Deleuze and Cinema

Dedications . . . to my loving parents

Dorothy Victoria (d. 1993) and William Charles (d. 2000)

and, finally, of course . . . to the beautiful stranger . . .
Deleuze and Cinema

The Aesthetics of Sensation

Barbara M. Kennedy

Edinburgh University Press

# Barbara M. Kennedy, 2000, 2002

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

First published in hardback in 2000.

Typeset in 10.5 on 13 Sabon

by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin

A CIP record for this book is

available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7486 1726 4 (paperback)

The right of Barbara M. Kennedy

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Discovering the Beautiful Stranger . . . 1

Part One

1 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 9

2 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 38

Part Two

3 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 67

4 Constituting Bodies ± from Subjectivity and
Affect to the Becoming-woman of the Cinematic 84
5 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 108

Part Three

6 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 125

7 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 147
8 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 163
9 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 180
10 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty?
Leon and a Molecular Politics via the Girl and the Child 193

Bibliography 215
Filmography 223
Index 225
Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the many friends and colleagues from different

Deleuzian persuasions, from universities both here, in America and

Australia, who have read versions of several chapters in the book. In

particular I should like to thank both Helen (Chapman) and Christine

(Gledhill) at Staffordshire University, who have both suffered the trials

and tribulations of my writing, and my personae, and offered advice and

support at all times. I also want to thank especially David (Bell) and Ian

(Buchanan), both of whom saved me from `myself' in times of sheer

exasperation and at times even worse, and offered both timely and

welcome words in more ways than one. Thanks too must go to Jackie

Jones at Edinburgh University Press, who recognised the potential, and to

Jackie Clewlow, who gave time and energy with secretarial support. Of

course I should like to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research

Board and Staffordshire University for funding and support. And, of

course, to those whom I love is a heartfelt thanks for continued support

through difficult times.

Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or

sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed

chaos ± neither forseen nor preconceived. Art transforms chaotic varia-

bility into chaoid variety, as in El Greco's black and green-gray confla-

gration, for example, or Turner's golden conflagration, or de Stael's red

conflagration. Art struggles with chaos but it does so in order to render it

sensory, even through the most charming character, the most enchanted

landscape.

(Gilles Deleuze and Fe

 lix Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 204)
Introduction

Discovering the Beautiful Stranger . . .

This book has emerged out of a deliciously dangerous, but delectable

journey through the spaces of Deleuzian deterritorialisations. But there
are many faces of Deleuze, and I can only engage with a selection: faces
from A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensa-
tion (1981), Dialogues (1987), What is Philosophy? (1994) and his
1
cinema books provide the main lines of flight. I have not used his
cinema books as a model for theorising cinema, but have creatively
melded with a web of Deleuze's work. My own line of flight took me on a
journey into the unknown, where dangers lurked, forced their way into
the threshold of my `self ' ± one already fractured, fragile, faltering and
disembodied from too much post-structuralist destratification . . . then a
return to too much phallic and Oedipal anxiety. Film had always been
important to my life, my pleasures, my desires. When I encountered the
philosopher of difference, new thinking and outside thought enabled
creative lines of flight I had never experienced before. This book traces
that processual flight; it explores the energies and intensities of `flying'
with Deleuzian thoughts and transgressing boundaries of established
feminist theory . . . out of bounds! The danger is . . . can I fly forever
through the paths of indifference and insouciance? Why not? Or will the
phallic paths of culture and academia bring me back to the containment
of `academic theory and the rational mind . . .!'
Deleuze is a figure of many colours, tones, many intensities and many
variations, his texts providing vast plateaus and canvases, presenting
themselves as screenic events, lines and landscapes of volitional and
dynamic concepts, brushstrokes, notes, refrains, digital configurations.
His multiple texts, and multiple personae, who are also not personae, act
like heteronyms, puppets or mannequins in the theatre of philosophy,
each text contradicting or aligning with others in machinic assemblage,
more like a factory, some have said, than a theatre.
2 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
I prefer to see him as an artist than a worker. But such a term is too
insubstantial, too shallow, too narrow. As an artist myself, I have always
tried to understand that intensity of feeling one has in that moment of
brushstroke into canvas, or in media work, the sound into image, or in
dance, the movement into muscle, or muscle into movement, the in-
between energies that cannot be described. Where are they felt? Where are
they subsumed? Who and what do they constitute? That is Deleuze: `it is
difficult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins;
preparation of the canvas, the track of the brush's hair, and many other
2
things besides are obviously part of the sensation'.
But maybe that's the romantic in me . . . this I can never relinquish and
maybe can never really be the true academic, certainly never a true
Deleuzian . . . much too romantic for that! Such honesty and integrity are
not part of the Deleuzian panoply of masquerade, discretion, disguise,
deceit and delights. Perhaps I fell in love too soon with a philosopher who
denied too much (certainly love ± and yet at times his work is distinctly
reminiscent of the romantics of the German tradition ± but that's another
project?), decried too much and lost his humanity to the forces of the
cosmos, the forces of the real, becoming-imperceptible. Get real?
Still, in the lurking dangers of his post-human thoughts, his ideas
mingle or bounce off each other, split, disperse, fracture or multiply, often
colliding with great force and passion, that we feel unable to resolve any
formula or stance to his work. There really is no oeuvre to formulate. The
3
`horror' he would exclaim, in true Conradian style, that anyone should
deign to try to do this, or even want to, and Foucault's suggestion that this
century should be called Deleuzian is, of course, a great travesty. I am not
trying to utilise his ideas in any formulaic way at all, but to encourage
engagement and collusion with this difference engineer, that we might
find something `perceptible' in the imperceptible ± a veritable `Figure in
4
the Carpet'.
Outside thinking and transversality cannot produce a schemic philo-
sophy upon which we can model our cultural, sociological, psychological,
ideological or libidinal spaces. Deleuze's texts meld alongside, imbricate
and collude/collide with others, for example, paintings or literature, the
veritable wasp and orchid, whilst at times we find a disconcerting but
delectable challenge in their seemingly contradictory stances, flying off at
tangents, like shooting stars or comets, into the chaosmos of the mole-
cular: Pollock or Klee, Mondrian or Kandinsky? But maybe there just
might be a touch of Rodin somewhere, even Heron or O'Keefe, if we're
lucky?
I have to acknowledge this polysemic nature of his work; work which
 Introduction: Discovering the Beautiful Stranger . . . 3

cannot and should not, God (Goddesses or Cyborgs) forbid, present a

fixed model for thinking. His language and creation of conceptual

personae can often make the reader feel disorientated, lost in space,

floundering in a forest of neologisms. Be patient, learn to go with the flow

and the force of his ideas, for they lead to exciting pathways, new

territories, vistas, landscapes of silence, solitude, but often schizophrenia.

