Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 49, December 2002
Roger Dawkins
An Infrared Vision of the World
Deleuze, the Sign, and _In the Mood for Love_
'The cinema does not just
present images, it surrounds them with a world.' Gilles
Deleuze [1] I often imagine how good
it would be to have a pair of those infrared binoculars --
the ones always used by the hero in movies to see what's
ordinarily hidden by darkness. Similar is the alien's vision
of warmth in _Predator_. In this film the commandos, led by
Arnold Schwarzenegger, cannot escape the prying eyes that
see the warmth of their bodies (no matter how much guerrilla
is in their warfare). My binoculars would be
more like glasses though, and could be adjusted to various
settings depending on my mood. But I'd still use them as a
way of seeing what ordinarily wasn't there -- in other
words, what is there but perhaps invisible. Like someone's
thoughts for example, or their emotions. Perhaps I could set
my glasses to see the oxygen being sucked up by a mass of
dancers in a nightclub; the heat from the sun in the shade;
the light reflecting off the ocean while I surf; and the
ideas before they're formed in my head. It is with this sense that
I watch Wong Kar-Wei's 2001 film _In the Mood for Love_. Yet
particular about this film is that I don't need special
glasses, because everything's in plain view already. _In the
Mood for Love_ is like a melting pot of 1960s life in Hong
Kong. It presents to us the
hustle and bustle of life as we usually see it, but it also
shows certain things that are ordinarily invisible -- no
less real, simply less visible. For instance, it shows all
the relations, like a harlequin's cape, which surround
everything and from which every character chooses a course
of action. It shows the emotions that circulate prior to the
protagonists' feelings. It shows the virtual thoughts from
which every thought is a meaningful expression. For me, Wong Kar-Wei's
film is an infrared perspective on the world, and in this
paper I want to consider how this is the case. How does this
film open onto a virtual dimension of what is given, onto
the affections, actions, and thoughts from which every
object and body is a meaningful expression? How does _In the
Mood for Love_ let us see what is real but ordinarily
invisible? To answer these questions
I will approach film as a language. To begin with I will
discuss language as a perspective on the world, and how,
since this is the case, the visions of my infrared glasses
are (in principle) the potential of all languages (spoken,
written, artistic, filmic). This is the subject of part one.
Then, in part two, I will address some of the ways the
universe is realised in a language and its signs. My focus
here will be on the kinds of signs Gilles Deleuze interprets
from Marcel Proust, each of these referring to a different
perspective on the world. Finally, in part three, I will
consider Wong Kar-Wei's film as language, the essence of
which is the same virtual world. Important in this section
though is how _In the Mood for Love_ makes the most out of
its signs, giving us an infrared vision of the
world. Part One: *Plane of
Immanence* Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari describe my infrared vision in ontological terms.
To see what is real but hidden is to tap into a primary
state of reality, where all is given and all is visible.
They call this primary state the *plane of immanence*.
The plane of immanence is
the ontological beginning of life, and so it is like a
tangled skein of all the 'categories' that make life. As
such, the plane is a plan of infinite action and reaction; a
crucible of qualities; a shimmering of light: a primeval
soup with neither 'centre, nor left, nor right, nor high,
nor low'. [2] It is 'a host of facts, occurrences,
implications, thoughts, emotions and associations past and
present'. [3] The plane of immanence
also takes into account something else, something principal
to its nature as 'cosmological birth of the world'.
[4] Without centre, the plane of immanence has no
reference point to which a past, present, and future are
relative. Instead, time swells in all directions and is a
product of the plane's movement and flow. The plane's
relations and flux are not subordinate to time (for there is
no concept of time separate from the plane's existence), and
so all relations take place in time. Therefore, to think of
a past and present is to think only of a moment constantly
split into a present which passes and a past which is
present. To help us understand the
plane of immanence better, we might trace its inception into
Deleuze's philosophy back to Benedict de Spinoza's
anti-theologism and, more specifically, Deleuze's
interpretation of Spinoza's doctrine of univocal substance.
