Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 37, November 2001
Dorothea Olkowski
La Longue durée
A Reply to Joseph Nechvatal
Joseph Nechvatal 'La Beaute tragique: Olkowski,
Deleuze, and the 'Ruin of Representation'' _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special
Issue vol. 5 no. 36, November
2001 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n36nechvatal In chapter four of _Gilles Deleuze and
the Ruin of Representation_, I present an account of
creative life that is grounded in the empiricist philosophy
of David Hume. For Hume, we do not need apriori principles
to guarantee that our experience is intelligible. The
connection between one perception and another arises from
the experientially organized habits of a 'mind' qualified,
that is, organized by its sensations which both connect one
experience with another and organize a self, a self which
is, in the words of Constantin Boundas, a 'theater without a
stage'. [1] On this basis alone, however, all that
sensation produces is habitual thought, the constant
conjunction that assures the continuity of experience and
the illusion of an identical, or at least stable self.
Creative life, however, takes something more. It arises from
an impression of reflection, an idea that 'returns upon the
soul', is felt, and reflected upon in the interval between
perception and action. Given the complicated nature of this
process, it is no surprise that the interval is not always
available to humans -- that many things are perceived and
felt which are never reflected upon. At times, in fact too
much of the time, we live more like single-celled amoeba for
which perception and action are instantaneous. For such
creatures, to perceive is to act, either to flee or to
consume the object of perception. Life for such creatures
has a tremendous intensity, that is to say, a speed and an
utterly eclipsed extensivity. It has speed because there is
no interval between the perception of an external being and
the response to it; hesitation can be death. It is precluded
from extensivity insofar as the latter would be the
extension of an intensional duration, that is, an ongoing
affectivity wherein the being feels itself, in pleasure or
pain, and on the basis of that feeling, reflects and extends
itself, heterogeneously towards something. Between itself
and this other thing, there must exist another interval, a
heterogeneous extensive relationship, a connection which
Deleuze-Guattari sometimes refer to as a desiring-machine,
although such a term perhaps does more to obscure the nature
of this connection than it does to make sense of it and
thereby enable one to insist upon the utter necessity of
this connection. In this manner, by means of extensive
connection, what is virtual, thus felt and reflected upon,
becomes actual, acted. Without the interval of reflection
and without the interval of extensivity, all acts are purely
habitual repetitions, they are *representations*, and it is
such habitual representations that my book and my work in
general aim to ruin. The question arises as to the
relationship between this aim and feminism, and then between
this aim and the work of art (cinema in particular, but also
works of art of all sorts). Perhaps I have in this endeavor
become an erratic sort of feminist. Completely committed to
examining the tensions between habit or representation and
creative life where ever I find them, I would insist that it
is not enough to be a feminist and to demand certain kinds
of rights and privileges for women in a world where what is
at stake is creativity everywhere. Such political questions,
I maintain, are also artistic-aesthetic questions because
they invoke the creation of new forms of social and
political life as well as new forms of artistic life. These
are feminist issues, but they are also sexual, aesthetic,
ontological, social, political, and ethical. Indeed, in the
drive for recognition and approval, philosophers often
either ignore the extent to which the connections at stake
are overwhelmingly sexual, or they habitualize them,
preferring to subordinate sexuality to what are perceived to
be progressive social attitudes or sex negative theoretics,
but which often are merely tactics of evasion. Thus, it
comes as no small surprise to me that nearly all artists and
intellectuals who have commented on my book believe that my
connection to and therefore interest in Mary Kelly is
misplaced. That these comments have generally come from
formalists may be part of what is significant, but what is
interesting is that they always have a ready alternative;
mostly, that alternative has been film.
[2] Joseph Nechvatal, for example,
concludes that Kelly's work fails as a ruin of
representation because it 'adheres to the framing and
centering tropes indispensable to the comprehension striven
for in prototypical representation and the average book'.
Thus, he maintains, we are looking at her art through a
renaissance 'intentional window', a single point perspective
which reduces our otherwise wobbly and wide peripheral
vision into a single bounded point of view. In short, there
is little to differentiate Kelly's inherence in the world
from that of Leonardo or Durer. The only difference, for
Nechvatal, is that Kelly replaces the old content with a new
content, one which appears to him to be but a tedious reply
to the master discourses of psychoanalysis. But Nechvatal's
insertion into Kelly's work and world is not mine. For him,
the ruin of representation appears to be a matter of
asserting form over content, and this leads him to a
particular interpretation of 'perpetual displacement' and
'excess of the signifier'. [3] Nechvatal interprets
these terms as calling for a shift in the perceptual process
whereby rather than focusing on the figure-ground
relationship which is always given in perception (a
relationship that tends to be easily assimilated into
single-point perspective), there will now be no focus at
all, only an increased emphasis on the edges of sight and
consciousness. Accomplishing this vision requires a
technological fix, an immersion into a 360-degree
perspective afforded by a 'single-processor Silicon Graphics
(SGI) VGX R4000 Reality Engine'. Immersion into this
technological vat dissolves horizon and frame and forces
vision into an allocentric mirror world which 'intensifies
thalmic input into the cortex by making the active thalamic
neurons in that region fire more rapidly than usual'. Such
'excess' in Nechvatal's view is the real ruin of
representation, for it produces a non-linear, dynamic
conceptual displacement of a view in favor of sweeping
processes of space/time. However, given this description, I
fear that either this experience is commensurate with the
visual and bodily disorientation that might be produced less
expensively by twirling round and round while holding one's
breath, or it would create a single and total world picture
that would have to be the epitome of representation. Never
having experienced this mechanism it is difficult for me to
know, but I do know that visual disorientation or expansion
of the visual field and displacement of the perceptual
