Temenuga Trifonova - Deleuze On Cinema

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A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema Temenuga Trifonova

Sartre’s Imagination and The Psychology of Imagination play an important role in philosophy’s renewed attempts to go beyond the human, to annihilate subjectivity, to return to pure perception in which objects vary for one another rather than for one privileged image or center of reference (consciousness). Before Sartre, Bergson was already interested in pure (inhuman) experience “above that decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience’” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 27). Deleuze confirms that human intelligence is bound to reduce differences in kind to differences in degree and that the former are rediscovered only “above the turn” in the examination of the conditions of experience by intuition: To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves. (ibid., 28)

Deleuze’s task in the two volumes of Cinema is to demonstrate how modern cinema in particular has made it possible to surpass the human condition by abolishing subjectivity as a privileged image in what Bergson calls “the aggregate of images” (the material world). Bergson’s theory of duration, of the contemporaneousness of perception and memory, is based on his analysis of the phenomenon of déjà vu, which he considers the most authentic expression of the true nature of our mental life: the automatic preservation of the past in the present. Similarly, in his two volumes on cinema Deleuze advances the hypothesis that the appearance of the timeimage in cinema (more specifically, in Italian neo-realist cinema) has revealed the true nature of time as a continuous forking into incompossible presents and not necessarily true pasts. Time-images are experienced as past; however, they belong to an impersonal rather than an individual past. In this sense, the timeimage is a form of déjà vu. In déjà vu we feel that we have experienced something before, yet we cannot trace the experience to our own past, as if our own recollections have been stolen from us or, alternatively, as if we are recollecting someone else’s past. Both Bergson and Deleuze conceive the subject as a sort of 134

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abridged and necessarily limited version of our entire mental life. To restore the richness and complexity of that mental life, they believe, subjectivity has to be suppressed or surpassed, which in turn calls for a redefinition of representation. Deleuze’s Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image1 exemplify the changes in our understanding of representation as they trace the transition from a cinema dominated by movement-images to the modern cinema of the time-image. In the regime of movement-images, time is subordinated to movement: things and events determine psychological duration. The drawback of the movement-image, according to Deleuze, is that it fails to present duration, but subordinates it to movement or spatialized time. Deleuze’s contention is that modern cinema has liberated itself from subjectivity or representation; however, his theory of the time-image does not get rid of subjectivity, but only reformulates the notion of the object. The object for Deleuze is a pure image, a “mental image” purged of any materiality and no longer subordinated to sensory-motor schemata. Deleuze believes that to restore its original nature as a being rather than an object of knowledge, the subject must become even more subjective: it must constitute itself “above” its own representations; it must create hyperrepresentations. Deleuze privileges the time-image over the movement-image because the former constitutes itself beyond representation, thus reaffirming the subject’s autonomy. The subordination of movement to time achieves namely this: when duration dictates what is happening, rather than events determining time, the subject has restored its independence from the world. While the representation of the world still presupposes an essential difference between things and their descriptions, the time-image eliminates this difference, replacing things with their descriptions. The relationship Deleuze establishes between things and their descriptions is similar to the one Baudrillard posits between objects and signs. Like Baudrillard, Deleuze appears to believe that simply placing the description of a thing in the “place” (this “place” is within the system of representation) usually occupied by the thing itself renders the description pure, or thing-like. All referential material, all objectivity is evacuated from the time-image, but precisely because of that, Deleuze contends, the time-image is not a subjective representation, but a thing in itself, a pure expression. This is so because the idea of an object always presupposes the idea of a subject (representation is not only the presentation of the world as a reflection of the subject but also, and to an equal degree, the selfobjectification of the subject) and the end of representation is the annihilation of both subject and object. However, Deleuze fails to take into account the fact that the act by which an end is put to representation cannot itself be bracketed out. SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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Something of the subject always remains and it is namely (and only) from the point of view of this remainder of subjectivity that the end of subjectivity is posited and simultaneously proven impossible.2 The impossibility of eliminating point of view applies both to literature and to cinema. In Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres, Bruce Morrissette describes an excellent example of this impossibility in the work of novelist/filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. Taking the case of Robbe-Grillet as an example of the attempt to get rid of the specific, situated point of view and substitute it with a purely “geometric and visual perspective”(45), Morrissette demonstrates how this project eventually restores, though in a slightly modified form, the omniscient narrator: Is it possible to separate point of view in itself, as localization of a camera objective or of an authorial eye, from the reason or internal justification of this same point of view? Does this “observer,” who for Robbe-Grillet…need not be a “character” in the narrative, have the privilege of randomly positioning himself almost anywhere? …Can he displace himself at will? What will then prevent such an eye of the camera or of the novelist from becoming, once again, an eye “everywhere at once,” if not an eye that is perpetually omniscient and omnipresent like the eye of God? …Yet if we grant the camera an absolute liberty of movement…an omni-optique system is obviously created, the justification for which seems as difficult or arbitrary as in the case of the omniscient author. (46)

