Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 23, July 2004
Thomas Carl Wall
The Time-Image:
Deleuze, Cinema, and Perhaps Language
I. Cinema equals
Language II. _Vertigo_ III. _Maborosi_ IV. Sound, Mood, and
Depth V. Sense
Intensified I. Cinema equals
Language Although Gilles Deleuze's
two volume study of cinema [1] is resolutely
anti-linguistic, it is nevertheless an approach to that
which is internal to language as well as to that which
modern cinema directly presents. Both volumes are enormously
innovative, rich, complex, and difficult. _Cinema 2_, which
I will discuss here, is difficult because it takes us beyond
the sensory-motor schema of the movement-image --
characteristic of classical, pre-war, Hollywood-inspired
films. Subordinated to action, to 'what happens next', or to
'what must be found out', the movement-image is an
action-image and its with previous and subsequent
movement-images reduces or normalizes its original
abnormality and produces narrative. [2] _Cinema 1_
focuses on what is intrinsically interesting in the
movement-image (apart from its narratological role) and in
this volume Deleuze invents a complex, systematic, and
specifically cinematic semiotic (derived largely from C. S.
Peirce) which tears cinema study away from the imaginary and
from linguistics. [3] _Cinema 2_ describes the
recovery of cinema's lost 'secret', the direct presentation
of that to which only language, not perception, is adequate:
time. [4] Beginning with Yasujiro Ozu, [5]
cinema presents time, not movement, and only the fact of
language is equal to its presentation. As the image is not
the presentation of an action, 'what happens next' no longer
matters, and that which is directly presented is not even,
*stricto sensu*, seen. The sensory-motor link is broken and
action becomes irrelevant. Movement no longer 'measures'
time but is folded into time. The difficulty is this: the
time-image is as much read as it is seen/heard. [6]
That which is presented is the metamorphosis of the
perceptible into the legible. More precisely, that which is
presented is the metamorphosis of the perceived into a pure
given-to-be-read. Because of this, paradoxically, cinema
cannot be *a* language (as it is for Christian Metz and his
followers), but it does come to equal language *as such*. To
equal language is not, however, to be linguistic. The
time-image is not a linguistically coded
statement. Movement does not vanish
from the movies of course, but movement is now subordinated
to time, not action. Deleuze describes this as cinema's
'Kantian revolution'. [7] For Kant, time is an
interiority that 'includes' us. [8] Time is that in
which we primordially dwell; it is our 'beginning'. Cinema,
insofar as it directly presents time, 'saves' this
beginning. That which is held in the time-image, I shall
argue, is equally that which is held in language: the
beginning, the thing *ipse*, the threshold, or the
*perhaps*. The cinematic time-image, like language, is the
direct presentation of *potentia*. The subordination of
movement to time neutralizes perception so that that which
is seen becomes readable, but not in the sense that it
becomes a unit of language. Let us say that the *seen* loses
depth, produces surfaces, is dis-coordinated, and must be
read 'into' such that it becomes the image of language as
such: the pure possibility of language or language
*perhaps*. Neither a perception nor a linguistic sign, the
time-image suspends a legible, an *utterable*, [9] a
*lekta*. [10] The time-image presents that which
language will get hold of and form into linguistic units,
but the *utterable* itself is the thing itself of language
and as such it refuses to be spoken just as the 'it' in
'it's raining' is not rain. (There is no actual 'it' that
causes, produces, induces, or gives the rain. It is raining
nonetheless.) _Cinema 2_ approaches the *it*. I speak here of the 'fact'
of language in order to indicate the being-language of
language, language so-called, as such, or language
*perhaps*. The fact of language is given the ambiguous
status *perhaps* because language as such cannot simply be
affirmed or denied. Insofar as language always presupposes a
'something' (an object) on which or about which it speaks,
language will always have missed *itself* because in itself
language is not an object but a medium. [11]
Language *itself* will always have escaped the
logico-temporal structure of linguistic presupposition.
Language itself, in short, is non-linguistic. [12]
It is not governed by any language system and its weakness
-- its inability to speak 'itself' -- is its power to
presuppose. According to Deleuze, when
the signaletic material of the sign is time presenting
itself, then cinema comes to equal language because the sign
must be read as much as seen. The time-image is not,
however, seen/read by the subject/viewer but is, let us say,
'witnessed' by the 'seer' (*voyant*), [13] for whom
reading and seeing continually exchange places, or parallel
each other, or confront each other. Perception is overtaken
by a reading of an infinitive, the viewer is affected by a
memory deeper than memory, and we find ourselves *in* a time
that has never been constituted as part of any present.
Neither a perception nor a textual reading, the seer
'sees/reads' only a *that*, a threshold -- a piece of that
of which it is a sign. Time, to be sure, is not
some palpable, perceptible thing. Its direct (unmediated,
immediate) presentation in cinema will therefore not be
something simply visible/audible. 'Attached' to the image,
time will not merely freeze-frame a movement. Time will be
that which arrests the movement of a movement into an
action. A movement that will not extend into an action will
remain suspended and this suspension will peel itself away
from the seen/said structure of perception and language
which pre-suppose some actuality prior to and outside of
that which is given to me in a representation. Instead of a
seen/said there will be presented strange, not-yet-actual
entities born of familiarity but now autonomous signs of
themselves: doubles and simulacra. Signs of themselves,
these entities are already pure reflections of language. The
time-image is a description, not an action. Movement
subordinated to time does not move into depths but instead
flattens perception into a milieu wherein the familiar scene
metamorphoses into a 'that' on which are inscribed pure
'possibles'. Doubled, enacted before acted, the time-image
will present, or procure, or fabulate that which will only
have been talked about because it will never have been
actualized. The perfectly recognizable actual situation
'leaks' a non-actuality whose being is purely in-language:
[14] 'There are Lulu, the lamp,
the bread knife, Jack-the-Ripper: people who are assumed to
be real with individual characters and social roles, objects
and uses, real connections between these objects and these
people -- in short a whole actual state of things. But there
are also the brightness of the light on the knife under the
light, Jack's terror and resignation, Lulu's compassionate
look. These are pure singularities, qualities, or
potentialities -- as it were pure 'possibles' . . . taken
all together they only refer back to themselves'.
