Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 38, November 2001
Andrew Murphie
Is Philosophy Ever Enough?
_The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Cinema_ Edited by Gregory Flaxman Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000 ISBN 0-8166-3447-5 395 pp. 'The encounter between two disciplines
doesn't take place when one begins to reflect on the other,
but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for
itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one
confronted by another.' Gilles Deleuze (367) 1. Moving Targets Film and philosophy, unlike many other
disciplines, share a similar problem: that of the world as a
whole. It is this problem that is central to all of
Deleuze's work. It is therefore no surprise that he should
have brought film and philosophy together in the _Cinema_
books. In these, as elsewhere, he suggests that we no longer
believe in the world, despite centuries of heavy-going
materialism. One could sum the _Cinema_ books up as a
prolonged and detailed meditation upon the conditions that
could once again lead us to believe in the world. At the same time, film and philosophy
have different approaches to believing in the world and, of
course, the world has different uses for them. Is there
really any point to bringing them together? Even the
_Cinema_ books -- and Deleuze himself -- seem nagged by this
question. I will suggest, as my own answer to it, that the
reverse also applies. Could we have either the cinema or the
philosophy we have today without the other? They may not be
absolutely compatible but, on the other hand, would it be
possible to absolutely separate them? Could the cinema ever
be said *not* to think or to create concepts (if at times
badly)? Would philosophy ever be enough by itself in a world
in which the search for transcendental truths is under
erasure and we have come to acknowledge the pivotal role of
the sign? After the century we have just been through, could
philosophy ever realistically attempt to disengage from
other forms of cultural expression again? Surely the short
answer to all these questions is no, and there is a sense in
which I believe this was Deleuze's answer. Unless we
consider the cinematic act to think, unless philosophy
enacts forms of encounter with the world, both are lost to
the world. Already this changes what it might be to think
and nothing marks the beginning of the new millennium more
than the emergence of such new concepts of thought across
the board. Let us then move the question on a
little. What do we mean by philosophy's encounter with
cinema? In short, will philosophy ever be able to account
for the cinema with any finality? Again the answer seems to
be no. This is not to denigrate the power of analyses of the
cinema based on such disciplines as linguistics or
psychoanalysis (although Deleuze of course rejects the
application of linguistic or psychoanalytic models). It is,
however, a matter of rejecting their finality. There will be
no framework that will ever account for the cinema if it
will not allow itself to be changed by the cinema in turn.
This is a well-known point, but it is worth repeating in
this day and age, not just in relation to the cinema but in
relation to the emergent media forms beyond the cinema. This
is also the point many essays in this volume make. It is not
that frameworks are without use; it is just that they are
dealing with moving targets and should begin by
acknowledging this. Much of film studies has not really
acknowledged this. Instead, especially over the last thirty
years or so, film studies has often, somewhat perversely,
dealt with the problem of a moving target by changing
framework every decade or so. Today, it is well-known that
this frenzy for renovation seems to have run its course.
