminatory power that shed the constraint of filmic time. Barthes insisted that the study of cinema should begin with stills.
Deleuze is (or was) also looking for a way to talk about the 'obtuse meaning,' but rather than move the direction of the still, he discusses the operations of the film as meaning making in process. Recognizing that something is being presented in film that cannot be articulated within the Symbolic, Deleuze moves to a discussion of the Imaginary through a reconception of Pierce's semiotic terms and Henri Bergson's philosophy of movement and image. Bergson claimed that movement was distinct from the space covered, in that space covered is past and movement is present, the act of covering. Space is then infinitely divisible in a Newtonian sense of 'immobile sections,' but movement cannot be divided without a qualitative change. Furthermore, Bergson contended that movement could not be reconstituted with immobile sections, because movement always occurs between two instants and maintains its own concrete duration. This is the key to the difference Deleuze articulates between himself and the phenomenological approach of Barthes: cinema cannot be reduced to sequence of immobile sections, a sequence of pregnant moments, still images or tableaus, precisely because what is significant for cinema is its creation of movement-images and time-images through the relation of those immobile sections, not the sections themselves (see 1 11). This raises two pressing questions: What kind of relational semiotics might be useful in thinking about cinema and what are the differences between this semiotic and linguistic semiologies?
Deleuze does not deny the existence of linguistic features within cinema. The importance of what he points out is that cinema is something more, something which cannot be fully analyzed through syntactical and paradigmatic frameworks. The core of the problem is that of the equivocation of a cinematographic image to a linguistic utterance. As a consequence, a linguistically derived semiology of the image must maintain a double transformation: the image must be reduced to an analogical sign and the codification of that sign. But through this process of reduction the most authentic aspect of the cinema disappears, that of movement, and Deleuze contends that the movement-image does not 'resemble an object that it would represent' (2 27). The movement-image is the object itself in a continuous modulation. Analogy and codification, or resemblance and code are constructs or 'moulds' (27) of perceptible form and intelligible structure, respectively that ignores the qualitative change occurring in those constructs in cinema. The cinematographic image is one of modulation, of the space between these two positions. According to Deleuze this is the operation of the Real, where the linguistic syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes give way to axes of 'differentiation' and 'specification.' The movement-image and time-image are types of signs constituted by these two operations. They form what is anterior to language, what Deleuze refers to as an 'utterable' from which utterances arise. What is then needed is a pure semiotics of signs and images, rather than a semiology, and Deleuze uses Pierce's conception of the unlimited semiosis between signs as images. Deleuze insists that though semiology might be useful for organization within the Symbolic, the Imaginary can only be considered through a semiotics of signs as they relate to other signs in process.
Deleuze's semiotic of the Imaginary is not a post-semiotic: it is not the newest replacement for an outdated mode of conceptualizing the study of signs. It is, rather, a pushing of semiotics to its limits, a stretching of its terms and ideas in order to see how they might create new directions for thought concerning representation and cinema. This is neither a call for the death of semiotics, nor the last word in cinema. In discussing the claims of the death of cinema due to the electronic image, Deleuze states, 'It is foolish to talk about the death of the cinema because cinema is still at the beginning of its investigations: [that is] making visible these relations of time which can only appear in a creation of the image' (2 xii). Cinema 1 and 2 are not a negative critique of semiotics which seeks to stand on the ruins of its predecessor. But this is nothing revolutionary either, as Barthes wrote in 1970, 'The contemporary problem is not to destroy... but to subvert...; today's task is to dissociate subversion from destruction' (IMT 64). Though Barthes' inquires took a different turn than Deleuze's, both are valuable to enriching our understanding of cinema. In consideration of the chosen site of our conference, let me end with a little (con)textualization: Deleuze's deterritorial (sub)versions should not be taken as the 'new breeze' of a 'kinder, gentler' critique, with a 'thousand points of light' which only lead to a 'new world order.' On the contrary, their rhizomic function is to offer a 'thousand lines of flight,' a multiplicity of exits which resist the totalizations of either monolithic or homogenized orders.
Works Cited
• 1 Life and work • 2 The major ideas of Deleuzian Philosophy • 3 Bibliography • 4 External links
Life and work Deleuze was born in Paris and continued to live there with a few exceptions, for most his life. His initial schooling was undertaken during WWII, during which time he attended the Lycée Carnot. He also spent a year in khâgne at the prestiguous Henry IV school, a sure sign of his potential for future academic success. In 1944 Deleuze went to study at the Sorbonne. His teachers there included Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Ferdinand Alquié, and Maurice de Gandillac. Like many post-war students, however, he found the work of authors such as Sartre more compelling than the traditional Hegelianism of philosophers such as Hyppolite. He aggregated in Philosophy in 1948. Deleuze's academic career throughout the 1950s followed the typical course of academics at the time, teaching at various lycées until 1957, when he took up a position at the Sorbonne. It was also during this time that he published his first work, Empiricism and Subjectivity, which focused on the work of Hume. Like many of the philosophers of his time, most notably his teacher Canguilhem, Deleuze was concerned with critiquing rationalism and essentialism. Thus his initial work has some similarity with the work of authors such as Michel Serres and Gaston Bachelard. Indeed, it is notable that Deleuze did not participate in many of the trends that marked the French intellectual scene after the war - he never flirted with communism, phenomenology, or structuralism for instance. The 1960s were a time of great change for Deleuze. From 1960 to 1964 he held a position at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. It was during this time that he published Nietzsche and Philosophy and -- more importantly -- met Michel Foucault, with whom he would develop a close friendship. From 1964 to 1969 he was a professor at the University of Lyon. In the fateful year of 1968 he submitted his dissertation, Difference and Repetition and his minor thesis, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Deleuze's work on the limits of rationalism and the philosophy of history proved extremely fertile for explaining the student uprisings of May 1968. Indeed, his work became one of the first attempts to comprehend the protests and their implication at a philosophical level. In 1969 he was appointed to the University of Paris VIII, an experimental school organized to implement educational reform which drew a number of talented scholars, including Michel Foucault, and Félix Guattari. Guattari and Deleuze became good friends and began a long career of collaboration with each other, which included both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. It was also in this period that Deleuze began experiencing chronic medical problems. His health slowly worsened until he took his own life in 1995 by jumping out of a hospital window.