[15] Taken all together these
qualities are a milieu, but the milieu is distinct from the
actual state of things present. It is a complex-surplus of
*possible* connections. The milieu is both these
auto-referential qualities taken all together and also the
dissolving of itself into innumerable 'possibles'. The
milieu *may* be. The milieu is the unstable, the unreliable,
the infinitely questionable. These 'qualities' or
'possibles' are already expressive, already possibly
legible, already, perhaps, language. The milieu is that
aspect of the actual which does not exist solely for the
next moment. These 'possibles' are a medium and hence
already a reflection of the language which they pre-exist
and in which alone they will 'live'. When the sensory-motor
schema (and its compelling consequence, narrative structure)
of classical cinema is disrupted in Ozu (and later, more
forcefully, in Orson Welles [16]), and when sound is
separated from the visual (as in Robert Bresson and
Marguerite Duras [17]), then the milieu will become
a 'that', a threshold on which are inscribed possible
entities or time-things which form a time-image, a 'crystal'
[18]: pure *maybeing*. Language -- the fact of
language -- is the pure expression of the time-image and the
time-image conserves the 'past' of language as a pure past
in the milieu (*as* the milieu), for the milieu will never
have been. Not a state of things, the milieu will always
have been the purely modified, the purely unreliable,
questionable, complex, and problematic. Furthermore, the
milieu will never have left a distinct impression because it
is the medium *of* all actual, distinct, and rememberable
psychological impressions. Its time is non-epochal and is
heterogeneous to both the rectilinearity of progressive time
and the regularity of cyclic time. It is time which always
*at once* stretches from beginning to end because it is in
no way constituted. It is explosive. The milieu -- which
will never have been -- is the original dwelling of every
actuality of which we may become conscious. The fact of
language is its unrememberable memory. The milieu is a gap at the
heart of perception and a not-yet-read at the heart of the
legible. It is the conservation of, perhaps, language and
saves language from being completely codified. The milieu is
a pure past which divides itself from every present, as in
Bergsonian *duration* (which Deleuze recuperates as
essential to his orientation in _Cinema 2_) where time is
that which divides or forks the present which passes from
the past it will have been (but of which it is already an
image, from which it is indistinguishable, and in which it
desists in a pure past). [19] It is a *perpetual*
splitting or doubling, and language is its ultimate
expression. [20] Hence language, at its origin or in
its pre-history, is obliged to communicate a perpetual
exteriority: time as the explosive complex of pure
potential. Language is not originally a tool. It is, at the
outset, the perpetual uncertainty of the milieu and the
communication of this uncertainty. The being who is
classically defined as the being who possess language is the
being who, thus, *perhaps* has language.
Perhaps-to-have-language is to dwell in perpetual beginning,
to dwell outside any environment in pure non-organic,
non-genetic, and unimaginable *maybeing*. II. _Vertigo_ Deleuze is very clear on
this point: 'it is this, it is time, that we *see in the
crystal*'. [21] That which we see is the Bergsonian
splitting or forking or doubling. It is not inferred through
movement. Clearly when, in Alfred Hitchcock's _Vertigo_,
Judy emerges from her bedroom dressed and with her hair done
up in the fashion demanded of her by Scotty, she is split.
She is both Judy and Madeleine, both present and past. (Her
'past' name is no doubt meant to recall Proust's cakes and
the involuntary memory which gives his narrator all of
Combray as a milieu he never actually experienced nor could
recall voluntarily. [22]) Judy walks toward Scotty
but she is divided into two distinct/indistinct doubles
which refer to each other and chase each other in an endless
circuit which forms an autonomous never-existing entity
*neither simply from the past nor simply in the present*:
she ('she') is crystalline. 'You love me because I remind
you of her', she ('she') says to Scotty. 'Yes, but it's you
too!' he says (and implies that she reminds him of herself).
He does not know to whom he speaks. In his brutal zeal to
bring out and complete that which in Judy reminds him of
Madeleine, he succeeds in producing an obscurity. Judy
emerges from the bedroom from out of time, not space. Her
apartment is also the monastery where Scotty last saw
Madeleine and the camera shows this to us as co-present with
the actual apartment they are in. Reproducing in Judy all of
Madeleine's qualities, Scotty fabulates a Madeleine-thing, a
thing of time that remains perpetually contemporaneous with
the present *and the past*. The Madeleine-thing is a thing
of time that perpetually divides into present and past.
Neither Judy nor Madeleine, 'she' is the autonomous
pre-existence of both. 'She' purely *may* be. Taking into
his arms the made-over Judy, he finds himself in a time
which divides him from himself as present and *already*
present. Judy appears to Scotty in
an actual present situation and she resembles Madeleine to
the nth degree. Scotty searches for an end to the
resemblance but he cannot find an end because at a level
deeper than resemblance, historical identity, or Scotty's
own rigorous memory, she ('she') is *more* Madeleine than
Madeleine. 'She' is the more-than-present continuity between
present and past and hence 'she' is absolutely new. 'She' is
a beginning. Scotty searches for an end to the resemblance
but he finds instead an unfinished continuity he is *in*.