A distinction needs to be made between the objectification of point of view and the alleged “dehumanization” resulting from it. The suppression or the disguise of the subjective point of view in cinema or in the novel never attains the total elimination of subjectivity. Robbe-Grillet’s apparent objectification of the point of view does not necessarily deprive his novels of humanism. His descriptions of objects and events create only the appearance of an impersonal work for they “do not in any way have a ‘photographic’ or naively realistic purpose; they are…rather supports or objective correlatives of a tacit psychology”(93). The most “objective” descriptions and manipulations of the point of view are bound to remain “pseudo-objective”(106).3 Most of Deleuze’s ideas in Cinema II: The Time-Image repeat and occasionally elaborate on Robbe-Grillet’s analysis of the New Novel in a series of essays written in the fifties and sixties and collected in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (1965). For example, while Robbe-Grillet draws attention to the role of “description”— as distinguished from signification—in the modern novel and film, Deleuze characterizes the cinema of the time-image as “pure expression”; while for RobbeGrillet “the false” is that which does not appear “natural,” that which is cut off from signification and thus from verisimilitude (163), Deleuze argues that the very nature of time in contemporary cinema is falsification. Robbe-Grillet proposes that precisely by refusing to signify and by instead drawing attention SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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to the sheer presence of things and human beings (by avoiding the humanization of the world), the modern novel and film do not get rid of man but rather achieve the opposite effect: they make man aware of the very real distance between him and the rest of the world. The less anthropocentric the novel/film, the more realistic. Robbe-Grillet explains that it is not a question of getting rid of subjectivity, but rather of eliminating the inside/outside opposition that has always determined the idea of subjectivity. The objectification of mental content—for example, the treatment of imagination and memory as physical reality4—is the ultimate form of realism, since it finally acknowledges the reality of what has always been dismissed as a merely “subjective point of view.” Unlike Deleuze, Robbe-Grillet is very much aware of the impossibility of a “total impersonality of observation”(18), despite the fact that the most common critique of his novels has been their allegedly “dehumanized” or “neutral” nature: Even if many objects are presented and are described with great care, there is always, and especially, the eye which sees them, the thought which reexamines them, the passion which distorts them. The objects in our novels never have a presence outside human perception, real or imaginary. (Robbe-Grillet 137)

Contrary to what critics of the New Novel argue, “the New Novel [and, I add, the cinema of the time-image Deleuze discusses in Cinema II] aims only at a total subjectivity” (138). Toward the end of the second volume of Cinema, Deleuze argues that cinema can and should be seen as the condition of possibility for signification in general, that cinema provides us with access to being, that it reconstitutes the dawn of the world before the birth of human perception or consciousness. Cinema is not a language. Deleuze insists that the best analogue for the frame in cinema “is to be found in an information system rather than a linguistic one. The elements [within the frame] are the data…which are sometimes very numerous, sometimes of limited number. The frame is therefore inseparable from two tendencies: towards saturation or towards rarefaction”(Cinema I 12). An information system is pre-human, neutral, pre-linguistic, inasmuch as information or data is ontologically older than signification or signs. There is an interesting reversal here: although information systems are empirically “younger” than signification or language (we started talking about “information systems” considerably recently), they appear to have already surpassed a certain limit of “humanism” or “subjectivity” and are now projected retrospectively as preceding signification or are characterized as “inhuman.” Such a gesture is necessary from a humanist point of view: since we cannot comprehend how the human has evolved into something so foreign to humanity as pure information, the only response we

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can conceive to this phenomenon is to posit the inhuman as pre-human, from which the human has evolved. This allows us to continue believing that we still exist in a human universe. Deleuze’s argument that cinema reveals a pre-human state of the world originates in this desire to preserve the belief in a human world. He asserts that unlike natural perception, which is grounded in a fixed and privileged point of view (that of the subject) and which is thus limited by our practical interests, cinematographic perception is essentially acentered. The question is whether Deleuze convincingly demonstrates the subject’s capacity to “get rid” of itself and whether the cinema of the time-image attains the desired self-abolition of subjectivity. In Cinema I Deleuze treats the camera as a kind of consciousness, more inclusive and disinterested than mere perceptual consciousness as it presents us with pure images rather than with selections from the flow of images. Whereas Bergson thought it necessary to “deduce” natural as well as cinematographic perception from pure perception, Deleuze believes cinematographic perception to have a great advantage over natural perception insofar as the former “lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon”(Cinema I 58). But is it true that the camera is never a centre of anchorage, even if we grant that with the perfection of the camera it stops being a fixed point of view but moves around, assuming different points of view? Obviously, just as human perception takes time to “go around” an object, so the camera moves around its objects rather than situating the point of view ‘within’ them. Deleuze wants to argue that the human eye can be eliminated from cinematographic perception in order “to rediscover the matrix or the movement-image as it is in itself, in its acentered purity, in its primary regime of variation, in its heat and its light, while it is still untroubled by any centre of indetermination”(Cinema I 66). However, he is forced to recognize that it cannot really be a matter of “reconstituting” pure perception but of “constructing” it and, although he does not put it in these words, simulating it: [The human eye’s] relative immobility as a receptive organ means that all images vary for a single one, in relation to a privileged image. And, if the camera is considered as apparatus for shooting film, it is subject to the same conditioning limitation. But the cinema is not simply the camera: it is montage. And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things. Universal variation, universal interaction (modulation) is what Cezanne had already called the world before man, “dawn of ourselves,” “iridescent chaos,” “virginity of the world.” It is not surprising that we have to construct it since it is given only to the eye which we do not have. (Cinema I 81, my italics)5

