Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 32, November 2001
Stephen Arnott
Deleuze's Idea of Cinema
_Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in
Politics, Philosophy and Culture_ Edited by Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin
Jon Heller Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998 ISBN 0-8166-30283 320 pp. We all recognise, at least
intuitively, that the creative disciplines, namely art and
science in very broad terms, differ profoundly from each
other, both in the miscellaneous practices they employ in
their day-to-day activities and in the objects, etc., which
they produce. How to articulate this difference precisely is
a task to which Deleuze and Guattari devoted themselves in
what was to be their last co-authored work, _What is
Philosophy?_, published in 1991. Here they seek to
differentiate explicitly the distinctive creative activity
of philosophy, science, and art. Many of the theses developed in this
work are evident in the brief essay by Deleuze which opens
Kaufman and Heller's important collection, and which
concerns, directly, the creative activity and artistic
achievements of cinema. The essay, appearing here for the
first time in English translation, should be read, then, as
a compliment to the larger work of _What is Philosophy?_,
and also to Deleuze's two-volume _Cinema_. Entitled 'Having
an Idea in Cinema' it is expressly concerned to answer the
question: 'What is cinema?' The answer Deleuze provides is
brief and enigmatic. Cinema, he says, is the creation of
blocks of movements/duration: 'If one puts together a block
of movements/duration, perhaps one does cinema' (15). For
those uninitiated into the conceptual proliferation that is
'Deleuzism' (to use the term coined and defined by Eric
Alliez), the sense of this proposition will be far from
apparent. An attempt to give a definition here of the
concept 'movements/duration' would, I fear, be doomed to
failure and would do injustice to Deleuze's complex and
original analysis of the methods, techniques, and
achievements of cinema's greatest innovators. I direct the
interested reader to _Cinema 1_ and especially to the
opening chapters of _Cinema 2_. So what might we say without seeking
to explain what Deleuze's definition means, which I leave to
the reader. Well, in the first instance, we might say
something of the spirit in which such a definition should be
taken. We are mistaken if we understand Deleuze to be
writing out a prescription for what cinema should be, as if
the philosopher, the sovereign of thought, is an authority
on the matter. Deleuze is quick to head off such a
misapprehension, and is explicit about how he conceives the
relationship between cinema and philosophy. He begins by
explaining: 'Philosophy is not made for reflecting on
anything at all. In treating philosophy as a power of
'reflecting on', much would seem to be accorded to it when
in fact everything is taken from it. This is because no one
needs philosophy for reflecting' (14). If not reflecting,
then what role does cinema play in and for philosophy, and
what role might philosophy play, perhaps, in and for cinema?
The essay, I suggest, is devoted to answering precisely this
question and will therefore be of the utmost relevance to an
understanding of the relationship, interaction, and
differences between cinema and philosophy. There can be no doubt that what
enables this relationship is that philosophy, cinema, art,
and science all share in the activity of creation.
Creativity serves as the basis of their potential
interaction. Deleuze asks then 'what is it to have an idea
in something?' (14), an idea in cinema, an idea in
philosophy, an idea in science. It is, of course, to think
of something new, something original, to create, and it is
in name of this creation that we speak. This speech, Deleuze
is quick to insist, is not simple communication, which he
views with suspicion and distrust. To communicate is to
convey information, and information is defined as a set of
order-words, of words which code some vested interest, and
which perform an act of repression. 'When you are informed,
you are told what you are supposed to believe.' (17)
Information, on Deleuze's account, is the mechanism by means
of which repressive power is exercised in societies of
control. Instead of the spaces of confinement of
disciplinary societies, we are now bombarded with
information which enacts an even more insidious control over
the way we lead our lives. Deleuze is interested to discover how
such control might be resisted, how we might overcome the
stifling stratification of received information. He finds
that the creative act can function as just such an act of
resistance. He insists that 'having an idea is not on the
order of communication' (17), it cannot be reduced to the
transmission of information because it surpasses or goes
beyond that information. Having an idea is to introduce the
non-stratified into the strata which contain us. For
Deleuze, what is interesting and remarkable in the work of
those he calls 'the great filmmakers' (16) is that once in a
while we see an act of resistance take shape, a uniquely
cinematic idea which casts asunder the order which seeks to
control and stratify it. In this essay Deleuze gives the
example of a particular cinematographic technique which we
can describe as the dislocation of sight and sound, which
occurs when the sounds we hear unexpectedly fail to cohere
with the images we see. Deleuze explains the effect of this
as follows: 'It is extraordinary in that it provides a
veritable transformation of elements at the level of cinema,
a cycle that in one stroke makes cinema resonate with a
qualitative physics of elements' (16). The unexpected, the
extraordinary, the remarkable, these are the characteristics
of the idea, and their effect is to loosen the grip of the
system of control, even if only for a time. I hope these remarks have gone some
way to impress upon the reader what I take to be the immense
import of this brief essay by Deleuze. I should also mention
that the translation by Eleanor Kaufman is excellent and
retains a consistency with the translations of crucially
related texts such as _Cinema_, _What is Philosophy?_, and
the essays on control in _Negotiations_. The editors are
also to be congratulated for the ordering of essays which
follow -- all of which, I think, contain and try to develop
themes and ideas raised in the essay by Deleuze. We should
note that this essay is used to complement the editors'
introduction and thus to raise the major themes upon which
the collection is focused. I shall run through the essays
briefly with a brief comment on each. The first section following the
introduction is entitled 'Global Politics' and is concerned
with developing the theme of control just raised by Deleuze.