This continuity is explosive in that it dislodges Scotty
from his present context and plunges him into the continuity
of his still-beginning passion for Madeleine whom Judy
incarnates. (When, by accident, we see an old lover on the
street after some time has passed and wounds are healed, we
can be struck by a burst of love and desire as that which is
still beginning for the beloved in spite of all our history.
This phenomenon is peculiarly intense because it is
objectless and non-presupposed -- for whom do we feel this
burst of love? And, even more acutely, who is struck in this
way if not 'ourself', but as someone purely *in* time,
someone who is not yet actually there?) In herself, Judy
internalizes present and past. In 'her' all the qualities of
Judy and all the qualities of Madeleine co-exist
continuously. No longer simply present, Judy is the
never-(yet-)present Madeleine; she is Madeleine but as
Madeleine never actually was. Madeleine *perhaps*. Beyond
any memory of her is Madeleine *as such*: *Incipit
Madeleine*. As the incorporeality of a continuity, the
Madeleine-thing remains still new. 'She' is purely legible,
purely possible, purely a sign whose signaletic material is
time. In fact, Judy *is*
Madeleine as the morning star is the evening star. Judy and
Madeleine are the same *denotatum*. However, just like the
morning star and the evening star, 'they' are distinct
*noemata*. In the film, Judy cannot not resemble Madeleine
to the nth degree and Scotty cannot stop himself from
witnessing this; she cannot not be 'Madeleine' (taken as a
verbality). Not merely a perception, Scotty reads into her
all that is Madeleine. To put it succinctly, 'she' is all
that inheres in the *name*: Madeleine. 'She' is pure
seeming, pure appearing-to-be, pure *maybeing*. 'She' is she
whom Scotty always already loves. Not an image nor a set of
properties which can be predicated of someone in particular,
'she' the always purely continuous maybeing of his beloved.
'She' is whatever Scotty wants. She whom Scotty loved was
enveloped entirely in the name. The name is the moment of
breathless temporality before it refers to an item in a
setting. The name names that which time will have sought out
and scarred in order to manifest itself. The name names the
eternal maybeing of the beloved and her exposure to all of
that to which language can refer. Much will have been said
about the Judy/Madeleine *person*, about her character and
her weakness in succumbing to a vile scheme, about her
regrets and her love for the man she deceived. But
originally the name names the purely so-called, the perhaps:
the lovable, the vulnerable, and the utterable. Suspended thus in
language, maybeing is the pure 'moment' of exposure and is
not a real predicate of a pre-supposed someone or something.
Maybeing cannot not be exposed to all that can be said in
language; hence it is a complex and inexhaustible surplus,
or a threshold to that which remains still to come in a
thicklessness or a milieu never presupposed, but in which we
find ourselves. III. _Maborosi_ _Maborosi_ (Japan, 1995),
a film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and starring Mikiko
Esumi, also concerns loss and mourning but without the
bizarre theme of the return of the departed. The film is
noteworthy for being composed entirely of duration shots,
time-images, milieus. In this film, that which the widow
(played by Mikiko Esumi) must endure is sheer everydayness.
We are shown no scenes of grieving and comfort, no scenes
which reveal some hidden truth about her lost husband and
their life together. After his death, we are shown the
street, the cafe, the bicycle, their modest apartment, the
factory where her husband had worked -- all stubbornly the
same as when he was alive and they were happy together.
Although music sometimes accompanies the duration shots, the
film remains absolutely un-musical and moodless. We are
taken sometimes by a shot of great beauty as when she opens
a shutter in her darkened bedroom to let in the icy winter
light, but all the scenes and acts are simple, banal, and
everyday. In every case, in every shot, life has already
come to fill the place of the departed (and thus to empty
itself of the departed). The widow's mother
discusses her future with her after the funeral and
arrangements are made to introduce her to another man. The
woman remarries and the marriage is a happy one. Her son
will probably not retain any memory of his deceased father.
She herself takes up her new existence step by step: the
marriage must be celebrated, the neighbors greeted, the
cleaning done, and her son grows up and must learn to ride a
bicycle, and so on. At the same time, however,
a reality made up of its refusal to become present insists
as if between each scene. Throughout the film we always have
the feeling that something is about to happen -- something
terrible perhaps, but something. [23] We may wish to
see the new husband offer her some sympathy when she begins
to wonder again about her first husband and his somewhat
mysterious death, but the film seems uninterested in either
the sympathetic capacities of the new husband or the details
of the mystery. We nevertheless unquestionably sense
*something* unshown which we try to read into each scene.
But we sense this only because everydayness itself is a
massive *potentia*. The film does not build to a
dramatically revelatory scene of any kind but a surplus of
purely intensive possibilities inhere in the everydayness
Kore-eda presents. There are few, if any,
close-ups in this film because the director is uninterested
in capturing either psychological authenticity or the 'star
quality' of his actors. Medium and long shots compose each
scene with almost always a stationary camera. The woman's
new life is recorded for us as if without comment. Each step
of her existence actualizes an inevitable present the woman
takes on and lives in. She becomes someone-she-must-be
through the sincerity of her commitment to her son, her new
husband, and herself. The woman maintains a sincere
relationship with the existence she takes up, but this
sincerity is torn from other cloth. Her sincerity is a
living-through of something else. She does not fear pain and
loss, nor does she repress feelings -- such that we would
want her to have a cathartic experience that would 'sweep
away the cobwebs' (as Midge suggests to Scotty in _Vertigo_
during his catatonic grieving of the loss of Madeleine).