Deleuze's monograph, _Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_,
reveals a relationship between the plane of immanence as a
kind of primeval soup, and Spinoza's conception of God. In
the _Ethics_ Spinoza suggests that God cannot be personified
(like the kind of figure portrayed by George Burns in the
_Oh God_ films), but is something more abstract: 'a being
absolutely infinite'. [5] Spinoza describes God as a
'substance', and in terms of how God gives life (if he is
not a figure that performs miracles), Spinoza refers us to
what he calls the 'infinity of attributes' implicated in the
existence of substance. For instance, the attribute of
thought and the attribute of extension are two examples,
and, for Spinoza, it is from attributes like this that every
mode of life is a product. Perhaps a similar way of
understanding the plane of immanence is to jump forward to
the late 19th century and think in terms of Charles Peirce's
phenomenology. For instance Laura U. Marks, writing in 2000,
explicates a Peircian ontocosmology based on what she
interprets as a 'pure materiality of the word', a 'zeroness'
of life, in which 'the whole universe is involved or
foreshadowed'. [6] Furthermore, Peirce seems to come
close to Spinoza's conception of the attributes when he
describes three related Categories of being which, according
to Marks, refer to three notions of reality essential to the
primordial state of zeroness. They are: Firstness as the
category of qualitative possibility; Secondness as the
category of actual existence; and Thirdness as the category
of the relation or event. Thus we can claim this tangled
skein of the universe to be univocal in so far as all life
partakes in some way of these three Categories of being.
The above ideas, from
Deleuze, Spinoza, and Peirce, give us an idea of an ontology
of the universe, yet there is one more principle we must
consider. This is what Deleuze calls, from Spinoza's thesis,
the principle of expression. *Expression* refers us to the
process involved in the relation between God and existing
things, and so with this principle in mind we would say that
substance (or God) expresses itself in attributes (like
thought and extension), and these attributes, in turn, are
*expressed* in bodies, plants, rocks, and other existing
things. But what is so significant
about couching the evolution of the universe in terms of
expression? If we consider a definition of expression, we
will see that the French infinitive
*expliquer*, from the Latin *plicare*, means '*deplier*,
*derouler* or to unfold in different series'. [7] In
line with this definition we can suggest expression as a
kind of *extension* or *development*, and, returning to
Spinoza, this means we would claim the modes as a
*development* of the attributes, and the attributes as a
*development* of substance. Yet there is something else more
important here: it is the fact that this development is
described as an unfolding *in different series*. Therefore
we must clarify things and say that, on the one hand, my
body is a development of the attributes, making it an
extension of substance; and on the other hand, my body is an
*expression* of the attribute of extension -- or, in other
words, an expression of difference. In short, expression
tells us that: 1, although an extension of substance, there
is no *resemblance* between my body and the attributes of
substance; and therefore: 2, the nature of the
substance-attribute-mode 'link' is what Deleuze calls
*essential* only. I want to retain this idea
of expression from a Spinozistic context for a more general
discussion of the universe. As a concept it suggests an
evolutionary ontology whereby all life is a product of
something universal and essential, but most importantly, as
an *expressive* ontology, it suggests that life is not the
*reflection* of something transcendental. Life therefore is
a growth and evolution of immanence. For Spinoza, this has
important implications for the individual. Expression means
that a true and adequate knowledge of things, life, the
universe etc., lies not within the limits of one's
imagination, or through reference to some transcendental
ideology. Instead, the highest kind of knowledge can be
gained by looking inwards and realizing that all life is an
explication of what is immanent and absolute in the
universe. Moreover, this power of understanding is the
potential of all thinking things in the universe.