Some alternatives to this renovation have arisen, although
some of these have not been much more satisfying. One
alternative to this periodic renovation of the house of film
studies, especially during the last decade, has been the
claim to reject theory. Yet films do create concepts, and it
is indeed impossible to imagine a film that, at some level
in some way, does not think in concepts. To sum this all up, the problem for me
is not one of whether film and philosophy are compatible,
but of keeping pace with their somewhat hectic relations
without boxing them in. This was, I think the task Deleuze
set himself in the _Cinema_ books. 2. Love and Dismissal There has indeed been a lot written
about cinema inspired by Deleuze. Perhaps the best of it
(Shaviro, Griggers, for example) has used Deleuze's books as
a launching pad for other ideas. Yet a lot has also not been
written. There is something about Deleuze that seems to
inspire either love or dismissal, and film studies is
strange in its oftentimes wilful ignorance of Deleuze's two
key books on the cinema. In her 2000, second edition,
_Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts_, for example, Susan
Hayward makes no mention of Deleuze at all (despite extended
discussions of Foucault and Derrida). Claire Perkins notes,
more remarkably, that the 1995 _Philosophy and Film_
collection does not have Deleuze in the index. There are perhaps many reasons for
this mixed response to the _Cinema_ books, but here I will
focus on two. The first is the oddness of the books
themselves. They are poised somewhere between a fairly
standard, if extremely detailed and well informed, account
of the greatest hits of French cinephilia on the one hand,
and a total reconsideration of the very nature of film on
the other. This makes them simultaneously easy to read and
difficult to understand. The second reason for the mixed
response is the nature of film studies itself. Not to put
too fine a point on it, today film studies sometimes still
looks a little saturated by theory, and a little exhausted
by the theory wars. Caught up in what we might call the
judgement and recriminations of postmodernism and after, as
opposed to the judgement of God, it sometimes seems that
film studies simply has not wanted to know about
Deleuze. To be fair, the feeling has perhaps
been somewhat mutual. On the one hand, Deleuze's work in
general (despite it being ascribed to and produced within
the period) seemed to hop over the period of postmodernism,
the linguistic turn, the detailed analyses of the phallus as
signifier, and so on. It did not ignore them but to my mind
moved on beyond them before they had even really begun. Yet
that which Deleuze hopped over has formed the basic
essentials for many in film studies for many years. On the
other hand, Deleuze's work is perhaps more traditional than
it is sometimes portrayed as being. Much of his writing,
including that in the _Cinema_ books, seems to me to be
resolutely modernist (or one might say hypermodernist). He
attacks psychoanalysis but invents a new variation upon it
(and seems quite Freudian at times). He claims to have
remained a Marxist. He wants to reinstate belief in the
world. Perhaps it is not enough to have done with the
judgement of God to approach his work, perhaps one needs
also to have done with the judgement of Postmodernism (and
its critics). What this all adds up to is that,
despite the excellence of much writing on Deleuze's _Cinema_
books (Rodowick in particular), it has long seemed to me
that another kind of book was needed, one which would give
the books a context and a launching pad within film
studies. 3. Read This Book For me, Flaxman's book is it. In the
end, this is such a good book -- it is so clear on so many
difficult concepts, leaving neither philosophy nor cinema
behind -- that it forces me to ask whether Deleuze's
concepts can go further. And that is how it should be. The
reason Flaxman's book is so good -- and in some ways so
radical -- is precisely that it does not *strive* to be a
radical departure. Neither the history of philosophy nor
film studies in general are 'abandoned'. In fact, they are
even nurtured at times, though they are pushed on, and it is
this that is exciting. Flaxman's fifty page introduction to
the collection is in itself a major contribution to clarity
in the area. It is quite simply one of the best summaries of
Deleuze's philosophy as a whole that I have read. At the
same time it provides the most navigable of pathways into
the _Cinema_ books' relation to cinema and to cinema
studies. I think this is in part because Flaxman is so clear
on the relation between thought and what it is that makes us
think. He gives this a Kantian framework: the genesis of
thought is to be found in a 'disorder of the senses' (12)
and in a ''vibration' between faculties' in which 'the
concept is the expression of sensations because sensations
mobilize the differential forces that make thinking
possible' (13). Immediately one thinks with Flaxman of the