_Maborosi_ does not revolve around something private and
authentic that remains concealed. It is nonetheless the case
that, in spite of herself, the woman is embraced by a
lassitude she cannot be rid of: washing the basement steps
of her new home by the sea, she grows weary and pauses.
Outside any psycho-corybantic spectacle, there is pause
between each of the steps of her existence, an arrhythmia
which is catastrophic: Everything, continuing. That the film does not
revolve around a central secret or a
something-to-be-revealed makes of it a dispersion rather
than a narrative. Each step of her existence bites into the
future and carves out a present into which the woman
retreats as to an alcove. But these presents are made up of
an unendurable dispersion. In each scene we do not know what
is background and what is foreground. Somehow, everything
the woman does seems abnormal. Depth is temporal and not
spatial. Her routines, her joys, her duties, and her love
for her new husband are movements in time, not space. Inside
this depthless depth the woman is pursued by the vertiginous
thought of her dead husband; a thought which, she tells her
new husband, 'goes round and round in [her] head'
and which she cannot get rid of. Unlike the little bell she
keeps as a memento of her dead husband, this thought keeps
her as its memento. She wanders away from her routines one
day and finds herself waiting for a bus which never arrives,
and then follows behind a procession of Buddhist mourners.
The thought that pursues her cannot be reduced to a memory
or exorcised in a catharsis. The thought is coldly
indifferent to her and her present situation. It is not a
voice, nor is it a calling. Her new husband speaks to her of
the sea and its 'power to beguile' -- when he talks to her
of how his father once saw a mysterious light in the
distance while he was fishing. (We suspect that the father,
who often stares blankly into space or out to the sea is
also pursued by a thought -- of his dead wife perhaps.) The
thought which haunts her, however, is finally nothing other
than her unconditional abandonment -- her abandonment to
thought, to the world, to her own flesh. In fact, her life
with her first husband was already this same abandonment:
with him she was unconditionally happy and abandoned to that
joy. Beyond happiness or unhappiness is an unconditional
abandonment. It is the always uncalled for, the unthought-of
thought. She is returned to her abandonment: to her
beginning. The woman in this film is
not robbed of her ability to act. She is robbed of her
ability to subordinate her movements to end in acts. She
mourns without being able to. She tends to her affairs and
to her son. She remarries. The world in which she acts is
the same as it was before her husband died. Yet she
*returns* to it. She returns to the world she never left
where everything is as it was -- *and* everything is
different from what it was or ever will be. She returns to
that which happens without ever being affirmed, without ever
reaching up into a perception, where all is *perhaps* as it
always is. What is unrecognizable in this world -- that
which we try to read into each scene -- is its very
sameness, its massive familiarity. The dimensions of the
familiar cannot be reduced to a thought, an image, or a
memory. The familiar is a milieu. Hence, the world to which
she returns is not the one she remembers, but the one which
escapes all memory *while remaining the same world*. There
where she is most familiar, she is least present.
Familiarity is always 'beguiling' because it is without a
why, without a subject, without determination, and with
truth. The massiveness of the familiar is a function of the
forgetting, not of Being, but of *having*, of *habitus*.
Everydayness is the always uncalled for and always already
forgotten milieu where non-organic lives live out autonomous
existences. The familiar is not nature, not culture. It is
not a place but a vicissitude, a lassitude, a lapse. We
cannot even say that it exists here or there, near or
yonder. It is the always continuous threshold into which we
routinely disappear, wandering as witnesses where we do not
even recognize ourselves and where we never-have-been.
[24] The language that equals
this familiarity is neither a mysterious, alluring silence
nor idle chatter, but that which we hear 'in' idle chatter
or everyday talk (such as much of the everyday talk
overheard in _Maborosi_): the pure possibility of
communication, or the having of language not as a property
nor a product, but as a habit. [25] To have language
without possessing it or being possessed by it is still to
have time, but without *having* to have it. To have language
in this way is perhaps to speak, perhaps to write, perhaps
to read, but simultaneously to prefer not to, thus,
*perhaps* to have language and thus to return to it. Perhaps
to have language is to dwell in the time anterior to all
being and possessing. IV. Sound, Mood, and
Depth Essential to the direct
presentation of time is the liberation of sound from its
role as guarantor of the whole, of depth and dimension. The
time-image is the 'heautonomy' of sonic and optic.
[26] When sound no longer fills space with depths,
then space is no longer a whole space but an 'any space
whatever', and 'there is now an interstice *between* the
seen and the said . . . an irrational cut . . . a
continually recreated disjunction': [27] 'These are pure optical or
sound situations in which the character does not know how to
respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases to experience
and act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip,
vaguely indifferent to what happens to him, undecided as to
what must be done. But he has gained an ability to see what
he has lost in action or reaction; he SEES so that the
viewer's problem becomes 'what is there to see in the
image?' (and not 'what are we going to see in the next
image?') The situation no longer extends into action through
the intermediary of affections. It is cut off from its
extensions, it is now important only for itself, having
absorbed all its affective intensities, all its active
extensions. This is no longer a sensory-motor situation, but
a purely optical and sound situation, where the seer
[*voyant*] has replaced the agent
[*actant*]: a 'description'.'
