Deleuze

Deleuze for the Desperate #2 Rhizome
Dave Harris
Introduction:
The project involves looking at some key concepts in Deleuze, as I explained in another
video. Incidentally, I have just remembered that D follows this approach himself with
Spinoza's work, (Deleuze 1988) picking out key terms like attribute or mode. Deleuze puts
them in alphabetical order but I think that can be a bit arbitrary.
The rhizome is perhaps the most famous concept, well-liked by people trying to 'apply'
Deleuze or D&G. Any gardener can think of an example of a rhizome – plants like the Iris,
ginger, certain kinds of bamboo or couch grass have underground roots or stems. When you
pull up a shoot of couch grass sticking up through the soil you uncover a straggly white tough
fibrous stem that wanders off unpredictably under the surface. Sometimes, you find it
connected unexpectedly to another green shoot somewhere else. Lots of apparently
unconnected bits of couch grass are really connected underground.
D&G get a bit defensive about the term in A Thousand Plateaus, (ATP) and say they now
realize the need to convince people with a list of properties. Rather than just reproduce this
list, which is not very helpful at first, I suggest we do something different. Of course, you
don't have to just follow my thinking or agree with me – try the techniques for yourself.
One other difficulty is that the term is used as an introduction to the major philosophical
arguments developed in ATP, and the definitions themselves get a bit lost. I suggest we focus
on those definitions and what is implied by them first, but also note the wider implications.
Of course, this is only one suggestion for an approach and there are others.
I don't want people who are just beginning to get distracted or overwhelmed by the
enormity of the work involved to track down all the implications. First, I have been pretty
selective, inevitably. Second I have divided up the commentary, and you will hear two voices
to indicate the split in focus – the second one is Maggie Harris's.
M Harris
My sections discuss some implications that arise. They need not worry complete beginners
right away, but others might want to think about them as they go along. There is a transcript
available so you can follow some issues up with that if you need to do so.
D Harris
As before, I suggest we think about this while watching some slow video. I was trying out my
amateur steadicam gear and going for a single take on a recent walk. I apologise if anyone
gets seasick with the wobbles or the whippy pans. Ironically, the video features shots of lots
of trees.
First we need to locate where the topic of the rhizome is discussed, and it is fairly easy in this
case. We'll start with A Thousand Plateaus, (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) where nearly all or
perhaps all, the references to the rhizome can be found. It has an index too. If you look up
the term rhizome, you find quite a number of definitions.
Let's start with the specific ones. It's not just plants that are rhizomes. Ant colonies, rat
burrows, the city of Amsterdam, the Freudian Unconscious, liberated sexual activity, musical
forms, aspects of American culture focused both on the cultural underground and the Wild
West, forms of guerilla warfare, the path of a pool of oil as it runs downstream. Even the
book itself, ATP, is a rhizome, D&G tell us (p. 24). Occasionally, other things are called
rhizomes as well, throughout the book. Reading the text around the actual definitions will
help
Optional discussion 1
One thing to note right away is that not all these examples relate to human beings. In
discussions like this, D&G want to talk about things found in nature as well. It would be
limiting to confine what they say to human affairs, although sometimes this is what happens
– concepts like the rhizome are discussed in terms of human activities alone – thinking,
writing, wandering. This is an anthropomorphic reading of Deleuzian work and it is only one
option. More on this in a minute, but for now, the suggestion is that the more general
accounts of the rhizome stress that human activity is connected to lots of other areas. The
'pure' rhizome is infinitely connectable,with each point having the capacity to connect with
any other point in any other system.
End of optional discussion 1.
Back to our definitions:
There are also more challenging general, theoretical or philosophical descriptions and
comments.
The first example isn't too bad:

[A rhizome is] a map and not a tracing...'open and connectable in all of its dimensions (13) D
Incidentally, in the same bit there is a reference to decalcomania – strangely taken to be crucial in
some commentaries, but just another example for me. It refers to a technique to add decoration to
pottery as a kind of applique. I don't know enough about it to see what exactly is rhizomatic about
this technique – maybe it has to respond to minute changes in the surface texture of the pot as well
as to the artistic intentions of the potter?
More abstractly:
The rhizome has no beginning and end. It is a matter of alliance rather than filiation. It proceeds by
the conjunction 'and…and…and'...American literature and some English literature shows this
'rhizomatic direction' (28), following a 'logic of the AND' (27). In other words, such works do not
follow conventional narratives but move from one episode to the next. No examples are specified
here – I thought of James Joyce and Ulysses but he is neither American nor English
More obscurely:
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension but ...with the number of
dimensions one already has available -- always n-1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple:
always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constructed: write at n-1
dimensions...A system of this kind would be called a rhizome' (7).
[The rhizome] is composed of dimensions or 'directions in motion'. It has no beginning or end, only 'a
middle (milieu) from which it grows and over spills' [I often wonder if translating milieu as 'middle'
rather than 'context' is helpful here]. It constructs linear multiplicities with N dimensions. It has no
subject or object. It moves on a plane of consistency 'from which the One [capital O] is always
subtracted (N-1) (24)
Even the simple example we started with gets a bit more complicated as we read on: plants connect
the rhizomes of their roots, with other things, like the wind or animals or human beings. The whole
thing is now described as a rhizome.
In human life, we are told a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles (8) We
are urged always to trace connections like this, always follow rhizomes until we get to the most
abstract and tortuous connections. These lines of flight away from the specific examples will
eventually lead us to a completel;y abstract or 'pure' mechanism or machine operating on the
mysterious plane of consistency (12). It is that pure mechanism, with no specific empirical bits at all
that is being referred to in the obscure stuff just now, referring to multiplicities and N dimensions
It is very tempting to ignore these complications and go with what you know already – the
rhizome as an underground root. Some people have used this simple metaphor to find some
immediate 'applications' to humans and to social life as we saw – the way in which some
people learn, for example, trailing from one task to another, wandering along directed by
their interests and personal motives which operate beneath the surface of their
consciousness. This is only a metaphorical connection, though - -and Deleuze actually
doesn't like metaphors which he sees as the result of lazy thinking, not going into the issues
the actual similarities between plants and animals which we discuss in a minute.:
Insert caption: the metaphor is redundant, since it implies some true primary meaning,
whereas ‘all meaning and identification derive rather from the unstable interplay of figures,
from configurations of sense’. Deleuze 1995.:188
My suggestion is we do something a bit more ambitious here, to try to work in all the
examples, and then try to see as a first stage how the more general and obscure bits fit in.
We should and we can tangle a little bit at least with the philosophy, using our own common
forms of thinking. I should say that Deleuze has serious objections to the ways in which
ordinary thought processes work, and we'll mention a couple more as we go along.
One way to start might be to return to the issue of what all the examples might have in
common. It seems that Deleuze and Guattari see something in common between human
activities and the activities of animals like ants and rats or even trickles of oil. We could think
in terms used in classical philosophy and ask if there is some underlying essential quality
here – do we share having been created by God as an earlier way of thinking about essences
would suggest? Theologians have amused themselves for centuries with this sort of inquiry
and its implications – does God create everything and if he doesn't who does? Does he
create each individual ant or just the species? Is he there in each patch of oil?
A currently fashionable view would take another option and say the links occur because
there is some cosmic consciousness that connects us all to the natural world, that even
plants have some kind of consciousness of their surroundings. But do trickles of oil? The
actual emphasis is possibly the other way around though. Plant rhizomes develop by
responding to local differences in their environment concerning moisture, temperature,
nutrient contents and so on. Rats and ants might respond to chemical or physical differences
in their environments – texture of the surface, gradient and so on. Trickles of oil also
respond to local gradients and the general effects of gravity. This is not really consciousness,
but more a basic detection of different sorts of intensity – of chemicals or gravitational
forces.
And it is often the case that these differences drive human actions too. We are not conscious
of all of them. We are affected by physical aspects of our environment. Our environment
produces affects. Now the term 'affect' has been colonised by recent psychology to mean
just emotions, but Deleuze sees an affect in an earlier 17th Century way to mean anything
that affects us, usually registered at the bodily level. That produces things in our minds like
emotions and feelings. We respond to chemicals in our bodies and in our environment. We
respond to external forces like gravity by feeling happy if we lose weight, sad if we put it on
and feel gravity tugging us down. We are nervous thinking of the effects of falling from
height, elated at feeling g forces on an accelerating motorcycle – and so on. The best place
to find this view of affects and how they work on bodies is Deleuze's book on Spinoza
(Deleuze 1988) or the online lectures on Spinoza (Deleuze 2007).
This could be what they mean by the section on page 9 of ATP:
'Puppetstrings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an

artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another
puppet...[let's call them] the weave. It might be objected that its multiplicity resides
in the person of the actor who projects it into the text. Granted: but the actor's nerve
fibers in turn form a weave' (9)
So human rhizomes are like plant rhizomes not because we share some essential
consciousness, but because both are affected by intensities of forces in their environments.
End of optional discussion 2
Let us try another normal technique of thinking, found in the social sciences this time. We
could ask: do the examples share common observable properties?. Vigorous couch grass
roots, ants on the march, rats building burrows, tourists wandering around Amsterdam, and
guerillas operating in enemy territory do not follow simple binary choices or directions laid
out in suggested routes. The claim is that you couldn't fit them into a logical pattern like an
algorithm (to use the modern term) or a 'decision tree' or 'command tree' (to use older
ones). This explains the contrast between rhizomes and trees appearing at time in the book.
We can connect this to one of the comments earlier:

[A rhizome is] a map and not a tracing...'open and connectable in all of its dimensions (13)
Guerilla fighters and tourists use maps, on paper or in their heads, but they do not always stick to the
prescribed routes or tracings, and, with a bit of poetic licence you could see ants on the march and
even the other examples as showing the same qualities, responding to local and immediate bits of
environment wherever they lead, as we saw. The rhizome as a map offers more possible routes than
the usual specific ones that we follow from inertia or habit or because we have been told to do so.
Note that we are developing a more general or theoretical structure. We could use the term 'abstract
structure' for now, although Deleuze does not like that specific term either. The easiest reason for
that ,incidentally, is that 'abstract' or 'theoretical' imply that the structure that results is not real, that
it exists only in our heads, that the qualities we have in mind are derived only from thought, from our
imagination, and that we have had to ignore or explain away other aspects that do not fit our
theoretical model. By contrast, Deleuze makes the extraordinary claim that these structures are real,
that they exist in reality – but in another dimension of reality. He calls this the virtual dimension,
where we find purified objects, with no empirical components. This is not to be confused with the
current usage of the term to refer to realistic computer-generated images.
Deleuze doesn't like the more usual philosophical argument that this is a transcendental level of
reality. He is criticising Kant Hegel or Husserl here, but you might know of a popular transcendental
approach in modern 'critical realism' associated with Roy Bhaskar ( eg Bhaskar , 1980) and others. If
you don't know this stuff, don't worry, of course.
Optional discussion 3 ends
Another extraordinary claim is that the operations at the virtual level explain all the empirical
examples and their characteristics - -we'll come to this argument when we consider the haecceity in
another presentation. All the examples are tracings to be put back on underlying maps.
So even the normal notion of a map will not do. Rhizomes at this level of reality, the virtual, are maps
'open and connectable in all dimensions', always capable of extending themselves into ever larger
maps, and operating not in two dimensions like normal maps but three (or more).
Nor are virtual rhizomes limited to just joining up with things that they have already connected or
established. They have no definite end. They are very flexible and can join themselves on to almost
anything, any activity, any environment or context. They just cheerfully add on these additional
dimensions, in a series connected just by 'and', following alliance rather than filiation (in other words,
they don't have to be in the same family as the things they connect with): power systems ally
themselves to linguistic systems so we are constrained by both direct force AND a set of
psychological mechanisms, that make us feel guilty if we disobey AND a linguistic system that seems
to offer us unconstrained, creative 'free speech' but within limits.
Where is all this leading? In a philosophical direction, aiming to answer philosophical questions,
including the ultimate ones like 'what is reality'. You might not want to follow the story this far just
yet, but that is where Deleuze and Guattari are heading. Deleuze and Guattari use specific examples
to get to more general philosophy. Any practical implications follow only after we have followed this
trail into the virtual, and left specific constraints and limitations well behind us. And when we return
to the practical, we must expect to meet reintroduced mixtures, impure combinations, say of
rhizomes and tree structures.
It is a strange story, and one that goes quite a way from common sense. We have seen that rhizomes
offer quite different specific characteristics in practice, but that they might have some general
properties that are not so visible. They feature ceaseless connections, and constant growth into
other areas. But this is not determined or controlled by human beings or gods, or some ultimate
purpose – they have ' have no subject or object'. They seem to proliferate all on their own. Once they
take on specific forms, we can intervene – block a couch grass rhizome, redesign Amsterdam, evict
rats from their burrows etc. But at the general level the philosophical figure of the rhizome carries on
about its own business. It is driven by forces beyond human control. It produces or turns into strange
multiple objects with lots of potential different specific forms – multiplicities. These exist at the
virtual level. At certain times and in certain states, multiplicities produce the more familiar rhizomes
we see around us, but there are other possibilities too, which may never actually ever appear in
physical form. Philosophy tries to work out the strange activities of these unobservable multiplicities.
This is not as strange as it sounds at first, and earlier forms exist of this sort of argument. A leading
structuralist, Claude Levi-Strauss says he was inspired by an understanding of geology first. We can
explain the surface features of landscapes – hills and valleys, particular directions of slopes and so
on, once we know about the geology of the area, the rocks that lie underneath. Levi- Strauss went on
to develop a structural model of language a bit like this, saying that all the rich varieties of myths in
certain preindustrial societies could be explained as combinations of underlying options to discuss
important matters like the relation of humans to nature. Deleuze's colleague M Foucault also
purposed what he called an archaeological model to study discourses, where you inspect the remains
of buildings or discourses that lie on the surface ,and gradually establish an overall plan or CGI model
of what the building might have looked like which explains the remains that you see –and sketches in
what has been destroyed.
Now these earlier approaches are discussed critically by Deleuze on the way to establish his own
underlying structures. Structure is the wrong word here, for him, as we saw, and it also implies some
fixed set of options, and Deleuze wants to argue instead for flux, flow and dynamic combinations of
forces, which themselves change and develop. This bit explains why he is sometimes called a 'post-
structuralist', although he does far more than just criticise structuralism. All this is carefully if
sometimes bafflingly argued in Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition ( Deleuze, 2004) , but there
is a much shorter summary in Deleuze and Parnet (1987), right at the end.
To take one more example, the commentary by DeLanda (2002) is very useful. Again we might not be
using specifically Deleuzian arguments but we can get a long way before we might have to correct
them. DeLanda says that modern physics thinks in terms of unobservable forces swirling around in a
complex or chaotic way, combining with each other to produce vectors. There also exist various
attractors that draw these forces together to form particular shapes or figures. Some, but only some,
can be chaotic attractors, and this provides the popular name for this approach – chaos theory. As
these forces stabilise they cool down and condense into matter of the kind we can detect. The
swirling hot forces of the cosmos just after the Big Bang eventually cooled enough to start combing
protons, neutrons and electron together to make atoms, then atoms into molecules of the elements,
molecules into compounds, compounds into larger compounds under the force of gravity – and so
on. Combinations often have different possible states which produces matter of different kinds –
gasses, solids and liquids, for example. Ice, liquid water, and steam look and feel quite different to
our senses, as indeed do the gases hydrogen and oxygen, but they are all states of one system
End of optional discussion 4
So we have moved from the specifics of couch grass to the generalities of chaos or complexity
theory,from empirical examples to purified ones. Was it worth it? If you are a philosopher, yes, since
it gives us a fresh take on all sorts of earlier philosophical approaches. What if you are not a
philosopher?
At the very least the approach helps us see that there is much more at stake in analysis than just
using a nice metaphor. You might not wish to delve into the complexities of Deleuzian philosophy,
but it would be wise to recognise that they are attached to the concept. It is obviously controversial
to grab the metaphor and then bolt it on to some other philosophical approach like social
constructivism or humanism, at least without acknowledging the problems.
More practically, maybe a Deleuzian approach shows that the specific rhizomes that exist here and
now are not the only possible ones, and should not make claim to be the only possible ones,
although they often do. That is not an issue with couch grass, although gardeners are usually
thwarted if they try to pull out bits of it only to find the thing starting up again somewhere else. It is
an important issue if if we start to see modern organizations as stabilised, limited or blocked
rhizomes. We can see a space for politics, for social change that points to other possibilities emerging
equally plausibly from the same underlying multiplicity, even ones that have not been realized yet.
This would be a pretty radical politics, not just operating with choices provided by existing systems
but realizing new possibilities. This is why we need a general account of possibilities, to break out of
existing constraints, in politics and practice as well as in thought.
We also might begin to see that human activity can operate only against a background of what is
already being made into reality by non-human forces –which limits the space for politics and social
change. Not everything or anything is possible. I am afraid this alternation between political
optimism and pessimism is something that runs throughout ATP at least, and is a major issue with
D&G.
Finally, I am aware that a couple of things haven't been discussed yet – a rhizome grows in the
middle without beginning or end. That is fairly simple in arguing that we should not worry about
rying to trace everything back to a single origin, a capital O One – like the medieval philosophers did
when they tried to explain everything as emanating from the will or characteristics of God. Nor
should we try to establish foundational concepts that always explain everything – the mode of
production for marxists, or the Oedipus complex for Freudians, or humanist qualities of creativity and
freedom, for that matter. It follows that there is no ultimate end we should be thinking of either, no
glorious future of freedom and self-understanding, no state of final equilibrium in the universe, no
peak of biological evolution.
A rhizome occupies N dimensions – that is not just the usual 3 dimensions, but any number. Note
also that Deleuze sometimes uses the term 'dimension' as some mathematicians do – as a line joining
points. The bit about operating with N-1 is a puzzle – I think DeLanda explains it best as referring to
abstract geometry. For now, we can read it as advice not to work with specific and unique things but
to subtract them or abstract from them, and think of the forces behind them so to speak. We should
also take out any original One that is supposed to spark it all off, as above.
There is one last mysterious term in the definitions of the rhizome – A rhizome moves on a 'plane of
consistency' That will have to wait for another session. For now a plane or plan is a way Deleuze has
of thinking of connections between rhizomes or multiplicities (in this case): roughly, for now, we
have to analyse each separate rhizome in a way which is consistent with what we know about the
others. It is partly a matter of doing philosophical work, since we can ever observe or measure
multiplicities at the virtual level – but it is not just philosophical speculation, more like discovering by
coherent philosophical argument, carefully developed, the underlying virtual reality that can explain
all the specific cases.
This is enough for one session. I'll leave you with some references to books I have mentioned and to
my notes on them.
Haecceity
Dave Harris
This term is discussed in a couple of places in the work of Deleuze and Guattari,not only our
standard source of reference – A Thousand Plateaus (ATP) , in Plateau 10 – but also in
Deleuze and Parnet (1987) Dialogues. I read this edition, not the one that came out with an
added bit on the end –Dialogues II (the added bit is not relevant in this case). If anything, the
account in Dialogues is a bit clearer, but unfortunately, my edition at least does not have a
full index, so it is not suitable for our preferred study strategy. However, I noted down a few
occurrences of the terms as I read Dialogues, and I've supplied a few page numbers where
the haecceity is mentioned, in the references at the end. The examples are pretty similar to
those in ATP
Maggie Harris reads some bits from Dialogues and raises some issues at the end
The term haecceity has had some appeal for a number of professions and activities – I found
a site called architectural haecceities, for example, It has also gained prominence in
educational circles where it is mentioned in connection with a highly successful joint writing
project by Gale and Wyatt (eg Gale, Speedy and Wyatt, 2010) . They describe their
relationship as a haecceity. This view is supported by Deleuze himself describing his
relationship with Guattari as like a haecceity (in yet a third source, Deleuze 1995,
Negotiations) .
With Guattari we merged to become ‘a non personal individuality’. These exist in