whole problem of outside thought -- meaning the encounter
with the outside that is thought, as much as the question of
how much a sense of inside and outside is formed through
this encounter. The problem of outside thought was crucial
to Deleuze (following Foucault who in turn followed
Blanchot) and in this Deleuze's philosophy differed from
Derrida's. While Derrida is famous for proclaiming that
there is no outside (or no outside-text at least), Deleuze
was concerned with the extent to which notions such as
internal and external broke down when thought confronted its
interaction with the world. Much of the book is in one sense
or another dedicated to this problem as it has many obvious
echoes in the cinema (not least in the very notion of the
frame). Flaxman gives a somewhat political
perspective on this problem. This is that of
'deterritorializing the cogito' (2). In the return to the
outside, to vibrations, to sensation as the genesis of
thought -- and the move away from the cogito -- Flaxman
shares much with many of the major developments in cognitive
science (see for example Tor Norretranders account of the
weakness of the cogito according to cognitive science,
information theory, and neurobiology). Sense comes first,
thought after. Judgement misses this because it attempts to
put conscious thought first. All this is well known but in
this book these ideas are developed, not just
rehearsed. Predominant also is the problem of
time. As Flaxman points out, quoting from Deleuze, 'time has
always put the notion of truth into crisis' (4), a notion
that instead becomes one of perspective. Lucid accounts of
Bergson, Foucault, and Kant follow which all put the problem
of perspective into perspective. For Flaxman, the cinema can
deal with all these problems because the cinema can disrupt
habits of thought, the whole ''common sense' of the
sensory-motor schema' that is 'underwritten (though
unsigned) by a whole moral-normal regimen' (36) which is
often based upon a domination of the 'seeable' by the
'sayable'. If it seems that either Deleuze or Flaxman is
attempting to overthrow either philosophy or film studies,
however, nothing could be more mistaken. Indeed, one strength of Flaxman's book
is that few of the chapters disregard Deleuze's strong
relation to film studies and to the history of philosophy.
Flaxman himself is strong on Deleuze and Kant, and in
particular on the way that Deleuze uses the Kantian
distinction between determining and reflective judgement to
reintroduce a more useful sense of judgement into film
philosophy (38). He then goes on the give a satisfying and
conventional structuring of the book into three main
sections, with an appendix, 'After-Image', containing an
interview with Deleuze. The three sections, 'Approaching
Images', 'Mapping Images', and 'Thinking Images', correspond
for Flaxman to ontology, epistemology, and ethics. I will
not take these in order, but instead group the essays
according to my own whim. 4. Key Philosophical
Concepts Firstly, there are excellent articles
which seem primarily to focus on the history of philosophy
as it is relevant to the _Cinema_ books, and here I would
include the philosophy of filmmakers such as Eisenstein.
Gregg Lambert's 'Cinema and the Outside' develops what is
probably the central theme to the collection. Quoting
Eisenstein on Kabuki and following his own description of a
goal in soccer (!) Lambert gives a wonderful definition of
the event as the 'total provocation of the brain' (256). It
creates an interval in the easy habit of the sensory-motor
circuit. The aim of cinematic shock is this provocation,
thought which breaks the regime of 'preestablished forms of
visibility' (257). This regime would maintain thought as
straight habit and diminish the interval in the
sensory-motor circuits. Cinematic shock, on the other hand,
returns thought to the body to the world at large, and to
'emotional intelligence' (257). The senses, and the thought
that follows, can interact with the world as unknown, not as
known. At the same time, Lambert points to
the failure of Eisenstein's more revolutionary ideas in the
very success of his technical, cinematic innovations. It was
not long before some of Eisenstein's technical innovations
in his deployment of montage were to become standard fare,
enhancing the smooth flow of mainstream culture rather than
'shocking' it or disrupting it. Rather than putting an
enhanced interval into the sensory-motor schema, the cinema
was able to create and reinforce, through the
movement-image, a superior working of this schema. The
circuits of this schema are those finally of Capital, which
assumes 'the force of the whole' (271). The only limit to
this representation is that of money. Again this calls for a
total provocation to the brain, only now in a move towards a
different image of thought. This is not that of thought as
'a power that would be placed in a circuit' (273) in order
to effect change in what appears to be an automatic world.
