Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 0822319624, 0822319705

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Part I. Movement, Image, Sign
1. A Short History of Cinema
2. Movement and Image
3. Image and Sign
4. Time and Memory, Orders and Powers
Part II. Force, Power, Resistance
5. Critique, or Truth in Crisis
6. Series and Fabulation: Minor Cinema
7. Thought and Image
8. Conclusion: The Memory of Resistance
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

GILLES DELEUZE'S TIME MACHINE

Post-Contemporary Interventions Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

GILLES DELEUZE'S TIME MACHINE

D. N. Rodowick

Duke University Press Durham and London 1997

© I997 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. "Man Doing Forward Handsprings," by Eadweard Muybridge is reprinted courtesy of the George Eastman House.

Als das Kind Kind war, war das die Zeit der falgenden Fragen: Warum bin ich 1ch und warum nicht Dul Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht darU Wann begann die Zeit und wa endet der Rauml - Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, Der Himmel tiber Berlin For my mother.

CONTENTS

Preface ix PART I MOVEMENT, IMAGE, SIGN I

A Short History of Cinema 3

2

Movement and Image

18

3 Image and Sign 38 4 Time and Memory, Orders and Powers 79 PART II

FORCE, POWER, RESISTANCE

5 Critique, or Truth in Crisis

121

6 Series and Fabulation: Minor Cinema 139 7 Thought and Image 170 8 Conclusion: the Memory of Resistance 194 Notes

2II

Bibliography 243 Index 249

PREFACE

And this book, if ever written, as it soon will be if I am in a situation to do it, will be one of the births of time. -Charles Sanders Peirce, "A Guess at the Riddle"

The publication of Gilles Deleuze's two-volume theory of film - Cinema I, l'image-mouvement in 1983 and Cinema 2, l'image-temps in 1985-caused something of a sensation in the French publishing scene. L'image-temps was rumored to have sold out its first printing on its first day in bookstores. Although both books were quickly translated into English, even today, over ten years later, Deleuze's study of film has had comparatively little impact on contemporary anglophone film theory. Certainly, Deleuze is difficult to read, and writing on a popular art has done little to make his philosophical style any easier to comprehend. Yet this difficulty has not prevented the flourishing of Deleuze scholarship in the anglophone theoretical community. Nor have university presses slowed their rate of translation. With the American publication of Difference and Repetition in 1995, all of Deleuze's major philosophical works, and indeed almost all of his books, are now available in English. Curiously, the communities of readers in both philosophy and film studles have treated these books as anomalies, although for different rea-

x Preface sons. For both philosophers and film scholars, a good part of Deleuze's books read like French cinephilic film criticism. Philosophers may suspect there is little of substance here, and film scholars may feel this is a throwback to a period of film study best left forgotten. From the perspective of contemporary film study, Deleuze's ideas are not only far afield of the reigning tenor of anglophone film theory; in some pages, they are also explicitly hostile to it. The Movement-Image and The Time-Image are books written on the frontier of these two communities. The publication of these books took readers in both philosophy and film studies by surprise. Paradoxically, both communities in different ways lack a frame or frames of reference for judging Deleuze's concepts and arguments. The impact of Deleuze's books on the philosophical community has been diminished, I believe, by an incomplete knowledge of film history or depth of understanding of the problems posed by the study of film language and spectatorship for larger questions of visual culture. While Deleuze himself may be an "amateur" film theorist, there are few nonspecialists who can match his level of cinematic erudition. (In using this qualifier, I am thinking of how Alfred Stieglitz and other Camerawork photographers characterized themselves as "amateurs/, refusing the "pro_ fessional" norms of photography as impediments to creative and innovative work. For me, "amateur" has an entirely positive connotation in both philosophy and film studies.) Throughout the two volumes, Deleuze evidences a broad and deep familiarity with the history of international film theory. On the other hand, his knowledge of film history departs little from the general histories that have been so profoundly challenged and revised by the new film history of the past fifteen years. Nonetheless, the range of his film viewing and his command of the canon of film history is still extraordinary. He is therefore an "amateur" in the best sense of the term. By the same token, there are few contexts in contemporary American film studies for either comprehending or critiquing in depth the tenor of Deleuze's philosophical arguments. Generally speaking, Deleuze's ideas have had much less impact on anglophone film studies than on other areas of cultural theory. Deleuze has not often written on the visual arts. And, as Michael Hardt points out in his introduction to Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, there is a specific difficulty in reading Deleuze. With each new book, Deleuze writes as if his reader were familiar with everything he has published before. This is especially true of the cinema books. Deleuze's style of writing and argumentation is not inherently difficult to understand. In fact, I argue that the cinema books continue a deep and complex meditation on time that is one of Deleuze's central contributions to contemporary philosophy. However, Deleuze takes for granted the

Preface xi reader's familiarity with an argument that has unfolded over thirty years through his books on Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, and Foucault, as well as Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and his books cowritten with Felix Guattari. In short, there are few in media studies who can match (or perhaps who would want to match) the range of his philosophical erudition.! The problem of context is yet more complex for the film studies community. There are two reasons why the anglophone film community might see Deleuze's film theory as rather anomalous work. First, since the publication of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, it is abundantly clear that Deleuze and Guattari have set out to critique and demolish the Saussurean and Lacanian foundations on which, coincidentally, most contemporary cultural and film theory has been based. Deleuze and Guattari have developed a philosophical approach to culture that, while semiotic, psychoanalytic, and anticapitalist, has little else in common with contemporary anglophone film theory. While Deleuze describes a theory of cinematic modernism, he is without question hostile to what I have called elsewhere lithe discourse of political modernism." This has produced consternation among reviewers who have insisted on judging Deleuze's book in the context of contemporary Anglo-American film theory. In fact, Deleuze unselfconsciously yet fundamentally redistributes the oppositions film theory has inherited from Tel Quel thought: realism/modernism, illusionism/materialism, continuity/discontinuity, identification/distance. Rather than trying to incorporate Deleuze in the extant schemas for understanding the historical development of anglophone film theory, I believe that The MovementImage and The Time-Image are more productively read as a challenge to those schemas. (In this respect, I hope Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine will be read as expanding the arguments I initiated in the context of my more sympathetic critiques of film theory in The Crisis of Political Modernism and The Difficulty of Difference.) One does not need to accept Deleuze's arguments either partially or completely to enjoy the freshness of his perspective on some questions that, in anglophone film theory, seem rather exhausted. Therefore, one reason to read Deleuze is to reinvigorate questions and problems that have otherwise reached an impasse. Intentionally or unintentionally, Deleuze challenges contemporary film theory to confront its blind spots and dead ends, as well as to question its resistances to other philosophical perspectives on image, meaning, and spectatorship. That much of the recent anglophone work on Deleuze and film is coming from writers who are approaching film theory from outside the field is symptomatic, then, of a certain inertia in film studies. And while it is no surprise that interest in Deleuze is great-