*Assemblage* For Deleuze and Guattari,
language follows the path of life's immanent
expression. For instance we might
consider Pier Paolo Pasolini's _Heretical Empiricism_ and
say that reality is a language. In this case the objects and
bodies of the extended world are a language, in so far as
they are expressions of matter and, more generally, the
plane of immanence. Yet we would have to emphasize that, for
Pasolini, this expression is not the reflection of anything
external to the expressions: instead it is an articulation
of what is already there. This is the differentiation of
something that is formed, but undifferentiated. In the same way then we
can follow Deleuze and say that natural language has as its
principle an immanent relation of phonemes. In this case the
essence of language is a heterogeneous plane of phonemes, of
vowel sounds, gutturals, and non-sense. Each word therefore
is less the reflection of a language system and more the
differential threshold of immanence. [8] Similar is his thesis in
_The Movement-Image_ and _The Time-Image_. For Deleuze
cinema is an expression of material intensity, and in this
case he calls the virtual dimension of language the
movement-image's *plane of consistency*. Comprising this
plane, and homologous to the ontology of the universe, are
the undifferentiated categories of life. Deleuze claims the
cinematic sign to be an expression of the categories flowing
beneath the surface of the image, and in this case, and
borrowing from Charles S. Peirce's phenomenology, he labels
these categories: affection, action, and
relation. A language therefore is an
assemblage of relations at a particular moment in time. It
has no fixed centre, and is not organised according to
anything outside its terms. It is an amalgamation of terms,
but not an organisation. An assemblage therefore is like a
map of the universe, and in terms of its principle of
differential expression, it is a non-Euclidean map of
gaseous proportions (the very space of which is constituted
by the movement of its vectors). Part Two:
'Apprenticeship' In _Proust and Signs_
Deleuze focuses on this sense of immanence in language. He
suggests that language, in its various forms, is an
'apprenticeship'. Deleuze uses the idea of the
apprenticeship to suggest that an aim of language is the
*progression* through certain different types of sign. In
this respect, the task of the apprenticeship is to arrive at
'Artistic Signs' that celebrate what he calls (in a rather
Spinozistic manner), 'essence'. I want to suggest that when
a sign is expressive of essence in this way, it shows the
differential categories of being in the universe. Language is an
*apprenticeship* though because not all signs realise
essence. Although all signs have essence as their principle,
some are conventional and are maintained within the rules of
an oppositional *structure*. Therefore a sign might have a
quality as its object, or even a memory, but if these are
construed in relation to something external to their terms,
then they are not expressive of essence. A quality, for it
to be a sign of essence, must refract the universe of
quality; a memory, for it to be a sign of essence, can't be
my memory or your memory, but must be expressive of a *world
memory*: what Deleuze describes in the cinema books as a
'pure recollection'. [9] The task of language then
is to find *disruptions* in conventional representations,
'accident zones' in the everyday order of things,
*alcoholism* in the day to day of things. [10]
From Proust's text Deleuze
writes that the apprenticeship is based first of all on a
negotiation of what he calls 'Worldly Signs'. Worldly Signs
reflect an experience of the world steeped in tradition and
convention, meaning that signs of this type are born of
'involuntary intelligence'. [11] Therefore these
signs are conventional in nature, and, as an example,
consider the *hardness* of the object in relation to the
*idea* of 'hardness', and the opposition of this concept
from other principles like 'malleability', 'brittleness',
etc. Obviously then, Worldly Signs do not take difference
into account, and are not constitutive of essence.