Rather it is an image of thought without this power, and
'haunted by' the 'automatic character' of that which has
given rise to it within the sensory-motor schema (273). This
all implies a philosophical ethics of the interval (278) in
which creating gaps in the smooth ongoing running of thought
is crucial to re-establishing contact with the world again,
if such a thing is ever possible. Lambert finished with the
question, 'if the brain was invented to surpass a closed
plane of nature, does the human in turn invent cinema in
order to surpass the closed duration of man?'
(288). If there is an opening, what kind of
opening is it? Of course, for Deleuze this would be an
opening to the virtual, but what is the virtual? There are
many answers given in the collection but perhaps the best is
to be found in Jean-Clet Martin's 'Of Images and Worlds',
which deals with Deleuze, Leibniz, and Bergson. In a
wonderfully enchanting exposition, Martin gives an
architectural perspective on the virtual. Beginning from the
'profound kinship between image and thought' (61) that he
draws from Bergson, Martin next distinguishes between a
point of view on matter, and the form of matter. In a sense,
a city, for example, has one form, if complex and constantly
changing. Yet it contains any number of points of view,
perspectives, 'way[s] of being' (64). In fact, there
are an infinite number of points of view of and within a
city, and this infinity is that city's virtuality. It is
these points of view, which, though real, are spiritual,
because they can interact, vibrate with one another, in the
mind, in thought or memory. In this way the world is
immanent. As Martin puts it quite beautifully, 'the world
bathes in the brain in the form of mental landscapes'
(75). This leads us to the very close
reading of Deleuze and Bergson by Flaxman is his own essay
'Cinema Year Zero', that gets to the heart of the central
problem in the _Cinema_ books. This is the tension between
Bergson's rejection of the cinema and Deleuze's use of
Bergson to approach the cinema. For if the cinema enhances
this bathing of the brain in a mental landscape, then there
is perhaps a price to pay. This is, as Flaxman puts it,
'anxiety before the image' (90). Deleuze tries to save
Bergson's retreat from the implication of the first chapter
of _Matter and Memory_, Bergson's anxiety before the image.
Flaxman does not try to save the later Bergson, and argues
that there was in Bergson's philosophy a retreat towards the
sensory-motor power, and away from the ethics in the
interval, as Bergson reached the work of _Creative
Evolution_. Of course, there are parallels to much of the
history of film studies, and Flaxman is particularly
interesting when he takes on the cognitivists. He points out
that the cognitivist assumption that cinema systems fit our
systems of meaning is firstly, just that, an assumption, and
secondly, an assumption that reinforces itself by assuming
both our own meaning making and the cinema's as 'natural'
(96). Opposed to this is Deleuze's assumption of a cinema
that precisely unsettles these assumptions, giving a
'nonhuman perspective' and a return to 'acentered
perception' (96). In a tribute to Flaxman's courage and
strength as an editor there are essays that take Deleuze to
task from positions that he himself rejects. Martin Schwab's
'neostructuralist' 'Escape from the Image' challenges
Deleuze's use of the Peircean semiotic by reinterpreting a
crucial film to Deleuze, Beckett's _Film_. Schwab argues
that Deleuze can be 'insensitive to the specificities of
cinema' (109). I think this is sometimes true, though I
wonder if one can generalise to the extent that Schwab does
from this basis. At the same time, Schwab presents such an
elegant and nuanced argument that I found it interesting to
disagree with it. In the end, I think he is operating with
different assumptions to Deleuze, arguing that 'subjects
conceive of a world and of themselves . . . in semiotic
terms -- terms that are not adequately conceptualized by
incurving and indetermination' (132). Perhaps, but what if
incurving and indetermination are already at the heart of
the semiotic relation to the world? There are other articles in the
collection, like Schwab's, that are interesting because they
re-deploy systems of thought that Deleuze himself
specifically rejects at the beginning of the _Cinema_ books
-- such as psychoanalysis. Angelo Restivo's 'Into the
Breach' seems to me to begin to usefully reintroduce a
Lacanian approach to trauma and the signifier. This trauma
occurs in the history of media production in the disruption
of the easy relations between sound and vision which Restivo
analyses in 1950s Hollywood cinema. In the new
configurations of these relations there is no longer and
easy opposition between 'information and 'noise'' (189). A
new aesthetics of the sublime is at work in _Cinema_, one of
'information and its overcoming' (190). 5. Information and its
Overcoming Flaxman's book also contains much for
those concerned with the contemporary evaluation of film