gestalt by technological means is no less manipulative and
instantaneous than the instantaneous perception informed by
habit. It occurs to me that Nechvatal seeks perceptual
reorientation because he fails to take into consideration
the ongoing impact of what Paul Virilio calls *la longue
duree*, ongoing affective life, the ontological unconscious,
the connection of desiring-machines, the immediate
connectivity between one thing and another that opens up an
interval for thought between every perception and any
response to that perception. [4] Thus, without
affective life, everything devolves around perception and
form. The depth where Antonin Artaud
experimented is precisely on the level of affective,
sensible life. It is the depth where sounds are separated
from bodies and organized into propositions, freeing them
for the expressive function. When sounds are not
differentiated from bodies, then sounds are the sounds of
bodies moving about, perceiving, yawning, chewing,
slobbering, choking, orgasming. This is not the same as
expression. To express something there must be denotation,
designation, the force of speaking and being spoken. As
Artaud discovered over and over again, words are not just
sounds. One must distinguish the 'sense' of perceptions from
their physical and psychological aspects. Given this, I
might be permitted to say that when what we envision is not
distinguished from merely seeing, then what is envisioned is
not freed as an expressive function. Thus, just as there are
'things said' as well as 'how the human voice articulates
itself in order to say things', there are 'things
envisioned', to be differentiated from 'how the eyes are
focused (or not) in order to see'. Envisioning requires more
than expanding or decentering one's visual perception, just
as speaking requires more than varying one's vocal chords
and/or articulation. So, on the one hand, if there is the
series to eat/to speak or event/sense so, on the other,
there might be a visual perceptual series like to see/to
envision or event/sense. In each case, the event refers to
something the body does and sense refers to expressible
meanings either linguistic or visual sense, both of which
have to be created. The choices are to create these meanings
either representationally or some other way. The perception or seeing can be
related to the envisioning or sense on the basis of
resemblance, that is, the envisioning or sense can merely
translate the real seeing, the gestalt perception, or in the
interval opened up by the affective, temporalization, in *la
longue duree* it may envision something else. It can only do
this if the real seeing is in 'perpetual displacement' with
respect to 'envisioning' the production of sense. Since
seeing itself is difficult (although not impossible) to
alter, it is difficult to imagine that very many people will
be attracted to the technological fix. But what we can
displace is the envisioning, which in turn, will alter the
seeing too. This is the 'excess of the signifier', through
which an absolutely new meaning may emerge in the interval.
It is in the disruption of the relation between event and
sense that the new erupts. If we fail to understand this, it
is because sense arises out of the actions and passions of
bodies, in the becoming language and the ongoing envisioning
of those bodies -- but instead of recognizing this process,
we present vision and voice with the representation, the
finished product, as the only way to make sense of what is
seen or said. It is this finished product that Kelly's work
evades. What attracted me to her art was the
display of what appeared to be her own clothing in _Interim_
(1984-1989). Each piece is folded, photographed, then
displayed as if on an advertising billboard and presented
with an accompanying text: a series of conversations between
the woman and the people in her life. Yet, the leather
jacket, the sheer night-gown, and the cotton dress do not
merely tell a story about an artist: a woman with a child
and a husband and a mother and friends. They document her
body, for the body is not visible in the images, but it is
envisioned by them for each viewer. One is free to 'see'
these images as Nechvatal has seen them, but there is also
the possibility of envisioning them, by means of their
perpetual displacement and the excess of the signifier,
particularly since the billboard format does not invoke the
mechanics of single point perspective, even though it does
involve the physiology of seeing. This is also why I do not
think that the ruin of representation is the end of film. I
must admit that, with a few exceptions, I do not love film.
I love video and performance, but I do not love film, such
that its ruin would not devastate my work nor my aesthetic
options. However, the analysis that I have developed for
seeing/envisioning might be of use in considering films.
Certainly, the narrative film with fixed shots remains
utterly representational. But technological fixes are
equally representational. Such is the motivation for
Virilio's concern with the application to cinema of
technologies created for war and for speed, where seeing
becomes not merely habitual but digital, so that we cease to
rely on our own vision and instead rely on that of computers
and satellites. What is eliminated is once again the
durational, affective element in our perception, the
interval in which we may reflect upon the seen. What has
begun to happen is that the technology both sees and acts
without thought. Its seeing and the response to that seeing
can be and often are instantaneous. This might serve as a
warning that expanding our perception may also result in a
ruin, not so much of representation, but of our very
capacity to envision and to make sense of our world. If
there is still a time and a place for envisioning, then
perhaps film still has a future somewhere between the
representation of fixed shots and that of absolute
speed. University of Colorado Colorado Springs, USA Footnotes 1. Dorothea Olkowski, _Gilles Deleuze
and the Ruin of Representation_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), p. 133. 2. Need I add that not only have these
comments come from formalists, but they have also come from
men who, like Nechvatal, find that Kelly adheres to the
framing and centering tropes indispensable to the
comprehension striven for in prototypical *patriarchal*
representation. The ways in which form and content interact
does not generally enter into these
considerations. 3. Olkowski, _Gilles Deleuze and the
Ruin of Representation_, p. 224. 4. Paul Virilio, 'Critical Space', in
James Der Derian, ed., _The Virilio Reader_ (London:
Blackwell Press, 1998), pp. 58-72, see pp. 59, 60, and 66.
Originally published in French as _L'Espace critique_
(Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1984), pp. 155-181. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Dorothea Olkowski, 'La Longue duree: A
Reply to Joseph Nechvatal', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze
Special Issue, vol. 5 no. 37, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n37olkowski>.
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