Next he describes another
type of sign in our experience of the world: the 'Signs of
Love'. For Deleuze these signs are based on a similarly
fixed perspective on the universe. This time difference is
subordinate to the lover's feelings of anxiety and jealousy
in relation to what Deleuze describes as the secret world of
the beloved. He writes that everywhere the lover turns, s/he
is confronted with what he interprets as signs of the
beloved's deception and lies. Objectivity, therefore, is
subordinate to love. Still following from
Proust, 'Sensuous Signs' are formed when one interprets an
object or thing according to the recollections of their
involuntary memory. An example might be the memories I
associate with watching certain films, the same memories
that, if they disappear, might take a moment of my childhood
with them. Again, these signs anchor our interpretation of
the world, yet this time the anchorage is
temporal. Finally, the 'Signs of
Art' are signs of essence and transcend all ideological
underpinning and moments of subjective construal. In this
respect they celebrate the differential relations of the
universe. Involved, for example, might be an interpretation
of an object's possible existence, and this interpretation
need not be limited to the object's actual existence in a
state of things. An artistic sign may relate the degrees of
whiteness possible within the purest of whites, like a field
of snow or a sheet of paper. An interpretation of essence
may take into account all the potential actions of a body:
its vectors of movement. It may also take into account all
the discourses surrounding a judgement. In this example a
particular judgement is like a throw of the dice, each throw
being a singularity, and furthermore, throwing is the only
rule. [12] Part Three: _In the Mood
for Love_ Wong Kar-Wei's film is
interesting because it charts the sign's expression of the
universe. It presents what I'm calling an *infrared vision*,
and in doing so grapples with the problem of the sign's
expression of essence. Set in the early 1960s in
Hong Kong, this film is about the affair of Chow Mo-wan
(Tony Leung), a newspaper editor, and Su Li-zhen (Maggie
Cheung), a secretary working for an adulterous travel agent.
Initially, theirs is a chance encounter: typical of Hong
Kong life in the 60s, Mo-wan and Li-zhen (and their spouses)
move in with two separate families (although next door to
each other), in a busy down-town block . . . Maybe because
of their close proximity, Mo-wan's wife and Li-zhen's
husband begin having an affair, and the two protagonists are
inadvertently thrown into their own complicated
relationship. Primarily, _In the Mood
for Love_ is about the chaos of chance encounters. In this
respect we can say that it maps the plane of immanence. For
instance, we first meet Mo-wan after he misses out on
renting the room Li-zhen just took. However, Li-zhen's new
landlord is nice enough to suggest the household next door,
where Mo-wan soon takes up residence. What ensues is a
sequence where we see the two protagonists moving in,
coincidentally, on the same day. Erratic hand held camera
actions complement the yells and conversations of the
removalists and the general hustle and bustle, while Mo-wan
and Li-zhen move their stuff (spouses not included),
constantly tripping over each other, accidentally putting
things in the other's apartment, noticing each other . . .
At the same time though,
both the protagonists are involved in their own individual
worlds. Deleuze would say these are the worlds enveloped by
their beloved. That is to say, both Mo-wan and Li-zhen are
married and in love (we assume), and according to Deleuze's
description of the 'Signs of Love', we could say that both
are teetering on the edge of the world of their beloved --
trying to understand them, trying to please them, trying to
decipher the inevitable lies and secrets that come with
being in love. Deleuze writes that the world of the loved
one is 'a world that excludes us . . . that the beloved will
not and cannot make us know'. [13] From Deleuze's
explication of Proust, the experience of love is always one
of interpretation, jealously, and anxiety. Love's signs are
thus 'deceptive signs that always conceal what they express:
the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and
thoughts that give them a meaning'. [14] Such is a
process of 'avowal' through which meaning is constantly
sought in the beloved. [15] With this idea of the
beloved is a notion of experience riddled with subjectivity.