xii Preface est in France, one should also account for why scholars in Germany, Japan, and Italy have confronted Deleuze's concepts more quickly and deeply than those in Britain, the United States, or Canada. Few would doubt the influence of French film and cultural theory on the recent history of anglophone film studies and cultural theory. However, the narrowness of the American and British perspectives on this history of French film theory and the complexity of French film culture is not often recognized. This is the second reason why Deleuze's work may seem anomalous to anglophone readers. The extraordinary work of translation and film theory accomplished in the 1970S by the British journal Screen has a continuing influence on film theory today, especially in the United States. However, it is not recognized often enough that Screen's editorial perspective on French cultural theory of the sixties and seventies was very particular, and itself already thoroughly filtered by the editorial position of Tel Quel, with its specific triangulation of literary semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism. Despite the indubitable value of this perspective, it did produce some rather one-dimensional readings of both the work of Christian Metz and of the different editorial manifestations of Cahiers du cinema, which are still perpetuated in many anglophone film studies classes today. For example, the way in which the work of Metz is opposed to that of Andre Bazin and Jean Mitry often obscures rather than illuminates what is most interesting in the debates of the 1960s. All three figures are more productively read in a context that acknowledges their complex filiations with the history of filmology and, more generally, with the history of French phenomenology. When read in the context of the history of French film theory, Deleuze's work on cinema seems less strange if no less complex. To the extent that Deleuze's books resemble in scope the "grand" film theories of the 1960s like Jean Mitry's two-volume Estherhique et psychologie du cinema, they do seem a bit anachronistic, even in the French context. However, despite the brilliance of Christian Metz's accomplishments and the range of his influence, Metz's work represents only one dimension of French film theory and criticism. For anyone familiar with the breadth and diversity of French thought on film in the past forty years-as represented in journals like Cahiers du cinema, Positif, Etudes cinematographiques, Cinemaction, Trafic, and many others-Deleuze's approach seems mainstream in many respects. And if one looks back over the past twenty years, comparing Deleuze's work to other important French writers like Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney, and Jean-Louis Schefer, all of whom, for the most part, remain untranslated in English, Deleuze's concepts and approach seem even less anomalous. They are very much a part of the complexity of debate in the

Preface xiii current French film theory scene and continuous with a series of questions and problems that have defined the history of European film theory from filmology through Bazin, Metz, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and into the contemporary period. From this perspective, one sees more clearly how Deleuze's arguments respond to Mitry's interest in Henri Bergson (though with a fundamentally new twist) and understands better how and why Deleuze takes up the cause of Pasolini while critiquing Metz, thus reinvigorating earlier debates on film semiotics from the late 1960s and early 1970S that are still generally misunderstood in the United States today. Deleuze contributes an original and innovative perspective on these debates. While I hope sincerely that this book will be read as a useful introduction to Deleuze's theory of film, thus clarifying his contributions, this is not my principal objective. Instead, I have chosen to treat the two books as philosophical works and to try to understand them as a logical development through cinema of Deleuze's more general concerns. Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is, in the deepest and most complex ways, a philosophy of time. I have chosen to look at The Movement-Image and The Time-Image as part and parcel of this philosophical project and, therefore, to read them as unfolding from Deleuze's major works of the sixties and seventies. The larger questions raised by these books are for me twofold. On the one hand, why does Deleuze turn to cinema to address questions of image, movement, and time raised in his earlier books? (In this respect, the cinema books can be read as a resume of Deleuze's philosophical work of the previous twenty-five years, a rethinking on new terrain of the concepts and questions defined in earlier books.) On the other, Deleuze is quite sensitive to the ways in which contemporary culture is becoming fundamentally an audiovisual culture. For him, the semiotic history of film is coincident with a century-long transformation wherein we have come to represent and understand ourselves socially through spatial and temporal articulations founded in cinema, if now realized more clearly in the electronic and digital media. Film theory and history therefore have a key place in both social theory and semiotic theory, a place that has been slighted in the recent history of philosophy. In many ways, Deleuze is trying in these two books to acknowledge philosophy's debt to film and film theory. In reading Deleuze, then, we should also ask: In what ways do The Movement-Image and The Time-Image help us see the history of film theory in a new light? And, more importantly, what new concepts provide fresh perspectives on contemporary visual culture? I believe I could have written another book, one that was thoroughly critical of Deleuze. There are some aspects of the books that I find indefensible. Deleuze's problematic attitude toward authorship represents one

xiv Preface of the worst aspects of Parisian cinephilism, and his film analyses are often derivative of other works. Moreover, the rhetorical shifts in his writing can be unsettling. Throughout the two books there is a consistent disjunction, often within the same chapter or section, between the sophistication and subtlety of his philosophical arguments and the thinness of their demonstration in his analyses of films, which often though not always read like a kind of romanticized mise-en-scene criticism. A third problem is his implied cultural elitism. In an era when postmodernism's critique of hierarchies of value predominates, Deleuze's theory of modernism often evokes a perspective where the last avatars of experimentation and thought in film are defending cinematic art from the onslaught of a one-dimensional mass culture.2 Finally, although he is the most sophisticated twentieth century philosopher of difference, Deleuze seems to have little to offer on the problem of difference in spectatorship. Despite some powerful pages on cinemas of decolonialization, he has little to say specifically on questions of sexual, racial, and class difference. While I would support all of these criticisms in one context, in another I think that many of Deleuze's attitudes are in fact defensible. The curious thing about Deleuze's treatment of authorship is that he approaches film authors no differently than philosophical authors. If it is still possible to treat Bergson, Nietzsche, or Kant in this way, why not Orson Welles, Alain Resnais, and Marguerite Duras? It all depends on methodology and approach, and Deleuze takes great pains to demonstrate how philosophical ideas resonate through artistic and scientific work, and back again to philosophy.3 Moreover, his philosophical arguments are not necessarily invalidated by the weaknesses of his film analyses, and sometimes his readings of films are in fact quite convincing. I hope to demonstrate in the course of this book that the concepts and ideas Deleuze proposes offer powerful ways of thinking about films in particular and contemporary visual culture in general. Finally, as I argue in the last chapter of this book, while Deleuze's theory of modernism does present a theory of value, one should not judge too quickly its aesthetic and cultural implications. In fact, Deleuze's Nietzschean approach to art presents a profound critique both of questions of hierarchy and of aesthetic disinterest-it is profoundly political in all its dimensions. The same may be said for his theory of spectatorship. Why not consider the cinema from the point of view of a "philosophical" spectator? Moreover, if a reflection on a theory of "the subject" is absent here, perhaps it is because the concepts of identity and subjectivity are being profoundly interrogated. Indeed, Deleuze's philosophy of difference may provide one of the most interesting and progressive challenges to the kind of identity politics that has dominated contemporary cultural studies. Deleuze's arguments may be

Preface xv philosophically abstract, but I believe they can ultimately be read as innovative and thought-provoking interventions in contemporary cultural politics. I should also stress that my own approach to Deleuze is particular and in some ways eccentric. I have not attempted here a complete overview or systematic account of Deleuze's theory of film. Many other approaches and criticisms are equally possible, and I sincerely hope that other scholars will pursue them. Deleuze's work is particularly rich, and in equal parts fascinating and infuriatingj many different paths are possible through these two books. For my own part, I have chosen to foreground certain concepts and arguments with greater continuity than they sometimes have in Deleuze's own writing, and it is often not completely apparent that these arguments are more coincident with my own interests than Deleuze's. In many instances I try to put Deleuze's concepts in new and original contexts. I should acknowledge here that rather than explaining Deleuze to you, the reader, my greater interest has been to understand why I have been so drawn to these books. I have not tried systematically to be faithful to Deleuze's thought, whatever that may mean, nor have I any desire to debate what a correct or proper reading of Deleuze would be. In fact, in retrospect I find some of my arguments to be a bit perverse, though in ways that, coincidentally, are analogous to Deleuze's own style of reading. Deleuze once remarked that his studies of individual philosophers have always resulted in the creation of monsters. Reading philosophy means less understanding or interpreting what the "masters" mean than producing something new out of an encounter motivated equally by Eros and aggressivity. There is no better reason to read than to discover an intellectual desire and to create something new from it. In this respect, I hope the reader will understand that I have tried here to birth my own philosophical obsessions concerning cinema and time, as well as the emergence of a contemporary audiovisual culture, out of a reading of Deleuze's. And, having done so, I follow Deleuze most directly in offering the body of my arguments to the multiple encounters they will now discover in the hands of readers. Throughout this book, my main objective is to demonstrate both the originality and consistency of Deleuze's philosophical concepts in ways that I hope will provoke further work in contemporary visual studies from these perspectives. The four chapters in part I are written from the position of what Deleuze would call "the formal expression of difference." Working in the context of the history of philosophy and film theory, in these chapters I map the logic of Deleuze's theory of images and signs and draw out the consistency of his concepts insofar as they relate to film. Chapter I is conceived as an overture in the composition of this book. My objective here is to present in the clearest possible way the fundamental concepts and over-