nature as well and ‘we call them “haecceities”’. Language passes between the
elements. Guattari and I 'don’t feel we’re persons exactly. Our individuality is rather
that of events’ (141).
I am still a bit puzzled by this, because the haecceity, and the event for that matter, have
quite a distinctive philosophical significance as we will see.
Dosse's (2011) account of their relationship mentions the normal things like a wide circle of
Parisian intellectuals , mutual fame, and a couple of mutual acquaintances who introduced
them to each other, but Deleuze himself does not discuss these social factors.
The whole example might show a bit of problem with Deleuze and Guattari generally – that
they see the forces of the universe producing event or haecceities directly, as it were, with
no real consideration of social factors, like the formation of a group of Parisian intellectuals
with shared beliefs and so on – social factors just act to transmit universal forces with no
independent effects. Sociologists would certainly not agree with that
For our purposes the haecceity is a good term to think about because it is closely linked to
other important terms in Deleuze and Guattari. The event is one, suggested in the quote
from Deleuze above. The singularity is another. The haecceity is also an assemblage of a
particular kind. And a rhizome. It would take far too long to spell out and disentangle these
much-discussed terms, but if you ever have to or want to investigate them, this discussion of
the haecceity might help you get started with those terms as well.
As before, we are aiming at a good working understanding, that will help develop further
work. At first, we will just have to accept that there are implications that we will not pursue
right away – we can practise a bit of selection to get at the most important bits. I hope this
will not cause problems – make you feel guilty or whatever.
It is especially important with the discussion in ATP that you avoid being bogged down, and
it's a good technique to practice with Deleuzian stuff generally – try not to chase down all
the hares that set off running in the discussions, at least unless you have lots of leisure and
there is nothing immediately at stake
Let's point out a few things in ATP that are implied but which can be postponed for later
research, or just lightly read over for information:
First, there is a reference to Spinoza, for example, probably an implicit reference to

Deleuze's book on Spinoza. Spinoza crops up in the other topics too, like body-without -
organs, and one of Deleuze's books on Spinoza is fairly readable (make sure you get the right
one because the other one is unreadable – the good one is Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza
Practical Philosophy). It is from Spinoza that Deleuze gets the odd seventeenth century idea
of latitude and longitude describing the dimensions of the haecceity on the plane of
consistency – that is the philosophical notion of the haecceity. At the virtual level, to cite
earlier terms, we find only intensive forces and we can describe them only in non-metricated
terms – first speed and slowness, rather than precise measures of velocity, referring to the
different time scales in which things appear and come together. This dimension is called
longitude. Secondly there is the power to affect bodies, including our own, and again we can
note these effects but not really measure them too precisely. Some haecceities will have far
greater effects on us, be far more important to us, than others, both actually and potentially.
This is the dimension called latitude. We will discuss how these terms operate in the
examples in a minute: for now, I want to help avoid a misunderstanding that stopped me for
a while, because I thought that longitude and latitude were being used in the modern sense,
and as a kind of metaphor or bit of poetry. Not at all – they are technical terms and they
don't fit well with common-sense understandings.
Second, there is also in ATP a fairly technical discussion of the way in which we could
develop a linguistics capable of expressing the characteristics of the haecceity, pp 290--292 .
A suitable approach, associated with the Danish linguist Hjemslev, is discussed at some
length in other whole Plateaus like 4 and 5 on linguistics and signs. We can largely skip that
bit for now and leave it for later, I suggest. It was important for Deleuze and Guattari to
challenge and reject the dominant model of linguistics at the time – structural linguistics, the
linguistics that claimed to explain everything in terms of abstract and universal combinations
of signs and signifier. I have briefly mentioned some criticisms of this rather static
conception in the stuff on the rhizome. An added annoyance was that this type of linguistics
had been used by a major rival in psychoanalysis – Jacques Lacan. Our heroes turned to
Hjelmslev for a more congenial alternative. I've added a link to a very good short article on
Hjelmslev and ATP in the list at the end if you really want to pursue this soon (Metcalf, nd).
Finally, in this context-setting bit, the term haecceity is clearly located in a chapter on
'becoming' , and it leads to a discussion of the plane of consistency in the next section, pp
292–300, which we are also recommended to read in the index. We will discuss these
important terms a little bit here as well – but largely postpone them for another day.
We will briefly consider the reference to the haecceity later in ATP in the context of a
discussion of science (p.408 in my edition)
Luckily, by the time we have postponed, or excused ourselves altogether from, reading these
asides, we have a nice limited set of examples.
Maggie Harris
Let's discuss a few examples from Dialogues first. We actually have a definition of a
haecceity here, from Deleuze, referring to himself in the third person:
Haecceitas is a term frequently used in the school of Duns Scotus, in order to designate the
individuation of beings. Deleuze uses it in a more special sense: in the sense of an
individuation which is not that of an object, nor of a person, but rather of an event (wind,
river, day or even hour of the day). Deleuze’s thesis is that all individuation is in fact of this
type. This is the thesis developed in Mille Plateaux with Felix Guattari.
This is found in a note on p 151
So some specific events or objects seem to arise from human action – a painting or a
sentence in a novel – and others form objects in nature – water and weather producing the
Grand Canyon, say. But the underlying process is actually something else, something else is
producing these individuations, or at least the potential for them.
The discussion in Dialogues goes on to criticise the simplification of objects and events in
Freudian accounts. For example, we can see sexuality and sexual desire as forming up
flexible assemblages of a range of specific activities directed at our own bodies, at other
people and at various objects. Freud was wrong to try to simplify and solidify this flexibility
and classify it into various forms like fetishism or perversions. These terms also imply value
judgements, of course because they are contrasted with 'normal' sexuality.
Structural linguistics is criticised on similar grounds. Seeing underlying structures of language

producing speech reduces the options for analysis and emphasises the categories. Instead,
we should start with the pragmatics of enunciation. These involve examining the way people
actually use language, and the assemblages of enunciation they draw upon, which will
include bits of other people's thoughts and various linguistic items.
While we are here, there is also an anti-humanist bit. So 'Charlotte Bronte' is not the name
of a single self-contained uniquely gifted individual but of a haecceity. All human individuals
should be understood as a collection of haeceites, not a single person but more a collection
of all the accidental things that have happened to them during their lives. Concepts are
haecceities as well, and they don't refer to single and simple things either. We will discuss
this later, but you might have already noticed this tendency in Deleuze and Guattari to use
the same name both for specific things – specific rhizomes like couch grass roots, and
general mechanisms at a different level of reality. This can be baffling – but it is deliberate.
end Maggie Harris
The discussion in ATP also makes clear that the point of the haecceity arises from the need
to account for the sum of elements and forces involved in any object or event, and we
should not reduce these down to a few major ones in the name of science. Haecceities form
up first at the virtual level from a combination of all sorts of factors and forces and then they
are realized or actualized to produce specific forms. At the virtual level, forces operate in a
special intensive way, and we need these odd philosophical terms like longitude and latitude
to chart them, as above. All the examples are a bit bizarre, or playful, if you are a fan.
In the first one, we are told that those practising demonology knew it wasn't enough just to
cast the spells correctly or to know the victim – other factors were involved in success like
weather conditions – 'rain, hail, wind, polluted air' to transport the affects.
The second example is the haiku, where a number of different qualities are brought together
to make a surprising or insightful thought or observation. I have found some examples online
– eg from Haiku Poetry.org:
An old silent pond...

A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.
- Matsuo Bashō
The third example considers Charlotte Bronte again, and her recognition of the impact of
weather events on human relationships, specifically on effects of the wind – and then a
couple of quotes from Jane Eyre I think.
The fourth example is Lorca's poem at 5 o'clock. This is also available on the web with other
work at PoetHunter.com. – he is burying his friend at 5 o'clock but all sorts of other
seemingly unconnected things are happening at the same time, including pageants of life
and death in the bullring. I will let you read for yourselves the relevant poem Lament for
Ignacio Sanchez Mejias:
Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias
1. Cogida and death
At five in the afternoon.

It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
The rest was death, and death alone.
The wind carried away the cottonwool

And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel
Now the dove and the leopard wrestle
And a thigh with a desolated horn
The bass-string struck up
Arsenic bells and smoke
Groups of silence in the corners
And the bull alone with a high heart!
At five in the afternoon.
etc
The fifth example is the specific combination of white light and heat cited in Lawrence – TE I
assume, describing the impact of a memorable day in the Arabian desert.
Sixth example – a Norwegian omelette, or what is known in the UK as a baked Alaska where
frozen ice cream or frozen yogurt is contained in a conventionally-baked sponge cake (no –
that's an arctic roll: a baked Alaska is ice cream in a meringue coat).
If you read on to the next section, you will find more examples: Proust's novel describing a
group of girls, combining and losing their individual characteristics in a kind of group
femaleness, discussed in Deleuze's book on Proust (Deleuze 2008), Boulez's music
experimenting with different rhythms and time signatures (which I know nothing about,but
see the transcript on smooth space).
Humans are only a collection of haecceities again, we are told, and are more affected by
circumstances than they sometimes realize. I argued this in the session on the rhizome. They
are affected by a particular day or a season, a life, the climate, wind and fog, their
relationships to swarms and packs, the nearest Deleuze and Guattari get to talking about
social groups. There are vampires which emerge only in the moonlight, or werewolves at full
moon – ie both require atmospheric and lunar conditions to transform.
Let us try to see what these examples might have in common. There seem to be two
[philosophical] issues.
First, Deleuze and Guattari insist throughout that none of these operate in normal clock time
– these events can be short lived or last years. So time is important, not clock time, but the
effects of different speeds and slownesses, things developing at different rates being
brought together. We might think of werewolves transforming in a few minutes on
particular dates, but there is a much longer evolution of the species – and a long history of
the moon supposedly affecting human behaviour as well. The implications are really relevant
for human thinking about objects and forces. We tend to stick our own limited time frame
around things and forget all the other processes that have been slowly maturing in the
background. This is anthropomorphism again. But human time is not the only kind of time,
and, when considering geological processes for example it is inadequate. Deleuze and
Guattari refer to a classical Greek notion of time outside of human affairs – not Chronos but
Aion, an intensive time with its own rhythms. Unexpected combinations of things arriving at
different speeds can have great personal and political significance, unintended
consequences as sociologists might say.
Secondly, we need to consider the entire assemblage at work, and its composition. The
examples here involve unreferenced allusions to other arguments in ATP and elsewhere. We
are told that streets as well as horses are involved, for example, and this is a reference to a
much discussed case -study in Freud, concerning the legendary Little Hans. Poor old Hans
developed an aversion to going outside, and this focused especially on a fear of horses. His
father discussed the case with Freud. Professor Freud eventually decided on the inevitable
sexual connotations, especially that horses often pulled box-like carriages, which was a
symbolic way of Hans expressing anxiety that his mother would have another child. Boxes
stood for wombs. Deleuze and Guattari continually argue here and especially in Anti-Oedipus
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984) that this is far too reductive and that other elements were
involved in a whole assemblage, including, in this case, Hans's desire to play in the streets
with the poor kids, which his parents forbade.
The example of dying rats sniffing the fresh air and reviving a bit refers to a story about a rat
colony by Hugo von Hoffmansthal, which is discussed elsewhere in ATP. I haven't read it yet I
am afraid.
[I have tracked it down though: von Hofmannstahl, H (2005) [1902] The Lord Chandos Letter
and Other Writings. New York: NYRB. The actual letter is very brief and describes the efforts
of an aesthete and aristocrat to express his feelings and gain insight into the beauty of the
world. He tries,only to discover that words can never get to grips with reality, and the point
is to somehow try to access this reality directly {it is easy to see why Deleuze likes this stuff,
although 'Lord Chandos' uses terms like 'empathy' which are too vague and humanist for yer
Man}. The author tries to open himself to experience,and to grasp the beauty of the world
even in mundane things like a watering can or the interior domestic arrangements of the
poor {bless!} Even a pack of rats being poisoned in one of his cellars can be beautiful and
insightful. He imagines the scene -- all the horrors of rats struggling for life and dying
painfully, but even here, a mother rat raises her head and nobly bares her teeth at fate!]
There is another animal example –the dog walking on a road, cited in a novel by V Woolf. I
am not sure which one, and of course it is not referenced.
[I have had a quick check and there is a scene describing a thin dog in a road in The Waves,
although no sign of the actual quote – maybe D&G were quoting someone else on Woolf?
There are lots of hacceities throughout the work though – eg :
'Unreasonably, ridiculously,' said Neville, 'as we walk, time comes back. A dog does it, prancing. The machine
works. Age makes hoary that gateway. Three hundred years now seem no more than a moment vanished
against that dog. King William mounts his horse wearing a wig, and the court ladies sweep the turf with their
embroidered panniers. I am beginning to be convinced, as we walk, that the fate of Europe is of immense
importance, and, ridiculous as it still seems, that all depends upon the battle of Blenheim. Yes; I declare, as we
pass through this gateway, it is the present moment; I am become a subject of King George .']
This thin dog has become a famous example – a particular dog walks on a particular road
and together the combination produces some affect –it is significant and insightful for
Woolf, and her readers. Deleuze and Guattari take this as a prime example, and say that in
order to get all the factors in and give them equal weight, we should use phrases such as
'the-animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock'.
So overall, all the examples seem to feature a coming-together of elements of different

