Deleuze Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (Contemporary Thinkers Reframed)

Deleuze AJ

m, a 3

CD Q

Damian Sutton Be David Martin-Jones

LB. TAU R IS

Published in

2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com

In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press, New York NY

Copyright

175 Fifth Avenue,

10010

© Damian Sutton and David Martin Jones, 2008

The right of Damian Sutton and David Martin Jones to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN:

978 1845115470

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full

CIP record for this book is available from the Library of

Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available

Typeset in Egyptienne F by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Page design by Chris Bromley Printed and bound in the

UK by TJ International. Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Acknowledgements List of illustrations

vii ix

Foreword: Deleuze reframed?

xi

Part One Introduction. What is a rhizome?

3

Chapter 1. Gaming in the labyrinth

11

David Martin-Jones Chapter 2. Virtual structures of the Internet

Damian Sutton Part Two Introduction. What is becoming? Chapter 3. Minor cinemas

45 51

David Martin-Jones Chapter 4. Becoming art

Damian Sutton

65

27

Parf Three I ntroduction. What is duration?

85

Cha pter 5. Movement-images, time-images and hybrid-images in cinema

David Martin-Jones Cha pter 6. Time (and) travel in television Damian Sutton Conclusion: Reframing Deleuze Notes

129

Select bibliogra phy Glossary I ndex

141 145

137

123

107

91

Acknowledgements

This book i s the product of many fruitful discus sions that we have had together over many years , as well as discus sions we continue to have as s cholars of philosophy and visual culture. We have both been excited and frus trated by Deleuze, and we both continue to enjoy the cut and thrust of the debate ove r h i s work, and are genuinely thankful that we were introduced to a philosopher who could make so many new thoughts ari s e in u s . We are aware that Deleuze and his work can s eem remote or impenetrable to others , however, and thus it is als o from the discussions we have had with colleagu e s and students that we h ave been able to fo cus out attenti o n on the extrao rdinary contribution of Deleuze to philosophy, as well as his contributi on with Felix Guattari. We have re solved to help others understand what we consider to be the most important concepts that Deleuze developed, and we hope that this gui de i s succ e s s ful in introducing new thinkers to Deleuze and his work. We hope the reader will not stop at this book but remain thirsty for more by and on Deleuz e , as we do. There are numerous commentari e s on Deleuze, and many useful analyses made that help develop his ideas and provide new methods of understanding. It has been a great privilege to get to know so m any of tho s e writers from whom we h ave drawn ide a s , and who have b ecome welcome friends and colleagues . This guide would not have been pos sible without the fruitful and challenging discus s i on s we have had with them, almo st too numerous to mention. For support, information and inspiration we would like to give special thanks to Antonio C arlo s Amorim, B ettina Bildhauer,

Philip Drake, Amy Herzog, L aura U. Marks, Bill Marshall, Helen Monaghan, Soledad Montane z , John Mullarkey, Nicholas Oddy, Patricia Pisters , Anna Powel l , John R ajchman, Angelo Restivo , D avid R o dowi ck and Karen Wen ell. In addition, we would like to thank the staff in our departments for their supp ort, and especially the students in our undergra duate and p o s tgraduate classes at Glasgow School of Art, Northumbria University and the University of St An drews . In particular, thanks should go to students on the MA in Film Studies at Northumbria University in 2 0 0 3-4, for engaging deb ates over recent films such as The Cell. Finally, we would like to thank the editorial team at LB. Tauris for helping us develop this guide, and for their advice and support throughout.

List of illustrations

Figure 1 . Mysterious Skin (d. Gregg Araki , Desperate Pictures/

Antidote Film s , 2 004) supplied by the Ronald Grant Archive . 5 9 Figure 2. Rachel Whiterea d , House ( 1 993) courtesy of the Gagosian

Gallery © Rachel Whiteread. Photo c redit: Sue O rmerod.

77

Fig u re 3. The Cell (d. Ta rsem Singh, New Line C inema, 2000)

supplied by the Ronald Grant Archive . Figure

4. Doctor Who

99

(B B C , 2007) copyright © B B C .

1 13

Foreword: Deleuze reframed?

This book is a brief introduction to some of the key phil o sophical motifs , theori e s and approaches of one of the twentieth century's most imp ortant philosophers , and one who s e ideas have strongly i nfluenced our p a s s age into the twenty first. Gilles Deleuze ( 1 925 95) was b orn in Pari s , and studied under Ferdinand Al quie and Jean Hyppolite . As a philosopher he developed a fairly predictable career, which s aw him work at I'Universite de Provence and later at l'Universite de Paris VIII, Vincennes/Saint Deni s , where he worked until h e retired in 1 9 8 7 . His colleagues included Jean Fran<;:ois Lyotard, Michel Fouc ault and, perhaps most importantly, Felix Guattari . The impact of Deleuze's philo s ophy is far from predictable, however, and the works that he produced over his lifetime

on

Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault, Henri B ergson and Gottfried Leibniz, among others

do

not rest on the bookshelf of the philosophy professor's office, but create re s onances in new artworks , new visual communications , new philo sophies. Unlike the works of some of his contemporaries, including that of Foucault and Lyo tard but also Jean Baudrillard and Sl avoj

ZiZ:ek, Deleuze's phil o s ophy i s

sel dom used as just an

interpretative mechanism for cultural criticism. Instead, D eleuzian ideas aris e in the Internet, in cinema , television and in visual art s , in architecture and p o litical thought. C ultural mo tifs s u ch a s 'non linear' thought, for example, can be traced b ack to Deleuze's work with Guattari, most commonly appearing under the heading ' rhizomatic' , or ' rhizomorphi c ' . In the l a s t few years s ome of the

c ontemp o r ary phil o s o phical world's most impo rtant thinkers including

Zi zek, Alain

Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

h ave turn e d to Deleuze and the legacy of his prolifi c work. D eleuzian ideas have influenced s cholars of history and economics, as well as tho se in politi c s , gender studies, and in art and design theory. D e leuzian influences can be s een in the work of Vilem F l u s s er, for examp l e , who s e nomadological writing has b een revisited in theories of visual culture, and Deleuzian ideas echo in the work of B runo Lato ur, one of contemp orary s o c i o logy's brightest minds in the study of technology and culture. This is why we felt tha t the time was right to develop a book such a s thi s ; a b o o k that we hope will be an invaluable companion for s omeone meeting D eleuze for the first time, and which will act as a springb o ard for a new thinker toward new ideas and concepts , new p roductive relationships between philosophy and creative practice. We will intro duce the new thinker (artis t/designer, p rofessional s cholar, s tudent) to s ome of the key i d e a s D el e uze devel oped through his career, through his adoption of earlier philos ophers , and in hi s collab orations with F elix Guattari (19 30 9 2 ) . We came to this project having worked on our own a s critical thinkers , finding as we talked together persistent i s s u e s ab out which we shared intere sts and concern s . We had both noted, for i n s tanc e , the growing widespread intere s t in D e l e u z e , which excited some colleagues and exasp erated o thers . We a l s o noted some of the shortcomings of Deleuzian debate s , however, which s e emed to be mired in the practice of quoting him like s cripture . This s eemed to opp o s e the dynamism that D eleuze's practice of phil o s ophy its elf illus trated, as in his ability to return to earlier phil o s ophers and deve l o p a relationship with them that leap s b eyond quotation and produces something new. Famous ly, Deleuze's practice has been des cribed (by him and otbers) as that of taking other philo sophers from behind, an inva sive act that produces by 'immaculate conception' a child of b oth. But it i s als o a n approach, that Ian Buchanan h a s des cribed as a 'calculated

creativity' , ab out knowing when ideas can b e taken further, when to return to the text, and when to pick up new texts and broaden one's scope.l Thi s book, for examp l e , i s a pro ductive result of individual and collective thinking a s we continue to work with Deleuz e , and continue to read him. Deleuze used a numb er of philo s ophical tactics that we have tried to adopt here. The first i s the principle 'ad fontes', whi ch in Latin means 'to the sources'. Deleuze's tactic of 'taking philosophers from b ehind' meant that his relationship to their works bordered on the intimate. While it is easy to see the influence of Bergs on, for example, in D eleuze's own phil o sophy of time , this can also give rise in the writing to a kind of bickering or lover's quarrel between philo s opher p ast and pres ent. C ertainly, when Deleuze returned to Bergson in the 1 980s the result was a realis ation of a lover's renewed p a s sion. This is why, even when Deleuze worked with Guattari, we have kept with Deleuze as the lead philosopher in that partnership, because, while their work undoubtedly developed its own unique concepts , when Deleuze c ollab orated with Guattari he was in fact already in collaboration with Nietzsche, Bergson and others , and i t is the ideas from the s e collaborations that give Deleuz e's philos ophy its characteri s tic voice. A s e cond tactic that Deleuz e employed is illustrated best in his last work with Guattari , What Is Philosophy?' The underlying princip l e of this is to ask a question that will give ri se to new concepts in an alloying with the creative product. It is the mistake of the one dimensional theorist to have the theory of the arts in mind and then take it to the artwork. Instead, we must start with a hunch about the philosophy, and then see where this is given ris e in the artwork. So Deleuze a n d Guattari b egin with becoming and get to Paul Klee, begin with affect and get to the monumental . A new concept can therefore be taken b a ck to understand again a conceptual p ower in the work of an arti s t long written off ( a s in Rob ert Mapp lethorp e , we might argue here) . Simil arly, a new creative form might better illustrate, and even give new dimension

to, a c oncept alre a dy develop ed, as in the case of minor cinemas . The p oint here, as John Rajchman suggests , is not that cre ative practice c annot do p hilos ophy, but that to do philos ophy is 'to fabri c ate concepts in resonance and interference with the arts ' .3 Phi l o s ophy c anno t do art (in b eing ' applied' to art as a theory) any more than art can do philos ophy, but instead they have the c ap a c ity t o raise new thoughts through the mutual contagion, ' in which both art and thought come alive and discover their res onanc e s with one another' .' We h ave cho s e n to ask 'What is a rhi zome?' , ' What i s becoming ? ' a n d ' What is duration? ' , b e c a u s e it i s from thes e that we can re ally get to grips with the us efulness of Deleuze. We have taken in discussions of imm anence, p sychoanalysis and the body without o rgans along the way, but it is these three c o ncepts that c o n s t i tute D eleuze's mo s t productive l egacy, and which have the cap acity in the right hands and minds to inform a creative l ife . The s e thre e que stions p rovi de a s tructure fo r the b o o k , and we exp lore t h e m u s i n g original analysis of examples from contemporary vi sual culture. The first p art introduces the idea of the rhizome as an ever­ exp anding labyrinth without centre, capable of either op ening up new horizons or cl osing down p o s s ibiliti e s . In our firs t chapter, ' Gaming in the l abyrinth ' , D avid M artin Jo n e s examines the computer game as illus trative of the interaction b e tween the rhiz o me and Platonic thinking . The video game provi d e s a multifaceted examp l e of the ways in which a rhiz omatic understanding of visual culture (and especially our conception of Deleuzian de and reterritorialisations of identity) often depends as much on the manner and context in which we use different media a s it does on the specificities of the medium. Accordingly, the different type s of identity that garners exp erience might visit such contrasting extremes as coloniser or gu errilla fighter. Next, D amian Sutton develops this in terms of online space and social re s i s tance, in our s econd chap ter, ' Virtual s tructures of the

Internet' . Virtual structures are tho s e created by television, telecommuni cations and, most recently, the architectures and environment of the Internet. Deleuzian thinking , fo cused on the rhizome , has been instrumental to our understanding of the Internet and the ' shap e ' it took i n its e arly years , and to the critical idea of the Internet as promi s ing a democratic access to information and communication that offers us unlimited movement and freedom. We then move on to study social formation through resistance and through difference, and to do s o we look at these in cinema and art as illustrative of 'becoming' . 'Becoming' is drawn from Deleuze's opp o s ition to exis tentialism and ' b eing' , his oppos ition to p sychoanalysi s , and his intere s t in the vitalism of the universe indeed, it forms the basis for much of D eleuze's philosophy. D eleuze and Guattari's proposal for ethical so cial resistance, for example, was that we must understand otherness through becoming 'Other' ('becoming woman' , 'becoming -animal ' , 'becoming-minoritarian') . In our third chapter, 'Minor cinemas ' , D avid Martin Jones uses Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of Franz Kafka to help understand the ro l e of minor cinemas in p olitical and s ocial critique . Kafka's grotesque, surre al and bizarre world could b e interpreted as a critique of the colonial situation in which he wrote. His idea of making major forms of literature stutter or stammer, to open up the hierarchie s they inform, can be applied to a numb er of minor cinemas

S enegalese, Turkish, Queb ecois among other s . In this

instanc e , recent US indep endent cinema is examined as a minor cinema. For our fourth chap ter, ' B e coming art' , D amian Sutton shows how D eleuzian political thought has coincided with a visual arts practice that is often profoundly militated against c apitalist ideology, the structu res of the c anon and even the notion of the artwork itself. Underlying this

is p erhaps D eleuze's mos t

important gift t o critical approaches i n contemporary art

a

theory of percepts and affects that explains why p a rticular artworks have such

a

lasting creative , monumental effe ct.

We tum in the last p art to the ' s ubstance' of organis ation, the full potentiality of time itself. D eleuze was profoundly influenced by Bergson, and he found in his work a theory of time from the point of view of the experience of life. From here Deleuze developed his own philo sophy o f time, one that i s best understood through our plastic repre s entati ons of it, such as cinema. In chapter 5 , ' Movement images, time images a n d hybrid images i n cinema' , David Martin Jones explains how D eleuze's philosophy of time i s expressed i n the movement image, which creates a linear narrative by focusing on the moving body of its protagoni st, and the time image, which atte mpts to repre s ent the virtual movement of time itself. The chapter then demonstrates how recent hybrid films that contain aspects of b oth images explore the difference between space and time, and the p arallels they draw b etween the mind and the body, dream and reality, and new media and film. After this, in chapter 6 , 'Time (and) travel in television ' , D amian Sutton looks at s cience fi ction televi s i o n to illustrate how Deleuze's phil o sophy provides for an understanding of our p erception of time, through his devel opment of B ergson's gift to philos ophy: the realis ation of mental becoming, informed by memory, within which we live . Deleuze and Guattari also look for the abs olute ground of life its elf, the energy and forces that make up b ecoming, given shape as an idea of the pure, simple universe that lends its elf toward organis ation. This is demonstrated in the ways in which we tell stori e s , and the ways in which we narrate and explain our experienc e of the world and its p o s s ibilitie s . D eleuze's philos ophy was rooted i n a sense of us efulnes s , intended a s a productive philosophy o f life . These are philosophies that have one eye on the future, and on how we must live . Thi s means that the value of h i s ideas c a n b e tested b y their continued u s efuln e s s , on the one hand, and their ability to give ris e to new concepts on the other. Hence we have tried to include sharp recent and contemporary examples from creative media games, televi sion, as well as art and cinema

Internet, video

that allow Deleuze's

ideas to develop beyond some of the fo rms with which he was familiar. The aim of this app roach i s not that we should s ay what this or that philosophical idea means, but that we should provide ways for new thinkers to see an idea in new cre ative form s , even as the idea changes and generates anew. We have chosen examples to illustrate Deleuze's writing, but also his ideas and their afterlife , as they are taken up by others or a s they form a constellation with philos ophies p a s t and present. In many of the chapters we h ave tried to give a sense of the wider histories and deb ates that our case studies have , informed at every stage by our Deleuzian analysis. Most important of all, we have trie d to u s e examples of h o w

as individuals , as a s ociety, as culture

we

demons trate concepts to ours elves . W e often u s e the visual arts to tell s torie s , of course, but it is easy to forget that they are a l s o employed to conceive, elab orate and discuss fundamental aspects of living: our relationship to s ociety and meaning, our relationship to growth a n d subj e ctivity, our relationship to time and the immensity of duration. We have reframed many of Deleuze's ideas so that the np.w reader and new thinker will have the courage and tenacity to 1

.k up Deleuze's books and s e e new iterations of, and

challenges to, his conceptual project i n the visual arts .

P art One

Introduction

What is a rhizome?

In literal term s , the word ' rhizome ' refers to a plant stem that grows horizontally underground, s ending out roots and shoots. Many grasses are rhizomati.c, as are any number of common plants found in our diet s , including asparagu s , ginger and the p otato . When Deleuze and Guattari used the term in their intro ductory chapter to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia ( 1 980), however, they did so to describ e a certain way of thinking .' The image of roots and shoots emerging from a horizontal stem encapsulated a manner of thinking that they favoured over the dominant thought process of Western philos ophy. Dating b a ck to the ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle, thi s dominant Western model is caus a l , hi erarchical, and structured by binaries (one/ many, us/them, m an/woman, etc . ) , and has been the dominant form of thinking in Western s ociety for s everal thousand years . Due to its emphasis on cause and effect and the creation of hierarchies, Deleuze and Guattari comp ared the dominant Western model of thinking to the tre e . This image refers not only to the literal shape of a tree (the seed is the cause, the tree the effect) , but also

for instance

to the genealogical lineage attributed to

ancestry in the family tree . In a family tree there is an obvious causal relationship between a single p oint of origin (the father) and his offspring. Thus the image of the tree expresses how the dominant model of Western thinking creates a single version of the truth (one tre e , seemingly living in isolation

or, if you like , one

father and one family) , from which the 'Other' is then defined

the

space around the tre e , or that which is 'not tree'. Thi s typ e of binary thinking has a long tradition and i s still dominant today, although in the late nineteenth c entury the German philos opher Nietzs che ( 1 844-1 900) began to point the way toward another way of thinking . Gre a tly influ enced by Nietz s che (Del e u z e wrote

Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1 9 6 2 ) , Deleuze developed the idea of the rhizome with c o -writer Guattari . D eleuze and Guattari did not establish rhizomatic thinking in opp o sition to the dominant We stern mo del. however. It is not exactly a case of tree versus rhizome. Such a move would have recreated a b inary opp osition (in thi s case, b etween right and wrong ways of thinking) . consistent with the dominant Western model of thought that Deleuze and Guattari were attempting to rethink. Rather, they felt that we should reconsider how we think. In a s e n s e , the image of the rhizome was supposed to ' s upplant ' , i f you c a n forgive the p u n , the image of the tree . Rather than a n oppositional model of thought, Deleuze a n d Guattari attempted to show that the previous model did not provide the whole picture . This difference is p erhaps easiest to understand if we consider the image of the tree in the c o ntext of a forest. In the forest there i s n o single truth, n o singular cause a n d effect, no o n e ' true' tree . Rather, the forest i s a single entity made u p of numerous trees , or, numerous 'truths ' . It is also impos sible to posit one origin to a forest, and not s imply because you c annot tell which tree came first. Any one tree i s a pro duct of an ass emblage, of water, sunlight and soil, without which there would be no tree s at all, regardl e s s o f whether a seed exists or not. To consider a tree i n isolation, then, i s erroneous , b e c au s e everything i s i n fa ct the product of an a s s emblage with various different elements , and i s not s imply attributable to one cause. Everything is, in this s ense, rhizomatic , and t o think in t h e manner of the tree i s only t o u s e o n e aspect of the rhizome . For Deleuze and Guattari, when thinking we should not always re duce things to ' one thing and its Others ' , one true way of thinking

and its competitors , but, rather, consi der that every thing always contains many truth s . For thi s reason they attempted to disc ard the hierarchical image of thought of the tree as somewhat illuso ry, and replace it with the horizontal image of the rhi zome. Instead of tree , rhizome. Instead of one , one as m any. Not one and its multiple Others , but a singular multiplicity. Like a forest, then, for Deleuze and Guattari the rhizome 'has neither beginning nor end, but always a mi ddle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspill s ' .' Some concrete examples can help us understand the broader ramifications of the rhizome and rhizomatic ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari used the rhizome to des cribe living entities (pack animal s such as rats and wolves) but a l s o geographi c a l entities s uch a s b urrow s , 'in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout' .' In the case of p ack animals , the moving masses continually form and re-form a single shape, a fluid entity that i s at once one and many. This i s a clear examp le of a rhizome - a herd of wild hors e s , a wheeling flock of birds, etc. The idea of the burrow, however, p rovi des a more interesting angle from which to consider the rhizome. C onsider the guerrilla war o f attrition that the Vietnamese Vi etcong fought against the overwhelmingly superior technology of the US military in the 1 960s and e arly 1 970s . As p art and p arcel of this s truggle they utili sed an e l ab orate tunnel sys tem which enabled them to evade the US military's land and air force s , s tore and move arms and supplies , build up numbers for ambushes and surprise attacks, and quickly dis a p p e ar again once overwhelmed. The rhizome as burrow, then, is a way of describing an underground political movement, both literally, as in this case, and figuratively. As a further, figurative example, undergro und prote s t movements are now also a b l e to gather s trength and support among geographically disp arate members using the rhizomatic networks enabled by the Internet. The rhizome, then, has many applications, one of which is i n the political realm.

Deterritoria lisation/ reterritorialisation

At thi s stage a note of warning i s needed. Whenever we expl ore thought (or, indeed, anything else) rhizomatically, there is always a deep ambiguity involved. The rhizome has the potential to produce great change, or, to u s e a word that Deleuze deployed in A Thousand

Pla teaus, to deterritorialise. There is a l s o a complementary m ovement that is always involved, however, a force that attempts to recreate stability and order, to reterri torialise. As a shifting p attern (be it the rapidly shifting flo cking of birds o r the slow spread of a forest), the rhizome is constantly creating a new 'line of flight" that enables it to deterritoriali s e . Along thi s line of flight i t has the p otenti al to move into (and onto) new territori e s . Lines of flight are created at the edge of the rhizomatic formation, where the multi p licity experiences an outs i d e , and tra n s forms and changes . At thi s border there is a doubl e becoming that changes both the rhizome and that which it encounters (which is always, in fa ct, the e dge of another rhizome) . Deleuze and Guattari explain this pro c e s s using the examp le of a wasp pollinating an orchid: How c o u l d move m e nts of d ete rritori alisation a n d processes of rete rritoria lisation not be relative , a lways connected, ca ught up i n one another? The orchid deterritorialises by forming a n i m a g e , a tracing of a wasp; b u t the wasp reterritorialises on that i m a ge. The wasp is nevert h e l ess deterrito ria l ised , b e c o ming a piece i n the orchid's rep roductive a p paratus. But it reterritorialises the orchid by transportin g

its p o l l e n .

Wasp

and

o rc h i d , a s h eterogeneous

elements , form a r h izome.s

Thi s exampl e illustrates that with every deterritorialisation there i s an accomp anying reterritorialis ation. The orchid ceases to be entirely orchid as it encounters the wasp. It deterritori alises (a process of becoming wasp ) , but, as its p ollen is move d els ewhere by the wasp, the orchid is also reterritori alised. The opp osite is a l s o true for the w a s p . As Deleuze a n d Guattari have it, '[A] b e coming wasp of the orchid and a becoming orchid of the wasp.

E ach of the se becomings brings about the deterritorialisation of one term and the reterritorialis ation of the other." A s with all s u ch encounters there is an a s s emblage create d , and a double becoming between b oth aspects of the a s s emblage. What thi s examp l e does not immediately show, h owever, is the p ower imb alance that usually accomp ani e s such encounters . For

a

clearer example of the amb iguiti es that surround de and

reterritorialisation it is worth consi dering humanity's most violent and influential form of de and reterritorialis ation: colonisation. When the ' New Wo rld' of the Ameri c a s was first officially 'discovered' by Europeans (not to mention Australia, New Zealand and s o on) . their coastlines were mapp ed by the first s ailors . As the s e lands were gradually occupied by E urop ean settlers a colonial mapping of thes e lands also took place. These acts of mapping were at once a deterritorialis ation of European identities a s they exp l o r e d new territori e s outside Euro p e

and a

reterritorialis ation, as they began to s ettle new lands. This process of mapping contained a mutual pro c e s s of b ecoming, as the colonis ers adapted to their new lands, and the new lands to their colonisers. Through contact with a new land and its peoples the values and pra ctic e s of th e s e European cultures were deterritorialised, transformed, and ultimately reterritorialised in a new form. Similarly, the native peoples of these lands (and, indeed, the l ands thems elves) were deterritorialised and reterritorialised into new forms due to the app e arance of thes e strangers . The history of colonialism is one of unequal reterritorialisation, however, in which the dominant Europ e an cultures

for all that

they did adapt on encountering new l ands and new peoples ultimately came to impose their culture upon the New Worl d. It would be euphemi stic to suggest that war, massacre, geno cide, slavery, concentration camp s , taxes, land c learances, disease and numerous other such abus e s were simply 'reterritorialis ations ' . While a dominant colonial power will often change a s its rhizome comes into contact with another, the other, weaker rhizome is

often absorbe � , or forcefully reterritorialised by its culture. Thus, although the rhizome provi des a new way of thinking , due to this imb alance in the process of mutual becoming other that i s de and reterritorialisation, the rhiz ome should not necess arily be c elebrated as the answer to all problems encountered when thinking in the manner of the tre e . Rhizomes in context

Finally, it is worth considering the context from which the idea of the rhizome emerged. In May 1 968 there was an enormous popular uprising throughout France, beginning with a mass s tudent strike in Pari s , whi ch was soon joined by workers all over the country. Not long after thi s , in 1 97 2 , D eleuze and Guattari wrote their first book together, An ti Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. A

Tho usand Plateaus was originally publi shed as the s e quel to Anti-Oedipus, and the idea of the rhizome is clearly a development of ideas found in thi s original text. Anti-Oedip us is a dens e book that rails against psychoanalysis for attempting to ' cure' non conforming desires by reducing them to the familial, O e dipal triangle of ' daddy mummy me ' . ' Deleuze and Guattari consider psychoanalysts as modern day priests,' charged with placing the origin, or root, of all psychological issues in the bourgeois family home. Psychoanalysi s , then, functions by perpetually imposing the image of thought of the tre e . If you have a s exual 'problem' , this i s because you did not develop correctly as a child. You did not develop into a healthy tree because your roots were not given the proper nourishment as a s apling. In fact, in chapter 2 of A

Tho usand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari return to psychoanalysi s to reiterate t h i s point in relation to the idea of the rhi zome, which they introduce in chapter 1 . In contrast to p s ychoanalysis , and p erhap s as a consequence of exp eriencing the uprisings of 1 968,' Deleuze and Guattari felt that humanity had more chance of developing if it looked le s s at the family as origin, and more at the rhizomatic p atterns of everyday

life in which we are intera ct with others. Humans are p a ck anima l s , and, although society structures our activiti es through institutions that are hierarchical (that function as tre e s ) , there is alway s the p o s s ibility of a rhizomatic gra s s ro ots (1) revolution emerging from the interaction of people. For this reason they p referred schiz o analysis to p sycho analysi s , a practice of finding ours elves by exploring our identities as pack animals

or, rather,

as a p a ck of animals . Instead of seeing the unc onscious as a dark and forbidding place in which desire is buri e d , for Del euze and Guattari the unc onscious is a place of underground passageways or rhizomatic burrows through which desire moves like a guerrilla fighter, ready to spring up when we least exp ect it.

o

Chapte r 1

Gaming in the labyrinth David Martin Jones

Thi s chap ter examines the vi deo game as i llu strative of the rhizome, and the problems of de

and reterritorialis ati on that

occur when we try to unders tand the effect of games on garners. It begins with an analysis of the way many video games are structured around a process of mapping that implies pos sible de and reterritoriali s ations within the p articular game world . It then explores some of the broader ways in which garners are de and reterritori a li s e d during the p ro c e s s of p l aying. Although the academic study of the vi deo game is a very recent phenomenon, numerous attempts have already been made to theorise what video games mean, and the effects they have on the people who use them. This s ection thus summarises many of these debate s , noting their significance in terms of the concept of a pos sible rhizomatic gamer identity. Finally, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the first three versions of the controversial game Grand ThejtAuto ( 1 998 1, as an example of the way gaming c an be viewe d as either a de or reterritori alising of identity. A brief history of video games

The history of the development of the video game is well known and well documented. Without going into any great detail, the first games were constructed in the 1 950s and 1 9 60s , and are usually considered t o b e Alexander D o uglas's c omputeri sed noughts and crosses (also known as Tic Tac Toe) created at C ambridge University in 1 95 2 ; William Higinbotham's very basic tennis game

(a precursor to Pong) designed as a visitor attraction fo r the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States (a government nuclear research facility) in 19 58; and, most sophisti c ated of all,

Spacewar, developed by Steve Russ ell and other res earchers at the Mas s achusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1 9 62 . In the 1970s video games b egan to b e p layed in the home, with the Magnavox Ody s s ey, quickly followed by the Atari games console and now classic game s s uch as Pong, Space Invaders and Pac Man. This perio d also s aw the flourishing of video games in the arcade. The 1980s brought home computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, and from Jap an b oth Nintendo and SEGA emerged as major players in the glob al market for video games. Finally, in the 1 9 90s and 2000s the home video game market really took off with the c ompetition between the short lived SEGA Dreamcast, the S ony Playstation, Micros oft's Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube.1 Moreover, although there have b een forms of online gaming since as e arly as 19 69, this practice h as also b lo s s omed more recently with the global spread of the Internet.' MUD (multi user dungeon) and , more recently, MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role p laying games) now bring t o g ether thous ands of garners in virtu al c ommuniti e s to interact with each other in the process of playing a game. This b rief and rap i d history has already seen one major boom and bust in the video games industry, during the 1980s, and, although video games are now a multi million dollar industry, at different times their incepti on and development have been variously due to the efforts of computer enthusiasts such as Russ ell and his colleagu e s at MIT, energetic entrepreneurs such as Ralph Baer of the mili tary electronics comp any S anders Associ ates , and Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari , as well as the university s ector and the military as research environments.' C orres p ondingly, although it is als o still relatively young, the field of video game study is one of the most rapidly exp anding of all a c a d emic discipline s . The m ajor b arrier that it fac e s i s overco ming t h e prej u dice that v i d e o games ( a m a s s medium

a s s o ciated with lei sure tim e , and often with the 'wa s ting' of time in general) are s omehow not worthy of study, no matter how p opular they might b e. This is a bias that Andreas Huy s s en has des crib e d in a much b r o a d e r context as forming p art of the fe minis ation of m a s s culture that has o ccurred throughout modernity, and it can al s o be applied to the s tu dy of pulp literature, radi o , film, television and so on.' Despite this barrier to its development, since the late 1 990s the field o f video game s tudies has produced numerou s b ooks and antho logies , and in 2 00 1 the first online journal dedicated to video garne s , Game

Studies.' As many of the people to write on the video g ame are g arners thems el ve s , and due t o the number of different gam e s th at exi s t , there a r e numerous take s on t h e effe c t the g aming experience has o n the garner. In the s ections that follow I dis cus s the s e theories to s ee whether they suggest that a de

or

reterritoriali s ation of the g arner is p o s sible, as p art of a larger di scussion of the rhizomatic potential of the video game. Pac Man: mapping space i n the video game

In Cinema 2 (I 985) , Deleuze notes that certain European films that emerged after World War II displayed a view of time s imilar to that of the labyrinthine m odel of time found in the writings of twentieth century Argentine author Jorge Lui s B o r g e s . ' In chapter 5 , this typ e of cinematic construction of time i s discus sed in more detail. In relation to computer games thi s concept is also us eful . The rhi zome can also b e considered a labyrinth , a lthough this must be understood a s an ever exp anding labyrinth without res trictive points of acc e s s or defined centre . As we s aw in the intro duction to Part One , a rhi zome grows from its middle. As s o much g aming i s concerned with the traversing, inves tigation, mapping and controlling of s p ace, thi s idea of the rhiz ome a s labyrinth can also b e applied to video games . C onsider a very early game such as Pac Man . The space o f the game is laid out as a single level , on a single screen, s een from an

aeri al point of view. This space is constructed rather like a maze, or s imple labyrinth, with p artitioning walls and channels along which the Pac Man can run. This s p ace is not a rhizome per se, as the l ayout is that of a fixed space that does not contain the po s sibility of change due to the actions of the gamer. It is not poss ible, s ay, to build a new wall. Nonethele s s , the gamer's actions controlling the Pac Man can be considered as a reterritorialising of this space. The Pac Man can b e consi dered an explorer who moves through the labyrinth, consuming everything in his way

from the

ub i quitous pills to the cherri e s , orang e s , s trawb erri e s , a p p l e s , grap e s , b ananas a n d other fruits that appear a s bonuse s , and even to the blue gho sts that appear when the Pac Man b e comes supercharged. This type of reading of the game is in line with that of s everal commentators who consi der the act of gaming to b e rather like that of colonisation. A s James Newman summari s e s i n Videogames: Typically, videogames create ' worlds' , 'lands', or 'environments' for p l a ye rs to

exp l o re , traverse , c o nq u e r o r even

dyna m i c a l l y

manipUlate a n d transform in some cases", sites" , i n which play i s at least p a rtly a n o c t of c o l o n ization a n d t h e enactment of transform ations upon the spa ce,'

Similarly, B arry Atkins in More than a Game (2003) discusses the colonial undercurrents of recent games such as Tomb Raider, in which the aristocrat Lara Croft j ourneys through foreign lands using her ' s u perior technology' to dish out violence against mute repres entatives of the indigenous popUlation, who s e artefacts she steals for herself.s In respect o f this type of rea ding, Pac Man appears to be the ultimate coloni ser, someone who se only goal in life is to consume a s much as possible, l aying to waste the ground he covers in the proce s s . A s we s aw in the intro ductio n to this p art, when s p a c e i s reterritorialis e d i n this way, as

a colonising action, there is

a lway s

an une qual power b i a s involved. Thu s , when viewe d in thi s light,

video games appear extremely cons ervative, at least at the level of content. There is a chink of light. however, here for people who do not want to simply damn all video games as b eing as conservative as their 'stories ' often are . Another way of viewing Pac Man is that it represents a deterritorialising of space. As the above quote from Newman shows , there is some ambiguity over whether playing a game is always an act of colonisation, or whether it might b e b etter understo o d as a n attempt t o ' dynamically manipulate and transform' space. Admittedly, the Pac Man cannot control the shape of the space he moves within, but his m ovements themselves can b e said to trans form it. While mapping the enclo s e d space in which he is contained, the Pac Man must avoi d b eing stopped (literally reterritorialised) by the ghosts that control the space. If he i s caught at any point then he i s killed. In many resp ects , then, Pac Man might be considered les s a game about colonisation

:S .5 >-

.D

than it i s a game about impris onment and escape. C ertainly, the

.2

sirens that s ound as the Pac Man nears es cape suggest as much.