Tease, taste, and territorialise his ideas into new structures, into frame-

works of film, art, music, dance, literature or the performing arts. He

presents not structures, but assemblages or open systems, and it is

through the openness of such systems that we might foreground some

of his ideas in what might seem to the philosopher a reductionist way. My

apologies but also sincere dedications go out to the beautiful stranger who

taught me never to be fixed, never to be satisfied, never to say `this is how

it is'; for, of course, it never is and never should be. I can only pay homage

to some of his ideas, which I here use in a multiperspectival choreography

and cartography, bringing back the aesthetic through the aesthetics of

sensation.
Why now? Why Deleuze? Why feminism? Why this meld? Contem-

porary visual culture has been written and theorised through a wide range

of discourses, one of the predominant areas being the theatre of repre-

sentation, the scopic and the specular economies of the visual. How can

we understand the visual structures of desire if not through the specular

economy? However, as much French theory has projected, the look and

the gaze have dominated film theory. Feminist film theory has specifically

utilised the theatre of psychoanalysis, replete with metaphors of castra-

tion anxiety. We need to rethink a post-semiotic space, a post-linguistic

space, which provides new ways of understanding the screenic experience

as a complex web of inter-relationalities. The look is never purely visual,

but also tactile, sensory, material and embodied. The eye in matter. This

book seeks to reconfigure corporeality and the role of the mind/brain/

body within the notions of sensation, through Deleuzian philosophy.

It seems that at the dawn of a new millennium, the impact of the

philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, like that of his counterpart Fe

 lix Guattari,

will substantially reverberate across science, literature, politics, art and

the visual media. My interest has been with reference to his significance to

film studies and to an understanding of a new aesthetic paradigm through

which to consider film as something `outside' the purely representational.

This has significant reverberations upon post-feminist epistemologies,

which have also been offering discourses outside of binary and Western

traditions of thinking, and, similarly, within those debates have proble-

matised concepts like subjectivity. A healthy concern with the non-

4 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
psychical explanations of the material world emanate from both the work

of Deleuze, with resonances from Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche and others,

and also in the work of current post-feminist pragmatics and epistemol-

ogies. Deleuze's ideas have challenged the very conception of thought

which prioritises rationalist discourses that underpin our ways of think-

ing, writing and expression, and our understanding of aesthetics, an

important concern in the realm of film studies. Bringing back the aesthetic

into view, following a lapse into obscurity as a result of cultural and

sociological studies of film, is a stance I wish to take; a stance which will

have as its basis the ideas formulated from Deleuzian lines of creativity.

He stands outside Cartesian dichotomies of Western epistemology,

blowing apart the labyrinths of thinking and exploring the caverns of

secrecy and indiscernibility.

Within film theory and predominantly feminist film theory, film has

been theorised through debates about representation, signification,

semiotics and structuralism. The concepts of `subjectivity' and `desire'

have been theorised through a wide range of critiques. This book

proposes to provide a new mind-set, which offers a way of thinking

beyond the language of desire and pleasure, beyond notions of a sub-

jectivity, through Deleuzian conceptions of affect, becoming-woman and

sensation. A new mind-set where subjectivity is problematised. Desire is

rethought through a different lens, a different mapping. A Deleuzian

theorising of the beyond of desire has much to offer a post-feminist

pragmatics, an agenda which seeks to move away from the strict binary

discourses of modernist configurations.

Contemporary cultural formations have been theorised through post-

modern ideas of fragmentation, distillation and a `politics of difference'

which has questioned fixed notions of identity and subjectivity. How do

we begin to understand and account for the popularity, the desires and

pleasures of contemporary cinema outside of these notions? Cinema

impacts upon the viewer; it resonates as a material capture. The experi-

ential characteristics of cinema cannot be totally explained through

discourses of desire, pleasure and subjectivity. A neo-aesthetics of the

visual encounter of cinema sees film as an `event', as a processual

engagement of duration and movement, articulated through webs of

sensation across landscapes and panoramas of space, bodies and time.

Film theory to date has failed to provide an adequate understanding of

how film matters, how it impacts, how it acts as a body in motion, in

space and in time, with other material elements of our world. Instead film

theory has been locked into formal analysis of ideology, representation

and critiques of signification. Contemporary films display a wide range of

 Introduction: Discovering the Beautiful Stranger . . . 5

effects, tonalities, reverberations, intensities, which connect at an affective

level, beyond any sense of subjectivity. A new aesthetic theory, which

accounts for how the affective is formulated through colour, sound,

movement, force, intensity, not just through psychical mechanisms, but

through material elements such as the mind/brain and body, may be

possible through a collusion with a Bergsonian-influenced Deleuzian

philosophy.

Through modernist discourses, cinema like literature was theorised

through humanist engagement with the `aesthetic', `beauty' and `feeling'.

Cultural theory impinged upon the humanities providing new debates

concerned with ideology, the cultural construction of gender, sexuality,

desire and subjectivity ± a challenge to aesthetics. Feminist theory was a

significant part of a cultural studies' approach to understanding the arts

and offered an explanation of the structure of desire through models

adapted from psychoanalysis and engagement with the film as `text'. This

was embraced through cinepsychoanalysis with an overreliance on Freu-

dian/Lacanian structures of desire and later through French feminist

reappropriations of psychoanalysis.

This book emerges through a synthesis of Deleuzian and post-struc-

turalist feminist philosophy and a reconceiving of the aesthetic to explain

the cinematic as a `material capture', not as a text with a meaning, but as a

body which performs, as a machine, as an assemblage, as an abstract

machine. It will engage with Deleuzian philosophy to conceive of a neo-

aesthetic as a way of exploring the enchantment of contemporary popular

movies through a post-semiotic and post-linguistic paradigm. This will

provide a neo-aesthetics of the film experience as an `event': an aesthetics

of force and of sensation, where `subjectivities' are no longer purely

contained in the image, or in the spectatorial psychic spaces, but through

a melding of matter, the material of film, force, and sensation as move-

ment, the `in-between' of those spaces. Rather than film being perceived

as purely representational, with images seen and perceived through a

purely specular economy, film is here explored as a mind/body/machine

meld, as experience, as sensation, as a perception±consciousness forma-

tion. Perception is not premised upon the visual alone, but through the

synaesthetics of sensation. Within this paradigm, images on the screen

operate as movement-images, as affect, as modulation in process, dy-

namic and unfixed, on a plane of immanence. Film is explored as

processual, not purely representational.