types –an animal and a human construction, or humans and weather conditions (this is the
longitudinal dimension as earlier). We might think of them as accidental collision of factors
that have some emerging importance, sometimes lifelong importance, as when Proust's
hero meets Albertine, who finally joins the group of girls and will be his lover, or when a
particular dog on a particular road sparks off some insight for Virginia Woolf. We could say
these collisions have lots of affects, stretching across a lot of latitude.
To take another often-repeated example, in other sections of ATP, and also discussed in
Dialogues, horses evolved over millenia and happened to end up in our era with physical and
temperamental qualities that are very useful for human beings. Human technology also
developed comparatively rapidly until a real breakthrough emerged when it came together
with modern horses – the metal stirrup or the man-horse-stirrup assemblage. Putting metal
stirrups on powerful horses led to much more effective military uses for horses, and the
whole process of the emergence of the mounted warrior into human history – like the
chivalric knights.
One last point to make about them – we have described them as accidents – but Deleuze
sees them differently, as always produced by combinations of forces, assemblages. Duns
Scotus, mentioned in the definition, saw everything as necessarily caused by God, with no
room at all for accidents. For Deleuze, the same can be said of Being: the forces operating at
the virtual level cause everything, Being speaks with one voice as he puts it, the univocity of
Being. We can't write off these important collisions of events as mere accidents, something
inexplicable. Even the UK police force no longer refers to collisions of motor vehicles as
'accidents' , RTA. Now they are RTC, road traffic collisions and they need to be investigated
before they can be termed accidents.
The last appearance of the term, in the Conclusion of ATP, on p408, reminds us of some
implications, in the middle of a discussion about two models of science. One looks for laws
and assumes constants or invariants. The other version does not make these assumptions
and argues instead that there are no constants, that everything is in variation. Objects and
events never stay still but are always changing or becoming. Equations and laws can only
ever be only approximate. There are singular objects, distinct individuations, haecceities,
with terms like 'object' or 'essence' used to describe them serving only as a vague working
definition. It is the underlying forces that we need to study. Insisting on fixed definitions,
laws and essences only stratifies reality, with clear political implications to that term, and we
have to oppose that with terms that imply specificity and flow.
Haecceities are therefore real but not to be pinned down too easily, wandering or nomadic
essences, continuums of intensities (intensive forces) rather than fixed locations on
continuums, matters of continual variations and becomings. We get a hint of Deleuzian
ethics here too when we are told that in general, the ones with the most connections are the
most valuable ones. However, not all haecceities are 'good', as you might expect from this
general indifference to humans – some are harmful, cancerous.
We have used the term haecceity to begin to get to grips with some important general
arguments in Deleuzian philosophy and noted the connections with terms like assemblage,
event, singularity. Whether these terms are interchangeable is debatable. For my money, a
haecceity is one type of assemblage or event, one that produces a particularly well-
individuated distinctive outcome [even a norwegian omelette?] something that seems to be
distinctive, even unique. The precise links with the event and the singularity are still unclear
to me and I will have to work on that a bit more.
Returning briefly to the bit at the start, where Deleuze describes his writing collaborations
with Guattari as 'like a haecceity', perhaps what he means is that although these distinctive
books look as if they are written by a single person, two rather different individuals came
together, no doubt with a lot of other factors as well, to produce them. It was not just him. If
that is so, I think it is a useful way to remind us that Guattari played a major part as well as
Deleuze, although sometimes that is forgotten.
Maggie Harris
Many other questions still remain. Haecceities form up at the virtual level before being
operationalised and actualised, in some cases long before humans were even around.
However, all the examples seem to require some human intervention to unite the elements
or to register their affects. Deleuze reminds us that there is nothing in the notion of a
uniquely gifted individual, though – they are all a collection of haecceities, so the haecceity is
the prior term. As before, we might be arguing that humans are really no more than
conduits for forces of the universe, or perhaps that the elements that enable human
activities, like fighting on horseback, were in existence long before and were just co-
ordinated by humans.
Human interests are possibly smuggled in somewhere else, though. We are told to say the
whole phrase 'the-animal-stalks-at-five o'clock' – but why stop there? Why not bring in
everything else that is connectable – the geological formation of the landscape it stalks in,
the other animals in its vicinity? We could have an endless sentence with dashes between
the terms: an-animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock-past trees-with roosting bats-living in caves-in
cliffs-of sandstone-laid down in the Cretaceous era-by seas which ...etc. We don't extend
things like this because we decide to limit it in our own interests—this is surely what
orthodox science is doing too, really, discounting variation and the rest for all practical
purposes. Perhaps it is not a denial of complexity so much as a pragmatic approach to it.
ADDENDUM ( after I recorded the tape]. I found that CS Peirce also used the term haecceity,
also drawing from Scotus. In a good discussion, DiLeo shows how important the term was in
Peirce's own philosophy, including his 'semeiotic': that work is cited heavily by Deleuze in the
books on cinema. To be very brief, what made things individual was their 'factual' existence,
the way they resisted experience and our usual categories of thought and generalizations
AND how they persisted in time and space. Maybe we can see these qualities in Deleuze and
Deleuze and Guattari above? The 'factual' qualities might explain their creative role for
writers, forcing new thoughts or a new awareness of reality beyond thought? D&G seem
less keen on the persistence stuff and insist haecceities can be transitory?
ANOTHER ADDENDUM I was slow to pick this up, but surrealism rejoices in haecceities too.
Surrealists were very impressed by a poem (by Lautremont) the title of which is usually
rendered as
Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella -- a classic
haecceity if ever there was one, with considerable latitude in the affects generated on the
likes of Dali and Bunuel. Surrealists also liked 'found objects' and apparently random lists
too, of course.
Deleuze for the Desperate #4 The body-without-organs (BwO)
Dave Harris
This is the fourth one in the series so far. Like the others, this one recommends we use a
technique designed to get some sort of initial understanding from the difficult texts written
by Deleuze and Guattari. It is an approach for those who might not have time to read the
whole texts in a suitable leisurely way, stopping to look things up, going off to think of
implications and so on. Instead, we focus on sections in the text, which we find using the
index, which discuss the particular key concept we are interested in. We read around the
entries a bit, then bring in some additional issues. This time it is the body-without-organs or
BwO.
All references and a transcript are available – see the link at the end.
As before, the main focus is going to be on the discussion in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2004) The BwO warrants a whole plateau to itself here, fortunately a fairly
brief one. There is also an extended discussion in Anti-Oedipus, and more discussion in
Deleuze's books Logic of Sense, (Deleuze 1990) and Proust and Signs (Deleuze 2000)
(references in the transcript, cited at the end). As before, a second voice introduces some
additional issues from this wider discussion – the voice of Maggie Harris.
M. Harris
My first section introduces a brief account of some main themes in the work of Carlos
Castenada, who appears a few times in A Thousand Plateaus. He was a cult writer in the
1960s and 1970s, but is perhaps less well-known these days. The second section introduces
some issues from Anti-Oedipus, where the Body-without-Organs is also discussed.
End MH
The body without organs (BwO) is another popular concept which attracts some attention,
and some people have insisted that it has application for the education system, people like
St Pierre or Guttorm et al. I suppose it came to the attention of social scientists as well, given
their interest in bodies as well as minds. A lot of the work in this 'turn to the body' in
Sociology refers to the way in which bodies are marked by social forces of various kinds, and
how people read off the social forces by the ways in which people hold and display their
bodies. Bourdieu (1984), for example, refers to characteristics of working class bodies or
middle class bodies, and notes that bodies are conventionally gendered as well. He goes on
to say that one major way to teach people about the power of social forces is to constrain
and discipline their bodies, to make female children adopt particular deferential stances in
the presence of men, for example. Foucault's (1977) work on prison regimes is also about
disciplining bodies with the intention to discipline minds, as in a behaviour-shaping regime.
Schools do that too, of course.
As the first clue to what the plateau on the body without organs is all about, we can think
about ways to escape these disciplines exerted on our bodies, to achieve some state where
the body is not heavily socialized or controlled. The body's full potential will then be released
– the potential to express desires of all kinds in a creative way, to be affected, in deleuzian
terms. This will liberate us from major forces of social discipline and help us think and act in
alternative ways. It is simply assumed that we would want to do this in the very title of the
plateau: how do you make yourself a body without organs?
The body without organs is one of these things that exist in reality, but in virtual reality
(discussed in the video on the rhizome) At least we give the virtual body a separate name,
not just call it the body, so this is a welcome break from previous practice with concepts like
the rhizome or the haecceity that refer to both actual and virtual states. However, we are
told quite early on that the BwO is not exactly a concept in the strict sense, unlike the
rhizome and the haecceity, but rather a limit state, something that we can perceive when we
push to the limits of conventional bodies to see what might remain or lie beyond them. We
get to it by stripping away the effects of various practices, not just by thinking, the practices
which constrain conventional bodies. We have to be very careful, though, to ensure that we
do not get just an empty body, or one that can easily be re- occupied by harmful forms.
Let's proceed straight away to the examples we have in ATP, Plateau 6.

On p 167 (of my edition) we have a list of ways to escape from the demands of conventional
bodies:
In a number of cases, the body shows that it has 'had enough of organs [and the
conventional pains and pleasures they bring] ' the hypochondriac body' is one example
[citing a French psychiatrist who had a patient who literally thought that they no longer
possessed any organs]. The 'paranoid body' is another example, where the organs are
continually under attack but constantly renewed [the reference is to the case of a famous
paranoid, Judge Schreber, much discussed in Anti-Oedipus]. There is the 'schizo body'
struggling with the organs and risking catatonia. [more on this case later] The 'drugged body'
is a kind of experimental schizo state [with a reference to W. Burroughs]. There is also the
'masochistic body' which is not just about the enjoyment of pain, but an attempt to stop the
organs from working in conventional ways and develop alternatives. All these examples
should also remind us of the need for caution. We should also avoid attempts just to empty
bodies, rather than releasing them to pursue 'gaiety, ecstasy and dance' (167). That promise
leads us to keep experimenting, until we have 'sufficiently [my emphasis] dismantled our
self', our conventional self, that is.
The most familiar example, perhaps involves experimenting with drugs. We can withdraw
into our body. The practice is sometimes called 'escapism', escape from the body and its
responsibilities and demands, but there is a positive side, new pleasures to discover and
experience. William Burroughs is discussed briefly. The reference to Castenada later on,
about p.180) also involves experimenting with drugs, this time, mind-expanding ones found
in peyote buttons. Artaud experimented with peyote too.
MH
Carlos Castenada, is the author of best-selling 60s/70s hippy texts allegedly about the life
and times of a (probably mythical) [yah-key] Yaqui sorcerer, “Don Juan”. Castenada claimed
to be an anthropology student. “Don Juan” sets out to rock the foundations of Castenada’s
world with a series of disorientation techniques, including long walks, starvation, odd and
frightening behaviour, isolation in the desert and (eventually) taking peyote. The first
volume was aimed at making us all realize our ‘scientific’ conventions were arbitrary and
close to magic themselves, and that people we thought of as 'noble savages' had a lot of
wisdom too. After that, the books got stranger still, more and more obsessional/paranoid.
There were more characters, more improbable alleged concepts central to Don Juan’s belief
system. There was a fair bit of repetition, and a general 'eco' philosophy supposedly
emerging from a series of ‘critical incidents’ (as we would call them now). It all sounded so
hippy that a few people began to say that the whole thing was made up. Deleuze and
Guattari say it doesn't matter if it was.
D&G discuss the issues raised in Book 4 of Castenada's epic, where sorcerers apparently
construct two views of the world, one based on appearances and empirical relations, a bit
like science as D&G see it, while the other operates with flows and fluxes underneath the
surface, dissolving all that seems to be actual. This is pretty much like deleuzian philosophy.
The two worldviews are discussed with quite a notable seriousness.
Castenada crops up quite a bit in A Thousand Plateaus in fact, not least in Plateau 10 on
becoming, where Deleuze and Guattari refer to themselves as 'sorcerers', and, at one stage,
refer to human bodies being connected to everything else through a series of 'fibres'. This is
a reference to one of those critical incidents described by Castenada, when Don Juan shows
him how his friend, another sorcerer, is able to make a hazardous crossing of a waterfall by
extending, and making visible, white fibres which snake from his abdomen and connect him
securely to neighbouring rocks and trees.
End of MH
We can liberate ourselves from normality, perceive the world in a new way, and deepen our
understandings with drugs or traditional techniques of sensory deprivation. Of course this
has been claimed by generations of artists and cultural rebels as well. Even ecstasy, once
highly popular among clubbers was said to liberate users from normal bodily desires,
subduing impulses to predatory sex or violence in favour of developing friendship and
sociability.
The other examples might require a bit of context. Take masochism first. We are given
graphic details of a masochistic practice, or maybe a fantasy, from the casebook of a French
psychiatrist about a man who requires that his conventional sex organs are heavily
restrained, to put it mildly. This looks like excessive discipline of the body, but we are told
that the idea is to 'destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted
forces' (172), and then that there is the intention of experiencing [a kind of culturally
induced] fear and suspense, instead of being dominated by lust, e.g. at the sight of women's
legs. Legs have ceased to be conventional organs [body parts really] and have been replaced
by signs such as boots, and as a result they are now a zone of intensity or a zone on the
BWO...that is they produce or channel desire, but not with the same conventional socially
accepted results and effects.
Once the conventional pleasures have been denied, the masochist is free to experience
unconventional even unformed pleasures, including 'becoming horse'. There is more than a
hint that these are somehow 'higher' pleasures detached from the 'normal' body, which
reminded me of Bourdieu's (1984) work on elite tastes.
This is far from the usual conception of masochism as involving simply the pleasures of pain,
the inverse of sadism. Deleuze argues this much more extensively in a book on masochism,
at least on the work of Sacher-Masoch. I have the 1991 version of Deleuze's book which also
includes a famous novel by Sacher-Masoch – Venus in Furs. Deleuze pursues some very
interesting criticisms of Freud on masochism and on the centrality of the father. Instead,
Deleuze says, Sacher-Masoch was offering a very cultured view of sexual activity, wanting to
revive mythical versions of women in ritual performances, a kind of sexual theatre. It was
important to exclude what passed for sexual reality, and this involved contracting a female
partner to learn to play a consistent and plausible part, sexual role-play in modern terms:
she was to be the cold but caring woman.
This account helps explain the sudden leap in ATP from masochism to 'courtly love', the
heavily ritualised activity of courtship that also involved very little actual sexual contact as
we would understand it, but which culturally sexualised normal behaviour instead – a
meaningful glance, gentlemanly behaviour. A caress is 'as strong as an orgasm: orgasm is a
mere fact, a rather deplorable one' (173). Incidentally Proust's novel (I have a summary on
my website Harris, nd.) gives some good examples of highly stylised bourgeois love and
courtship in Paris.
The same apparently goes for Daoist love [can't help you here]. We can examine D&G's
description, and note how they return us to philosophical concepts:
Again, men should not ejaculate, both parties should not see desire as a lack or simply a
delaying of pleasure to gain some 'externalizable surplus value' (174), but constituting an
intensive BwO, again with nothing external or transcendent. This energy can be directed
towards procreation, but this is only 'one side of the assemblage of desire, the side facing
the strata, organisms, State, family'.
The 'strata' here can be thought of as solidified forms of energy or creativity that have been
compacted and then made rigid, just like geological strata, an argument pursued in Plateau
3. We are told there are three main forms of them: ‘ the ones that most directly bind us: the
organism, signifiance and subjectification...you will articulate [discipline] your body –
otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and
interpreted – otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a
subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement –otherwise you’re just a
tramp’ (176-7).
Each of these constraining strata need a bit more explanation:
Organisms, 'the organization of the organs'….Conventional organisms are subject to the

judgement of God. We will see the origin of this phrase in a minute. It refers to Christian
doctrines about bodily functions, riddled with undertones of guilt, hatred of the body, bodily
pleasure as sin and so on. Christianity, God, wants to constrain or destroy the creative
liberated body, the BwO, and so do scientists and doctors -- both reduce us to animal-like
organisms. The animal parts of us are seen as defining us. The organism is therefore a
stratum on the BwO, something that has accumulated, coagulated and sedimented 'in order
to extract useful labour' by imposing particular forms and functions and organizations on the
BwO. So, taking the obvious example, manual labour especially reduces us to 'organic muscle
power', as if we were horses or oxen.
We counter it by 'articulating' our organs differently, rearranging the priorities and

connections, as in some of the experimental practices above. That is to refuse dominant
notions of the human organism, refusing to be judged by our 'natural' bodies, as brutes or
beasts of burden, as mere 'specimens' by doctors, or as fleshy robots by scientists.
Signifiance (NB not significance) refers to the operation of conventional language systems,
the translator's note tells us. Roughly, it is the capacity to signify or make sense using
conventional language and its approved techniques. Mostly, this is heavily conventional and
we are forced to use language 'properly', in a form of deep socialisation which 'clings to the
soul'. Plateau 5 discusses this best, when you are ready – for example we are told that
language contains implicit 'order words' which imply social hierarchies. Experimenting with
signifying is the only way out – hence the general admiration for experimental language and
art.
And the individual subject. We become subjects only by accepting discipline – elsewhere,
Deleuze and Guattari expresses some admiration for Althusser's marxist account of this
process. Again Plateau 5 awaits. We are offered an apparently individual identity in social life
and we learn to accept it, and our place. Incidentally, Althusser (1977) saw the school as a
major mechanism here. This discipline is heavily reinforced every day and is very difficult to
resist. We counter it with experiment again, with nomadism, nomadic subjectivity, insisting
we are several selves.
The mental disorders, especially paranoia and schizophrenia had already been discussed in
some depth in Anti-Oedipus and again the BwO emerges as a key term. Annoyingly, the copy
I have does not offer a full index of concepts. So we can't really use the study strategy that
we have been advocating with this particular volume, which is to use the index to collect
examples of the term in use. As before, as I read through my copy of Anti-Oedipus, I noted
down a few page numbers where the body without organs is discussed. My notes on Anti-
Oedipus are not as full as I would've liked, because it was the first book by Deleuze and
Guattari that I read, more than 20 years ago, and I wasn't quite into them by then.
Nevertheless, we can summarize a few themes and try to see how the body without organs
fits.
MH
Anti-Oedipus is openly political in its condemnation of capitalism and the way in which it
controls people. A dominant feature is the critique of approaches to mental illness and
mental health which end up by constraining the creativity of human beings and making them
much more malleable. Indeed, at its worst, analyses of matters such as desire can imply that
a healthy orientation will actually require levels of political oppression or social repression.
Some do not undergo the stages of being disciplined successfully and they end up with
neuroses, things like obsessional disorders or hysteria, or even psychoses. The psychoses are
serious mental illnesses that dominate the life of the sufferer, such as paranoia or
schizophrenia.
Other Freudians have developed these arguments about psychosis in particular, and the
work of Klein is discussed in Anti-Oedipus as well. To be very brief, the argument is that all
infants have a traumatic experience when they first encounter the outside world, and
discover objects, including people, other than themselves. Indeed, some of these other
objects are positively threatening, claiming the attention of parents, and increasingly
intruding into the safe and secure world of the infant. There seem to be two responses to
this trauma in Klein. First, children can get very depressed at realizing that they are no longer
the centre of the world, and this depression can develop into psychosis. It takes the form of
a paranoid suspicion and hatred that the outside world is determined to crush or extinguish
them altogether. Second, they can try to protect some inner self, by splitting up their
identity, and insulating the inner one from outside reality altogether, for example. This split
self can turn into schizophrenia.
If we can summarize the main critical thrust of Anti-Oedipus in a few words it would be to
suggest that this whole schema is far too rigid and driven by an interest in control. Infants
are far more creative than Freud and Klein believe. We saw this in the session on the
rhizome with the case of Little Hans, who stars in Anti-Oedipus too. Hans was trying to make
sense of his world and to join together all the elements that interested him in the world
outside his parental home, especially those he could observe from his window, which was
situated opposite a loading bay. His early attempts to make sense of these events in his own
way were interpreted by Freud in the classic terms of Oedipal anxiety. The lad's agoraphobia
could be explained ultimately by his anxiety that his mother would have another child – the
box-wagons stood for wombs. The structure of the 'normal' family as Freud saw it was
imposed, as a mechanism to control 'natural' but anti-social sexual forces. No violence was
required, although his mother did make the routine threat that she would castrate him if she
caught him masturbating.
That was an historical case producing a lot of speculative analysis, but Guattari himself
worked with adult psychotics in his experimental clinic. Many had already had the usual
treatments for their disorder, often confinement in an institution with compulsory
treatments like electro-shock therapy. Guattari treated them instead with group therapy
with every effort made to reconnect people, 'transversally' or rhizomatically, with the real
world, not the paranoid or schizophrenic one. The regime tried to open out experience and
build on creativity, to break the barriers between staff and inmates. Patients were
encouraged to participate in new forms of work, or new contacts with the arts.
End MH
Both Guattari and Deleuze had a particular interest in a famous figure in the bohemian
artistic life of Paris -- Antonin Artaud. Artaud was seen as a wildly creative figure,
experimenting with drugs, writing experimental texts and inventing a new kind of theatre --
the theatre of cruelty (cruel or uncompromising toward the audience, that is). Artaud had
been confined in an asylum for a decade, away from Paris, diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and
had suffered a great deal. He was treated with a behaviour-shaping regime including ECT,
severe diets, and deprivation of social contacts. He was finally rescued after a campaign by
Parisian intellectuals and others, but had clearly suffered: he was in ill health, a drug addict,
and had lost all his teeth. He was regarded as a bit of a martyr, and there are two long
documentaries available on YouTube telling his story. (refs at the end
He wrote a play outlining his personal philosophy and defending himself against charges that
he was mad. The title of the play was To Have Done With the Judgement of God – the origin
of the terminology in Deleuze and Guattari. It included scurrilous mockery of the catholic
church, made all sorts of allegations about Americans, and advocated drug taking. It was due
to be broadcast on French radio on November 28, 1947, says Brian Holmes (2009) but was
banned: alert readers will see that that date appears under the main title of Plateau 6 on
BwO.
The play was not broadcast, but it probably circulated among the intellectual underground.
It finally surfaced in the form of a heroic reading of the transcript in English on YouTube
(Vaughan-Johnstone, nd) , and finally, the whole thing became available on the web [see
Surrealism-Plays, nd). It is a very strange piece, and you can read it yourselves. The bit about
body without organs occurs right at the end:
Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him
bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with
god his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered
him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.
OK we have done the main thrust of the argument I think, except for Spinoza. He crops up
elsewhere as we have said, and here is he being rendered as offering 'the great book of the
BwO'.
Spinoza drew attention to bodies long before Bourdieu or Foucault. He argued that an action
in the mind is necessarily an action in the body, or a passion in the body is necessarily a
passion in the mind...that consciousness is actually an illusion, which merely registers
effects. We have hinted at this in the earleri videos when discussing affects.
In general, Spinoza, according to Deleuze (1988) is famous for the idea that there is a single
substance with an infinite number of attributes, uniting God and nature. This denies the
transcendental God, and implies a number of ‘practical theses that made Spinozism an
object of scandal’ (17).
Roughly, existing things are just modes of the attributes of universal substance. Modes
represent degrees of power to affect and to be affected, which they get from their origins in
'universal substance', so to speak.
I don't know if this is helpful or not. I think it means that the BwO is something like the
universal substance, and specific organisms, or organisations of its organs, are modes. In
other words, we have two levels of reality again, an actual and a virtual. This is seen perhaps
in philosophical asides throughout ATP Plateau 6:
[The BwO is] a distribution of intensities in a spatium [something which is intensive itself],
and not space. ..non-formed, non-extensive matter, 'intense matter', something where
'intensity = 0" , and zero is not to be taken as negative, simply as a sign that there is no
energy at work except that which matter itself possesses. (169) ...the full egg before the
extension of the organism and the organization of the organs', before the formation of the
strata' (170 )
This notion of the egg, full of potential and as yet not fully formed into separate organs and
conventional bodies also appears in AO, linked to the specific paranoid and highly detailed
fantasies of Schreber:
The body without organs is like the cosmic egg, the giant molecule swarming with
worms, bacilli, Lilliputian figures, animalcules, and homunculi, with their organization
and their machines, minute strings, ropes, teeth, fingernails, levers and pulleys,
catapults: thus in Schreber the millions of spermatazoids in the sunbeams, or the
souls that lead a brief existence as little men on his body....The socius [existing social
system] is not a projection of the body without organs; rather, the body without
organs is the limit of the socius, its tangent of deterritorialization, the ultimate
residue of a deterritorialized socius. The socius—the earth, the body of the despot,
capital-money—are clothed full bodies, just as the body without organs is a naked full
body; but the latter exists at the limit, at the end, not at the origin. (281)
That is, existing societies are not the natural production of the creative potential of human
bodies, but stratified, 'filled' and 'clothed' versions of it. If we can work back from these
added forms of organization we can get to the BwO, as we will see in a minute.
There are several more asides but I will leave you to find them. Two final implications
remain, divided rather artificially into political and philosophical – as you will see, both are
connected:
1. Political. We are in a social formation and need to see how it is stratified. Then we can
trace the strata back to the deeper assemblage. Then 'tip the assemblage' towards the plane
of consistency [that is treat it as a plateau, to see how it connects at the virtual level]. This
reveals the BwO as a connection of desires, flows and continuum of intensities. This will
provide each of us with 'your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into
other collective machines' (179). BwO is therefore a place and the plane of consistency, a
collectivity - 'my' body is a location on it, 'what remains of me, unalterable and changing in
form, crossing thresholds'.
However, we have to be very careful before abandoning conventional bodies altogether in