xvi Preface all logic developed across Deleuze's two volumes. In so doing, I hope to orient readers, especially those with little prior knowledge of Deleuze's work, in his philosophical language and logic as well as the basic architecture of Deleuze's interest in and arguments on film and film theory. In the next three chapters, I develop, deepen, and complicate these concepts, enlarging their place in the context of Deleuze's broader philosophical concerns while introducing my own arguments and perspectives. Chapter 2 examines Deleuze's theory of the image and its movements with respect to his fascinating reading of Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory. Chapter 3 is an account of Deleuze's critique of film semiology and his alternative theory of signs as read through the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. From Deleuze's perspective, there are, in fact, two "pure semiotics": one for the cinematic movement-image and one for the cinematic time-image. Chapter 4 presents a formal account of what Deleuze calls the three direct images of time, with their accompanying powers of falsification. The chapters of part 2 consider the time-image as expressing difference in itself. Most important here is how the time-image's powers of the false initiate a Nietzschean critique of the will to truth with respect to the cinema of the movement-image as well as our contemporary audiovisual culture. In the time-image, Deleuze sees an affirmative will to power with the potential for creating new values and new modes of existence. Here I argue that Deleuze's approaches to Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza open both The Movement-Image and The Time-Image to the broader network of philosophical problems addressed in his other books, including his work with Felix Guattari. More than a philosophical description of the time-image, part 2 shows what modern cinema shares with critical art and philosophy in general, and what cinema's concepts affirm with respect to Deleuze's broader political and philosophical concerns. Chapter 5 examines how the concepts of movement and time are transformed in the passage from the movement-image to the time-image and introduces the principal questions raised by Deleuze's Nietzschean aesthetic. Chapter 6 looks at Deleuze's theory of political cinema as worked through in the concepts of fabulation and time as series. The philosophical relation between image and thought, as well as how cinema's concepts affect thinking as a "thought from the outside," are the questions discussed in chapter 7. My concluding chapter returns to the political critique and theory implied in Deleuze's theory of cinema. Specifically, I address how Deleuze reads the force of resistance in relation to Foucault's later theories of power, and how Deleuze and Guattari present the critical and utopian force of philosophy as a virtuality that may be intuited and thought through in direct images of time.

Preface xvii The completion of this book has been marked by many ironies that I have felt deeply. I learned of Deleuze's death on the very day that I finished and mailed the first draft of this book. Most of my writing took place across the passing of cherished figures in my life, including Christian Metz, and, most significantly, my mother, who suffered from an illness similar to Deleuze's, and who passed away just a month before Deleuze took his own life. In chapter 7, I comment at length on the relationship between philosophy and death-a theme that appears with some consistency in Deleuze's work. In this context, I believe that it is important to emphasize that Deleuze's treatment of death as a philosophical figure is always in service to life-the affirmation of life as the creation of the new-and to resisting those forces that inhibit in life the appearance of the new, the unforeseen, and the unexpected. In his homage to Deleuze in Cahiers du cinema, " . .. une aile de papillon," Jean Narboni relates a charming anecdote in this respect. Commenting on Deleuze's passion for classification and invention, Narboni expresses the feeling that the movement and logic of Deleuze's thought often anticipate an image, sign, or concept in the cinema before the filmmakers get around actually to inventing them. "I let him in on this one day," writes Narboni, "and he laughed (25; my translation)." This wonderful story expresses the drollness of Deleuze's philosophical perspective as well as its affirmative powers. In the preface to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze himself comments on the critical and anticipatory power of philosophy. A book of philosophy, he relates, is comparable both to detective fiction (roman policier) and to science fiction. In the first case, concepts intervene in local situations in order to resolve them, and the concepts change along with the problems raised. Every concept, then, suggests its own sphere of influence and dramas where it exerts itself by means of a certain cruelty. But in the second case, and more importantly, philosophy has a utopian side that expresses its deepest relationship with time. This is not a drama of investigation or a policing of or by the concept. Rather, like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, both nowhere and now here, philosophy points us toward another world, a world to come that is also this world, or a plane of immanence where "I make, remake, and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery, which repeats and differenciates them" (Difference and Repetition, xxi). Thus philosophy is always untimely in Nietzsche's sense. Philosophy is neither a philosophy of history, nor of the eternal; it is "' against this time, in favor, I hope, of a time to come.'" And there is no greater strategy of resistance to the mortuary forces of alienation, reification, and

xviii Preface ressentiment. That Deleuze is a philosopher of time means that he is a philosopher of life: an inventor of concepts that affirm life and its untimely forces of creation. I began my work on Deleuze with the help of a Senior Faculty Fellowship from Yale University in I990-9I. The final revision and editing was accomplished in the fellowship of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Generous leave time was also granted by the University of Rochester. The arguments of my introductory chapter took shape in discussion with several audiences whose critical acumen was matched only by their hospitality. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs invited me twice to present my ideas, once at the University of Kent and once at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, despite their own reservations about Deleuze. I also profited from critical discussion with audiences at the University of East Anglia, the University of Iowa, the University of Rochester, the Columbia University Interdisciplinary Seminar on Film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the University of Toronto, Duke University, Cornell University, and in Vienna at the Institut Franc;aise. Many friends and colleagues took time from their own work to read and comment on various drafts of this work. Foremost among them are Dana Polan, Reda Bensmala, Michael Westlake, and Dudley Andrew. Mark Betz provided invaluable editorial help throughout the process of final revision. I also wish to thank my editor at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, especially for his patience. Other friends, students, and colleagues who contributed to the composition of this book include Richard Allen, Mark Anderson, Raymond Bellour, David Bordwell, Donald Crafton, Thomas Elsaesser, Lorenz Engell, Jane Gaines, Michael Hardt, Amanda Howell, Biodun Iginla, Frank Kessler, Wayne Koestenbaum, Andras Balint Kovacs, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Tom Levin, Laura U. Marks, Brian Massumi, Alain Menil, Toril Moi, Marion Picker, Julia Pimsleur, Lauren Rabinovitz, Sally Ross, Shirley Samuels, Kristin Thompson, N. Frank Ukadike, Geoff Waite, Jennifer Wicke, Janet Wolff, and Nancy Wood, as well as Tim Murray, Tom Lamarre, Naoki Sakai, and the other members of the Deleuze study group at Cornell. To all I express my most heartfelt thanks.

PART I MOVEMENT, IMAGE, SIGN

1

A SHORT HISTORY OF CINEMA

1924. The classic cinema has perfected its geometry of forms, its logic of spatiotemporal exposition, and its "laws" for the linking of actions through montage. In Sherlock, Jr., Buster Keaton plays a young projectionist who divides from himself in lap dissolve, entering the rectangle of the screen as the space of his own dream. The action following is exemplary of the logic of (paradoxical) sense informing the classical Hollywood cinema in its silent phase. In this series of shots, Keaton's moving figure provides a stable foreground against a shifting background of increasingly unlikely and dangerous locations: a garden, a busy street, a cliff side, a jungle with lions, train tracks in a desert. When Keaton finds himself on a rock by the ocean, he dives, only to land headfirst in a snowbank. Keaton's movements from one shot to the next link incommensurable spaces through what modern mathematics terms a "rational" division. The interval dividing any two spatial sections serves simultaneously as the end of the first and the beginning of the second. In Keaton's film, every division, no matter how unlikely and nonsensical, is mastered by this figure of rationality where the identification of movement with action assures the continuous unfolding of adjacent spaces. The consequence of this identification is the subordination of time to movement. Time is measured only dynamically, as a process of action and reaction rebounding across contiguous spaces through match-cutting.