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Although montage is a technical procedure, it is still controlled by the subject, by the human eye. To argue that from the point of view of “another eye” (the camera) montage is not subjective or human, not constructed, does not solve the problem because “the other eye” is indeed another eye and we can never see the world through it except indirectly (the human eye looks through the non-human eye—the camera—but is not identical with it). This holds true both for the filmmaker and for the film audience. However, what is most striking about this passage is the suggestion that the camera—a piece of technology developed by the subject—is a more “natural” or “material” form of perception than human perception. Deleuze claims that matter as an aggregate of movement-images is nothing other than “camera consciousness;” that the world is a film even before the human eye appears. If matter is made up of movement-images, consisting of light vibrations, which do not need to be perceived in order to be and which lie somewhere inbetween a thing and a representation, then a cinematographic image, insofar as it is exactly such an intermediary image—neither a thing nor a representation— [Deleuze notes that cinema does not give us the photogramme as such but only an intermediary image which is already movement (Cinema I 2)] resembles most closely what Bergson calls pure perception (perception before the birth of consciousness). Deleuze distinguishes three variations of the movement-image— perception-images, affection-images, and action-images—which he arranges according to their degree of objectivity. Perception-images are most objective or material since, as Bergson has shown, perception is “in” matter. Affection is our response to images, but this response is not yet prolonged into action on the images. Action-images are the most subjective of the three, since they involve a motor response to images.6 Finally, the time-image goes beyond these three kinds of images and returns us to pure perception. The difference between the movement-image and the time-image can be overcome through a systematic process of substraction (by analogy with the phenomenological epoche) or a bracketing out of the constitutive elements of the movement-image. To produce the time-image, one does not add something to the movement-image, but actually deconstructs or purifies it of its three constitutive variations (perception, affection, action). One of the problems with Deleuze’s account of the different kinds of images is that when he speaks of perception-images, affection-images, action-images and time-images he does not mean specifically cinematographic images. He borrows Bergson’s terms transposing them, without any explanation, from the discourse of natural perception to that of cinematographic perception. His attempt to explicate the difference between the movement-image and the time-image SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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makes this clear. We encounter the former in the habitual recognition of images (Bergson’s habit memory) and the latter in spontaneous recollection (Bergson’s pure memory). The movement-image prolongs a perception-image into a sensory-motor response: instead of perceiving for the sake of perceiving, we utilize our perception for some practical purpose at hand, extending the image into a certain action upon the image. However, in the case of the time-image we perceive purely for the sake of perceiving: we do not respond to the image by acting upon it, but, rather, we stop at the perception or—what amounts to the same— we are returned to a kind of perception purged of any sensory-motor necessity. Now, in a movie there are obviously no such distinctions among the images we see on the screen: it is not that some of the images are real things while others we perceive as images. All images on the screen are images. A spectator perceiving an image on the screen obviously does not attempt to act upon it as he would act on a real thing. What Deleuze actually wants to argue is that certain images are perceived as if they were real things, whereas others are perceived for their own sake. Although such a distinction can certainly be posited, Deleuze fails to explain what is unique in the movement-image and the time-image in cinema, as opposed to these two types of images in everyday perception. A movement-image is impure, by which Deleuze means that we perceive it with an ulterior motive (the intention to act on it). In the movement-image, a thing on the screen appears only as a thing, creating the illusion that we can respond to it in the same way we respond to real, external stimulation. There is an odd reversal here: the thing as such (the movement-image) is a representation or a signification, since it refers to some real object that we recognize in it automatically. Only when we substitute a description of the thing for the thing itself, Deleuze argues, does the image become pure expression. The material world as such is already a signification, whereas the pure mental image we have of it (the description with which we replace it) is pure expression. For Deleuze, the movement-image belongs to the regime of signification because it provokes a sensory-motor response from us—i.e., the body is the ultimate source of signification. Common sense, however, has always treated signification as something “mental.” Taking over Bergson’s idea of the body as a special image, Deleuze contends that natural perception is already signification: merely by reflecting images back upon themselves and thus making them appear to us, we are representing them. This is a radical shift in the understanding of the nature of signification or representation, for Deleuze implies that representation is not a manifestation of a reflective consciousness; instead, representation marks the birth of perception. Representation is not produced by an act of addition but by an act of dissociation. SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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Given that Deleuze fully embraces this essentially Bergsonian idea, it is difficult to make sense of Deleuze’s critique of the subject as a “master” of representation. Even if we want to continue using the word “master,” the preceding ought to have made it clear that the subject is not consciously representing the world; rather, merely by appearing to the subject, the world is “representing” itself because of the limited, finite nature of human perception. Conversely, when a barrier is erected between the image and the body, when we form a mental image, we are returned to pure perception, to matter in its original luminosity. But it would be wrong to equate the mental, pure image (the timeimage) with matter as such, even though the mental image restores us to pure perception—i.e., to matter. Matter is devoid of any virtuality—it cannot consist of time-images. A time-image is possible only after (or on top of) a movementimage, as its negation or interruption. We can be restored to pure perception only if we have first “deviated” from it, only after it has degraded into natural perception. On one hand, then, the time-image resembles Sartre’s imageconsciousness: it is the evacuation of referential material, consciousness collapsing back upon itself, absolutely transparent to itself. Yet Deleuze claims that the time-image returns us to the materiality of the world. Paradoxically, the material world is restored to us (at least in cinematographic perception) only by being evacuated first. Clearly, Deleuze wants to claim an ontological significance for the cinematographic image. However, his concept of the time-image as a direct presentation of time rests on a historical or empirical analysis. Although in the introduction to Cinema I he warns his readers that what he is offering them is not a history of cinema, the central argument of the two volumes—that the cinema of the movement-image has been replaced by a cinema of the timeimage—is based on the analysis of a particular historical moment: World War II and man’s inability to comprehend or respond adequately to the terror of annihilation. Accordingly, the concept of the time-image is imbued with ethical significance. The purely optical and sound cinematographic image ... is supposed to make us grasp something intolerable and unbearable. …It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities. …In any event something has become too strong in the image. (Cinema II 18)

