Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Deleuze Special Issue
Vol. 5 No. 41, November 2001
Barbara M. Kennedy
Fugitive Spaces -- Between the Critical and the Creative
A Reply to Amy Herzog
Amy Herzog 'Reassessing the Aesthetic: Cinema,
Deleuze, and the Art of Thinking' _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special
Issue vol. 5 no. 40, November
2001 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n40herzog In response to Amy Herzog's recent
critique of _Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of
Sensation_ [1] I firstly want to acknowledge her
valid concerns in relation to those elements of Deleuze that
have not been taken up in the book, but also to defend the
very experimental nature of the project, written, as I
highlighted very clearly, from artistic and creative zones
of indetermination. Herzog herself indicates that Deleuze's
interest in film and the arts generally lies in their
contribution to the 'art of living'. [2] My point
exactly. This was the perspective from which the book was
written, or shall I say *painted*! My intentions were never to take up a
philosophical project, specifically one so contradictory and
contentious as that of Deleuze (I leave that to the
ontological pursuits of the *philosophers*), but to re-think
through those a-signifying spaces, the experiential of the
cinematic through *collision* with Deleuze. Whilst I
acknowledge that for Deleuze creative possibilities lie
within the affective temporalities and the 'self', which are
modalities of durational and existential 'potentia'
performing as they do through the qualitative
multiplicities, it was never my intention to explore this
within the book. As Dorothea Olkowski has stated, 'each and
every affection is situated at the *interval* between a
multiplicity of excitations received from *without* and the
movements about to be executed'. [3] So, affectivity
occurs or is effectuated within the intersticial spaces
between excitation and action. _Deleuze and Cinema_ performs
as excitation. Such Bergsonian influence is nonetheless part
of a wider trajectory which is processually emanating from
the book into my current project -- both filmic and
choreographical (using my *body* to think with) -- on
Choreographies of the Screen, work which manifests a
post-feminist collusion of the creative and transformational
possibilities of duration and temporality. _Deleuze and
Cinema_ was but a stepping stone towards opening up
possibilities for practice and theory across
film/art/feminisms, possibilities which, certainly in my own
work, now closely align themselves with Deleuze-Bergsonism.
The book begins by acknowledging this distance from both the
_Cinema_ books, its project one of creative assemblage, not
explication or philosophical expediency. Taking those debates forward, _Deleuze
and Cinema_ has initiated more contemporary work in filmic
practice and choreography which will imbricate with the book
(and beyond), through feminisms which embrace duration and
change -- a feminism which is an ethics of becoming and not
a politics. Neo-aesthetics is thus re-considered beyond any
representational medium, through the transitional space
*between* the perception and the action. _Deleuze and
Cinema_ provided that plateau for experimental work to
develop, which is exactly what is happening within
post-feminist and film theory, not to mention film practice.
Herzog's understanding of *sensation* shows a limited
acknowledgement of the ways in which the concept is explored
in _Deleuze and Cinema_. Rather than the films *engendering
sensations* (Herzog), _Deleuze and Cinema_ attempts to
collide and transpose by an architectonic and technologised
manifestation of the film experience. Such an experience is
articulated beyond the visual and thus there is no
prioritisation of the *films* per se in terms of images,
sounds, colours, rhythms -- these are concepts which are
transported through material and assemblaged constructs. Her
criticism of the *shot-by-shot* explication of particular
sequences, specifically that of the film _Orlando_, fails to
acknowledge that it is *precisely* the temporality of those
shots which effectuates the haeccetas. Shot-by-shot
explication in itself is a technologised understanding of
the temporal, and of course it is unacceptable to suggest
that any film can be explained by such shot-reverse-shot
mechanisms. Herzog is critical of the 'microscopic' detail,
but this is vital for an understanding of how the film
*works* ontologically as film, and not what it means. It is
clearly the duration and temporality of these shots which
technologise the processual and experiential notion of film
as body and film as observer: but most of all film as
assemblage. Whilst Herzog is right to suggest that _Deleuze
and Cinema_ does not bear out the full capacity of the
questions it poses, nonetheless is performs as a durational
space within a becoming of film theory/philosophy/feminisms.
It moves, it performs -- it *acts* and thus mobilizes future
possibilities. Giving the book a triptychal structure
was a creative *mobilizing* of Deleuzian philosophy -- by
colliding such sections the aim was one of creativity and
possibility -- not linear or logical rhetoric, nor rational
argument per se. If any objectives were highlighted, as
Herzog indicates, 'to forge a new aesthetics', this was only
part of a much wider artistic project -- an avant-garde
project in itself. Within the tripartite structure the
further differentiation and splitting of the Deleuze section
was but a series of brush strokes, fibrillations, and
nuances of the canvas itself, and as such an expression of
*temporality* in a pure form. I acknowledge that the pathway
from desire and pleasure, through becoming-woman and affect
to sensation, provide a *limited* account of Deleuze's
exponential work in the _Cinema_ books, but the creative
movement through sensation in relation to
duration/temporality is currently being choreographed in my
more recent work. The methodology of Part Two of the book
endeavoured to provide a non-locatable space for the reader.