4 Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine This geometry of action and movement expands by levels as well as by linear development. The moving whole of the film is assured by the continuous linking of one shot to the next, as well as by the embedding of photograms into the shot, shots into sequences, sequences into parts, and parts into the moving whole of the film as one great clockwork mechanism. The dynamics of the classical film function like a Newtonian universe where laws of motion function independently of time. This subordination of time to movement has philosophical consequences. 1962. The modern European cinema, as well as the New American cinema, has displaced the Newtonian conception of space that characterizes the classical period. Chris Marker's La jetee depicts a not-so-distant future where a prisoner of war is subjected to a series of painful experiments that enable him to "travel JJ in time. Whether this passage is actual and physical, or mental and spiritual, is ambiguous. Movement, drained from the image and divorced from the representation of action, has relinquished its role as the measure of time. In La jetee, the image of time is no longer reduced to the thread of chronology where present, past, and future are aligned on a continuum. The painful binding of the subject-physically stilled no less than movement is frozen in the image-liberates him briefly in time, just as the imaging of time is released from its subordination to movements linked with physical actions.! Once chronology is pulverized, time is fragmented like so many facets of a shattered crystal. The chronological continuum is flayed, shaving past, present, and future into distinct series, discontinuous and incommensurable. The narrative sections of the film are disconnected spaces, divided into blocks of time linked in a probabilistic manner: the park, the museum, the quay at Orly. The spectator's apprehension of what comes next is equivalent to

A Short History of Cinema 5 a dice throw. Time no longer derives from movement; "aberrant" or eccentric movement derives from time. With both action and movement absented from the image, there is now only linking through "irrational" divisions. According to the mathematical definition, the interval dividing segmentations of space is now autonomous and irreducible; it no longer forms a part of any segment as the ending of one and the beginning of another. Image and soundtrack are also relatively autonomous. While referring to each other, they nonetheless resist being reconciled into an organic whole. As a result, there is no totalization of space in an organic image of the whole and no subordination of time to movement. Inside and outside, mind and body, mental and physical, imaginary and real are no longer decidable qualities. This is another theory of mind and another logic of sense, defined by a decisive break with the earlier model. My two examples illustrate how Gilles Deleuze conceives the history of cinematic signs in his volumes, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. Deleuze himself would demur from characterizing his books as historical works. Still, I would argue that they are informed by a historical idea adapted from the German art historian Heinrich W6ffiin. In his Principles of Art History, W6ffiin argues for classifications of style based on historical modes of "imaginative beholding" (vi).2 The task of the history of aesthetic forms is to understand the specific set of formal possibilities-modes of envisioning and representing, of seeing and saying-historically available to different cultures in different times. Equally important for Deleuze is the work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in the history and philosophy of science. In their book, Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers characterize the evolution of science and philosophy as one of "open" systems that incessantly exchange information with their cultural environment and never cease altering that culture as they themselves change. Strategies of observation, representation, and conceptualization-of modeling nature-are no less historically based than W6ffiin's modes of imaginative beholding. These two references are important. For Deleuze's larger objective is not to produce another theory of film, but to understand how aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific modes of understanding converge in producing cultural strategies for imagining and imaging the world. Reduced to its simplest form, the question informing Deleuze's cinema books is this: How does a sustained meditation on film and film theory illuminate the relation between image and thought? With respect to our recent history, Deleuze argues, the development of cinema provides a privileged site for comprehending a decisive shift in strategies of signification, understanding, and belief that is no less true for aesthetic thinking than it is for

6 Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine philosophical and scientific thinking. This shift concerns the question of time. For example, Prigogine and Stengers argue that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the study of thermodynamic systems, and then probability physics, reintroduces time to science's image of the physical world. This is an image of irreversible Becoming in contrast with the static and eternal image of Being depicted by Newton's universal laws of motion. At about the same time, Henri Bergson produces his image of thought as internal movement and of memory as complex duration. Among aesthetic practices, Deleuze argues, cinema concretely produces a corresponding image of thought, a visual and acoustic rendering of thought in relation to time and movement. At the outset, time is the focus of both of Deleuze's cinema books. This emphasis on categories of movement and temporality, in relation to visualization or imaging, is meant as a critique of theories of signification in both contemporary philosophy and film theory. The history of philosophy is often conceived as a teleological and progressive refinement of logic in its relation to thought. Thought is considered here to have an (ideally) unchanging identity to which logical representations can progressively adequate themselves. Alternatively, for Deleuze, one might say that there is no thinking other than thinking-through. "Through" what? Images, signs, and concepts. In this respect, Deleuze follows V. N. Volosinov's argument in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that "consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs . ... The individual consciousness is nurtured on signs; it derives its growth from them; it reflects their logic and laws" (II, 13).3 Deleuze similarly appropriates Bergson to argue that thought is quintessentially temporal, a product of movement and change. And, rereading Peirce, Deleuze argues that the image must be considered not as a unified or closed whole, but rather as an ensemble or set of logical relations that are in a state of continual transformation. This is why, in my examples from Sherlock, Jr. and La jetee, what was "in" the shots was less important than understanding how they were linked, grouped, and interconnected, and what these connections implied for a theory of sense. To refer to the movement-image or time-image, then, is to refer to a fluid ordering of representational elements. This ordering in turn produces different types of signs, a logic based on division and regrouping. Such an emphasis clarifies Deleuze's preference for Peirce's semiotic as opposed to a film semiology derived from Saussure. Metz's notion of the filmic enonce and his theory of narrative derived from the grande syntagmatique are both criticized by Deleuze for assuming that meaning is only linguistic meaning and for reducing the image by subtracting its most visible

A Short History of Cinema

7

characteristic: movement. For Deleuze, the image components of cinema comprise instead a moving" signaletic material which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). Eisenstein compared them first to ideograms, then, more profoundly, to the internal monologue as proto-language or primitive language system. But even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically" (Time-Image 29). Since Peirce's theory is a logic and not a linguistics, and since it understands signification as a process, Deleuze finds it more applicable for understanding the generation and linking of signs in movement. Where semiology wants to define the cinematic sign by imposing a linguistic model from the outside, Deleuze applies Peirce's logic to deduce a theory of signs from material the cinema has itself historically produced. The idea of the image also serves as a periodizing figure in the two books, marking the borders of relatively distinct cinematic logics and practices. (In fact, Deleuze defines two "pure semiotics," one of movement and one of time.) In this manner, Deleuze examines how mutations in the history of cinematic signification have produced our contemporary "audiovisual culture." If for Deleuze postwar cinema is different from what preceded it, thus indicating a gradual yet distinct transition from the regime of the movement-image to that of the time-image, this difference marks equally a transformation in the nature of signs and images, and how the cultural image of thought evolves. Deleuze depicts image practices as social and technological automata where each era thinks itself by producing its particular image of thought. In turn philosophy can map this image in mental cartographies whose coordinates are given as "noosigns." This is an implied image of the brain with its internal wirings, connections, associations, and functionings. In its largest sense, then, the image describes historically specific cinematic practices as "spiritual automata" or "thought machines." In this respect, an era's image of thought is "the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought" (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy! 37). The cinema is considered here as an "artificial intelligence," a Cartesian diver, or a machine for the fabrication of concepts.' For Deleuze this is the most compelling gambit of writing a history of "cinematic" philosophy: to take an era's strategies of thinking-through, represented aesthetically in the nature of its images and signs, and render them in the form of philosophical concepts. But also for philosophy to understand how the possibilities of thought are renewed in aesthetic practices. As a philosopher, Deleuze claims an interest in film because it provides