radical experiments, and D&G get rather conventional here: We have to keep enough of our
organism to carry on with every day life and enough signifiance and subjectification if only to
be able to criticize them as systems, 'to respond to the dominant reality'(178). We can
'mimic the strata'. We should beware excessive destratifying which will lead to 'empty and
dreary bodies' [the catatonic drug addict, the seriously ill schizophrenic, or, in terms of the
body politic, the absence of democratic bodies in fascist dictatorships]. Patience is required,
a temporary dismantling of the organs. It is easy to 'botch' it, failing to produce it, or
producing it as something empty. Heading towards the plane of consistency and
experimentation will end in death, a black hole or catastrophe unless you take precautions.
Better to stay stratified rather than provoke an even heavier stratification. Hence 'lodge
yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous
place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,
experience them, produce flow, conjunctions here and there... [but] have a small plot of new
land at all times'. We need a 'meticulous relation with the strata'. [In short we need
philosophy to 'connect, conjugate, continue: [produce] a whole"diagram"as opposed to still
signifying and subjective programmes'. Philosophy is the safest way to experiment.
And finally general philosophical implications
How does the BwO (and the haecceity as well) relate to the whole of virtual reality, or rather
what we can understand of it, the 'plane of consistency'? We find a bit of indecision here, a
problem yet to be solved – eg:
...masochism, Tao and courtly love are [not] interchangeable, but they are locations on a
field of immanence or plane of consistency, which we must construct [by philosophizing, of
course]. This runs through different social formations and assemblages and shows itself in
different types of BwO. 'The plane of consistency would be the totality of all BwOs, or pure
multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chinese, another American, another
medieval, another petty perverse, but all in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in
which each person [sic] takes or makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will
have succeeded in abstracting from a Self... According to a politics of strategy successfully
abstracted from a given formation' [sounds a bit like Foucault on strategy here]. (174)
But later ...So the plane of consistency is not the sum of BwOs, but rather the sum of
elements that have been selected, full and creative BwOs, leaving out cancerous or empty
bodies. Is this just a logical construction, or does each BwO actually produce effects which
are 'identical or analogous to' those of others? If so, we might be able to get the same
effects from drug use or masochism from other BwOs, like 'being soused on pure water' as in
an experiment by Henry Miller. Or perhaps there is a real exchange of substances, an
intensive continuum of substance. 'Doubtless, anything is possible' (184). [Guattari doesn't
really care, if this is indeed him -- it is therapy and politics that attracts him]. In any case, we
need 'an abstract machine capable of covering and even creating [the plane of
consistency],... assemblages capable of plugging into desire' which will ensure there are
connections and pursue 'transversal tie-ins'. If we don't do this, all the BwOs will remain
separated from each other marginalised, and cancerous and emptied doubles 'will triumph'.
We still haven't covered all the examples – there are more in the books on Proust, Kafka and
in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. You will have to read this for yourselves – I've given page
numbers for relevant sections in the references. The idea is that you can achieve a BwO by
developing a particular writing technique -- a machine that does not write about the normal
bodily sensations and emotions or from normal subjective positions. Both Kafka and Proust
manage to do this, after normal subjective writing. Bogue's book is really good on this.I also
have notes on a useful article by Buchanan on the BwO.
Deleuze had an early interest in cinema as also offering a chance to develop non-human
'machinic 'perspectives through cameras and sound recording equipment, and the books
(especially Cinema 2) show how modern film-makers detach from the normal 'sensori-
motor' perspectives of conventional human subjects.
STOP PRESS: I have also discovered a bit on the BwO in the paintings by Bacon: Deleuze, G. (
2005) Francis Bacon. Trans. Daniel Smith.London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 34--6.
Deleuze for the Desperate #5: the movement-image
Dave & Maggie Harris
The first thing you need to consider when you read Deleuze on the cinema is that Deleuze is a
philosopher. He seems to display a great deal of knowledge about film, and he probably was a
considerable film buff, but his main interest is in seeing film as a kind of philosophy. He sees a
number of other art forms, like novels, painting and theater, in the same way, as attempts to think
about the world and to depict reality. With the cinema, he is particularly interested in the way it is
able to show us movement and the operation of time: that's why the two books are called the
movement-image and the time-image. This makes Deleuze's account of cinema rather selective from
the beginning, because he's choosing films that particularly illustrate these two sorts of image,
although he thinks they are very common. Largely, his chosen films are going to be what might be
called art house or experimental film. There are some films discussed which are more popular, but
even here, these films illustrate the work of thinkers and philosophers, who also happen to be
directors or screenwriters, auteurs as they are normally called. These auteurs have written about
film as well as making some classic breakthrough films. They include figures you will have heard of,
such as Griffiths, Hitchcock, Hawks or Welles, Pasolini, Rossellini and Visconti, Eisenstein and Vertov,
but also Mizoguchi, whose work I did not know but who is acclaimed.
M. Harris
What you don't find in Deleuze is much discussion of the things that have interested recent media
theorists: nothing on the audience; nothing on the production side of film; often very little
commentary at all once the film has been fitted in to his overall scheme of work. Indeed, you can call
on knowledge of these more modern topics to criticize Deleuze's work for its obvious
selectivity. Deleuze tells us that he knows this is a selective treatment, but that he is not interested
in the history of the film. He also has a pretty low opinion of a lot of popular film.
End M. Harris
I repeat, he is a philosopher, and he is interested in film as philosophy, not as entertainment, not as