This book will locate Deleuze, his ideas on desire and sensation, within

a new paradigm of post-feminist film theory. This will provide a move

towards a post-semiotic, post-linguistic exploration of desire and move

6 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
beyond a contemporary politics of difference, towards an experimental
`pragmatics of becoming', where subjectivity is subsumed through `be-
coming'. The film then will be experienced, it is argued, as a complex
assemblage, as an abstract machine, across visualities, bodies, apparati,
energies, intensities, forces and discourse. The book offers a post-feminist
reconsideration and reappropriation of a neo-aesthetics of sensation. The
aesthetic experience is, to quote Brian Massumi, `dynamogenic' and
5
involves an `absolute continuum of depersonalisation'. An aesthetics
of sensation then emerges beyond the humanist configurations of sub-
jectivity; subjectivity is subsumed through becoming, affect ± and sensa-
tion. The structure of what follows is both triptychal (Deleuzian) and
linear (non-Deleuzian). The first part outlines concepts of the micro-
political, the aesthetic and the post-feminist in Chapter 1. Chapter 2
introduces a concern with film theory and its basis within the formal
structures of psychoanalysis, while the second part of that chapter shows
how contemporary film theory has made some inroads into alternatives
to cinepsychoanalysis. The second part is an exploration of some of the
ideas of Deleuze and how they might be substantively relevant to a new
mind-set of film theory, with chapters on Deleuzian concepts of pleasure
and desire, becoming-woman, and sensation. Part three is an exploration
of several films, through Deleuzian deterritorialisations. Thus I have
endeavoured to produce a work which colludes, assembles and imbricates
a selection of rich and creative lines of flight to offer new directions in film
theory. Its only requirement is for the reader to fly with its exuberances,
its eclectic mix of writing styles, sometimes poetic and personal (sub-
jective even ± such irony!), sometimes academic, and sometimes purely
outrageous in its patterns of intensity.

NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement±Image; Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Fe
 lix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 166.
3. I am referring to the work of Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness.
4. Henry James's `The Figure in the Carpet' is a short story which provides an
intriguing comparison to the complexities of Deleuzian assemblages. Much of
Henry James's work has been valorised by Deleuze. James's idea about the
multiplicities and configurations of language and its meaning, as somehow only
having relevance according to its fields of engagement, has intriguing links with
Deleuzian ideas of multiplicity and the rhizomatic.
5. Brian Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, p. 745.
Part One
Chapter 1

From Micro-politics to Aesthetics

`[T]he work of art is a being in sensation and nothing else: it exists in

1
itself.'

FROM POLITICS TO AESTHETICS:

MICRO-POLITICS, PRAGMATICS AND AESTHETICS

As an introduction, I shall outline here how the original determinations of

this project were founded within feminist politics, but moved into

aesthetics. A feminist political project is one concerned to present an

argument that is ultimately liberatory to the cultural, social and personal

experiences of women. My initial question was to explain why feminist

film theory did not explain the pleasures and desires experienced when

watching certain neo-noir movies, which appeared to be politically

problematic. Why are films such as Blade Runner (1982), Leon (1994)
and Romeo is Bleeding (1993) so pleasurable, for example, despite the
problematic representations of woman, films inevitably critiqued as

objectifying and disempowering to women? But such political objections,

premised mainly on representations and image, fail to answer or engage

or try to engage with why it is that such films can still operate as

pleasurable and desirable experiences. My aim was to investigate how

film operates as a pleasurable and desirous experience outside frame-

works of image and representation alone. In so doing the very terms

pleasure and desire come under close scrutiny and it is suggested that

other concepts might become more appropriate to describe the cinematic

experience, the cinematic event. During the course of the debate, the

concept of sensation is deemed more appropriate for the discussion of the

filmic experience.

In traditional film theory, most analysis of desire and pleasure has been
10 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
based upon signification, text, meaning, semiotics and the visual, espe-

cially in feminist film theory. This has led to a focus on debates around

feminist readings of what a text `means', connecting with some overall

`political' stance. I want to argue, through the heuristic device of philo-

sophy, for a micro-political (see definition below) position whereby the

impact of cinema is not only experienced through signification, but

through film as a material as much as a psychical assemblage, which

operates through the processual, force, and intensity as much as image,

representation and signification. Thus there is a concern with what a text

does, rather than with what it might mean. The premise is then that film is

thus experiential and not just representational. Any understanding of

desires, pleasures or sensations needs to be theorised within an under-

standing of how film works ontologically, as film, rather than merely as a

mode of representation.

By critiquing psychoanalysis and offering other explanations of desire

and a beyond of desire premised upon philosophical ideas within con-

tinental philosophy, specifically the work of Gilles Deleuze, I originally

intended to show how feminist film theory was lacking in its explorations

of desire. However, I found myself very quickly moving outside such a

project, through a concern with micro-politics, pragmatics and aesthetics,

developing Deleuze's theories of desire and sensation into new strategies

of aesthetics and the filmic experience. The project became more one of

philosophy and its interpretation through film rather than film explored

through philosophy. Initially some definitions are required for my usage

of certain terminology.

Micro-politics is a term which might be used instead of politics, in the

sense that it advocates that meanings, social structures and lived experi-

ences are too complex and multifaceted to be explained through the more

strictly fixed positionalities of politics in the wider (macro) sense. Radical

macro-political arguments are usually premised upon binary discourses,

one side of which argues for the advocation of liberation of some sort. A

specific voice is presented for a specific group within society, with the aim

of changing conditions of experience for more liberated experiences.

There is, then, a very clearly fixed binary thinking involved, for example,

right and left, or masculine and feminine. Any central politics of an

imbrication or consilience of voices (a middle view), a third way, is

negated. However, micro-politics advocates that changes occur in smal-

ler, less coagulated or clearly framed groups and structures, outside of

any binary terminologies. Macro-political struggles are conceived as

taking place in collectivised groups. But struggles occur not only in

group-sized multiplicities, but within and across those groups as it were,

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 11

rather like the patterned, molecular elements of the atom. `Struggles occur

not only in group-sized multiplicities, but also in those multiplicities

internal to or functional through and across subjects, within subjects,

2
against the control of the ego and the superego.' For example, political

battles such as the Tiananmen Square incident (1989) actually had

reverberations which were much wider than the overly political. They

concern artistic and attitudinal resonances, multifarious and not fixed

within a set political view, the results of which had significant cultural and

aesthetic resonances not previously set up by the main political agenda.