Using Bergson’s account of the birth of perception, Deleuze argues that movement-images characterize a clichéd—i.e., metaphorical or representational perception:

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Temenuga Trifonova A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing. As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving. …We therefore normally perceive only clichés. But, if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess or horror or beauty… (Cinema II 20)

On one side, the time-image has a strictly historical origin—it would not have been possible without the war, whose effect was the shattering of sensorymotor schemata—but on the other side, the time-image is said to be ontologically superior to the movement-image, which is only a cliché. Yet this superiority of the time-image is the result of a failure—the jamming of sensory-motor linkages— that is both a historically specific phenomenon and one that benefits us immensely since it allows us a more “authentic” or direct access to material reality. Since Deleuze considers the time-image aesthetically and ontologically superior to the movement-image, he seems to suggest that the failure of sensorymotor linkages, which happened at a particular point in history, has to be encouraged, fostered—that it was a serendipitous failure. Only something that traumatic and unspeakable could have changed our idea of what an image is and made us understand that the material world is made of images. Thus, a particular historical event is credited with the utmost ontological significance, just as a particular film “school”—Italian neo-realism—is supposed to reveal the inherently cinematic nature of the material world. And yet, Deleuze insists that we cannot experience time directly in everyday perception: the “I” who perceives cannot experience nonchronological time because the “I” cannot get rid of itself in normal perception, cannot bracket itself out and become as impersonal and anonymous as the camera. Natural perception is necessarily subjective or substractive, whereas cinematographic perception is anonymous or “crystalline.” The pure optical or sound image— the time-image—is a de-serialized image that cannot link up with other images. In addition, it is de-serialized from no one’s point of view, whereas a natural perception-image is de-serialized (insofar as perception is a kind of framing or de-serialization) from the point of view of the subject. However, can an image be de-serialized from a non-existent point of view? Can the failure of a pure optical image to link up with other images be established not from a subject’s point of view but from a no-place or from an any-point-of-view-whatever? The answers to these questions hinge upon what Deleuze means by “point of view.” Point of view generally signifies interest. The time-image, on the other hand, is perceived in a disinterested manner, as if it were not perceived by us, but, rather, by other images. SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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The notion of disinterestedness is an essential characteristic of the Kantian aesthetic judgment. The Deleuzian time-image is subtilized into a pure, selfsufficient mental content. The paradox is that while this new subjectivity takes us back into the heart of things,7 it is also “no longer motor or material, but temporal and spiritual”(Cinema II 47). The time-image strips perception of its natural, subjective character (eliminating the subject/object split) but it also reveals the spiritual character of the object. The time-image then fulfills the mediating role Kant attributes to aesthetic judgement: it is a bridge between mind and matter. The Kantian undercurrent in Deleuze’s discourse becomes even more obvious when Deleuze specifies that only pure recollection, but not memoryimages as such, constitutes this new subjectivity. Memory-images are only its bastardized form since they actualize it. The new subjectivity—manifested in an expansion of consciousness—results only from the failure of attentive recognition. When we fail to remember, the image we perceive does not link up with other images and we perceive it for its own sake. We are reminded of another grand failure, the failure of imagination in the Kantian account of the sublime. In the Kantian scenario, the imagination cannot apprehend the sheer enormity of the sublime object (neither Kant nor Deleuze differentiate between perception and imagination, both of which signify the faculty of empirical understanding), but we are nevertheless capable of comprehending the object as a totality, which Kant interprets as an indirect sign that we are in possession of a much greater power than imagination, namely Reason. Similarly, pure recollection is the failure of memory-images to exhaust the virtual. Just as the idea of totality is infinitely greater than what the imagination can apprehend, virtual or pure recollection is infinitely greater than the memory-images in which it actualizes itself. The pure image is the residue left behind by the failure of recognition: the virtual or the sublime cannot be found in a specific image but only in what is still left over or apart from the image. The pure image provokes a sense of uneasiness, indetermination and incompleteness. Deleuze’s Kantianism manifests itself also in Deleuze’s surprisingly unBergsonian interpretation of duration. Since he thinks Bergson’s pure memory as an ontological realm, Deleuze substitutes a non-chronological time for Bergsonian duration. The virtual, in Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, does not express duration, but time as an a priori intuition. In fact, Deleuze argues, “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”(Cinema II 82). Deleuze identifies time with being, eliminates change (chronology) from it, and draws a rather counterintuitive conclusion: “Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always objective, but the virtual is SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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subjective” (82-83). Being (time) now becomes coextensive with subjectivity, the individual human being appearing “smaller” than subjectivity: the more absent we are from the actual, from the present, or the more we lose ourselves in recollection, the more we expand our original objectivity and become more and more subjective. This reversal of the traditional understanding of the subject/ object relationship according to which the objective is ‘bigger’ than the subjective liberates us from the bitter resentment or fear of never being objective enough. It also frees us from postmodernism, which is a valid standpoint only as long as the subject is conceived as a point of view, necessarily limited, among many other relative points of view. However, if one starts from Deleuze’s assumption that we are always already objective, subjectivity becomes a retreating horizon toward which we are able to advance. The objective or the present is now considered a point of view, whereas subjectivity becomes the most impersonal, inhuman mode of consciousness. To illustrate his notion of the time-image as an inhuman event, Deleuze asks us to imagine ... an earthly event which is assumed to be transmitted to different planets, one of which will receive it at the same time (at the speed of light), but the second more quickly, and the third less quickly, hence before it happened and after. The latter would not yet have received it, the second would already have received it, the first would be receiving it, in three simultaneous presents bound into the same universe. This would be a sidereal time, a system of relativity, where the characters would be not so much human as planetary. …It would be a pluralist cosmology, where one and the same event is played out in these different worlds, in incompatible versions. (Cinema II 102)