8 Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine a complex moving picture of duration. And what divides the movementimage from the time-image is their respective spatial rendering of time in this sense. Deleuze rejects the idea that the film image is always "in" the present, whether with respect to itself or its spectator. The image is instead a grouping of temporal relations. "The image itself," writes Deleuze, "is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships of time from which the variable present only flows .... What is specific to the image ... is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present" (Time-Image xii). These temporal relations are rarely apparent to quotidian perception; rather, they are rendered as visible and legible in the images that create signs from them. Because of its constitutive factors of movement and time, the cinematic image can never be reduced to a simple unity, nor can the relation between image and thought be reduced to a simple, punctual present. Nevertheless, the movement-image and the time-image each manage this relation differently: the former gives us an indirect image of time; the latter, a direct image of time. The gist of this unusual idea derives from Deleuze's rethinking of "the interval"-the space or division between photograms, shots, sequences-and how the organization of intervals informs the spatial representation of time in cinema. While he borrows this concept from Dziga Vertov, Deleuze gives it much wider scope. Understanding how the organization of intervals serves the spatial imaging of time makes clearer Deleuze's attempts to formalize the logic of enchainment as a kind of geometry of cinema. In his "Short History of Photography," Walter Benjamin focuses on how the problem of time characterized the evolution of early photography. Neither the indexical quality of the photograph nor its iconic characteristics fascinated him as much as the interval of time marked by exposure. In the technological transition from an exposure time requiring several hours to only fractions of a second, Benjamin marked the gradual evaporation of aura from the image. The idea of aura invoked here is clearly related to Bergson's duree. For Benjamin, the longer the interval of exposure, the greater the chance that the aura of an environment-the complex temporal relations woven through its represented figures-would seep into the image, etching itself on the photographic plate. More concretely, the temporal value of the interval determines a qualitative ratio between time and space in the photograph. In the evolution from slow to fast exposure times, segmentations of time yielded qualitative changes in space: sensitivity to light, clearer focus, more extensive depth of field, and, significantly, the fixing of movement. Paradoxically, for Benjamin, as the iconic and spatial characteristics of pho-

A Short History of Cinema 9

tography became more accurate by decreasing the interval of exposure, the image lost its temporal anchoring in the experience of duration, as well as the fascinating ambiguity of its "aura." Benjamin's commentary on the long-exposure photograph portrays it as a "primitive II time-image, a kind of open window on accumulating duration. Alternatively, the reduction of the time interval in "instantaneous" photography introduced a new possibility for the image: the representation of movement. Not only the freezing of movement, as in the extraordinary photographs of the young Jacques-Henri Lartigue; but also its serial decomposition, as in the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. The seed of the movement-image's indirect representation of time is already here. The developing technology has a specific goal. It equates movement with physical action and dissects movement by dividing it into rational segments-here, the action of a man doing forward handstands in twelve contiguous images. Even in these early motion studies, the management of time is a central problem for the so-called scientific perception and analysis of movement. Action cannot be clearly represented without reducing the interval of exposure to a fraction of a second; the action itself must be carefully "timed" in relation to the relay of cameras to assure that movement is recorded as successive and contiguous segments. Thus time is subordinated to movement and represented only indirectly through the agency of movement in two ways. First it is reduced to a constant (in Muybridge's case, 160th of a second), repeated as equidistantly spaced intervals. Second, it is restricted to a line of action; it flows only through rationally segmented, contiguous movements. Time serves here as the measure

10

Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

of space and movement; it can only be "seen" through the intermediaries of space and movement. These two principles were necessary, of course, for the perfection of cinematographic technology. Yet the cinema added what pioneers such as Marey and Muybridge neither desired nor imagined: it automated movement by projecting these images at a fixed rate. At this stage, the cinema of the movement-image becomes, for Deleuze, a spiritual automaton, producing with its own signifying materials an image of memory and thought extraordinarily close to what Bergson was describing through the philosophy and psychology of his day. By extending the subordination of time to movement in a new way, the developing narrative cinema replicated a logic Bergson described as "an open totality in movement." This figure, through which Bergson describes the essentially temporal character of thought, is seized by Deleuze to describe the narrative organization of classical cinema. In Bergson's view, thought always moves in two directions at once: while it unfolds along a horizontal axis, it also expands across a vertical axis. The former is an axis of association; it links related images through principles of similarity and contiguity, contrast and opposition. At the same time, associated images are distinguished, then grouped conceptually, into ever-growing ensembles or sets through a process of differentiation and integration. Through integration, related images are internalized into a conceptual whole whose movement expresses a qualitative change: the whole is different from the sum of its parts. But this whole in turn enlarges itself through retotalization in related sets. Across all levels there is both continuous linear movement by association and volumetric expansion through differentiation and integration. Deleuze argues that the classical cinema, the cinema of the movement-image, provides a concrete image of this process. In so doing, it clarifies for philosophy the distinction between sets and wholes, as well as Bergson's definition of the relation between time, the whole, and the open. While an ensemble or set organizes diverse elements, it is nonetheless relatively and artificially closed. There is always a thread that connects a set to another, more extensive one, and so on ad infinitum. In contrast, the whole belongs to time. It traverses all sets and prevents them from realizing their tendency toward closure. Therefore, time is defined by Bergson as the Open: that which changes and never stops changing its nature at each moment. This account of movement as an open totality closely resembles the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein, as Deleuze himself points out in The Movement-Image. It is also logically very close to Raymond Bellour's account of the textual organization of classical Hollywood films. Such resemblances are not surprising, since Deleuze in no way opposes the prac-

A Short History of Cinema

II

tices of Soviet and Hollywood films, especially in the silent period. He sees them as two distinct manifestations of the movement-image, different in kind but not in nature. Both, for example, organize the shot as a moving ensemble rather than as a static figure. Thus Deleuze writes, "In so far as it relates movement to a whole which changes, [the shot] is the mobile section of a duration" (Movement-Image 22). As in Eisenstein's conception of the montage-cell, the shot defines a relatively open and variable space where the process of framing determines a provisionally and artificially closed set. Framing detaches objects from the pro-filmic space, grouping actions, gestures, bodies, and decors in a motivated ensemble. At the same time, the frame opens the shot to the moving whole of the film. The shot already integrates the action-movement linkage from the photogrammatic level. Through montage this schema replicates and extends itself by levels, determining the movement or movements that distribute these elements into larger ensembles. The continuity system of editing established one set of norms for the linkage of shots through rational divisions. But an enlarged conception of offscreen space is equally important for Deleuze because it expresses the essentially open character of sets. Just as the continuous movement of the film strip is integrated into the shot, the shot into sequences, the sequences into parts, and so forth, every ensemble is part of another, more extensive one. The interval here is the sign of a differentiation that is continually retotalized in the image of an organic whole expanding through rational divisions. In sum, Deleuze writes: The movement-image has two sides, one in relation to objects whose relative position it varies, the other in relation to a whole-of which it expresses an absolute change. The positions are in space, but the whole that changes is in time. If the movement-image is assimilated to the shot, we call framing the first facet of the shot turned towards objects, and montage the other facet turned towards the whole .... [It] is montage itself which constitutes the whole, and thus gives us the image of time .... Time is necessarily an indirect representation, because it flows from the montage which links one movement-image to another. (Time-Image 34-35) The movement-image provides only an indirect image of time because time is reduced to intervals defined by movement and the linking of movements through montage. Deleuze makes no distinction between avantgarde and narrative cinema in this respect. American silent film, the Soviet montage school, and the French impressionist cinema are all grouped in the first volume by this principle. Although they produce qualitatively different montage strategies-analytical fast and slow motion in Vertov, abstract