Pragmatics: I shall be referring to the concept `pragmatism' as follows.

Pragmatism starts out from Darwinian ideas. In other words, Darwinian

naturalism. The origin of naturalism was based upon the Darwinian idea

that human beings are chance products of evolution. Pragmatism pro-

vides a suspicion of the great binary oppositions which Western philo-

sophy such as metaphysics has held important. Thus Darwinians share a

concern with the notions of Platonic other-worldliness, critical of the

belief of any other world than the real and the natural. Darwinian belief is

further critical of distinctions such as mind/body and objective and

subjective and attempts to try to reformulate such Platonic foundations

through contingent thinking processes. Within pragmatism, then, based

on this naturalism, everything is constituted by relations with or to other

things, contingently, where there is no intrinsic, ineluctable nature to

language or to living things. Pragmatism gets rid of dualistic or dichot-

omous thinking, in terms of relational thinking. Pragmatism also is

suspicious of all forms of foundationalism (Platonism, metaphysics,

transcendentalism and so on) and argues for the contingency of language,

community and self. In my use of the term pragmatism in this project, I

shall be using it along with micro-politics, as a term which might be more

useful than the term politics. Rather, pragmatism is a term used to

describe a process of thinking contingently and relationally.

As an example of how this relates to thinking about feminism, then, I

believe that women's experiences of lived and material life are complex

and highly contradictory and women cannot be given a political for-

mulaic politic through which to make sense of their experiences. One's

experience of being a mother, for example, might be situated as a

complexly difficult experience to think of in relation to the critique of

masculinity as it prevails in critiques of patriarchy. First-wave feminism

was specifically keen to problematise phallocratic structures of living as

somehow dependent upon biology. Men were seen to blame for all the

problems encountered by women, for example. A simplistic rendition of

first-wave feminism, maybe, but the views of writers like Catherine

12 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin make no apologies for the culpability of

men in women's suffering. How for example, then, does one make sense

of one's relations with a son, in relation to such critiques of masculinity, if

such radical and restrictive binary forms of feminism are manifested in

our thinking? One's experience of emotions, love, fear, hate, jealousy,

pain, grief and bereavement, does not sit so easily with how one is urged

to be in terms of specific forms of feminist thinking. We are individual

beings regardless of gender and the emotional and rational elements of

our lives are a complex process of inter-relationalities that cannot be

simplistically formulated within a `politics'. I am not suggesting that a

politics with a large P is not useful for changing the experiences of a

practical, economic and lived experience of most women, and those

political agendas that have made significant changes to the material,

economic and lived experiences of women's lives have to be commended

and continued. But what I am questioning is the use of the term politics

when we are thinking of much more amorphous concepts like emotions,

feelings and experiences of being in the world, and how we explore these

issues through academic debates. This is especially relevant in something

like film studies, where subjectivities and identities might, it is argued, be

constructed via ideologically framed texts, but, nonetheless, might be

created from elsewhere. Thus, I find the term pragmatism is a much more

useful term, despite the critique that this might suggest some sort of

relativism.

Aesthetics : the etymology of the word `aesthetics' designates the

`faculty of feeling' derived from the Greek adjective `aisthetos', which

means `perceptible to the senses'. In the arts and literature, the modernist
3
period (and here I mean the early twentieth-century movements in

literature and art and should not be seen as the Frankfurt School of

modernism, where art is seen as critique) was specifically concerned with

the valorisation of aesthetics, where the arts were deemed modes of

representation of reality and aesthetic signifiers as perceptible objects.

Modernism as a period of art and literary study during the early decades

of this century connected aesthetic appreciation with an ethical sense of

harmony and the good, but not in any romantic sense. Aesthetic elements

of good form were premised around specific stylistic structures in the

content of a work of art, painting, novel or poem. Form and content were

very closely theorised through modernist valorisation of certain stylistic

conventions. The use of line, or tone or colour, for example, would

display a universally acknowledged appreciation, a harmony of relation,

which would then justify value in relation to a painting. Its form would be

evaluated in terms of how it conveyed taste, beauty, pleasure, through the

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 13

use of specific stylistic elements. Certain sounds and assimilations of

sounds would convey a similar aesthetic in terms of poetry. Leavisite

determinations of the pleasures of poetry and the novel are representative

of this notion. In modernist valorisation of the aesthetic, the aesthetic

message did not simply have a transitive function. It was of value in itself.

Pierre Giraud has written that, `Art is subjective, it affects the subject',

that is to say, it `touches the human organism or psyche by means of an

impression or action, whereas science is objective, it structures the

4
object'.

However, I use the phrase neo ± meaning `new' aesthetic ± throughout

my project to define a newly framed definition of aesthetic, one which

attempts to imbricate the artistic and the scientific, premised on the

existence of a material basis rather than just a psychic basis, to the

affective experience. Questions of affect are explored through different

premises from those of modernist aesthetics. I want to look at how the

affective is experienced through a material process. In other words

beyond the subjective positionality premised upon psychic processes it

held within the modernist movement. I am not suggesting that the psychic

construction of subjectivity is not still an important factor, but rather I am

looking at how subjectivity is a much more complex concept and can be

re-theorised through a connection with scientific or biological sources of

the materiality of the body/brain. This `neo' (and in many ways bio)
aesthetic will also be used in a differently framed political sense in that

through an encouragement of the neo-aesthetic, new affectivities, new

intensities between people might provide a mutant sensibility which could

prove more significant in changing people's experiences of themselves and

the world, than any macro-defined politics. Affectivity might formulate a

more significant trajectory towards the transformation of our culture

than politics.