:S .5

As the Pac Man eats each of the little pills he creates a cleared

�

en c

channel. and the more channels he clears the closer he is to

·e

escaping from the maze. In fact, the only way for the Pac Man to

(!)

deterritoriali s e

to literally move on from this s p ace

is to

continually move in different direction s , hide , avoid the gho sts as much as possible, and use the supercharge to ambush them as they converge on him. In this respect, Pac Man can be considered les s a representation of the process of colonis ation than a representation of the process of perpetual evasion and deterritorialised movement deployed in order to combat colonisation. To return to our example from the intro duction to thi s p art, the movements of the Pac Man are a little like that of the Vietcong in their tunnels . His constant shifting of direction traces the trajectory of hit and run guerrilla warfare . Thus , although the s tatic space through which the Pac Man m oves is n o t rhizomati c , his m ovements are rhi zomati c , because they deterritoriali s e and transform the sp ace through which he move s . In addition to the textual level. though , what

c

II

potenti al i s there for de

or reterritorialis ation of the gamer's

identity while playing video games? The ga ming experience: de- and reterritoria lisations

Several theories exist that view the gaming process as offering the p otential for the gamer to deterritori alise his or her identity. Most obviously, gaming i s a form of play, an action in which people tradition ally 'l o s e themselves'. When playing a game the gamer usually experience s the game world through an avatar. An avatar is a character in the game world that stands in for the gamer. S ome c la s s ic examples of avatars would include Pac Man (and, indeed, Ms Pac Man) , or Mario from Donkey Ko ng and the Super

Mario game s . More recent examp les would include third person shooters , such a s Lara C roft in Tomb Raider and Solid Snake in "tl

�

�

� tl)

Metal Gear Solid, characters in first person shooters , such as the anonymo u s space marine in Doom, or Gordon Freeman in Half

Life, the various family members that garners give their own names to in The Sims, and so on. At its most b asic level, then, the presence

!:l

of the avatar means that, once immers e d in a video game , the

�

gamer c an literally become another p erson for a while . Moreover,

(!)

-0

in first and third person shooters it is not uncommon for a m ap indent als o to appear in the c o mer of the s creen, requiring the gamer t o maintain a rather s ophisticated visual overview of the game world, noting the p osition of his/her avatar on the m ain s creen and on the map in the corner. Here the gamer is further deterritorialised from his/her own identity, controlling an avatar that is at once visibly 'here' and 'there ' , at once both T and 'he/she'. More over, each time we play a vi deo game the experience is different. As we learn to play games more and more effectively we transfo rm ourselves , the development of the avatar's progre s s within the game mirroring the improvement of our skills a s garners

improving o u r knowledge a n d exp ertis e i n the pro c e s s .

Thi s c o u l d b e considered a form of deterritoriali s ation of the gamer that is built into the computer game . Gonzalo Fras ca, for

instance , argues that some games are less interested in p roviding the gamer with a s e t goal to reach ( a s first

and third person

sho oters generally dol than with enabling the gamer to explore multiple creative possibilities. Frasca cites SimCity as an example of this type , a s it has the p otential to b e noticeably different every time the gamer constructs a new city." In s u ch games there is an open ended p otential for the gamer to deterritori ali s e his/her identity. Thi s p o tential is multiplied again in multiplayer game s such as Quake, The Thing and Half Life: Counter Strike, where there are more possibiliti e s for new experiences each time the game is p l ayed, because different players will react differently both to events in the game world and to the pres ence of each other. The most p o sitive take on this form of immersion is that it has the p otential to lib erate garners from their u s ual identity. It enables them to act in ways they never would normally in reality. Viewed in this way, video games are s o cial s afety valve s . They let people experiment with their identiti e s , imagine ideal identiti e s , o r simply let off steam by breaking rules a n d destroying things they would u s ually have to respect. On the other hand, some critics of video games see this a s a dangerous illusion that can lead to s erious anti s o cial b ehaviour. More to the p o int, the i d e a that garners deterritori alise their identity and b e come other people when immers e d in the game is easily criticised. For many people the exp erience may feel no different from that of playing with a doll or an action figure as a child. Why should we necess arily believe that, when g aming, we h ave left our own b o di e s and

become Pac Man, Mari o , Lara C roft or Solid Snake? After all, although frus trating, it i s unusual to feel physical pain when Pac Man is eaten by Pinky the little pink gho s t. MMORPGs, mods a nd the rhizome

A more sophisticated way of consi dering the way games enable garners to deterritorialise their identities is through the creation of virtual gaming communities .lO Indee d , drawing on Deleuze and

:E .5

k .2 CIl

:E .5

CI c

'e

/5 ..

Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Miroslaw Filiciak has noted that gaming communities can enable rhizomatic i dentities to emerge." One example of this typ e of rhizomatic interaction would b e a LAN party, where garners congregate to interact virtually over a local area network, or LAN. For the peri o d of the game these garners form a c ommunity, sharing a set of rules established by the game that is p l ayed. After the game the garners disp ers e again, their temporary group identity illustrating how a rhizome i s formed by

a

shifting mass of deterritorialised individuals who meet and

temporarily reterritoriali s e , only to di s p ers e (deterritori alisel once again. I ' Further exampl e s of this typ e o f rhi z o m e are found in MMORPGs such a s EverQ uest, Star Wars Galaxies, WarCraft and Ultima Online. When p laying these games the garners may never physically me et, but there may be thous ands of online us ers involved simultaneously, interacting in the s ame virtual environment. E ac h user creates his/her own avatar or avatars, which can b e considered virtual versions of the user's self, through which they c an experiment with their identity. Filiciak state s : In t h e case o f MMORPGs, there i s no need for strict diets , exha usting exercise program mes , or cosmetic surgeries

-

a dozen o r so m ouse

clicks is enough to adapt one's 'self to expectations . Thus, we have an opportu n i ty to p a i n l essly manipulate o u r i d entity . . . 13

Through interaction with other online users, us ers in these virtu al gaming c o mmunities are then a b le to exp eriment by u s ing the s e other, virtu a l s e lve s to interact with others . This exp erimentation with identity c a n be unders tood a s deterritoriali s ing in numerous ways , b u t , just as o n e s imple example . let us c onsider gendered identity. Although a male gamer may only try on the identity of a virtual female character for a few hours (or vic e vers a) , there is no doubting that in some ways this experience becomes a p art of his 'real life ' exp e rience , a p art of his identity. If any proof of this were nee ded, EverQuest a lone is

reported to have 'generated a (real world) economy c omparable to that of a medium sized country', with one third of its adult us ers s pending longer in the game than they do in work. I. In addition to this deterritorialisatio n of the user's or gamer's self, some video games enable the gamer to adapt or construct his/her own game environment, to create modifications, or 'mods ' . Above a n d b eyond the choosing or adapting of 'skin s ' for avatars (turning the avatar into a character of the gamer's choice) , in certain games the gamer has the option of creating his/her own characters and leve l s . This potential for video games to enable garners to adapt their game world was app arent once Doom 's source code was released to the general public, allowing its users to adapt the game environment. I S Nowadays games such as Quake

and HalfLife similarly allow the gamer to create his/her own mods . I ' In the s e instances, rather than characters exploring an

:S .E

k

environment of the game designer's invention, the gamer is able (to

.2

a certain extent) to play God. This practice ensures that the g amer

:S .E

- rather than c o n s t antly running for his/her life in o rder to

til

Cl c:

deterritorialise the s p ace of the game world (like Pac Man or Lara

·S

Croft)

(!)

can deterritori ali se the very maze in which he/she runs.

Now the game environment itself becomes

an

adaptable rhizome.

Garners effectively become producers of the game, not just because they interact with the game world (design and build a city, kill the zombies, etc . ) and therefore 'design' the narrative of their g ame exp eri ence , but a l s o because they c an , quite literally, help to design the world in which they play. I7 Here the space of the game becomes rhizomatic. If we return to the example of Pac Man and its correlation with guerrilla warfare, it is a s though the gamer - rather like the Vietcong

is now able to dig his/her own tunnels,

to increase the p o s s ibilities of surprising his /her opp onent s , and of influencing the o utcome of the gam e . However, it i s always worth rememb e ring that, even in MMORP Gs

where there seem to be almost infinite p o s s ibilities

for rhizomes to d evelop

there is a strong reterrito rialising

CI

00

influence exerted by the virtual gaming community. As Sue Morris docum ents , in multiplayer games s o c i al rul e s s o o n develop among the garners involved: 'C ertain actions are considered to be unsporting or forms of cheating even though they are well within the p o s sibilities of the game . " · Where such norms appear it i s evident that the rhizomatic pos sibilities offered by thi s particular grouping of g arners is in the proce ss of reterritorialising. Video games a re bad?

One question arises from this analysis of the p otential for identity deterritoriali s ation offered by the video game. If video games offer so many p o s s ib ilities for p o tenti ally lib erating i dentity exploration, why are they regarded with suspicion by the general public and the media? The most obvious answer is that no one can really explain the allure of video game violence, a violence in which the gamer willingly p articip ate s. In 2 002 a l awsuit filed against the m anufacturers of video games by p arents of s choolchildren killed in the C ol umbine mass acre in 1 99 9 was dismi s s ed. Many people accordingly hold the view that video games in isolation could not caus e a m a s s acre such a s C o lumbine . " E ven so, the debate continu e s . The question th at D e l e u z e 's idea of the rhizome enab l e s u s to ask of this debate is: does this violence enable a deterritori alis ation of the g amer's identity, or i s it s omehow reterritorialising? F urthermore , video games are also regarde d with suspicion by some theori s t s , but for a very different reason. To consider the extent to which video games also reterritorialise the gamer we mus t consider the related question of ideology

or, put another

way, the p olitics of the v i d e o game . Here again, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome is extremely helpful. For s ome criti c s , video games can be l o o s ely interpreted as practice for c ap it a li s m . They expre s s the i d e o l o gy of market c apitalism, which is transmitted to the psyche of the gamer under the cover of a s eemingly innocent game. Leaving aside the fact that

very few games are actually innocent, Pac Man again offers a clear examp le of thi s working o f ideology. In Trigger Happy, Steven Poole notes how the Pac Man is the 'pure consumer' , only happy when he i s eating, and never fini s h e d eatin g . 20 In s hort, he i s a repres entative of consumer capitalism, and the gamer who contro l s him is simply p e rforming the logic of c o n sumpti on. C onsume and you will be rewarded with p oints (consume and you will b e p aid) , cons ume and you will be temp orarily freed . . . and then returned to the s ame environment in order to consume some more . Indeed, Pac Man i s far from the only such example, as very many video games revolve around completing jobs or tasks and collecting p oints as a reward. Thus there is a general feeling that video games are dangerous, either because they are too viol ent, or because they are so much 'c apitalist brainwashing' .21 C ombining the s e two approaches , in some cases they are regarded with suspicion b e c ause they u s e violence as p art of this brainwashing. This feeling i s exacerbated by the development and use of video games by the military. Not only were the first games developed by workers in the military sector ( such as Higinbotham and E aerl , but so too has military investment in arcade technology Lockheed Martin

for instanc e , on behalf of

advanced its development." The very existence

of the flight s imulator as b oth video game and tool for combat training reinforces awarene s s of the link b etween video games and the dominance of the military industrial c omplex under market capitalism. For thi s reason, Poole initially begins by celebrating the free circulation of the original source code for Spacewar, calling it a 'b enign virus . . . eating up time all over the world on government, military and scientific mainframes ' ." Once such a commo dity has been appropri ated by major corporations and has become a saleable product, however, thi s idea that it is somehow a benign virus is o ften replaced with the notion that it has b een reterritori a l i s e d and i s a commo dity that s erve s the needs of

capitalism. We might be forgiven for wondering how such a product can be potentially deterrito rialising for its consumer. Surely it must expre s s a very reterritori alising agenda? In answer to thes e questions , the fact is that whether video games are viewed a s de

or reterritoriali sing i s a m atter of

perspe ctive. For every argument that the video game is reterritori ali s ing there is a counter argument that the use of the game is p otenti ally deterritorialising. As Po o le also notes of Pac

Man, its popularity with female garners may have been due to its unb ridled celebration of consumption in a very literal sens e . In a world where there i s peer pressure to remain slim, Pac Man offers an opportunity for its us ers to embrace virtual e ating. Far from a s u b liminal trick encouraging p e o p le to be more avi d consumers (an ideological reterritorialisation of the gamer), in this instance Pac Man offers lib eration from the pressures of the cult of the ideal s lim b o dy.24 Research into the effect of video games on the gamer h a s failed to provide conclu s ive proof either way, with various writers in the 1 980s concluding that video games either c orrelate d with aggre s s i o n among u s e r s , o r worked to calm them." Thu s , while D erek A. Burrill convincingly argues (in 2002) that video games b as e d on James B ond films ins cribe a certain typ e of mas culine b ehaviour on the gamer characterised by a ' s tealthy, violent s exism'," Mia C ons alvo just a s convincingly argues (in 2 003) that The Sims offers the gamer numero us p o s s ibilities for trying out new gendered and s exual identities." The final s ection of this chapter examines how this ambiguity i s evident i n the first three versions of Grand Theft Auto. Grand Theft Auto

The original Grand Theft A u to (hereafter G TA) is a crime spree game, in which the gamer has an aerial view of the activitie s of h i s /her avatar a s h e/she travels around the maze like roads of 'Liberty C ity ' . The avatar i s guided by an arrow that leads him/ h e r to phone b o oths . On answering the p h one , mob jobs are

outlined in text on the screen. The arrow then leads to the job . Once the job is compl e ted (often the removal or retrieval of a vehicle ) another job become s available, and so on. The purpose of the game is to complete the jobs, and in o rder to do so the gamer is required to steal cars , motorbike s , bus e s , or trucks, develop s ome proficiency in driving these different vehicles, and avoid the police. On route to jobs he/she i s also able to kill pass ers by, gangs ters or p olice, either with his/her vehicle or the various weapons left in crates scattered about the city. Grand Theft Auto 2 (GTA2) was somewhat simil ar, except that the game environment was more deadly due t o the controlling presence of s everal warring gangs. In GTA2 it i s p o s s ible to get mugged or killed simply by s tanding s till for too long in the wrong are a , the traffic is more aggres sive generally, and after capture the police unceremoniously dump the avatar on the road from a m oving s quad car. The aerial view of the avatar in the first two versions of GTA provides the garner with a somewhat similar experience to that of

Pac Man , only o n this occasion there is o nly ever a small section of the city visible at any one time. GTA therefore contains more sudden surpri s e s , as the police may arrive on s c reen from any directi on. It is also more difficult always to know where you are going. The arrow points in the general direction of the job, but the roads themselves may wind away from the direction of the arrow, making the inexperienced garner take a circuitous route. More experienced garners , however, will have explored short cuts acro s s the city's various p arks and half completed bridges , and so will get there more quickly. In terms of mapping, then, the exp erience of playing GTA is one of constant exploration. As with Pac Man , although this could b e considered to be i n line with the notion that the gamer colonises the space of the game world, the constant uncertainty over direction, the danger of imminent capture and the perpetual unfol ding o f off s creen s p ace all ensure that the gaming experience is more one of deterritorialisation than of reterritoriali s ation. As each of the games also includes a p aper

fold out map of the city, should a gamer wish to learn the space in a more c alculated manner this is also pos sible, but the expe rience of gaming is in effect one o f exploration, p roviding therefore the usual ambiguity a s to how capable the gamer is of reterritorialising (colonising) the s p ace, and how much he/she must manoeuvre (deterri toriali s e ) to avoi d b eing reterritori a l i s e d (captured or killed) by the game. In terms of ideology, in spite of the emphasis on criminality,

GTA initially app e ars to conform exactly to the idea that video g ames are practi c e for capitalism. Most obviously, the game is s tructured around a s eries of jobs completed for a p oints reward. Admittedly, the s e are all c riminal activiti e s , but, even s o , the argument remains valid. After all, who would buy a game in which the jobs the gamer had to complete were photocopying or filing? Moreover, tapping into ideas of individual freedom prevalent b oth in the United States and more generally under market capitalism,

GTA is built upon the p remise that you are 'free ' (this is Liberty City, after all) to steal a car if you so desire. In fact, as m oving around the city without wheels is so time consuming that it often negates any pleasures the game offers , stealing a c ar is practically e s s ential. Here the game expre s s e s the ideology of automobile freedom on which the United State s built its Fordi st economy in the early twentieth century. Finally, although the game s e ems to celebrate criminal activity, a s the g amer i s p erpetually at risk of imprisonment by the police, GTA actually shows how diffi cult it i s to make crime p ay. The above notwithstanding, there is debate as to whether GTA , and the public controversy surrounding it, necessarily imply that it is reterritorialising of the identity of the gamer. Taking the view

that the violence of the game leads to violence in the gamer, the British Police Fe deration condemned GTA as ' sick, deluded and b en e ath contemp t ' . S urpris ingly, h owever, the New York Police D e p artment t o o k the o p p o s ite view of G TA2, s tating tha t th ey would rather have such criminal activity take place in a game than

on the streets .'S C ontrary to the idea that game violence breeds real violence, the p ositi on of the New York Police expresses the notion that the g ame p rovi des a s afety valve mechanism that allows p e ople to l o s e themselves (deterritori alise) fo r a while in a new i dentity, getting fe elings of rep re s s e d violence out of their sys tem. More imp ortantly, p erhap s , all the G TA game s , and esp eci ally

Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3) , enable further deterritorialisation of the gamer from the goal oriented ideology of the marketplace. By the time of GTA 3 ( 2 002) the graphics had changed considerably, and, rather than an aerial view of the city, the game is constructed as a 3D environment with a third-person avatar seen from eye level. as in games such as Tomb Raider. The choice of vehicles to steal has risen to include SUVs , s tation wagons and even b o ats , and now cut s cenes (small s ections of movie like footage) are used to intro duce mob characters and the jobs they offer. Along with this revamping of the graphics come even greater free doms for garners , who can s imply ignore the tasks they have b e en s et, and expl ore the city. Garners can ab andon cars altogether, take the train or the subway, or s imply enjoy exploring the city on fo ot. In this way, not only can a jog through the p ark be rewarding in terms of the graphics experienced ( s omething it would have b e en fairly difficult to argue of GTA or G TA2) , but so too only in this way can many hi dden p a ckages and weapons be fo und. The incre a s e d pos sib ilities for activitie s b eyond the goal oriented c ompleting of tasks has led one commentator to comp are GTA3 with a flight simulator, where the plea sure was in experimenting in a simulated environment, rather than succes sfully completing the game . '9 Admittedly, thi s experimentation can involve such activities a s carjacking, causing car crashe s , mugging, running down, shooting or violently b e ating p a s s ers by to death, and stealing. The p oint remains that the GTA games are concerned with o p ening up a s p a c e for exp e rimentati o n , an arena th at is deterritorialising of the gamer's identity.

p o tenti ally

In term s of offering a deterritorialised identity to the gamer,

GTA3 also g o e s much further than its predeces sors in certain other respects. It c ontains a ' radar' , a small map inset in the b ottom l eft-hand c o rner of the screen, enabling g arners to chart their position in the city a s b o th big screen and map ind ent. Garners experience Liberty C ity from both 'here' and ' there ' , as both ' I ' a n d 'them'. T h i s schizophrenic experience of b eing b o th pres ent i n t h e game w o r l d and a b l e t o watch yourself from afar is enhanced by the vario u s different camera angle s that can b e cho sen from which to view the avatar (including the traditional aerial view of the first two games but also the avatar's first person p oint of vi ew) , and g arners ' ability to change radio s tations in the c ars , which also changes the s oundtrack to the game they are playing. C learly, GTA3 aims to give garners the opportunity to blur the b o undary b etween 'real life' exp erience and the game. Like Pac Man, then, the GTA games are all confined within an app arently labyrinthine space, but the limits to the city are clearly defined. The one thing the avatar cannot do is swim away from Lib erty C i ty, s o , as in Pac Man, there is no e s c ape from its impris oning labyrinth. Thus the mapping of the city's streets in the process of p l aying the game may appear to repres ent a colonial c onque s t o f s p a c e (reterritorialis ation) , but from another p erspective the game i s forever creating a rhizome, forever deterritorialising as the avatar moves into unknown territory. Moreover, b eyond the level of the game world its elf, garners have the potential to deterritoriali se their usual identity as they explore the pos sibilities of a criminal life that is not normally available to them, o r s imply ignore crime and enjoy travelling around the city, creating a deterritorialising rhizome as they do s o .

Chapter 2

Virtual structu res of the I nte rnet Damian Sutton

It is p erhaps no acci dent that the mid 1 9 90s re s urgence in Deleuzian thinking and deb ate coincided with the first few years of the Internet boom. By the time that the Internet had p as s ed from being a wholly academi c or military affair to a commercial and cultural space b eyond the ivory o r s tone towers , terms such a s 'rhizome' were b eing u s e d not only a s a theorem but as a rallying cry. Now it c an s ometimes s eem difficult to move intellectually because of the sheer agglomeration of D eleuzian commentary on the Internet. To think of the Internet as oI).ly a carrier of D eleuzian thought, however, is to m i s understand the influence that 'rhizomatic' o r 'rhizomorphic' thinking had on the Internet's very etho s - an influence that continues to be felt even as we enter the days of Web 2 . 0 , an ethically inspired attempt to wrest control of the ether away from corporations and conglomerates , and leave it in the hands of the people. The rhiz ome, as a theorem, a way of moving, and a way of connecting, allows us to understand not only some of the p olitics of the Internet, but also the laws of connection and movement that give tho s e politics shape and colour. The simplest picture we can draw of Internet p olitics is one of ' Jeffersonian democracy ' , named after the United States ' third president, a champion of local, individual and state rights over big government and federalism. At the heart of this was the individual's right to make money in a free market (that i s , an individual who was white, male and who owned land) . The idea is a curious mixture of politi c s , and n o t wholly suitable for to day's

political liberalism, which s ees the championing of the free market and the right to make money as s omething that multinational corp orations do. N evertheless, the compari s on i s strangely easy to draw between the exp ansion of the New World and the s ettling of the wide open spaces of the Internet: individuals in a new terrain, s taking out their land, their place, b attling against centralised government ( e spe cially when it is repres ented by taxes or the forces of order) , s p e aking a language of lib erty and social equality, yet ready to cl aim their right to make a profit. And yet we need a strange comparison because of the strange p olitics of the Internet that exists, an intens ely charged political space in which the rights of free speech and free will are championed by commentators on all sides, provided they have money to inves t in the equipment. We also need a strange comparison because of the ways in which "tI

the Internet dis p l ays that most strange of chara cteristics in the

�

rh i z o m e ,

E G:i

reterritoriali s ation, for open, non linear, deconstructions of the

IX

� ::J

GI

� !!

the

c a p acity for deterritori a l i s ation to b e c o m e

c apitalist hierarchy to be turned into an obs cene imitation of the very thing that it aims to decompose. The Internet is significant not simply because it has p ervaded our lives to such an extent, but b ecause in so doing it is a s o cially structured space that reflects the s ame formati ons we walk through and drive through in real life , the virtual counterp arts of the shopping and leisure centres, financial centre s , cafeteri a s , l ecture theatres and libraries. New s o cial areas of interaction, such as photo and video sharing sites s uch as Yo uTube, are incorporeal or virtual spaces hosting the s ame kinds of s o cial interaction as do the dorm room, TV ro om, book club or film club. The immanent I nternet

The best place to start is by describing what the Internet is made of, and the Internet is made of immanenc e . Well, almo st. Ordinarily, we c an't see immanence, we c a n only sup p o s e that it's there. All we ever see is the shape that it leaves

in the matter around us. The Internet helps here because we can easily unders tand that it has form and shape that is substantially different from the matter with which we encounter it. If you were to read this b o ok online, you would be able to turn pages (by scrolling or clicking) , read the lines , even perhap s mark the 'page', but you would still not be interacting with the 'matter' of the b ook in any way. You woul d b e using a mouse or keybo ard. You would have the idea o f the b ook in mind, however, and that idea would have a shape that you give it or perhap s the shape that is suggested by the computer (images of page s , for instance) . Where the s e two shapes inters ect is the cl o s e s t thing we ' l l get to a phy s i c a l manifestation of immanence

t h e plane o f immanence. It i s the

plane, the intersection or c o a l e s c ence of the material and immaterial, that matters . At first glance, we can understand that we have a general sense that everything we see around us has form or shape, from the materi al world to l arger s ets o f force s and pressure s . For instance, we can eas ily obs erve that the lecture hall we enter has rows o f s eats , a lectern, a data proj ector, a microphone, that thes e are in p l a c e f o r a reason: a l l t h e s eats , for instance, a r e b anked to face the lectern; the le ctern may even be on a dais or platform. We might a l s o be aware that thi s organis ation of the material corresponds to larger, more intangible forces and organis ation: the education system, its theories and methods , the wealth or poverty of the college and so on. Thes e levels of organis ation operate together, and are mutually dep endent. To peel them away might des troy other layers . In this sense, the layers of organi s ation are like strata, in that they are both integral components, and fault line s , o f the l arger structure. The whole, the larger substance, is what Deleuze and Guattari call the 'plane of organi sation ' , the materi al intersection of all forms, subjects , organs and functions . Deleuze and Gu attari are doing more than simply describing social or cultural formations in a novel manner, however. Instead, they want to ask: what happens

when you remove all form, all the strata? Is there anything left? The answer is 'yes ' , since there would be forces and energies that remain, that never go away: 'Pure relations of speed and s lowness betwee n particles imply movements of deterritorialis ation, just as pure effects imply an enterpris e of desubjectification . " This is the pl ane of consistency, the plane of immanence. So, while we might n ever be able to remove all form, what D eleuze and Gu attari are sugges ting is that to di s m a ntle p art of it stratum , to reduce a function

to p eel away a

is to let s ome of those forces loose,

to b egin the pro c e s s of dete rritorialis ation. For D eleuze and Guattari , to think immanence i s the greatest challenge; that is why it is the ultimate task of the philos opher: 'We will s ay that THE p lane of immanence i s , at the s ame time, that which must b e thought but which cannot b e thought. I t i s the non thought within thought. " Even after thi s there is a greater calling , however. A detached observer might watch for the p l ane to break free, might be able to talk about its existence, but the real task is to provoke the p rocess of deterritori alis ation in others . ' Perhaps this i s the supreme act of philos ophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show it is there . " So the Internet immediately offers its elf as something within which to glimp se immanence. It is a virtual reflection of the real world, but one that b oth mimic s and is clearly different from the real spaces it reflects . The Internet is les s a s eries of o bj ects and sp aces than a s eries of movements between them. Thi s movement can be in 'logical' linear s e quence

from b ank account to online

shop - or it can take new pathways linked only by the random thoughts of the surfer. Indeed, movement through the Internet can s eem sep arate from the us er, in that the user rides the movement, rides the wave : henc e 'to s u rf ' . The Internet therefo re already b egins to peel away the s tratum that forms society, since that s tratum relies on clear conne ctions of obj e cts and space s , connected broken a n d reconnected i n new formation s . N o matter how m any new c onnecti o n s are made , whatever formatio n ,

what is constant is the movement, no matter how quick or how slow. The real boom time for the Internet came in the mid 1 990s, when it flowered from a largely academic and business medium into one of social interaction. The Internet started as a military application, ARPANET, designed in the 1 960s as a network of computers that would survive even if one or more were destroye d, as in a nuclear attack. By 1 989 the population of Internet users in the United States, its largest community, stood at about 400,000, mostly academic and research users . This was the year that the first commercial Internet service providers commenced op eration, some of them already existing companie s such as C ompuServe. By 1 994 C o mpuS erve , America Online and Prodigy shared eight million subscribers in the United States" This period of growth was further accelerated in the late 1 990s by the falling price of personal computers (PC s ) . This included the widespread manufacture of comp onents for us ers to build p e s at home, as well as the introduction of models such as the bubble shaped Apple iMac G3 in 1 99 8 . The Internet thus quickly b ecame interesting as a s o cial medium, to the amateur user as much as the scholar. There are few web logs that do not, at some stage, reflect upon the very ability of the Internet to traffic their thoughts and ideas acro s s the world, producing the exact same data in different countries and contexts seemingly indep endent of the equipment it is s e en on. Even now it is often the medium of the Internet that is discuss ed, rather than the content per s e , and, in dis cussi ons (as we have s e en) about MMORP G s such as Ultima Online and Seco n d Life, it is not so much the us ers or the game itself that i s discu s s e d but the difference b etween the life of one and the life of the other. What is discussed is the deterritorialisation immanent in the difference b etween one's home in real life and one's home online. Some of the first s tudies of the Internet, such as tho s e by Arturo E s cob ar, recognis ed this as 'technosociality'

sociocultural

construction according to technology.' Life begins to move to new

beats and rhythms, to a p oint of irreversibility, when it is realised that there i s no g o in g b ack. Furthermore, the b e at of the Internet

d rum wa s marking time for the politics of the media, which, for many, h a d until then been c o nfine d to the p ag e s of a c a demic studies

or liberal and radical new s p a p ers . The Internet's

technos o ci ality is not connection (it rides on the back of the telephone network), even though the study of the Internet is turning

toward thi s . Its techno sociality is not information (it op erates like any other d atab a s e , only on a vast s c ale) . The Internet's

te chno s o ci ality is in its fl ows of information and the control of those flows; hence the p o litics of the hacker culture that grew up in tho s e first few years of the Internet's boom

the s ame few years

of that tremendou s resurgence in interest in Deleuze and Guattari. Thi s was a p oliti c s of deterritorialisati o n , for which the cry was "CI

'Information wants to be free', and in which it was realis e d that it

�

was i d e a s , rather than objects , that would b e the g o o d s of

I:¥

'truth in reality ' , as Tim Jordan observe s : a strange c ombination

!:! Gi

re::J

CJ)

c ommerce. Not o nly that, but a free market of ideas would enable of laissez-faire e conomy and left wing media activism.·

Gi c

::;