an aesthetic form, and not as ideology. The very book starts with a commentary on a particular
philosopher that Deleuze admires and has borrowed from— Henri Bergson. I feel sorry for poor film
studies students who open the book and encounter that first chapter! Ideally, you need to read what
Deleuze thinks of Bergson more generally. If you don't have too much time at present, you might
just have to rely on my gloss on Bergson's concepts for now. There are also some notes on Deleuze's
view of Bergson on my website here.
In one of his books, Matter and Memory (vii--viii) , Bergson defines what he means by an image:
'a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than
that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed half way between the "thing" and the
"representation". This conception of matter is simply that of common-sense'. So the image is not a
picture or representation of something, which is what we might normally think of as an image. For
Deleuze, these representations would be better understood as signs. Instead, an image is rather an
idea of something, a conception of something that exists. So, to jump ahead, a movement - image is
a conception of the way in which things move. As we will see, this conception does not involve a
single representation but a whole series of signs, a whole sequence of shots.
Deleuze also thinks that the study of signs in the work of CS Peirce is going to be a good way to begin
to understand the signs found in cinema. I'm not going to discuss this here at all, however. Bogue
(2003) is the best text to read to trace this argument out.
There's a lot of references to films you may or may not know. Again we see Deleuze's rather narrow
interest in movement, and also his unconscious elitism again—no doubt all his friends in Paris had
seen these films, and he is assuming that we readers will have seen them too. There is often rather
limited comment as a result. You might be more used to discussing film in more detail, and this will
be a critical resource. However, one of the delights in reading the books for me was the discovery of
directors and films I'd never heard of before, and I was able to go off and have a look at them. I
learned a lot. Another delight was seeing what Deleuze made of films that I had watched, and using
his work to develop new ways of looking at them. If you had the time to read more widely, and
watch the films like I did, you would probably enjoy the books a lot more. But you are pressed for
time, I have been assuming throughout this series, so let me see if I can put you straight on the
money. It is not quite so simple as with the earlier topics, where we plucked key concepts out of the
wild and woolly theorizing, because whole books are devoted to these concepts. So this video can
only offer a kind of initial orientation to the argument, a first grasp, which will obviously be limited
and will need fleshing out. But the assumption is we have to start somewhere, that we cannot just
plunge straight into full blooded Deleuze, especially if these books on the cinema are the only ones of
his you have read.
Let's concentrate here on the philosophy of the cinema. I have more extensive notes on the actual
books on the cinema on my website which you can go to if you want: here and here.
Why should images or conceptions of movement and time be so important? Deleuze has a very good
argument here. First, these are important philosophical concepts to understand how the universe
works, and Bergson has made a major contribution. Second, these are precisely the images or
conceptions that the cinema in particular can depict. The cinema offers us images which are quite
unlike those of any of the other arts.
Strangely, though, a lot of conventional film studies can be seen to largely ignore movement and the
specifics of moving signs. For example, in my day it was common to use analyses of photographs to
try to understand film, or at least stills from film. One example would be Barthes' (1973) famous
analysis of the photograph of the black soldier standing underneath a French flag. We would
examine signifiers in this photograph, those usually understood as denotations and
connotations. Other analyses tended to take film as a form of written literature, and would use the
same analytic techniques to grasp filmic narrative as they would to grasp narrative structures in a
novel. I think of analyses which I used to do of the Bond movie, which would begin with a discussion
of Eco's structuralist analysis of the Bond novels. Analysts would try to find all sorts of parallels with
literature, and use terms such as signifier, syntagm and paradigm. Sometimes they would identify
particular narrative structures, such as realist ones, in the novel, and then try to find them in film, to
cite a debate that raged in the 1980s, associated with the name of Colin MacCabe (see Bennett et al
1981).
M. Harris
The first shock that Deleuze offers is his argument that none of these approaches are going to be
able to properly grasp movement in film. If we look at film stills we are not looking at film
movement, and if we are looking for literary forms, we will miss the particular ways in which film
links elements, including those not found in literature, like visual or sonic ones. These are linked
together to form a narrative.
End M. Harris
Let's start with some very simple observations about movement. The cinema is very good at
illustrating movement, we can all agree, but it does this in a number of ways. Very early cinema, for
example, was rather like the theater in that a fixed camera on a tripod recorded the action that was
taking place in front of it on a set. We saw movements, by the actors, and sometimes by non
humans like horses, but it was within the confines of theatrical notions of the set and a scene, even
when shooting outdoors. The scenes would then join together with other scenes, with
straightforward cuts, where the screen just went dark, just like scenes at the theater.
However, cinema soon developed different ways of illustrating movement. One way is by editing
scenes together so that they represent a larger sequence—montage. There are clearly different
ways to do this, and you might have learned about some of the conventions of realist or continuity
editing. For example, the camera obeys the 180° rule, or the need to match shots on eyeline across
cuts, or pursue shot - reverse shot techniques. If skillfully done, the join between the shots is
practically invisible to the audience, at least once they had learned how to view cinema, and the
movement in the film flows across the cuts. One great example here is Hitchcock's film Rope, which
is cleverly edited it so it looks as if it is just one continuous take, or at least a couple of continuous
takes (Deleuze does not mention this example himself).
The real breakthrough, however, came when cameras were able to move themselves, tracking in
various ways for example. The invention of different sorts of lenses, including the zoom lens, also
enabled them to move in and out of the scene, so to speak. The cinema developed the classic variety
of shots—long shot to establish context, mid-shot to focus on action, closeup to display
emotions. Again a movement flows between the shots as montage or zoom. Of course, with the
advent of talkies, film could also include sounds and make them act as signs as well.
The cine camera also developed unusual pictures of reality, which are not just those of natural
human perception. The camera can give us a nonhuman or objective view. To take some easy
examples, it hovers above the landscape or it zooms in and out. In more experimental cases it can
show slow motion or time lapse, reverse sequences, or very unusual non natural angles (try
Downside Up). Modern cameras can stand in places where humans cannot—in front of a stampede,
in a clearing in the forest in front of a dangerous animal, lowered into the sea, put on the outside of a
space vehicle. We can see the world as it is without human perceptions (Deleuze calls this whole set
of points of view, including human and nonhuman ones, 'percepts'). The ability to depict the
nonhuman or the objective is important, because it is going to show us how human subjects are
affected by things moving in a life of their own, relating to each other without human intervention,
or even human knowledge.
Now, the camera can depict some very interesting kinds of movement, interesting for philosophers,
that is. We are finally beginning to see illustrations of what movement really is for people like
Bergson. It is not a mysterious force that operates somehow in addition to or between still
moments, which is the classic Greek conception. Instead, movement is a force in itself. Everything is
in motion, and still objects are seen as temporarily halted movement. We now see movement not
just in terms of fixed poses or instants, but as operating constantly, affecting all the stages in
between significant moments, 'any-instants-whatever', as Deleuze puts it.
This conception of movement as the major process in depicting reality began to deliver results in
maths and science too in the early 20th century, and Deleuze briefly mentions a couple of them. One
view of physics, often shown in popular documentaries (like B Cox's recent Forces of Nature episode
2), has the independent movements of forces occasionally stabilizing around attractors and slowing
down or cooling down to produce matter, first gaseous then solid or liquid matter. Deleuze cites
Bergson's understanding of this as a matter of light being obstructed by matter, and we should see
light as standing for all the electromagnetic forces.
Incidentally, in the second commentary on Bergson, Deleuze gives the clearest definition yet of the
term that keeps cropping up in his work—the plane of immanence. Immanence (with an 'a') is a
state where some inner potential is being realized. The plane of immanence is that theoretical but
real level of the universe in which energy is just starting to turn into matter, where light is just
beginning to be obstructed, a plane where matter and energy coexist, both virtuals and actuals exist,
in Deleuze's terms. It is a bit like the level at which both ice and water coexist at 0°centigrade.
Cinema also shows this new kind of creative, active movement on the plane of immanence, or rather
the image or conception of it. This is the important development in the movement image. One such
movement that Deleuze actually talks about quite a lot in the first volume is between background
and foreground, context and location, the big picture and the local picture, the objective and the
subjective, what is in the frame and what is left outside it. Parts are shown in relation to wholes by
these camera movements.
You probably know that some people think there is a formula for the narratives of popular films: an
initial state of equilibrium is shown, then it is disturbed by some intruding force to produce
disequilibrium, then the problem is resolved leading to a new equilibrium. Think of High Noon, my
favorite western, although again not mentioned by Deleuze. A town in the American west is just
settling down at last to a normal life with law and order, then the bad guys turn up, from the past
and from prison in another state, destroying equilibrium and threatening to turn back the clock,
metaphorically speaking. We hear of them off-frame long before we actually see them. The hero
has to take action, reluctantly, to restore equilibrium, partly by invoking his own violent past. He
wins, but it is a new equilibrium that results, with lessons for us all—ideological ones, you might
think, suggesting that violence is sometimes necessary, even for Quaker women, that civilization is
constantly under threat from dangerous outsiders, but that luckily real men are available to rise to
the challenge.
Deleuze is not interested in ideology and offers a different terminology. For him, there's a closed set
of elements, which could be humans and objects, interacting in a predictable and ordered way. We
mean a mathematical set here not a film set. Then something disturbs the set, something from the
outside. This is able to disturb the set because the set is always only a part of a larger whole, never
fully closed off from the outside, even though no-one in the set realized this. The disturbance
produces a qualitative change in the operation of the set.
Again, this is not just a narrative for film, but a description of how change happens in the real world
too: stable sets of solid things interact predictably, but they are always subject to the Whole,
something more open, something more chaotic if we can use popular terms. This is what produces
qualitative change. Think of a homely example: the dinosaurs were developing nicely into different
species and types, fairly regularly and predictably over millions of years, and then... The asteroid
strikes and we get qualitative change, not change inside existing patterns of dinosaur development,
but changes of species themselves, the extinction of one and the rise of others. The asteroid moving
through space was always part of the Whole, a cosmic system that earth was related to, although of
course the poor old dinosaurs did not know that, plodding along in their seemingly closed set on
Earth.
M. Harris
That is a spectacular example, but it does not too far from what Bergson thinks normal evolution
involves: some element from a complex multiplicity outside the apparently closed world of species of
plants and animals intrudes and sets off a qualitative change. Bergson describes this process in
terms of a life force, an élan vital, and the concept is connected to his major term, duration, which
we will come to in the video on the time-image.
End M. Harris
So, back to film. Elements of the Whole, a set of multiple possibilities, intrude and spark off
qualitative change and the film shows this happening. This can be done in many different ways, and
Deleuze explores some. There are different conceptions of the Whole, for example, in French and
German film and in different genres. However, the thing about classical film is that it still feels it
should place human beings at the centre of this process. It is all tied to humans, and the ways in
which they respond to the world and then react, in the 'sensori-motor schema' as Deleuze calls
it. One characteristic of modern experimental or art cinema is that it abandons this organizing
schema, as we shall see in discussing the time-image. You might be able to see some possibilities
already by thinking of how we discussed the nonhuman perceptions of cameras just now.
How does this work in normal films? First someone, or the camera itself, perceives that something is
happening out there, outside the normal set of stable life, from somewhere that is normally kept at a
safe distance, on the horizon. It has the capacity to change everything. We see the smoke from the
Indian fires, the gathering snowstorm, a new threat to world order in the rise of dangerous
politicians or gangsters, the initial signs of an alien invasion, or whatever. This has to be shown on
screen in a manageable way, in a perception-image. We might have subjective perceptions by the
character, or initially objective ones. Some objective ones can rapidly becomes subjective, or
sometimes the reverse, as in interesting cases where the camera does not adopt the standpoint of
any one character, but moves among them and can come to tell their story in a particularly
important development—the 'free indirect discourse'. These interplays between subjective and
objective are possible because of Bergson's initial insight that we started with: an image has an
existence placed half way between the thing and the representation, and is thus capable of acting as
either. Deleuze modifies Bergson in fact, but let's leave that for later.
After perception, everyone takes appropriate action, requiring an action-image. Again, there are
different possibilities here including different sorts of links between action, situation and subsequent
action, in what Deleuze calls 'large' and 'small' forms, and this is a particularly interesting section of
the book. There are different types of action too, like impulsive or reflective types, and this is where
Bogue (2003) says Deleuze draws on Peirce to help him identify the classic signs for these different
types.
We also see what motivates this action. We see the impact of external events upon the people,
usually in the form of some facial responses shown in close up—a frown, a doubt, a tear or
whatever. Deleuze particularly admires actors who can let micromovements play across their
features, and takes as an example the amazing classic 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne
d'Arc. Incidentally you can now watch this free, online, on the superb website Open Culture here,
together with many other classics. This film tells the whole story, more or less, in a series of large
closeups of the actors' faces—the slyness of the prosecutors, the surprise, hurt, but saintly innocence
of Joan, the sadistic voyeurism of the torturers. This is the affection-image, and 'affection' here has a
special philosophical meaning: it means the human responses to external events, often, but not
always, emotional responses. In Bergson (19), this is clear: affections refer to all the human impulses
for initiating action, not just emotional responses.
Deleuze also sees 'affect' not in modern terms, as just emotion, but as any influence acting on
humans. The term is much discussed in his other work, but there is a particularly neat argument
here in the second commentary on Bergson. Human perception is selective, and we perceive what
we want and need at the time. But the things left out by the selectivity can still affect us, without us
knowing at the time. We still receive affects from events, and we can be strangely affected by things
like the weather, in a favorite example in Deleuze and Guattari (2004), even if we do not notice it or
perceive it at the time. Anyone trying to teach young kids, or students, during a snowstorm will
know that.
Although affects are often registered by movements of the face, or even parts of the face, or a
montage of faces, Deleuze says that nonhuman things or processes can affect us as well. Here, he
notes that spaces or sections of spaces can also offer affects—the bits of wall or stairs almost out of
shot, caught in the closeup of Joan's face. In another film on Joan, The Trial of Joan of Arc, directed
by R. Bresson, we see the mundane spaces of Joan's cell with a glimpse of a busy corridor crammed
with English guards just outside, or we see shots of Joan's manacled ankles as she sits on a
nondescript prison bed. All these refer to the depressing and alarming indifference and
impersonality of these mundane ordinary bits of space, an awareness that they have witnessed
imprisonment and executions before as a routine. Deleuze says such shots indicate any-space-
whatever in a clear link to the any-instant-whatever discussed earlier.
Together, the perception image, action image and affection image are components or 'avatars' of the
overall movement image, the overall conception of a force from outside, from the whole range of
possible forces, affecting the actors and objects in the limited set.
I will let you go off to examine the very interesting ways in which Deleuze develops these points and
illustrates them with films, very often with just a simple couple of comments. The books are not at
all easy to follow at first, and are spattered with references to films you may not know. I coped by
running through the books doggedly waiting for something or someone I did know, while going off to
learn more and watch more films. Quite a few of these films are now online, doubtless because fans
of Deleuze have uploaded them to YouTube or Ubuweb. As I said before, Bogue's excellent
commentary is very clear and helpful.
Finally, you can also turn to the Glossary at the end of volume one. It is in alphabetical order, but I
have picked out the main terms, and I think it makes more sense organized slightly differently. I have
also added some comments.
So the movement image is defined in the glossary as 'the acentered set [ensemble] of variable
elements which act and react on each other'. An acentered set means that movement is not
immediately centered on human perceptions or actions but is objective. As we saw, the most
interesting movements are those that come from the outside and cause qualitative changes. In
classical cinema, centered on human beings, the objective reality has to be given human significance,
provided with an image center: 'a gap between a received movement and an executed movement,
an action and reaction (interval)'.
This center is provided by connecting variable elements to human action, mimicking ordinary
consciousness by organizing everything around the individual's body. First this is done through the
perception image, 'a set [ensemble] of elements [either subjective or objective] which act on a
center, and which vary in relation to it'. The effects of these perceptions are shown in the affection
image , filling the gap between an action and reaction, 'that which absorbs an external action and
reacts on the inside'. The overall result is an action image, an image of 'the reaction of the [human]
centre to the set.
I must say I don't find these definitions terribly useful.
Finally, Deleuze argues that this whole way of making movement image films changed, as the result
of a number of factors. There were social crises like world war two, which disrupted normal
perceptions and actions and their settings. The whole process of depicting movement images
became rather artificial predictable and clichéd. There's also a new philosophical thinking about
movement, with particular emphasis on time. The result was a series of time- image films, which
we're going to cover in the next video.
STOP PRESS. I forgot to mention the useful if condensed discussion of cinema in Deleuze, G. (1995)
Negotiations. Trans Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. I'll maybe mention it in the
next video. I have some notes on the whole book here
Deleuze for the Desperate #6: time-image.
Transcript
Dave Harris
This video is going to provide you with a chance to gain a quick initial understanding of this complex
work. You need an initial grasp, for yourself, before tackling full-on Deleuze, I have been arguing in
this series. I have more detailed notes on the cinema books on my website, references on the
transcript, but I’m going to focus on the philosophical bits here, assuming they will be the least
familiar for Film students. There is a debate about whether the main theme of the book is really
philosophical anyway rather than cinematic (principally in Badiou 2000) – certainly, both are mixed
together.
We’ve chosen the most accessible examples of films as illustrations and you might want to test out
deleuzian readings for yourselves. As we said in the earlier video, Deleuze’s readings are very
‘centred’, and you might easily see all sorts of other things going on in the films as well.
Don't forget (as I did on the video) to look at Bogue's book to see how the system of cinematic signs
is developed, via Peirce)
To start, we can think of a time-image in Bergson’s sense as a philosophical conception of time. This
will not be an ordinary conception of time, indicated by clocks or calendars. We’ll get a series of
arguments about the conception of time from Bergson and then we see how films illustrate these
arguments with various signs and sequences on their own.
Deleuze offers his own summary of the key bits from Bergson pp 82–3 of Cinema 2 (Deleuze 1989),
and there are lots of other resources including my notes on my website if you want them. I'm going
to give a quick sketch of Deleuze’s position here, perhaps with some added bits, some explanations,
simplifications and vulgarizations and some asides
Bergson talks about time first of all in terms of how it affects human beings, and this is found in his
book Matter and Memory. Human beings spend a lot of time engaged in activity with the real world
which they experience through sense impressions or sensations. They have perceptions, which result
in actions, and in normal action, the gap in between is filled with affections. We saw this notion
being used to explain the movement-image in the earlier video. However in practice, something else
intervenes in the gap between perception and action – memory. The first thing the time-image has
to show is how memory works.
For Bergson, memory operates with a number of levels. Closest to practice, it supplies us with
automatic or habitual ways of acting that we've learned in the past, so that I just know how to ride a
motorbike or swim. We're talking here about something that my colleagues in Sport Science used to
call muscle memory, or bodily memory. However, sometimes memory does not provide us with an
automatic connection and we have to do something more deliberate, try to recollect something
that's happened in the past that's going to help us in the present. There is a further level still at
which memory works, to contain all our understandings provided by the past, all our experience with
no immediate implications for action. This is pure memory, and we can access it by a particular act of
placing ourselves in the past, usually by recollecting some particularly significant moment, some
'shining point', or a theme. Once we are there back in the past, we can then extend the links to other
memories located in the same level of the past or in others. If we could do this fully, we would be
able to recapture all our former past life, but before long the present intervenes and sets its agenda
requiring us to act,and get on with forming practical recollections. However, we get close to living in
pure memory when the demands of the present are minimized, and the most common occurrence of
this presence of pure memory is when we dream.
So film is going to have to show us how memories operate. The movement-image film has already
implied and shown the automatic link between bodily memories and action, but recollection and its
connections with pure memory also need to be shown, and one way to do this is via dream
sequences as we shall see.
Memory has a major influence on what we do in the present, and is always crowding in on us and our
perceptions and feelings. It exerts pressure, most obviously through automatic recollection, but the
other levels of memory influence us too, although we might not be so aware of it. Our total
experiences make us what we are. We gain experience by having endured, having persisted over
time, having experienced duration in Bergson's famous terminology. This is not easily measured in
clock time – as so many hours or years or whatever – because we know that the quality of our
experiences vary so much – a moment can be as important as a year. Clock time is a human
construct designed to help us act in the world.
We act automatically, almost like objects when we display habitual movements, but we feel at our
most subjective when we are back in the past exploring our memories. However, my very
subjectivity, my personality is the result of duration. Duration is what produces subjectivity: we live
in and through duration. A few significant films are going to show this whole process of the way
duration makes us what we are, and Deleuze lists some interesting ones, the most accessible of
which is Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Others are going to show parts of this process.
M Harris 1
There are other implications, although these do not figure in Deleuze’s discussion of film. One is that
other living things and inanimate ones are also found in duration. They do not have memories of
experiences like we do, but they are also occupying a particular interval in time or duration. And that
has given them particular characteristics and qualities. We do not always see how important the
dimension of time it is, but it is universal and constant. We can see that human beings or animals
age, that buildings and machines wear out and decay. But everything is changing through time, even
something as apparently solid as a piece of rock. That is slowly and continually being eroded by wind
and water. We cannot dispense with the dimension of time if we want to understand things.
Especially as the present moment, which can seem so important, is actually almost irrelevant in the
great scheme of things compared to the past. Again, clock time seems unsuitable to grasp these very
different paces and periods of duration – we argued this in the video on the haecceity (link?).
Deleuze also has little interest in grand forces or great plans that seem to steer time – Destiny or Fate
–although we do see those in some films, including movement-image films
End M Harris 1
To revert back to human action for a moment, why is the present moment not very important? It is
clear that things I do in the present are intended to have an impact in the future: I study hard now in
order to gain a qualification next year, say. It is also true that the present moment rapidly turns into
the past, so that what I began 5 minutes ago is already past. I still feel the effects of it since the past
is always crowding in on me always affecting my perceptions, pushing me on through a series of
present moments, trying to actualize itself in the special language of Bergson. It's hardly surprising
that for Bergson and Deleuze, trying to pin things down to what they are like here and now, in the
present is not very fruitful, because the present is a mere point in the passage of time, between the
past and the future. In general, this is going to have considerable importance, for example in
criticizing any attempts to isolate states of objects or people in the present or at any simple point in
time in order to study them and generalize about them. What is really happening in the whole of
reality is what Bergson calls a state of 'general becoming', not stasis, but a constant process of time
passing and changing things, linking past, present and future. You might well be aware that for
Deleuze becoming is a crucial concept, and that Deleuze and Guattari (2004) have a discussion of lots
of deliberately spectacular examples where men become women, or horses.
In film, there are some examples of this constant becoming in one particular time-image – the crystal
image – and examples of where the objectivity and independence of time and becoming is fully
demonstrated
M Harris 2
One more thing about duration. If we think of our own experiences, it is clear that things need not
have happened in the way they did. I could have chosen to go to a different university, I could have a
different job, partner or child. There is a whole set of possibilities, only some of which have been
realized. Again the same applies to animals and objects as well. A proper philosophical account of
duration takes these into account. In deleuzian terms, duration is a multiplicity, another key term, a
cluster of related but different possibilities. Some get realized, while others remain as virtual or
potential.
End M Harris 2
The point is that time-image cinema shows us all or some of these characteristics of time as duration,
not all at once necessarily. Movement-image cinema describes us when we act almost automatically
or habitually. Real men instinctively know how to respond to crisis, and their actions are almost
immediate and automatic. They solve problems with action. But cinema increasingly comes to want
to try to represent the effects of memory and time as well, partly as a reaction to films dominated by
the movement image, which, incidentally were also seen as largely American, so European film-
makers wanted to react. We also saw that it is no longer easy to react just automatically to settings,
after everything has been turned upside down by war or crisis—how do you live now, in a ruined city
like Berlin in 1945 [the theme of Rossellini's 1948 film Germany Year Zero, as Deleuze notes].
There were also technological developments in cinema which enabled directors and writers to depict
things non-realistically, including the effect of memory, or states of subjectivity. These are discussed
in the first commentary on Bergson (Chapter 3) in Deleuze's second book on the media. We have to
remember that Bergson himself did not study cinema, but analyzed natural perception, so Deleuze
has to connect his work to the cinematic image specifically. What we actually see on the screen are
visual or sonic signs, and they show us what Bergson described as images (conceptions, in between
ideas and things, we said in the video on the movement-image).
There is an early turn away from normal automatic movement in cinema, and the first display of it is
the appearance of abstract or pure optical or sound signs. For post-War films, the ruined landscape
of Berlin offers shots of buildings and streets which look like abstract paintings, no longer belonging
to the familiar world of automatic action, no longer available for any normal action at all. If they are
not so clearly tied to automatic action, they must only be available for interpretation by
memory. They serve to prompt recollection. They become recollection-images as a first stage to
engage memory—still close to perception and action as we saw above, but not automatic, rather
'attentive' in Bergson's terms. We find these developments in early experiments, but even in popular
film, as we shall see.
M Harris 3
Before we start discussing actual films or film techniques, it is necessary to say that probably all the
techniques that Deleuze describes have now all become clichés too. They are now all pretty familiar
although they were once shockingly new. A lot of recent films deliberately parody techniques used in
serious film, sometimes in the form of hommages, or pastiches. The techniques are no longer closely
linked to the serious intent to do philosophy. They have become much more playful and aimed at
entertainment,and we are not supposed to leave the cinema philosophising. What we're talking
about here is the cultural development usually called postmodernism, and, of course, it happened
after Deleuze wrote about cinema.
It is also worth noting that in many cases, Deleuze is talking about the views of other critics about
films as much as the films themselves. We should also bear in mind throughout that Deleuze’s
reading is a particular philosophical one.
End M Harris 3
Let's return to Deleuze's era and look at his examples of how time is depicted directly. We mentioned
recollection and dreaming earlier. One technique is to use the flashback to indicate a part of life in
the past which is being recalled in the memory. There are also dream sequences. Deleuze provides
us with examples, but he particularly likes those which challenge naturalism or realism and oppose
straightforward linear narrative. Neither flashbacks nor dreams always do this, and both can appear
as a kind of sidestep or pause without disturbing the normal course of events.
Flashbacks used to be introduced by the screen image dissolving for example, sometimes
accompanied with strange music, in order to fill out a bit of the story. Deleuze likes flashbacks that
do something different, show us a ‘fork’ in time, a moment when things could have been different,
where different possibilities are revealed. The films of Joseph Mankiewicz are the examples, and they
include the blockbuster Cleopatra.
Dreams used to be clearly indicated as dreams not reality by the use of visual clues such as slow
motion or bizarre characters. Deleuze mentions a Buster Keaton film, Sherlock Junior, one of those
which you can now watch free online, where the dream of the character is projected onto a separate
cinema screen enclosed in the one we're watching (after a clever bit of superimposition) —all the
time we watch this separate screen, we know that the character is dreaming ( although the two
screens merge after a while) . However the best examples leave us with ambiguity about what is
dream and what is reality, what is the past and what is the present. Deleuze says there are ‘implied
dreams’, and these also offer an implied philosophical criticism of reality and the demonstration of
its connection with states of consciousness. There are cases where everything is normal, except that
the world is moving around the character, for example – the end sequence of Laughton’s classic The
Night of the Hunter offers a good demonstration. I should say that a lot of dream sequences are also
inspired by Freudian theory and show us the Unconscious – but Deleuze is no fan of Freud by the
time he wrote the cinema books so there is no discussion.
Bergson also discusses various psychological problems with memory, which include things like
hallucinations and amnesia. These are also shown on film. Deleuze finds some philosophical
significance here as well because at least they show the disconnections between mental life and
normal life based on action, although I find this a bit forced. They show that the mind has its own
material that it works with in an effective way. Again the best films here for Deleuze are the ones
that refuse to differentiate conventionally between hallucination and normal life but show their
connections. There are some very conventional genres which can be read in this way, including
musical comedies and burlesque. The musical, for example was often seen as depicting an idealized
world alongside the mundane one, and to also display the possibilities of going from one to the
other. Deleuze likes those sequences when a character's everyday walk turns into a dance, for
example, the classic one being Singin’ in the Rain, of course. The same can be said of comedies
where ordinary actions suddenly shift into a strange world of comic events, things go wrong,
disasters accumulate beyond human control and so on. In Deleuze’s hands, Jerry Lewis becomes a
philosopher!
Dream sequences show whole circles of connection between the objects in our dreams, as in
Sherlock Junior, where balancing chairs turn into Keaton balancing on the edge of a cliff, then
recovering his balance in a jungle with lions, and so on. Freud explains these links and their logic in
his great work on dreams (Freud 1977), but Deleuze says the objects are just ‘anamorphoses’,
distorted projections of each other.
However, this circuit can also be shrunk into smaller and smaller circles and even to a point, at which
objects themselves trigger off whole associations of images directly, as it were. This is the difficult
concept of the crystal image. It might help us get a grip if we think of those school science
experiments when a saturated solution was used to grow a crystal of something, usually by
suspending a small object to seed the process. You can see this demonstrated on this link:. As the
crystal grows, it shows us what was a liquid turning into a solid. If we were to get philosophical we
could say we see a past state turning into a present one, or the liquid showing its potential to create
a solid, a virtual state turning into an actual one. This is a key quality of duration, you will recall, so it
is a time-image.
In cinema it is the virtual image crystallizing into an actual optical image, a ‘simultaneous double’ as
Deleuze calls it (68). A crystal-image is one which is capable of showing both the virtual and the
actual. The easiest case is the mirror, where the image in the mirror reflects an actual character, but
then becomes actual itself, takes on a life of its own, and we cannot distinguish the mirror image and
the character. Think of a homely example where you have an interview for a job and you check your
appearance in the mirror before you set off, to make sure you look like a proper candidate. Then it is
the candidate that actually leaves the house, while the person stays behind. As the most accessible
example, Deleuze mentions the mirror sequence towards the end of The Lady from Shanghai, when
both characters, who have already appeared as ambiguous people with different aspects to their
selves just reflect themselves endlessly. There are lots of other examples of doubled images too. The
effect is also to raise doubts about what we knew about the characters before – their concrete
actuality also dissolves as Deleuze puts it.
And then an interesting aside about actors themselves actualising a virtual role, and, when it is done
well, becoming invisible as an actual person – and vice versa as in those films when ventriloquist
dummies become real, or in the superb film Freaks, where the ‘monstrous’ freak show acts reveal
their full humanity. As an aside I think this is a good example of Deleuze assuming a pretty critical
viewer here who is not taken in by the realism of the action or their own preconceptions, but who
reads film philosophically. Or there is the ship in Moby Dick, which is ostensibly a normal commercial
whaleship at one level, but also the seed for scenes from some dreadful cosmic drama that has been
years in the making. Or the hotel in Last Year in Marienbad, scene of the unfolding of two different
stories where quite different things happened in the past, all of them perfectly possible alternatives.
Other examples abound in Tarkovsky, keen on mirrors, and Fellini, keen on seeds, for example.
Another device is the film within the film, or films about making films (my own favourite here is
Truffaut’s Day for Night), again making it hard to distinguish the real film, so to speak. There are
films about producing other works of art too, like Godard’s Passion. For some critics, this can be seen
as an exhausted form, where cinema closes in on itself, but for Deleuze, they also show the capacity
of film to produce these special images, crystal-images. It is also possible to offer a kind of self-
criticism, showing the material reality beneath film, including the need to organize the finances
(Godard’s Tout va Bien is my favourite here, which starts with lots of cheques being signed).
The doubling of such images, showing the connections between actual and virtual are related directly
to Bergson’s terms, and shows one of the interesting things about the present, which we discussed
earlier – the past is always there in the present, the present image also contains its past. In Bergson’s
terms, the present always divides or splits and one element passes and becomes virtual. As
recollection or as pure memory, it is available to raise new possibilities or potentials for present
action –our past selves affect our present ones. Thus ‘we see time in the crystal’ as Deleuze puts it
(81) – assuming you are a philosopher, of course. I sometimes suspect that a deleuzian could see
time in just about any shot or sequence with the right philosophical blinkers.
Many examples then ensue, including a discussion of Renoir’s classic La Règle du Jeu, which, in
Deleuze’s hands, shows several mirror structures linking different orders. The most obvious one is
the reflection of upper class life in the simultaneous life of the servants below stairs, together with its
character the gamekeeper who can operate in both worlds and who will introduce a temporary
disruption or ‘crack in the crystal’ as Deleuze puts it, by killing one of his fellow workers. All crystal
images need a crack in order to move on, perhaps. Deleuze hints that we might even call this a ‘line
of flight’, to cite one of his most popular terms. Many other specific options are also possible,
including what might be seen as failures of the crystalline – for example when recollections or
memories arrive ‘too late’, and Visconti’s films are the example here.
There is also an interesting discussion of sounds acting as something uniting present and past, as in a
‘ritornello’, a recurring theme in musical compositions, and this is another concept much discussed in
Deleuze and Guattari (2004).
Then we get on to two other important conceptions of time, still based on Bergson and expounded in
Deleuze (1989) Chapter 5 – time as a sheet of the past and as a series of presents. The sheet notion
is easier because it recalls an actual model of memory in Bergson, where memory as a whole is
represented as an inverted cone. The point of the cone represents the present in its contact with our
common-sense notion of reality. The much larger base of the cone represents pure memory. There
are layers or sheets in the cone representing regions of memory closer and closer to the present and
to action as you head towards the point.
Orson Welles’ films, especially Citizen Kane, are going to show us these sheets of time. Characters are
asked to recall Kane and they jump back into regions of the past and show a series of events
happening then. We can see that these sheets do not correspond exactly with each other and cannot
be organised as more or less close to some agreed truth about Kane. Nor are they seen as simply
under conscious control – the point is to explain the significance of Kane’s last word ‘Rosebud’,but
none of them can form a precise recollection image to explain it. Deleuze’s discussion of Welles is
very interesting and full (Chapter 5) and brings in notions like how the deep focus shot acts a bit like
the crystal we examined just now, with figures in the past seen in the deep background, and present
action in the exaggerated foreground. Both are linked together, and even interact. Thus we see
temporality itself as an independent dimension and the 'continuity of duration' (108), a depth of time
not space, indicating regions of time, linked to other regions. We see what pushed Susan into
attempted suicide in one deep shot: as she suffers in the foreground, Kane enters through a door in
the far background and moves towards her as an indication of his bad influence on her over time.
Let’s tackle the more difficult notion of the peaks of the present. It follows from what was said about
the crystal as showing us present, past and future. For Bergson, as we saw, the actual present is an
elusive moment between past and future, so it is hard to get a stable notion of the actual present. In
practice we operate with different senses of the present – not so much the actual moment, but a
present of the past and one of the future. If we philosophize hard enough, we can use this sort of
experience to see behind chronological time and the supposed importance of the actual present
moment. Instead we can think of a ‘peak present’, one which informs us particularly well about
objects and their pasts as well as presents, offers a useful point of view of events. We can activate
the chronological past of an event and bring it into the present, adding together past and present
characteristics to develop a clear point of view. This is what a properly philosophical grasp of the
crystal image shows us, and so does a proper philosophical grasp of the event – I’ve argued this in
the video on the haecceity (https://youtu.be/77CMNYJEb4I).
The point is that cinema provides us with excellent opportunities to develop this sort of enhanced
perception by linking past and present. Last Year in Marienbad is again a good example. Each
character offers recollection images, which we see on screen as reconstructions of events, but none
of their recollection images show fully what happened. Deleuze argues that for Resnais at least, this
was the whole point, to show that the full past is never grasped in the characters’ recollection
images, but the film as a whole CAN do this and provide an enhanced or peak view in the present.
This is one way to read the film, as a deliberate construction, a work of art, to show a past that has a
real and independent existence which escapes any subjective attempt to grasp it. Deleuze cites other
Resnais films which pursue the autonomy and separation of levels of time not grasped in subjective
recollection.
This justifies cinema as one art form that does better than subjective memory, showing the
fragments of the past, beyond any subjective grasp and then showing how they can be linked to each
other artistically, breaking with naturalism or realism, in montage and in depth shots. These links are
non-natural but important creatively and politically.
Once cinema gets the general idea of breaking with naturalism, it continues to do so, challenging
natural linear forms of narrative, organic notions of composition so on for example. Both of those
notions are difficult to sustain as true accounts if there is no longer any agreement on past events –
what happened, what happened first. Some cinema sets out to be deliberately pedagogic in this
sense, hoping to correct or challenge common sense ideas about time and events and open new
possibilities.
The rest of the book goes on to discuss various arthouse or avant-garde movies as examples of non-
natural, even downright false, depictions and connections developed in the name of art or politics,
but this video is already long, so we will have to leave it to you to explore...
Good luck.
Initial notes (1996) on Deleuze, G. ( 1992) Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: The Athlone
Press.
NB I took these notes in 1996 ( it is now 2011) , before I had read anything much else on Deleuze. Some of it
makes more sense now! One problem is that I am no longer sure about the origin of the asides in brackets. I
have added doubtful ones in square brackets, not to claim credit but so as not to malign Deleuze. One day I
will go back and check. The actual works are spattered with examples from films of all kinds. I have not seen
that many of them,although they are actually much more accessible now online or via LoveFilm or equivalent. I
have largely omitted these examples, but indicated where in the text they can be found for anyone interested.
There is a discussion on the book and the movement image between Deleuze and two blokes from Cahiers
which is quite useful -- here
NB I have collected together all the bits on Bergson from the 2 volumes here
Cinema raises the old problems and paradoxes of movement and how to analyse it—as a series of
discrete ‘immobile sections’ together with some abstract quality of ‘movement’? A series of
transitions between essential ‘poses’ (common in art) or as ‘any – instant – whatevers’ (common in
analytical sciences)? Bergson’s philosophy can lead into clarifying the dilemmas. Here, it will lead in
turn to attempts to pin down the specific effects of cinema as a combination of action plus
movement— ‘movement – image’ [image in the Bergsonian sense of concept, I assume, something
that is both objective and subjective, material and a representation ?].
For Bergson, movement is a qualitative change in the whole, that is the relation between a moving
body and its environment—a hungry dog wants to eat something and this changes the whole, the
dog and the food. Movement is the dynamic, the ‘vibration’ which changes elements (9). The whole
is never given but always open—durée describes the way in which human beings relate to that
Open. The Open can be closed in various ways by classifying things as belonging to sets, or by
pursuing abstractions. Nevertheless, movement cannot be understood as a closed relation between
immobile sections [I think the argument is here that even apparently immobile sets still relate to
some mobile section]. Images are best understood as an instant, when they are immobile, and as
movement-images when they are ‘mobile sections of duration’. There are also time-images—
‘duration images, change images, relation images… Images which are beyond movement itself’ (11).
Sets of elements are framed as in a cinematic image. They can be saturated with elements, or
‘rarefied’ featuring a single element. There is a correspondence with the depth focus shot and the
close up. They may be explicit and pedagogical, as in Godard, geometric (formalist, featuring lines
and angles), or dynamic (changing irises and other variables). Sometimes they shape the frame
within overall frames, or feature a vocabulary of gradings and distinctions, of light, for example. The
cinema also frames the ‘dividual’ (14) [a possible reference to the essay on social order which
emphasises the replacement of real individuality with a more commercial and structural version, but
also see the Glossary at the end]: some standard of measurement is applied to disparate objects ,
such as faces or landscapes, which produces deterritorialization. Point of view stances also feature
pragmatic rules, [such as continuity editing]. There is a clear implication of a context beyond the
frame too, and this can allude to the notion of the Open, or the whole again, although this is not the
intended effect of continuity editing which merely hopes to synthesise different frames. There can
also be a radical allusion to the whole, sometimes suggested by a single image.
Scenes and shots are cut in two ways as well. There can be a succession of sections with an allusion
to the whole duree, combining immobile and mobile sections. [Camera] movement expresses the
changes in relations in the wholes [for example Hitchcock’s moving camera crossing the road and
going up and down the stairs in Frenzy]. In this way, cinema depicts duration—the shot ‘acts like a
consciousness’ (20), but consciousness invested in the camera rather than in the spectator or the
hero. Cinema constantly reconstitutes the relations between wholes and elements, unlike any
participant or viewer. This is how the films express ideas, in movements and relations, for example
in the combination of constrained, lattice- like shots and circular sweeps in the The Third Man, which
is akin to Kafka’s literature (21). Kurosawa has camera movements like brush strokes in Japanese
characters, and various other spatial metaphors. In these examples, the shot is the movement
image, the mobile section. Shots are more continuous and varied than natural perception, and can
act as ‘the general equivalent’ of all the means of locomotion, offering some abstracted essential
movement, intended to emancipate [from naturalistic perception?] (23).
The fundamental openness of the whole is suggested by cinematic flexible recompositions, which
express ‘time itself as perspective or relief’ (24), rather than aiming at stasis as does
photography. This allusion to movement arises from sequencing scenes, as in montage, and from the
mobility of the camera [Deleuze says that the early or contemporary commercial cinema offers mere
sequences of the mobile sections again, with limited movements]. There can be an allusion to a
depth as well [including political and theoretical depth]. There are in fact many detailed different
possibilities [listed pages 26-27]. Cinema can never actually represent the Open, of course, and there
are always discontinuities and ruptures [and conventional requirements to tell simple stories and
impose naturalistic relations between elements]. The Open is merely testified to, for example by
deliberately false continuities [montage as in Eisenstein?]; these show the arbitrary nature of normal
continuity, and invoke [the context], the ‘out of field’.
Shots combine to give montages, sometimes these can be assembled within shots. There are
different relations between parts and wholes, as a general way of expressing ideas. Options include
Griffiths on the organic unity of the USA as the functional adjustment of different strands,
personalised in the form of duels and so on, through to Eisenstein’s Marxist critiques, offering new
notions of the whole in the form of dialectical relations between parts and wholes. The various laws
of the dialectic influenced Eisenstein, for example the shift from quantity to quality. There also
notions of synthesis and transcendence in the ‘pathetic’ shots—the connections of objects at
different levels of the dialectic spiral, for example the way individuals are connected to great events,
the way consciousness dawns. [There is a very interesting discussion of Vertov and Dozhenko, with
lots of detail].
French cinema took a different option, away from Griffiths’ notion into social science, offering
mechanical composition, the notion of a whole as a machine (including Renoir). Individuals acted as
units, whereas the wholes were depicted as ‘passion’, a kind of zeitgeist. Mechanical analogies
included industrial machines or rivers, or the sea. The relations between the units followed
mechanical rhythms, an algebra to generate the maximum amounts of movement [part of a drive to
establish what was distinctive about moving pictures—‘ photogeny’]. Alternation rather than
dialectic was offered. There are links to the Kantian notion of the sublime here, through the
connections between mundane local movements and movements in nature or the universe as a
whole (46). The whole is not just the sum of the parts. Instead, French cinema aimed at
‘simultaneousism’, seen in developments such as triple screens, polyvision, superimposition. It was
impossible to quantify the effects of these techniques, leading to a feeling of measurelessness and
immensity.
German expressionism used light rather than movement to get the same effect. Light and dark are
seen as primitive givens. Instead of the dialectic, we get stripes, contrasts or blends. These allude to
the non organic side of life which absorbs life and death, oppositions between the vital and the
organic ‘as in elan vital’ (51) [as in Bergson again?]. This produced a characteristic horror of puppets,
robots, golems and so on. [Clever stuff on how the transitions from the organic to the non-organic
were coded by the relations of light and dark, 52-3]. Increasing intensity produces the formless
(another variant of Kant, the dynamic sublime), via a montage of contrast.
More philosophical problems emerged, for example the relations between images and
movements. Was one ideal and the other material? However, movements produce images and
images engender movements, at least in human beings. The cinematic image also offers possibilities
here. For example it organises gestalts as forms of intentional consciousness, showing how the
world becomes image.
Classical phenomenology privileges natural perception rather than cinematic forms, and again
Bergson gets closer: he sees cinematic perception as one possible way to focus and centre
perceptions from a flux. Each set equals an image. These include movement for Bergson,
necessarily, as a kind of implied context and set of relations. The images are the primitive category,
and there is an infinite set of them. The image is identical with movement (59) and the movement –
image is identical with matter, So Bergson is a materialist. However, reality is not a mechanical
system which is closed. The fixed parts are best seen as a ‘machine assemblage of movement –
images’, hence ‘the universe [is a] cinema in itself, a metacinema’ (59). Bergson is the theorist of
movement, and solid bodies are seen as merely temporary [reifications], ‘movements on a plane of
immanence’. Matter is formed from the identity of the image and the movement (59). The
mechanistic universe is only a subset, characterised by its discrete ‘block of space – time’ one of an
infinite number of ‘presentations’ of the plane (59).The image alludes to becoming, to ‘everything
that they have not yet become’ (60).
Potential sites for action are immanent in the sense that light is [some constituting medium which
diffuses]. There are connections here with the theory of relativity as a deliberate project in
Bergson. Light passes on unopposed, and only becomes an image when it is obstructed, just as in
photography. Matter is a fixed form of light, leading to an interesting point about objects not being
revealed until they reflect light. In a similar way, images are not recognized until they are perceived,
but they do exist independently of the perceiving subject none the less.
As with light, so with human consciousness. Unlike the old model which sees the consciousness is
shedding light, as a torch beam does, which classical phenomenology shares, although in a modified
form, ‘For Bergson… Things are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them’
(60). Living beings are unique images, however—they focus and organise, they frame and organise
into sequences (action), organise the flux of variation, operate in the gap or interval between
reception and execution. Hence the organisation and roles of images is at the centre of this process,
and many are omitted according to needs. Human beings have different facets for receiving and
transmitting images. The reception facets close and isolate images as in perception or framing (62)
[called ‘condensation’ in Bergsonism?] . At the other end of the interval, transmission produces
unpredictable open consequences, unintegrated with reception. [Really unpredictable or emergent
as a complex effect of duration?] This unpredictability produces new features of human action,
indeterminism around living images. Thus, located on the plane, images react constantly and
infinitely among themselves; around living matter they are organised or closed and become centres
of variation. There is an evolutionary process here—as matter solidifies into particles, so images are
subject to more and more or elaborate perceptions [this makes a bit more sense after reading
Deleuze on Bergson and duration].
Perception is therefore ‘subtractive’, producing things ‘minus that which does not interest us’. In this
way, ‘an atom perceives infinitely more than we do’ (64) [this is what intentionality does?]. The
cinema can deliver both sets of perceptions, from the ‘total objective perception which is
indistinguishable from the thing’ to a ‘subjective perception’ (64). The latter is a perception–image, a
subset of the movement-image.
Subtraction is not the only process. The rest of the world is recognized as a horizon, a potential for
action again. Perception is inseparable from action (64). The distance between the core and
periphery is a way of thinking about the gap between action and reaction. There is a connection
between perception–image and action–image, both of which are subsets or ‘avatars’ of the
movement-image (65), an organisation (‘incurving’) of the universe rather than a simple subtraction
or framing. There is another possible avatar too—affect, which ‘fills the gap [between] troubling
perception [and] hesitant action’ (65). This refers to subjectivity from the inside [normal human
perspective] and to the notion of quality [Bergson’s separation of multiplicities with differences of
kind and those with difference of degree?]. Affect supplies a motor tendency. It is found combined
in human beings. [So the four types -- movement -image and its three avatars—are illustrated with
examples from cinema 69-70, and there is particular attention to Beckett’s work Film, page 66 F.
There are implications for time- images too.]
[You can watch all 17 minutes of Film here and see if you read it as Deleuze does. It is a convenient
example to match with the extraordinary levels of interpretation Deleuze offers. Deleuze says Film is:
an astonishing attempt...[to] rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves...[like