12

Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

or intellectual movement in Eisenstein, rhythmic and metric variations in Epstein and Dulac-the idea of montage is in every case founded on managing the number of rational segmentations of movement per unit of time. In this respect, the avant-garde of the twenties demonstrates a fascination with movement and space rather than time, and the organization of time is subordinated to the representation of movement through montage. Both conventional and avant-garde cinemas were obsessed with this problem, and their theories of perception and memory derive from it. The same thing may be said of the noosigns produced by the movementimage. I have already defined what Deleuze believes them to be: on the one hand, linkage through association; on the other, an expanding whole expressed through differentiation and integration. The relation between intervals and the whole here is essentially behaviorist. It is articulated through an action --+ reaction schema organized by conflicts, oppositions, and resolutions. This movement of action and reaction derives from an American ideology of will, a belief that the mastery of environments and opponents is inevitable and infinitely extendable. While Eisenstein, taking his cue from Engels's Dialectics of Nature, perfects and organizes this schema in a different way, he does not fundamentally change it with respect to the ideal image of thought it expresses.s Both presuppose an organic model of composition predicated on the belief that the changing whole of the open totality in movement represents a process of infinite expansion. The integration of parts into ensembles, and ensembles into wholes, culminates in a totality where image, world, and spectator are identified through a grand image of Truth. Deleuze defines this image as an "ideal of knowledge as harmonious totality, which sustains this classical representation .... Eisenstein, like a cinematographic Hegel, presented the grand synthesis of this conception: the open spiral with its commensurabilities and attractions. Eisenstein himself did not hide the cerebral model which drove the whole synthesis, and which made cinema the cerebral art par excellence, the internal monologue of the brain-world; 'The form of montage is a restoration of the laws of the process of thought, which in turn restores moving reality in process of unrolling'" (Time-Image 2IO-2II). When Deleuze refers to the organic movement-image as "classic" and the time-image as "modern," this means neither that the latter flows from the former as natural progression, nor that the modern form necessarily opposes the classic as critique. Instead, this transition represents a distinct if gradual transformation in the nature of belief and the possibilities of thought. The organic regime, sustained by the movement-image, proceeds by linking through rational divisions, projecting a model of Truth in relation to totality. The noosigns of the movement-image derive from a belief in

A Short History of Cinema 13 the possibility of action and the stability of Truth. In the aftermath of World War II, especially in the European cinema, this situation changes, producing a different form of "imaginative beholding." For example, according to Deleuze, the appearance of neorealism represents a crisis in the cinema of action and movement. Especially in Rossellini's films, such as Germania Anno Zero (1947), Stromboli (1949L or Viaggio in Italia (1953L narrative situations appear where reality is represented as lacunary and dispersive. Linear actions dissolve into the form of aleatory strolls. Events occur where it is no longer possible to act or react: situations of pain or beauty that are intolerable or insupportable; occurrences that are incomprehensible or undecidable. As a result, the action --+ reaction schema of the movementimage begins to break down, producing a change in nature of both perception and affect. Since the linking of images is no longer motivated by action, space changes in nature, becoming a disconnected or emptied space. Acts of seeing and hearing replace the linking of images through motor actions; pure description replaces referential anchoring. One thinks immediately of a film like Antonioni's L'Avventura (196oL whose ironic title points to spaces where any decidable action or interpretation has evaporated, leaving characters who wait, who witness only the passing of time as duration. What Deleuze calls the non organic or crystalline regime of the timeimage thus emerges out of the social, historical, and cultural context of postwar reconstruction. 6 However, if the modern cinema offers a direct presentation of time, the emergence of this time-image is not a necessary consequence of the evolution of the movement-image. For Deleuze, the history of cinema is in no way a progression toward an ever more perfect representation of time. Rather, the relation between time and thought is imagined differently in the postwar period-as represented in the signs produced by the time-image no less than by changes in the image of thought in biological sciences and in the image of time introduced by probability physics. This is why the cinema of Alain Resnais is so significant for Deleuze's project. Resnais represents for the cinema of the crystalline time-image what Eisenstein represented for the organic movement-image. From Toute la memoire du monde (1956) to Mon onele d'amerique (1978), Resnais evinces a constant facination for replicating an image of thought, but in relation to time rather than movement. The time-image organizes a new geometry of the interval marked by the concept of "irrational" divisions. This geometry derives from a heightened sensitivity to the flows of time modeled no less by the calculus of probability physics than by the time-images of modern cinema. As I explained earlier, "irrational" has a precise meaning adapted from mathematics: the interval no longer forms part of the image or sequence as the ending of one or the beginning of the other. Nor can other divisions-for example,

14

Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

sound in relation to image- be considered as continuous or extendable one into the other. The interval becomes an autonomous value; the division it represents is irreducible. Ideally, it no longer facilitates the passage from one image to another in any decidable way. On this basis, since the interval functions as an irreducible limit, the flow of images or sequences bifurcate and develop serially, rather than continuing a line or integrating into a whole. The time-image produces a serial rather than organic form of composition. Instead of differentiation and integration, there is only relinking by irrational divisions. This relinking describes a specific form of grouping the images parcellized by irrational divisions. In Deleuze's summary: [There] is thus no longer association through metaphor or metonymy, but relinkage on the literal image; there is no longer linkage of associated images, but only relinkages of independent images. Instead of one image after the other, there is one image plus another; and each shot is deframed in relation to the framing of the following shot .... [The] cinematographic image becomes a direct presentation of time, according to non-commensurable relations and irrational divisions .... [This] time-image puts thought into contact with the unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable. The outside or obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same time as the interval [interstice] or the cut has replaced association. (Time-Image 214, 2791 This difficult passage may be unpacked in reference to a well-known film and one of Deleuze's principal examples of the cinema of the time-image: Marguerite Duras's India Song (19751. The opening shot of the film frames a red sun setting into clouds over a verdant delta. This is a direct image of time in its simplest manifestation: an autonomous shot describing a single event as a simple duration. The ensuing shot of the piano in a darkened room is nowhere motivated by this image. Nor will there be any clear spatial or temporal links in the cascade of images that follow. The cut defines an unbridgeable interval, and having done so, each shot becomes an autonomous segment of time. Similarly, instead of linking one to another, the images divide into series-the embassy interior with its piano and its mirror that unsettles the difference between on- and offscreen space, the ruined exterior of the villa, the tennis court, the park, the river. The same may be said of the soundtrack. At the beginning we hear the beggar's cries, then the two "intemporal voices" whose mutual interrogation initiates India Song's uncertain narration. The sounds themselves divide into distinct series-the beggar, "les intemporelles," the piano theme,

A Short History of Cinema IS the voices and music of the reception, the cries of the vice-consul-and it is never certain whether they occupy the same time or not. Between and within the relations of image and sound, the interval divides and regroups but never in a decidable or commensurable way. By the same token, this geometry is not totalizable as an image of Truth. This does not mean that India Song is randomly organized; quite the contrary, it is rigorously composed. But unlike the organic movement-image with its relatively determined and predictable relations, the image of time portrayed here is more probabilistic. The autonomy of the interval produced by the timeimage renders every shot as an autonomous shot: a segment of duration where movement is subordinate to time. And because the interval defines only incommensurable relations, the divisions both between and within the image and soundtracks split into series whose progression can only be interpreted in a probabilistic manner. If, as Deleuze asserts, the crystalline regime produces an increased sensitivity to time, this means that the interval suspends the spectator in a state of uncertainty. Every interval becomes what probability physics calls a "bifurcation point," where it is impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change will take. The chronological time of the movement-image fragments into an image of uncertain becoming. Aesthetic forms project a sense of order onto an otherwise stochastic universe. In this respect the regime of the time-image is no less conventional or patterned than that of the movement-image. However, change in the order of sense implies change in the nature of belief. The organic regime believes in identity, unity, and totality. It describes a deterministic universe where events are linked in a chronological continuum: one believes retroactively in a past that leads inevitably to the present; one has faith in a future that emerges predictably out of the present. Alternatively, the regime of the time-image replaces this deterministic universe with a probabilistic one. In Sherlock, Jr. action leads to repetition, extension, and renewal figured in the final image of the film. In La jetee the end replies to the beginning, but only as an irreversible sequence leading to the death of the protagonist. Incommensurable and undecidable relations between shots yield an entropic narrative marked by finitude, exhaustion, and death, which, nonetheless, leads to the rebirth of history as utopia. The hero dies, but he transmits from the future an energy source that permits a ruined society to prolong itself, although with uncertain consequences. I do not use the term "entropy" lightly. Prigogine and Stengers argue that the image of thought represented by the sciences of chaos reproduces itself in our information culture. Marked by accelerated temporalities and uncer-