It has been difficult to trace how what was originally a project on

feminist film study, then, has now become a philosophical project about

aesthetics and the cinematic experience. The significance of subjectivity

and desire have been of intrinsic importance to all persuasions of feminist

film theory and thus since my project argues for a move from thinking

about the subjective/objective binaries within film experience, to present a

notion of `becoming-woman' of the affective and sensation, then to some

extent it is still important to engage with some debate on feminist film

theory. If I am to locate a neo-aesthetics of `becoming-woman' which

moves us beyond thinking through subjectivity, in favour of a `beyond' of

subjectivity, through to sensation, where the materiality of the brain/mind

and body are more closely connected, then it is necessary to show how
14 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
and why subjectivity was important in early feminist film theory. The

importance of subjectivity to feminist thinking about film has blocked the

way forward, because of its intractable problematising of psychic man-

ifestations. I want to show a way out of this impasse by changing the

mind-set and the thought perspectives away from subjectivity as merely a

psychical process. But the engagement with feminist film is only tangen-

tial to the main premise of the project, which is to argue for a beyond of

subjectivity, in sensation and affect. Consequently in Chapter 2, for the

purposes of locating the project, I briefly describe how desire and pleasure

were theorised in cinepsychoanalysis and then how feminist film theory

began to become involved with more materialist models of the filmic

process, by moving beyond psychoanalysis and initiating some concern

with the materiality of bodies.

The very term `body' will become significant as it becomes a polysemic

and polyvalent term, in my premises, rather than a fixed definition of

biological body. I acknowledge here that it has not been my intention to

thoroughly critique the range of psychoanalytical paradigms used in the

whole field of feminist film theory. (This in itself could constitute a book

or thesis alone.) What I do, rather, is show how feminist film theory

moved away from psychoanalytical discourses which were reductively

based upon specific renditions of desire as connected to some specific

subjectivity and through that subjectivity to an ontological transcendent

state of being. Furthermore, within such theories, the role of the body

(and definitions of what body might mean) was very much missing. The

very concept of desire is important within this discussion, and provides

the linchpin for newer theories of desire and what I refer to as a beyond of

desire, in sensation.

If I am to locate a neo-aesthetics of `becoming-woman' which moves us

beyond thinking through subjectivity, and rather through a `beyond' of

subjectivity, where the materiality of the brain/body/world are explored

as sensation, then it is important to show how and why subjectivity was

important in early feminist film theories and to some extent in contem-

porary feminist film theory. This therefore provides the starting point for

the project. Any suggestion of a `becoming-woman' of the filmic experi-

ence is also going to question the use of the term `woman' with its cultural

connotations which have been critiqued through various phases of

feminist theory. If my use of the term `becoming-woman' is to have

any relevance to a neo-aesthetics then there has to be some debate about

the use of this term in the light of feminist politics.

This conjuncture between the concepts of micro-politics, pragmatics

and aesthetics became focused through an exploration of contemporary

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 15

movies, specifically American or at least Euro/Western centred. Indeed, I

initially explored the contemporary genre neo-noir, but felt that the

concepts I was developing actually needed to be explained and explored

more through other movies. Thus I use a combination of genres, seeing

them as paradigms for philosophical engagement, rather than as the main

focus of the book itself. The aim of the project is not to focus on a set of

clearly defined filmic texts for investigation, but to work through theo-

retical and philosophical questions and utilise film as a medium through

which to explore these issues, heuristically. As an interdisciplinary

project, it aims to bring together the two disciplines of philosophy and

film in an experimental and creative way, as film-philosophy, which

might offer up innovative questions for engagement in both fields of

intellectual pursuit. Here philosophy takes on the role of the micro-

political. The project becomes film-philosophy, rather than one or the

other. For example, neo-noir films such as Romeo and Juliet (1996),

Strange Days (1995) and Blade Runner offer prime examples of movies
through which to explore specifically dynamic, visually exciting and

thrillingly exhilarating action. Nonetheless films like Orlando (1992)

and The English Patient (1996) are much more significant in terms of my

development of philosophical concepts such as `becoming-woman' since

they imbricate conceptions of the term `affect' in a neo-aesthetic sense.

These films lend themselves to philosophical engagement. Films like Leon

offer appropriate texts through which to think about the concept of

`becoming-girl', a trajectory from `becoming-woman' and used in an

assemblage of new aesthetic regimes of thinking.

Thus I justify my use of different genres by stating that I am exploring

`affect' and `sensation' through different experimental visual engage-

ments, all taken from contemporary films, and generic categorisation

is not prioritised as an important element in that debate. The outcome is a

different theory for understanding the process of the filmic encounter,

beyond notions of desire and pleasure, into sensation, where the concept

of the `body' becomes wider and more complex. It is an experience which

is premised upon the materialist aesthetic of sensation, where body and

mind are imbricated, rather than theories of desire or pleasure, where the

body and mind are separated. Furthermore the very term `body' takes on

new and polysemic definitions in this argument.

In a project set within the parameters of a philosophy/film intersection,

what began as a feminist political project, then, has emerged as a

valorisation of a neo-aesthetic through resort to a philosophy of expres-

sion (that is, a new definition of the concept `aesthetic' which does not
have its connotations of modernism and elitism) as a way forward in
16 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
transforming our cultural, political, emotional and ethical places in the

world, and as a way of changing our lived experiences of the world. This

is therefore a newly framed political agenda.

My original intentions were to try to explain why it is that certain films

that are problematic in representational terms to a feminist politic are still

nonetheless pleasurable. The debate initially was concerned with the

concepts of desire, pleasure and subjectivity and how they have been

articulated within feminist film theory, specifically through psychoana-

lytic criticism. However, what emerged was an interesting development

away from the politics of representation, to a concern with how the visual

experience of the cinematic encounter impinges upon the materiality of

the viewer, and how affect and sensation are part of that material

engagement. By materiality I mean the biological, molecular and material

nature of the body and the perceptions within the brain/mind of that

body. The concept materiality is not here used in the Marxist sense of the
5
term. The term `body' is also differently conceived to mean more than

just the flesh and blood corporeal body.

The project then began to develop into a concern with the aesthetics of the

visual image, and how that impinges upon the minds/bodies of those who

view, outside any psychical explanations that psychoanalysis might pro-

vide. Definitions of terms such as mind/body became significant to this

debate. The whole imbrication of the corporeal body with the body of the

natural world and the body of technological forms, such as film, became

part of the debate. Thus an argument about gendered spectatorship devel-

oped into a wider consideration with aesthetics, an aesthetics assembled

across the imbrication of bodies in a more abstract sense. The catalyst for

this change in direction was the exploration of the role of subjectivity and the

body and how these had been particularly important in feminist film theory.