Deleuze’s description of the time-image as a planetary or cosmological image recalls Baudrillard’s vision of the subject in hyperreality, an “ex-orbited,” planetary, inhuman subject. In fact, Deleuze’s time-image as a direct presentation of time is indistinguishable from Baudrillard’s simulated time. However, while Baudrillard considers the hyperreal a threat to the reality of the world, to the extent that it makes it possible for us to perceive something that has stopped existing a long time ago but whose virtual image still persists, Deleuze views the increasing virtualization of the world as liberating. Baudrillard laments the fact that we have been “ejected from a position in space and time where we were able to reflect our events back to ourselves with any endurance, and therefore consequence” (Horrocks 10). Since all events and all our acts have been reduced to information, we are no longer the source or origin of what we do or what happens to us. Events and acts refer only to other events and acts, not to a subject who produces them and who attributes to them their significance. The subject has either vanished completely or has been inscribed in a network of events and SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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acts, which no longer have particular causes and effects (the very notions of “cause” and “effect” rest on the ascription of value to things; however, in a virtual world the question of value can no longer arise). While Deleuze interprets the humbling of the subject to the status of any-point-of-view-whatever as a liberation of things (of other images) from the necessity to be true or consistent, Baudrillard does not think such liberation possible, arguing instead that although the old idea of truth has long disappeared, it has been replaced with the idea of credibility. Credibility does not describe a state where all images are “equal” and none subordinated to a central, privileged image; rather, credibility is the principle of truth gone mad. Deleuze describes the pure optical and sound image in terms of a spectacle. In modern cinema the situation is not extended into action but remains a purely optical or sound description or inventory of things and characters. This has the effect of inflating the image or its significance, making it spectacular (selfsufficient) even when it is everyday. The “spectacle,” however, has completely different connotations for Baudrillard and Deleuze: the former identifies the spectacular with the hyperreal, whereas for the latter the spectacular is the very nature of the time-image. The spectacle oscillates between the simulacral image and the time-image as the “direct presentation of time.” The pure image is independent of subjectivity because subjectivity is possible only as a relation between the subject and the world. Replacing a thing with its description does not constitute the triumph of the subject, but its disappearance. For Baudrillard, too, when a thing is replaced by its image, the image becomes self-sufficient and independent from the subject. The subject exists only as the difference between itself and something else (a world), but as soon as the subject projects its images or descriptions of things on those things, the things underneath disappear, the difference between subject and object disappears. Everywhere it looks, the subject sees only itself, which means that it cannot see itself any more because seeing is possible only as the positing of oneself as different from what one sees. The appearance of the hyperreal signals the disappearance of subjectivity. Thus, at the very moment when the subject’s power seems to have reached the limit—things are replaced with their descriptions or images— the subject annihilates itself: a pure optical image is independent of the subject. Paradoxically, by derealizing the world, by making things as references vanish, the subject constructs precisely what it was always lacking as long as it was locked in the system of reference and representation: an absolutely sovereign world, which is not subordinated to the subject, but includes it as merely one virtuality among many. Only by making the world virtual can the subject ensure that there is something different from itself, something over which it has no SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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control. Once the real is no longer sufficient (no longer different enough from the subject), but appears as a mere construct of the subject, the only way to save the real is to make it hyperreal, to posit it as the absolutely sovereign being that the subject has always wanted to be but never was/is. True sovereignty is not possible as long as the subject identifies itself as an interiority separate (and thus dependent upon) something outside it. Subjectivity cannot be abolished completely, but there always remains a “place” from which the suppression of subjectivity is announced, a “place” where subjectivity retreats to preserve itself. What Baudrillard calls “the fatal object” is not an object that exists independently of subjectivity. Rather, the fatal object is the subject having finally attained sovereignty, the subject as absolute exteriority. The transition from the movement-image to the time-image in cinema reveals the decreasing role of the subject as an agent of representation. The movementimage still belongs to a system of representation, whereas in modern cinema the story or plot is replaced by pure (nonreferential) time-images or pure (nonreferential) language: For the time-image to be born…the actual image must enter into relation with its own virtual image as such; from the outset pure description must divide into two, “repeat itself, take itself up again, fork, contradict itself.” An image which is double–sided, both actual and virtual, must be constituted. We are no longer in the situation of a relationship between the actual image and other virtual images, recollections, or dreams, which thus become actual in turn: this is still a mode of linkage. We are in the situation of an actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real with the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual exchange. (Cinema II 273-275)