16

Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

tain social change, these are images of disorder, instability, and diversity; in short, nonlinear relationships where small causes initiate massive and unpredictable consequences. Increasingly, the past is felt as an intangible origin, incommensurable with the present; the emergence of the future seems unpredictable and undetermined by the present. The image of time produced in modern cinema blossoms no doubt from a cultural sense of disorder and unpredictability. But at the same moment, it charges our perception of time with a receptivity to the multiple, the diverse, and the nonidentical. I would like to conclude this chapter on this note of encouraging ambiguity. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel prize for demonstrating that bifurcation points define an equal chance in the evolution of physical systems: Either the system disintegrates into chaos, or it makes an unforeseen and unpredictable leap to a new, more complex, and differentiated order. When Deleuze defines the interval in the time-image as an irrational division and an incommensurable relation, he is introducing the same dice throw into the relation between image and thought. In this sense he claims a "power of falsification" for the autonomous interval of the timeimage that derives from its undecidability. What one sees in the time-image, writes Deleuze, "is the false, or rather the power of the false. The power of the false is time in person, not because the contents of time are variable, but because the form of time as becoming questions every formal model of truth" ("On the 'Crystalline Regime'" 21)? Truth here is not opposed to the false as its opposite or negation; rather, the powers of the false are a measure of truth in its temporal, and therefore fragile and embattled, forms. Nor is truth an identity waiting to be recovered. liThe idea that truth is not preexistent," writes Deleuze, something to be discovered, but instead, must be created in every field, is easily seen in the sciences. Even in physics, all truths presuppose symbolic systems, even if only coordinates. All truths "falsify" preestablished ideas. To say lithe truth is a creation" implies that truth is produced by a series of processes that shape its substance; literally, a series of falsifications. In my work with Guattari we are each other's falsifiers, which means that each understands in his own way what the other proposes. The result is a reflected series with two terms. Nothing prevents a series of several terms, or a complicated series with bifurcations. The powers of the false that will produce truth-those are the intercessors .... (Negotiations 126, I72) The delimitation of truth is a process-without predetermined points of departure or ends-that is creative rather than reflective. This is not a dialectic in the sense of a negation that produces a higher unity, forging identity

A Short History of Cinema I7 out of nonidentity in a process of totalization. That is the organic model of truth produced by the movement-image. Rather, it is a dialogue, an interrogation, always a series of at least two terms, each of which is able to question, interrogate, or falsify the other in a process that assures the temporalization of thought. The "intemporal voices" perform this function in India Song; just as important is the irrational division between and within image and sound producing both as nontotalizable series. Here the autonomous interval becomes an opening where unforeseen relations occur. For Deleuze, the cinema of time produces an image of thought as a nontotalizable process and a sense of history as unpredictable change. The autonomous interval is not a sign; it does not define a place for thought to identify itself, even temporarily. Although it characterizes the noosigns of the time-image as irrational divisions and incommensurable relations, it serves neither as link nor bridge between image and thought. Rather, the organization of intervals in the time-image assures that the flux of images and the movements of thought will be disjunct and discontinuous. Where the movement-image ideally conceives the relation between image and thought in the forms of identity and totality-an ever-expanding ontology-the time-image imagines the same relation as nonidentity: thought as a deterritorialized and nomadic becoming, a creative act. Borrowing from Maurice Blanchot, this is what Deleuze calls "thought from the outside." Thinking, in its attempts to inhabit or encircle the image, continuallyencounters a force of time as virtuality, an interval internal to thought, which divides it from itself and in its relation to the image. Thought becomes agitated and turbulent, thrown ever closer to its bifurcation points as it is tossed along the incommensurable relations defined by the time-image. The interval no longer disappears into the seam between movements and actions. Rather, it becomes a ceaseless opening of time-a space of becoming-where unforeseen and unpredictable events may occur. Deleuze calls this the "good news" already announced in The Logic of Sense: "meaning is never a principle or origin; it is produced. It is not something to be discovered, restored, or re-employed-it is to be produced by new machineries" 172,89-90). Such is the time machine of Gilles Deleuze.

2

MOVEMENT AND IMAGE

Time is invention, or it is nothing at all. -Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

In 1916, Hugo Munsterberg, neo-Kantian philosopher and pioneer of Gestalt psychology, proposed that the cinema be defined as an "art of subjectivity."l With this claim he challenged the idea that the purpose of art is imitation. Instead, art should actively and creatively manipulate or restructure reality according to the laws of thought. Film fascinated Munsterberg because for him it reproduced aesthetically the spatial and temporal categories that govern mental activity itself: perception, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion. The idea that films can present an image of thought-the aesthetic externalization of an otherwise internal and intangible process-is thus one of the primary, and earliest, fascinations of philosophy's encounter with film. A similar fascination informs the image of thought presented in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. But just as Deleuze's theory of signs challenges reigning notions of film semiotics, some of philosophy's most cherished dualisms are demolished in Deleuze's reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson in the two cinema books. Otherwise familiar coordinates on the map of Western philosophy-distinctions between subject and ob-

Movement and Image r9 ject, inside and outside, mind and nature, referent and image, realism and constructivism-shift restlessly on the page. The Cartesian grid plotting the trajectory of philosophical inquiry since the seventeenth century is of little use here. By the same token, Deleuze's philosophical career has been devoted to those figures who have most profoundly challenged the French Cartesian tradition, including Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and especially Bergson. In particular, Deleuze's path through Bergson must be renavigated, if one is to understand the originality and limits of Deleuze's approach to cinema, as well as the place of the cinema books in his philosophical oeuvre. Deleuze's four commentaries on Bergson-two chapters in each volumeare the philosophical heart of the cinema books.2 Deleuze draws extensively on Bergson's oeuvre, but two works are fundamental: Matter and Memory (r896) and Creative Evolution (r907). We should not be surprised to find the cinema addressed directly or indirectly by Bergson, Deleuze argues: the arc between these two books covers the early history of cinema, and in this period cinema informs philosophical culture by providing the image of movement in relation to thought. Paradoxically, however, the final chapter of Creative Evolution critiques the "cinematographic" model of thought as a mechanistic illusion. And even if there is, not surprisingly, no mention of cinema in Matter and Memory, Deleuze considers it to be a work of film theory from first page to last that anticipates cinema's importance for philosophy. To resolve this paradox, or at least to understand how it produces the most original aspects of Deleuze's film theory, requires a deeper understanding of movement, image, and duration as the key concepts of Bergsonism. Along the way, Deleuze's Bergsonian reading of Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs must also be addressed. "[M]odern science," wrote Bergson, "must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take time as an independent variable" (Creative Evolution 336).3 Bergson believed strongly in the necessity of a dialogue between philosophy and science. Nonetheless, he was skeptical of claims to universality and ideologies of progress characterizing modern science's mechanistic and reductionist attitudes with respect to time. In reducing time to a sequence of instantaneous states linked by a deterministic law (what Deleuze calls "any-instant-whatevers" [instants quelconquesll, Bergson argued that scientific rationality is incapable of understanding duration. Assessing the limits of scientific reductionism illuminates those qualities Bergson associated with duration. After Newton published his universal laws of celestial mechanics in r687, movements were considered to be orderly phenomena whose precise consequences and effects could be calculated using a few differential