But that concept of subjectivity itself was distanciated and radically dis-

located to such an extent that subjectivity was subsumed through a prag-

matics of `becoming'. `Becoming' is a term taken from philosophy and refers

to a continual processual movement in time, with no finality, no fixed

positioning. `Becoming' is pure process. The significance of this term in

relation to this book is explored at length in Chapters 3 and 4. Questions

which I initially proposed, then, in the light of feminist film theory, questions

around pleasure and desire in relation to contemporary movies, especially

neo-noir films, gradually developed into a debate about the cinematic

encounter as an experience, as an `event of material capture', rather than

with any intrinsic meaning those films might have ideologically, politically,

culturally or libidinally. This project argues that film is experiential: a

material capture of the processual, rather than merely representational.

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 17

My call for a `becoming-woman' of the cinematic argues that the

cinematic encounter may express such material capture through its

affective and aesthetic resonances and provide a micro-political man-

oeuvre in terms of ways of thinking and feeling. Within the `becoming-

woman' of the cinematic, desire and pleasure are rethought through a

deeper level of feeling, in `sensation'. But I use the term sensation in new

ways, premised upon the work of Deleuze on affect. It is not sensation as

it is used in the literal or phenomenological sense of the term. Sensation

involves more than a bodily or corporeal engagement. The very termi-

nology `becoming-woman' is explored, in the light of the concept `wo-

man' and to some extent my argument repositions aesthetics, through a

new concept of `woman'. It functions in a micro-political and pragmatic

way, as opposed to a political strategy within a feminist agenda.

The question of politics has been prevalent and problematic through-

out. In a contemporary cultural, economic and political malaise which

continues to put profit and production as the prime motivators of human

actions, aesthetics might occupy, as Fe

 lix Guattari writes and explores in

Chaosmosis ,
6
a significant position for a radical ethics at the convergence

of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It cannot be argued that

aesthetics in itself is a political or a transformational paradigm. Several

attempts by materialist film-makers and the avant-garde have of course

7
experimented with the use of film for political ends. But a different

understanding and encouragement of a neo-aesthetics might produce a

mutant mentality and encourage a rethinking, re-enchantment and en-

gagement within our lives. It might just begin to highlight the processes of

creativity, which might then impinge upon transformations of our ex-

periences. An ethics of experimentation, an experimentation which this

project itself is partly trying to engage with, in its experimental use of

philosophy, may emerge which will provide different ways of thinking

and feeling about our experiences at the beginning of a new millennium.

By trying to imbricate the philosophical, the aesthetic and the micro-

political, I am attempting to present a creative understanding of visual

culture, specifically contemporary film, an understanding which might

impinge upon the sensibilities and mentalities of those who view.

FROM A MICRO-POLITICS OF POST-FEMINIST

THINKING TO RETHINKING THE AESTHETIC

As I am presenting a claim for a materialist aesthetic, premised on the

affect and sensation, where subjectivity is rendered subjectless, I want to

explore how and why `subjectivity' has been important to feminisms, and
18 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
how my definition of post-feminism moves away from a concern with

subjectivity. Therefore this section of the chapter aims to explore the main

points of intersection between current feminist epistemologies and post-

theory (that is, theories of post-structuralism). It then shows how we

might move into rethinking the aesthetic as a paradigm for a post-feminist

pragmatics.

In a theoretical climate saturated with post-structuralist and post-

modernist debates, contemporary feminism has become a contentious

and problematic arena. I shall only provide an acknowledgement of this

array of feminist discourses, and not provide an analysis of its various

8
manifestations in detail. However, whilst not exploring this range of

feminist theory here, it is important to acknowledge that the concept of

the `subject' and `subjectivity' have been fundamental to feminist dis-

course generally. It is the concept of `subjectivity' which has been

important to feminist film theory and is to become significant in my

own argument on the neo-aesthetic and so I need to explain where and

why subjectivity has been located within feminist theory.

I shall then distanciate that definition of subjectivity through what I will

call a post-feminist perspective. Before exploring the concept of subjec-

tivity then, first, how do we define feminism and post-feminism? Femin-

ism is a term which describes both a cultural practice and a political

position. Feminist theory is both a political practice and a discursive field

that has specific epistemological bases and also particular methodological

principles. I am not going to outline the history of feminist theory and I do

therefore assume some knowledge of this by my reader, but it is important

to highlight some of its basic concepts. Within feminist discourse, the

concept of the `subject' has been fundamental to the production of

gendered identities. Cartesian and structuralist discourse have prioritised

binarism, through which the process of thinking has been contained

within a series of binarily formed oppositions: male/female, animal/

machine, rational/intuitive, subject/object, mind/body, for example. Such

oppositions serve, according to feminist theory, to position the `subject' as

fixed and intransigent, on one or other side of the binary. The sentient

and fixed subject, according to feminism, is a legacy of masculinist theory,

which from Cartesian origins prioritised the masculine subject in dis-

course, as a positive term against the feminine as negative. Along with

that fixed, sentient, masculine subject has been the prioritisation of

specific concepts like rationality, logic and reason. Western philosophical

epistemology has created deep structures of our lives, consciousness and

experiences to be representative of all humans, regardless of gender. Seyla

Benhabib argues that such categorisations obliterate differences of

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 19

gender, as these shape and structure the experience and subjectivity of the
9
self. Western reason has been a discourse of a self-identical subject. This

of course has prevented the presence of difference and otherness. A

philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel then prioritises this subject

of reason: a male, sentient and logical being. In opposition the female was

perceived as emotional and irrational. Such binary categorisations have

maintained an intransigent approach to theories of the subject.

10
Debate proliferates regarding the effects of post-structuralist deter-

minations of a fractured subject and the implications for feminist theory

11
and practice. The main contention has been that just when feminism

appears to have enabled the articulation of an agentic, autonomous

subject for women, post-structuralism fragments that politic. Indeed,

Seyla Benhabib is suspicious of a post-theory which advocates the

dissolution of the subject. The post-structuralist dissolution of the `sub-

ject' is not, according to Benhabib, compatible with the aims of feminism.

She believes that any subjectivity that is not structured by language and

by the symbolic structures of narrative available in culture is unthinkable.

Most post-structuralist concerns with the fragmentation of the subject

have indeed taken their lead from feminist theory in contradistinction

from Seyla Benhabib. The aim of much feminist philosophy has been to

provide for a locus for a new `female subjectivity'. Feminism's political

agenda has been to distanciate the sentient subject of phallocratic dis-

course. But the advocation of a sentient subjectivity maintains a binarist

positionality across gender relationships. It still prioritises the `subject'. It

does not question the very concept of `subjectivity'. Subjectivity is still

defined as a concept which emerges from structures of psychic, social,

libidinal and biological determinants. It does not offer any problematisa-

tion of the very concept itself and neither does it take into consideration

the materiality of experience.