Berkley] to be is to be perceived, declares Beckett...[the bit where the character scurries
along hugging a wall, filmed only from the back, is]...a perception of action, an action-
image...[The bit where the character enters the room and goes round closing windows,
covering mirrors and evicting pets, filmed largely from the back with the camera not
intruding past 45 degree angles, is]...the perception of perception or the perception-
image...in a double system of reference...[Then]... the character...is finally seen [by the
camera] from the front ...[and] ...the last convention is revealed: the camera...is the double
of [the character], the same face, a patch over one eye (monocular vision) with the single
difference the [character] now has an anguished expression and [the camera] has an
attentive expression...We are in the domain of the perception of affection: the most
terrifying, that which still survives when all the others have been destroyed: it is the
perception of self by self the affection-image...
So – OK this is pretty understandable, but the next bit is much more ...er...contestable...
The end [fade-out on the character rocking in a chair and a close-up eye] suggests – death
immobility, blackness. But, for Beckett, immobility, death, the loss of personal movement
and of vertical stature...are only a subjective finality...only a means in relation to more
profound end. It is a question of attaining once more the world before man...the position
where movement was...under the regime of universal variation, and where light, always
propagating itself, had no need to be revealed...[Proceeding to ] the extinction of action-
images, perception-images and affection images, Beckett ascends once more to the luminous
plane of immanence, the plane of matter and its cosmic eddying of movement -images. He
traces the three varieties of image back to the mother movement-image...Beckett’s
originality is to be content to elaborate a symbolic system of simple conventions [how much
the camera can reveal of the character] – according to which the three images are
successively extinguished – as the condition which makes possible this general tendency of
experimental cinema (66—68).
There are two references in this section to Beckett’s own commentary on the film –in French. They
offer Beckett’s own analysis of the film – according to Deleuze, Beckett says there are three
‘moments...the street, the staircase the room’. But Deleuze says his schema of action-image ‘groups
the street and the staircase, while the perception image covers the room and the affection image the
‘hidden room and the dozing of the character in the rocking chair’ (n 31, 272). A couple of issues
seem relevant : in the first place, the writer is highlighted as the author of the film, not the director –
for the first and only time as far as I can see, since in every other example it is the director, ignoring
altogether the writer, not to mention the actors, the lighting camerapersons and the technical crew.
[My colleague Ian Gilhespy reminded me of this--There is a performance of Krapp's Last Tape
directed by Beckett here]. In Film, was it not likely to be Keaton who added the clowning bits [blimey
– I sounded like Zizek there]? While we are here, the concept of genre is not critically discussed
either throughout and is taken to be an artistic term, never a commercial one.
In Note 32, we are told Beckett has not done enough in his commentary ‘to represent the set of all
the movements’ (227). It seems it was Fanny Deleuze who completed the picture with a rather
baffling diagram (see below -- I can't see a point B can you?). O is the character, OE is the camera.
No doubt this makes a nice neat diagram -- but is this the only reasons for theorising like this – some
notion of completion, mastery or explanatory power? The symmetry of the diagram somehow
guarantees the validity of the classification? This reminds me of the obsessive listing and classifying
in Anti-Oedipus or Thousand Plateaus
Of course these are also centred readings, with the philosophical meanings given pride of place. I
think the film can be read equally well as being about identity and the ‘social mirrors’ that support it
– the views of other people, photos, actual mirrors etc. The film adds the perceptions of pets as
mirrors. But it could equally be seen as about stardom and anonymity, no doubt.
Peirce’s work on signs is also useful, if we see the sign is a particular type of image, one which
represents (from the point of view of composition, generation or even extinction). There is work to
be done on the relations between Peirce’s classifications and Deleuze’s types of image [see Glossary].
Films usually have montages or assemblages of different images, and often one is usually dominant
[in experimental film the perception image tends to be dominant]. Shots correspond too—the long
shot indicates perception, the midshot action, the close up affect. The shots can help us offer a
whole readings of films (70).
The perception-image can be subjective or objective, the former belonging to a participant and
the latter external. These can shift. The subjective image can become a collective one as the camera
moves among the characters, taking on an anonymous generalised viewpoint rather than a single
pov. This is definitely not naturalistic, and corresponds to the difference between direct and
nondirect speech. Pasolini especially used this linguistic analogy, and his camera develops a ‘free
indirect discourse’ (72). [There is an aside on Bakhtin on this too, pointing out the odd tendency to
be a subject in speech capable of referring to oneself as an object – I think (73). The process parallels
the use of dialects in an utterance] This shows the duality of the (ordinary empirical) subject and a
(necessary) Transcendental Subject (73). However, in such discourses, there is never a complete
formal split but rather ‘an oscillation of the person between 2 points of view of himself’ (74) [A
necessary, ironic reflexivity?]. The camera itself often does this oscillation – it observes and
comments on actors as they act, rather than obediently doing subjective and objective perceptions.
An example is Pasolini’s ‘insistent’ or even ‘obsessive’ framing (74) (where the camera frames the
scene before and after the actor is in it). Cameras can also use different lenses on the same image,
including ‘excessive use of the zoom’ (74). This shows the ‘cinema of poetry’ [NB I noted to myself
that all this is derived from Deleuze’s critical perception and it might contrast strongly with what the
directors themselves believed they were doing]. The effect can be to produce some sort of reflexivity
among the actors too as they watch themselves acting, and as the directors become neurotic (75)
Bergson considered the subjective as showing where images vary according to one central and
privileged image rather than constant variation. Subjective variations can produce the objective after
[a sort of relativist] moment, where lots of movements of points of view allude to a notion of the
Absolute or the Sublime. This is expressed in French cinema’s obsession with flowing water, as an
embodiment of variation and flow [lots of examples follow pp78-9].
Vertov developed a notion of gaseous perception. He clearly aimed at demonstrating the movement-
image, showing the possibilities of universal variation in a whole cinema of interaction and variation
rather than a standard materialist perception. The human eye was seen as immobile, and thus
inevitably subjective (the centre of variation). By contrast, the camera showed movement through
montage, which objectified perception, to overcome ‘boundaries and distances’ (81 –quoting
Vertov). It does this by adopting the perspective of matter [images are materialist], for example by
establishing intervals and gaps that prefigure the role of the human subject. The gaps between two
correlated images replace consecutive images, and when these are collected, an assemblage of
matter ap[pears, a deciphering of reality. Vertov extends from suggesting images joined by a subject
to variation as such [the example here is, obviously, Man With a Movie Camera]. There are even
montages of elements of an image. Vertov strayed into formalist dialectics of matter rather than the
humanism of Eisenstein, or the ‘spiritual ’ aims of French cinema’s depiction of natural objects.
American cinema was influenced by Vertov too, aiming to discover molecules of matter or
‘photogrammes’. Their programme corresponds with Castenada as an attempt to stop the world, see
the gaps between objects etc [D really likes Castenada!]. A US experimental film is described as an
illustration (86).
The affection-image. The face in close-up shows this best. A face is any image (even a clock
face) which shows a ‘reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements’, which indicate normally
hidden aspects [a better start than the pseudy delirium of the commentary on faces and faciality in
Thousand Plateaus].The passive immobile surface signifies a surface while the micromovements
show the hidden effects of desire, hence different kinds of close up [LCU and VLCU?]. [Very large
close ups] offer a series of images that produces a qualitative leap, such a movement from one ‘pole’
to the other. Griffiths and Eisenstein illustrate the possibilities (91f). Eisenstein aimed to show the
progression from individual to dividual ( ‘an immensely collective reflection...the unity of power and
quality’ (92)).
It is possible to use light and dark on a face to signify a relation to matter generally [amazing
examples 92—3]. In a close up of the face, images escape from boundaries and immediate contexts,
producing ‘pure affect’ ,located in ‘any-space-whatever’(97). The same effect can be generated by
CUs of other parts of the body or of things. Both the object and what it expresses can be seen as
related, as in the icon [Peirce?], ‘the set of the expressed and its expression’ (97). When actualised,
the qualities of affection-images become the ‘quale’ of the object, the actual emotions or impulses
[associated with it] (97), and thus its action-images.
This is easier to see [!] in concrete or relational terms, rather than via Peirce’s insistence on ‘first’
qualities: ‘qualities or powers considered for themselves without reference to anything else,
independently of ...their actualisation’ (98). Better to describe these as affection-images (not just
action or image), preserving the idea of potentiality. These can only be expressed by ‘a face, a face-
equivalent or a proposition’(99), especially in CU. In CU, faces lose their normal function, to
individuate, socialise [have a social role] or relate/communicate. Instead, faces in CU offer allusions
to nihilism, the void, Fear, as the face expresses nothingness [fucking weird stuff! A fancy example of
the uncanny in Freud?].
Power qualities are not produced by real events since they pre-date them. They are both expressed
for themselves and then realized or embodied [See DeLanda on how inorganic elements preform
complex molecules without human intervention etc?]. Faces in CU also show pure (‘virtual’) relations,
especially how objects and emotions are related. These relations are shown in montage (including
internal montages as different bits of the same CU are shown). The ways in which faces turn away
from and towards [objects] expresses relations – singularities and relations form complex unities like
the dividual again – ‘that which neither increases or decreases without changing qualitatively’ (105)
[seems completely opposite to the earlier definitions]. We can see how faces are linked to
propositions. These are virtual relations of possibility and potentials rather than real(ized) relations,
but demonstrating the latter can allude to the former (the example is the Besson film Joan of Arc
which shows the realized trial but alludes to the expressed passion of Joan) [Pretty simple point after
all the fuss?]. Further examples (107) lead to the definition of a CU as a shot framed so as to
eliminate depth or perspective, or to include a fragment of a field, to allude to a virtual relation.
It is possible to convey ‘any-space-whatever’ in other ways too. The Besson film shows
fragmentations of space, deframings, collision-type links. The any-space-whatever is demonstrated
as a concrete singular space rather than an abstraction. It has ‘lost its homogeneity’, it alludes to an
infinite number of possible linkages, to potentiality (109). So the a-s-w is another way to express the
affection-image, as well as a face [make your bleeding mind up, and/or stop making this up as you go
along!]. The a-s-w would be a ‘qualisign’ for Peirce. Rapid montage can allude to pure
power/quality [ I am not at all sure I know what this means -- another argument with Peirce? A
repetition of the earlier point?].
The a-s-w is constituted [in Besson? Always?] by the play of light and shadows, especially shadows.
These represent the virtual, the infinite. Expressionism offers a ‘lyrical abstraction’ of the alternatives
(112-3) according to whether light and dark alternate or are seen as opposites. There are possible
‘spiritual’ parallels, producing the classic different types of ethical choices, including no choice; moral
necessity; physical necessity; psychological necessity (from desire) [Expressionist cinematic
equivalents of techniques of neutralisation?]. Alternatives also appear according to whether one is
aware of the choices or not – one can choose to choose or live unaware of choice. These are also
illustrated in lyrical abstractions where the theme is avoiding false choices, choices that lead to no
choice (Faust), or a choice to renew choice even if it ends in self sacrifice. Themes can develop into a
denial that there is even a self rather than just actualisations of possible selves, a ‘moralism opposed
to morality’ and ‘faith opposed to religion’ (116).
These are further examples of the relationship between philosophy and the cinema – the choice to
choose is beyond specific choices; the light constitutes the whites, blacks and greys; fragments
suggest the whole; spaces suggest any-space-whatever.
Whole new dimensions are added with colour. [And there is an aside about musical comedy
‘extracting an unlimited virtual world from a conventional state of things’ 118]. It is not that colour
codes affect – colour is affect, it absorbs objects into relations (examples discuss Antonioni and
Bergman). The asw is now a matter of absorption, an empty space. [An aside notes that post-War
cities are also full of empty spaces, potentials, asw]. Experimental films offer examples (122) [one
good example is provided – a slow zoom to explore a room].
The action-image. This is an intermediate form between action and affect, between the
ASW/affect pair and the ‘detached milieux/mode of behaviour’ pair. It also belongs to the ‘originary
world/elementary impulse’ pair. The originary world can be seen as a pure set, the source of origin
of actual milieu. Impulses are seen as the initial energy required to seize fragments. This provides a
naturalist rather than realist notion of actualised forms. [All references to Bergson’s philosophy, I
assume]. Primordial origins can be alluded to as well (125) faith, understood as being immanent to
the originary. They can be represented by symptoms (‘the presence of impulses in the derived
world’), and idols and fetishes (‘the representation of the fragments’) (125). These aspects are
illustrated in the cinema of Stroheim and Bunuel (and the examples here include the drawing room in
Exterminating Angel, the desert of columns in Stylites). These are films about the originary world
which ‘carries the milieu along’, and represents both origin and end (as in the escape of the
bourgeoisie from the drawing room, only to end in a cathedral). The effects of the originary world on
real milieu often appear as degradation or cyclical return, although both tend to represent the
negative effects of time.
Impulses are always directed at fragments (including shoes or even ‘invalids’). Impulses can carry on
until they cross boundaries and exhaust other milieu. They are deeper and more general than affects
attached to objects. They can cross social boundaries (the beggars in Viridiana) and aim at the
general goal of fragmenting, gathering up the scraps and ending in the death impulse. Bunuel is is a
naturalist in this sense rather than a structuralist proper. He alludes to faith rather than religion,
however, in his particular way of discussing spirituality and choice which connects into the tradition
of lyrical abstractionism discussed above.
[A commentary ensues on a number of directors who represent such a naturalism—133f]. The role
of female actresses in American cinema can allude to the originary—‘originary women’ (134), esp.
King Vidor in Duel in the Sun [much discussed by Mulvey as an example of a fiery tempestuous
woman who disrupts normal male society, but has to be killed as a result --trailer here ]. However,
staying at the level of impulse is the problem and there is a tendency to stray into realism, of
actualised milieux and behaviour. Losey is discussed (137): his trick is to allude to originary violence
as too great to be actualised, even in the characters. Here too, women offer an escape into
something outside the ‘hermetic’ world of men.
Action – image, the large form. Milieux are made concrete and actualised in action – images
proper—‘realism’. This can still be linked to originary milieu. Realism can include fictional realism, as
in the dream, defined merely by ‘milieux which actualise a mode of behaviour which embodies’
(141). The action-image is the relation between the two. Milieux can actualise several qualities and
powers which interact on a character, producing a response, and a new situation. The process of
individualisation produces a kind of duel, between man and milieu, or an hourglass structure—the
broad and narrow dimensions represent the broad and narrow dimensions of the character. This is
the ‘large form—“Situation/Action/Situation”’ (141). Each stage has its characteristic signs, including
‘synsign’ and ‘binomial’ [using Pierce again]. The example here is the walkdown/shootout in the
western.
Documentaries can be seen as a subtype of the action image. Flaherty gives an example of the duels
between communities and hostile milieu, without third terms, for which he has been criticised (like
the role of colonising powers and the effects on community). For example, Nanook [clip here]
represents duels between man and environment producing survival and changed situations.
There is a psycho – social subtype in King Vidor, an ‘ethical’ realist form relating individuals and
collectivities. It is possible for individuals do not always trial for change the situation, and they can
even produce worse results. The form is still realist, sometimes hourglass, rather than the
Expressionist notion of entropy discussed earlier, and there is still a focus on concrete milieux and
their pathologies, or specific behavioural disorders. This is the world of the born loser, the heroic
drunk or criminal, especially in its film noir variant. The rise and fall narratives of gangster movies
also fit—here the milieu of the underworld is a ‘false community’, a jungle, while the behaviour of
the hero also reveals fundamental flaws, which can sometimes be exploited by the minor characters
[including the femme fatale?]. The films act as critics of society—or as a compensatory nightmare to
strengthen the American dream (145).
In the western, the landscape encompasses via metaphors of ‘breath’ [sic, 146] or later, colour codes,
especially the ‘sky and its pulsations’ (146). The community and the land is mediated by a
leader. The milieu itself can ‘breathe’ especially in Ford movies, and can bring together minorities in
a melting pot. We are close to epics here, but westerns also include elements of tragedy and
romance. Ford offers change as a spiral movement rather than a circle which permits ethical
commentaries, for example of the transformation of natural law to written law. There are also
‘healthy’ dreams about a community, ‘vital illusions, or realist illusions which are more true than
pure truth’ (148).
There are variations on the birth and rebirth of a nation in American cinema as well, just as in Soviet
cinema, but in an ‘organic’ dialectic [there are British organicist analogies too]. This often takes place
via analogy or parallels between American and other civilisations, especially classical civilisations, and
develops notions of the growth of vigorous national states which have two elements of the American
dream—the melting pot, and the ‘ferment which creates leaders’ (148). These historical themes are
found in all the other American genres too, including gangsters. This is an ideological form of history
of course [with references to Nietzsche on history, 149 f], for example the ‘monumental’ themes
(great buildings and events for example) which are linked periods and tend towards the
universal. There are the usual problems in grasping the real movements of history with its tensions,
which are often represented and individualised as duels. ‘Antiquarian’ themes involves the
reconstruction of past societies as some kind of social context for the present. ‘Ethical’ themes
depict the battle between good and evil, decadence and vigour in a ‘constant discovery of America’
(151). These are often all work together to produce ‘a strong and coherent conception of universal
history’ (151).
So there are common elements among the genres: (a) organic composition and combinatories in
typical action images (sky, landscape etc.)and ‘encompassers’ [ see Glossary], movement within
images; (b) movements which contract into a duel which must be produced by convergent lines from
a situation, as in the ‘large form’ like the hourglass [illustrated with reference to M]; (c) duels
themselves present moments of simultaneity where parallels converge; (d) duels dovetail and
interact with other duels; (e) the large gap between the milieu and behaviour can only be bridged
progressively, because the power of the hero needs to be developed, for example by a group, and
only after moments of doubt or impotence. Strength can be transferred from one character to
another.
There is an emphasis on behaviour as mobile from one milieu to another. Behaviour is to be