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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

equations. The most important and far-reaching was the statement of the inverse-square law as a constant of proportionality: F=GMm/r. The idea that universal constants like the value for gravity could be mathematically described effectively eliminated time and change from science's image of nature. Once a mathematical constant was established, it held for every corner of the universe and for all bodies of given masses, earthbound or celestial. Moreover, its truthfulness was independent of the identity and physical properties of those bodies, the time and place of measurement, and the presence of an observer. Proportionality dependence meant that causal chains extended in an unbroken line from the distant past to the foreseeable future and were spatially extendable in all directions. Essentially, the universe was static and homogeneous; through mathematical description, it could be disassembled into constituent parts, from smallest to largest, as well as reassembled. Science became the activity of isolating basic building blocks, understanding how they combined and recombined into more complex yet predictable systems. Isolating constituent elements would undoubtedly lead to further stepping stones in an understanding of nature that, ideally, could and would be one day complete. The idea of an evolving celestial mechanics was as absurd as considering God as evolving. The idea of progress was preeminently human progress, assembling the elements for an ever more complete mathematical description of nature. This mechanistic and reductionist view of science is peculiarly static. Our understanding of nature may change constantly, but the constants of nature never change. Progress is defined by the idea that, if the universe is an unchanging whole, ideally it will be comprehensible in each and all of its parts. The presence of an observer will not affect this process in any way. Unpredictable change, the unforeseen appearance of the new, the interactivity of observer and nature, or change as a heterogeneous continuum are excluded from this ideal of science. Indeed, contemporary science still largely remains an effort to maintain this image of an orderly, clockwork universe-in the face of challenges from the theories of evolution, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics and other systems of nonlinear changeas summed up by Einstein's admonition to Niels Bohr: "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." Bergson responded by claiming, "'Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.' Nature is change, the continual elaboration of the new, a totality being created in an essentially open process of development without any preestablished model. 'Life progresses and endures in time.' ,,4 What Bergson called the "cinematographic illusion" is a particular imaging or visualization of how the reductionist attitude miscomprehends movement and change. In the opening chapter of The Movement-Image, Deleuze

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explores and redefines Bergson's argument through three theses on movement and time. These theses involve the relation between movement and instant, the quality of instants supposed by different philosophies of science, and the relation between movement and change. Each thesis considers a particular description of time relative to movement.5 In The Movement-Image, Deleuze's first thesis considers the reductionist error as a formula where movement equals "immobile sections + abstract time." This is contrasted with the idea that "real movement -+ concrete duration." Here is a first approach to understanding the duree in Bergson's sense. Real movement is distinct from the space traversed. The latter is past, while movement is present as the act of traversing. Unlike space, movement cannot be segmented or divided into static sections without changing or eliminating its quality as movement. Therefore, movements are singular, heterogeneous, and mutually irreducible. Conversely, all spatial segmentations partake of the same homogeneous space. In this manner, Deleuze reasons that no sequence of immobile sections can reconstitute genuine movement: "You can only achieve this reconstitution by adding to the positions, or to the instants, the abstract idea of a succession, of a time which is mechanical, homogeneous, universal and copied from space, identical for all movements .... On the other hand, however much you divide and subdivide time, movement will always occur in a concrete duration; thus each movement will have its own qualitative duration" (Movement-Image I). With respect to movements, duration is singular, qualitative, and unrepeatable. This is the difference between calculating the formula for the trajectory of falling bodies and the unique event of a meteor exhausting itself in the earth's atmosphere. Bergson defines the cinematographic illusion as "immobile sections + abstract time." Indeed this is an accurate description of the serial organization of images on the film strip: movement frozen as instantaneous poses, aligned on a linear and irreversible continuum, and automated at twentyfour frames per second. Writing before 1907 in a scientific context, Bergson probably had little knowledge of the newly emerging narrative cinema. At the same time, the scientific uses of cinematography for motion analysis, including the time/motion studies advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, were well advanced. In this sense, Bergson's characterization of reified movement and mechanized time as "cinematographic" is perhaps well deserved. Alternatively, Deleuze argues that cinema's potential for imaging time and movement was bound to be misrecognized in the early period since its "essence"-the shot's capacity for presenting temporal rather than spatial figures, mobile rather than immobile sections-is conquered only through

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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine

the use of montage, moving camera, and mobile point of view. Ignoring the narrative development of primitive cinema, Bergson misses what cinema implies for his philosophy.6 Nevertheless, for Bergson the model of "cinematographic" perception is not entirely false; it is part of quotidian perception, or what he calls "habitual recognition" (reconnaissance). The apprehension of reality always requires an interior "cimima tographe": a selective sampling and organization, a series of snapshots preserving only those features relevant for our immediate needs whose inherent discontinuity is mentally suppressed. Indeed, what an apprehension of the duree entails is a philosophical intuition of reality that goes beyond natural or quotidian perception. Deleuze's more basic defense is ambiguous, however: he forges a curious identity between movement and image that resonates problematically throughout the cinema books. What the cinema presents is not photograms or the series of individual frames on the film strip. Rather, he says, "it is an intermediate image [J'image moyenne], to which movement is not appended or added; the movement on the contrary belongs to the intermediate image as immediate given" (Movement-Image 2). In other words, what counts for Deleuze is the brute empiricism of an image in movement, the immediate evidence of our eyes. This is not simply a phenomenological argument. Because of the mobility of point of view-an eye distinct from any weighted body-the cinema breaks with the conditions for "natural" perception upon which phenomenology is based? Thus the actual cinematographic apparatus is better than the one turning inside our heads, for, Deleuze asks, "is not the reproduction of an illusion in a certain sense also its correction?" (Movement-Image 2). This is a curious statement. Deleuze argues that the selective, discontinuous Images of natural perception are corrected cognitively" above" perception by a mental apparatus that is part of perception itself. Natural perception and cinematographic perception are therefore qualitatively different because the projector automates movement, immediately correcting the illusion separate from any human presence. For this reason, the "cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movementimage ... a section which is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract movement" (2). Now it is certainly false to suggest that there is no cognitive correction for movement in the perception of cinematic images. But it would be equally false to conclude against Deleuze that cinematic perception and quotidian perception are therefore equivalent. Nevertheless, Deleuze's reasoning is certainly weak here, and this identification of movement and image will be further tested in my arguments below. Deleuze's reading of Bergson's first thesis describes the discovery of the

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movement-image, beyond the conditions of natural perception, as a philosophical innovation of Matter and Memory. This discovery is contemporaneous with an aesthetic and technological innovation: the photographic recording and projection of moving images. His reading of Bergson's second thesis portrays the cinema as the invention of a philosophical image occupying a key transitional moment in the history of Western thought. Indeed, cinema represents the appearance of "an organ for perfecting a new reality." The first thesis states that movement derived from any succession of instants is illusory rather than authentic. The second thesis explores why this is so according to the quality of instants. Classical philosophy considered movement the regulated transition between poses or privileged instants. These poses referred back to Forms or Ideas that were themselves timeless and immobile. Movement was imagined as deriving from formal transcendental elements, an ideal synthesis giving order and measure to the dialectic of Forms. The modern conception of movement as immobile sections + abstract time is quite different. The problem here is to judge whether the cinema is the perfection of the world's oldest illusion (the Plato-machine of Jean-Louis Baudry), or the culmination of modern scientific thought, or finally, whether it augurs a new conception of movement and duration. In The Movement-Image, the classic cinema occupies a transitional phase between these last two moments in the history of philosophy. The birth of modern science replaces the dialectical order of transcendental poses with a mechanical succession of instants: Galileo's linkage of the time of falling bodies to the extent of space covered; Descartes's calculation of the movement of a flat curve by linking the position of points moving on a str