The lover is constantly looking for signs and using their
intelligence in an attempt to 'work out' the beloved. Also,
Deleuze writes that the process of loving is itself the
repetition and application of a *law*. Such is a serial
repetition of a primordial notion of 'love' that is manifest
in the opposing and contrasting relations of a succession of
loved ones: 'each love contributes its difference, which was
already included in the preceding love, and all the
differences are contained in a primordial image that we
unceasingly reproduce at different levels and repeat as the
intelligible law of all our loves'. [16] However when the
protagonists begin their affair the film becomes even more
interesting. For example, there's a
scene in a restaurant where we can see the worlds of the
beloved being opened up. In this particular moment of the
film, Mo-wan and Li-zhen get together to talk, and each is
suspicious of the other's spouse, but neither is initially
sure enough to say anything. After a while though, the signs
are revealed: Mo-wan mentions a handbag of Li-zhen's; a
style of handbag that his wife has also, and that turns out
to be a gift to both women from Li-zhen's husband. Similarly
Li-zhen mentions the tie Mo-wan is wearing, claiming that
her husband has the exact one: 'He wears it every day' she
says. As this revelation happens, the slow cross-cutting
between characters, as they sit at a seedy dinner table, is
all of a sudden disrupted by a swift and sudden backwards
and forwards pan between Mo-wan and Li-zhen. While the
horizontal movement of the camera unites them through their
mutual revelation, something else is happening also. Not
only is the intersection of the character's worlds based on
the betrayal of their spouses, the camera movement also
seems to suggest the kindling of a new relationship between
Mo-wan and Li-zhen. The camera marks the beginning of their
affair, and as such, marks the creation of new worlds, of a
new beloved for each of the protagonists. As this relationship
develops throughout the rest of the film, what is most
interesting are the stakes of the affair for the
protagonists. On the one hand, the affair suggests and
depends on the typical 'other world' of each character's new
beloved. In this sense, the characters always meet *between*
places, in this *other world* that is different from
everyday life: in alley ways, in the rain, in hotel rooms,
on the phone. Like all affairs, rarely do Mo-wan and Li-zhen
meet in their 'real' or actual worlds. They constantly meet
in hidden zones, creating hidden worlds of their desire and
secrecy. The affair, then, is based on the law of the
secret. On the other hand though,
the protagonists constantly say that they do not want to be
'like them', like their sneaky and deceitful spouses. In a
lot of ways their affair is reactionary, but not reactionary
in the nature of opposition or revenge. They seem to use
each other as a way of attempting to neutralise their
participation in the world of their cheating spouses. For
instance, they practice mock confrontations, and in one
particular scene Li-zhen pretends that Mo-wan is her husband
and accuses him of infidelity. In so doing she tries to
negotiate his lies and maintain her feelings. These scenes
often appear as moments of falsification in the narrative,
and usually the viewer does not realise until after that it
is a mock confrontation. Why is this interesting
though? Quite simply, the
characters' self-consciousness can be seen as an attempt to
map Deleuze's world of essence. _In the Mood for Love_ is a
story about the characters' attempts to maintain a certain
objectivity and clarity in their relationship, and so it is
really a story that attempts to chart Deleuze's
apprenticeship. It has the virtual world of complication as
its principle, and this is evident with the assemblage of
actions, feelings, and relations from which the affair(s)
spring, but also it has essence as the experience Mo-wan and
Li-zhen are attempting to steer their relationship
towards. For example, at one moment
they even rehearse their own break up. With this they try
and maintain their feelings and prevent the uncertainty and
anxiety that inevitable leads to the lies and deceit of
love. Yet these scenes do not appear from the outset as
moments of falsification in the narrative, and so the fact
that they are so indeterminately false testifies to how
close to essence the lovers get in their
apprenticeship. It is with these
rehearsals and falsifications that the film celebrates
essence -- in other words, peeling back the actual to show
what's hidden at its depths. Deleuze describes early Soviet
cinema in the same sort of way, writing that montage is
constitutive of a kind of kaleidoscopic vision of the world:
like the thousand faceted eyes of the insect. Yet whereas
the kind of accelerated montage particular to films like
Dziga Vertov's _Man With A Movie Camera_ exposes an infinite
continuum of matter, objects, bodies, and people in
relation, we can say that _In the Mood For Love_ is more an
*infrared vision* of the world. The characters reveal the
signs of love to each other and make themselves aware of
love's consequences. In doing this they expose themselves to
the universe of feelings and affections; they try to grasp
these feelings and understand them by removing them from the
vector of jealousy and betrayal so typical of the beloved.
They rehearse the signs resonating from their bodies: their
actions, the relations of these actions, and their gestures.