structured by the milieu. [Then there is an odd bit about the differences between passive vegetable
and active animal forms, terms which make a link with Bergson—vegetables ‘accumulate the
explosive on the spot, whilst the animal undertakes the demolition’ 156]. War films are an example
of these alternating forms of structuring. Or Baby Doll, [clip] with its slow accumulation of tensions
then a violent release. Or combinations of little episodes which accumulate [On the Waterfront is
the example]. There is a tendency for greater toughness and exaggeration of this process, linked to
the collapse of the American dream (157). These films feature real behaviourism because they see
behaviours as caused, although internal motivations are important too. In fact the focus is often on
the internal dimension, the whole point of fictional realism. This inner focus is what overcomes the
artificiality of realism and of acting. These the elements must appear in the image—each action
image displays an ‘emotion/object’ pair, as much as any other pairing of aspect and face, impulse and
fetish. The inner, the ‘impression’ links the situation and the explosive action.
The action image small form. This is an alternative possible form linking
action/situation/image (see above) where action ‘discloses’ the situation which triggers off new
actions, moving from an habitus to a partially disclosed situation, a local example. This disclosure can
be elliptical rather than spiral, constructed around events rather than organic, and comedic rather
than epic. The signs here act as indexes. The initial actions are an index for the situations, which
implies a lack of knowledge, a ellipsis [for example as in sudden shifts forward in time. Other
examples include highly condensed metonyms and metaphors—a shirt collar falling from a drawer
indicates an affair]. This offers a ‘reasoning image’ (161), where the audience has to work things
out. There are also indices of equivocity [for skilled readers only?], where only slight differences
appear in actions, but where these lead to two very different interpretations, hence the
ellipsis. These often linked with the need to be economical, as in the French new wave.
Again there are different genres: (a) the comedy of manners; (b) the costume film as descriptions of
an habitus. Unlike historical epics of the large form, which are about historical developments and so
on, these are about habits [with a possible pun to allude to dresses]: dress here acts as an index; (c)
Grierson and free cinema instead of Flaherty, featuring concrete modes leading to social situations as
sites of struggle, enabling the underdog perspective to appear; (d) the detective film, where actions
become indices; (e) westerns as well, especially those produced by Howard Hawks, which replaced
the organic encompassers with ‘pure functionalism’, functional groups rather than organic
communities, nor to work based but arbitrary, often collections of travellers. Here local interiors
offer unexpected events in contrast to large experience, such as the odd bits where the functions of
men and women interchange in Hawks movies; (f) the neowestern, which focuses on micro politics in
small groups, such as The Wild Bunch, where the bigger groups fade out—there is racial indifference
for example. There are no grandiose actions, no dream, focus on local westerns rather than ‘the
west’, episodes are linked by a broken line or vector rather than an organic form; (g) burlesque which
is devoted to this shift, for example in Chaplin [how small differences in behaviour reflect large
differences in reality of the situation—a shaking body can indicate sobbing or shaking a cocktail]
(169). Analogy merely shows complete differences between situations. Chaplin films are vectors
joining these episodes. Another example would be Harold Lloyd on the demonstration of the
‘perception image’—he appears to be driving a large car but this is revealed as him cycling behind
it. Both comedians did gestures which could be comic or tragic/emotional. Some commentary was
also offered, as when Hitler and the little man were seen as similar—the idea being that social forces
or discourses produce one rather than the other (172).
The talkies introduce discourses of this kind [commentaries, dialogues?]. These links to the larger
forms in Chaplin. It is different for Keaton, who locates himself in large milieux and borrows scenes
from films of those, for example Griffith, producing large gaps between the location and the comic
action. This gap can be bridged in a number of ways: (a) the ‘trajectory gag’, a rapid sequence of
actions [jumping gaps, sliding down poles, running along trains and so on]; (b) the ‘machine gag’
where weird ( ‘Dadaist’) machines are produced (175) with definite functions. This can involve
‘minoring’, where the immensity of machines is reduced to a personal scale, alluding to a political
‘anarchistic machine’ to assert human rights to use the big machines (176). Machines can also offer
‘recurrent gags’ with absurd causal sequences [as in Heath Robinson]. Minoring links the action to
the situation, recurrent gags ‘make the hero equal to the situation’ (177).
Figures. The figure is a sign of ‘deformations, transformations, or transmutations’ (178). Scripts