[28] Instead of extending into
an action and a narrative progression, the time-image
presents the cut, the disjunction: the non-musical
invisible. In a word, dispersion. Non-narrative,
auto-referential, and auto-temporalized, the time-image is
a-tonal and moodless. Rather than being a tableaux that
opens a linguistic territory wherein the audience can
identify with personalities and be impressed by the
dramatized themes of good, evil, justice, injustice, and so
on, the time-image is a crystal open to innumerable
depthless, non-organic connections. The time-image is *more*
open and *more* presentative than any presentation already
linguistically codified. Unlike Heideggerian 'Mood' or
'Attunement' (*Stimmung*) however, the time-image does not
primordially open onto a totality of beings. Nevertheless, a
comparison to Heidegger's ontological analysis of 'Mood' is
instructive. It is in the section on
*Stimmung* from _Sein und Zeit_ that Heidegger introduces
the important term *Geworfenheit* (Thrownness): [29]
*Das es ist*, or 'that it is', the facticity that Da-sein
*must* be. But Da-sein is 'thrown-being' or is always
already being (being-in, in-the-world, in-amongst-others,
etc.) and mood is the primary attestation to Da-sein's not
being its own origin. Prior to and beyond all cognition,
mood is an evasive turning away that both discloses and
closes off the pure *Da*. Prior to all experience,
*Stimmung* makes possible all that is within the world to
matter in some way and hence to be experience-able.
*Stimmung* veils Da-sein's very self but it also
'structures' Da-sein as the being whose being it is to be
its 'there' veiled-ly, hence perpetually to 'miss' its very
self, its authenticity. Primordially temporal, *Stimmung*
brings us back to something, back to the world. We are
continually traversed by *Stimmungen* and *Stimmungen* are
the very weight of our *must-be-the-there*, our exposure to
being. From one moment to the next we cannot know what mood
we will be in nor why nor what we will feel like doing or
avoiding. Mood is the stunning fact that we are always at
the limit of ourselves, that we are always, as it were, 'on
the verge'. The fondness for drugs and alcohol comes from a
desire to engineer and regulate our moods. If you like,
drugs and alcohol allow us to personally experience our own
moods, for mood is nothing if not unreliable and vaguely
indifferent to us and our activities. Mood colors everything
in advance, altering perception such that there is no
perception that is not always already altered. More simply,
mood is the fact that we are always deluded and serialized
(like a soap opera!) by processions of moods we barely take
note of and barely experience because another mood, just
like the previous mood, is always vaguely imminent. This
serializing of existence, prior to any experience, is the
being-thrown that defines Da-sein: we are deeply marked,
placed, or situated, such that we are always deeply *in*, or
continually born into, our not-being-at-the-origin of our
being. In the limit-mood *Angst*
however, Da-sein finds the Voice of Conscience and is 'able'
to be its 'there' with ontological authenticity. Through the
pure, wordless, given-to-be-understood of the Voice of
Conscience, Da-sein can resolutely *decide*, and not merely
be-led-unto this or that; Da-sein can open onto the totality
of Being. In his study of Heidegger's Da-sein -- and also
Hegel's *das Diese nehmen* ('taking the this') from the
first chapter of the _Phenomenology_ on 'sense certainty' --
Giorgio Agamben recalls *Stimmung* to its root in *Stimme*
(Voice), the acoustico-musical essence of 'Mood' or
'Attunement'. [30] However, *Angst*, remember, is
the experience of the *un*rootedness of *Stimmung*. That is
to say, for Heidegger, language is not the Voice of man and
hence our *Stimmungen* are the experience that language is
not our *Stimme*. That language is not the Voice of man
becomes for Heidegger the origin of the *other* Voice -- the
Voice of Conscience -- as a wordless (that is, a *negative*)
Voice, and in this way he preserves a tradition wherein
another Voice, without language, preserves and makes room
for, and indeed makes possible, the groundlessness of human
being. Because of the august silence of this Voice, Da-sein
can act as the negative foundation of its own
negativity. However, Agamben argues
that it is conceivable (Heidegger notwithstanding) to cancel
the Voice altogether and to read *Stimmung* as the
liberation of language from Voice, as the definitive
cancellation of the Voice, of destiny. Liberated from its
role as guarantor of Voice, of foundation -- even of
Negative foundation -- the *Da* of Da-sein is the very place
of language itself but without a Voice. No longer the
re-moval and consignment of Voice to chronothetic oblivion,
language ceases to function in a metaphysical mystery or an
ontological attestation of authenticity. Human being does
not necessarily have language *negatively* (as re-moval of
Voice) and language ceases to be a negative route to the
properly human dimension whose foundation is unspeakable.
Agamben's insight here is to notice that that which is
metaphysically abysmal is also *habitual*. That is, human
being, deprived of Voice, is also deprived of the abysmal,
negative presentation this absence would be. 'To exist in language
without being called there by any Voice, simply to die
without being called by death, is, perhaps, the most abysmal
experience; but this is precisely, for man, also his most
*habitual* experience, his *ethos*, his dwelling, always
already presented in the history of metaphysics as
demonically divided into the living and language, nature and
culture, ethics and logic, and therefore only attainable in
the negative articulation of a Voice.'