I would argue that subjectivity may be reconceptualised even beyond

the post-structuralist notion of fluidity or multiplicity as it is explored

12
specifically in French feminisms for example. It may be subsumed

through a more complex situational and contingent exploration of forces

outside of the psychic, the social, the libidinal or the biological, in favour

of a more complex web of processes, and intensities, through an inter-

relationality of differences and repetitions within experience and the

material. This argument of the book will show how this occurs and is

manifested through the filmic experience.

13
Rosi Braidotti has referred to contemporary feminist philosophy as a

practice of sexual difference and claims a `feminist female subject'. She

explores the concept of the `nomadic subject' as a way to think about

20 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
subjectivity and specifically a female, feminist subjectivity beyond the

phallocentricity of the dominant conceptions of the `subject' found in

traditional philosophy. Unlike Benhabib, Braidotti sees an engagement

with post-structuralism as an area of new possibilities. She does not

perceive a `crisis' of values in the same way as Benhabib. Rather, Braidotti

argues for a `qualitative leap in the feminist imagination' which will adapt

heterogeneity and new forms of materialism in a micro-political frame-

work. This is precisely what this book is attempting to do. Admittedly,

French feminist writers like Irigaray and Cixous have prioritised a

feminism of difference which has argued for the ossification of binarism

and to project a concern with multiplicity and fluid subjectivities, thus

challenging Cartesian and structuralist concern with a fixed notion of

14
gendered identity and subjectivity. (See note 13 above.) Similarly Moira

Gatens has positioned significant debates regarding conceptual shifts in

feminist theory. Her politics of difference, drawing on Foucault, explores

the micro-politics of power, and investigates the construals of bodies and

15
power, through a politics of difference. But much work still maintains

either the significance of a specific subjectivity, or at the very least the

continuing significance of the very term `subjectivity' whether in the

singular or the plural. Even Donna Haraway's claim for a cyborg

16
heteroglossia, whilst it has been substantially liberatory for rethinking

feminist politics, has a notion of subjectivity, albeit cyborgian. Indeed,

Haraway's cyberfeminism offered alternatives to Enlightenment ideas of

17
subject, identity and selfhood. A cyborgian politics is premised upon

differences and affinity, not on identity and opposition. Far from appro-

priating phallocratic structures within culture, it breaks down those

boundaries which have maintained oppositional discourses. Cyberfemin-

ism offered new configurations of the `subject' through thinking about

identity and affinity and has proved significant in feminist deconstruc-

tions of cultural forms including film. However, subjectivity was still an

important element in each of these feminist strands, despite writers like

Grosz and Gatens, and the real issue for this book is the fact that

materialism was left out of the equation. There is no consideration of

how the materiality of the body, or indeed what a `body' might mean,

whether through mind, brain or actual flesh-and-blood body had a role to

play in the ways we experience the world. French feminisms did, of course,

consider the body, but their uses of this inquiry maintained an essentialist

perspective on the body/culture binary. Woman was equated with body

and nature, man with culture. A new consideration of the concept of the

aesthetic aims to bring materialism back into the equation and to offer

experimental thinking about the nature of `body' and `subjectivity'.

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 21

In contrast with the contentious deliberations across feminisms of

`difference' a post-feminist agenda is concerned with the micrology of

lived experiences, across and between the spaces of any fixed, sentient,

or even fluid gendered subjectivity. How can we define post-feminism?

How is this term used in this book? The media proliferate the term in

articles about post-feminism, claiming that feminism as a political

practice is no longer popular, or necessary, that it no longer needs to

be concerned with its original principles. Debates abound each day on

this topic. I have no wish to be part of this debate, since such a definition

of post-feminism seeks only to look at the cultural, economic and social

implications of feminism, in terms of women's lived experiences in the

real world. I am not saying that this agenda is not still important. Rather

I am trying to define a post-feminism, which colludes with post-theory,

which is about more than the lived experience, but is about thinking

processes at a fundamental level, a post-feminism which tries to bring

back materiality and to understand the basis of experience as having a

material and affective basis, as much as sociological, cultural or libi-

dinal.

The restricted definitions of post-feminism that the media portray do

not consider the more philosophical inquiry into the nature of the

complexities of the very act of thought itself. A definition of post-

feminism, in an academic sense, may initially be described as a theoretical
set of practices within which one may speak as a `woman'. However, that

very concept of woman becomes multiple, complex and polysemic. I want

to extend the term therefore to explain post-feminism as a desire to move

outside a politics of difference or a politics of gendered subjectivities, to a

micro-political pragmatics of becoming where subjectivity is subsumed to

becoming-woman. Here the term `becoming-woman' is, in my use of the

18
term, synonymous with the affective forces of the material.

Any call for a politics of becoming is in danger of hypostatising that

very politics. Therefore, a pragmatics of becoming, instead, uses con-

tingent assemblages of thinking processes through which to distanciate

subjectivity from language. Subjectivities are simulacra, which are sub-

sumed through a more profound engagement with the forces of `becom-

ing', material forces, molecular and fibrous forces, rewired across new

assemblages outside of language, in the pre-discursive and the pre-

personal. A post-feminist agenda, as an ethical framework, engages with

thinking outside the boundaries of epistemological, Cartesian, modernist

thinking. It enables a reconceptualisation of the thinking process itself. A

post-feminist agenda requires a rethinking of the very foundations of

thought itself. Thought needs to be emancipated, freed from the labyr-

22 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
inths of rational and epistemological determinations, so that terms such

as `subjectivity', `identity' and the `body' and, for my purposes here, their

relation to filmic aesthetics may become creative and experimental. In a

post-feminist discourse, aesthetics then becomes part of the contingent

process of thinking. This will enable a new thinking of the cinematic

experience outside of those theories premised upon structuralist defini-

tions of language. Rather, the a-signifying elements of the filmic experi-

ence may be perceived as a molecular experience of the material, as an

event, as material capture, as a processual engagement of forces, inten-

sities and affect: as a `becoming' rather than merely with the rhetoric of

spectatorship theory, where identity and subjectivity have been priori-

19
tised.