can be turned into either large or small forms according to the conceptions of the director (which can
turn on a sudden realization of the signifying power of some detail, for example ) [Storm Over Asia is
the example –clip here -- or Ordinary Fascism –clip here -- where everyday events tell the story]. In
the first example, a dialectic of quantity quality shifts tell the story, a guided small form. Other
directors saw the dialectic in terms of parts and wholes which produced a larger form [Dozhenko is
the example]. In Eisenstein the issue is the reconciliation of opposites, a transforming form [the
discussion turns on how big forms produced concrete embodiments. In 1996 I read this as rather
Hegelian, or buts, presumably it is much more to do with the actualization of virtual potentials in
Deleuze’s own philosophy?] (181). In Eisenstein, development of the small level, the concrete or
embodied becomes ‘pathetic’ [I do not know if this has a special meaning]. Such transformation is
often done via special images, such as the theatrical interludes in Ivan... [clip here] The links
between these images are indirect, via an image which prefigures, or indexes, depending on
whether one is moving from action to situation or vice versa.
This leads to discussion of figures of discourse, such as tropes, where a word in the figurative sense
replaces another word—metaphor, metonym, synecdoche. There are also imperfect tropes such as
allegories or personification, all cases where words are substituted for each other in a strictly sense,
as in reversals. There are also a ‘figures of thought which do not pass through any modifications of
words (deliberation, concession, support, prosopaeia)’ (183). In each case, cinema has figures which
correspond. [Prosopaeia is ‘a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the
audience by speaking as another person or object’, according to the indispensable Wikipedia.]
There are also visions. The example is Herzog’s cinema, depicting visionaries where actors exceed
the requirements of the situation, leading to sublime action (in the large form) and heroic action
(which is appropriate). Herzog also demonstrates the enfeeblement and reduction of the small form
[with some weird examples 185].
Transformations take place in particular domains: (a) the physio – biological milieu which acts as a
transmitting fluid; (b) the mathematical domain, describing space and relationships like the whole
and the part, the global and the local: elements of the local make sense by connection to a global
(187); (c) the aesthetic domain, such as the landscape [and there is a weird aside about Chinese
painting which apparently operates according to principles of either insisting that the elements have
a unity in the One, or that elements are separated into distinct autonomous events. This produces
metaphors of breath, circle, spiral for the former, and broken line or wrinkled stroke for the latter—
so some earlier allusions are explained?] Kurosawa’s cinema is the example, where the exposition of
all the given factors in the situation is followed by explosive action. This is not the same as the usual
sequence from situation to action, though, since the givens are quantitative: an actual situation is
depicted with allusions to a notion of ‘any quantity whatever’’ [this seems to lead to some sort of
critique of positivism here, with its failure to grasp the quantitative properly by acting too hastily and
literally, acting or reacting before a considered approach]. In the Seven Samurai, the question is not
the pragmatic one of how to defend a village, but the more general issue of ‘what is a samurai
today?’ (191). [Deleuze’s admits that this looks ‘mundane humanist’ (192)].
Another approach [Mizogauchi] displays the opposite tendencies, developing from the small form
(192 f). The small scenes are linked, for example by high angle shots for individual scenes, and
contiguous shots ‘which produces a sliding effect’ (193). There is a persistence of medium shots and
circular movements of the camera, and the use of a special kind of ‘rolling shot… [which] unravels
successive fragments of the space to which are… attached vectors of a different direction’ (194) [the
commentary referred to here is in French]. This leads to a lengthening, the connection of fragments
and a demonstration of vectors increase, demonstrating the ‘line of the universe’’, linking together
heterogeneous elements. The lines go through women for this director, although he is aware of the
social appearance of women as prostitutes or oppressed. Reality thus appears as disconnected,
disoriented. [God knows what this actually looks like but try this clip from Ugetsu]
The crisis. Peirce discusses ‘thirdness’, signifiers, their law or relation, as for itself, irreducible to
actual examples. There is a focus on acts rather than actions interpretations or relations, on natural
and abstract relations rather and signification and the law, on natural unities and progressions [the
example here is again one of painting and how portraits led to an interest in the face and then to the
circumstances of painting art]. There is less interest in abstract connections through geometrical
properties. This approach in necessarily involves mental/intellectual/cognitive aspects.
Affection-images and action-images imply some mental or intellectual element, but the latter can
have its own image. This image can explicitly signify ‘relations, symbolic acts, intellectual feelings’,
and a direct relationship with thought. [A strange discussion ensues on burlesque and the Marx
Brothers—Groucho represent symbolic reasoning as comedy as in “either my watch has stopped or
this man is dead”]. Hitchcock was always more interested in relations than a mere whodunit, crimes
was seen as a part of the wider set of relations, of exchange, say: this becomes a symbolic act of
which the actors are unaware, although the camera explains (for example why the hero of Rear
Window has hurt his leg—we see pictures of a racing car). Even the audience can be seen as the
third term, since there reactions become part of the film.
English philosophy developed an interest in relations as a key element of logic. The relation became
the starting ‘postulate’ of the film for Hitchcock [who was therefore interested in English philosophy
or somehow influenced by it?]. His films develop possible variations and changes, were action is
often determined by ‘experienced conjunctions; because… although… sense… if… even if’ (202). To
do this, Hitchcock develops specific signs of relationships—not the detective’s account, but various
‘marks’ (where some natural or customary series is being referred to) and ‘demarks’ (where one
term leaps out of natural relations, such as birds, or the crop sprayer out of context). There also
symbols—concrete objects bear a relation, where a key can indicate a marital relation, birds become
representative of the relations of nature, or objects express nodes of abstract relations [no example
given here —maybe the dead stuffed birds in Psycho express the weird relation between Norman
and hiss dead mother?] Hitchcock’s work led to a crisis in traditional images of the cinema, because
the emphasis on relations casts into doubt the status of the images of concrete objects themselves—
they become mere terms in a relation (205).
This crisis was always there though. There was always a tendency to deny action as such in favour of
showing relations. The milieux in sequences of situation and action are seen as no longer decisive,
but merely one constitutive element of action, part of a multiplicity rather than a decisive fact. The
same goes for decisive actions—these in turn become, turn into improvisation, develop the present
for their own sake rather than a part in a narrative. The crisis has its origin in a number of external
and internal (artistic) impulses. [These look rather like a list of the factors that have produced
postmodernism—the War, the end of the American dream, the consciousness of minorities,
excessively imagery, and the effects of experimental narratives from literature (206)]. Conventional
sequences of situation and action are no longer believable, and new signs emerge [we have here the
usual claim that changes detectable by French intellectuals somehow represent real changes grasped
by everybody].
In the new cinema:
1. The image refreshes situations which are ‘dispersive’, with multiple characters and
narratives, for example Altman.
2. The lines of the universe are broken, become elliptical, featured discrete and segmented
actions rather than regular transformations, or are replaced by chance—‘white events’—
rather than expressions of personal interest [the example here is the actions in Taxi Driver]
There is indifference, the interchangeability of the action-image and the affection-image.
3. There is the dominance of the stroll rather than the journey or the project or
initiation. Aimless movements, repetitions, things that can happen anywhere.
4. Cliché becomes important as a unifying principle of sets of elements rather than totality and
linkage. Unities are provided by actualities (news, interest items, songs) and the ‘eye of the
camera’ [which seems to refer to some internal monologue of a third party]. These become
inner psychic clichés. The inside becomes like the outside [the examples are the clichés in
Altman]. The political function of this is to make the outside tolerable, almost as a plot (209).
5. The condemnation of this conspiracy takes the form of attacks on or demonstrations of the
power of the mechanical reproduction of images and sounds. There is a potential role here for
cinema in offering a critical reflection of its own role (210). Directors become aware of their
own activities in selecting images, for example. However it is common to direct this, at least
in American cinema, both into a critique of misappropriation in two abstract repetitions of
themes of [Altman again] to mere parody for—American cinema now has its own traditions
to dominate it.
Critical trends in Europe include: (a) Italian cinema post-War. The cinema had escaped fascism
both, so there was no need to preserve national honour (as in France), permitting new
beginnings to include the excluded. [The example here is Rossellini]. Neo-realism is the precursor
of the five characteristics of the sign mentioned above, as in the fragmented scenes of Rome
Open City, and voyaging for the characters in Bicycle Thieves. Fellini also offers a plethora of asw,
but there is a reconstruction in the form of clichés of Italianness. There is a condemnation of the
mafia conspiracy too (212 – 13).(b)The French new wave features the voyage-form for the
present in its own right, offering random links, again lots of asw. There is also ‘making false’:
warping perspectives, slowing down of time and an alteration of gestures (213) as signs of the
new realism. There are clumsy fights rather than stylised duels. There is an awareness that these
have become clichés too. (c) New German cinema where the characters can choose to become
clichés, leading to a general theme of suspicion of a general conspiracy aimed at enslavement.
There are problems with these trends too, including the danger of descent into parody. There are
examples of thoughtful reflection on what an image is in Godard, extracted from clichés. There
are links to Hitchcock as well as Marx in the French new wave (pursuing common interests in
mental images and thirdness), but also an interest in smashing the system of perception-action –
effect, a deliberate prolongation of the crisis in order to liberate a new thinking image.
NB There is also a glossary – I don’t know if it really helps though! It shows how Deleuze
interprets Peirce (and Bergson) for his commentary. I have scanned it and included it below (217-
8):
Glossary
ACTION-IMAGE: reaction of the centre to the set [ensemble].
AFFECTION-IMAGE: that which occupies the gap between an action and a reaction, that which
absorbs an external action and reacts on the inside.
IMAGE CENTRE: gap between a received movement and an executed movement, an action and a
reaction (interval).
MOVEMENT IMAGE: the acentred set [ensemble] of variable elements which act and react on each
other.
PERCEPTION-IMAGE: set [ensemble] of elements which act on a centre, and which vary in relation to
it.
PERCEPTION-IMAGE (the thing):
Dicisign: term created by Peirce in order to designate principally the sign of the proposition in
general. It is used here in relation to the special case of the ‘free indirect proposition’ (Pasolini). It is a
perception in the frame of another perception. This is the status of solid, geometric and physical
perception.
Reume: not to be confused with Peirce’s ‘rheme’ (word). lt is the perception of that which crosses
the frame or flows out. The liquid status of perception itself.
Gramme (engramme or photogramme): not to be confused with a photo. It is the genetic element of
the perception-image, inseparable as such from certain dynamisms (immobilisation, vibration,
flickering, sweep, repetition, acceleration, deceleration, etc.). The gaseous state of a molecular
perception.
AFFECTION-IMAGE (quality or power):
Icon: used by Peirce in order to designate a sign which refers to its object by internal characteristics
(resemblance). Used here in order to designate the affect as expressed by a face, or a facial
equivalent.
Qualisign (or potisign): term used by Peirce in order to designate a quality which is a sign. Used here
to designate the affect as expressed (or exposed) in an any-space-whatever. An any-space-whatever
is sometimes an emptied space, sometimes a space the linking up of whose parts is not immutable or
fixed.
Dividual: that which is neither indivisible nor divisible, but is divided (or brought together) by
changing qualitatively. This is the state of the entity, that is to say of that which is expressed in an
expression.
IMPULSE—IMAGE (energy):
Symptom: designates the qualities or powers related to an originary world (defined by impulses).
Fetish: fragment torn away, by the impulse, from a real milieu, and corresponding to the originary
world.
ACTION-IMAGE (the force or act):
Synsign (or encompasser): corresponds to Peirce’s ‘sinisign’. Set of qualities and powers as actualised
in a state of things, thus constituting a real milieu around a centre, a situation in relation to a subject:
spiral.
Impression: internal link between situation and action.
Index: used by Peirce in order to designate a sign which refers to its object by a material link. Used
here in order to designate the link of an action (or of an effect of action) to a situation which is not
given, but merely inferred, or which remains equivocal and reversible. We distinguish in this sense
indices of lack and indices of equivocity: the two senses of the French word ellipse (ellipse and
ellipsis).
Vector (or line of the universe): broken line which brings together singular points or remarkable
moments at the peak of their intensity. Vectorial space is distinguished from encompassing space.
IMAGE AT TRANSFORMATION (reflection):
Figure: sign which, instead of referring to its object, reflects another (scenographic or plastic image);
or which reflects its own object, but by inverting it (inverted image); or which directly reflects its
object (discursive image).
MENTAL IMAGE (relation):
Mark: designates natural relations, that is, the aspect under which images are linked by a habit which
takes [fait passer] us from one to the other. The demark designates an image tom from its natural
relations.
Symbol: used by Peirce to designate a sign which refers to its object by virtue of a law. Used here in
order to designate the support of abstract relations, that is to say of a comparison of terms
independently of their natural relations.
Opsign and sonsign: pure optical and sound image which breaks the sensory-motor
links, overwhelms relations and no longer lets itself be expressed in terms of movement, but opens
directly on to time.

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Deleuze for the Desperate #2 Rhizome

End of optional discussion 1.

Back to our definitions:

The first example isn't too bad:

This could be what they mean by the section on page 9 of ATP:

'Puppetstrings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an

End of optional discussion 2

We can connect this to one of the comments earlier:

With Guattari we merged to become ‘a non personal individuality’. These exist in

First, there is a reference to Spinoza, for example, probably an implicit reference to

This is found in a note on p 151

Structural linguistics is criticised on similar grounds. Seeing underlying structures of language

end Maggie Harris

An old silent pond...

Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias

1. Cogida and death

At five in the afternoon.

The wind carried away the cottonwool

So overall, all the examples seem to feature a coming-together of elements of different

Deleuze for the Desperate #4 The body-without-organs (BwO)

Let's proceed straight away to the examples we have in ATP, Plateau 6.

Each of these constraining strata need a bit more explanation:

Organisms, 'the organization of the organs'….Conventional organisms are subject to the

We counter it by 'articulating' our organs differently, rearranging the priorities and

However, we have to be very careful before abandoning conventional bodies altogether in

And finally general philosophical implications

Deleuze for the Desperate #5: the movement-image

Dave & Maggie Harris

I repeat, he is a philosopher, and he is interested in film as philosophy, not as entertainment, not as

I must say I don't find these definitions terribly useful.

Deleuze for the Desperate #6: time-image.

an astonishing attempt...[to] rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves...[like

There is an emphasis on behaviour as mobile from one milieu to another. Behaviour is to be

Figures. The figure is a sign of ‘deformations, transformations, or transmutations’ (178). Scripts

In the new cinema:

ACTION-IMAGE: reaction of the centre to the set [ensemble].

PERCEPTION-IMAGE (the thing):

AFFECTION-IMAGE (quality or power):

ACTION-IMAGE (the force or act):

Impression: internal link between situation and action.

MENTAL IMAGE (relation):

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