A geology of hacktivism

'Hacktivism', a s an oppositional strategy o f political resistance to state control or global corporatism, is made of an older stone, one that has been recut or carved again. This is the hard, sandy stone of Marxis m , form e d in the writings of Karl Marx a s a sediment that would be revealed (when the tide of C ommunism had begun to roll b ack from left wing intellectual writings) in some of the best media analy s i s to emerge fro m the l ate 1 9 6 0 s and e arly 1 9 7 0 s . The s andstone is now weathered and eroded, repointed by new media theory. If we look at some of its most vivid thinkers , however, then the s tone, like the blondest s andstone , s till h a s luxurious and colourful strata. On e key thinker fro m that early period was Hans Magnus Enzensb erger, who, like others , s aw that the telecommuni cations

medium was linear and centralised, that it was a one way flow of information from the centre to the periphery. Viewers , listeners and readers were reliant upon this s ervice, alienated or es tranged from the source and from each other, since this one way communication precluded contact with the community in any meaningful, mediated way: 'The distinctions between receivers and transmitters reflects the social divis i o n o f l ab o ur into pro ducers and consumers . " Of course, this notion of alienation or estrangement was profoundly influenced by Marx and his identification of estranged or alienated labour. In mass manufacturing, workers are far removed from the final object of p ro duction, in which they have o nly a contributing hand. They are paid directly for their labour, and the commodity value of the pro duct is far removed from them and their own Iwhich is only the direct value of their work, for which, as labourers, they are practic ally interchangeable ) . What excited Enzensberger at the time, however, was the burgeoning growth of video and other media technologies, such as wireless radi o , for instance, that were p otentially available to new communitie s . What he s aw was the p o s sibility of media control wrested fro m c entral i s e d , state owned organis ati o n s

and

corporations and put into the hands of workers' communiti e s , because thi s technology could b e situated in the h o m e or the workplace and u s e d to broadcast across the p athways of s ocial interaction. Thi s would be a social formation used to transmit news, which normally comes from the authoritarian centre, that would have new agency because it would be free of state b i a s . The idea of video technology within the h o m e , expre s s e d by Enzensb erger in 1 970, still carries vital relevance to new models of news and information s ervices . He imagines

(n) etworklike c o m m u nications m o d e ls b u i l t o n the p r i n c i p l e o f reversibility o f circuits . . . a mass newspaper, written and distributed b y its rea ders, a v i d e o n etwork of politically active g roups .s

'0

i

:> .., ..,

The c ontemporary realis ation of this kind of network can b e s een i n collab orativ'i' news networks such as Indymedia, a n d even in the princip l e of wiki and the development of Wikipedia. Where

Indymedia is a news s ervi ce that is cons ciously opp o s itional. its real political p ower i s in the connections it cre ates between l o cal. amateur news gatherers that would not have b een created by normal, centralised, broadcast news coverage by televi sion and radio corporati ons . This is a public vo ice create d by s hared ideas and the u s a b ility of the technol ogy, rather than th e combined reception of the s ame mes s age. Indeed, what can often happen is that p olitical i s s ues are rai s e d on a global scale because of the connections, rather than shared political i deals . Thi s is reflected in the growth of Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that is created by the contributions of us ers , and which e s chews the clearly defined 'authoritative' voices of academia or commerce, for instance, which are s een to reflect centralised and dry accounts of the worl d , its s ocieties and histories. Instead, contributors come from the b o dy of users , often with no recognised authority (indeed, it is possible to be virtually anonymous) . and the shared knowledge can be constantly edited by others . Thus the knowledge deposited for reference in

Wikipedia, which often tops any online s earch for information on a given topic, is created through contestation and debate. The veracity of this knowledge is often at stake, and pages devoted to c o ntroversi a l s u bje c ts such as politicians and p o litical i s s u e s , celebrities, a n d even sports teams , often have

a

large discus sion

forum and a long history of editing and counter editing. It is even possible to e dit one's own entry, and there is no guarantee that any entry is written by an authoritative contributor or edited by a genuine p eer. Wikipedia therefore b alances the weakness of inexactitu de and inaccuracy against the p owerful connections it make s between us ers and the ability it has to become, through a genuine notion of common sense, the authoritative voice on a s ubject. Web sites such as Indymedia and Wikipedia can therefore be seen as p owerful agents for deterritori ali sation, de stabilising the

social forces of the state, which are inve sted as much in cultural formations as they are in the government, or law and order. The connections are no longer made between the centre and a disp arate community of is olated users, but across u s ers and b etween each other, and the ' c entre' (the news corporations, for example, on the lookout for gra s s roots news) i s left following in the fo otstep s of a new, emancip ated p opulation. Nonetheles s , Enzensberger's enthusiasm for the media a s a technology of emancip ation w a s couched within an imp o rtant warning against the ever more p owerful culture industry, which seeks to create new u s e r s , viewers and particip ants who will continue to consume. Mo st importantly, it will look for any way to do this , and the very means of resistance are a p rize target. Much of the content of Enzensberger's e s s ays echo e s the work of his contemp oraries , p arti cul arly, perhap s , in thi s respect the work of Louis Althus s er, who wrote of how the state app aratuses of repre s sion, such as l aw and order, are joined by ideo logical apparatu s e s such as the school, the C hurch or even the family. These are app aratuses whose role is to reproduce 'the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation'.' Effectively, we as subjects

as learners, users , viewers , consumers

are called

into b eing by the systems within which we grow up, and which give us our ideology. No matter how independent we think we are, no matter how much we resist what we see as the cultural mains tre am, we will eventu ally b e c ome a p art of it. We will eventually b ecome good little capitalists , because even the means of resis tance involves consumption. What does this mean for Enzensb erger? First, he s aw that it was too easy for new u s ers to b ecome detached from culture, or in a nihilistic fashion b e come reduced to 'is olate d tinkering' . 10 Such users might s peak out against consumerism or state p ower, but eventually their anger dissipates or i s turned inwards. We can see this in websites such a s C harlie B rooker's TV Go Home (www.tvgo home.com), which introduced British culture to his sharp criticism

of the m e dia e c o n o my. Real and fictional characters were developed over a series of spoof pages from the B B C 's televi sion guide the Radio Times, which placed them in o d d juxtap o s ition, lamp ooning celebrity culture and its trivialisatio n of p olitical and s o ci al i s s ue s . This included the ficti onal character of Nathan Barl ey, who eventually became the subject of his own televi sion seri e s . Ironically, however, Brooker's own trajectory with TV

Home

Go

was predicted in s ome of the acid attacks in the Nathan

B arley column on the ways in which media creatives are constantly trying to capture the contemp orary mood or zeitgeist, often with the l atest technology, in order to market it b ack to the mainstream: Playing table football i n a Hoxton juice bar, Nathan Barley and three near-Iookalikes decked out in regulation Carha rt u niforms excitedly discuss their plans for a five-minute Real Player comedy sketch destined for an a bsurdly over-designed online entertainment ' porta l ' r u n by one of t h e i r o w n schoolfriends, w h o h a s c o m missioned them to d eliver six comedic ' webisodes' despite the fact that none of them can write , perfo r m , or be trusted to deliver the goods on time, and that even the fastest a n d smoothest of RealPlayer video streams is basically fucking unwatc h a b le . "

The fact that streaming video and 'web i s o d e s ' later b e c ame a major p art of Internet media content for busines s es and amateurs alike is perhap s also illustrative of Enzensberger's second concern: that capital reco gni s e s the power o f new technologies and the attractivene s s of cultural re sistance, but ' only so as to trap them and rob them of their explosive force' . 1 2 New cultural formations created and enhanced by new technologies are not only us eful in their attractivene s s to youth markets , but any effectiveness can be dissipated as they are made more mainstream and a bigger part of wider consumer culture. Businesses, especially thos e appealing to young people with disp o s able income , are constantly on the l ookout for new avenues for marketing.

For example, in 200 1 a new type of graffiti began to appear in the United Kingdom on electric junction boxe s , rubb i s h bins and boarded up shop s : a black stencilled image of a baby's face, tightly cropp ed in a four inch square. The appe arance of thi s image immediately echoed the already wi despread images of Andre the Giant, the French wrestler. He has become something of a poster boy of cultural resis tance as the fac e of the ' O b ey Giant' street art campaign (www. obeygiant. coml . the work of arti st Shepard Fairey. Indeed, as with the ' Obey Giant' campaign, the b aby p ictures were accompanied by an amateur website, dedicated to investigating the phenomenon of the se slightly unsettling images of a b aby a s ' B i g Brother' , a n d mirroring the multiple sites devoted to Fairey and his work. The now defunct investigative amateur web site www.whois lupo .com had crude graphics, a weblog and links to 'si ster' site s , one of which was the Jap ane s e site for the auto manufacturer Volkswagen. As cultural commentators , s u ch as Need to Know (www. ntk.netl , quickly pointed out, the ' s treet art' was, in fact, p art of a teaser c amp aign for Volkswagen's new mo del, the Lup o , which had at that time just b e e n rel e a s e d in Jap a n . 1 3 The viral marketing involved mimicking the ways in which word of mouth, and now new media networking, creates a 'buzz' within which to l aunch marketing camp aigns . The quick adoption of a new phenomenon of cultural commentary, s uch as street art, by adverti sing companies h a s made it difficult fo r the l atter to maintain its grass roots , p opuli s t image. Even Need to Know acknowledged the Lupo teaser camp aign a s 'Nathan e s que'. The episode casts a harsh light on the activities of cultural resistance group s that appeal to youth markets , exchange art

s cho o l

trained personnel a n d enrol followers through t h e consumption of T shirt s , music and collectibles . The effect can b e seen in the widespre a d adoption of s o cialist o r communi s t revolutionary imagery by high street stores that m arket politi c al resis tance as a commo dity.

New class structu res

While Enzensberger was enthused by the new technologies of video, what was really imp ortant to him was the connections such technologies offered. Later theorists, esp ecially tho s e who have fo cused on the p olitical p otenti al of new medi a , have taken thi s c riti que in a new directi on. They have acknowledged that what u l timately deterritoriali s e s is c apital i t s e l f, and i t is the indep endent control of c apital by the indivi dua l . as a process of s e lf- determination, that leads to true political emancip ation. This is the idea that media theorists such as McKenzie Wark have put forward, p articularly in rel ation to his argument that a new c l a s s system has developed through new medi a . Where once was discuss ed a s chism between the labouring c l a s s and the state or corporate clas s , there now exists a new division between massive media conglomerates and an ' underclas s ' of s o cial activists as h ackers . Thi s i s a s ituation created by the new production of immaterial g o o d s in to day's new media econ omy. The mo dern worker in the We stern world is less likely to create objects, and more likely to create knowledge, informati on, concepts, and the means of c ommunicating them. These might be s ervices offered at a call centre, or an artwork sold in order to enhance the emotional response to an office s p a c e . Even if the new We s tern worker creates things, they are not as important as the immaterial value that such things accrue. This means that, for Wark, the two new c l a s s e s that h ave emerged are the hacker class, whi ch ' ari ses out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property' , and the vectoralist class, which controls 'the vectors along which information circulates ' . Most imp ortantly, Wark al s o notes that 'the vectoralist class goes out of its way to c ourt the hacker class ideologically' . 1 4 Hacking as a practice of resistance is always on the verge of co option into the mainstream. Wark is p rofoundly influenced by Michael H ardt and Antonio Negri , economic philosophers who were thems elves inspired by D eleuze and Guattari . It is thi s influence that can be traced to

Wark's unders tanding of the vectoralist class . C apital. suggest Hardt and Ne gri , ' op erates on the plane of immanenc e ' , relying on the e quival ence of money to bring all values to gether in

' quantifiable, commensurable relations ' . The rh i z om o rp hi c spaces of the Internet, which allow for the fre e flow o f information a s a

commo dity, create an ideal place for capital to flourish because, as they make clear, cap ital 'tends toward a smo oth space defined by

unco ded flows, flexibility, continual modulation, and tendential equalization' . " C apitalism a s a c o m m ercial force needs to deterritorialise, to create smooth, unhindered space, in order to reterritorialise and create new money making formati ons . This can be seen in the example of media conglomerates such as Sony C orp oration. In 2004, as p art of a consortium, Sony bought legendary Hollywo o d studio Metro Goldwyn M ayer (MGM) for a reported $5 billion. This included the rights to the James Bond franchise, produced by EON Productions , with which it had already established connections for the last Pierce Brosnan film in the series ,

Die A nother Day (2002 ) . The purch a s e of MGM, however,

allowed Sony to fully exploit the franchise for the ' reboot' of B ond with D aniel C raig in the role for Casino Royale (2006) . The film was made by C olumbi a Pictures and MGM, b o th now p art of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who would go on to distribute the DVD.

The music, by David Arnold, would be distributed by Sony's joint owned subsi diary, S ony BMG. Arnold had p reviously produced his own interpretation of Bond themes for East West Records,

Shaken

and Stirred ( 1 997), before coming into the Sony fold after he had worked on the Warner Brothers distributed music for previous Bond films . This me ant that, for Sony, any arti s tic decisions they made on the film could refer back to the Bond b ack catalogue with

impunity, since there would be no 'rival' comp any or artist with intellectual property rights . At the s ame time a massive multimedia camp aign wa s launched, which included silver special edition models of the S ony Ericsson K800 and K790 Cyb er shot mobile phones , designed to evoke the vintage Aston Martin DB5 that C raig

drives in the film in homage to p revious Bond incarnation S e an C o nnery. The Bond 'pro duct' for S o ny was not so much the film but a notion around which to orient an array of products that u s e d the fre e fl ow of S ony's internal organis ati on to create a network of franchi s e opportunitie s linked by the film's web site. To draw a picture of vectoralism as entirely mainstream, as Wark tends to do, would be inaccurate , however. The penetration of these umbrella corporations into 'grass roots ' or cult forms, such as comic b ooks , means that they are able to successfully tap new emerging you th m arkets, especially when they s e em to b e in oppos ition to mainstream modes of authorship. Eileen Meehan had very quickly noted this in her analy s i s of the Batman ( 1 9 8 9 ) film and merchandising phenomenon, whereby Warner C ommunications Inc. were s e en to 'cash in' on the succes s of the graphic novels that reanimated the sup erhero 's career. In fact, as owners of DC comics from 1 9 7 1 , Warner i s s u e d the graphic novel The Dark Kn ight

Returns a s p art of their own marketing strategy to create a buzz i n t h e run up to releasing t h e movie. Warner's inves tment built the 'basic infrastructure' " for future franchising, a model to which can be added information technology and the Internet. In 2002 Sony released Spider man, with a major webs ite that acted a s the hub for a fan network, and allowed them to 'pre s ell' the movie by encouraging fan art and fan fiction. What this means is that resistant objects and practices, such as comic b o ok s , culture j amming, viral art , o r h a ckin g , which deconstruct capitalism'S old hierarchie s , can therefore be seen to

assist in its new formations . The clearest illustration of this i s the confu s e d m e s s age of lib ertarianism put forward by Wark, who campaigns intellectually for an exploited undercla s s , the hackers who produce intelle ctual p rop erty that will be exploited by c apitalism's facele s s and soull e s s c orp orations. Wark asks us to sympathi s e with in divi duals who are unab le to a s s ert their intellectual prop erty rights in online gaming, who labour within new 'life ' games such a s Ultima Online to create the world that

Electronic Arts (the game's owner) will exp loit. Wark and other new media p ro ducers in the hacker classes are really a middle class of wo rke r s , however; an aspirational new c l a s s that has managed to ri s e above the conditions of manual toil in order to become an emp owered p art of the new economy. A s a middle clas s , tho ugh, they exp l o i t in their own turn the l a b ourers in China, Mexico and other countries, many of them women, who manufacture the equipment (the latest P C , the l atest Apple) with which hackers create the new intellectual property. This is the real divide between the clas s e s in the new media economy, a global structure m aintained by the virtual structures of the Internet, in which capital deterritorialises and reterritorialises the economy. This is where Deleuz e, Guattari and the politics of connection come in. For E nzensb erg er, it was important that p o litical empowerment comes not from the complete deconstruction of the apparatuses of ideology, but from an effort to realis e the promises that their technologies make. This involves new connections and new types of s ocial interaction, and also involves recognising their power before the state d o e s , b efore capital does . In this s ense it invo lves s e eing the immanent p ower of the technologies of connection quickly enough to take control in such a manner that they can no l onger be c o opted. Thi s is why p roj e cts such as

Wikipedia, for all their factual inaccuracie s , have the great potential they do. In making the access to information free, or as free a s the a c c e s s to a comp uter entai l s , they take away the investment of money and commerce that normally flows in the free s p a c e of the new connecti ons . All that is l eft is the connection itself. In thi s way one need only be watchful against reterritori ali s ation. Wikipedia needs to b e a contested space in order to prevent it settling into a se dimentary rock of white, We stern i d e o l ogy, in order to prevent a p articular way of writing history and re cording knowledge from starting to lead or create that knowl edge. It needs to be a contested space in order to resist reterritorialis ation, in order to fulfil

one day, p erhaps

its

potential to host the knowledge of a truly worldwide community.

Part Two

!

Introduction

What is beco m i n g ?

One o f the sens ations any rea der might exp ect from reading Deleuze, especially from reading the work with Guattari, i s an overwhelming sense of restles sness, p a rticularly when i dentity is concerned. Not only is the issue of identity an urgent one for them as philosophers , but their style makes it a recurrent subject around which they orient much of their philo s o p hy. Inde e d , this is s o becau s e , for D e l e u z e , identity itself i s always in motion: the identity of the individual subj ect, pre s s ur e d from all s i d e s by forces that will make him or her, articulate him/her, o rgani s e him/her; but als o the collective subject, p u s h e d together through environmental, governmental, o r s ocial forces, or coming together in a resi stance to the s e . This restles s n e s s creates the s ubj ect through coalescence, co agulation and co ordination, here moving swiftly, there moving slowly. Identity i s always in motion, no matter how rooted it seems or how fixed. Not only that, but all identifications are in motion, since any fixed s tate of an object is merely a stage of app arent rest before another change . If we pick up a c offee mug and look at it, we can have n o doubt that it is a fixe d o bject in time and space. It i s , in fact, fixed to the extent of being brittl e . It will smash if we drop it, and its 'es sential ' identity would be at an end. What we are really lo oking at, however, is a moment (no matter how long) of apparent rest in the life of its molecules and atom s . It was once wet clay, formed and shaped, glazed and fired under pressure. It continues to change, cracks and fissures forming on its surfa c e , until we b reak it, when it will b e

tossed asi de as rubbish, returning it to the earth. This 'fixed' o bject in s p a ce is also a fixed o bject i n time (Deleuze c alled thi s an ' o bjectile" ) o nly ina smuch as we i s o l ate it in our minds from the continual change of the universe . This p l a c e s D e l eu z e 's phil o s ophy at odds with any other phil o s o phy that focuses on 'being' and what it is ' t o b e ' . Ins tead, if i dentit y i s always in motion, it i s always coming into being, a never ending project of becoming. It is the simple fact of becoming th at i s b e h ind the creati o n of the rhizome, since the rhi z o m e exploits and enjoys continual change and connection, rather than s e eking t o fix or prevent it. Simil a rly, as we shall s ee, it i s this continual coming into being of all things that is the only thing we can rely on, the o nly thing that allows us to mark time against the sheer vas tness of eternity. B ecoming, then, i s perhaps the single contribution around which all Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy revolves

the keystone of their philos ophy of life itself. For this

last reason, becoming i s b o th a guiding principle for the analysis of culture , and an ethical call for a different way of being ( o r b e coming ! ) . The ideas they develop from this central discovery b e c o ming wom an, b e coming animal, becoming imperceptibl e have become currency in an array of ethical debates including femini s m and p o s t femini sm , enviro nmentali s m and p olitical scien c e . ' This has o c curred through the philos ophy's central u s efuln e s s as an interpre tive strategy u n d e rstand how hierarchies

its abili ty to help us

of i d entity and e s s ence are

constructed and resisted. To appreciate becoming a s a fact of life, a s tage of critical s elf awarenes s , o r even an ethical response i s to a p p r e ciate how i dentity its elf is formed through opposition, alterity and difference. Deleuze and Guattari note that culture o rgani s e s itself along principles of 'propo rtionality', in that, within a symbolic structure where an equivalence of terms is reached, a hierarchy of relations is created as a ' s erializ atio n o f res emblances with a structuration o f difference s ' .3 This i s a rationalis ation of culture made in order

to understand it

as much by sociologists as by ourselve s . The

problem here is that the p rincipal identity against which thi s proportionality is measured is man, as the s creen upon which all identities are p rojected and found different. The ethical p o s ition that Deleuz e and Guattari take relies upon the realis ation of this principle of difference, even for thos e who are 'naturally' relegated to a p o s ition of sub ordination. Deleuze and Guattari replace the binary structure with one based on a kind of substantial quality : instead of the binary structure of man woman, for instance, they suggest that man is the maj o r or molar entity, against which woman is minor. As with much of Deleuze and Gu attari's philo sophy, h owever, it is never as simple as that. To truly b egin to dismantle and rebuild the hierarchies created by culture's p atriarchy, one has not only to confront and p a s s through the p o s ition of the minor, but to appreci ate thi s as a becoming , rather than e s s ential and fixed. Put another way, in order to dismantle a p rejudiced system based on s ex, gender or race, one has to understand from within the things that make differences

different. A woman cannot s imply b e different, she has to pass through this difference, she has to appreci ate this difference as being at once symb olic and artificial . Difference has to b e felt as a construction rather than as an essence. The s ame situation o btains for any minority, and, indeed, the collective term that Deleuze and Guattari u s e is becoming minoritarian . The p o s ition becoming woman take s in this ethic al p ro ces s i s s ignificant, since it is the p rincipal bin ary organi s ation that culture adopts . Simp l e oppo sition t o the patriarchal hierarchy is n o t a n option, though; the ethical p ath is not to be different , but to be imp erceptib l e . This h a s caused femini st phil o s ophers , s u c h as Rosi Braidotti, to criticise Deleuze and Guattari for suggesting that women give up the only weapon they have, the only agency they p o s s e s s , in the struggle against discriminatio n

their femininity.'

Fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari's phil o s ophy, however, is the fact that i dentity is created not by any kind of essential or

material b eing, but only by re acti ons by others to what are s een as characteri stics . B ecomings are made up of a variety of these th at act as markers , or comp ositional elements. Any e s s ential i dentity, no m atter how different from man, would s imply be another molar one . True becomings are mol ecular, since they are made up of elements and chara cteristics that m ay at any time change and reform. For this re a s o n the notion of contagion and cro s s

contamin ati on becomes e s s enti al to understanding identity as contingent, to create a sense of s elf awarenes s and empowerment. When a man turns into a wolf in horror fiction he does not become just another wolf, he is infected with the characteristics of the wolf (as we have seen, the wolf is a co nstant pres ence in A Thousand

Platea us) . Simil arly, t h e soldier w h o dres ses a s a woman i n o rder to escap e , or even in order to entertain other s o l diers, does not imitate a woman, nor b ecome a woman, b ut unders tands suddenly the struggle that women fa ce when reduced to their ess ential characteristics . It help s , here, if we use an example that illustrates not just

becoming woman, but also the wider aspect of identity spread through contagion

thi s time in the wartime concert party. This

has b een a staple of Briti sh culture for many years , perhaps having its m o st famous manifestation in the B B e TV show It Ain 't Hal/Hot

Mum ( 1 974-8 1 ) . The s how followed the exploits of a Briti sh army concert p arty stationed in Burma during World War II, with epi s o des that often revolve d around the staging of the shows to tro o p s , and i n which the s o l diers p l ay b oth male and female ch aracters . While some of the s o l diers, especially Bombardier B eaumont (Melvyn H ayes) , are p l ayed along the lines of lower middl e c l a s s high camp, it is o ften the burlier characters , M a ckinto s h ( S t u art M c G u g a n)

and Evans

(Mike K i n s ey) ,

representing working class backgrounds from provincial Britain, who get the b est laugh s . It is when the se men complain of the impracticality of wearing women's underwear, rather than the o stensibly homo s exual B e aumont, that we see the s o l dier as

becoming-woman. This is b ecause their b ecoming woman occurs not through sexuality but, instead, toward affinity : it allows them to engage in the kind of social bonding and subsequent loyalty that is normally off limits to men but expected in women , and seen as a sign o f their social difference and inferiority. Becoming is an operation of the social a s well as p ersonal identity, in that the collective i dentity of groups also works through contagion. It help s here if we continue to think of the group of soldiers who

are brought together by circumstance (often hardship, catastrophe) and who form a collective b ond. As Deleuze and Guattari describ e : 'Bands , human or animal . proliferate by contagion, epidemi c s , battlefields, a n d catastroph es . " Their multiplicity i s a n e s s ential part of the war machine, the unit being made up not only of gunners and bombardiers, but also of piani s t s , s ingers, dancers . We understand them as having a filial bond even though they are brought together by events and kept together by camaraderie. Jus t

... Ol c:

·e

o o

�

.!2

"6 .c:

as when King Henry, in Shakespeare's Henry V, describes h i s 'band

� C

of brothers ' , we recognis e that it i s a shared i dentity of affinity,

�

rather than blood connecti on, that is exp erienced by this b and of brothers in the jungle . They share a becoming animal in living in trenches and especi ally 'foxhol e s ' , but, most importantly, their affinity is created by shared humour in the fac e of adversity humour that is the contagion that connects them all. This is what we mean when we s ay that 'l aughter is infectiou s ' . S o how, then, d o e s o n e locate oneself within thi s dizzying multip licity of becoming, this restless change of identity? Deleuze and Guattari's answer i s that we repres ent intersections of time and p l a c e , coordinates within social s tru cture s . They u s e the analogy of longitude and l atitude. The geographical metaphor i s succinct: culture i s dizzying, i t i s easy to g e t l o s t , a n d what we need is a kind of GPS (Global Posi tioning System) device that will pinpoint us and our identity. The metaphor doesn't res t there , however, even though Deleuze and Guattari were writing long before hand held devices and global s atellite surveillanc e .

o

:I "0 o .;:

E:

�

Latitude, for them, is a way of des cribing the accidental genesis of our identi ty - it i s an accident of b irth that we might b e white or s o uth Asian, that we might be male or female. Intersecting this is the s p ecific materi ality of our own b o die s , longitude, and together they create only an intersection of degrees, what Deleuze and Guattari call

a

'haecceity' .' The metaphor is app osite, though :

what you get at the intersection is a point, a location, which tells us very little until it move s . It might be an accidental genesis that gave us our p oint on a cultural , societal map, but it's up to us how we use our potential becoming, up to us how we move. After ali, a s Deleuze and Gu attari s ay: 'We know nothing about a b o dy until we know what it can do . "

Chapter 3

M i no r c i n emas David Martin Jones

Deleuze and Guattari's c oncept of the minor is an extremely useful way of understanding p ower relations in to day's world, in particular in contexts where i ssues such as p o st colonialism and globali s ation influence how people conceive of their i dentities . This chapter first describ es the origins o f the term . I t then briefly dis cus s e s s everal of the different ways in which it has b e en applied to cinema , creating the concept of a minor cinema. Finally, the American indep endent film Mysterious Skin (2004) , by cult director Gregg Araki , i s analy s e d as a work of minor cinema.

Mysterious Skin i s a work of minor cinema created outside the mains tre am and d e signed to que stion the 'norm s ' of i dentity usually prop agated by Hollywo o d . It suggests the p o s s ibility of various different typ es of minoritarian American i dentity by examining s exual desire in the contemporary United States . What does 'minor' mean? In 1 975 Deleuze and Guattari introduced the idea of the minor in a

book on Franz Kafka, Kafk a: Toward a minor literature. In 1 9aO they developed the idea in A Thousand Plateaus. In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari argue d that, as a C z ech Jew living in Prague but writing in German, Kafka's work c ould be considered an example of minor literature . For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka took the major, or dominant language that spoke for the various countries in the Austro Hungarian Empire (i . e . German), and made this official or 'paper language'!

which was not sp oken by the majority of Czechs

speak in a minor way. In p olitical terms, Kafka's grotesque, surreal and bizarre world could b e interpreted a s a pro duct of the colonial s ituation in which he wrote, as the C ze chs s truggled for independence from the Austro Hungarian Empire. ' In A Thousand

Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari note that to make a major language s p eak in a minor way i s to make it stutter, stammer or even wail .' Thus a minor language is not establi shed in oppo sition to a major language. After all , Kafka did not use the C zech l anguage to oppose German. Instead a minor langu age, takes a major language, and , b y deterritori ali s ing i t , forces it t o become s omething else. At the extreme end of this pro c e s s of becoming, Deleuze and Gu attari des crib e the deterritorialis ation of a major language as its transfo rmation into s omething more like mus ic.' The terms ' m ajor' and 'minor' , they exp lain, can be understood a s musical terms . A minor language p l ay s the s ame tune a s the maj o r language, it just plays it i n a minor key.' For instance, a C aribbean C reole might jumble together a colonial European language and an Afri can language derived from a slave community's country of origin. It thereby makes a major E urop ean voice s ound in a minor key. Alternatively, the rhythmical rhyming of rap or hip hop can be considered minor when used to express a different typ e of i dentity

such a s that of African Americans , or France's different

ethnic and racial minoritie s

from that usually s poken by the

dominant l anguage of the s e countri e s . It mu s t b e unders tood, however, that 'minor' d o e s n o t always e qual 'minority ' . While Kafka was a C zech Jew subject to a colonial s ituation, and in that s ense in the minority, he was al s o a wealthy member o f the bourgeoisie who spoke German as his first language. To work in a minor way, then, is not necessarily to b e a 'minority' in the way this term i s u s ually deploye d , with all its negative c onnotati ons of economi c , gender, racial and ethnic s tatu s . To b e minor is to take a major voice, and speak it in a way that expresses your preferred identity. This political aspect of the minor is cruci al, for minor practices (art, literature, language) have

the potenti al to destabilise the normal conventions of the major voice of a s o ciety. To act in a minor way, then , i s not to opp o s e a dominant p olitical system, but to inhabit the system and change it from within. Thu s , although Deleuze and Guattari's work on Kafka was originally fo c u s e d on the way a minor language could b e created i n literature, their idea o f the minor c a n be app lied to any numb er of contexts , including cinema. Modern pol itical cinema

Deleuze and Guattari did not define clearly how their idea of the minor could be appli e d to cinem a . Rather, it was in the second volume of D eleuze's solo work on cinema, Cinema 2 ( 1 985), that he began to illustrate how the minor could exist in cinema. In Cinema

2, Deleuze returned to the idea of the minor under a different name. Discussing what he now called 'modern political cinema',' D eleuze draws parallels b etween certain filmmakers and his earlier ideas concerning Kafka . ' Initially he mentions several French directors , such as Alain Resnai s , Jean Rouch and Jean Marie Straub, but

., o

E

Q) c

before long his work fo c u s e s on more globally marginali s e d

'5 15

filmmake r s , such as Yilmaz Guney, You s s ef C h ahine, Glauber

:E

Rocha, Pierre Perrault and Ousmane Sembene. The works of these directors

from Tu rkey, E gyp t , Brazi l , Quebec ( C anada) and

Senegal respectively

more clearly illustrate what i s at stake in the

notion of modern political cinema. The films of these directors contrast the output of the mainstream film industries in their countries of origin, as many of them have renounced commercial gain and attemp ted to use cinema to create new i dentities under difficult p olitical circums tanc e s . I n a l l these instance s t h e countries i n question were facing political turmoi l . For instance: S embene's Senegal was a n ewly post colonial country; Rocha's Brazil was under military rule, a s was Guney's Turkey (whose population w a s a l s o divi ded over the issue of Kurdis h i dentity in Turkey) ; Perrault's Quebec struggled for independence from C anada; and so on. At one point Deleuze

c

.., I/)

points out that it was much easier for such filmmakers to see that the p e ople were mi ssing 'in the third world, where oppre s s ed and exploited nations remained in a state of p erpetual minorities, in a c ollective i dentity crisi s ' .s Mo dern p olitical cinema, then, was mo s tly likely to be found in the Third World, a s it was concerned with the creation of new identiti e s , of a people who are 'mi s s ing' or yet 'to come ' " Effectively, modern p olitical cinema is minor cinema. In Cinema 2, D e l euze only slightly adapts the three characteri stics of minor

literature found in chapter 3 of Kafka (,What is Minor Literature? ' ) t o create the i d e a of a modern political cinema. Firstly, he notes how modem p olitical cinema attempts to create a new sense of identity for the future, or a people yet to come. Thi s he does by contras ting it w i th the unp roblematic conception of ' the p eo p l e ' fo und in "C!

clas s i cal cinema s , such as the films of Frank C apra in the United

�

States (think of Christmas time classics such as It's a Wonderful Life

�

Sergei E i s enstein, who s e ' O d e s s a Step s ' sequence in Battleship

�

Potemkin ( 1 9 2 5 ) is one of the most famous in cinema history. In

�

United States , or the Soviet people, already exist. For the filmmaker

E Q)

�

( 1 94 6 ) ) , an d the m o s t distinctive of the Soviet Montage directors ,

the s e clas sical cinemas it is taken as read that the p eople of the it i s s imply a question of shaping the identity of that p eople. In C apra's cinema this is often done by evoking the righteousness of democrati c, small town family values in the Unite d States or, in Eis enstein, the revolutionary potenti al of the proletari at in the Soviet Union. In the works of the directors of modem political cinema, however, the p eople do not exist in a readily acces sible ma s s . Rather, the s e films show the people s truggling to emerge under political conditions that would deny their different identities. S e con dly, D eleuze discu s s e s the eradication of the divi sion between public and p rivate spaces in modem p olitical cinema, noting how this makes all personal actions inherently p olitical. Protagonists in these cinemas do not have the luxury of a s ecure, distinctive space of the family. Rather, characters often inhabit the