By opposing the virtual to representation, Deleuze suggests that the imaginary (or the virtual) extends beyond the subject. In addition to Bergson’s influence on Deleuze’s idea of time as falsification (through the concept of false memory or déjà vu) we need to note Sartre’s significance with respect to this idea. The imaginary life, argues Sartre, is possible because “it is not only the material of the object that is unreal but all the spatial and temporal determinations to which it is subjected participate in this unreality” (PI 180). Whereas in perception the spatial determinations of an object depend on those of other objects and are, therefore, variable, the spatial determinations of the image are “interiorized,” turned into absolute, invariable qualities of the object (182). The unreal is selfreferential, absolute, falsifying. The self-referentiality of the image consists in the indistinguishability of the true and the imaginary within the image. Time (but not spatialized time, which is always referential and thus measurable) is selfreferential in nature: the time-image does not describe a certain state of things but is itself that state of things. Falsification is synonymous with pure expression: SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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to falsify means not to signify/represent. Falsifying narration is, Deleuze believes, beyond metaphysics and beyond postmodernism, whose relativism still rests on the idea of truth. This kind of narration is supposed to restore the original neutrality and meaninglessness of a world without truth. Falsifying narration is metanarration and its self-referentiality, Deleuze claims, restores to us the pre-signifying regime of pure images. Surprisingly, over-signification (self-referentiality being the highest degree of signification) restores us to a pre-signifying state of things. One would assume that the more we suppress referential material and replace it with our description of it, the further away we move from reference, reality, matter, but Deleuze argues that the opposite is true: since natural perception is already signification, we need to go beyond that to meta-perception (the timeimage is meta-perception, perception for its own sake) or meta-narration, in order to undo what natural perception has done. We must, in other words, denaturalize perception, make it as artificial as possible, in order to restore perception in its original purity. If postmodernism can be generally defined as a kind of thinking about the world that reduces everything to language, Deleuze’s refusal to view the timeimage as a certain kind of sign reflects his general distaste for postmodernism. Rather than representing, the time-image ... expresses the “typical,” but expresses it in a pure singularity, something unique. This is the sign, it is the very function of the sign. But, as long as signs find their material in the movement-image, as long as they form the singular expressional features, from a material in movement, they are in danger of evoking another generality which would lead to their being confused with a language. The representation of time can be extracted from this only by association and generalization, or as concept….Such is the ambiguity of the sensory-motor schema, agent of abstraction. It is only when the sign opens directly on to time, when time provides the signaletic material itself, that the type, which has become temporal, coincides with the feature of singularity separated from its motor associations. (Cinema II 42-43)

