Deleuzian Delusion and the Enigmatic Cinematic

About 15 years ago I became very interested in Gilles Deleuze and bought a copy of A Thousand Plateaus. I still have it. There it is as it is today, battered from wear after all these years. Deleuze and Guattari were all the rage back then, name checked and quoted aplenty throughout the post modern artcrit and artists’ crowds alike. At the time, as a relatively recent arriviste in Australia, steeped in ideas about nomadism, migration and mobility, I found A Thousand Plateaus full of analogous concepts, the rhizome as a metaphor for thought and idea formation, deterritorialization as an almost direct description of the migrant experience, becoming a body without organs in the context of questions of identity and individuality, all chimed with the post-colonial complexity of my Australian situation. My super 8 film Periscope 180° was the one that most directly picked up on these ideas, primarily through the voice over which in part lifts snatches of phrases from A Thousand Plateaus; in fact it quotes from many sources but reworks the references into its own semi-poetic essayistic flow of tenuous unresolved concepts, open and connectable, inconclusive yet evocative and with the suggestion of a profundity, however unfounded.

Just over 11 years since he threw himself out of a window to his death, there seems to be been a definite resurgence of interest in Deleuze’s theories, in particular with regard to cinema and artists’ moving image here in London. A series of seminars at the Photographers’ Gallery, organised by Catherine Yass, is premised on Deleuze’s theories about the relationship of sound to image, particularly how this might be used to elucidate contemporary artists’ work in the moving image.

And for the past two days I have been attending Interval 2, a conference and screening event organised by Steven Eastwood, taking Deleuze’s ideas about how the cinematic must have a ‘shock effect’ on thought and the idea of the irrational interval, a cut between two moving images not motivated by movement or action which allows the brain to pass into the not yet thought. The presenters at the conference were an impressive and quite diverse range of professional international luminaries like David Rodowick and Janet Cardiff, alongside PhD students and artists. I haven’t had time to process the implications of all that I’ve seen and heard but a few particular impressions have formed.

My first impression is that those speakers whose presentations were only tangentially related, or completely unrelated to Deleuze’s theories, were actually the most interesting and developed. Rodowick’s presentation in particular dealt with his ideas about the different ‘cosmogenies’ of the digital and the analogue in the moving image and the implications of the transitional period we find ourselves in right now (this was a chapter from his next book so to save time and blogspace you can look forward to checking it out there!). Janet Cardiff and her partner Georges Bures Miller’s assured presentation of their work, which relies heavily on the relationship of sound to image and geographic situation was, particularly in The Berlin Files, full of irrational intervals, and made no reference whatsoever to Deleuze.

It seems though that Deleuze’s theories are indeed so open that they can be applied to more or less any work. This is due to an emphasis on non-conclusion, an interest in mid-points rather than end-points, his own writing as experimental philosophy evinced a great interest in the creative act, creativity as thinking in action, and makes him all but impossible to pin down: in short producing a very useful and adaptable philosophy.

More related to Deleuze, albeit indirectly via Bergson, who was profoundly influencial on Deleuze, was Firoza Elavia’s presentation on Claire Denis’s film L’Intrus. Elavia used Bergson’s idea of the passage of intuition into intellect (or is it the other way around – no matter I suppose) to identify the processes at work in L’Intrus, that somehow this idea that intuition results in an irrational interval that is equally intellectual was all very well but made for a very dull ‘explication’ of the processes at work in what is a remarkable film actually influenced more by the post-Lacanian subjective metaphysical pyschoanalysis of Jean-Luc Nancy (the film being adapted from one of Nancy’s essays). But of course the point is that there can be a Deleuzian ‘reading’ of pretty much anything. When asked if her readings had actually allowed her to reach an interpretation of the Denis film Elavia had to admit not. But was quick to point out that that was not the point, because Deleuze encourages open readings.

So many years after their publication in the early 80s, Deleuze’s books Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image are being used as texts to investigate cinema and artists’ moving images. Perhaps in a time when film (specifically 35mm and 16mm) is becoming used by artists’ reinvention of the cinematic wheel in a gallery context, this might be appropriate. Deleuze’s idea of the irrational interval was prompted by an examination of Godard, and his writings rarely stray far from a cinema which, like Godard, while partially disrupting the codes of cinematic dramatic narrative, relies on the understanding of cinematic semiotic codes as a pre-condition in order to conceive of anything like an irrational (irrational in respect to the self-perpetuated rationality of an ‘illusionistic’ cinematic language) interval as disruptive and worthy of investigation. So the veneer of radicalism relies on a deep conservatism, it is a theory that is ‘normative’, as wide ranging and imaginative as it might be, it has to rely on a ground zero of cinematic expression. This is why Deleuze was not equipped to deal with structural film and other practices that eschew the normalisation of cinematic language: partly because they were outside of his purview, and partly because in some ways they had already done the job of philosophy for him.

The kind of film that best suits Deleuzian cinemantics is the enigmatic, which can use that irrational interval in an indefinable and hence poetic way. This cinema is very attractive and interesting precisely because it is either located in the realm of cinematic codes, or borrows those codes to enhance its sense of an internal, perhaps intuitive, and irrational logic which speaks to a subjective poeticism.

What interests me about the Deleuzian irrational interval is how it speaks to contemporary conditions in rather complex and problematic ways. On one hand it is a deeply western notion: while appearing radical and intellectually challenging, it is deeply imbedded within the canon of western, particularly French, philosophical development. Its re-emergence as theoretical currency comes in a recent history of the retreat of post modern moral relativism and a rise of the clash of civilisations and the new religiosity. The failure of relativism was in its inability to take account of a lack of relativism in other cultural formulations. The Deleuzian seems to suggest that it’s all good with a kind of liberal openness and inconclusiveness, but it shies away from idealism and determinacy, this unfortunately seems to be at odds with the contemporary social and political reality. It seems to date from a (pre-neocon, pre-Taliban) time when the (western) world thought it had finally become secular. So perhaps Deleuzian theory, in its anachronism, ironically offers a kind of intellectual certainty, a reminder of a cinematic golden age when post-enlightenment politics were straight forward and secular.

The idea of cinematic coherence, the Hollywood dream, the unproblematic linear narrative, is an escapist myth, which is precisely why it is so attractive and continues to play a role in lowest common denominator mainstream cinema and television. But this is becoming more rare at all levels of both mediated and everyday contemporary experience (is all everyday experience mediated now? I think mine might be), which is already located in the irrational interval. There is a continuous discontinuity in the urban experience as signs, symbols, sounds, referents, signifiers jumble through the landscape, on the television, on the internet, on the radio, in magazines, on the buses, on your Playstations, Gameboys, mobile phones and iPods, everywhere life is more than simple irrational intervals, it is multiple coexisting and competing moving images. Deleuze may prove a vital, important and illuminating historical theoretical touchstone. But the world has moved on.