'cramp e d s p ac e s ' of s o ciety's margin s , spaces that are too easily invaded by the official forces of the public realm. iO For this reason it is not p o s sible for minor characters to transfer a certain set of value s learned in the home to their public live s , as private acts quickly become public acts due to the monitoring of the lives of minor characters by the controlling forces o f s o ciety. For a concrete filmic example of this type of existence, consider the French film La Raine ( 1 9 9 5 ) . Set in the Pari sian banlieue (the run down housing proj ects on the outskirts of Paris) . La Raine follows the adventure s of three unemp l oyed teenagers , Vinz (Vin cent C a s s ell) , Hub ert (Hub ert Kounde) . and SaId (S aId Taghm a o u i ) . With France's manufacturing indus try in decline, the male p opulation of the banlieue finds itself redun dant, and violent clashes with the police soon follow. The three post colonial youths find their cramped home lives cons tantly invaded and monitored by the p o lice and the media. Practic ally every action they take therefore has a political edge, as is seen most clearly in the desire of Vinz to take revenge for the murder of their friend at the hands of the riot police. Under such circumstances, whenever and however the individual acts , he or s h e makes a p olitical statement that resonates within the public sphere. Although this is a rather negative s ituation to exi s t in, it a l s o contains the potenti al for minor actions to imp act directly upon society. Finally, Deleuze argues that modern political cinema is marked by a refu s a l either to repro duce negative stereotyp e s , or to oppo s e such typ es with 'positive ' stereotype s . For D eleuze, either practice creates a colonising (or in s ome c a s e s a neo colonising) image of the people. Rather than enabling the creation of a new people, this practice fixes one image of the p eople in place, thereby halting their transformation into s om ething els e in the future. Instead, mo dern political cinema multiplies characters , to illustrate how the identity of the p eople to come will never stop transfo rming. As p art and p arcel of thi s proces s , directors of mo dern p olitical cinema often b ase stori es around characters

involve d in creating s tories of their own identity. In this way the films thems elves refu s e to establish one singl e , authori al p oint of vi ew. After all, to posit one authoritarian view on a p o l itical s i tuation is not a minor action, it is an o p p o sition. Instea d , minor films o ften enter into a dialogue over which fiction (that of the film, o r the stories told within the film) c an best estab l i sh a new i dentity for a people yet to come. For this r e a s o n minor cinema can at times appear self c onsciously s tyl i s e d . D i r e c tors of minor film do n o t create a s o l i d image of a new identity s o much a s question the manner in which i dentities are usually constructed in mains tre am cinema. In this way, the m ajor voice of cinema b e gins to stutter, stammer or wail, with o ut to o quickly reterritori alising ' the p e o p l e ' into a new stere o typ e . Neverth ele s s Deleu z e 's theory o f m o d e rn po litical cinema is in many ways quite vague. He never really gives concrete examples of exactly how it takes the dominant language of classical cinema and makes it speak in a minor voic e . His ideas are practic ally imp o s s ible to grasp unless you have s een the films he briefly reference s , and even then his lack of sustained concrete analysis erects further b arriers to our understanding. Fortunately, several schol ars have taken his i d e a s and applied them with rig our to vari ous cinemas. Let us now turn to a few of them to enhance our unders tanding of m o d ern p o liti c a l cinem a , o r, minor cinema. M i nor cinema

Probably the first person to coin the phra s e 'minor cinema ' in English was D. N. R o dowick, in Gilles Deleuze 's Time Machine ( 1 9 9 7 ) . 1 1 R o d owick d i s cu s s e d how p o st col onial west Afric an nations, such as Senegal in the 1 9 6 0 s , used cinema to rethink their identity after an extensive period of occup ation by the French. Previously, cinema h a d b een used by the French to repres ent the native west Africans . French cinema was a m ajor voice that very

often rep res ented west African identity in a negative m anner, as a primitive culture. For this reason west African filmmakers had to struggle against not only the dominant language of the colonis er, French, its elf, but also French cinema when it p o sitioned west African people as colonial subjects. Rodowick analys es Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret ( 1 963) as a work of minor cinem a . " O ften consi dered the first indigenous African film, Borom Sarret is the story of a taxi driver (with a horse drawn cart) from a poor dis trict of Dakar, the capital of Sene g a l . Ro dowick comments in p articular on Sembene 's utilis ation of African oral storytelling traditions to make a minor use of the norms of Western cinematic representation. R odowick demonstrates how the sound recording of the film gives it the feel of a story told verbally, as though in the African oral tradition. The s ound is deliberately non naturalistic (Le. it does not always match the image) , and many of the characters ' voices are spoken by Sembene himself. This has a peculiar effect on the spectator, who is used to seeing images constructed to appear 'naturali stic ' , or as though

.. tI

E

Q) c:

they obj ectively reflect reality. In the case of French cinema's

'13 o

previous representation of west Africans , this naturalism was used

:E

as a disguis e b ehind which to propagate the negative image of west African culture as essentially primitive. By contrast, S embene creates a film in which images and soundtrack are di slocated, and the normal experience of watching a story unfold in cinematic images suddenly appears to stutter, due to the minor actions of the filmmaker. Instead, the film appears rather like a story addressed to the various types of native Senegalese people that it depicts , asking them to que stion how they c an create a new coll ective, how they can become a people of the future. Since Ro dowick's intercession a number of works have emerged that des cribe how minor cinemas are created in different contexts, from small national cinemas, to exiled and diasporic cinemas, to women's cinema . 13 As one illustrative examp le, let us now consider the US independent film Mysterious Skin.

c:

.. II

A m e rican i ndependent c i n e m a as m i n o r cinema: Gregg Ara ki

The films of iconoclastic director Gregg Araki b elong to a long tradition of queer American indep endent cinema that includes s uch notab l e directors as Kenneth Anger, John Waters and Andy Warhol. As queer cinema is usually created outside the mainstream it very often has the p otential to be minor, although it is often more o p p ositional than minor. O n the other hand, in The Celluloid

Closet ( 1 987), Vito Russo has exhaustively charted the long history of m ainstream Hollywo o d fil m s that were queered in a minor way by writers , directors or actors willing to slip a queer theme o r sub text into a m ainstream film. Here we see a far more minor queering of the accepted norms of the mainstream. Araki 's films are p art of a movement that developed in the 1 990s calle d N ew Queer Cinema, and as such they often straddle these two worlds . " Many o f h i s films are independent films with queer subject s , and as such are perfect for creating minor cinema. In addition, though, they very often attempt a degree of crossover into the mainstream by utilising established genres or styles, even while queering them, and making them speak in a minor way. Thus it is primarily through his fo cus on queer s exualities (be they homos exual or otherwise ' devi ant' from the established heteros exual norm) that Araki is able to que s tion various d ominant norms of US identity. Mysterious Skin

(2004)

Mysterious Skin i s the story of two young teenagers , Neil McC o rmick (Jo s e p h Gordon L evitt) and Brian La ckey ( B r a dy Corb etl , living in the small town of Hutchinson, Kans as. B oth b oys were s exually abused by the local Little League baseball co ach (Bill Sage) when they were eight years old. Brian is now a sad teen, troubled by traumatic memories for which he has no rational explanation. Inste ad, he concocts theories of alien abduction to explain his b l a ckouts and lost memories. Neil, on the other hand, had his heart b roken at eight by the co ach (who disapp e ared

suddenly) . and has since become a rent boy with a nihilistic, even s elf destructive approach to life . When Brian seeks out Neil looking for answers Neil takes him to the co ach's old house and reve als the truth to him .

Mysterious Skin clearly conforms to the three characteristics of a work of minor cinema . Firstly, its teenaged p rotagonists create

a biz arre a s s emblage that deterritorialises stan dard norms of behaviour, suggesting

a

new mo del for a people yet to come . Neil's

homosexuality ensures that Wendy (Michelle Tra chtenb erg) and he, although friends since chil dhood, do not b e c ome lovers . The protagonist's romance with the 'girl next door' s een in s o much US suburban drama is thus unavailable to them. B rian, for his p art, is so traumatised by his p artial memories of abuse that he has become, as Neil's friend Eric (Jeffrey Licon) describes him, 'weirdly as exual ' . When fellow alien nutcase Avalyn Friesen (Mary Lynn Rajskub) attempts to s e duce him, B rian is unable to reciprocate.

1 . Mysterious Skin (2004).

Thus Araki 's qu eer p o liti c s deterritorialises the heterosexual coupling typ ical of the us teen film . I f there i s a people yet t o come in this film it i s clear that i t will have t o emerge from the wounded teens who have spent their lives having their expectations of what life ' should' b e like (which they have learned from the movies) dashed by reality. Thus Wendy often performs the role of caring mother to Neil , and Neil and Eric take turn s caring for the traumati s e d Brian. Unlike the teens in typical teen movies there is no romantic resolution for any of these characters. Instead , they all learn to face the uncertain future and to try and support each other. The c asting of Jos eph Gordon Levitt as the teen hustler Neil is key in this respect, as he is well known for playing wholesome hetero teens who do get the girl in b oth the TV s erie s Third Rock from the Sun ( 1 9 96 2 00 1 ) and the teen flick

10 Things I Hate About You

( 1 99 9 ) . Audience expectations are

rocked by his p e rform a n c e , a s Araki p l ays out our normal exp e ctati ons in

a minor key, forcing us to

co nfront the

p o s s ibility that the normative representation that we are u s e d to may require deterritorialising if a new identity i s to be created. Indeed, it was undoubtedly this uncharacteristic performance that enabled Gordon Levitt to cro s s over into the US independent s e ctor and then s e cure the lead in the teen noir Brick (2006). The second criterion for a work of minor cinema is also met, a s t h e film eradicates the b o undary b etween political and private spaces. As a hustler, Neil inhabits marginal space s , such as motel rooms , cars , bus terminal toil ets and the chil dren's playground where he waits for client s . Through Neil's illicit sexual a ctivities we witn e s s a life live d aimle s s ly in p ublic p l a c e s . In fact, it transpires that Neil 's relationship with the private sphere was a dversely affected when he was a chi l d . His first ej aculation o ccurred when he was just a small boy, watching his mother give her latest boyfriend a blow job on the la dder of his garden swing set. Here the public sphere inva ded his childhood s anctuary, and it is no accident that, as a teenage hustler Neil hangs around a

public children's playground ( c o mplete with swings and slide) . waiting for clients. Public and p rivate have b ecome one and the same for Neil, who associates sex with symbols of childhood that for him have lost their usual connotations of innocent play. In fact, as his mother is fre quently drunk or absent, Neil effectively functions without the p rivacy of a secure home. For this reason he falls for the co ach, who stocks his house with foo d and games appealing to young chil dren, and generally p erforms the role of Neil's ab s ent father by giving him l ifts home after b a s eb all practice. The invasion of sex into Neil's fractured home life , and the false security offered by the co ach's house (where his surrogate father sexually abus es him) , have destroyed Neil's access to a private life , and as a teenager he lives his life entirely in public s p a c e s . The sanctuary of white suburbia usu ally uph e l d by Hollywoo d (again, think no further than It 's a Wonderful Life) is here shown to b e a lie. Fulfilling the third criterion of a work of minor cinema , Araki's s elf c onscious cinematic style is u s e d to ins ert the film into a

.. o

E

QI c:

dialogue between filmmaker, fictional story and audience, in a

·13 o

similar manner to that which Ro dowick describes in Semb ene's

:§

Borom Sarret. In doing so he avoids the creation of new, 'positive' queer stereotypes, preferring instead to proliferate the possibilities of divers e teenage identities. Part and p arcel of this approach is a self conscious exploration of style. As numerous critics have noted, Araki's films stand out from the mainstream due to his incorporation of asp ects of the avant garde . l5 As opposed to the transp arency of fo rm adopted by Hollywo o d (which attempts to suck the viewer into its fictional world and avoids drawing attentio n to its constructed nature at all costs) . the avant garde foregrounds the fictional status of the film, asking the viewer to think about how the world is 'normally ' repre sented to them by film. In Mysterious Skin the effect of distancing the spectator from the story is achieve d by stylistic ally inhabiting the Hollywo o d norm and using it to tell a story that

c:

questions the u s ual s exual identity of the Hollywood teen film, while self cons c iously referencing previous famous Hollywo o d productions ab o ut small town life. I n this way Mysterious Skin appears as though a story told in cinematic quotation mark s . The viewer is confronted with numerou s images that seem familiar, but have b een ' queered' to such an extent that they can only question our p erception of what i s normal. E arly on in the film Wendy and Neil stand in a d e s erted drive in, and fant a s i s e about how their lives might look if they were in a film. As they listen to the 'voice of God' through the sp eaker it b egins to snow. Neil and Wendy look up to the heavens . A revers e shot then follows , taken from a crane l o oking directly down on them, s howing them looking up as the snow fall s . This i s in fac t a direct cinematic reference to the op ening of Frank C apra's tale of s mall town American life, It 's a Wonderful Life. In the earlier film a shot/reverse shot s e quence is u s e d to create a dialogue b etween a family praying for their father George B ailey (Jam e s Stewart) in the s mall American town of B e dford Fall s and an answering d i s cus sion between angels in heave n . " We literally fo llow the p r ayers a s they fly t o h e aven , and witne s s a convers ation b etween angels as they decide how to respond. In

Mysterio us Skin, however, a shot of the heavens s een from the p oint of view of the characters on e arth is a b s ent. Even though the characters claim to hear the voice of God from the silent drive in movie s p eakers , their view of heaven i s not shown to the s p ectator, and there i s no convers ation between protective angels . In fact, a s the impassive camera's aerial stare suggests , heaven has

abandoned the s e characters , just a s both Neil and Brian's fathers have ab andoned them to the care of their working mothers . The effe c t of thi s s e eming renunci ation of all p atriarchal values , whether religious or familial, is c o mp ounded when teenage Neil gets drunk one night and visits the coach's old house. C onfronting this closed door to the past, he mutters bitterly that the co ach, his s urrogate father figure, had once referred to him as his 'angel ' . The

film uses the notion of abandoned souls to suggest that, for Wendy and Neil, the heavenly redemption available to George Bailey in the small American town of Bedford Falls in It 's a Wonderful L ife is not available. Their identity i s no longer that o f the whol e s ome, ' s aved' America of the immediate p ost war years . Thi s replaying of Hollyw o o d myths in a minor way o c curs several times in the film. When Neil and Wendy are in New York , Wendy warns Neil to be c areful by referencing Dorothy in The

Wizard of Oz ( 1 9 3 9 ) , s aying: 'We 're not in Kansas anymore . ' This time, however, unlike Doro thy, the s e characters have no utopian family home to return to by clicking their heel s . More obviously, during the film's Halloween s e quence

the

s afe sub urb an

excitement of H alloween seen in Hollyw o o d classics of the past such a s Meet Me in St. Louis ( 1 944) and E. T. : The Extra Terrestrial ( 1 982) is made to s tutter when Neil physically and s exually abuses a disabled boy in the manner he has learned from the coach, and when B ri an is once again sexually abus ed by the coach. Finally, Araki's decision to shoot the scenes of child abuse in a

.. o

E

II C

manner that did not traumati s e the child actors creates a further

'0 o

minor effect. For the abu s e s e quences Araki filmed the chil dren

:E

and the coach sep arately, as though they were rea cting to each other, although in reality the o ther party was absent. He then edited the shots together, creating the illusion that both p arties were present at the s ame time . 1 7 This technique is called the Kuleshov effect after the S oviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov who , in the l ate 1 9 1 0 s , dis covered that audiences would infer that shots filmed s ep arately belonged to the same s p a c e and time. In Hollywo o d cinema the Kuleshov effect is typically used to bolster the illusion that the fictional world of the film is 'real ' , and not a created fiction. It furthers the aim of Ho llywo o d cinema, to suck th e viewer into an unquestioning relationship with the n arrative world. For instance, the Kuleshov effect is often used to make spectacular stunts appear real in acti on p acked blockbu s ters . A shot of an explosion may be followed by a shot of an actor reacting

c

.., -0

to it, even though he or she is nowhere near the actual event. In this instanc e , however, a technique usually deployed to make the audi ence feel unquestioningly s ecure in their relati o nship with the film (even as it constructs ideological norm s , such as that of heterosexual primacy) actually makes the viewer feel extremely unea sy. The s cenes look so real that they are twi ce as frightening, e s pe cially when we are placed in the p o sition of the children, l o oking up fro m their p oint of view, at c l o s e ups of huge adu l t fa c e s that fill the screen. The spectator's desire to believe that fictional images are real is purposefully played upon, the illusion of re ality that n o rmally enhances n aturali s m here m aking us s quirm, as it p o s itions u s in the role of abus e d chil d . Replaying this major technique in a minor way renders literal the way this proce dure usually makes us, a s spectators , subject to a p otentially "tI

� ,g(1,1 Q!

�:I

(1,1

�

:;

abus ive ideology. In the final s cene, Mysterious Skin provides some respite for its

characters , as Neil and Brian break into the co ach's old house, and Neil helps Brian come to terms with what happened to them when they were eight. In one respect, then, the film finally recoups the s uburban home as a place of s anctuary and healing. This private s p a c e is only a temporary sp ace for thes e characters , however, who will ultimately have to leave it again to get on with their live s . On c e again , t h e film plays t h e accepted image o f t h e suburb an home in a minor key, and it does s o to suggest that a p eople of the future can b e created only by excavating the dark and hidden p a s t s ob s cured by thi s homely image s o often p eddled by Hollywoo d, just as Neil and Brian are 'healed' by their final encounter with it. In this way the film refuses to prop agate either exis ting s tereotypes of homos exuality or hetero s exuality, and instead develops the narratives of s everal damaged teens , who s e identities a r e constantly in t h e proce s s of renegoti ation in the narrative

a process that is mirrore d in the film's renegotiation

of Hollywo o d myth s .

Chapter 4

Becom i n g a rt Damian Sutton

What does it mean, for Deleuze and Guattari, to be an artist? Deleuze and Guattari consider artists almo s t within the s ame breath as philos ophers, in the sense that arti sts have glimps ed something of the immanence that holds the universe together in its tremendous forces and flow s : ' They have s e en s omething in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves . ' l This idea of the arti st a s a kind of philosopher i s attractive , but we might struggle if we attach it to any artist, or any artwork. Art can be a kind of philosophy, but this is not the same thing as saying that art is philosophy. The idea of the artist as philos opher sounds us eful when attache d to Pablo Picasso, and the notion can even seem to elevate your p ractice or ours as artists . What happens, however, when we attach the term ' art' in this context to Thomas Kinkade or Jack Vettriano? Is the artist a philos opher then? Perhap s this is why, for D e l e u z e and Gu attari , art i s one s tep remov e d from philo sophy. Art is, as Gregg Lambert has sugge sted, a kind of 'non philos ophy ' , an approach that cannot b e philosophy, but which ultimately has the cap acity to enliven philosophy. For instance, the philosopher has a responsibility to knowledge that the artis t d o e s not, that of the creation of concepts . L amb ert suggests , however, that 'it is only in its encounters with non philosophy that, following Deleuze's assertion, the task of concept creati on can b e proposed anew'.' Art exists to reveal and give shap e to the prob lems and concepts with which phil o s o phy grapp les. When philosophy grows tired, or reaches an imp asse, it

is the arti s tic event that throws up new challenge s as it pres ents tho s e concepts and problems afres h . What, then, d o e s art d o , i f i t cannot b e philosophy? For Deleuze and Guattari, thi s i s very clear. Only philosophy can supp ose the plane of immanence, the non organ i c life that run s thro ugh the univers e , giving it shape and form. Art can sup p o s e the shap e s themselves , however, and can give us

a glimp s e o f that immanence.

It does this by creating p ure s en s ations that exi s t b eyond parti cul ar readings; Deleuze and Guattari call these percepts, and call the p ure responses that exi s t b eyond p articular meaning

affects. In so doing, art is able to do more than simply illus trate the problems and concepts with which philosophy works: it is able to ask some of the same questions of culture that philos ophy does , even if it g ets different kinds of answers .

�E

Q; c<

� al

�

:g

Why is there no becoming-man?3

In a black and white photograph from 1 98 8 , an ageing, elegantly p r e s ented man s t a r e s out at the c amera from a deep b l a ck b a ckground. He is o u t of fo c u s , and the camera instead h a s brought into sharp cl arity the s kull that decorate s the walking cane that he holds in his hand. This is one of the last photographs that the a rti s t Rob ert Mapplethorp e took of hims elf before his death, and it s eems to repres ent the intersection of a body of work with the b o dy of the artis t hims elf, as the art world s ought to create the arti s t who was Mappl ethorp e. This Ameri c an artist/photographer p a s s e d away fro m an AIDS /HIV-related infection in March 1 9 8 9 . At the time, a major retro spective of Mapplethorpe's work, The Perfect Moment, was on a tour of the United States that was to include Philadelphia, B o ston, Hartford and Washington D C . The work included still life photographs of flowers and s tatues and images of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyons , as well a s many of his s elf portraits . The exhibition al s o included the 'x' p ortfoli o , a s eri e s of images of g ay s adomasochism, the 'Y' portfolio of flowers , and the '2' portfolio

of black male nudes . Finally, the exhibit included images of the children of Mapplethorp e's fri ends. His photography represented exp erimental and oppositional sexuality, in direct confrontation with the a c a d e my, and in the tra dition of nineteenth century painters

G u s tave C o urbet and E d o u ard Manet, who h a d

confronted the s exualised g a z e of art in their own time. A t the same time, the aesthetic strictnes s of Mapplethorpe's approach tightly comp o s e d , clas sical, highly fini shed photographic prints demons trated what Kobena Mercer has called a 'fundamental cons ervati s m ' , implicating him in the very culture of sexual obje ctifi c a t i o n he seemed to rej e c t . ' The s e lf p o rtrait o f Mappletho rpe therefo re s e ems a l s o to embody thi s kind o f dicho tomy : t h e more h e s e e m s to o p p o s e the mainstream, hetero sexual and cons ervative ideas

of art, the more his

oppo sition help s substantiate the mainstream. This is app arent in the circums tances s urro unding The Perfect Mo ment, and the aftermath o f Mapplethorp e's death

circumstance s that

reterritorialis e the queer look of his photography. Even at the moment of his death, Mappl ethorpe became a standard bearer, willing or not, for a numb er of political is sues including the right to free speech

that were seen to b e under

attack as the American right gathered its fo rces as p art of what became known a s 'the culture wars ' . Thes e forces had a s their figurehe a d the Repub l i c an senator fo r North C arolin a , Jes s e Helms . Helms had previously lobbied against the federal funding of health programmes to promote s afe s ex and AID S education, and, for writers such as Richard Meyer and Steven C . Dubin, it was Helms in p articular who would come to stand for the p olitical right's o p p o s ition to Mapplethorp e and his work.' In so doing, Helms w o u l d in fac t b e the p rinci p a l a gent in creating Mapplethorp e the artist, who s e work has a particular set of meanings . The Perfect Moment was on show at the Mus eum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, without much incident, when the news came of Mapplethorpe's death. The artist's battle with AIDS related

1: a 0> c

'E

o

�

IG

.. -0

infection, a n d the

subj e c t matter o f s o m e of h i s m o s t

confrontational photography, made the final connection for Helms between homos exuality and disease. The show was due to go to the C orcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC in July, and would be within a city bl ock of the White House and down the Mall from the S enate. For Helm s , thi s meant that his intervention woul d s eem p r ovidenti a l : he would have an opp ortunity to s afeguard the n ation's morals and b e given license by circumstance to do it in the C apitol its elf. The director of the C orcoran, C hri stina Orr­ C ahall, cancelled the s how, citing the p o litical climate, and it at once p olarised the two camp s , even uniting group s of arti sts who had p reviously had different op inions over the work. C ritics of Mapplethorp e's work, such as Mercer, had cited the objectification of black men in his work, which at best reduced them to s exual stereo typ e s and at worst recalled the days of slavery and the traffic in the b l ack male b o dy. Now, however, they were united in their belief that the work should b e shown, and demonstrate d thi s in a mass rally outside the C orcoran, proj ecting images from the show onto the building and making the c overs of several m ajor magazine s . Another gallery, the Washington Project for the Art s , picked up t h e show, a n d O rr C ahall l ater resigned. In the meantime, Helms had lobbied for an amendment that would restrict the use of federal funds, s p e cifically the National Endowment for Arts , for art that included obs cene or indecent materials . C rucially, this included depictions of sadomasochism, homoerotici s m and the exploitation of children: Helms would once again equate homo sexuality with obscenity and illegality in the public mind, and in p articular equate homosexuality with the abuse of chil dren

and the diverse work of Mapp lethorp e would

illustrate this . Helms used four photographs from the exhibit, including two unclothed photographs of children, when lobbying . The other two images were of men with their genitals exp o s ed , p erhap s t h e most famous of thes e images b eing Man in Polyester

Suit ( 1 980} ' in which a black man in a suit is photographed from

the chest down , his penis exp o s e d . The amendment, which was eventu ally p a s s e d by C ongres s , would therefore also reconn ect black sexuality with indecency ap.d fear, in a manner that recalled once again the era of slavery. When the exhibition removed to C incinnati, Ohio, similar events unfolded on a more local scale. Here, the Contemporary Arts Center put the s how on, only for director D ennis Barrie to find himself in court for p andering obscenity after a sustained c ampaign by a coalition of conservative pre s sure groups. Here, the defence argued for Barrie that the definition of obscenity had three criteri a b a s ed on a previous landmark case (Miller vs State of California, 1 9 7 3) : the average pers o n mus t obs erve a p rurient interest in s e x in the work taken as a whole; the work must depict sexual conduct defined by the host state as p atently offensive; and the work must lack serious literary, artistic, historic or s cientific value . 7 B arri e's defence counsel was able to argue, successfully, that the c a s e for the work lacking s erious value could not b e proven, and all three necess ary criteri a were not met. Thi s was helped by affidavits from the p arents of the children involved, as well as testimonies from art profession als that acted as ' crash courses in aesthetics' for the jurors . As Dubin further note s , this was intended to ' deflect attention away from the difficult subject matter of the photographs, onto formalist considerations such as composition'.' Even the term 'taken as a whole' was a challenge for the system, however, with different me anings understo o d by all parti e s . The judge and jury agreed that this meant individual images, rather than the whole exhibit, as the p r o s ecution's c a s e suggested. Nonethel e s s , even within the successful defence of B arrie there was the development of a particular, unified identity to Mapplethorpe's work. For, while only three of the photogra p h s were cite d , it was cle arly the whole show that was on tri al, and the whole show stoo d for Mapplethorpe (as retrospectives are intended) . At stake, then, was the reputation and insistent m eaning behind Mapplethorpe 's life and career, bound up with his development as a p erson.

Mapp l e th orp e was reduced to p articular characteri s tics that stand for his work , bec oming a concept for critics of all typ es. In thi s way, the polishing of Mapplethorp e's c areer in the retrosp ective , and the controversy that surrounded it, acted in much the s ame way as Mapplethorp e's images of black men that Mercer had criticised. Mercer fo cused on the ways in which the photograph s re duce the b l ack male to the level of the flowers or statues , as things . The images of black male nudes simply replaced one system of sexuali s e d repres entation in art with another: 'Substituting the s oci ally inferi or subj ect, black/man for the conventional ideal of the (white)/woman, Mapplethorp e draws on the codes of the genre to frame his way of s eeing b lack male b o dies a s " b e autiful thing s " , erotic and a e s thetic obj e c ts . " The trials of Robert Mapp l e thorp e , first in the Senate and later in C incinnati, served to highlight the growing problem of AIDS/HIV and s timulated awaren e s s among liberals and cons ervatives alike. Helms and o thers had unwittingly provi ded opportunities for camp a i gners against homophob i a , and the record bre aking attendance at the galleries that showed the work help ed strengthen AIDS awarene s s campaigns . These were a by pro duct, however, of the creation, in social, cultural and legal terms, of the artist and his body of work, to the extent that his very image comes to stand for it. Moreover, at the same time, so Mercer's argument runs , thi s b o dy of work h a d re e s tablished the principles of difference in rep res entation in s lightly new lines only: the black man's b o dy ' inve sted with what the white male s ubj ect wants to see' . 1 0 A woman has t o become-woman . . .

At first glance the question 'Why is there no b ecoming man?' seems straightforward enough to answer: becoming deterritorialises man from his position as the molar entity around which all o thers are s tructured (capitalism , p atri archy) . ' [Ml an is majoritarian p ar excellence . . . the determination of a state of standard: Deleuze and

Guattari prop o s e . " Artists work to rais e this as a twofold is s u e of experience. On the one hand , there are different experiences of the world from that of man, and p artic ularly white men. On the other hand, tho s e different experiences are al so experiences of difference its elf. As we fin d with the work of Mapplethorp e , artworks that highlight difference, especially within the aesthetic or formal constraints of art practice, often recreate the systems of difference. This illustrates the power of the p atriarchal system that has man as its s tandard

it even c onstructs the very terms of

oppo sition, the terms of difference its elf. We might see this in the way that, in art his tory, a canon of male arti sts has b e en created, to the exclusion of women artists as well as arti sts of colour. For this reason, artists have developed their work to o p p o s e this canon. Some , such as the arti s ts ' collective the Guerilla Girl s , directly challenge the established histories through publishing and protest. Others , s uch as Judy Chicago, have sought to create artworks that highlight a forgotten canon of imp ortant women writers and arti sts . 'The Dinner Party' (1974-9), Chicago's most famous work, is an installation of a huge triangular b anqueting tab l e , set for thirty nine inspirational women from history, in which e ach is represented by a ceramic plate decorated with vulvar and flower fo rm s . The s etting also includes the names of 999 other important women, and the whole is finished with e l aborate gold and white decoration s . Thu s Chicago sets her canon of women in opposition to the male canon, within a s o cial context that invokes domes tic labour and s ocial propriety. Dinner p a rties are traditionally the responsibility of the woman as homemaker, and involve couples in an iteration of the hetero sexual, patriarchal order. The extra dimension is given by the place settings them selves , however, which evoke the female s exual organs and s e rve to remind us that it is only this basic difference that s eparates one canon from the other. Nevertheless, the highlighting of 'man' as the majoritarian form that leads to social inequality represents only one dimension to the

.. ..

concept that Deleuze and Guattari wanted to create. They wanted to go further, and attack the very principle of difference its elf. This is what they mean by effectively asking the question, 'Why is there no b e c oming man? ' It allows them to di s c u s s the problem of s etting up

o p p ositi ons . To create an altern ative c anon is

problemati c , since it manage s to keep in place the very situation of differenc e it app ears to deconstruct. New canons of women artists are in danger of a kind of ghettoisation: It is i m portant not to confuse ' m i norita ria n : as a becoming or process , with a ' m i n o rity: as a n a ggreg ate o r state . Jews , Gypsies, etc . , may constitute minorities u n d e r certain c o nditions, but that in itself does not m a ke them beco mi n gs . One rete rritorial izes, or a l l ows o n es e lf to be rete rritoria lized , on a m i n ority as a state; but i n a becom i n g , o n e is d eterritori a l ized . '2

S o , for Deleuze and Guattari , it is not a physical or e s s ential identity that initiates or gives dynamic power to b ecoming, but instead it i s p rovoked by the so cial op eration of difference . In a sense, this means that a woman even has to distance herself from her difference, to see it anew, and regain some of the agency that thi s offers her. She does not automatically have it, but it is created for her by her difference from the majority/standard (man) and it ri s e s up fro m her minority (woman as domesti c , as weak, as dis enfranchis e d ) . This is what gives contemp orary performance art s uch extraordin ary p otenti al. not j u s t a s an illus trative mechanism ( a s in fiction) but as one of exp eri ence for the perfonner, p articip ant and viewer. One of the clearest examples can be s een in the installation/perfonnance 'Dolores from l Oh to 2 2h' by N ew York based artists C oco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez. 'Dolores from l Oh to 22h' was staged in 200 1 at the Kiasma Mus eum of C ontemp orary Art, Helsinki, Finland, and broadcast simultaneously in galleries in Los Angeles, London, and Ljubjlana in S l oveni a . The p e rformance 'recreated' the c a s e of D elfin a Ro drigu e z , a worker at a maquiladora , or assembly factory, in

Tijuana, Mexico, who was the subject of intimidation and abuse by her employers after attemp ting to uni oni s e with her fellow workers . The install ation was staged in real time, and broadcast using surveillance style cameras set up a s if by the employers . Fus co, playing the worker, was not allowed to leave the room, and the situation of intimi dati on was played out as Dominguez entered as the employer. Dominguez was ab le to plan his acti o n s , although o n l i n e v i ewers were g i v e n a c h a n c e to suggestions

make

s ome of which demonstrate d , as t h e performance

p rogres s e d , viewers ' eagerne s s to see Fusco, the 'employe e ' , abused a n d humiliated. The conceptual foc al point fo r the p i ece i s the act of combination

the willingness of the workers to unioni s e and

create an identity that supersedes all of them and acts as a block of b ecoming, or haecceity. This need o nly be a desire , and Fusco needed only to have that fact related in the convers ations that stru ctur e d the twelve hour p erfo rmance. Nonethel e s s , the performance itself relied on very specific forces being aligned, coming together in thi s block, in order to work. At the heart of this was Fusco's own identity, her own becoming woman . She does not imitate Rodriguez, but instead she remains Coco Fusco throughout, at least in the eyes of viewers and online viewer/participant s . This is crucial t o much o f the arti st's work, esp ecially i n h e r later explorations of the role of women in the War on Terror. The s e works have s e e n h e r take o n the role of interrogator, including a video made of her ' training' as a recruit by ex special forc e s interrogation experts . The work relies as much o n h e r abilities as a college professor (who s e p edagogic role is clearly defined) as it does her abilities as an actre s s (to disappear as a p erson into the role, or to follow orders ) . Added to thi s i s the industry in which Fus c o p ortrays the s ituation of exploitation i n the maquil adora. The performance was billed by Fusco and Kiasma as dealing with some of the is sues of s urveillance that entered into the public eye with television game shows such as Survivor and Big Brother, both

of which involved twenty four hour coverage of contestants living together and p erforming tasks . 1 3 The performance moved b eyond zeitgeist i s s u e s of surveillance to engage with wider issues such as the exploitation of maquiladora workers , and this is where the l onger lasting impact o f the installation is clear. The issue of l abour and wealth continues to be a problem, and one m a d e wo r s e by the c ontinue d exp ansion of info rmation technology in the office and in the home

as p art of work and

leisure . In repres enting the assembly line workers in Mexico and acros s the worl d , and by extending the p erformance to include online p articip ation, Fusco implicated ( and still implicates) the user of technology into the very system that exploits the workers . This counts as much for viewers in the gallery in Helsinki (one of the world's fi r s t 'wireles s ' citi e s ) as it d o e s fo r v i ewers on the Internet. Every time we upgrade our computer, television s et, DVD player or games console, we particip ate in a system that is only p o s sible through the exploitation of these workers , and a system that is thre a t e n e d by a c t s of combinati o n such as that of Rodriguez. To h e ar this in a lecture from Fusco as an art p rofessor would seem p atronising, since her position is far removed from that of Rodriguez and other maquiladora workers

it is privileged,

even. As a performance , however, it uses the contradiction that e x i s t s in the technology, the very fact of her own p o s ition as a privileged woman, in order to work. B eing a woman is not enough; F u s c o must b e come woman by entering into the s itu ati o n of Rodriguez and o thers , with the baiting of viewers reflecting the b aiting of employers in Tijuana.