studies. Laura U. Marks 'Signs of the Time', one of the
strongest essays in a strong collection, discusses Deleuze
and Peirce, Bergson and Foucault, but within the context of
documentary, taking as her examples documentaries made in
Beirut. As these documentaries simultaneously seem to seek
'the organic embrace' of the movement-image and, with the
power of the time-image, to 'deterritorialize memory', they
raise the question of 'what is the real' -- not only in
'Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema' but in the relation
between sign and world (194). Schwab wrote that Deleuze's
semiotic is more Bergsonian than Peircean but Marks
implicitly disagrees, giving along the way a wonderful
summary of Peircean semiotics in general, and of their
relation to the movement-image and the time-image in
particular. Here, at the core of disagreements at the heart
of poststructuralism over the sign (and over the signifier
of De Saussure versus the sign of Peirce) Marks points out
that for Peirce (and Deleuze) it is never the intention that
the sign should *represent* the real. How could it if the
sign was not something separate from the world? The sign
'rather . . . enfolds or implies' the real (194). For
documentary this means that the assumption that one is
trying to represent the real somehow -- or even that 'there
is a real to be re-represented -- is mistaken and will only
'impoverish the image' (195). This is, however, the
assumption at the core of the movement-image approach to
documentary making. An approach based upon the time-image,
on the other hand, is one that understands the way in which
an image is only the form of something implicit, something
folded into the image. In the case of the documentary one
major part of this is the infolding of the past in to the
present in a manner which makes the difference between them
'indiscernable'. This again leads to an ethics which Marks
specifically relates to 'inconceivable events' (205). The
ethic of this time-image approach is one which again raises
the powerlessness of thought within the habitual schema, no
matter how grand this schema may be. This ethic 'allows
inconceivable events to remain inconceivable, while
insisting that they must be conceived of' (205). It is not,
as it is for many documentaries, a question of judging the
truth of images, but rather producing images that call for a
new form of thought outside of the habitual modes (outside
thought). The further implication of this for a documentary
maker is that this may allow the future genesis of an
'unknown body' (210), as Deleuze puts it, a not
insignificant consideration for those involved in political
documentary film making. Of course, all this implies that the
specific circumstances of production will always produce
what it is that they need to generate in those specific
circumstances. In 'The Film History of Thought' Andras
Balint Kovacs applies this to the whole notion of film
history through Deleuze and vice versa. He provides a
glancing blow on the way through by pointing to that which
many try to avoid in reading the _Cinema_ books. This is
that the books could be viewed as profoundly teleological
works in which the 'time-image' and the emergence of a
cinema of the brain, of the interval, is the 'goal' (156) of
the process. This means that the _Cinema_ books '*are by
definition written from the point of view of the modern*'
(156). The positive side of this evolutionary approach is
that it makes the specific historical nature of the
cinematic signs and forms of production obvious. Put simply,
the movement of history is specific and the cinematic
production of signs changes with a change generated at least
in part internally by the cinema itself. Put even more
simply, if you are going to be specific about film history,
there is probably no generalisation possible about the
nature of cinematic signs. Deleuze, despite the possible
teleological nature of the _Cinema_ books, is constantly
careful to point out that he is not presenting an exhaustive
analysis that will stand for all time. Kovacs goes on to
give an analysis of the modern's relation to the new and the
break, and points to the way in which 'the digital culture
of the 1990s has blown up and popularized [this] to
incredible proportions' (169). In another essay, Francois
Zourabichvili's 'The Eye of Montage' gives detailed
consideration to the relation between cinema and the notion
of the machine with regard to Vertov and Bergson. To my mind
it also answers many of the problems Schwab finds within the
_Cinema_ books. In one of the clearest answers yet to
those who question the use of Deleuze's _Cinema_ books
beyond the films they themselves analyse, there is Dudley
Andrew's quite wonderful analysis of West African cinema in
'The Roots of the Nomadic'. For a start, Andrew has a much
clearer notion of the nomadic than one finds in many
Deleuzian discussions of the same. This involves a much more
complex (and one might say 'desiring') relation to cultural
and geographical roots than the term is often burdened with.