Each time the characters meet, with each rehearsal and each
feigned smile, it's as if the plane of immanence, ordinarily
so imperceptible, is rendered visible. *In the end however, they
are doomed* In the end, they simply
fall in love. The signs that they try to create with their
mock confrontations and rehearsals are inextricable tied to
the lover. As Deleuze writes in _Proust and Signs_, these
signs are too bound to their material of expression, and
therefore can never transcend the constraints of their
identity. The protagonists become embroiled in their own
affair, in the interpretation of the other's 'Signs of
Love'. At various moments we see the strain involved in
Li-zhen's attempt to penetrate Mo-wan's world, a particular
example being when she goes to rendezvous with him in a
hotel room. Quick edits, jump cuts, and repetition show her
anxiety as she rushes up and down the stairs of the foyer,
completely indecisive, her interpretative faculties working
over time as she asks herself: 'Should I or Shouldn't I?'
On the one hand, the
apprenticeship fails. If we return to my analogy at the
beginning of this paper, we could say that both Mo-wan and
Li-zhen had access to the infrared glasses, and they had
instructions (they were both, after all, suffering the
fall-out of adulterous partners). Yet they failed to 'see'
the differential relations of the universe and create signs
of essence because they were in love. Accompanying these
feelings is a loss of subjectivity, and with a loss of
subjectivity, the anguish of the beloved. On the other hand though
the film ends with the lovers breaking it off, and in this
sense their apprenticeship succeeds. It's rather sad to
suggest that the apprenticeship depends on destruction in
this way, but it's not sad when we remember what the lovers
were setting out to achieve. They wanted objectivity. They
wanted to understand the actions of their partners, and
although this understanding had to be a product of Mo-wan's
and Li-zhen's relationship, what was always primary was the
mastery of feelings. This is like the cliché
perpetuated often in most romantic comedies, whereby the
beloved claims, 'I just don't want to get involved, I've
been hurt too often. . .'. In Mo-wan and Li-zhen's case
though, they put this principle into practice by attempting
to master the conditions of their relationship. The film
makes clear Deleuze's argument that the grasping of essence
is impossible within the tangled web of the lovers'
discourse. For me though this film
isn't so much about whether the lovers fail or succeed. It's
about the path traced by the lovers' relationship. It's
about the territory created by their encounter, and in my
eyes this territory is the essence of language: an infrared
territory. Sydney,
Australia Footnotes 1. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema
2: The Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.
68. 2. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema
1: The Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), p. 58. 3. John Cournos,
'Introduction', in Andrey Biely, _St Petersburg_, trans.
John Cournos (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. xi.
4. This phrase is from
Jean Louis Schefer's _L'Homme ordinaire du cinema_ (Paris:
Gallimard, 1981). See Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, p. 37.
5. Gilles Deleuze,
_Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 13. 6. Laura U. Marks, 'Signs
of the Time: Deleuze, Peirce and the Documentary Image', in
Gregory Flaxman, ed., _The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and
the Philosophy of the Cinema_ (London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 196. 7. Andre Pierre Colombat,
'Deleuze and Signs', in Ian Buchanan and John Marks, eds,
_Deleuze and Literature_ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000), p. 14. 8. For the idea of *the
differential threshold of immanence*, see Deleuze's
_Difference and Repetition_, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 205. 9. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, p.
98. 10. For the idea of
alcoholism as a window on difference, see Deleuze's writing
on F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Twenty-Second Series: Porcelain and
Volcano', trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, in
Constantin V. Boundas, ed., _The Logic of Sense_ (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990). 11. Deleuze, _Proust and
Signs_, p. 98. 12. Deleuze borrows the
idea of the dice-throw from Nietzsche, and it appears
throughout _Difference and Repetition_. 13. Deleuze, _Proust and
Signs_, p. 9. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p.
84. 16. Ibid., p. 68.
Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2002 Roger Dawkins, 'An
Infrared Vision of the World: Deleuze, the Sign, and _In the
Mood for Love_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 49, December
2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n49dawkins>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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