The major ideas of Deleuzian Philosophy Deleuze came from a long line of Continental philosophers concerned with various means of destabilizing essentialism (Spinoza, Nietzsche). At the same time each one felt there was something else to put in its place. For Deleuze it was the One-all which can be thought of as the totality of everything. This totality extends to the end of our physical universe and its conditions of possibility. Such a basic premise seems to harken to Plato and his theory of the realm of ideas and the difference between the intelligible and the sensible. Rightly so, as Deleuze feels he is overturning Platonism. In doing this he seeks to privilege the physical corporeal world by destabilizing the 'idea' of ideals. We get from Plato the impression that these ideals have some sort of stable ontological status (they're real, and they don't change). Furthermore, when they come down to physical reality they are never instantiated quite right. Deleuze saw this as a weak formulation of the real world of the virtual (his realm of ideas). For him any actualization (real, physical, observable-world stuff) is a nexus of virtualities which are necessarily interacting imperfectly. This imperfection implies problems or areas in which the next actualization can let another virtuality intersect the previous virtualities. On a moral/political level, Deleuze takes this idea (and a host of others) as a means of allowing him to reject Fascism in its macro (Nazi-esque) and micro (internalized capitalist) forms. He believed that we should cherish and accept the instability of the physical world and flow through the actualizations of virtuality instead of seeking to limit them. To limit and regulate them is to limit and regulate life and process. This has led some to connect his philosophy with anarchist politics. These metaphysical commitments lead Deleuze to elaborate throughout his career an original philosophy rooted in internal difference. He constructs in his works a "non-Hegelianism" by seeking to explain ontological change in terms of immanent difference. Rather than rely upon a change of unified beings imposing wills on each other, forming coherence by reaction (as Deleuze might consider Hegel to do through his dialectic, see for instance the master-slave relationship), Deleuze scours philosophical predecessors for concepts that differentiate between external and internal causation and privilege internal causation, or power that is not divorced from its implementation. For instance, from Bergson, he is inspired by the idea of duration, a time of the body lived and self-differentiating, without reference to external beings. This key focus of Deleuze, a unity between power and its action, can be seen throughout his more political commentaries. For instance, in Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop the concepts of royal versus nomad science. Royal science proceeds by the separation of power and action, and essentially a division of labor between the intellectual and the manual. Nomad science has its own divisions of labor, but maintains an integration of intellectual and manual labor. Here we see resonances with Marx's early critiques of the alienating features of capitalism and private property. To return to Deleuze's larger project, this "productivist monism" as we might call it, reflects his understanding of thought itself. Rather than focus on the idea as an alienation of lived activity, or a transcendence from lived activity, Deleuze considers the "concept" to be a point of indeterminacy between given things, the ruptures between beings that allow their change and causal interpenetration. Deleuze thus relates his theory of mind and politics to the metaphysics described earlier. The concept functions as a creation of new bonds between things, based upon bridging their virtual indeterminacies. Hence we may call Deleuze's philosophy, along with those of his predecessors Spinoza and Nietzsche, one of pure affirmation: at no instant is a "negation" in the Hegelian sense occurring, at no instant is there truly any negative transcendence or transcendence through "abstraction" occurring in the world, not even in human thought. The concept of "becoming" is one which is found throughout Deleuze's work and can be thought of forming the basis of his philosophy. Deleuze proposes becoming as opposed to being as forming the ontological basis of life. In What is Becoming? Deleuze writes: "This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future." In other words, a becoming is a pure event, and it is in this sense Deleuze devalues nouns and fixed idenfications while simultaneously valorizing verbs. To put it simply, Deleuze would almost certainly agree with the Nietzschean aphorism: "There is no doer behind the doing." All of this highlights Deleuze's emphasis on the productivity of being. Being is certainly not a fixed thing, but rather a constantly modulating process. Deleuze's terminology highlights this productivity in other ways, as he often describes the process of becoming as "machinic" or as the consequence of "desiring-machines."
• Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux. 1980. Trans. A Thousand Plateaus -
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1987. reader will note quickly, however, that Bogue's study reaches far beyond a relatively simple tripartite typology and criss-crossing axes. For, after examining globally the importance of frame, shot, and montage, he closely explicates the elaborate taxonomy of images and signs that Deleuze develops in Cinema 1 inspired by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Bogue makes clear that despite this important reference, Deleuze remains chiefly inspired by Bergson, only taking what he needs from Peirce, specifically his three modes of being, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Deleuze then conjoins these to the already posited trio of images as follows: "Rather than tying the perception-image to Thirdness, Deleuze posits the existence of a fourth movement-image corresponding to the category of Thirdness, the relation-image ... and then treats the perception-image as a species of image that lies outside Peirce's classification schema (a Zeroness)" (67-68). To these Deleuze adds two more types (the impulse-image and the reflection-image) and then goes on to differentiate each image three ways: "by its genesis; by its composition as function of the interval; and by its composition as function of the whole" (69). Fortunately, Bogue tracks this taxonomical expansion with two very crucial tables (70-71), one of the images and corresponding signs of the movement-image (both "signs of composition" and "signs of genesis"), the other comparing the Cinema 1 glossary with a recapitulation of movement-image signs from Cinema 2. After reviewing each of the images/signs as they are manifested within particular directors' works, Bogue concludes by attempting to summarize the proliferation of the Deleuzian semiotics. He indicates that the signs of the movement-image are at least fourteen, at most twenty-three, but also that "for Deleuze, cinematic images constitute the 'signaletic matter' that directors, like sculptors, mold, bend, smooth, scrape, gouge, cut, paste, and weld to form light-and-sound sculptures in time," with his taxonomy serving as a tool "for inventing a language adequate to those sculptures and the creative processes that generate them" (105). So far, Bogue has only explored how Deleuze accounts for the movement-image, that is, based on the sensorimotor schema, but with its collapse, the time-image emerges, necessitating a whole new set of terms. While montage, according to Deleuze, provides an oblique view of time, he posits a new category of images and signs through which the time-image is directly manifested. As with the movement-image, Deleuze divides the time-image into subgroups: hyalosigns, which include optical and sonic images, memory-images and dream-images, and crystal-images (chapter 4). Moving on to a different order of the time-image, Bogue considers chronosigns (chapter 5), which present "either coexisting relations and simultaneous elements of time (the order of time) or a before-and-after in a single becoming (the series of time)." Then he examines noosigns (chapter 6), which "reveal a new relation between thought and image," and lectosigns, which "manifest a new relation between the visual and the sonic" (107-8). Suffice it to say that to each of these technical and cinematic details, Deleuze (and Bogue) juxtapose new concepts--crystalline states for the hyalosigns; sheets of past, peaks of present, and powers of the false for chronosigns; linked to the latter, the power of the outside and the interstice for noosigns; and also linked to chronosigns, silent and audible lectosigns as well as the modern dimension of the time-image as "archeological, stratigraphic, and tectonic" (189). Given the complexity of these three facets of the time-image and the myriad examples of directors to whom Deleuze refers, 1 can hardly do justice either to Deleuze's elaborations or Bogue's careful explications, and can only assert that Bogue opens up Deleuze's two volumes in unprecedented ways. Clear proof of this is located in the conclusion, where Bogue provides a succinct yet thorough review of all six chapters, tying the whole volume together. He also reminds us why Deleuze's project remains first and foremost a work of philosophy, one rejecting narratological and psychoanalytic approaches to film. For Deleuze, directors invent images just as philosophers invent concepts, and Deleuze seeks to reinforce the fundamental relation between philosophy and non-philosophy. As Bogue concludes, this Deleuzian task transforms the question "What is cinema?" into an equally fundamental question, one that Deleuze (with Guattari) pursued to the end of his life, "What is philosophy?" Bogue's study thus contributes immeasurably to the work of students and teachers alike in their pursuit of a clear understanding of Deleuze's lifelong study of the intersection of philosophy within and through the arts.
Cinema 1: Movement-Image
Gilles Deleuze's theories of film have long held a strange position within the fields of film studies and philosophy: While rather ideosyncratic, Deleuze's theories are often ignored due to the very breadth of his project -- including both his own criticism and his collaborations with Felix Guattari. Similarly, Christian Metz, drawing even more strictly from linguistics in his analysis of film, has inhabited a nebulous position. Bringing these two theorists together through an analysis of Deleuze's appropriation (and dismissal) of Metz, Roger Dawkins redefines the project of film theory, situating it with a foundation in Deleuze's clarification of language in the cinema. Making Sense of Matter in Deleuze's Conception of Cinema Language Roger Dawkins <1> Writing in the 1960s and early 1970s, Christian Metz's work on the cinema favoured systematic exactitude, and was concerned with uprooting film theory from what he saw as the "generalized" approach of the early twentieth century (Andrews 213). Metz thought that a more scientific approach to the cinema was to be found with the question of language, and although this question was metaphorically present since the 1920s [1], Metz was the first to apply modern linguistic models to this problem (Guzzetti 292). What resulted was a methodology of analysis based on the formalism inherent to Ferdinand de Saussure's and Louis Hjelmslev's linguistics. This meant that Metz determined cinema as a "textual system," with the image wholly subordinate to an external structure for its meaningful articulation. <2> For Gilles Deleuze though, writing at the tail end of structuralism in the mid-1980s, such an emphasis on this kind of formalism drastically reduces the creative potential of the image. His idea of language is aligned with the poststructuralist debates of the late 1970s, debates that claimed the notion of the "totalizing system" in structuralism to be fundamentally limiting to the possibility of thought (Thomas 67) [2]. Approaching the cinema from a philosophical background (which caused quite a stir) [3], Deleuze contends the presupposition of formalism by claiming a prelinguistic dimension of the image as the locus of language and meaningful articulations. Whereas proponents of structuralism acknowledge a prelinguistic dimension that presupposes structure, Deleuze rethinks the prelinguistic, suggesting it as the matter from which language is a product, thereby opening up the potential of language beyond the reflection of preconceived form. <3> Since this conception of the prelinguistic is largely a philosophical stance, Deleuze's application of this thesis to the problem of language in the cinema suggests a return to the kind of philosophical speculation Metz was trying to avoid. However, although they are different projects, the intersection of both, as marked by Deleuze's critique of Metz in the cinema books, nevertheless is important in problematizing what the question of language in the cinema might involve and what this question may entail. <4> The aim of this paper is to consider the importance