Herzog's restricted understanding of Part Three explains its
emphasis upon the aesthetic, material qualities of the
films. It does not of course do this, but acknowledges the
in-between spaces of the molar, the *image* of the screen,
with those molecularities inherent within the qualitative
multiplicities of affectivity. To discuss the *qualities* of
the films is a restrictive conceptualisation of the nature
of the project. The concepts were not so much *utilised*,
but rather *technologised*. Herzog is critical of the
multiple references 'to liquidity and the fluid', which
produce 'emotional' responses; critical of their
manifestation through shot explication. But the very nature
of film and its production is totally dependent upon *shots*
and their articulation. They are fundamentally the means
through which temporality is manifest. This concentration on
*shot* explication then is an implicit understanding of
temporality and duration, something which the opening
sequence of _Orlando_ evocatively exemplifies. What Herzog
means by the film's 'larger unfoldings' is problematic in
this regard. Does she mean narrative/ideology or cultural
significance -- concepts of a redundant film theory? The
concentration on shot analysis deterritorialises the
exploration of film from its narrativity to its performative
strategies, simultaneously acknowledging temporality and
duration. As resonance, vibration, and forced
movement, the book's own *duration* participates as
affective temporality, through the durational spaces of its
language, patterns, spaces, and non-spaces. What is *not*
said becomes part of its complex choreography. The book is a
dance, a painting, and also a poem and homage to *love*. It
is not an academic, linear text with a clearly framed
argument -- the intentions set out specific questions and in
a Chekhovian way it is the proposition of those questions,
in assemblage with the creativity of its haecceties, which
enable the book to perform its aparalletic evolution through
academic discourse, practice, and experience (subjectivity
even!). As an artist and dancer and not as an academic, this
is where I place my spaces, this is where I dance my steps,
contractions beyond the confines of conspiratorial discourse
and academic sterility. _Deleuze and Cinema_ was never
intended to be an explication of Deleuzian philosophy, and
that it chose to engage with *him* and his works is in
itself an affirmation of life and art, not negation. Indeed,
by choosing *not* to concentrate on the problematics of
existing theoretical paradigms in film theory, specifically
psychoanalysis (there is a plethora of texts which do this),
the book articulates an aleatory performance of Deleuzian
*spirit*, which of course Herzog does at least acknowledge.
My *dance with a stranger* was clearly an unprecedented (and
obviously contentious) move in transdisciplinarity, crossing
the borderlands and mestiza of critical theory and creative
writing -- such a monstrous and anomolous coupling of which
Deleuze, I am sure, would have approved. Herzog's criticism of the omission of
any discussion of the distinction between movement-image and
time-image, of course I respect, but such a criticism fails
to acknowledge the implicit understanding of this
throughout, in terms of the technologies of film-making.
Deleuze's own criticism of 'Classical Hollywood' would then
render it impossible for us to take a Deleuzian
understanding to those movies? I think not. Indeed some
writers are already working with Deleuze to reconsider some
favourites from the classical period: Ian Buchanan recently
looking at Hitchcock is a case in point, whilst my own work
reconsiders the jouissance of the musical in a new
light. Herzog's criticism of the book's
discussion of becoming-woman again falls into the age old
trap of thinking through language in sterile and linear or
structural ways. If Herzog had read my text more closely she
would understand that I explain carefully that the concept
*woman* needs to be technologised, and that thinking through
language involves a technologised and machinic understanding
of linguistic prevalence. Indeed, those 'order-words' which
both Bergson and Deleuze were critical of are destabilized
through a technologised understanding. Re-thinking
*language* then allows us to consider *woman* as the order
and processes into which she is installed, not what she
*is*, and thus changes the *politics* which worries Herzog.
Such concepts as *woman* are part of contingent assemblages,
not singular concepts with an *identity*. A post-feminist
framework is an ethical framework -- thinking outside the
boundaries of epistemological, Cartesian, and modernist
thinking. Finally, Herzog makes no mention of my aim of
imbricating the scientific with the artistic, by rethinking
a bio-aesthetics in its consilience with neuroscience.
Again, with resonances of Bergson, but also contemporary
neuroscience, such discussions open up new possibilities for
film theory. In conclusion I want to remind the
reader of some of the claims of _Deleuze and Cinema_. It
states that it is providing a 'move towards a post-semiotic,
post-linguistic exploration of desire and moves beyond a
contemporary politics of difference towards an experimental
'pragmatics of becoming''. [4] In this it succeeds.
It claims to offer new directions in film theory. In this,
as Herzog acknowledges, it succeeds. It 'aims to bring
together the two disciplines of philosophy and film in an
experimental way, which might offer up innovative questions
for engagement in both fields of pursuit'. [5] In
this it succeeds. At the end of the day, the significance of
_Deleuze and Cinema_ as a Spinozist legacy, lies in what it
*does* and not in what it might *mean*. Staffordshire University,
England Footnotes 1. Barbara M. Kennedy, _Deleuze and
Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation_ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000). 2. Henri Bergson, _The Creative Mind:
An Introduction to Metaphysics_, trans. Mabelle L. Andison
(New York: Citadel Press, 1992) p. 106. 3. Dorothea Olkowski, _Gilles Deleuze
and the Ruin of Representation_ (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), p. 93. 4. Kennedy, _Deleuze and Cinema_, p.
5. 5. Ibid., p. 15. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Barbara M. Kennedy, 'Fugitive Spaces
-- Between the Critical and the Creative: A Reply to Amy
Herzog', _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue, vol. 5
no. 41, November 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n41kennedy>.
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