Michael Hardt's excellent 'The Withering of Civil Society'
attempts to offer a political solution to the state of
control in which we find ourselves. Hardt gives a lucid
account of the transition from the disciplinary society
diagnosed so expertly by Foucault, to the societies of
control which have now become dominant. Our society is no
longer characterised by vast sites of confinement, but
instead by the careful control and transmission of
information. This theme is then taken up brilliantly by
Brian Massumi in his 'Requiem for our Prospective Dead'.
Here he analyses the activities of the mass media within the
context of two recent crises in which America has seen fit
to involve itself: the Gulf War and the unrest in Somalia.
Massumi draws our attention to the way in which political
decision- making and the presidential face given to that
activity was portrayed by the media. During the course of
his discussion, Massumi utilizes many ideas and concepts
unique to a Deleuzian political analysis to brilliant
effect. An essential read for anyone interested in the
mediatization of our world and the types of control it
performs and licences. The section ends with a rather short
but nonetheless highly relevant essay by Eugene Holland
entitled 'From Schizophrenia to Social Control'. Holland
also gives an account of where he locates the essential
differences between disciplinary and control societies,
drawing principally on the two volumes of Deleuze and
Guattari's _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_. Like Deleuze he
locates the site of resistance to control in the work of
art, and recalls John Coltrane's revolutionary approach to
music as an exemplary instance of such resistance. This
section in toto provides the most comprehensive analysis and
discussion of control societies available
anywhere. In the next section, 'Cinema,
Perception and Space', we find the critical essay by
Jonathon Beller, simply entitled 'Cinema/Capital', which
seeks to understand why it is that Deleuze almost completely
ignores cinema's relation to capital. It is an important
essay which expands on Deleuze's notion of cinema to include
its unavoidable ties to money, and shows how cinema and
television are complicit in the mechanisms of control which
have become ubiquitous in our society: 'Technologies such as
cinema and television are machines that 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' (92). Deleuze conspicuously neglects to discuss
this aspect of the cinema of mass appeal, and focuses
instead on the cinematic work of art. It is as well that we
remember that the dominant role of cinema in our times is as
a conduit for mass media opinion and dogma. We should recall
the warnings of Artaud who viewed cinema as repressive of
the revolutionary events he sought to enact in the theatre.
Nonetheless, we should not think that this critique of
popular cinema takes anything away from its potential as a
site of resistance and creativity. The remainder of the essays of this
section are chiefly concerned with the revolutionary
potential of the politics of both Deleuze and Guattari in
the context of the far-reaching mechanisms of control in the
midst of which we find ourselves. They each deserve
attention which we unfortunately do not have space to give
them here. The first two essays of the fourth
section are devoted to developing an understanding of
Guattari's highly original semiotics. Their authors are to
be credited as being the pioneers of this area in the
English-speaking world. Their observations and
clarifications will prove invaluable to anyone seeking to
understand the singular approach to language and meaning
which Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari in concert,
develop. The final essay by Brian Reynolds gives an
interesting account of Deleuze and Guattari's enigmatic use
of Artaud's phrase 'body without organs'. Reynolds employs
Rousseau's detailed account of his own masochistic and
hypochondriac characteristics as an enactment of the
activity Deleuze and Guattari suggest as a means to escape
the stratification of society, to make oneself a body
without organs. And so to the final section,
'Philosophy and Ethics'. This begins with an essay which at
first may seem somewhat out of place here, but which
functions to describe Deleuze's unique metaphysics, a
philosophy we need to understand if we are to appreciate the
ethical challenges which then need to be faced. Timothy
Murphy's essay 'Quantum Ontology' performs a fascinating
comparison of Deleuze's ontology of becoming with the
quantum ontology of physicist David Bohm. The achievement of
Murphy's arguments is to show that Deleuzian ontology is to
be taken seriously in the light of its close similarity to
the most current and revolutionary theories in quantum
physics. Once we have taken onboard the physical appeal of
this ontology of becoming, of a world and a universe in
perpetual change, eternally throwing up new challenges and
new problems, we are confronted with developing an ethics
which leaves behind the old dogmas and transcendent and
indisputable principles of morality, in favour of a practice
which complements rather than resists the Protean nature of
our world and lives. To this task Deleuze and Guattari
devote considerable energy, and their achievements are
expertly highlighted and conveyed by Daniel Smith in his
essay 'The Place of Ethics in Deleuze's Philosophy'. Smith,
it must be said, gives a remarkably comprehensive overview
in the limited space afforded him, and I cannot think of a
better introduction to Deleuze's ethical philosophy in
English. I shall conclude my review here with
the addendum that there are other worthy essays in the
collection which I have been unable to mention here but
which remain to be discovered by the reader. I unreservedly
recommend this collection both to those already familiar
with Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual creation and to the
newcomer who is yet to discover its richness and diversity.
The inclusion of Deleuze's essay on cinema is a real bonus
and will be of particular interest to those concerned to
articulate the relationship and potential points of
interaction between cinema and philosophy. University of New England Armidale, New South Wales,
Australia Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Stephen Arnott, 'Deleuze's Idea of
Cinema', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue, vol. 5
no. 32, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n32arnott>.
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