[31] In other words, human
being is not necessarily an agent (of change, of progress,
of history, nor even of conscience, negativity, nor
authenticity). For Agamben there is a 'beyond' of Voice
where human being never-has-been which is the simple
'infancy (in-fari) of man'. [32] Beyond the nihilism
of the absolutely speakable and the spectacular (which
massively re-defines modernity for us), and beyond the
romanticizing of moods or attunements (which has become a
relic of another era), [33] there is a not-yet-born
of human being waiting to be thought. In the language of
this paper, this entity-not-yet-being is purely *perhaps*,
and throughout his career Deleuze has been articulating this
maybeing as a radical *potential* outside any negativity
under the rubric of the *event*. [34] Maybeing is an
event and its temporality is neither the ultimately abysmal
temporality of the pre-supposed, nor is it the active,
linear temporality of the extensive. It is the time of
intensivity: the infinitive temporality internal to language
as such. V. Sense
Intensified The notion of the
time-image is a continuation of work Deleuze had already
begun in _The Logic of Sense_ in the chapters on language
and orality. [35] With the framing of sound and its
heautonomy with image, surfaces are produced and depths (and
their archaic terrors) are canceled. Characters wander
undecidedly and exchange action for a kind of 'seeing' which
is a witnessing of the event as that which an actual
situation 'leaks' (as I have already discussed). Now,
according to Deleuze, the incorporeal (or the *noematic*)
which the actual situation leaks is also simultaneously the
'sense' which inheres in the proposition. They are the same
entity. [36] What is called 'event' and what is
called 'sense' is the same thing. It is the very sharing of
the same thing and it is the time-thing itself insofar as it
is a *continual* process of sharing. As a limit or border
shared -- on the one hand, by the actual situation which
leaks a *noematic* incorporeality, and on the other hand, by
the language that will envelope it in statements -- this
border is also completely empty because it is exhausted in
its being-shared by the two sides it unites/separates. It
has no being of its own. It may-be. It is the 'empty form of
time' and it is the very event-time of sharing/dividing,
uniting/separating the actual and language. If the actual is
what language pre-supposes, the event is the
non-pre-supposed, or the very event of language itself. The
thing itself of language is also the empty 'form' of time.
Cinema, by virtue of its
technico-aesthetic innovations, is able to present this
directly, automatically. It is able to present that which
renders possible whatever is possible. In this way cinema
continually presents pre-linguistic signs and images and
returns the subject/viewer to a memory (beyond memory) of
infancy where infancy will be understood as the difference
between the natural born creature and the being who has
language and can experience and remember this or that.
Deeper than memory is the 'moment' of never-experienced
infancy; no longer merely a noise-machine but
not-yet-linguistic, this infancy has its own autonomy.
Located chronologically between birth and maturity, it
nonetheless has its own power to tear itself from that
chronology by virtue of its continual forgetting and its
continual dispossession of its own thought. Torn from
chronology, infancy does not simply sink into a past but
persists as a pre-maturity and a forgetting that remains
continuously anterior to the powers of the speaking-being of
so-called maturation. Infancy is an irrational cut between
birth and maturity. It sees and thinks . . . whatever --
automatically -- and hence shares, or connects, with the
automation of cinematic apparatuses an 'ability' to not
not-see. [37] The phantom which has always haunted
cinema is the continuation of infancy.
[38] In my discussion of
_Maborosi_, I said that the familiar is a massive
*potentia*. It is also the case that the familiar is,
precisely, the massively normalized. (Normalization is just
the ceaseless postponement of the *potentia* of which I
speak, hence the everyday anxiety with regard to 'what is
normal'.) In the time-image, and with the notion of the
event, Deleuze is able to define something beyond
metaphysics and negativity, and also something ontologically
ambiguous. He defines an awaiting and a witnessing for which
there is no narrative content and no possible citation. This
waiting/witnessing is nothing other than a politics. This
politics does not take the form of a de-familiarization that
reveals either hidden systems of oppression or hidden
psycho-historical depths, but is rather a shattering of the
normalization of the familiar, such that the familiar is
intensified by being suspended prior to the actuality into
which it routinely disappears. Only language as such is
adequate to this suspension, for it already enfolds that
which is still to come. National
Taipei University of Technology Taipei,
Taiwan-ROC Notes 1. Deleuze, _Cinema 1:
L'Image-mouvement_, published in 1983 by Les Editions de
Minuit; _Cinema 2: L'Image-temps_, published in 1985 by the
same publisher. This essay will quote from the translations
by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam: _Cinema 1: The
Movement Image_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986); and Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta: _Cinema 2: The
Time-Image_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989). 2. '[T]he
movement-image seems to be in itself profoundly aberrant and
abnormal movement' (Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, pp. 36-7). It is
aberrant because in fact, on the screen, one sees monstrous
disproportions and impossible perspectives all the time. See
also note 29 below. 3. Chapter 2 of _Cinema 2_
summarizes Deleuze's rejection of Metz and linguistic
analysis of film, as well as his preference for the
semiotics of C. S. Peirce as a starting point for defining a
specifically cinematic semiotic. See also chapter 12 of
_Cinema 1_ and 'Doubts About the Imaginary' from
_Negotiations:
1972-1990_, trans.
Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press), pp.
62-7. 4. 'The direct time-image
is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema, but it
took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom' (Deleuze,
_Cinema 2_, p. 41). 5. See Deleuze, _Cinema
2_, p. 273. 6. Deleuze calls this the
'Lectosign', and it is defined in the glossary to _Cinema 2_
as 'a visual image which must be 'read' as much as seen' (p.
335), to which I will only add that, as the time-image is a
sonic-optic heautonomy, it is also a framed aural
image. I should mention that my
discussion here of a non-linguistically legible image has
been studied at length by Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier.
See her essay 'The Cinema, Reader of Gilles Deleuze', trans.
Dana Polan, in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski,
eds, _Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy_ (New
York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 255-60; see also her essay 'On
Unworking: The Image in Writing According to Blanchot',
trans. Roland-Francois Lack, in Carolyn Gill, ed., _Maurice
Blanchot: The Demand of Writing_ (New York: Routledge,
1996), pp. 138-52. 7. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_,
pp. xi-xii. 8. Deleuze refers to this
'interiority of time' in several works. In _Cinema 2_ (p.