of a prelinguistic stage in the idea of language Deleuze outlines in his cinema books. More specifically, this concern with the prelinguistic lies with its significance in enlightening Deleuze's (brief) criticism of Metz's "language" of the cinema. In this respect, what will become clear is that the "root" of Deleuze's "difficulty" lies with Metz's conception of the prelinguistic, a conception that stems largely from the structuralist perspective of his work. <5> As a way of addressing such questions this paper will be organized as follows. In the first part, the prelinguistic will be posited as the principle of Deleuze's notion of cinematic language. Then, in the paper's second part, the prelinguistic will be considered specifically in relation to Metz and a problematization of the structural methodology he appropriates. However something which is beyond the scope of the present context is the unravelling of how Deleuze implements his perspective on the prelinguistic by way of the signs he formulates in the cinema books. This is a task underlying his entire cinematic project, and so this paper will content itself simply with identifying this principle as its stands in relation to both Metz and Deleuze. The Language of the Cinema <6> To begin with the question of the prelinguistic, a good starting point is what it might involve. Gary Genosko writes that in Felix Guattari's work on language, Guattari develops an idea of the prelinguistic from his interpretation of Hjelmslev's semiotic. In his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (originally published as Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundlæggelse in 1941), Hjelmslev describes language as based on a "sign-function" that forms matter into substance according to a matter-form-substance relation on a plane of expression and a plane of content. For instance matter would be a sound and thought element, form would be a language's rules of organization, and substance would be the product of matter and form. Bearing this in mind, Genosko writes that with Guattari's interpretation of the sign-function, matter is considered independently from its formation as substance. Referring to the nature of matter's reality, Genosko notes that Guattari is happy to label it a "matter-sense" in response (181). <7> In Guattari's conception, considering the prelinguistic means reversing the matter-form-substance relation. This is a reversal which refutes the priority of form and emphasizes a conception of the prelinguistic anterior by right to its formation as substance. Moreover this draws our attention to two notions of the prelinguistic: first, the prelinguistic simply as matter prior to language (i.e. to its formation as substance); and second, Guattari's notion of the prelinguistic as that which is not only before language, but that which is necessarily independent of language too (matter-sense). <8> If we turn to Guattari's collaborations with Deleuze, we can note a further suggestion of the prelinguistic. For example in A Thousand Plateaus (c1980, 1987) they describe a similar sense of matter with the "plane of consistency." The plane of consistency operates beneath formalized contents (or "strata") as the dimension from which the regimes of signs constitutive of stratification are formed. Deleuze and Guattari describe the plane of consistency in the following way: "The most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion..." (69). <9> Also, we note the development of two determining principles of the prelinguistic. First, the prelinguistic matter is not amorphous: "The plane of consistency...is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every kind" (70). The second principle suggested by Deleuze and Guattari is that the prelinguistic is neither amorphous nor signifying. What is left with these two principles is a thesis of the prelinguistic according to which it is relative, by right, to nothing: "There is no 'like' here, we are not saying 'like an electron,' 'like an interaction' etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real" (69). <10> The claim in this paper is that in Deleuze's work on the cinema, there is the same principle of matter-sense underlying his taxonomy of images and signs. For instance in the chapter "Recapitulation of Images and Signs," Deleuze suggests a notion of language as the product of the movement-image and its relations. Therefore it follows that the sign, as a formalization of expression, or "a feature of expression" (Time 33) that comes to represent "a type of image" (Movement 69), is always a product of the movement-image's relations. To put this another way would be to say that an idea of the sign never precedes the relation of terms constitutive of that sign, and rather than having a representative or reflective function, the sign is more the presentation of a specific aspect of the movement-image as matter-sense. <11> However there is more to the prelinguistic in the cinema than the idea of matter prior to its formation as substance. The prelinguistic is also anterior by right to form, and in this respect the above principles I outlined from A Thousand Plateaus are wholly necessary to its nature. In the first case, the prelinguistic dimension of movement-images, like the plane of consistency, is non-amorphous (29). In order to maintain an independence from form, the prelinguistic cannot be amorphous, because if the relation of movement-images constituted a chaotic or undifferentiated mass, then it would be entirely necessary for an external structure to be present in order to form this "blob" into meaningful articulations. <12> The second principle of the prelinguistic is that it is "a-syntaxic and a-signifying" for the same reason it is not amorphous (29). Therefore when Deleuze describes the prelinguistic movement-image in the cinema books as a "signaletic material" which "includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal and even verbal (oral and written)" (29), it is important to note the above qualification of this material also. For if the prelinguistic is not a-signifying and a-syntaxic, then it would be an assemblage of possible significations. If the significations of a language were present in its prelinguistic matter as possibles, then implied is a formal structure in relation to which these significations are possibilities, in turn meaning that the expression of matter is more the realization of something external to its nature [4]. <13> Both principles stem from a criticism at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, a criticism steadfast against the presupposition of transcendent structure. In this conception of language, a transcendent structure limits the expression of the prelinguistic to the reflection of form. The reflection of form is the suppression of creativity, and for Deleuze this is a benign activity in any question of language (or philosophy) [5]. <14> What we are left with then are two notions of the prelinguistic. The first is the prelinguistic as an amorphous and syntaxic matter, according to which a conception of language is based on the formation of this matter into substance. The second is a more positive notion of the prelinguistic as the matter-sense from which signs are a product. In this respect the prelinguistic is not a reflection of some ratified form, and thus there is more scope for creative expression. For this to be the case the prelinguistic involves two principles: it is non-amorphous, but at the same time it is a-syntaxic and a-signifying. The prelinguistic in this second sense is the matter-sense of language, a matter-sense which proceeds not towards some preestablished expression, but towards the truth of an expression which is established at the same time. Crises of Matter <15> The problem of this paper is the following: how does the prelinguistic illuminate the relation between Deleuze and Metz in the cinema books? We can begin to see an answer if we turn to Deleuze's discussion of fact and principle in The Time-Image (1989). For instance Deleuze writes that the fact of the image lies with its historical constitution