This recalls the paradox we encountered in Bergson’s account of memory and the body: the body (in Deleuze, the sensory-motor schema) expresses what is most typical, abstract, general about us, whereas memory individualizes our mental life. In The Creative Mind Bergson explains the origin of general ideas in terms of the body’s similar responses to certain external stimuli. Following Bergson, Deleuze declares the movement-image actually poorer than the timeimage, because “it associates with the thing many different things that resemble it on the same plane, in so far as they provoke the same movements” (Cinema II 45). Deleuze’s conception of the time-image as the subordination of movement to time seems strangely out of place in the general context of his thought about time. Having argued so passionately that movement is not added to matter since SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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matter is already movement and thus already image (the movement-image), now he wants to argue that time is separate from movement, in fact that it is anterior to it. While the conception of matter as image was a blow to metaphysics, the idea of time as an a priori form, separate from matter (and thus from movement, because matter is movement) seems like a return to metaphysics. Is Deleuze successful in placing the time-image, along with the new kind of subjectivity that appears with it, outside language? This new subjectivity “is no longer motor or material but temporal and spiritual: that which ‘is added’ to matter, not what distends it; recollection-image, not movement-image” (Cinema II 47). The movement-image, on the other hand, distends matter which is originally concentrated. Like Bergson and Baudrillard before him, Deleuze adopts the idiom of “distension” and “concentration” to describe the relationship between matter and mind. As Baudrillard explains in The Perfect Crime, originally the universe is the absolute concentration of matter (heat), absolute self-identity with no room for negation. At one point it gradually starts cooling off and this cooling off is the birth of time as it creates gaps, spaces, intervals, lags within matter. The real is not a mere construct of the subject, but emerges simultaneously with the birth of the world. For Deleuze, the only difference between matter and mind is that between the movement and the time-image: the former refers (i.e. extends into movement) while the latter does not. In the final analysis then, Deleuze remains a postmodernist since he reduces the difference between matter and mind to a linguistic one (reference). Instead of asking “Is there an objective reality?” he asks “How can images exist in two regimes at the same time, a referential and a non-referential one?” Deleuze assumes that there are objects (non-referential images) and subjects (referential images, whose reference is always already self-reference) his only task being to distinguish between them. He does not ask “How is knowledge possible?” but only “What kinds of knowledge exist and how can we avoid confusing them?” Deleuze remains more concerned with what the cinematographic image does for thinking than with the specific qualities of the cinematographic image. The image no longer belongs to the domain of aesthetic theory, but to that of ontology. In Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, for example, the image is already a limit constantly being crossed or de-limited, this de-limitation being the sublime. The most noticeable difference between the Kantian and the inhuman (postmodern) sublime is that the former can be characterized as an expansion of consciousness, whereas the latter is best described as an intensification of the sense of being. Expansion presupposes the subject’s mastery of the material world, while intensification implies the “reduction” of the subject to its own materiality or facticity. SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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Is the time-image a sublime experience? There is a fundamental way in which the Lyotardian sublime differs from the time-image despite the fact that both are conceived as experiences of time. Lyotard draws a rather disturbing analogy between the sensation of time characteristic of the sublime experience and the mechanism puppets obey. What makes the sublime experience resemble the mechanistic “life” of the automatic doll is the experience of time not as a synthesis of separate moments, as a series of retentions and protentions, but as the mere happening of time. The experience of the sublime is one of “divine automatism” where the human being (or the puppet) is freed from all intentionality—which Lyotard identifies with the “capacity for temporal synthesis” (The Inhuman 163)—and from all diachrony. This “divine automatism” Lyotard explicitly identifies with “the self-sufficiency of the Same”(163) emphasizing the fact that the sublime experience is an experience of the being of time rather than of the passing of time. The postmodern sublime presupposes the suppression of subjectivity inasmuch as subjectivity is defined as intentionality or the capacity for temporal synthesis. Only when the subject has been reduced to a puppet, when it responds automatically to external stimuli, when it has renounced itself completely, when its agency has been eliminated leaving behind only sensory-motor schemata, can the subject feel time directly, without the necessity of breaking it down into segments and then trying in vain to synthesize them. Things stand quite differently with Deleuze’s time-image, however. Indeed, the main distinction Deleuze draws between the movement-image and the timeimage involves the breaking down of sensory-motor schemata in the time-image as a result of which the subject, no longer able or willing to respond automatically to external stimuli, suspends all action and perceives images merely for the sake of perceiving them. For both thinkers the direct experience of time depends on the exclusion of agency or subjectivity: Lyotard’s puppet acts purely mechanically, without any subjective intention, while Deleuze stresses the postmodern subject’s inability to act. Because Lyotard’s notion of subjectivity is limited to agency or intentionality, once that disappears the subject disappears too. On the other hand, Deleuze argues that a new kind of subjectivity is born with the appearance of the time-image. Nevertheless, there is still something automatic or puppet-like about this new kind of subjectivity. As Deleuze observes, the cinema of the timeimage is a cinema of the seer, not of the doer. When the subject’s ability to act has been suppressed, the subject’s attention to images is intensified, and now all it can do is perceive images for the sake of perceiving them. It is almost as if the subject becomes hypnotized by the images. A man in a state of hypnosis acts automatically, mechanically, without intention or will. SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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In the regime of time-images, the subject is no longer the privileged point of view that organizes other images around itself, because now other images have become points of view themselves. The time-image is no longer subjective since it presents us with a direct experience of time rather than with a representation of it. Since Deleuze identifies subjectivity with action, once the subject is deprived of the power to act upon other images, Deleuze can argue that representation has been surpassed and the time-image has become pure—i.e., objective. Deleuze suggests that the subject erases itself and becomes an object among other objects (or an image among other images) precisely by not objectifying itself i.e., by not acting upon other objects/images. By withdrawing from the world, by failing to respond to it, the subject purges itself. Bergson defines consciousness or freedom precisely as the gap between a stimulus and response, the life of consciousness growing richer when it fails to respond to external stimuli. In this sense, Deleuze’s time-image signals an expansion of consciousness, an increase in human freedom. Deleuze does not explain, however, how an increase in human freedom can be interpreted as the growing objectivity of images and the suppression of the subject as a privileged point of view on the world. There is another implicit assumption, namely that the subject is a point of view, and a privileged one at that, only insofar as it acts. However, even when the subject suspends action, it still remains a point of view. The breaking down of sensory-motor linkages in the time-image is not yet the end of subjectivity as a point of view. In fact, the opposite is true: the less able the subject is to act on other images, the further subjectivity is intensified or, as Deleuze himself acknowledges, a new kind of subjectivity is born. This new subject still interprets images and events but no longer judges them as true or false, real or imaginary. The recognition of incompossible presents and not necessarily true pasts is not the death verdict of the subject but simply its reformulation. Subjectivity can no longer be limited by the idea of truth, because truth is a limit constantly surpassed by the subject. All of this actually follows from what Deleuze himself has said about truth. According to Deleuze, to be a point of view on the world means that one is able to judge the truthfulness of the world. Such judgments are rooted in action: the subject’s capacity to judge the truthfulness of the world depends on its ability to act upon the world. The time-image has demonstrated, however, that the notion of the subject has to be redefined— broadened—because the subject is not exhausted by its ability to act upon the world, by its ability to judge how true or real the world is. Thus, Deleuze’s answer to his own question—”How can we abolish ourselves?”—should have been “We cannot.” We cannot abolish ourselves; we can only enlarge ourselves.8 University of California, San Diego SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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151 Works Cited