82) he points out that 'Bergson is much closer to Kant than
he himself thinks: Kant defined time as the form of
interiority, in the sense that we are internal to time (but
Bergson conceives this form quite differently from Kant)',
and (p. 32) he says that Kant carries out the 'great
reversal' by which movement is subordinated to time and as
such it tears movement from a generality that would read
movement as linguistic. When movement is subordinated to
time it is divided in itself and becomes *auto*-referential,
hence time originates a crystalline auto-affection and in
this way Deleuze links Kant to Bergson in a manner which
cannot be underestimated for an understanding of his work as
a whole. In _Kant's Critical
Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties_, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984) Deleuze outlines the division of the
subject into an 'Ego' (*moi*) affected by 'its' 'I' (*je*)
-- but as if this 'I' were an Other -- so that 'I am
separated from myself by the form of time' (pp. viii-ix)
This division is crucial to Deleuze's departure from the
psychoanalytic reign of the imaginary. In the beginning is
neither a primal death nor the fatal Word, for 'there is no
other crime than time itself' (Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, p. 37).
But the most thorough discussion of Kantian time and the
paradox of auto-hetero-affection is not from this volume but
from the dense and stunning analyses in chapter II,
'Repetition for Itself', from _Difference and Repetition_,
trans. Paul
Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 85-91, in which he
links Hume and (again) Kant and Bergson. The kernel of
Deleuze's reading of Kantian time comes from a note appended
to section 25 of the 'Analytic of Concepts' of the _Critique
of Pure Reason_, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1965), p. 169: 'The 'I think' expresses
the act of determining my existence. Existence is given
thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this
existence, that is, the manifold belonging to it, is not
thereby given. In order that it be given, self-intuition is
required; and such intuition is conditioned by a given a
priori form, namely time, which is sensible and belongs to
the receptivity of the determinable [in me]. Now,
since I do not have another self-intuition which gives the
determining in me . . . I cannot determine my existence as
that of a self-active being; all I can do is to represent to
myself the spontaneity of my thought . . .' (translator's
ellipses). However, Deleuze 'deepens'
Kant by formulating a passivity that precedes Kantian
receptivity. This prior passivity is a synthesis (hence an
'active passivity') or what he calls
'contemplation-contraction'. That which makes possible
Kantian receptivity is a prior contraction of an outside
which the passive *moi* is then able to be affected by. In
this way, Deleuze radically, and quite colossally,
'materializes' Kant. Prior to the passivity of receptivity
is an enfolding or enveloping which 'becomes' the affected
self. 'In' the affected self is the outside it itself, in
fact, is. Spontaneous receptivity is haunted by an always
prior contact which 'produces' time as an irrecuperable
past. Prior to receptive
sensation is a contraction of that which is to be sensed
thus that which senses is already 'in' the outside it
senses. That which senses is itself a differentiation from
and also a repetition of that which it senses. The *moi*
which senses is in-itself an alteration; its *ipseity* is a
contamination. In any present sensation is hence a past (the
contracted outside) and a future (the anticipation of the
repetition the *moi* itself already is). This is the
'passive synthesis' which is so important to Deleuze's
escape from psychoanalysis. The passive synthesis is
anterior to Kantian receptivity and is also 'older' than the
Freudian Ego. Contemplation-contraction produces time to
which it is interior. For the purposes of this
essay I wish to highlight only certain aspects of the
passive synthesis: 1. The contraction of an outside is
simultaneously the production of time to which the
sensational *moi* is internal; 2. The
contemplation-contraction is simultaneous. No pre-existing
Ego or subject contemplates and then contracts afterwards;
3. There is thus nothing to remember; no spectrality and no
staging occurs. That which 'happens' can only be experienced
*as* repetition (as past-future, as always already and yet
still to come). In my discussion of
_Vertigo_, the 'Madeleine-thing' is that which 'in' Judy can
only be experienced as repetition, and similarly the
everydayness I invoke in my discussion of _Maborosi_ is
entirely 'made up of' repetition. In each case that which
escapes the present is nonetheless undergone as the
exteriorization of an interiority, or to put it somewhat
differently, as an exteriorization of an intimacy too
intimate for a subject to experience within him or herself.
The ontological status of repetition is pure maybeing
because that which is repeated is that which is contracted:
*everything*, the whole milieu within which this or that
rememberable experience occurred. That which is experienced
as more-than-intimate is the medium or the threshold (which
is already the idea of language). Let me add that a
brilliant analysis of the pages from _Difference and
Repetition_ I cite here can be found in Joseph Libertson's
_Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication_
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), pp. 304-9.
What is more, Libertson compellingly links the
contemplation-contraction of Deleuze to 'senescence' in
Levinas and to 'inner experience' in Bataille. 9. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, p.
29. 10. Paul Patton,
'Introduction', in _Deleuze: A Critical Reader_ (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1996), p. 13. 11. In 'Integral
Actuality', part of his Introduction to _The Idea of Prose_
by Giorgio
Agamben, trans.
Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1995), Alexander Garcia Duttmann
describes language as a 'midst', a 'milieu', a '*medio*',
etc. (pp. 3-6). The inspiration of Agamben for my reading of
the time-image will become apparent later in this essay, but
I also acknowledge that Duttmann's astute essay has helped
me formulate my analysis. 12. Steven Shaviro comes
to this same conclusion from a different angle in _The
Cinematic Body_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993). Remarking on the Deleuze and Guattari criticism of
the classic opposition of *langue* and *parole* as
ultimately untenable, Shaviro says: 'Even language, we might
say, isn't really 'structured like a language'' (p.