as "narrative utterance" -- in other words according to the form implied by external narrative structures. On the point of the widespread acceptance of narrative as the dominant mode of cinematic language, Deleuze and Metz are in agreement. They differ however because Deleuze accuses Metz of losing sight of this narrative fact, therefore confusing fact and principle. I described above the principle of the image as non-amorphous yet a-syntaxic, and so with the confusion of fact and principle Deleuze sees Metz to be asserting the primacy of form at the expense of the prelinguistic matter-sense. <16> To approach this problem we must look into the narrative model in order to see how it bears on the prelinguistic in the cinema. In this respect the following passage is useful in its capacity as a kind of summary criticism of the methodology behind Metz's emphasis on narrative. Addressing the philosophical framework of Metz's approach to be fundamentally Saussurean, Deleuze writes that Metz "applies certain determinations which do not belong exclusively to the language system [langue], but condition the utterances of a language [langage], even if this language is not verbal and operates independently of a language system" (25). If we look at the relation between narrative and linguistics in terms of langue and langage we will see how Metz overlooks the principle of the image. Moreover we will see this confusion as a structuralist dilemma in Metz's work that takes into account Hjelmslev's ideas also. Such a structural perspective implies, most importantly, a conception of the prelinguistic that Metz also adopts, and it is this structuralist perspective on the prelinguistic that is at the root of Deleuze's criticism of Metz. <17> First of all, what of the relationship between Saussure and Metz? Saussure began developing his conception of linguistics in 1916, which involved the division of natural language into a finite amount of minimum units (phonemes) and an infinite number of compound articulations (monemes, phrases and sentences). These articulations were based on certain rules or conventions, and the totality of these rules at any given moment in history was what Saussure called "langue." Based on the fact that language construes meaning according to the double movement described above, from Andre Martinet we can also suggest this procedure of langue as a "double articulation" [6]. With this conception of language, the object (or "referent") is most importantly "bracketed" since linguistics constructs the object of study based on the system of langue. Signification is therefore arbitrary, and important is not the sense of language's relation to its object, but the formalism according to which thought and meaning is construed. It was in the face of the widespread acceptance of Saussurean linguistics as a methodological approach to contemporary theory that Metz attempted to legitimise the study of the cinema, thereby elevating its status to the level of academic discipline. <18> With Saussure's method in mind, Metz's early writing was concerned with this question of langue in the cinema. Yet his project was frustrated when he claimed the basic unit of the cinema to be the image's signification as a "complete segment of reality" (Film Language 115). For instance consider his famous example: "A close-up of a revolver...signifies 'Here is a revolver!'" (67). Implied therefore were the following consequences: first, as a "complete signification," Metz claimed an absence of "discreet elements" (like the linguistic phoneme or seme), and this was unlike langue; and second, signification in the cinema is anything but arbitrary (unlike langue also): from the above example we can see how it was highly motivated for Metz. Therefore Metz's initial assertion regarding the idea of langue was that there is nothing resembling double articulation, and signification is motivated (114). <19> However Metz soon developed his thesis, shrinking the prior distance between cinema and langue. For instance he later claims a sense of cinematic articulation, stating this to be evident in the realisation of narrative through the cinema's formal elements. These formal elements include, for example, editing, lighting, camera angles and mise-en-scene. He later reconsidered his rejection of arbitrariness, claiming a sense of the arbitrary with the narrative determination of the cinema and the conventions of editing (Buckland 210). <20> Therefore, although not being specifically the same, we can see Metz asserting a notion of langue with the formal elements associated with narrative. Moreover he narrowed this gap further by claiming a version of langue's syntagmatic and paradigmatic in the operation of cinematic narrative. Deleuze notes the significance of this move in The Time-Image: [L]anguage features which necessarily apply to utterances will be found in the cinema, as rules of use, in the language system and outside of it: the syntagm (conjunction of present relative units) and the paradigm (disjunction of present units with comparable absent units). The semiology of the cinema will be the discipline that applies linguistic model, especially syntagmatic ones, to images as constituting one of their principle "codes" (25-26). <21> What does this idea of the syntagmatic involve? For Saussure, syntagms are a "horizontal" dimension of language, and are the regular and typical patterns of structure in the language system. As such, the syntagmatic is like the actualisation of langue, which up until now was more of what Paul Thibault describes as a "virtual" dimension. Langue is a "whole" then, and "has value" only by virtue of the syntagmatic -- in other words, by virtue of "the relations among the parts which comprise the whole" (261). Although the absence of discrete elements complicates things slightly in the cinema, Metz nevertheless asserted the syntagmatic at the level of the sequence. He claimed that all films partake to some extent of eight principal syntagmatic "types" [7].Furthermore, non-narrative (or "modern" cinema) is simply a disturbance of the above syntagmatic grammar [8]. <22> The paradigmatic on the other hand is the "vertical" dimension of a signification's "associated relations" in linguistics. Thibault writes that this dimension contains all the combinations possible in a given "syntagmatic solidarity" [9]. Important though is that the paradigmatic only eventuates based on the completed signification of a syntagm, and so meaning is construed as a result of a signification's opposition to other possible significations in the paradigmatic. At the level of the word, opposition occurs in the paradigmatic dimension of a word's minimal units, yet in the face of its completed signification. <23> For Metz a linguistic sense of the paradigmatic -- whereby present units are clarified by absent units -- is difficult because the paradigmatic dimension of an image is infinite in possibility. Therefore, although initially like linguistics, since "The filmic shot is...the result of the ordering of several elements (for example, the different visual elements in the image -- what is sometimes called the interior montage)" (116), the cinema is unlike langue because "these elements are indefinite in number and undefined in nature" (116). However this does not completely rule out the possibility of the paradigmatic, and we see this at the level of the oppositions of Metz's eight syntagmatic types [10]. More specifically also, since these syntagmatic types are determined at the level of the image's relation, the paradigmatic really begins with the type of cut or edit, and the spatio-temporal relations between images [11]. <24> To sum up the problem of Saussurean linguistics in the cinema, we can suggest a sense of langue for Metz according to the above syntagmatic and paradigmatic operations of narrative. In his quest to find an equivalent to langue, Metz settled on narrative because of its capacity to function as the same kind of formal condition. Cinema therefore is like a language system without double articulation and the arbitrary motivation of its terms, and