The immanence of art The examples of Mapplethorpe and of Fusco both suggest that it is the p articular time and place of the artworks , in inters ection with the specifi c histories of maker or context, that give the art its i denti ty. Artworks , then, are the constructions of much l arger forces than one single artis t or even one historical trajectory, and

so we need a way of unders tanding them that expre s s e s this larger agglomerati on. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, pick out in their own work key artists who work with a medium to produce crucial effects

Paul Klee, Was s ily Kandinsky and C l aude Monet

with c o lour, for example

yet in fact their philos ophy of art s uits

artists for whom the slightest of interventions has b een enough to create monumental works . The arti st might be an intelligent, skilful and articul ate individual. but it is all too easy to adopt a molar p o siti o n . In fact, the artist's role is one of a s s emblage, or of putting things together: ' C ompo sition, comp osition is the sole definition o f art. C omp o s ition is a e s theti c , and what i s not comp o s e d i s not a work of art. ' 1 4 The first p o s ition seems fixed in the practice of privileging an artist and his/her particular medium, the second s e ems to account only for s ituationist practic e , o r for the technique of the

etants donnees,

the ready made.

In fact, D eleuze and Guattari have a remarkably consistent theory of art that takes into account b oth p o sitions , and rages against cliche: 'In no way do we believe in a fine arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogene o u s arts . To us, Art is a fal s e concept . . . ' 1 5 What gives art practi c e its constituency, and what gives it a purp o s e , i s thi s range of problems addre s s e d by art as a multiplicity of methods . What Deleuze and Guattari try to develop is a theory of art that can comprehend its ability to have historical and contextual agency to have an effec t in time and space. This agency is not limited to a particular moment or medium, but is something that they all share. To start, we can say that art involves simple modulations of form

decisions to put this p aint here in this manner, to make that

mark there, to divide objects or put them together. As

percepts,

these do more than repres ent a decision, however, and D e l e u z e a n d Guattari s ubtract (or ab s tract) t h e arti stic intenti o n . T h e modulations a r e much more important than the decisions , since they reveal the forces ' that p o p ulate the w o r l d , that affect u s , that make us b ecome ' . When Kandinsky achieves this b y 'linear

"tensions" ' , for example, it means that in drawing a s traight line to rep res ent

the b o un dary b etween c o l ours he expre s s e s the

extra ordina ry fo rc e s involved in creating any s traight line: physical forces s u c h a s gravity, physical ten s i o n s such as mus cularity, cultural forces from art history and visual culture (even the force of thos e critics in Kandinsky's mind that must have s a i d that his intenti o n was r a d i c a l , antithe tical, or n o t proper artistic

expression) . ! G

O n the other hand, there are share d,

inarticulate feelings that we all seem to know are important, that we feel before we begin to express them. They might account for the fact that, if we strip away culture, history

patriarchy

from

so many artworks , they remain great, emotive, extraordinary. Thes e

affects

exi s t before articulation, yet they are what we describe and

share through the exchange of l anguage and ideas ; they are what we cling to create our own identity ('We are not in the world, we become with the world; we b ecome by contemplating it. ' !') even though they are s omehow indep endent of us . The artist may make decisions , may deal with the forces and materials (percepts) , but the inters ection with sens ation (affects) may never occur or, most importantly, may o ccur in s pite of the arti st's efforts . Artworks rely upon the conjunctio n of percept and affect, when the material ' p a s s e s into sensatio n ' , and until then they are just cliches o r ruminations of the materi a l . ! · Arti s t s therefore a r e given s omething of a choice, a n d their subsequent curi os ity i s what they b ring to the conversation. They can work with the materi a l s and l e t the inters ection o c c u r in its own interval , or they can intervene , often by giving up the materi al itself and relying only on the movement of forc e s . Thi s i s what conceptual art reli e s on at its best, especially in p e rformance or situation, s ince the minimum physical limit of effort i s reached just as the maximum conceptual effect i s achieved . I n this respect Nicholas B ourriaud, for example, s e e s the artist as the kind of 'tenant

of culture'

observed by anthrop ologists s uch

as Michel de C erteau. ! 9 For the arti st, the social situation becomes

2. Rachel Whiteread , House ( 1 993).

an e s s ential p art of the practice of art, including the p o litical or everyd ay lives of the arti st, the gallery and the s tudi o , the lecture hall and the bar. The artis t i s a s o cial engineer, trying to foster the situation that will create the event that will in tum produce what Bourri aud calls a 'lasting' artwork . 20 Influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, B o urri aud s e e s art in the inters ection of the material and the cultural , which i s almost the same thing for him (but not quite) as p ercept and affe c t : 'Art keeps tog ether moments of subj e ctivity a s s o ciated with s ingular experiences . ' ' ' B ourriaud accepts that this gives the artis t an extraordinary p olitical and so c i a l agency, t o create and fo ster new relationship s , to b ring situations together or tear them ap art, to intervene in a p o liti cal, even milit ary, way into

world

s ituati o n s . The

arti s t n ow

' determines the relationship that will be struck up with his [sic] work ' , and the relations 'between people and world' ." This places second, however, the movement of materials , the practice its elf, and invites the i d e a that to be an arti s t o n e has simply

to be

an artist. Perhap s a better p rop o s al i s to suggest, as critic historian Jacques Ranciere d o e s , that the arti st's practices are "'ways of doing and making" that intervene in the general distribution of ways o f doing and making' .23 The arti stic intervenes in the s o c i al situati on, but art practice itself is a p art of that. Artistic practice might invo lve m ateri a l d e c i s i on s shaping

but

aesthetic

mark marking , framing,

p r a ctice is an intervention into these

decisi ons as well as their s ocial condition. An artwork must intervene in art as well a s s oci ety, it must question the use of materials as well as the culture and situation of the work. If we look for a good example of this we can find one in Rachel Whiteread's 'Hous e ' , which was p art of her Thrner Prize winning e ntry in 1 9 9 3 . As a s c ulpt o r, Whiteread's w o rk is fo c u s e d o n p ercepts , and a t that t i m e h e r work m o s tly invo lve d c a s ting domestic objects (mattres s e s , furniture) . Situated in the East End of London, 'House' was a c a s t in concrete of the interior o f a

typical Victorian suburban house, which was revealed when the house was demolished (along with the rest of the neighbouring estate) . Standing for only a matter of months , it was the subject of b oth praise and deri s i o n , as an arti s ti c interventi on into the changing landscape o f London and as a social intervention into the diminishing memory of a way of life. The shape and texture of the interio r of each room could b e seen in fine detail, as had been the case with Whiteread's other work s , such as ' Ghost'

(I 990) , the

cast of a sitting room. This meant that the sculpture had the s ame effect a s a photograph o r home movie, in that viewers were given the s e n s ation of d i z z ying memory from an almo s t literal transfiguration of the p ast onto a s olid obj e ct. The cast rooms expressed the movements of all the people who have lived in such house s , following and p robing the occup ation of space simply by filling it up. To touch the c oncrete was to touch the impression left by the hands of children , adults, workmen, builders, and to touch the traces l eft from l overs sitting on the window ledge, letters thrown into the fire, of tears at a windowpane. It was also to touch the experience of Londoners , of Britons , who se lives were given shape b y the ' suburban semi ' . This i s similar t o the effect that Whiteread was able t o create i n her 'Holocaust Memorial (Nameless Library) ' for Vienna's Judenplatz in 2000. The negative c a s t of b ooks can do what few photographs are able to (and there are many photographs of the Holocaust) : it can suggest the enormity of the catastrophe by turning lives into books , into novel s and the like, whose pages (rather than spines) have left an imprint in the concrete. Whiteread's s culpture , in focusing on the p hy s i c al sha dows left by mundane p er s o n a l existences, w a s able to addre s s i ssues that affected millions. 'House' at first sight might appear to represent monumentality in art as a cliche of s culpture in stone and concrete. Its 'cliche' makes it a u s eful obj e ct, however, with which to inve s tigate the monumentality of artworks : what it is that makes them last in Deleuze and Guattari's terms .

At first glance , their theory of art is expre s sible in the idea of blocks of sensation

p ercepts and affects coming together as an

inters ection created by p articular conditions. These are reliant upon the spectator, viewer, critic and maker, in that they reveal the p l ane of o rgani s ation (the movement of materials) . What they are really suggesting, however, is that there may be an art that reveals the plane of immanence , the forces themselves whose traces we normally see in the movement of materi als. This is when the arti s t c o m e s c l o s e s t to the p r oj e c t of the philosoph er. Ju st a s the philos o p her's

task

is

to remove the

s trata

to

appreciate

immane n c e , the fo r c e s of life , s o arti sts mu st remove the contingent or reliant. When Whiteread p eeled away the walls of the house that she cast, what was revealed was the space between the cast and the wall s ; not an o p en space of material s but the time and space that had been literally ins crib e d by occupations , by life its elf. This is art that is m o numental , figuratively and literally. As Deleuze and Guattari relate, art is monumental when i t releases us from its formal prioritie s , including the substance of its m aking and the social situation within which it sits, and yet simultaneou sly reve als a truth (p olitical, aestheti c) within the inter s e ction of tho s e thing s . Art undoes the tri ple organisation of perceptio ns, affections, a n d opinions i n o r d e r to substitute a m o n u m ent com posed of percepts , affects , a n d blocs of sensations that take the place of language

. . .

A m o n ument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confi d es to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event."

E ffectively, true artworks are tho s e that remain, that will s p e ak to the future, s p e ak b eyond their own time and p l a c e . This i s why, for examp le, Whiteread's 'House' c ontinues to exist even though i t has been torn down like the houses around it. Indeed, that i s the p o int of h i s torical irony, whereby truths remain to be reve ale d , rep eated o r mirrored. Time will tell whether 'House'

has the real m onumentality of an artwork; not the simple monumentality of s cale but that of confiding to the future. The fact that some artworks remain current, no matter how hoary o r ' lived in' they s e e m , i s b ec au se they a r e s till c onfi ding in the future, or perhap s they hold a truth still waiting to b e heard. Such artworks are monumental in the s ame way that a village war memori al or a city's H o l o c a u s t memorial i s monumenta l : not because they are large but because they reveal the enormity of a parti cul ar truth that will continue to be current .

P art Three

Introduction

What is d u rati o n ?

It would b e fair t o say that we all have a p retty good idea what time is. For most of us, time i s the way we measure the passing of our live s . Our everyday life is measured in temporal cycles. There are sixty se conds in a minute, s ixty minutes in an hour, twenty four hours in a day, s even d ays in a week and s o on. With thi s knowledge we are able to get up e ach morning , calculate how long it will take us to get to scho o l , university o r work, usually arrive just a little too late, c ount the minutes until lunch and so on. The s e cycles are accumul ative , with s even days in a week building up to fifty two weeks in a year, which in turn builds up in time as every ten years sees the p a s s ing of a decade, etc. Fo r most p e o p l e , then, the exp erien c e of time p a s sing is of a

progression

linear

through time . This i s most obviously so becaus e , each

birthday, our age increases by one year, and b e c ause every so often we catch a glimp s e of a slightly o lder face in the mirror, or realis e that the once easy jog to the dep arting b u s has b ecome a hell for l e ather sprint. Even s o , whil e the a b ove all seems fairly straightforward, Deleuze's view of time is slightly different, due to the influen c e of French philo sopher Henri B ergson ( 1 859 1 94 1 ) o n Deleuze's conception o f time. I t was from B ergson's notion of duration that Deleuze's work on time in the cinema developed. B ergs on's concept of duration refers t o our understanding of tim e , but not exactly in the usual way. In everyday use we might say that if we went to a football m atch and stayed until the final whistle then we were ' there for the duratio n ' . 'Duration' is thus

a word we use for a dis crete meas ure of time, and therefore can also h ave the implied meaning that we are doing s omething for an ino rdinately l engthy peri o d of time . For instan c e , if we were trapped in an elevator with s omeone who we found rather b oring, then we might sigh to ours elves , and again acknowledge that we were 'there fo r the durati o n ' . In B ergson's c a s e , h owever, the concept of duration refers to time a s an open and expanding who l e , that i s only understo o d by humans usually once it h a s b e en sp atiali s e d , o n c e t h e flux of time h a s b e e n fixed into four dimensional coordinate s . When this idea was adopted and adapted by D eleuze it led to some s tartling conclusions as to the way in which time can be repres ented in cinema. B efore we jump to the conclusion that French phi l o s ophers B ergs o n and Del euze simply had too much time o n their hands and set about overc omplic ating matters for the s ake of it, it is worth b earing i n mind that D eleuz e's conclusions were drawn from his observation of the way cinema rep resented time after Wo rl d War II. Deleuze was not arguing that our usual perception of time was 'wrong' but, rather, that certain films were suggesting

another way of thinking

about time that had huge ramifications

for, among other thing s , the way in which we i m a gine our everyday i dentiti e s .

Bergson a n d Deleuze B ergson believed that time was a virtual and ever-expanding whole that he c alled ' duration' . The major works that defined thi s concept were

Time and Free Will ( 1 889), Matter and Memory ( 1 896),

Creative Evolution ( 1 907), a n d Duration and Simultaneity ( 1 92 1 ) . ' B ergs o n's philo s ophy i s b ro a d ranging and extremely complex, making it difficult to examine any one of his ideas without op ening up numerous other huge cans of worms . In b rief terms , however, let us now s ummarise Bergson's view of time and duration. To begin with, let us focus on the p ast. In Matter

and Memory,

B ergs on argues that memori es are not stored in our brains but,

rather, that the past is a virtual store of time. When we remember events from our past, he argues , we travel virtually within this massive virtual vault of p a s t time s , s eeking out memories and recollections . At the time o f its publication Bergson's work was extremely influential, especi ally in artistic circles . Evidence of the imp act of his ideas can b e seen in the writings of various authors from around the worl d , the most prominent of whom was the French author Marcel Proust. Proust's magnum opus,

In Search of Lost Time 0 9 1 3 2 7)

b oth utili s e d and devel o p e d

Bergs on's ideas t o explore t h e life of its narrator, Marcel (a character modelled on the author) and his life in France b efore and after World War 1. Proust's novel takes Bergson's ideas a step further, a n d shows how involuntary memory can facilitate a sudden, unexpected leap b a ck into the virtual p a s t . Proust demonstrates how recollections can b e brought involuntarily on by smells , s ounds , tastes or b o dily posture s , and uses the example of the taste of a c ake, called

madeleine, which

suddenly transports

the narrator b ack in time to memories of his childhood. The continue d impact of B ergs on's ideas on the literary mind is evi dent to d ay, with Ian McEwan's

A tonement ( 2 0 0 1 )

clearly

showing evidence of a B ergsonian view of time . In fact, although the idea th at we are all time travellers within a giant virtual memory b ank was most e asily transferred to literature during Bergs on's lifetime, with the growth of the visual media during the twentieth century the m o s t obvious place to look for arti stic rep r e s entations of duratio n are now cinema, television and vari ous new media (e.g. the Internet and computer games) . For instance , during a flashb a ck in film, television or even a video game, the viewer or gamer i s transp orted into the virtual past of the narrative , often

as we shall see further in Part Three

in a

Bergsonian manner. Let us p rovi de some more depth to B ergson's view of time . Bergson theorised that the virtual p a s t was ever exp anding. At each moment in time there was a divi s ion of time into what

Deleuze would later c o m e to call ' a present which is p a s sing and a p a s t that is p res erve d ' . ' The present moment is exp eri enced by us i n the actual day t o day things we do. The p a s t i s an image of the s e day to d ay actions , which i s stored in its virtual form. At every moment in time, then, there is an actual and a virtual version of everything we do . When we try and remember the p a s t it i s a m o n g the stored virtual images of the past that w e s eek. When the p a s t interrupts our daily life unb idden, for instance when invo luntary memory ' fl a s h e s ' us b ac k to the p a s t , it i s often b e c au s e our a ctual p res ent ( a taste, a s ound, a smell , a phys ical p o sture) matches a virtual image stored somewhere in our virtual past. It is, therefore, to this p art of the virtual p a s t (which B ergson imagined to be s h a p e d like a h u g e c one') to which we are transported. The sense of a continuous present, on the other hand, occurs because we are conscious of the actual version of our activities that occurs in the pres ent. It is here, in space as much as in time , that we normally p erceive the linear progress ion of time p a s sing. In

Creative Evolution B ergson

develops upon his notion of the

p a s t and argues that the whole univers e is constantly expanding. As B ergson p uts it: ' The truth is that we change without ceasing . '4 C orrespondingly, as the universe exi sts in time, time is a l s o an ever exp anding who l e : duration. The following quote summarises his stance: Dur a t i o n is the contin u o u s progress of the past which gnaws into the futu re and which swells as it adva n c es. And as the past grows without ceasin g so there is no limit to its preservatio n . Memory . . . is not a faculty of putti ng away reco l l ections in a d rawer, or of inscri b i n g them in a register. . . . (I) n rea l i ty the past is p reserved by itself, a utomatically.5

For B ergs o n , then, the past i s pres erved virtu ally, constantly being added to as each moment in time creates a new 'image' t o be added t o the s to re o f the p a s t , or rememb ered , ' automati c a lly' .

More over, the weight of the virtual past is constantly p u s hing time onward into the present, e a ch new image that is added to the p ast, building up the momentum that enables time to ' gn aw' into the future . Observing time from thi s point of view, B ergson concluded that when we obs erve change, w e u sually do so by measuring the difference b etween a present and a past s tate . This i s easy to imagine if we take

a

common example. Looking b a ck at photos of

ourselves as children, we c an imme diately see the difference b etween ourselves then and ours elves now. C hange is e asy to s e e , then, when we compare actual states . It i s much harder to capture and measure the continuo u s proce s s of change, however. In

effect,

when

we m e a s ure

time's p a s sing we

s p ati a l i s e

duration, creating ' cut out- and kee p ' images that w e c a n compare in order to conceive of change . Even so, B ergson maintained that there was a continuous process of change taking place in the time b etween thes e app arently m e asurable s tates . Thu s what we p erceive as actual re ality is really a snap shot or freeze frame of the perp etual process of virtual b ecoming that is duration. We measure time by spatialising it. In

Cinema 1 ( 1 983)

and

Cinema 2 ( 1 98 5 ) , Deleuze

develops his

work on B ergson. Put briefly, unlike B ergs o n , who was s ceptical about cinema's abili ty to render visible durati o n , D e l e u z e fe els th at c ertain films are able to render visual the p a s s ing of time of durati on; th e s e he calls 'tim e i m a ge s ' . O n the o ther hand, he argu e s , there exi s t 'movement i m a ge s ' . T h e s e are also a b l e to record the p a s s ing of time, but only by sp atialising it into b l ocks of s p a c e time . The time-image is a glimp s e of time in and for its elf, of durati on. The movement i mage, on the other han d , helps u s understand how the virtual whole of time i s spatia l i s e d by consciousness as we attemp t to m ake sense of our daily live s .

Chapter 5

M ovem ent-i m a ges , t i m e - i m a g es a n d hybrid-i m a g es i n c i n e m a David Martin Jones

In his cinema texts

Cinema 1 ( 1 983)

and

Cinema 2 ( 1 985),

Deleuze

uses cinema to argue that our conception of time changed in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II. To illustrate this shift in thinking, he identifies two broad c ategories of image, the time image and the movement image. In this chapter I first intro duce each of thes e categories of image using well-known examples . I then analyse a recent film,

The Cell ( 2000) ,

to briefly

show how and why these two categories h ave increasingly b egun to intertwine since the end of the twentieth c entury.

Movement-image In

Cinema 1 ,

Deleuze argue d that c ertain typ es of films existed

that could be classified as movement images. He identified several different types of movement image, from France, the Soviet Union and Germany, but the most typical was the action image of the cla s s i c al Hollywo o d film. I focus on thi s type of movement image from now on, as it p rovides the clearest example of Deleuze's i deas . Deleuze chos e the term 'movement image' to des cri b e films in which time was sub ordinate to movement. In this s tyle of filmmaking, time was ren dered indirectly. Put another way, time w a s edited to fit the s t o ry. Now, it d o e s not take fam o u s

philosopher

to

o b s erve

that,

in

cinema,

time

a

is

conden s e d . A s viewers , w e expect the events of s everal days , weeks or years to be rendered in a recognisable time span: ninety minutes for a mainstream film, two hours for an art film,

and three to fo ur for a B ollywo o d film. There is more to it than thi s , though . For Deleuze, the pas sing of time in the movement image i s focus e d around t h e movement of t h e protagoni s t , a n d b e c o m e s spatialised in t h e proces s . This i s because, in the movement-image, rendering visual the passing of time is a secondary concern to the telling of the s t o ry. As an exampl e , consider

Hard

Die Hard ( 1 988) . Die

d epicts one hellish night i n the life o f New York C ity cop

John M c C lane a s he b attl e s armed robb ers i n the N akatomi Building, Los Angel e s . Thi s night i s reduc e d to the len gth o f an easily digestibl e feature film, a s time is edited to fit the story. The story fo cuses o n M c C l ane's activiti e s , linear temp oral c ontinuity being maintained by this focus o n the protagonist. No matter how many different s paces McClane variously runs , jumps and explo des through (from bullet strafed offices , to cramp e d air ducts , to perilous lift shafts, to de ath defying leaps from the roof of the s ky s c r a p er) , the s tory remains fo c u s e d o n M c C lane , and the pas sing of the night i s rendered vi sible by his incre asingly b attered physique. Thu s , although the movement image appears to provide the m o s t c ommon s e n s i c a l , dire ct image of tim e , in actual fact it p rovides an indirect expression of time . Time in the movement image is not o nly conden s e d , i t is also sp ati a l i s e d , rendered visible only as a product of the time it takes for a protagonist to act. Indeed, it i s the ability of the protagonist to act that facilitates the p a s s ing of time in the movement image . When protagonists of a movement-image encounter a s ituation that necessitates that they a c t , they are able to do s o , and through their actions the situation is resolve d . In Die Hard, McClane uses his police training, death d efying c ourage and brute mas culinity to overcome the threat of the technologically superior robbers . Thus the trajectory of the movement image is typically from situation, through action, to changed situ ati o n , a trajectory that is propelled by the ability of protagonists to act upon what they see. The movement image,

then, is characterised by action b a s e d around p rotagonists whose sens ory-motor continuity (their ability to act upon what they see) is unbroken. This facilitates the construction of a linear story that c a n traverse any number of varied s p a c e s , with continuity b eing p rovided by the protagonists ' active pres ence.

Time-image

In contrast to the movement image, Deleuze offers the time image. He argues that certain film s , especially several that emerged from western Europe after Worl d War II, p rovide evi dence that our conception of time is changing. In the films of art cinema directors of the 1 9 6 0 s and 1 97 0 s

such as Alain R e s n a i s and Jean Luc

G o dard from Fra n c e , o r Federi c o Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni from Italy

D eleuze detects a new a n d diffe rent

c o nception of time. In the time image, the p a s s ing o f time i s depicted in its own right. It provides a direct image of time. At the most extreme l evel, we could consider a film such as Andy Warhol's

Empire ( 1 9 64) ,

which depicts the E mpire State Building in a static shot over the c o urse of eight hours . Here the action is not condensed in any way, a n d the p atient viewer is able to exp erience the p a s s ing of time , as it were , in 'real tim e ' . This is an extreme examp l e , however. For D e l e u z e , the emergence o f the time image b e g a n in p o s t war E urop ean cinemas, like that of Italian Neorealism in the late 1 940s. O n the first p age of

Cinema 2,

Deleuze p rovi des a p rime example

in a famous scene from Vittorio de Sica's

Umberto D ( 1 95 2 ) . This

scene has been variously discus sed by critics as diverse as Andre B azin in 1 95 3 and D avid B ordwell and Kristin Thompson in 2003 . 1 I n this p arti cular s cene, Maria, a pregnant maid, wearily trudges through her daily chore s , including lighting the stove and m aking coffe e . ' In a Hollywo od film thi s typ e o f scene would probably never be shot, but even if it were the moments of 'dead time' , in which Maria sits and contemplates her p regnancy, would most likely hit the cutting room fl o o r. Here , then, i s an excellent

example of the way time images record the pas sing of time in and for its elf, rather than e diting out moments of time deemed ext r a n e o u s t o the d eve l o p m ent o f the n arrative of heroic indiv i duals. On another level , the time image i s able to represent the virtual whole o f time found in B erg son's duration. In

Cinema 2,

Deleuze

combines B e rgson's m o d el of the virtua l whol e of time with the concept of the labyrinth of time found in the fictional writings of Argentine author Jorge Luis B orge s . ' The resulting model i s that of a labyrinth of virtual p athways through time. A s individuals we only ever know the one p athway that we live, the one that solidifi e s and b ecomes actual around us. An infinite numb er of other p o ssible timelines exist in a virtual state, however, and each one becomes actual elsewhere

or, rather, ' e l s ewhen ' . Nowadays

thi s mo del o f time is well known t o fan s of sci ence fi cti o n , p arallel univers e s b e i n g a staple of television s erie s such as

Star

Trek: The Next Generation ( 1 987 94) . For Deleuze, this model of time was typically manifest in two ways, which he c alled ' Peaks of Pres ent' and ' Sheets of Past' . Films that delve into the past in a B ergsoni an/Deleuzian manner include

Citizen Kane ( 1 94 1 ) , and numerous films by Fe derico Fellini as 8 Ih

( 1 963), Roma ( 1 972), Amarcord ( 1 973)

As a more contemporary example, in Ruiz m a de a film of Proust's

1 999

and Intervista

such

( 1 987).

Chile an director Raoul

Time Rega ined

in whi c h the

protagonist, Proust the author, lying dying in bed, moves virtually thro u g h the s tored p a s t in s e arch of l o s t memori e s . Here the time image i s clearly seen, as an incap acitated p rotagonist (unable to act decisively and affect his situation for the b etter) instead travels b etween the sheets o f the p ast, enabl ing the viewer to c atch a glimp s e of the virtual who l e of time. On the other hand Deleuze o b s erved the existence of time images that also capture the virtual existence of duration directly, but do so by focusing on the moment in the present when time splits . Here the definitive exampl e i s Alain Resnais 's

Last Year at

Marienbad ( 1 9 6 1 ) , a film that repl ays a meeting b e tween a man and a woman that takes p l a c e during a dinner p a rty.' Vari o u s contemp orary films c an also b e viewed i n this way, including the German hit Run Lola Run ( 1 998). Run Lola Run rep l ays the s ame story three times (that of its protagoni st's desperate attem p t to obtain DM l O O . OO in twenty minutes flat in order to s ave her boyfriend's life ) , each time with a different conclusion. In this sense it p erfectly exp resses the notion that the s ame event takes place an infinite number of times in infinite parallel univers e s . In Deleuze's words, it evokes the ' simultaneity of presents in different worl d s ' that exi st if we conceive of time as a virtual labyrinth . ' I n the time image w e encounter a fundamental confusion over the truth. Take the flashback, for instance. In the movement image, flashbacks often appear in order to provide an answer as t o why events in the present are taking shape in certain ways . It i s not uncommon fo r this typ e of fl ashb ack to b e u s e d to reve a l

a

psychological trauma from the p as t , which c a n exp l a i n

a

character's motivati on in the present. The clas sic examp l e s of this typ e of fl ashb ack can be found in Alfred Hitchcock's films , such as Spellbound ( 1 945) and Mamie ( 1 964) . In the movement image fl ashb acks m ake clear the causal link between the p a s t and t h e present. They reaffirm a straightforward view of t i m e a s a singl e, linear trajectory. In t h e time image, b y contrast, delving into the p a s t often causes greater confusion. In Citizen Ka ne, for ins tanc e , different p erspectives are offered on the life of Kane , illustrating the subjective nature of truth. He was different things to different p eople. Similarly, in Fellini's films the p a s t is rarely a place where solutions are found. Rather, exploratio n s of the p a s t demonstrate how many contradictory or confu s ing versions of the past exist in the virtual labyrinth of time . As Anna Powell has recently p ointed out, this typ e of confu sion b etween past and present is often deployed to terrifying effect in horror films , especially in h aunted house movies such as The Shining

( 1 980) , The Haunting ( 1 999) and The Others (200 1 ) , where different

layers of the p a s t c o exist with, and continue to influ e n c e , the p resent.' Accordi ngly, editing in the time image i s often discontinuous, linking together unconnected spaces or regions o f the p ast in a way that delib erately creates confusion in t h e m i n d of the spectator. In t h e time image, then, o u r certainty as to the truth of what has happened in the p a s t , what i s happening in the pres ent and what will happen in the future i s always questioned.