Caws, Peter. Sartre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1991. — . Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: The Athlone Press, 1986. — . Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athlone Press, 1989. Flaxman, Gregory, ed. The Brain is a Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2000. Horrocks, Christopher. Baudrillard and the Millennium. Cambridge: Icon Books: 1999. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. 78-89. Morrissette, Bruce. Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1985. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination. New York: Citadel Press, 1963 (1948). Schwab, Martin. “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image Ontology” in Flaxman, 109-139. Zourabichvili, François. “The Eye of Montage: Dziga Vertov and Bergsonian Materialism” in Flaxman, 141-149.

Notes 1. Readings of Deleuze’s two books on cinema tend to reduce the cinematographic image to thought, disregarding the specificities of the cinematographic image and subordinating it to an examination of Deleuze’s ontology in general. See The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000). 2. See Martin Schwab, “Escape from the Image: Deleuze’s Image Ontology” in The Brain Is the Screen, 109-139. Schwab argues that Deleuze’s books on cinema develop an “imageontology [that] remains insensitive to the specificities of cinema”(109). More importantly, however, Schwab shows that there is an irreconcilable gap between Deleuze’s idea of subjectivity as a force of differentiation (the subject is a special sort of image dissociated or substracted from the aggregate of movement-images) and, on the other hand, his belief that it is necessary to restore the original undifferentiated flow of images. How, asks Schwab, can the subject be both an agent of differentiation and de-differentiation, or how can the subject willfully abolish itself and “dissolve” in pure perception? Schwab rightfully notes that although Deleuze considers himself (and is considered by others) a philosopher of difference, he still clings to the Romantic idea “that our world has fallen and that subjectivity is an alienated condition” (133) and presents the subject as a sort of impurity of which the world has to be cleansed. 3. The refusal to represent subjectivity does not result in the dissolution of the point of view in the world of things, because it is always carried out with some ulterior (subjective) purpose in mind. See the chapters “Modes of ‘Point of View’” and “The Alienated ‘I’” in Novel and Film, where Morrissette analyzes the paradoxical effect of the first-person point of view (in Robbe-Grillet’s novels it obstructs rather than fosters the reader’s self-identification with the protagonist) and of the third-person point of view (in Dostoevsky’s works, it has the opposite effect of ensuring self-identification with morally objectionable characters). SubStance # 104, Vol. 33, no. 2, 2004

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4. For an illuminating discussion of the Bergsonian aspect of Robbe-Grillet’s objectification of his characters’ psychology (characters reveal themselves not through introspection but through the perception of physical objects, which, as Bergson argues, is always selective, always imbued with memory), see John Ward, “L’Année dernière à Marienbad” in Alain Resnais or the Theme of Time (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). 5. See François Zourabichvili, “The Eye of Montage: Dziga Vertov and Bergsonian Materialism” in Flaxman, ed., The Brain Is the Screen (141-149). According to Zourabichvili, what Deleuze actually wants to argue is that the only nonhuman eye is montage, whereas merely pointing the camera at objects “is still human, all too human”(146). Real movement—movement that exists for itself—can be presented only through montage, especially through false continuity which “has an objective effect: that of opening the image onto a point of view that is not its own, and in so far as it is not its own. Each image thus interacts with other images, instead of organizing itself according to the conditions of the centering of ‘natural’—that is, subjective—perception”(147). 6. Neither Bergson nor Deleuze distinguish between image as perception or the thing perceived, on one hand, and our response to it—i.e., the act of perception. Both the act of perception and the object of perception are images. 7. For a critique of the belief that cinema can achieve a kind of fundamental realism or objectivity, see Metz 194-201. Although Metz insists that cinema is not a language system, he is nevertheless critical of the alleged “innocence” of the film image. 8. See Peter Caws, Sartre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Ontology is unable to dispense with the subject, as much as it wants to do so (59). The main thesis of Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego—”transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity”(TE 96)—is unacceptable, because a certain aspect of subjectivity is bound to survive the epoche. If one tries to get rid of subjectivity and invokes a pre-personal consciousness, an absolute kind of existence, one inevitably gets entangled in absurdity after absurdity. Caws suggests a middle road—he admits that subjectivity is never simply given, but he also rejects the idea of an impersonal consciousness in which there is no trace of subjectivity, because there is no way to explain the transition from such an absolute existence to an individual consciousness.

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