it is nevertheless linguistic since formalism is primary. This is the sense of language Deleuze is addressing when he notes Metz's project to involve "certain determinations which do not belong exclusively to the language system [langue], but condition the utterances of a language [langage]." <25> At the same time though, it seems that what is really going on in Metz's approach to cinematic language is an emphasis on the notion of "systematic theory" seminal in Saussure's linguistics (Weber 914). Saussure's aim was to establish linguistics as an authentic and rigorous science, and necessarily involved was the establishment of a true and unique "object" of study. However natural language, being such a heterogeneous mass of "the physical, physiological and psychical domains" (916), eludes such a determination, and it was for this reason Saussure focused on langue as the most appropriate "object" of analysis. Samuel Weber describes the fecundity of such an approach as apparent in the following tenets of structuralism some years later: i) the rejection of mere empirical observation or data as inadequate in establishing the object and method of science; ii) the tendency to construe science as a mode of description and of classification, as a taxonomy involving a semiotic system conceived as a closed, homogenous and discreet medium; iii) the conviction that the laws which govern the functioning of the sign system are independent both of the individual subjects participating in it and of the specific material embodiment of the sign; and finally, iv) the assertion that the object of semiotics is dependent upon a prior point of view, involving a certain conception of structure of science and its object (917). What each of these tenets point towards is an emphasis on the point of view as inaugural and wholly constitutive of the object, and with this in mind the question of narrative in the cinema is a translation of structuralism's emphasis on the systematic. <26> In respect of structure, it was suggested at the beginning of this paper that Hjelmslev's approach to language could be interpreted from a similarly systematic point of view. In his Prolegomena the formation of matter into substance according to the "mutual solidarity" of the planes of content and expression is commonly thought to be a "generalizing" of Saussure's signifier-signified relationship (Buckland 205). As I noted earlier, the most traditional interpretation of language in Hjelmslev's account is the following: it is a system that rests on the principle of an amorphous thought and sound element ("purport"), shaped by a concrete and formal structure ("sign-function") (Hjelmslev 55). Distinguishing his approach from "philosophical" "speculation," Hjelmslev (like Saussure) claims an analysis of the formal system of language to be most rigorous (6-7). Such an approach transcends "mere primitive description" in favour of "a systematic, exact, and generalizing science" with which "all events (possible combinations of elements) are foreseen" and "the conditions for their realization established" (9). <27> Warren Buckland notes also the importance of Hjelmslev's account of structure in Metz's approach to the problem of language in the cinema. He describes the following two principles as significant in the development of Metz's project: 1) The capacity of Hjelmslev's system to function as a "generalization" of Saussure's signifier-signified relation: Hjelmslev's linguistic analysis is significant because it "does not stop at entities whose content and expression are correlated" (205); 2) In terms of its relation to the history of semiology, Hjelmslev's work "developed a deductive procedure designed to analyse all communication activity, which were defined as semiotic if they could be organised into an expression plane and a content plane, each analysable into form, material and substance" (206). In Language and Cinema (19??) Metz acknowledges this relationship, noting his interpretation of substance as "the meeting of form and material...it is...that which appears when a form happens to organise a material" (209-210). <28> Each of these ideas constitutes an overarching systematic point of view in Metz's approach to the cinema whereby form is wholly required for meaningful articulation. Such is a presupposition of formalism according to which narrative is only one specific manifestation of systematic theory. As an example, consider the period of Language and Cinema and Metz's revision of his earlier work in the collection Essais sur la signification au cinema I (1971). In the original essay "Le Cinema: Langue ou Langage?" (1964), Metz claims the image reflects a basic notion of reality according to Mikel Dufrenne's thesis of "natural" signification -- in other words, "when a signification is somehow immanent to a thing" (78). In the footnotes appended to his later revisions in Essais, Metz changes tact slightly, claiming that an image's so-called natural signification really only marks the subject's invisible "assimilation" of a cultural code (78). In the first instance signification is a given and the identity of the code is presupposed, while in the second instance the transcendent ideology is simply more explicit in its capacity as cultural ideology. In both what is primary and what is most important is the ideology actualised by the object, and we can say that both suggest the object as an example of matter that cannot be considered independently of form [12]. <29> In all of this, a structuralist position boils down to the presupposition of form (as a transcendent point of view) in the matter-form-substance relation with which I began this paper. Therefore the root of Deleuze's difficulty with Metz lies with his structuralist point of view on the prelinguistic, since in contrast, matter for Deleuze and Guattari most importantly can be considered independently of form: it is matter-sense. With the matter-sense of the prelinguistic, terms in language are not limited to the reflection of form, and in the cinema images need not be reduced to the representation of narrative codes. Instead, "They are the object of a perpetual reorganization" (Time 265). Final Words <30> As a way of concluding, consider the following footnote and how the question of matter is most revealing in Deleuze's dismissal of Metz: The linguist Hjelmslev calls "content" [matter] precisely this element which is not linguistically formed although it is perfectly formed from other points of view. He says "not semiotically formed" because he identifies the semiotic function with the linguistic one. This is why Metz tends to exclude this material in his interpretation of Hjelmslev (Time 287 note 9). Codes are not an evident given in matter, and therefore matter can be considered independently of the linguistic function. In other words matter is "perfectly formed from other points of view": it is a "signaletic material" as Deleuze emphasizes earlier in "Recapitulation of images and signs" (29). As I have said, and Deleuze makes this perfectly clear, Metz's error lies with the fact that his interpretation overlooks the independence of matter, excluding matter-sense, and this stems directly from his emphasis on codes like narrative. <31> Narrative was Metz's answer to the problem of langue, and in its capacity as formal code, narrative was simply another instance of a structural point of view that favours form over matter. Therein lies the root of Deleuze's difficulty with Metz, a difficulty that begins with narrative and takes into account the entire structural project. What I have tried to show in this paper is that the principle underlying Deleuze's concept of language in the cinema is based on the conception of the prelinguistic as matter-sense, a prelinguistic dimension that is anterior by right to its formation as substance. Notes [1] Stam et. al. cites the metaphorical application of "language" to the cinema in the 1920s by Riccioto Canuda, Louis Delluc, Vachel Lindsay and Bela Balazs among others (28). [^] [2] In this respect see also Cinethique's critique of Metz in Screen v. 14, n.1/2, pp. 189-214. [^] [3] "In Anglo-American circles...interest in the two volumes was tempered by skepticism, not only about the source (a philosopher) but also about the sweep (roughly six hundred pages)...Because the cinema books are positioned in an immense oeuvre, part of 'une vie philosophique', they discourage reflection in toto..." (Flaxman 2). [^] [4] See Deleuze, Difference (211ff.) for a more detailed explanation of the concept of the possible. [^] [5] Paul Patton gives a useful summary of reflective/representational thought and non-representational/dynamic/creative thought in "Anti-Platonism and Art" (144-145). [^] [6] According to Pasolini, Martinet "represents the final and defining movement of Saussurean linguistics" (Pasolini 202). Buckland describes this process as follows: "Verbal language is posited by Martinet to be organised on two levels: the first (the higher) level is analysable into meaningful units (morphemes) which are signs...; and a second, lower level, consisting of non-meaningful units" (206). See A. Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics. Trans. Elizabeth Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. [^] [7] See Film Language (124-126). [^] [8] Deleuze: "Christian Metz has no insurmountable difficulty in accounting for the deliberate disturbances of narration in modern cinema: it is enough to point to changes of structure in the syntagmatics" (Time 26). See also Deleuze's footnote on this point (285 note 3). For examples from Metz, see "The Modern Cinema and Narrativity" in Film Language (185-228). [^] [9] See for example Thibault chapter 11, "Dimensions of Contextualization: The Mechanism of Langue" (257-303). [^] [10] "[I]t should be remarked that the existence of several types of image-ordering has the effect of creating… a specific paradigmatic category, which is constituted precisely by the total system of the different syntagmas" (Film Language 68 note). [^] [11] Describing a certain "value" of the cut, Metz writes: "This is the case with the "fade-dissolve" duality within the framework of the "conjunction of two sequences": a simple commutation, which the users -- that is to say, the spectators -- perform spontaneously, makes it possible to isolate the corresponding significates: a spatiotemporal break with the establishing of an underlying link (dissolve), and a straightforward spatiotemporal break (fade)" (Film Language 99). [^] [12] Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, Deleuze suggests that Metz's use of the psychoanalytic model in The Imaginary Signifier reveals a similar presupposition of form as the narrative/cultural model of Film Language and Language and Cinema (Time 285 note 3). [^] Works Cited Andrews, Dudley. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London: Oxford, 1976. Buckland, Warren. "The Structural Linguistic Foundation of Film Semiology." Language and Communication 11.3 (1991): 197-216. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986. ---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989. ---. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. Flaxman, Gregory. "Introduction." The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Gregory Flaxman, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000. Genosko, Gary. "Guattari's Schizoanalytic Semiotics: Mixing Hjelmslev and Pierce." Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998. Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power, 1995. Guzzetti, Alfred. "Christian Metz and the Semiology of the Cinema." Journal of Modern Literature 3.2 (April 1973): 292-308. Hjelmslev, Louis. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Trans. Francis J. Whitfield. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1961. Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1991. ---. Language and Cinema. Trans. J. Donna Uniker Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Patton, Paul. "Anti-Platonism and Art." Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, eds. London: Routledge, 1994. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Heretical Empiricism. Louise K. Barnett, ed. Trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana, 1998. Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. 1915. Trans. Wade Baskin. Glasgow: Fontana, 1974. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge, 1992. Thibault, Paul. Re-Reading Saussure: The Dynamics of Signs in Social Life. London: Routledge, 1997. Thomas, Jean-Jacques. "Poststructuralism and the New Humanism." Substance: A Review of Theory and Literature Criticism 68 (1992): 61-76. Weber, Samuel. "Saussure and the Apparition of Language: The Critical Perspective." Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 913-938.
One is best equipped to project the trajectory of the present state of the new media into the future of cinematic course using the tools of history. , I will draw attention to parallels between early cinema and the one which is promised by the advent of the new image technologies;, following the path of early cinema’s evolution into the narrative form
cinema's apparently chaotic present recalls in many aspects its origins about a century ago.” the recurrence of this historical cycle opens up a non-linear conception of the past from which the “shards of a future discarded or disavowed” can be discovered The historical precursors of cybercinema can be traced back to exhibition techniques such as Panorama, Fantasmagoria and Kinetoscope. The core resemblance between these image techniques and cybercinema rests not only in the principle mechanisms of their operation but also in the reasons for which they have come to exist, as well as the ways they attempt to hide or display the fantasy. Panorama was invented in, reproducing a painting on a cylinder encircling the viewer. By overcoming the difficulties of achieving the right perspective, and of mounting and lighting such large pictures,.,
Panorama changed “the web of relations between things” in the image and “conveyed a new image of the world,” where the single vanishing point of the baroque observer was substituted by a ‘democratized’ point of view, that of the observer; a mobile point of view based on the viewer’s decision to choose the part to which he/she would pay greatest attention
The panoramic scene intersects the photo virtual reality of the cybercinema to the extent that it engages the viewer actively. the observer is not placed in front of the image, but surrounded by it, occupying an imaginary space inside the image, “an image which is intended to resemble as closely as possible the experience of being surrounded by or being inside nature in reality.” . . , panorama did not address an individual, but a large number of spectators who could simultaneously observe very different scenes of a panorama. by denying the full view of the image at once Panorama forced an increased level of the spectator's attention
Just as Panorama multiplied the perspective and changed the web of relations between the objects of an image, hypercinema multiplies the objects of the viewer’s gaze and allows a non-sequential access to the web of relations between the elements of a plot. Interactive hypercinema and Panorama both invoke the notion of a mobilized and active gaze.
The magic lantern the fore fathers of cinema and the gothic horror of Fantasmagoria has been carried over in the form of the horror genre (with the aid of special effects technologies). The history of Fantasmagoria in the age of Enlightenment, however, parallels cybercinema in its ability to advertise itself as scientific, rational and at the same time astounding
- “I pretend to be neither priest nor magician; I have no wish to deceive you; but I know how to astonish you.” Today’s creators of computer-generated special effects resemble the optics specialists of the Enlightenment era.
The purveyors of magical illusions learned that attributing their tricks to explainable scientific processes did not make them any less astounding, because the visual illusion still loomed before the viewer, however demystified by rational knowledge that illusion might be.”