Hybrid-images Deleuze's categoris ation of images poses one imp ortant question: exactly why are some films movement imag e s , and some time­ image s ? At the b e ginning of

Cinema 2

Deleuze mentions World

War II as a dividing line b etween the ' classical' conception of time found in the movement image and the 'modern' vision of time of the time imag e . H e d o e s not elab orate on why World War II marked this break in any great detail, however. At this stage, then, let us briefly consider some of the p o s sible re asons for the emergen ce of time images and movement images at different time s in the last c entury. At an industrial level. the reason for this division appears fairly clear. The rules for continuity e diting created and refined by the Hollywoo d studio system in the early decades of the twentieth century were designed to ensure complete clarity of narrative for the vi ewer. For this re a s o n , the movement image b e c a m e dominant, as t h e 'reality' of time's p a s s ing w a s sub ordinated to the telling of the story. On the other hand, since the end of World War I the European film i n d u s tri e s have attemp ted to create dis tinctive cinematic s tyles that can compete audiences

albeit with niche

in a m arketplace dominated by the universal appe al

of the Hollywoo d pro duct. To do so they often utilise a s p e cts of avant g arde mo dern i s t arti s t i c traditi o n s peculiar to certain European

c o untri e s ,

s everal

o f whi ch,

including

cub i s m ,

s urre a l i s m a n d expre s sioni s m , experimented with time i n a vari ety of way s . In the aftermath of Wo rld War II, then, the

emergence of time images in the art cinemas of E urop e an countries such as Italy and France can be interpreted as attempts to create a different typ e of narrative fro m the H o l lywo o d movement image. This i s certainly one rea s on why t h e time­ image was b o rn . A n indus trial dimension is never enough on its own, h owever. Like all films , movement and time images can be interpreted in any number of other ways . Wh at about their content? Deleuze notes that post war Europe was marked by a proliferation of what he calls the ' any spac e whatever', spaces where people no longer knew how to react to their situation.' Although he never s aid so particul arly directly, Deleuze s aw the effect of the war on Europe reflected in the inability of pro tagonists of the time image to influence their situation positively. By contrast, the cinema of the now triumphant sup erp ower the United States had no s u ch problem; hence the Hollywo o d movement image was popul ated by individualistic hero e s who had no difficulty reacting t o their circumstance s . We are now getting closer to understanding why time images and movement images appeared where and when they did. Put in simplistic term s , many Europ ean countri e s were damaged by the war, not only economically and physically, but al so p s ychological ly. The primacy of the c o l onialist c entral European nations on the global stage was suddenly supers e de d by the emergence o f two sup erp owers (the S oviet Union a n d the United State s ) in the ens uing Cold War. Time images emerged in these nations as they lo oked back into their pasts, questioning the truth of their identities a s they b egan to rebuild after the war. Why, then, are there s o many hybrid images now? Why are there s o many films that contain asp ects of b oth movement image and time image? Again, the most obvious place to look is the marketp l a c e . With an incre a singly glob al m arket to aim at, national film industries , film studios and independent filmmakers know that films that can cro s s over b etween mainstream and niche markets (such as the art cinema distribution network) can

make a gre a t deal of p rofit. S ome high p rofile examples of this approach include Groundhog Day ( 1 9 9 3 ) , Pulp Fiction ( 1 994) ,

Sliding Doors ( I 9 9 7 ) , Run Lola Run ( 1 9 9 8 ) , Being John Malkovich ( 1 999) , Mem ento (2000) , Irreversible (200 2 ) , Eternal Sunshine of the

Sp o tless Mi n d ( 2 004) and 50 First D ates ( 2 0 04) . All the s e films contain the basic elements of the movement image, but have also incorporated aspects of the time image (most usually in the form of a rep eated, jumb l e d or otherwi s e disrupted narrative time s cheme) , therefore guaranteeing maximum market appeal. They use clearly defined genres and recogni sable stars to appeal to mass markets, but also exp eriment with narrative time in o rder also to appeal to a more ' intellectual' art cinema crowd. Once again, however, there is more to this than money, a s at least two critics have noted. Patricia Pisters ' The Matrix of Visual

Culture ( 2 0 0 3 ) examines films with characteristics of both time and movement image as expressions of a new age, where ' a new camera c o n s c i o u s n e s s makes clear dis tincti on b etween the subj ective and the objective imp o s sible; [andl the past and the present, the virtual and the actual have become indistinguishable' ." For Pisters , thes e hyb rid films are evi dence of a broader historical shift. As c ontemporary popular culture becomes increasingly image oriente d , even Madonna's music videos (Pisters analyses

Don 't Tell Me) b egin to represent what Deleuze called ' the crystal of time' , the indi s tinguishable existence of time as both virtual and actual image s . ' David Martin-Jones takes a slightly different tack i n Deleuze,

Cinema and National Identity ( 2 006) , interpreting films such as Sliding Doors, Run Lola R u n , Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spo tless Mind a s expre s s i o n s of national i dentity. For Martin Jones , the fractured temporal narratives of these films visualise recent disruptions to the narrative of national identity, a process that the films then attemp t to work through to find the most p rofitable trajectory available to both the film's narrative and that of national identity.

For the remainder of this chapter I examine one hyb rid film, The Cell ( 2 000) , which p rovi des evi dence of all three of the above r e a sons behind the prol iferation of the new hyb rid image. The s e are seen in its use of movement and time image to appeal to l arger markets , its acknowl edgement of a new era of ' c amera consciousn e s s ' in which actual and virtual become indis tinguishable, and its subtle examinati on of the effect of this new era on questions of national identity. The Cell

(2000)

The Cell is a mixture of science fiction film and serial killer thriller. It fo cus e s on experimental p sychoanalyst C atherine D e a n e (Jennifer Lopez) , who i s p art of a t e a m of US scientists attempting to explore the human mind. D eane is intro duce d in a s equence that appe ars to h ave the logic of a dre am, in which she talks to a

3. The Cell (2000) ,

troubled chil d . It soon transpires that D e ane's body is actu ally wrapp e d in a s exy, space age, red rubber virtual reality suit with a ' neurol ogical syn aptic transfer system' face veil, and suspended fro m h ooks in the ceiling in a laboratory alongside the comato s e b o dy of the b oy. Through unspecified high techery the neurological synaptic transfer system enables her to tune into the mind of another. Her cons ciousness is thereby able to travel into the b oy's mind. When the s tory of the FBI hunt for a disturbed s erial killer C arl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D ' Onofrio) is introduced it is only a m atter of time before Deane is hooked up to the mind of the killer, exploring his mind for clues a s to where his final victim is b eing held. S targher is a schiz ophrenic who was violently abused by his father when a chil d, an d who has consequently devel oped into a pathological killer. H e ki dnaps women, drowns them, b l e aches them to look like doll s , and then susp ends himself over their corpses by metal chains attached to hooks in his fl e s h in order to derive auto erotic p l e asure . When the FBI catch him, h owever, he has already slipped into a coma, and the only w ay of s aving the final girl he has kidnap p e d is for D eane to enter his deranged mind. Throughout The Cell there i s a clear distinction drawn b etween the p hysical worl d , which is conventi onally ren dered as a movement image, and the mental world, which follows the unusual logic of the time image. Like any Hollywood thriller it has a clearly define d dea dline (in this instance, the need to save the trapped girl before she drown s ) , it fo cus e s on the actions of its active mas culine protagonists

especially the bodies of well trained

FBI agents breaking down doors, examining crime scenes, driving cars, and flying in p lanes and helic opters

and the editing is

conventional in its manipulation of time to suit the bodies of thes e men as they rush to meet their deadline. On the other hand, the film also contains numerous aspects of the time image. D eane and her p atients are physically suspended so that they cannot act, allowing D eane to travel virtually within the minds of others . On

entering the mind the editing suddenly becomes discontinuo u s , a s a range of biz arre lands capes are introduced to repres ent the workings of the mind. Here we have obviously moved from movement image to time image. In this respect, The Cell illustrates the way in which the movement and time image typically interact in contemp orary cinem a . Although both typ es of image appear in the s ame film, the time image is used to explore the inside of the mind , while the movement image is equated with the activity of the b o dy. Other examples of this type of hybrid include The Matrix

( 1 99 9 ) , Bei ng John Malkovich , Mulholland Dr. (200 1 ) , Identity (2003) ' Gothika (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Jacket (2005) . In terms of its market o rientation, the film could be des crib ed as an MTV inspired Silence of the Lambs ( 1 99 1 ) . It takes the serial killer genre into new territory by employing the time image in a manner that is similar to the MTV music video . Once inside the mind of the serial killer the imagery becomes all important, as we are given clues to the p sychological rea sons for the killer's actions through dis turbing tableaux: of a horse standing in a room that is suddenly di s sected by a falling glass cage; various imprisoned dolls , women and doll women; p eople in water tanks; me dieval torture s cenes; impres sive throne rooms and b edchamb ers; . and the recurring image of the young Stargher's b aptism from which his s chiz ophrenia stemmed. In this respect the film is akin to music videos that use striking images to accomp any a song. Thus the film uses its hybrid format to reach a broad audience of both serial killer fans and the bigger teen market of the MTV generation. Similarly, the casting of its major star, Jennifer Lopez, i s a strategic ploy, as she was well known as a pop star b efore she turned to acting. When watching her in the mind of the serial killer it i s almost a s though w e are watching a music video

as her b o dy i s

variously impri soned in a small g l a s s box at t h e top of a p erilous tower, catapulted upwards only to hang suspended by a rope around her ankl e s , falls into a slow motion dive, is brought t o

o

E

CIJ c

'0 .S:

'" CIJ Cl o

E

� 1i

�

'tJ c o '" CD Cl o

E

.�

�

ii

CD Cl o

E

�CD

E

�

o

:E

rest, suspended in mid air with dark hair billowing as she telep athically c ommunicates with an albino Als atian dog

all the

time effortle s s ly changing costume, from everyday casual dres s, to flowing red robes, to elegantly p atterned transp arent bl ack dres s . The choice o f Tarsem Singh a s director i s telling i n thi s respect. His p revi ous c redits included director of the music video for R.E.M. 's hit s o ng, Losing My Religion. In the R . E .M. video, shots of the b and are p unctuated by tableaux depicting figures in ' exoti c ' histori cal c o stumes drawn from artistic a n d b iblical s ources, and impri s o ned a n d b o und b o di e s , including S aint S e b a s tian tied half naked to a tree and p enetrated by arrows . At times the images in The Cell s e em extremely similar, as though Tarsem has rem ade this p articular vi deo in order to fit the major themes of thi s fe ature fil m , and with a much l arger b u d g e t . Finally, in an attempt to appeal to this broad demographic, the theatrical trailer for the film makes excessive use of the most striking images from the time image s ections, focusing especially on J Lo in her various costumes and b i z arre s ettings . Much a s a music vi deo can he consi dered a p romotional shop window for a s ong that a record comp any i s s elling, s o too here does the film's incorpo ration of the time i m a g e

in this instance deploy e d in ways that are

remini scent o f a music video

also function as eye c atching

advertising for the film.

The Cell also illustrates very clearly Pisters ' contention that we now exi s t in an era marked by a camera consciousnes s , most clearly because the workings of the human mind are depicted exactly in the m anner of an MTV music vide o . Pisters argues that in the slightly e arlier film Strange Days ( 1 995)

where people are

able to enter the recorde d memories of others through a virtual reality device called a 's quid'

'the brain has literally b ecome the

s creen' on which it is imp o s sible to tell reality from illusion. J O In

The Cell, once inside the schizophrenic mind of the comato se Stargher it i s similarly imp o ssible to distinguish between fantasy and reality, past and present (Stargher's childhood exists alongside

his murdero us adulthoo d ) , and virtual and actual. This hybrid image, like tho se that Pisters discu s s e s , is also evi dence that we live in what she calls the 'matrix of visual culture ' , an image oriented world where our exi stence is increasingly determined by the reality of image s , or, rather, the indisc ernib ility between reality and images . Finally The Cell demonstrates Martin Jon e s ' o b s e rvations concerning the way in which s uch hybrid films use a disrupted narrative time scheme to negotiate transformations t o national identity. In thi s film the increasing intrusion of scientifically constructed surveillance into contemporary US s ociety is made to app e a r r e a s s uringly ' s afe ' through the story of a caring psycho analy s t who willingly enters the minds of others in order to help them. Emerging in 2 0 00

noticeab ly b efore 91 1 1 raised

the issue of homeland se curity as a major concern in the United States

-

The Cell shows a combined team o f FBI and top

scientists , u s ing equipment that effectively has the p ower to control p e o ple's minds . Significantly, The Cell shows this technology b eing used only for ' good ' . Unlike the damning portrayal of the way the media manipulates people's minds seen in Strange

Days, The Cell suggests that p o werful companies p ursuing scientific r e s earch into various ways of controlling thought, and state run institutions such as the FBI, are all part of the s ame protective milieu. In The Cell, the time image i s very much 'contained ' within the film, u s e d only to show the 'illogical' workings of the mind. The discontinuous spaces of the killer's mind are mapp e d by the psycho analy s t Deane, and eventually a l s o by FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) , in order to s ave the killer's last victim. The se two characters from the 'real' world of the movement image are thus able to triumph over the 'chao s ' repres ented by the time image, ensuring that the movement image, which still dominates the US mainstream, retains its normative status . The spatialised view of time s een typic ally in the movement image is finally

transcendent over a p o tentially destabilising rendering of time in its pure state, of the confusing l ayers of time of durati on. Del euze situate d the app earance of the time image in the peri o d immediately after World War II. This suggests that it was a form of exp ression in E uropean countries whose p revious sense of a c ontinuo u s nati o n a l i dentity had b e en interrupted by the war, their disrupted narratives almost literally repre senting the suddenly disrupted national narrative of these nations . Throughout th e C o l d War, and as the Unite d States m aintained and then strengthened its glob al dominance after World War II, Hollywood has retaine d the movement image as its dominant form, even tho ugh the time image occas ionally appears in avant g arde or independent films . Thu s , when the time image does b egin to app ear more in films such as The Cell, it is intere sting to see that it remains a controlled instance of the time image, rather than a force with the potential to disrupt the overarching linearity of the film. The time image is intro duced to show how effectively the Unite d States (through its industry and its security p ers onnel) c an c o ntrol any threat to disrupt its

dominant image of

national identity. The fact that Deane's body, with a little help from FBI agent Novak, is able to map the spaces of the time image is signific ant. Even in the movement image, discontinuous sp aces appe ar, as in

Die Hard, but the consistent appe arance of the p rotagoni st helps the viewer map thes e s p aces by fo cusing attention on his/her ab ility to act. Even when it veers into the territory of the time image, then, The Cell retains a role for the character from the movement-im a g e , who g u i d e s

the

sp e c t a t o r through the

d i s c ontinu o u s s p a c e s of the killer's mind. With the p o s sible exception o f Eternal Sunshin e of the Sp o tless Min d , o f all the films mentioned ab ove that repres ent the actual world with the m ovement image and the mental world with the time image, few feel s e cure enough to allow free reign to the confusion that can be cau s e d by the time image .

Desp ite the se three m ajor ways in which we can understand the incre a s e d appe arance of images that contain aspects o f b o th time image and movement image , a word of caution is necess ary. B oth Pisters and Martin Jones a cknowl e d g e the dangers of as suming that all s uch films are equal. In fact, even during the most bizarre moments when we travel through a killer's mind in

The Cell, the

time-image is constraine d to ensure that it does not

endanger the legitimacy of the m ovement image as the dominant form of image;

most

o b vi o u s ly,

when

the

time - i m a g e

is

incorporated it is u s e d to repres ent the workings of an ill or deranged mind. This is an extremely conventional construction for Hollywood, where a confus ing or frightening mental state is often intro duced using a cinematic style that c ontrasts with that of the movement imag e . Thi s was the c a s e , for instan c e , in Hitchcock's

Spellbound ( 1 945) ,

which contained a s urreal dream s e quence

o riginally d e signed by S alvador Dali . ! ! It is n o coincidence that Stargher's comato s e state i s describ e d as 'like having a dream and never waking up ' . In

The Cell,

the final dea dline for s aving the girl retains the

linear p ro gres sion of sp atialised time of the movement image, while the direct image of time of the time -image is deployed a s a moment of spectacle within an o therwise conventional narrative. As D eleuze noted of Fellini's films , in the time-image the child and the man exi s t contemp oraneously a s the p rotagonist s e arches through the different l ayers o f his p as t . For D el e u z e thi s coexistence entailed the possibility of eternal rejuvenation, as 'the p a s t which i s pres erved takes on all the virtue s of beginning and beginning again ' . ! 2 In

The Cell,

by contrast, D e ane discovers the

chil d and the man c oexisting in the killer's mind, but is abl e to ' cure' S targher by helping the b oy. After D e ane wounds the monstrous a dult Stargher, the b oy S targher l e a d s her to the imprisoned girl, and (after she allows Stargher to visit her in her mind) when Deane cures the little boy Stargher in a baptism ritual the mons trous adult side dies for ever. Rather than the p otentia l

for endless change offered by the virtual c oexistence of child and man in duration envisioned by B ergson, Proust, Deleuze , Ruiz (etc.) in the time image,

The Cell

reterritorialis e s time into a straight

line by pos iting a p sycho analytic a l origin for the killer's pres ent s tate in the p a s t . By helping the b oy, D e ane effectively realigns time into a linear continuum that is rendered as though it were a cure. This suggests that there is only one 'right' version of the p ast, and destroys any confusion b etween c o existing p ast and pres ent (child and manl . and any further potential for change .

Chapter 6

T i m e (a nd) travel i n televis i o n Damian Sutton

Up to this p o int, we have l o oked in p a rticular at the plasti city of representations of time in cinema of time

cre a t e d

through

the

formations or structurations

fi lmmaking

pro c e s s

and

its

devel opmental history. Even now, with the a dvent o f split s creen television and film, and with ever more s ophisticated methods of film narratio n , the idea of time as a logical. linear progre s sion is hard to res i s t . Indee d , Briti sh TV shows such as the B B C 's

(2004 ).

or the hugely succes sful US Fox show

Hustle

24 (200 1 ).

h ave

gone a long way to repres ent a s ingul ar, fixed, contemporaneous time through which we all live. When we see slow mo event s , or actions c ro s s ing each other in split s creen, th e simultaneity expressed reveals one world, one narrative ,

one ti me .

On the other

hand, flashba cks and non sequential narratives have remained a s c ontemp o rary staples of cinema and, e s p eci ally, televi s i o n . Television shows s u c h as C B S 's

Crime Scene Investigation (200 1 )

in the Unit e d States are predicated on flashbacks to reconstruct the various theories of the p olice investigations , as is the c a s e with many detective show s . Similarly, Warner Bros' presi denti al drama

The West Wing ( 1 9 99 2006)

often u s e d dis continuous narrative

to develop the backs tory to each character's history of involvement with the incumbent president, often at times of national cris i s , or to give analy s i s to a complex political mano euvre . S o , if television shows carefully develop a clear sense of time a s a linear progression, even to t h e extent o f following a p articular day p er epi s o d e

(The West Wing)

or even a day per season

(24) . how

do they succe s s fully maintain a sense of p a s t and future that is able to interru p t and even inform present actions? Perhaps the answer lies in D eleuze's ideas ab out our experience of time itself, and in p articular his reliance on Bergsonian ideas of memory as a kind of s en s ati o n of time. Deleuze was perhap s m o s t influenced by Dutch p h i l." s opher B enedictus de Spinoza

( 1 63 2 77) ,

though

the legacy of his work on B ergson can b e seen in so much of his p hilos o p hy, especially in trying to understand how i t i s that we c oncep tu alise the continuously changing situati on in which we l ive. For while Spinoz a gives Deleuze the notion of immanence, it is B ergs o n 's i d e a of duration that effectively sp arks in him the d evel opment of a philo s ophy of time . The debt to B ergson is so s trong that Hardt has suggested that Deleuze's dealing with Berg s o n really b egan his ' apprenti c eship in philosophy ' . l First, however, w e need t o consider how w e organis e time . For Deleuze, the kin d of time that we turn into history does not exi st. Inde e d , we can only ever live in the p res ent, the infinite simally small moment that divi des past and future . There is no 'real' past into which we can travel.

Even to read the last sentence a second

time would n o t give us again the exact experience

we have

chan g e d irreversibly even in the small time it takes for all the electron s in all the atoms in all our molecules to achieve one rotatio n . S o , if we do not live in the kind of time that we imagine as linear and s equenti al, then what do we live in and why do we

create time a s its image? TV shows s uch a s Lost and the recently revived B B C show

Doctor Who ( 1 963 89, 2005 )

have very different

approaches to thi s , taken from different p oints of view of our construction of time . For the characters in the US show Lost, there is a collective here and now with pressing need and demand s , which i s informed b y the p ersonal p ast of each individual. They will illustrate for us the p a s t as memory in a virtual c o existen c e . For t h e characters i n t h e B B C 's long-running

Doctor Who, however,

it i s time on a fun damental level and on a grand s c a l e that they exp l o r e .

Doctor Who 's body without organs C onsi der w h a t it means to o rgani s e our time . We create organs out of elements of our lives, like organs in a bo dy, which work and function together. For instance: we make a list of things to do this day, giving it a logical and reward ing internal structure. This relies on a given set of situations , however, based on agreement as much as nature . S o , a unit o f time we c al l a ' day ' requires a night b eforehand and afterwards : the turning of the E arth and the rotation around the Sun. It a l s o relies on a certain amount of o u r o wn wilful ignorance : to m a k e s e n s e of o u r day w e n e e d to ignore the fact that at midday in London it is already late afternoon in B aghdad, e arly morning in Washington D C . This organis ation o f time is ess enti al t o time travel narratives , s u c h a s tho s e i n

Doctor Who .

F o r ins tanc e , the travell e r s '

technology i s often o u t of p l a c e , such a s the ghetto b l aster that turns up in 1 9 63 in 'Remembrance of the D aleks ' ( 1 989). In this c a s e w e a r e remind e d that, no matter how f a r the Doctor travels, h e i s always i n our present, and the ability for past, pres ent and future to c oexist is e s tablished with consi derable e a s e . In other cas e s , i t is alien technology that appears futuristic t o u s , when i t i s transplanted into Victorian London in 'Evil o f the Dalek s ' ( 1 9 6 7 ) , Restoration London i n 'The Visitation' ( 1 982), or 1 930s New York i n 'The Daleks i n Manhattan ' (2007). With time mea sured b y culture and s o ciety, in the univers e of

Doctor Who

we have to rememb e r

that at midday on E a rth it is early m o rning on t h e planet Skaro and l ate afternoon on the p l anet Tel o s . If we

return t o o u r regular E arth d ay, p erhaps

most

signifi cantly, t h e day we p l an requires a whole system of lab our exchange to turn our effort into qu antifiable study or quantifi able work , into eight hours of labour that will 'earn' us five hours of free time b efore the day i s out. This i s a 'd ay' that gives figural shap e to tim e , an organ within a b o dy of organs (days weeks months, years decades centuries) that i s time as we understand it. If we took all this away, we would h ave chao s .

c o ·ii

.�

j

.5

� 11

"

1J c

.2G>

E ;:

0Q

Or would we? In an episode of the 2007 season of Doctor

Who,

' B link' , the Doctor (David Tennant) is a s k e d t o explain time a n d how it work s . This is b ecause he has recorded a mes s age in the p a s t to S ally Sp arrow (C arey Mulligan), a person in the present, via a video playb ack that a p pears to b e 'live ' . What should happen i s that the m e s s age be sent (like a m e s s a g e in a b ottle) in a one way directio n, since it is not p o s sible for us to interact with a video playback. The D octor s eems to interact with S ally as if answering questions , though. In fact, a transcript of the conversation will be given to the D o c tor in the future (he i s , of course, a time traveller) in the knowledge that he will become trapp ed in the p a s t while trying to defeat a group of monsters called 'the weeping angel s ' , living statues w h o kill b y touching people and throwing them b a ck in time to live in the p as t . The 'D octor's metho d of escape (and the d efeat of the angel s ) is therefore to set in motion the events that lead up to Sally di scovering the video disc and thus the m e s sage, often by contacting people she knows have disappeared. They relay instructions to her when they meet her as o l d p e o p l e . This piece o f time travel fantasy appears , from the outset, to have a neat circular logic, yet what has happened is that the limits that we set on our organi s e d time have been broken. A d i s tinct s en s e o f the p a s t (the video m e s s age) exi s t s , but b e c omes indistinguishable from the present, which i s the future of the Doctor from a p o s ition that he knows is the p a s t for Sally. What thi s illustrates i s that, when w e take away organis ation, we are not left with a chaotic s tructure but, inste a d , one that actually allows a remarkably smo oth transiti o n from p a s t to pres ent and b ack again. All the aspects of time

p ast, present and future

are revealed as one time:

The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of ca use to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more l i ke a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey " . stuff.'

This idea of time a s a 'non linear, non subjective' entity i s what Deleuze and Guattari would call a b o dy without organs , or B w O .

Introduced in

Anti Oedip us,

the BwO could be s een as Deleuze

and Gu attari 's way of understanding pure sub stance, such as the human b o dy (the person who b e comes a s ubject) as well as the collective body of society, the

socius, which b ecomes

a people.3 The

principle is the starting p oint for understanding the personal and social s ubject. The metho d of analysis they call schizoanaly s i s , which understands the individual

or social subject

as

collections

or aggregates , s tems from the BwO. The BwO i s , for Deleuze and Guattari , a pres u p p o s ition of identity. Famously, Deleuze and Guattari 's task, spread acro s s the mammoth two volume work of

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is

to p rovide an alternative, dynamic way of understanding identity that resists the rigi d Oedipal structure of p sychoan alysi s . Where psycho analysis begins with the binary linear relationship of child and p arent, D eleuze and Guattari uncover a third p osition BwO

th e

that exists in triangulation. This is the b o dy that will

b e c o m e i d entity, waiting to b e created a s a b o dy over time, coagul ating and shifting only a s a kind of inevitable ' glacial reality ' : ' You will b e organized, you will b e an organism, you will articulate your body . . . " The subject i s forme d over time, and the impression of s elf a s fixed (as one's true s elf, for instance) i s in fact a misunderstanding of the way that the subject exi sts and changes in an awes omely slow path through time. As a p resupposition, the BwO exists b efore organisation, and the immediate tendency is to think of it as chaotic or even a s an empty space. This could not b e further from the truth, however, and it remains filled with energie s and forces , along with the matter. The B w O is thus b o th desire and p o tenti ality, an Furthermore, it i s p redestined t o organis ation shap e s

awaiting .

i t coalesces into

and s o the b e s t way to unders tand it in its purest

exi stence is as

smooth

at b o th b e ginning and final state .

Political/economic s tructure s , for exampl e , organi s e the b o dy of the s o cius in order to create their own smooth shap e s : capitalism, for exampl e, i s a system that tri e s to convert all value into an

exchangeab l e c urrency that can be moved a n d r e d e p l oyed at will. In o ur lives we are p a i d for our labour in money that can b e c o nverted t o any currency, that c a n buy objects created b y others , and can even buy the value of others ' labour: ' C apital is indeed the b o dy without organs of the c apitalist, or rather of the capitalist b eing . "

As we found earlier, the economic philosophers Hardt

and N e g ri h ave l i nke d the smo othing effe c t of c a p ital to the development of

a

worl dwi de economy. For them, the 'general

e quivalence of money brings all elements together in quantifiable, c ommensurable relations . . . C apital tends toward a smooth space defined by unco d e d flows , flexibility, c ontinual mo dulation, and tendential equalizatio n . " The b o dy without organs i s a presupp o s i tion o f form and meaning , and thus the c l o s e s t Deleuze ever comes to a figural description of immanence. A smo oth space of p ure movement and transition, it is imp o s s ible to conceive of without the process of o rganis ation that will create shapes from it: the smooth space of the BwO is its elf irresistible. What matters then is its relationship to organisation, b oth of the p ersonal and s o c i al b o d i e s , and time i s mark e d out by the machine like creation of a b o dy or a s o cial s ystem. This is why Deleuze and Guattari are also drawn to the machine from the very first p ages of

A nti-Oedipus,

since the

machine is an a s s emblage of p arts , an o rganis ation of the b ody, which p r o d u c e s its own p r o d u c tion as much a s it p r o d u c e s movement o r o bjects. (Humans a r e not m a d e up of b o dies a n d m i n d s but are d e s iring machine s . ) T h e p rinciple o f the machine is what throws the socius toward a smo oth state of the p oliti c a l s y s t e m , f o r examp le, which remakes i t s e l f after every c ataclysm. This i s what h a p p ens in an epi s o de of

Doctor Who ,

'The Girl in

the Firep l ac e ' , in which the D o ctor and his c omp anions Rose (Billie Piper) a n d Mickey ( N o el C l arke) fin d thems elves on a s p a c e ship that h a s opened a time window to eighteenth c entury France. Here, the sequentiality of time its elf is b roken as bulkheads reve al various p oints in the life of one person, the real Madame

de Pompadour (Sophia Myles). C l o ckwork robots service the station after it is ne arly destroyed in an ion storm, and they repair the station u s i n g the real organs o f the i nj u r e d c rew (an eye for a c amera lens , a he art as an electrical relay) . They are awaiting the moment when Reinette, Madame de Pomp adour, reaches a c ertain age in order to use her brain a s the station's central computer. The story is fantasti c , and held together by the D octor and Reinette a s eventual lovers meeting throughout her life , a s he steps in a n d out of the station's bulkhead s . As with 'Blink ' , which shared the same writer Steven Moffat, the tragedy of the s t o ry i s provided by the varying s p e ed s of the two ' p r e s e nt s ' . In ' B link' victims were thrown b ac k through time to meet 'young' old fri ends when thems elve s old and dying, whereas here the D o ctor steps b ack into the station for a moment only to return after Reinette's death. The two tim e s s lide uneasily alongside each other, like strata of differing thicknesses in the same rock.

4. Doctor Who (2007).

Doctor Who 's

a dventures in the development and evoluti on of

humanity provide a rich example of a television show playing with, if not actually doing, phil o s ophy. Many of the stories, for instance, illustrate the varying organis ations of the BwO that Deleuze and Guattari outline, the ' doubl e s ' that the n a scent BwO might turn into . The clockwork robots , for example, in reconditioning the s p aceship, create a

cancerous body that relies

on rote repetition of

form. Thi s is the b o dy that becomes a despotic, totali s ing b o dy, well represented in

Doctor Who's

m o s t fam o u s monsters , the

D aleks . The b a cks tory given to the D a l eks i n ' Ge n e s i s o f the D aleks '

( 1 97 5 ) ,

in the middle of the s eries '

1 963 89

first run, has

them a s the product of a fascist style government b ent on b o th the eradication of the impure and the has tening of their own evoluti o n . Other a dventures in

Doctor Who

i l l u s trate similarly

c ancerous s o cial b o dies , such as the C yb ermen, who similarly crave a kind of purity through an absurd renewal of the b o dy. At first this is pres ented as a willing s o ci etal choice in 'The Tenth Planet'

( 1 966),

but by the time of the show's revival the Cybermen

firmly demonstrate a horrific physical co option as their primary method of s ocial growth . The BwO is therefore best explored in

Doctor Who

a s a mirroring of p ers onal and s oc i a l , or, rather,

through a p ersonal b o dy that h a s a responsibility to the social. O n the other hand, the show often pres ents a full (fulfilled) b o dy, such as when the D o ctor sp arks revolution by s p e aking directly to ins ignifi c ant citi z ens in 'The S unmakers '

( 1 978)

or by hastening

their p hysical evolution in ' The Mutants'

( 1 972) .

Finally it i s the

e mp ty o r

vitreo us

B w O , a s a shell rather than s p a c e o f ful l

p otenti ality, t h a t i s pre s ented in t h e two part story 'Human Nature/Family of B l o o d '

(2007) .

Here ' the family' are formle s s

entitie s w h o inhabit t h e b o dies of others , including s c arecrow s . They pursue the Doctor, who , i n s etting a trap for them, ironically does so by using a fantastic device to 'decant' his personality into a s afe place while his human alter ego, John Smith, b attles against the alien s . Once revived, however, and understanding that he will

effectively widow Smith's lover, he takes her hand, and together they fil l the moment (as a BwO in its elf) with the happy life they would otherwise have had, leading to his own happy, natural death. At the heart of D eleuze and Gu attari's later treatment of the b o dy without organs is a philosophy of an ethical life . The key to this , they suggest, i s ' knowing whether we have it in our means to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its double s : empty vitreous b o dies , cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fas cist:7 This relies on the continual testing of ideas and futures , o f guesses made a s to how humanity might turn out, and the presentation of moral and ethical dilemm a s .

Doctor Who,

like all good s c i ence

fi cti o n , manages thi s through the principal n arrati on of time travel, in which the past, pres ent and future fill up the b o dy

c o

'ii

'�

without organs .

i

Getting lost

E

.5 Qi >

Let us assume that in real life we don't have a time travel machine.