Andrew also gives a lovely account of what he calls,
following Deleuze's 'the people who are missing', the
'movies-that-are-missing' (245). This occurs in the
emergence in Nigeria and Ghana of a video market where films
are shot cheaply and distributed direct to video. Andrew's
discussion should be compulsory reading on all new media
courses. 6. Ethics and the Evil of
Morality The final section of the book,
'Thinking Images', deals extensively with ethics. If thought
is 'outside thought' (whatever that may be) how do we then
deal with thought's relation to the world. What do we do
with it? Lambert's essay, discussed above, clarifies the
issues. This is followed by Eric Alliez's 'Midday, Midnight:
The Emergence of Cine-Thinking'. This asserts that the
consequence of a differential ontology is not just any
ethics of heterogeneity, so popular these days with some
sections of what remains of the left and right of politics,
but an ethics of heterogeneity that makes us 'believe in
this world, in this image here, in the identity of thinking
and life' (299). Tom Conley's 'The Film Event' is a fine if
unadventurous analysis of the nature of the event which
begins with Montaigne (and somewhat inexplicably insists, in
distinction to the rest of the book, on both French and
English translation for quotes). It is perhaps the only
slight disappointment in the collection, if only because
personally I did not feel carried forward by it. Peter
Canning's 'The Imagination of Immanence', however, I did
enjoy. It is a clear and incisive analysis of the difference
between morality and ethics. Nothing is clearer on what
Canning unhesitatingly calls the 'evil' of morality. Nothing
could be clearer on the political dimensions of this, in
particular on the way in which morality invents evil in
order to police and coerce, by 'campaigning for and
practicing its [evil's] eradication' (331). Nothing
could be clearer on the point of a Deleuzian ethical
philosophy, and Canning ends with a call for a 'new social
link based upon hospitality and cooperation' and
'nonrelation' (357). Finally, just when one thought the
feast was over, Flaxman has incorporated a translation of
one of the lesser known interviews Deleuze gave on his
relation to the cinema, 'The Brain Is the
Screen'. Obviously I recommend this book as a
wonderful point of engagement with the _Cinema_ books,
whether one has read them or not. Moreover, I recommend it
as one of the more interesting assessments of where film
studies is at the moment, as well as where it could be
going. University of New South
Wales Sydney, Australia Bibliography Bergson, Henri, _Matter and Memory_,
trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books,
1991). --- _Creative Evolution_, trans.
Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1911). Deleuze, Gilles, _Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). --- _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989). Freeland, Cynthia A., and Thomas E.
Wartenberg, eds, _Philosophy and Film_ (New York: Routledge,
1995). Griggers, Camilla, _Becoming-Woman_
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1997). Hayward, Susan, _Cinema Studies: The
Key Concepts_, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge,
2000). Norretranders, Tor, _The User
Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size_ (Middlesex:
Penguin, 1998). Perkins, Claire, 'Cinephilia and
Monstrosity: The Problem of Cinema in Deleuze's _Cinema_
Books', _Senses of Cinema_, no. 8, July-August 2000
<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/deleuze.html>;
accessed 15th July 2001. Shaviro, Steven, _The Cinematic Body_
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993). Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Andrew Murphie, 'Is Philosophy Ever
Enough?', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue, vol. 5
no. 38, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n38murphie>.
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