The computer-aided cineastes of today also do not seek to hide the elaborate scientific and technological tricks of their trade from the spectators; on the contrary, the very devices of image making and effect generation are now a source of entertainment in their own right. Although the demystification of the source of shadows and sounds removed the magic lantern technology from the hands of priests and black magic charlatans, it did not stop haunting the imagination of spectators. .
However, the invention of Fantasmagoria generated a new pictorial lexicon for artistic and creative expression; one which has since evolved into our current fantasy genre. Similarly, the computer technologies that constitute cybercinema are capable of expanding the horizon of narrated image beyond the boundaries available to celluloid film and optical cameras. The most revolutionary aspect of cybercinema and that which differentiates it from traditional cinema is not narrative, but the apparatus of image making On the other hand, cybercinema does not have its root in the physics of optics, nor in photorecording of reality, but rather in creating discrete images of objects and bringing them to life through animation. Cinema was not conceived as a recorder of reality, or an art of audiovisual narrative, nor did it aim for collective spectatorship in its beginnings. Proto-cinematic techniques of the 19th century, such as the Phenakistiscope, the Thaumatrope, the Zootrope, the Praxinoscope, and the Choreutoscope, created ‘moving pictures’ by manual animation of hand painted images. It was the ease of photographic re-production of the image and the coherence of mechanically generated movement, along with the ability of film to project the reality of the modern age, that pushed animation into the periphery of motion pictures, reserving the manual manipulation of the image for the creation of special effects. the opposition between the styles of animation and cinema defined the culture of the moving image in the twentieth century.” As animation foregrounds its artificial character, openly admitting that its images are mere representations.” The graphic visual language of animation is in opposition to the indexical and photographic idiom of film, with its discrete and crudely rendered movement of characters against a stationary and detailed background standing in contrast to the uniform sampling of motion by a film camera. Animation’s construction of space from separate layers of image as opposed to different lengths of lenses are characteristics that led digital cinema as “a particular case of animation which uses live action footage only as one of its many elements.” Similar to the animated images of the 19th century, computer generated motion pictures are constructed individually, and the spatial and temporal coherence or discordance of the action in them is a function of the artist’s ability -or desire- to interpolate the matrices of the image(s) with details. On the one hand, he creates the virtual reality of the “, depictions of God, and temporality distorted events, as did Barker's panorama and Robertson's Fantasmagoria. He also inserts enough digital noise to draw attention to the limitations of the operator and the apparatus, as did the animators of the Kinetoscopes. Another striking similarity rests in the genesis of these fantasy-making technologies. , it was primarily the scientific interest of the French Physiologist, Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) that led to the birth of ‘instant’ photography, which made the transition from animation to cinema possible. Marey was interested in the mechanical recording of an individual’s blood circulation. In 1880 he met with Eadward Muybridge, who was commissioned by Stanford university to provide photographic evidence for horses’ locomotion. In advancing Muybridge’s technology of recording animal motion, Marey invented a clocked photographic mechanism so that when the shutter was tripped it made twelve exposures of 1/72nd of a second each. He used this device to record the changes in the shape of birds wings during flight in relation to air resistance, thus making a significant contribution to the knowledge of aerodynamics. Similarly, the age of space exploration, the fascination with genetics of life, and the medical demand for a view of internal images of body’s anatomy and function have necessitated an increase in computer speeds which is beyond any mechanical imagination, while the exponential increase in the computer’s capacity to hold and process information is beyond the imaginable perception of the human brain. It is ironic that as science demystifies the secrets which haunt our imaginations, ‘entertainment’ fills in the gap of the departing God. Science shed a light of ‘optics’ on superstitious fears of the spectators of Fantasmagoria, but the movie theater became the new Mecca gods. And now that science is making modest progress in replicating the physics and physiology of human cognition and conscience, we have embarked on a fantasy ride along artificial intelligence. . In fact, the most significant outcome of appropriation of science by entertainment is not the production of more fascinating fantasies, but more realistic fictions.
”It is precisely when it appears most truthful, most faithful and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical,” “[i]t is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image is most immoral and perverse “the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers... to the producers” and thus, “the products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.” . While the indexical nature of a film image increases the believability of the photo-realistically captured scene, the awareness of a digitizing apparatus creates a distance between the screen and the spectator which he/she can fill according to his/her own individuality. Furthermore, the relative access to the technological means of digital image production, even if small in scale and capacity, demystifies the almightiness of the studios behind hypercinematic production and bring miniature studios to the personal computers of the general publicwould] usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy.” Thus, digital reproduction of works of art raises a similar dichotomy to the one Benjamin associated with the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. On the one hand, the loss of authenticity of the image . On the other hand, by bringing the technology to the reach of the contemporary masses it emancipates the ‘cinema-art’ from its “parasitic dependence” on the “cult” of institutions such as studio systems. Now the question to ask is, how -if at all- would the technology of digital reproduction enhance or modify the politics of cinema? How would it regress or progress the composition of “public spheres”? How does it morph the norms of cognitive experience and how does that mark the faces of culture and society?
the persistence of early exhibition practices in the 19th century provided the conditions for an industrial-commercial public sphere which depended on peripheral social groups, and by catering to this public (working class, women, immigrants), cinema functioned “as a matrix of challenging social positions of identity and otherness and as a catalyst for new forms of community and solidarity.” She proposes that today the global electronic media culture stands at a similar juncture, in its ability to form a new matrix of identities, by means of “reproducing itself through ceaseless diversifications.” While the mechanical reproduction of works of art in the 19th century opened the elitist cult of art criticism to the general public, the devices of digital (re)production (such as hand-size digital cameras, cheap editing software, and free-ware image processing and simulating applications) have opened the temples of movie production. Just as the masses of the 19th century could hang a copy of a painting on the walls of their living rooms as an icon of their “expression,” the contemporary masses can hold on to the experience of a mini-studio, with the capabilities of miniaturized digital lighting, editing, sound, camera and mise-en-scene. “image peasants.”