If time i s a b o dy without organs in a s tate of full potentiality, then how i s it that we create the progres sion that we find so nec e s s ary to unders tand time, to create an image of it with which we are c omfo rt a b l e ? For D e l e u z e , the answer c a n be fo u n d in the philos ophy of Berg s o n , and in p articular his work on memory, and the TV show

Lost

Lost

provid e s a u s eful illustration.

i s a prim e time show made by ABC for US televi s i o n ,

syndicated around t h e worl d , about a group of survivors from the crash of a pass enger airliner on a Pacific i s l and. The first two s e a s ons in particular are interesting, since they deal with the c l a s s i c 'Robinson C ru s o e ' scenari o . They are about the s urvivors having to come to terms with the crash at first, then with survival, then with the hope for rescue, and finally with the realis atio n that res c u e is unlikely. In addition , all the appropriate nightmares of d e s ert i s l an d life are in p l ay : mysteri o u s monsters and wild beasts, other shipwreck survivors and res tl e s s natives (here an unidentifi e d group of white p e o p l e , who may or may not be the

-. " c o .. Q)

E ;: II -

descendants of shipwrecked convicts ) . When the existence of a research statio n is discovered, the season's themes begin to include issues of surveillance, control, spirituality and predestination. In later seasons the existence of 'Others ' , as well as another island, is developed, new characters are introduced, and a complex b attle of wits between new and old inhabi tants ensues. In the first two

seasons , however, the survivors exi st mo stly with their fears and their memori e s . This i s where the initial success of the show l ay. For many of the ep i s o d e s , a p articular character is the fo cus , and events o n the island are presented i n p arallel with scenes from their life b efo rehan d. This often includes key moments in their lives : moments of trauma , moments of happin e s s and moments of choice. The character Sayid (Naveen Andrews) , for instance, is an ex Repub lican Guardsman from Ira q , whose involvement on the is land with rival S awyer (Jo sh Holloway) and later ' o ther' inhabitant Ben (Michael Emerson) brings b ack traumatic memories of his days l e arning to torture susp ects , first for the Iraqis and later for the co aliti on forces after the Iraq War

a story develop e d

over a numb er of episodes. As survivors o f a plane crash, their memories as emotional b aggage therefore substitute for their real lost baggage, and only a few are able to retrieve much of what they travelled with except for these memories . Occasionally, however, such as when Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and S awyer appropriate each other's belongings, it becomes clear that they often share each other's memori e s because their lives are all already intertwined. Thus the creators o f

Lost hit on a n ideal format t o develop dramatic narrative through the deve l o p m ent of character s ' b a ckgroun d s , while drawing out an initially simple des ert i s l an d c oncept. Indeed, for many ep i s o d e s , very little actually happens on the island, while small or otherwise insignificant events open up a rich b ackstory. In many ways the show's episodes run along the lines of normal flashback s , and characters l earn from their memori e s much more than facts or faces, a n d instead moral , intellectual or

even spiritual lessons. Thes e are lived memories that unfold when needed. Only o c c a s i onally do characters seem actually to be daydreaming in the show, yet the memori e s are deep, clear and take time. E ach is e s sentially a fulsome illustration of B ergson and Deleuze's appre ci ation of our existence in duration, an exis tence given sub stance by memory. Firstly, like B ergson, Deleuze s ees duration as the b a ckground o r presuppo sition of time. Our actual time of the present, however, Deleuze recogni s e s as much more complex. On the one hand the present is always passing, yet on the other hand it always s e p arates our sense of p a s t and future. In fac t , i f w e tri e d to divide p a s t from future to fin d the p r e s e n t m o m e n t we c o u l d never achieve i t , since t h e divi sion w o u l d g e t s m a l l e r and smaller infinitely. T h i s is b e c a u s e time is not made u p o f instants in progre s s i o n but i s itself indivisible a s a s ingle presuppos ition: duration. What we call the instant, then, i s in fact p sychologically felt as we try to make sense of the time that will come and the time we have been through. The instant is a kind of pure subjectivity called

affection,

often misunderst o o d as p ercep tion." Affection divi des

the p a st and the future b e c a u s e it a l s o divi des matter and intention, cau s e and effe c t , as a series of s ubj e ctiviti e s , as impuriti e s ' alloye d ' to p erception. Here, D e l e u z e i s relying on B ergs on's interest in our a b s olutely basic existence as b o dies in time. Matter, the material world, cre ate s needs or choices upon which we act. An example of this i s hunger as a

need subjectivity,

which makes a ' h o l e in th e c ontinuity of thing s ' ! We m i s s s o m ething, we fe el a bit remote or l o s t , a bit empty, and w e reali s e

(brain subjectivi ty)

(affection-subjectivity) .

w h e r e this ' h o l e ' i s . We 're hungry

We h ave a think and, rememb ering that

there is a fridge in the other room

(recollection subjectivity) ,

we

think to put our book down and go to get s omething tasty from it

(contraction subjectivity) .

Affe ction is therefore an impurity,

b e c a u s e it is b oth a fe eling and a memory, mixing with o u r pe rceptions . I n between matter and memory, then, is affection

here

the pang of hunger. For Deleuze , however, the most signific ant ro l e taken in this s e ries is that of memory, which i s always with u s , and without which we would not be able to pass from need, through brain and affection, to contraction. We therefore live constantly within the 'cerebral interval ' , the gap between affection and contraction, and that gap is filled to bursting with memory. 10 For Deleuze, then, the usefulness in B ergs on's work is demonstrated in the realis ation that no t only are we constantly living in memory,

but also that memory itself is the past that we carry with us as a living present: memory as virtual coexistence. What thi s means for Lost is that the s eries i s potentially endless . E ach character's memory is inexhaustible since it is b rimful of the past, simply waiting to b e oriente d toward the p resent. Thi s is because each character, as with us all, is living in a constant p a s s age of affection, is always in a cerebral interval, so that the smallest and most insignificant 'hole in continuity' has the p otenti al to provi de an hour of television. Hunger, for instance, ari ses at first in dis cussions about the airline foo d running out, or how to c atch fish, but develops into a wider story about s ocial responsibility and guilt through the character of Hurley (Jorge Garcia) . An obese, fa st food employee, Hurley is wracked with guilt ab out an accidental death p o s sibly caused by his weight. In the episode ' E veryb o dy Hates Hugo ' , he is put in charge of a fo o d lo cker found in a res earch station, a situation that causes h i m t o remember h i s past a n d the day h e w o n the lottery. This w a s also a situation of potential change and personal or s ocial responsibility, and the epi s o de p l ays out his anxieties via his dreams as well as his fl ashb ack s . In a l ater ep i s o d e , ' D ave ' , after Hurley has eventually dis tributed the food, a ration crate i s parachuted onto the i s l and, this time causing him to remember his period in a ment al instituti on as a result of his guilt and conse qu ent overe ating. In s u m , Hurley's guilt ab out this accident, his overwhelming worries about social responsibility, tinged also with guilt about survival (he is often the one to conduct the eulogy

over dead comrades) , are lived through as memories , bundled with real needs in the present s ituati o n . If we live in memory, how do we go a b o u t s electing the c o rrect memori e s for the p r e s e n t situ ati on? F urthermore, if memory i s a virtual coexis tenc e , then from where do we get the impression of going b a ck i n time? What makes a fl a shback s e em like a fl ash

back?

For instance ,

Lost

uses very limited on s creen

i n d i c ations of memory, often with the simp l est indic ation that the a ction is off the island. O therwise, many epi s o des start with a character lo oking directly in the air, although this may or may not b e in that character's past. Nonetheles s , when watching television shows such as Lost, as with our own memories , we immediately get a s en s e of pastnes s , even b efore plotlines b ecome clear. This i s b e c ause, as Bergson and Deleuze note, w e leap into memory, rather than recompo sing the p a s t : 'We place ours elves at once in the element of sense, then in a region of this element . ' l l So memory i s , in a s ense, like getting l o s t in an unfamiliar forest, as so many of Lost's characters do. At first we s e n s e s imple difference different place

a

b efore getting our bearings as we receive more

information. The perio d of disorientati on that many of the characters exp erience in e p i s o d e s b eginning in flashb ack is an i l l u s tration of thi s , but thi s

is

a l s o reflected in our own

dis orientation as we try to make s ense o f the story unfolding as m o re and more snippets of fl a s hb ack are revealed. We get l o s t in their memories , and gradually get our b earings . This is especi ally the c a s e with the chara cter of L o cke ( Terry O ' Quinn) , who s e intermittent p araplegia m e a n s that h i s fl ashbacks a r e the m o s t d i s o ri enting, making h i s p sychological development in the series p erhaps the most complex. A similar situation obtains with Korean couple Sun (Daniel Dae Kim) and Jin (Yunjin Kim) , who se memories e a ch n arrate two very different a s p ects of the s ame story, often with the who le of previous ep i s o d e s given new meaning as each o f the troubled lovers ' memories are s h own to us. While this emp hasises ab ove all the p ersonal and unreliable nature o f all

memory, in p a rtic u l ar it demonstrates how memory is cho sen b ecau s e of its us efulness to the present. When, in fla shback, Sun is ab out to leave her relationship with Jin by l e aving him boarding

the doomed flight at the airport, it is her memori e s we see when she needs them to inform her present situation on the island. Later it becomes c l e ar that we have not s een all that occurs at the airport

that Jin, a mob enforcer for Sun's father, has been m a d e

aware of her affair a n d h e r plan to escap e . This awareness prompts

from him the first of a series of attempts at reconciliation that will c ontinue o n the island as they b ecome a s tronger coup l e . While s o m e of the e arly ep i s o d e s might h ave c entred on o therwis e mino r 'holes in continuity' for the characters , such a s hunger, a continue d focus on the s eemingly insignificant would b e dizzyingly boring. As would be expected, many o f the flashb acks i n

Lost are increasingly

oriented toward graver and graver situations,

entailing new moments of choice, new happiness, new trauma, and the interweaving lives of the passengers is revealed in more detail. We have to understand this orientation of the memory toward the present s ituation as one of us efulness

a literal orientation, in

fact. Memori e s are required to inform the present, and so reveal new ideas, new p aths to take . This i s the case for drug lord Mr Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaj e ) , who s e memory quite literally s p e aks to him via the app arition of his brother Yemi. B e c ause we already live in memory, it is recollection that is directing o r g u i ding p er c e p ti o n . When we a r e troub l e d we ' appeal

to

recollection' to inform us . 1 2 Memory responds in two movements : ' [Olne of translation, by which it moves in its e ntirety to meet exp erience, thus c ontracting more o r less . . . a n d the other of rotation upon its elf, by which it turns toward the s ituation of the moment, pres enting to it that side of its elf which may prove to b e the most useful . ' " Memory therefore app ears t o act i n the manner of an old jukebox, or in the s ame way that we might choose o l d rec ords on a gramophone . W e make a s election (app eal to the past), the machine picks the record, turns it over s o the correct side

faces u s , and p l ays us what we want to hear. Indeed, the research station that the survivors find in season two of Lost has an o l d record player, who se accomp anying collection o f records from the 1 960s and 1 970s suggests that the station is long abandoned. Jus t like B ergson a n d Deleuze's jukebox memory, however, this record player i s a red herring: the station has been manned throughout the intervening period, with new pers onnel arriving within the l ast few years . We need to remember the sp atial description of memory. We get lost ( a p p e al ) , but b egin to understand our surroundings (translation, contraction) and cho o s e which way to explore (rotation/orientation) . It is we who orient ourselves toward memory, within memory, not the other way around. The characters ' memories therefore mark out their time on the island, and the only clock available is a countdown mechanism set at the o d d interval of 108 minutes, which requires res etting by entering a code into a computer in the research station. For Locke , Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) and Mr Eko, the choice to p ress the button is one that arises from their memories, which inform their decisions . Perhaps the most brutal sense of memory's usefulness is in the case of Sayid. His memory of learning to commit acts of torture do not so much create new trauma for him as remind him how to do it

taking him through the same choices, the s ame personal p ains ,

the same urgency that he faces in the present: to extract information through violence in order to save other lives. It is from memory that he perceives the opportunity and necessity to carry it out, however. The example of Sun and Jin simil arly demons trates that the usefulness of memory is based on present action, rather than objective truth , and, as viewers , we are asked to as sume that their memories are not complicated by illne s s , for example, as Hurley's are . Nevertheles s , the show's relatively flat depiction of flashback leads us to assume a presupposed subjective truth, which is affect. In watching Lost it is not necess arily important to know th at we are seeing the whole past, but simply that we understand why the se characters are searching for these memories in the fores t .

t: o

'ii

.�

1! .5 �

> o .:

-.

1) t: o

..

tl)

E ;:

Conclusion : Reframing D eleuze

Ultimately, Deleuze's is a

productive phil o s ophy, o n e that

should

engender creative thought. For that rea s o n , Deleuze has become p o p u l a r with arti s t s e s p e c i ally, and with cre ative in divi duals more generally. As authors we think, for instance, that D eleuze i s indi s p en s able t o t h e creative indivi dual . Thi s d o e s not m e a n that every creative act can b e phil o s o phical, however, o r even that we will know it to be able to create it. If it did, then we would end up like Ranciere's aimle s s artists , endlessly pushing the m aterials around, endlessly making only material decisions in the vain hope that one day we might break the cliche. We might imagine that we can create concept s , but in fact we would have given up aesthetic thought. If we try to endles sly create , endles sly repeat creation, then we will not be the engineers of situations we need to b e in order t o really create the conditions from which a new concept will ari s e . How, then , can D eleuze's philosophy b e truly us eful? Deleuze's is a philos ophy of the s o ci ety yet to come, and it starts with a philosophy of life itself. This is the p owerful life that exists under the skin of things, the very principle of substance. Throughout Deleuze's philos ophy there is a s trange insistence, a thunderous heartb eat who s e throbs are felt in the philos ophy of b e coming, of duration, and the instant, and in the inevitability of deterritorialis ation and reterritorialis ation. This is the sound m a d e by Deleuze's thinking on immanence

thinking it for u s ,

gra sping it a s a fact s o that w e might glimp s e it a s he doe s . Deleu z e 's philos ophy i s marked b y the fact that life i s happening, life simply

is,

and this should stiffen our resolve to cre ate a better

formati o n . It requires being watchful and c areful in a creative s ort of way. We started here by l o o king at the rhizome as a principle of organi s ation as well a s a p rincip le of action. Through D eleuze's philosophy we s aw how the p atterns o f s o c i ety emerge a s arb ore s c e n t fo rms

based

on

simp l e , l i n e a r hierarchi e s

transfonnations of a principle of difference into structure . We also cons idere d the powers of deterritorialis ation that exist in cultural activity and formati on, res i s tant p owers that have the ability to di s a ssemble hierarchie s . We were also forced t o cons ider the in evitab i lity o f reterrito rialisation, however, the p owers that m o l ar formations

capitalist p atriarchy, for instance

h ave in

recuperating or co opting tho se p owers of deterritorialisation. It is all too e a s y for resistance and opposition to become p art of the mainstream. We looked at thi s first in video games and the logic of achievement that trains the gamer for capitalism, and then in the structures of the Internet, which foster a s ense of resistance that can s o easily b ecome p art of c apitalist culture o r insidious nihili sm. The p owers of deterritorialisation still exist, however, and s o , as a p o liti cal philos o p hy, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thinking requires effort and watchfulnes s , and most of all an awarenes s of the continu al change that supplies the imp etus for growth fo r th e rhizome or the tre e . This growth is the trace of insistent change, the constant coming into being, o r becoming. We l o oked at this from the p o int of view of the artwork, illustrating, for instance, the creation of canonical 'molar' artworks and artists from even the most exciting of p otential resistance . We also looked at the ways in which filmmakers , for examp l e , disassemble from within the majoritarian language with which they work, by making cinema stutter and stammer. In the end we demonstrated how the s e practi c e s

require

the

engineering of situati ons , the

c oordination of the material (film, concrete, found objects) and the contingent (l anguage, me aning, s ocial interacti on) , in order to create artworks that last the test of time. These practices make use

of b e coming itself, the insis tent change that offers the p ot enti al for p olitical change , for examp l e , in playing film l angu a g e in

a

minor key, subtly affecting and reforming it from within. The key to creating lasting artworks and films is to realis e that sensational effect n ever actually l a s t s , and n ever actually sp eaks t o new situati o n s , and instead to reali s e the need t o address the very change in situati ons themselve s . This l e d us o n t o deal with the thundering insistence that gives change itself substance , the impetus of life . D eleuze identified thi s as immanen c e , a b out which w e c an know but never think , never give a repre s entation. We can experience it only through the open-ended durati on in which we exist. Thi s immanenc e is the sub stance o f durati o n itself, and duration i s thus the trace in thought left by the knowledge of immanence. We found that w e use time to make sense of immanence, to give it some sort of shape in our lives . We found this when l o o king at televi s i on's depictio n of time, whether exp eri enced o n a grand scale a s history or s en s ed as the p astne s s of memory and refl e ction. Tim e travel narratives dismantle the b o undaries of p ast and pres ent to reve al the smo oth immensity o f duration. Thriller narratives , on the other hand, reveal how our lives are experienced through memory, which orients u s to the p re s s ing matters at hand. We also encountered this notion of 'making s en s e of time' in Deleuze's brilli ant analysis of cinema and its two images of time. One, the movement-image, is b a s e d on the movement of objects in space to create a narrati on system of caus e and effect. The other, the time image, offers u s the virtual whole of time, exp erienced through the collapse of p a s t and present, o r through the unfolding of a moment to reveal multiple p aths and labyrinthine p o s s ibilities . We found, however, that the time image had develo p e d from industrial and cultural situations in oppositi on to Hollywoo d's main stream filmmaking ( a n d its reliance

upon the

movement image) ,

and

was

a d o p t e d by

mainstream filmmakers to present within narratives now ' c l a s s i c ' ideas of subj ective o r ab errant time i n cinema's hybrid image s .

c: o ·en :I

"0 c: o

o

1/1 N

Once again, Deleuze's phil o s o p hy requires a watchful eye toward the p owers of reterritorialis ation. Overall, we have trie d to demonstrate how vis u al culture , in particular media forms such as video g ame s , the Internet, cinema, television and art, frame our world for us . Media forms help us make sense of some of our m o s t b asic intuitions

that we are in

time, that we are in s ociety, that we form an i dentity, and that we change and are a p art of change. The greatest valu e in Deleuze 's phil o s ophy is that it provides us with analytical and conceptual tools to see and understand this framing of our world through visual culture . S o , finally, how c a n we go ab out p utting D eleuze's philo s op hy to new work? We have attempted in this guide to illustrate some of Deleuze's key ideas in a manner that will allow them to continue to be us eful for the new thinkers who will be b rought into being by the new social, political and arti stic situations that occur. We have written this to app e al to the new thinker who refuses to just p l ay a video game, who refuses to just surf the net, and who refu s e s to sit b ack and simply watch. We have written this als o , however, to appeal to the thinker who is not satisfied with mere resistance and opp o sition to what he or she sees as s ocial inequality or inequity, s i n c e mere

o p p o sition

can

only

res tate

the

p rincip l e s

of

difference themselves . W e have written this to appeal t o the artist who does not want simply to make phil o s o phical art, but who wants to engineer the conditions of the situation and the material so that the artwork will create resonances with philos ophy and be truly monumental . D eleuze's is a pro ductive phil o s ophy, and to b e truly creative the new thinker n e e d s to adopt some of the tacti c s that D eleuze himself adopted: go to the s ources , keep asking questions , look for new concepts and i d e a s in the m aterial. The new thinker mus t l o o k for n e w formations and n e w organi s ations, within which t o p l ay in a minor key. Deleuze's phil o s o phy i s kept current b y h i s interaction w i t h p h i l o s ophers fro m k e y p oints in intellectual

history, and this accounts for his crucial p o s i t i o n in the intersection o f visual culture with a new and emergent society of the image. His work promises fruitful new collaborations and relationships with contemporary phil osophers and other cre ative individual s . His ideas are there to be developed by other thinkers who wish to engage them with similar precision and integrity, as he himself engaged others with both verve and diligence. Deleuze's work is tes tament to philos ophy as a conversation in progre s s ,

a

discussion in which ideas are c ontinually reframed, retested and questioned anew. This means that we feel it is important to keep returning to D eleuze, to develop his philosophy and to continue to encounter it anew. This is at the core of his relationship with B ergson, for instance, or in his working collaboration with Guattari . Working with Deleuze is an exp erience that is never the s ame twi c e , b e c au s e D e l euze's philos ophy informs fo r situ ations in continual change, and in fact helps express and understand that change in itself. As authors, for instance, we have so much more to do, and the task that we have given ourselves (in our own projects a s well as ones such as this) is an ongoing one. One aim is to l o ok at new configurations of Deleuze and other thinkers , past and future. Another is to look at new creative forms and other creative medi a , considering the ways in which they give ri s e to new concepts , or how they reconfigure exis ting ones in new situations . To do this we need to go to the s o urces , reading tho se we haven't read b efore, trying new ones that app ear as exciting new thinkers encounter Deleuze for the first time. We aim, above all, to make full use of Deleuze's productive and creative philosophy. C are to join us?

c o ·ii ::I

U C o

o

" N

Notes

Foreword

2

Ian Buchanan, Intro duction to A Deleuzian Century?, special issue, South Atlantic Q uarterly, vol. 96, no. 3 ( 1 997 ) , 389. Gi l le s Deleuze and Felix Gu attari , What Is Philosop hy?, tran s . Graham B urchell a n d H u g h Tom l i n s o n (New York, NY: C o lumb i a University Pres s , 1 994) .

3

John Rajchman,

The Deleuze Connections

( C ambri dge, MA:

MIT

Pre s s , 2000). 1 1 5 . 4

Ibid.

Pa rt One: I ntrodu ction Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A

schizophrenia, 2

Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

trans . B rian Mass umi, 3rd edn (London: Athlone, 1 99 6 ) .

Ibi d . , 2 1 .

3

Ibi d . , 6 7 .

4

I b i d . , 9.

5

Ibid . , l O .

6

Ihid.

7

G i l l e s Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A n ti Oedipus: Cap italism a n d schizophrenia (Milleap olis, MN: University o f Minnesota Press, 1 983). 5 1 .

8

Ib i d . , l l 2 .

9

For a fuller discus sion of the influence of May 1 96 8 on D eleuze's thought, see D. N. Rodowick,

Reading the Figural, or Philosophy after

the New Media (Durham, NC:

Duke University Pres s , 200 1 ) . 1 70 202 . For

a more general discussion of this time period on Deleuze and Guattari's thought, see Michel Fouc ault's introduction to

Anti Oedipus,

xi xiv.

Cha pter 1 Much of this is a summary of information contained in Steven Poole,

Trigger Happy (New York, NY: Arcade, 2000); Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games (New York, NY: Three Rivers Pres s , 200 1 ) ; Mark

J. P. Wolf and B e rnard Perron (edsl.

The Video Game Theory Reader Videogames ( L o n d o n :

(London: Routledge, 2 0 0 3 ) ; James Newman,

Routledge, 2 004); a n d John Kirriemuir, ' A History of Digital Game s ' , i n

Understanding Digital Games, eds J a s o n Rutter and J o Bryce (London: S age, 2006), 2 1 3 5 . 2

Kirriemuir, 'A His tory of Digital Game s ' , 2 3 .

3

Poole,

4

Andreas Huy s s e n ,

5

ww. gamestudi e s . org.

6

Trigger Happy, 1 8 2 0 . After the Great Divide: Modernism, mass culture and postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1 9 86), 44 6 2 . Gill e s Deleuze,

Cinema 2: The time image

( 1 9 8 5 l . tran s . Hugh

Tomlinson and R o b ert Galeta , 2nd edn (London: Athlone, 1 9 94), 1 3 1 ; Jorg e Louis B o r g e s , 'The Garden of Forking Path s ' , in

Labyrin ths

(London: Penguin , 1 96 2 ) , 44-54. 7

Newman,

8

B arry Atkins , More

Videogames, 1 08 9 . than a Game (Manchester:

Manchester University

Pres s , 2003), 59 60. '0 (I)

E 2 Qj

9

Gonzalo Fras c a , 'Simulation versu s Narrative' , in Wolf and Perron (eds),

10

The Video Game Theory Reader,

221 35.

There has b een s ome very justifiable criticism of t h e i d e a that garners actually create a 'community' as such, b ecause communities usu ally

a: (I) N :J (I)

h ave ' ethical dimensions' rather than simply b e ing a group o f people who communicate virtually, as is the case in gaming communities. For a fuller discussion of this deb ate, see Martin Hand and Karenza Moore,

Gi

Q 0 ..,

' G aming , I dentity and Digital G arn e s ' , in Rutter and B ryce ( e d s ) ,

Understanding Digital Games, 11

1 66 82, 1 73.

Miroslaw Filiciak, ' Hyp eridentities ' , in Wolf a n d Perron (edsl.

Game Theory Reader,

The Video

87 1 0 2 , 9 7 .

1 2 F o r a more in depth examination of LAN parties, see H a n d a n d Moore, ' G aming, I dentity and Digital Games ' , 1 68 6 9 . 13

Filiciak, ' Hyp eri dentiti e s ' , 9 0 .

1 4 Kirriemuir, ' A History o f Digital Game s ' , 3 3 . 15

J o Bryce a n d Jason Rutter, 'Sp ectacle of the Deathmatch', i n ScreenPlay:

Cinema, videogames, interfaces, eds

Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

(London: Wallflower, 2002) , 6 6 80, 6 9 . 16

B ryce a n d Rutter, ' S p ectacle of t h e Deathmatch' , 7 5 .

1 7 F o r a fuller analysis of this argument, see S u e Morri s , 'First person Shoo ters

A Game Apparatus ' , in King and Krzywinska ( e ds ) ,

ScreenPlay: Cinema, videogames, interfaces,

8 1 97.

18

Morri s , ' First person Shooters

19

Jo Bryce and Jas o n Rutter, 'Digital Games and the Violence Debate' , in Rutter and B ryce (eds),

A Game Apparatu s ' , 94.

Understanding Digital Games, 2 05

22, 207 1 1 .

20

Poole,

21

Ibi d . , 2 3 5 .

22

Ibi d . , 208 9 .

23

Ibid . , 1 7 .

Trigger Happy,

177.

24

Ibid . , 1 80- 1 .

25

Bryce and Rutter, 'Digital Games and the Violence Debate ' , 2 0 8 .

26

D erek A. Burrill, 'ah, Grow U p 0 0 7 ' , i n King a n d Krzywinska ( e d s ) , ScreenPlay: Cinema, videogames,

27

interfaces,

1 8 1 93, 1 82 .

Mia C onsalvo, 'Hot Dates and Fairy tale Romances' , i n Wolf and (eds ) , The Video Game Theory R eader,

28

Po ole,

29

Gonzalo Frasca, 'Sim Sin City : Some thoughts about Grand

Trigger Happy,

Perron

1 7 1 94, 1 8 8 .

208 1 1 .

Th eft Auto

3', Game Studies, vol . 3, no. 2 (2003): www.gamestudies. org/0302/frasca (acce s s e d 26/6/200 6 ) .

Chapter

2

1

Deleuze and Guattari ,

A Thousand Plateaus, 2 7 0 .

2

Deleuze and Gu attari ,

Wh a t Is

3

Ibid.

4

Gisle Hannemyr, 'The Internet as Hyp erb o l e : A critical examination of

5

Arturo E scob ar, 'Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the anthropology of

6

Tim Jordan, 'Language and Libertarianism: The p olitics o f cyberculture

adoption rate s ' , cyb erculture',

Philosophy?, 5 9 .

The Information Society,

Current A n thropology,

and the culture of cyberpolitic s ' ,

vol . 1 9 (2003). 1 1 4-- 1 5 .

vol . 3 5 , no. 3 ( 1 9 94). 2 1 4 .

Sociological

Review, vol . 49, n o . 1

(200 1 ) , 9. 7

Hans Magnus Enzensb erger, ' C onstituents of a Theory of the Media ( 1 9 7 0) ' , in

Raids and R econstructions

(London: Pluto Pres s , 1 9 7 6 ) .

2 0 53 , 2 2 . 8 9

Ibi d . , 34-5 . Louis Althu s s e r, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatu s e s (Notes towards an Inves tig ation) ( 1 9 6 9) ' , in

Lenin and Philosophy, trans.

B en

Brews ter (London: New Left Books, 1 9 7 1 1 . 1 2 7 88, 1 4 6 .

1 0 Enzensberger, ' C onstituents of a Theory o f t h e Media' , 3 2 . 11

Charlie Brooker,

TV Go Home,

1 4 July 2000, www.tvgohom e . com/

1 40 7 2000.html (accessed 2 0 / 1 0/2006 ) . 12

Enzensb erger, ' C onstituents of a Theory o f t h e Media' , 3 7 .

13

.http: //www.whoislupo. com/

almost an object lesson i n how n o t to

do thi s ' , Need to Know, 16 N ovember 2 00 1 , ww.ntk. net/200 1 l 1 1 1 l 6 (accessed 2011 0/200 6 ) . 14

McKenzie Wark, 'Information Wants to be Free ( B u t is Everywhere i n Chains)"

Cultural Studies,

vol. 20, nos 2 3 (2006) , 1 6 5 83, 1 7 2 .

!

o z

15

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire ( C ambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2 00 1 ) , 3 26 7 .

16

E i l een R. Meehan, "'H o ly C ommodity Feti sh, B a tman ! " : The p o litical economy of a commercial intertext' , in Rob erta Pearson and William Uricchi o , The Many Lives of the Batman (eds), (London: Routledge/ British Film Institute , 1 9 9 1 ) , 47 6 5 , 54.

Pa rt Two: Introduction Gilles Deleuze, T h e Fold: Leibniz and t h e baroque, trans. Tom C onley (London: Athlone, 1 99 3 ) , 1 9 . Thousand Plateaus, 232 309.

2

Deleuze and Guattari,

3

Ibi d . , 2 3 6 .

4

R o s i B r a i d o tti, Patterns of Dissona nce: A s t u dy of wo men in

A

contemporary philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Guild (London: Polity Pres s , 1 99 1 ) . 1 2 1 . 5

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 24 l .

6

Ibi d . , 2 5 3 .

7

Ib i d . , 2 5 7 .

Cha pter 3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a minor literat ure (Minneapoli s , MN: University of Minnesota Pre s s , 1 9 8 6 ) , 1 6 . 2

Ibid., 24 5 .

3

Deleuze and Guattari , A Tho usand Plateaus, 1 04 .

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

6

Deleuze, Cinema

7

Ibid., 2 1 5 24.

8

Ib i d . , 2 1 7 .

9

Ib i d . , 2 1 5 1 6 .

2, 2 1 8 .

10

Deleuze a n d Guattari, Kafka, 1 7 .

11

D . N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuz e 's Ti m e Mach in e (Durham, N C : Duke University Pres s , 1 9 9 7 ) . 1 53 .

12 13

Ibi d . , 1 6 2 9 . Mette Hjort, Small Nation: Global cinema (Minne apolis, MN: University of Minnesota Pres s , 2005); D avid Martin Jon e s , ' O rphans, a Work of Minor C inema from Post devolutionary Scotland ' , Jo urnal of British Cinema and Television, vol. 1 , no. 2 ( 2 004) . 2 2 6 4 1 ; B i l l Marshall, Q uebec National Cinema (Montreal: McGill Queen's University Pre s s , 200 1 ) ; H a m i d Naficy, A n A ccented Cinema : Exilic a n d diasporic filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pre s s , 200 1 ) ; Laura U.

Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural cin ema, embodiment and

the senses (Durham, N C : Duke University Press, 2000); Meaghan Mo rris , Too Soon Too Late: History in popular culture (B loomington : Indi a n a University Press, 1998); Alison Butler, Women 's Cinema: The contested screen (London: Wallflower, 200 2 ) ; Belen Vidal, 'Playing in a Minor Key', in Books in Motion: Adaptation, intertextuality, authorship, ed. Mireia Aragay (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 2005) . 14

Geoff King, American

Independent Cinema

(London: I.E. Tauri s , 2005),

2 22 49; Glyn Davi s , ' C amp and Queer and the New Queer Director: C as e study

Gregg Araki ' , in

New Q ueer Cinema: A Critical Reader,

e d . Michele Aaron (E dinburgh: E dinburgh Univers i ty Pres s , 2 0 0 4 ) , 53 6 7 . 15

King,

A merican Independent Cinema, 8 3 , 23 5 6; Katie The R o a d Movie Book, e d .

' R evitalizing the R o a d Movi e ' , in

Mills, Steven

C ohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1 99 7 ) , 308 13; James

M.

Moran, ' Gregg Araki: Guerrilla film maker for a queer generation', Film

Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1 (19 9 6 ) , 1 8 26 , 1 9 2 0; Kylo Patrick R. H a rt, "'Auteur/Bricoleur/Provocateur": Gregg Araki and postpunk style in the Doom Generation', Journal ofFilm

and Video, vol. 55, no. 1 (2003) 3 0 Film Comment, vo l .

3 3 ; and Chris Chang , 'Ab sorbing Alternative' ,

8, 3,

n o . 5 . 47 53 , 5 3 . 16 17

F o r a fu ll d i s c u s s i o n of thi s s e quen c e , see Kaja Si lverm a n ,

Male Subjectivities at the Margins (London: Routledge, 19 92) , 90 1 06 . S . F . S a i d , ' C l o s e Encounters ' , Sight and Sound, vol. 1 5, no. 6 (2005), 3 2 .

Cha pter

Z

4

1

Deleuze and Guattari,

2

Gregg Lamb ert,

What Is Philosophy?, 1 7 2 . The Non philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

.., ..,

(Lo n d o n :

C ontinuum, 2002) , 152 .

A Thousand Plateaus, 2 9 1 .