35). 13. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_,
p. 27. 14. The notion of
being-in-language is taken from Giorgio Agamben's _The
Coming Community_, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993); see in particular the
section 'Homonyms' (pp. 70-7) in which he defines
being-in-language as the 'non-predicative property *par
excellance*'. For a lengthy discussion of this, see my
_Radical
Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and
Agamben_, chapter
4: 'The Political Neuter' (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1999). The notion of being-in-language is also
found in the Walter Benjamin essay, 'On Language as Such and
on the Language of Man', trans. Edmund Jephcott from
_Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926_; edited by Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) pp.
62-74. 15. Deleuze, _Cinema 1_,
p. 102, my ellipsis. 16. See Deleuze, 'On the
Movement-Image', in _Negotiations: 1972-1990_, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.
50. 17. See Deleuze, _Cinema
2_, pp. 241-3. 18. The 'crystal' is one
of the key terms in _Cinema 2_, and Deleuze devotes a
chapter to the notion: 'The Crystals of Time' (pp. 68-97).
The term is defined in the glossary as 'the uniting of an
actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can
no longer be distinguished' (p. 335). 19. An excellent
philosophical discussion of Bergson and Deleuze can be found
in Constantin V. Boundas's essay 'Deleuze-Bergson: An
Ontology of the Virtual' from _Deleuze: A Critical Reader_,
pp. 92-103. See also Gilles Deleuze, _Difference and
Repetition_, pp. 71-3. 20. In 'Klossowski or
Bodies-Language', Appendix II of _The Logic of Sense_,
trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), pp. 280-301, Deleuze shows how
language mimes the doubling already dividing a body from
itself. Body-gesture (a movement-body which separates itself
from the organic body and exposes itself to the outside)
already pre-figures the language which will express
it. 21. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_,
p. 81, emphasis in original. 22. See Gilles Deleuze,
_Proust and Signs_, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George
Braziller, Inc., 1972), chapter five, 'The Secondary Role of
Memory', pp. 51-64. 23. Steven Shaviro drew my
attention to this remarkable and moving film, and made this
observation with regard to it. 24. The notion of a
never-having-been comes from Giorgio Agamben's _Language and
Death: The Place of Negativity_, trans. Karen E. Pinkus
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 104,
but my application of the term is inspired by Maurice
Blanchot's essay 'Everyday Speech' from _The Infinite
Conversation_, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 238-45. In one parenthetical
passage Blanchot says: 'When we meet someone on the street
it comes always by surprise and as though by mistake, for we
do not recognize ourselves there.' In my opinion, Agamben's
notion of *habitus*, which I will speak of later, should be
read together with Blanchotian 'everydayness'. 25. Again, I weave
Blanchot ('Everyday Speech') with Agamben (_Language and
Death_, p. 94) in the sense that what matters to each is an
impersonal (and, for Agamben, a non-tragic)
relation/non-relation to/with language. I have attempted
here to combine certain aspects of their approaches to
language under the notion of 'language, perhaps'. 26. See Deleuze, _Cinema
2_, pp. 251-3. 27. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_,
pp. 272 and 251-2, my ellipses. 28. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_,
p. 272. 29. Martin Heidegger,
_Sein und Zeit_ (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), p.
135; _Being and Time_, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962), p.
173. 30. Agamben, _Language and
Death_, pp. 55-6. 31. Ibid., p.
96. 32. Ibid., p. 91. See also
an earlier work where Agamben develops at length his concept
of infancy: _Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction
of Experience_, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso,
1993). 33. See 'The Idea of
Music', in _The Idea of Prose_, pp. 89-91. We should be
surprised to find someone today scoring an ode to joy or
writing a poem on (or committing several volumes of research
to the anatomy of) melancholy. 34. The notion of the
'event' and the aversion to (Heideggerian or Hegelian)
'being' are constants in the Deleuzian *oeuvre*. For the
'event' there are numerous valuable discussions in _Deleuze:
A Critical Reader_, as well as Brian Massumi's remarkably
clear discussions in _A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari_
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 18-21. For his aversion to
both Hegelian and Heideggerian ontologies, see Michael
Hardt, _Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy_
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.
xiii. 35. Deleuze,
_Negotiations: 1972-1990_, pp. 62-7. 36. Deleuze, _Logic of
Sense_, p. 91. 37. The passivity implicit
here is the heart of Steven Shaviro's study of cinema, _The
Cinematic Body_. See especially the section entitled
'Passivity and Fascination' (pp. 43-50), from his first
chapter. 38. Deleuze has praise for
Jean Louis Schefer's _L'Homme ordinaire du cinema_ -- part
of which has been translated by Paul Smith in a collection
of writings by Schefer entitled _The
Enigmatic Body: Essays on the
Arts_ (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 108-38. Schefer's
book on cinema inspires Deleuze to read the movement-image
as in-itself aberrant movement which is linked by Schefer to
a 'suspension of the world' (_Cinema 2_, p. 168), to the
anaperceptions of childhood, and ultimately to a 'primitive
scene' (_Cinema 2_, pp. 36-7). Deleuze rejects Schefer's
eschatology, of course, because his research takes him to a
pre-history which is time itself and not a psychoanalytic
crisis. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Thomas Carl Wall, 'The
Time-Image: Deleuze, Cinema, and Perhaps Language',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 23, July 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n23wall>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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