3

Deleuze and Guattari,

4

Kobena Mercer, 'Imaging the Black Man's S ex', in

1tvo,

PhotographylPolitics

ed. Patricia Holland, Simon Watney and Jo Spence (London:

C omedia, 1 9 8 6 ) , 6 1 . 5

Richard Meyer, 'The Jes s e Helms Theory of Art' , (200 3 ) , 13 1 -48 , Steven C. Dubin,

uncivil action

October, no. 1 04 Arresting Images: Impolitic art and

(London: Routledge, 1 9 9 2 ) .

6

Meyer, 'The Jesse Helms Theory of Art' , 1 4 2 .

7

Dubin,

8

Ib i d . , 1 8 8.

9

Mercer, 'Imaging the B lack Man's Sex ' , 6 3 .

10

Ib i d .

Arresting Images,

11 D eleuze a n d Guattari , 12

Ib i d .

II

�

187

A Thousand Plateaus, 2 9 1 .

13

Juha Pekka Vanhatalo , 'Coco Fusco

Magazine,

Life under Surveillance ' ,

Kiasma

no. 12 (200 1 ) , ww.kiasma.fi/index.php?id= I 7 2&FL= I &L= 1

(accessed 2 3 /0 1 /2007) . 14

Del euze and Guattari ,

15

Deleuze and Guattari,

16 Del euze and

What Is Philosophy?, 1 9 l . A Thousand Plateaus, 300. Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 1 8 2 .

17

Ib i d . , 1 6 9 .

18

Ibi d . ,

19

Nicholas B o urriaud,

193.

Relational Aesthetics

(Paris: Les pres s e s d u reel,

200 2 ) , 14. 20

Ibi d . , 1 9 .

21

Ibi d . , 2 0 .

22

Ibi d. , 4 l .

23

Jacques Ranciere ,

sensible, 24

The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the

tran s . Gabriel Rockhill (London: C ontinuum, 2004) , 1 3 .

Deleuze and Guattari,

What Is Philosophy?,

1 76.

Pa rt Three: I ntro d u ction See Henri B ergson,

Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness ( 1 8 8 9 ) , trans . F. L. Pog s on (Mineola, NY: Dover, 200 1 ); Matter and Memory ( 1 8 9 6 ) , trans. N ancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, 5th edn (New York, NY: Zone, 1 996); Creative Evolution ( 1 907). trans . Arthur Mitchell (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1 9 98); and Duration and Simultaneity ( 1 92 1 ) . trans. Robin Durie and Mark Lewis (Manchester: C linamen Pres s , 1 9 9 9 ) .

4

Cinema 2, 274. Matter and Memory, 1 6 2. B ergson, Creative Evolution, 2 .

5

Ibid, 4 5 .

2

Deleuze,

3

Bergson,

Cha pter 5 Andre B azin,

What is Cinem a ?,

vol. II, trans. Hugh Gray, 2nd e dn

(Berkeley, C A : University of California Press, 1 9 7 1 ) , 76 7; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film History: An

introduction, 2nd edn (Boston,

MA: Mc Graw Hill , 2003), 364.

Cinema 2, l . Cinema 2, 1 3 1 ; B org es, 'The Garden of Forking Path s ' , 44 54. Cinema 2, 1 0 1 ; Ro dowick, Gilles Deleuze 's Time Machine,

2

Deleuze,

3

D eleuze,

4

Deleuze,

5

Deleuze,

6

Anna Powell,

1 00 8 .

Cinema 2, 1 03 . Deleuze a n d Horror Film

University Pres s , 2005) .

(E dinburgh: E dinburgh

7

Deleuze,

S

Patricia Pisters , The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze

9

Ibi d . , 3 4. For a detailed exp l anation of the c rystal of time s e e ,

in film

Cinema

2, xi.

th eory ( S tanfo r d ,

Deleuze,

Cinema

CA: Stanford Un ive rs i ty Pres s , 2003) 43-4.

2, 6S 9 7 .

10

Pisters , The Matrix of Visual Culture, 44.

11

For a greater discussion of Spellbound and several other famous dream

lZ

Deleuze,

s e quenc e s , s e e Deleuze , Cinema 2, 57 S.

Cinema

2, 92.

Cha pter 6 Michael Hardt,

Gilles Deleuze: An apprenticeship in philosophy

(Minneapolis , University of Minnesota Press, 1 99 3 ) . 2

A later

p art of the convers ation rep eats : Sally: 'Let me get my head

round this: you're reading aloud from a transcript of a conversation you're still having?' The Do ctor: 'Uh . . . wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . : 3

Deleuze and G uattari ,

4

Dele.uze and Guattari ,

5

Ibid.

6

Hardt and Negri ,

7

Deleuze and Guattari ,

Anti Oedipus, 1 0 . A Thousand Plateaus,

1 59 .

9

Empire, 3 2 7 . A Thousand Plateaus, 1 65 . Bergson, Matter and Memory, 5 8 . Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism ( 1 966), tran s . Hugh Tomlinson

10

Ibi d . , 5 3 .

11

Ibi d . , 5 7 .

lZ

Ibi d . , 6 3 .

13

Bergson,

8

Habb erjam (New York, NY: Zone, 1 99 7 ) , 5 Z .

and B arb ara

'"
15 z

." ..,

Matter and Memory,

1 68 9.

S elect bibliography

When we have made reference to works by Deleuze we have used the imprint we have to hand. For this bibliography we have put Deleuze's major work in chronological order, with each book's year indicated. By Gilles Deleuze

Empiricism and Subjectivity: An essay on Hume's theory of human nature, 1 953, trans. Constantin V. B oundas New York, NY: Columbia University

Pres s , 1 9 9 1 . 1 9 6 2 , tra n s .

Nietzsche a n d Philosophy,

Hugh Tomlinson, London:

Athlone, 1 9 83,

Kan t 's Critical Philosophy: The doctrine of the faculties,

1 963, trans. Hugh

Tomlinson and Barbara Habb erjam, London: Athlone, 1 9 9 5 ,

Proust and Signs, Bergsonism,

1 964, trans. Richard Howard, New York,

NY: Braziller, 1 972.

1 9 66, trans . Hugh Tomlinson and B a rbara Habb erjam, New

York, NY: Zone, 1 9 9 7 .

Difference and Repetition,

1 9 6 8 , tran s , Paul Patton , 2 n d e dn, London:

Athlone, 1 9 9 7 ,

The Logic of Sense,

1 9 6 9 , trans , Mark L e s t e r a n d C harles Stivale, London:

Athlone, 1 9 90,

Expression i n Philosophy: Spinoza,

1 9 7 0 , trans . Martin Joughin, 2nd edn,

New York, NY: Zone, 1 9 9 2 .

Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation,

1 98 1 , trans . Daniel W. Smith, London :

C ontinuum, 2005,

Cinema 1: The movement image,

1 9 8 3 , trans . Hugh Tomlinson and

Barbara Habberjam, 2nd edn, London: Athlone, 1 9 9 7 .

Cinema 2: The time image,

1 9 8 5 , tran s , Hugh Tomlinson a n d Robert

G aleta, 2nd edn, London: Athlone, 1 994.

Foucault, 1 9 8 6 , trans , Sean Hand, London: Athlone 1 98 8 , The Fold: Leibniz and the baroque, 1 9 8 8 , tran s . Tom C o nley, ,

Athlone, 1 993,

London:

Essays Critical and Clinical, 1 9 9 3 , trans . Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco, Minneapol i s , MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1 9 9 7 .

A.

See a lso

Dialogues

(with C l aire Parnet) , 1 9 7 7 , tran s . Hugh Tomlinson and B arb ara

H abb erj am, London: Athlone, 1 9 8 7 . 1 9 9 3 , e d . C o n s tantin V. B o u n d a s , New York, NY:

The Deleuze Reader,

C olumbia University Pre s s , 1 9 9 3 .

Neg o t iations, 1 9 72 90,

1 9 9 5 , tran s . Martin Jo ughin, New York, NY:

C olumbia University Pres s , 1 9 9 5 .

Pure Immanence: Essays on a life, e d . John Rajchman, tran s . Anne Boyman, N ew York, NY: Zone, 200 1 .

By Deleuze a n d Guattari

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia,

1 97 2 , trans . Robert Hurley,

Mark S e em, and Helen R. Lane, London: Athlone, 1 984. "CI Q)

E E Qi

c: (\) N � Q)

Qi

Q co ..,

Kafka: Toward a minor literature,

1 9 7 5 , trans . Dana Polan, Minne apolis,

MN: Universi ty o f Minnesota Pres s , 1 98 6 .

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia,

1 980, trans . B rian

Massumi , 3rd edn, London: Athlone, 1 9 96.

Nom adology: The war machine,

1 9 86, trans . Brian Mas sumi, New York,

NY: S emiotext(E ) , 1 9 8 6 .

Wha t Is Philosophy?,

1 9 94, trans . Graham Burchell a n d Hugh Tomlinson,

New York, NY: C olumbia University Pres s , 1 9 94 .

Useful commenta ries Alliez, Eric,

The Signature of the World, or What Is Deleuze and Guattari 's

Philosophy?,

tra n s . Eliot Ross Alb ert and Alb erto Toscano, London:

C ontinuum, 2004. Ans ell Pearson, Keith,

Deleuze,

Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of

London : Routledge, 1 9 9 9 .

B a di o u , Alain,

Deleuze:

The

clamor of being,

tran s . Loui s e Burch i l l ,

Minneap olis, MN: University of Minne sota Pres s , 2 0 0 0 . B oundas, C onstantin V. , e d . Deleuze

and Philosophy, E dinburgh:

E dinburgh

University Pres s , 2006. Boundas, C onstantin V. and Dorothea O lkowski, e d s ,

Gilles Deleuze and

the Theatre of Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1 99 3 . Buchanan, Ian, Deleuzism: A metacommentary, E dinburgh: Univers ity Pres s , 2000.

E dinburgh

ed. , Pre s s ,

A Deleuzian Century? ,

Durham, N C : Duke University

1 99 9 .

Buchanan, I a n a n d Adri an Parr,

Deleuze and the Contemporary World,

E dinburgh: E dinburgh University Pres s , 2006 . C olebrook, C l aire,

Gilles Deleuze, London: R o utledge, 2 0 0 2 . Out of this World: Deleuze and the philosophy of creation,

Hallward, Peter,

London: Vers o , 2006. Hardt, Michael,

Gilles Deleuze: An apprenticeship in philosophy, London:

Routl edge, 1 9 93. Gro s z , E l i zab eth , ed.,

futures,

Ithaca,

Rajchman, John,

Becomings: Explorations in time, memory, and

NY: C ornell University Pres s , 1 9 9 9 .

The Deleuze Connections, C ambridge, MA: MIT Press , 2000 . The Two-fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari:

Stival e , C h a rle s ,

Intersections and animations,

ZElek,

Slavoj,

London: Guil dford Pres s , 1 9 9 9 .

Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and consequences,

London:

Routledge, 2003.

Deleuze i n the arts Bogue, Ronald, ,

Deleuze on Cinema,

London: Routledge, 2 0 0 3 .

Deleuze on L iterature, London: Routledge, 2 0 0 3 . , Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the A rts,

London:

Routledge, 2003. Bryden, Mary,

Gilles Deleuze: Travels in literature,

Bas ingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2 0 0 7 . Buchanan, Ian and Marcel Swib o d a ,

Deleuze and Music,

E dinburgh:

Deleuze and Space,

E dinburgh:

E dinburgh University Pres s , 2 004. Buchanan, Ian and Gregg Lambert, E dinburgh University Pre s s , 2005. Flaxman, Gregory,

cinema,

The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the philosophy of

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minne sota, 2000.

Kennedy, B ar b a r a ,

Deleuze and Cinema: The aesthetics of sensatio n ,

E dinburgh: E dinburgh University Pres s , 2002. L a m b ert,

Gregg,

The No n philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,

London :

C ontinuum , 2002. Marks,

L aura U. , The Skin of the Film: In tercultural cinema, embo d i m e n t and the senses, Durh a m , N C : D u k e University

Pres s , 2000. Martin Jon e s , D avid,

Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity, E dinburgh :

E dinburgh University Pre s s , 2 0 0 6 .

M a s s umi, Bri an, e d . ,

Guattari,

A Shock to Thought: Exp ression after Deleuze and

L ondon: Routle dge, 2 0 0 2 .

Olkowski, Dorothea ,

Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation,

B erkeley, C A : University of C alifornia Pres s , 1 9 99. O ' Sullivan, S imon,

A rt Encounters Deleuze and Guattari,

B a s in g stoke:

Palgrave M a cmillan, 2006 . Pisters, Patrici a ,

Film Theory,

The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pre s s , 2003.

e d . , Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press , 200 1 . ,

Powell , Anna, Deleuze

and Horror Film, E dinburgh:

E dinburgh University

Press, 2005. Ro dowick, D . N.,

Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine,

Durh a m , N C : Duke

Univers ity Pre s s , 1 9 9 7 . ,

ed.,

The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze 's Film Philosophy,

Minneap o l i s , MN: Univers ity of Minnesota Pres s , 2008. Sutton, Damian,

Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time,

Minneap o l i s , MN: Univers ity of Minn esota Pres s, 2009. Zepke, Stephen,

Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and aesthetics in

Deleuze and Guattari,

London: Routledge, 2006.

Online resou rces A/V - Actual/Virtual, Deleuze journal: Deleuze at G reenwich, a c a d em i c

www. erLmmu . a c . uk/deleuze/ blog:

http ://deleuze atgreenwich.

blogspot . c o m l

Film-philosophy. com,

International Salon Journal: www.film philos ophy

. c oml

Offscreen,

film criticism with D eleuze page: www.offs cree n . com/b iblio/

lib/catldeleuzel

Rhizome,

artb a s e and resource : www.rhizom e . o rg/

Rhizomes, online journal: www. rhizomes .netl Spoon collective, Deleuze Guattari List: www3.iath.virginia.edu/spoons/d g_htmllindex.html Stivale, Charles, Deleuze and

Guattari Web Resources: www.langlab.wayne.

e du/C StivalelD GI

WebDeleuze

French online res ource (in French) : www.web deleuz e . c om/

php/index.html

Gloss ary

Throughout his career Deleuze developed a number of key i deas and concepts , many of which are discussed in Deleuze Reframed. This glossary provides simple definitions of these tenus as they relate to Deleuze's work and our discussion, and evidence of how we have worked with Deleuzian concepts . Some of the ideas took Deleuze many years to develop, and many of the terms continue to b e res o lved and understood anew by scholars of philo sophy and visual c ulture. These definiti on s , then , repre sent our present understanding of these complex term s .

A pure subjectivity as the experience o f feeling in the instant. It

affection

is 'alloye d' to other subjectivities

need, brain, recollection and contraction

as we understand what we feel and act upon it. Since these feelings overl ap, we l ive in affection and create a gap, or

cerebral interval,

when

we need to make s ense of it.

affects

The pure resp onse to an artwork that is articulated through the

empl oyment of language and shared c ultural meaning. Together with percepts they constitute

becoming

blocs of sensation.

The ongoing process whereby the world is always coming into

being , which we see in relation and proportionality. In terms of identity, b e c o ming explains how i dentity is formed through exp erience and th e reflexive understanding of opp osition, alterity and difference.

becorning animal

A process of identity whereby the individual is returned,

or returns to, the state of animal in order to achieve further self awarenes s . that o n e i s reduced t o living like a n animal in o rder to survive.

becoming imperceptible

The absolute elimination of identity as a goal of

self awarene s s and resi stance to processes and hierarchies of domination.

becoming-minoritarian

The principle of becoming experienced through

collective resistance to a dominating majority, p ursued by employing the language and culture of the majority. Minor cinemas, for example, explore emergent i dentities ( e . g . cultures affected by post colonial nationalism) or

i d entities problemati s e d by society (e.g. queer cinema) through the use and subversion o f mains tream cinematic storytelling.

becoming-woman

The reflexive experience of femininity as a signifier of

difference, i n relation to man as the

molar identity

against which identity

its elf is m e a s ured. S ince it is an experience o f identity, rather than an es sence, it can be felt by anyone

male or female

as an awakening to

social structures based on difference.

Body without Organs (BwO)

Pure substance as it exists before organisation

and which allows p a s s age

of ideas, o r i dentities, of time

through its

completely smooth structure . The BwO is experienced when organisation b reaks down o r is reve aled to b e arbitr ary o r c ulturally determined. The BwO is organised and filled by the desire in order to create structure, but can also, as a smooth substance, be a tool of transferability (e.g. capital ) . The BwO therefore has multiple potential destinations: empty, full or cancerous.

deterritorialisation

The bre aking up of order, boundaries and form to

produce movement and growth, especially where this involves the survival or the creation of new life ( L e . in nature) o r the disturb ance of arbitrary or s ocial rules empl oyed in repres sion.

duration

The p ure change of the worl d , which we organi s e into

chronology as the pas sing of time. Duration is experienced as an irreducible progre s s of varying speeds and can unfo l d to accomm o d ate the m o s t intricate of thoughts a n d memories .

haecceity

The intersection of bo dily materiality and social circumstance;

the conditions of our identity.

immanence

The ab s o lute b ackground of life expre s s e d o nly in th e

inters ection of form, subject, organ and function. Thi s inters ection is the

plane of immanence, which is memory

given shape in objects and their organis ation .

The past experienced in the present, and c alled up or appeale d

to by p resent situations. We appeal to memory in order to understand the present, and explore it i n order to provide s olutions to current p roblem s , i deas a n d des ires .

movement image

The image of time devel o p e d in cinema

as

a

chronology s p atiali s e d through editing and montage. For Deleuze, the movement image is the adoption of the technology of cinema as a p rincip l e of narration

frames c reate shots create montage

which is exp l o red and

a dopted by Hollywo o d and other mainstream cinemas . The movement i m a g e both relies upon and enforces t h e chronolo gical image of time and the progression of cause and effect in culture.

obj ectile

An identity that exists in time, rather than in space, and whi ch

is fixed for a while from becoming the ongoing change of becoming.

percepts

Pure sensations in art that are articulated by the manipulation

of m a teri a l s into language and exp r e s s i on. Tog ether with affe cts t h ey cons titute

blocs of sensation.

psychoanalysis

The exploration of identity through its devel opment in

childhood a s a unitary p ersona in which the unconscious is repressed. For Deleuze and Guattari, p sychoanaly s i s i s a tool of territori a l i s ati o n or reterri torialisation , as m u c h forming t h e chi l d 's i dentity a c cording to s o c i ety's norms a s deducing when the child's development dep a rts fro m i t and when the unconscious re emerges through illnes s , malady or trauma.

reterritorialisation

The re e stabli shment of o rder, b o undaries and

forms to pro duce stable embodiments or static identities. This might also include the incorporation of radical ideas or practices into domin ant s o c i al form ation s .

rhizome

A plant stem that grows horizontally, such as a tuber. The term

is also u s e d by Deleuze and Guattari to refer to rootless p l ants that spread hori zonta lly rather than setting in deeply

such as couch grass. Something

that exhibits in shape o r activity the attributes of horizontality

o r lateral

growth, a s in a rhizome, might b e c a l l e d rhizomatic, a s o p p o s e d to arborescent or tree like. Something that exhibits in its information the same attribute s , in order to produce a rhizome, might b e called rhizomorphic.

schizoanalysis

The exploration of identity as a collective persona i n order

to unders tand g rowth and development that employs a multipli city of character traits, and which makes use of the uncons cious as repre s s e d memori e s a n d desire s .

strata

T h e formation of immanence into objects a n d organis ations a s

effects u p o n each other a n d which make up the consistency o f the world in which we live . Looking at s o c iallcultural life in thi s way is therefore a kind of geology. Not only do strata add layer upon layer of meaning to our daily interactions, but it is often possible to differentiate b etween strata only if they appear different, and so

strata refers

as much to the difference

as to the l ayers .

time image

The glimpse of duration that o c curs when the logic of the

movement image i s disrupted. This can b e p rovoked by the disruption or or breaking of film l a n g u a g e ( l ong take s , s t i l l l ife c o m p o s i t i o n s , direct address to c ame ra) or by the use of rep etition, reflection, metaphor and other poetic devices . Hi stori c ally, the time i mage i s a pro duct o f cinema s that had to rebuild after World War II ( e . g . in Italy) o r that opp o s e d mainstream domina n c e ( e . g . in France) . Later cinema practices adopted some a s p e cts of time - i m a g e cinema within the mainstream, creating hybrid images and dis turbing the politic a l p ower of the time image.

Index

B ergs on, Henri xi, xiii, 85-9, 94,

8 1 /2 94 9 1 1 1 terrorist attacks 1 03

1 0 6 , 1 0 8 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 7- 1 9 , 1 2 1

l a Things I Hate A b o u t Yo u 6 0

Big Brother 7 3

24 (Fox) 1 07

B ordwell, David 93

50 First Da tes 9 8

B orges , Jorge Luis 13 Borom Sarret 5 7 , 61

AIDS/HIV 66 7, 7 0

Bourriaud, Nicholas 7 6 , 7 8

Akinnuoye Agbaje, Adewale

Brazil (and minor cinema) 5 3 Brick 6 0

1 20

Althusser, Louis 3 5

British Police Federation 2 4

Alquie, Ferdinand xi

Brookhaven National Laboratory 1 2

Amarcord 94

Brosnan, Pierce 39

Ameri ca Online 31

Bushnell, Nolan 12

Andre the Giant 3 7 Andrews , Naveen 1 1 6

C apra, Frank 54, 62

Anger, Kenneth 5 8

Casi n o Royale 39

Antonioni, Michelangelo 93

C a s s e l l , Vincent 5 5

Apple 3 1 , 4 1

Cell, The viii, i x , 9 1 , 9 9- 1 06

iMac G 3 3 1

Celluloid Closet, The 5 8

Araki, Gregg 5 1 , 58, 6 0- 1 , 63

C erteau, Michel d e 7 6

Aristotle 3

C hahine, Youssef 53

Arnol d, David 39

Chic ago, Judy 7 1

ARPANET 3 1

Citizen Kane 94-5

Atari 1 2

Clarke, Noel 1 1 2

A tonement (novel) 8 7

C o l d War, the 9 7 , 1 04

Austro Hungarian Empire 5 2

C o lumbine high scho ol m a s s acre

Badiou, Alain xii

C ommunism 32

Baer, Ralph 1 2 , 2 1

C ompu Serve 3 1

B arrie , Dennis 6 9

C o nnery, Sean 40

Batman ( I 9 8 9 movie) 40

C ontemporary Arts C enter,

20

Battleship Po temkin 54

Cincinnati 69

B audrillard, Jean xi

C orb et, Brady 58

B a zin, Andre 93

C orcoran Gallery of Art,

Being Joh n Malkovich 98

Washington DC 68

C ourbet, Gustave 67

Electronic Arts (EA) Games 40 1

C raig, Daniel 39 40

Emers on, Michael 1 1 6

C reole (language) 52

Empire S tate Building, the 93

CSI: Crime Scene Inves tiga tion

Empire 93

(CBS) 107 C usick, Henry Ian 1 2 1

Enzensberger, Hand Magnus 32 3, 3 5 , 38, 4 1 E O N Productions 3 9

D ' Onofrio , Vincent 1 00 D ae Kim, D aniel 1 1 9 D ali , Salvador 1 05 Dark

Knight Returns, The

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless

Mind

98, 1 0 1 , 1 04

European colonialism 7,

97

EverQ u e s t 18

(graphic novel) 40 DC C omics 40

Fairey, Shepard 37

Die Ano ther Day 3 9

Fellini, Federico 93 5, 1 05

D i e Hard 9 2 , 1 04

Fluss er, Vilem xii

'Dinner Party, The' (Judy Chicago)

Foucault, Michel xi France (and classical cinema) 9 1

71 Doctor Who ( B B C TV) 1 08- 1 5

Fusco, C o c o 72-4

' B link' 1 1 0, 1 1 3 ' The Daleks i n

Game Studies (journal) 1 3

Manhattan 1 09

Garcia, Jorge 1 1 8

'Evil of the Daleks' 1 09

Germany (and classical cinema) 9 1

' Genesis of the Daleks '

'Ghost' (Rachel Whi teread) 7 9

1 14

Godard, Jean-Luc 93

' The Girl in the

Gordon-Levitt, Joseph 58 60

Fireplace' 1 1 2 1 3 , 1 1 3

Gothika 1 0 1

'Human Nature/Family

Gra n d Theft A u to (video game

of Blood' 1 1 4

franchise) 1 1 , 22-6

'The Mutant s ' 1 1 4

Groundhog Day 98

' Remembrance of the

Guattari, Felix xi xii , 4, 46, 1 2 7

Daleks' 1 09

Guerilla Girls 7 1

' The Sunmakers' 1 1 4

Guney, Yilmaz 5 3

' The Tenth Planet' 1 1 4 ' The Vi sitation' 1 09 ' D o lores from 1 0h to 2 2 h ' ( C o c o Fusco) 72 Dominguez, Ricardo 72 3 'Don't Tell Me' (Madonna) 98

Half-L ife 1 6 , 1 9

Gordon Freeman (character) 1 6 Half Life: Co un ter­ Strike 1 7

Donkey Kong 1 6

Hardt, Michael xii

Doom (video game) 1 6 , 1 9

Haunti ng, The 95

D ougl a s , Alexander 1 1

Haye s , Melvyn 48

E. T. (The Extra Terrestrial! 6 3

Henry V (play) 49

East Wes t Records 39

Higinbotham, William 1 2 , 2 1

Helm s , Jesse (Senator, R-NC) 67 8

Egypt (and minor c inema) 53

Hitchcock, Alfred 9 5 , 1 0 5

Eisenstein, Sergei 54

Holloway, Josh 1 1 6

Hollywood (as classical cinema! 6 1 , 96 7 ,

1 04-5 ,

1 25

'Losing My Religion' ( R . E . M! 1 02 Lost (AB C ! ! O8, 1 1 5-2 1

'Holocaust Memorial (Nameless

'Everybody Hates Hugo '

118

LibraryI ' 79

'D ave' 1 1 8

'House' (Rachel Whiteread! 77, 78 8 1 Hume, Davi d xi

Lyons, Lisa 66

Hustle (B B C TV! 1 0 7

Lyotard, Jean Fran90is xi

Hyppolite, Jean x i Madame de Pompadour

1 1 2- 1 3

In Search oj Lost Time (novel) 8 7

Madonna 9 8

Indymedia 3 4

Magnavox O dyssey 1 2

Internet, t h e xiv, xiv, 1 2 , 27-41 , 8 7 ,

'Man in Polyester Suit' (Robert Mapplethorpe! 6 8

1 24, 1 2 6 virtu al communiti es

Manet, E douard 6 7

1 8 19, 31

Mapplethorp e, R o b e r t x i i i , 66 7 1 , 74

Intervista 94

95

Irreversible 98

Mamie

It A i n 't Half Hot Mum ( B B C TV! 48

Marx, Karl 32 3

It 's a Won derful Life

54, 6 1 -3

Italian Neorealism 93

Massachusetts Institute of

12

Technology Matrix, The 1 0 1

Jacket, The 1 0 1

May 1 968 (political upheavall 8

James Bond (franchise! 2 2 , 39 40

McEwan, Ian 87

Jefferson, Thomas (US President! 27

McGugan, Stu art

48

Meet Me i n St. L o u i s 6 3

Kafka, Franz xv, 5 1 -4

Memento 9 8

Kandinsky, Was sily 75 6

Mercer, Kobena 67 8, 7 0

Kant, Immanuel xi

Metal G e a r Solid 1 6

Solid Snake (character!

Kiasma Museum of Contemp orary Art, Helsinki 7 2 3 Kim, Yunjin 1 1 9

17 Metro Goldwyn Mayer 3 9

12

Kinkad e , Thomas 65

Microsoft Xbox

Kinsey, Mike 48

Miller vs State of California 6 9

Klee, Paul xiii Kounde, Hubert

MMORPGs (massive multiplayer

55

Kuleshov, Lev 63 4 Kurdish identity (and cinema! 53

online role-playing games! 1 2, 1 7 20 Moffat, Steven Monet, Claude

113 75

La Haine 5 5

MT V 1 0 1 2

Last Yea r a t Marienbad 94-5

MUDs (multi user dungeons! 1 2

Latour, B runo xii

Mulholland Dr. 1 0 1

Leibniz, Gottfried xi

Mulligan, C arey

Licon, Jeffrey 59

Museum o f C ontemp orary Art,

110

Lilly, E vangeline 1 1 6

Chicago 67

Lockheed M artin 2 1

Myles, Sophia 1 1 3

Lopez, Jennifer 99, 1 0 1 2

Mys terious Skin 5 1 , 57 64

National Endowment for the Arts 68

Rocha, Glauber 5 3

Need to Know 3 7

R o driguez, Delfina 7 2 -4

Negri , Antonio xi i

Roma 9 4

New Queer C inema 5 8

R o u c h , Jean 5 3

New Worl d, t h e 7 , 2 8

R u i z , Raoul 9 4 , 1 06

the Americas 7

R un Lola R u n 9 5 , 9 8

Aus tralia, New Zealand

Russel l , Steve 1 2

7

New York Police Department 24 5

S age, B i l l 58

Nietzs che, Fri e drich xi, 4

S anders Associates 12

Nintendo GameCube 1 2

Sebastian, S aint 1 02

Noughts and crosses (Ti c - Tac Toe)

Second Life 3 1

SEGA Dreamcast 1 2

II

Sembene, Ousmane 5 3 , 5 7 , 6 1 Q ' Quinn, Terry l l 9 'Obey Giant' ( S hepard Fairey) 37

Senegal (and minor cinema) xv, 5 3 , 56 7

Shaken and Stirred (album) 39

Orr- C ahall, Chri stina 68

Shining, The 9 5

Others, The 95

S i c a , Vittorio de 9 3

Pac Man 1 2- 1 3 , 1 5 , 1 9 , 2 1 -3 , 26

Sims, The 1 6 , 22

Silence of t h e Lambs 1 0 1

Pac Man (character) 1 4- 1 7 , 1 9

SimCity 1 7

Sinclair Spectrum 1 2

M s Pac Man 1 6

Sin g h , Tarsem 1 02

Pinky 1 7

Sliding Doors 9 8

Perfect Moment, The 6 6 9

Sony C o rporati o n 3 9

Perrault, Pierre 53

Sony Pictures

Picasso, Pab l o 65

Entertainment 39

Pip er, Billie 1 1 2

Sony BMG 3 9

Plato xiv, 3

S ony Ericsson 3 9

Pong 1 2

Prodigy (internet servic e provider) 31

Proust, Marcel 87, 94, 1 06 Pulp Fiction 9 8

S o ny Playstation 1 2 S oviet Union (and cinema) 54 Space Invaders 1 2 Spacewar 1 2 , 2 1 Spellbound 9 5 , 1 0 5 , n 1 3 5 Spider man (2002 movie) 40

xi,

Q uake 1 7 , 1 9

Spinoza, B aruch (Beneructus)

Quebec land minor cinema) xv, 5 3

Star Trek: The Next Generation 94

R . E . M . I 02

Stewart, James 6 2

1 08

Star Wars Galaxies (video game) 1 8 R a d io Times 36

Strange Days 1 02 3

Rajskub, Mary Lynn 5 9

Super Mario Bros (video game

R anciere, Jacques 7 8 , 1 2 3 RealPlayer 3 6 Re sna is, Alain 5 3 , 93 4 'Robinson Crusoe' (scenario) l l 5

franchise) 1 6 Mario ( character) 1 6- 1 7

Survivor 7 3

Taghmaoui, SaId 55

Vau g hn , Vince 1 03

Tennant, David 1 1 0

Vettriano, Jack 6 5

Thing, The 1 7

Vietcong 5 , 1 5 , 1 9

Third Rock from the Sun 6 0

Volkswagen Lupo 3 7

Third World (and cinema) 54 Thomp son, Kris tin 93 Tic Tac Toe (nou ghts and cro s ses) 11

War o n Terror 7 3 Warcraft 1 8

Warhol, A n dy 58, 93

Time Regained 94

W ark, Mackenzie 38--41

Tomb Raider (video game franchise)

Warner Brothers 3 9 , 1 07 as part of Warner

1 4 , 1 6 25

C ommuni cations 40

Lara C roft (character) 1 6- 1 7 , 1 9

Washin g ton Project for the Arts 68

Trachtenberg, Michelle 5 9

Waters , J o hn 58

Turkey (and minor cinema) xv, 53

Web 2 , 0 27

Turner Prize, the 78

West Wing, The (Warner B ros) 1 07

TV Go Home 3 5-6

Whiteread, Rachel 77 80

Nathan Barley (character) 36 7

Wikipedia 34, 41 Wizard of Oz, The 63

Worl d War 1 87, 96 Ultima Online 1 8 , 3 1 , 40

World War II 1 3 , 48, 8 6 , 9 3 , 9 6 , 1 04

Umberto D 93

United States ( and minor cinema) xv, 60

YouThbe 28

Zi z ek, S lavoj xi