Post-feminism, then, is a concept which describes a micro-political

engagement with a multiplicity of voices across the regimes of feminist

political discourse. Founded within post-structuralist debates which have

questioned and problematised Cartesian epistemologies, post-feminism

seeks to rethink the nomadic and spatial arenas of feminist voices, to

present what we can therefore refer to as a `situational' ethics, where we

need to think beyond the univocity and dual perspectives of gendered

categorisations, identities and subjectivities. Judith Butler argues that

there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity

is performatively constituted. She is also suspicious of the claim that any

20
theory of politics requires a `subject'. Claims that a politics is not

possible without a subject merely secures a specific formation of a politics

that requires that these notions remain unproblematical features of its

own definition.

Maybe a post-feminist pragmatics makes possible the abandonment of

such premises. Butler would argue that to claim that politics requires a

stable subject is to claim that there can therefore be no real political

opposition to that claim. The very act of requiring a subject forecloses a

political domain and with that foreclosure, which itself becomes an

essentialist element of the `political', comes an enforcement of particular

limitations on what constitutes the political. This enforcement is thus

protected from any critique. Benhabib has claimed that a politics is

unthinkable without foundations, without premises such as subject

and subjectivity. But to argue that a stable subject is necessary is to

protest that there can be no political opposition to that claim. To

challenge that is to present a politics. We do not have to be fixed in

any substantive vision of the subject to be political. What is political is

using the language, and discourse through which to challenge those

ontological foundations of thought itself, within and through which a

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 23

subject has been discerned as required. To offer a critique of `subjectivity'

and its substantive role within politics is to argue for a concern with

materiality, not instead of but alongside, psychic formations of a sub-

jectivity. It is thus a pragmatics or a micro-politics rather than a politics.

Thus we need to consider a micro-political or pragmatic agenda rather

than a `political' agenda. As I defined earlier, micro-politics is an

engagement with thinking about how struggles occur not only in groups,

but through and even beyond multiplicities of identities, subjectivities and

corporealities, internal to or functional through and across individual

subjects and within subjects. These multiplicities are processes which are

molecular, articulated through the fibrosity of the body's corporeality

and materiality, in assemblage with the cultural, the ideological, the

libidinal or the social. Subjectivity is therefore subsumed to the more

profound game of difference and repetition. Subjectivity itself is proble-

matised. It is subsumed through a concern with materiality and mole-

21
cularity of existence, through a machinic type of assemblage, rather

than psychic structures of a subject. Systems of thinking which prioritise

the centrality of the `subject' need to be rethought to engage with `effects

or consequences of processes of sedimentation, the congealing of pro-

cesses, interrelations, or ``machines'' of disparate components, function-

ing in provisional alignment with each other to form a working

22
ensemble'. In unpacking this quote, I would suggest that it means

subjectivity is too complex to be explained through singular concepts

such as the cultural or the psychological. Subjectivity is but one element in

an arsenal of components that go to make up, in a machinic way, or as an

assemblage, our experiences of a lived reality. Being in the world is too

complex an issue to be explained through merely the sociological, the

cultural, economic or psychological determinants. And psychoanalytic or

cultural explanations of subjectivity are not the only formats through

which we can try to understand our experiences of cultural formations

such as film. Film may be seen not only as a cultural formation, but also as

a psychic, corporeal and consciousness formation which exists beyond

the constraining ideologies of much feminist and indeed modernist

thinking. Other frameworks which bring into focus the actual material

experience might be appropriate. Where for example does the aesthetic

function within such frameworks? How is the aesthetic accommodated in

such restrictive explanations of subjectivity? How can we determine a

material aesthetic premised upon forces outside of subjectivity? Where is

the space for the a-signifying aspects of experience? Where is the concept

of materiality? In explaining our sense of who we are in the world and

how we experience that existence, many processes are involved in

24 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
complex and inter-relational, machinic assemblages and any explanation

requires more sophisticated and complex webs of understanding than

those already offered through sociological or psychoanalytic paradigms.

Deleuzian ideas seem to open up such territories.

BETWEEN DELEUZE AND POST-FEMINISM:

23
APARALLETIC EVOLUTION

In this section I want to signpost some of the reasons why post-feminism,

micro-politics and Deleuzian ideas seem to be in consilience. I will not be

exploring these issues in detail here, merely offering reasons for their

coagulation and setting up some bases for later engagement. My reasons

 tranger, the difference engineer, the philosopher of
for colluding with L'E

the outside and of monstrosity, is that his ideas might enable a micro-

political, pragmatic and post-feminist understanding of the aesthetic

experience of the cinematic. An experience that is not premised on a

substantive notion of subjectivity, inherent within language and a gen-

dered reading space, but an experience that is perceived as an event, as a

processual, aesthetic event of sensation, articulated beyond subjectivity.

What then are the intersections of a post-feminist pragmatics and

Deleuzian ideas?

Like post-feminism, Deleuzian ideas are concerned to redefine and

refigure theoretical practice. Deleuze moves beyond dualistic and binary

thinking processes. His ideas challenge the centrality of binary logic and

critique Platonist thinking in what has been referred to as a `reversal of

Platonism' and a delegitimation of representation within Platonist

thought. Thus, systems of thought based on subject and signification

(as is most film theory) are no longer prioritised. Deleuze conceives of

thought as an effect or process which participates as effects or processes

of what he calls `machinic assemblages' functioning with other compo-

nents, for example, space, time, bodies and texts. This therefore is

relevant to my argument that film can be experienced not merely as

signification or process or even a symbiosis of these, but what Deleuze

refers to as an `abstract machine': an assemblage, functioning with other

components such as corporeality, the body of the viewer, other bodies,

such as texts, spaces, materiality and time. The abstract machine is neither

physical nor corporeal in character, but exists as matter in collusion, or as

Deleuze refers in `aparalletic evolution', (see Chapters 3 and 4 on

Deleuze), with the matters composed within the bodies of the viewer/

observer. I shall be taking Deleuzian ideas forward as a methodology for

developing and reconfiguring new structures in post-feminist film theory

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 25

which synthesises signification, process and embodiment in new ways,

where subjectivity becomes problematised, and even subsumed, in the

equation, just as post-feminism attempts to do.

As indicated, Western and Enlightenment epistemologies have priori-

tised the rational and have legitimated the erasure of women and their

contribution from all areas of life, socially, culturally, sexually and

epistemologically. Deleuzian ideas provide a powerful set of `differences'

which we might use, alongside other discourses, to experiment with a new

way of thinking. I don't see his ideas as in any way confrontational, but as

a web of discourses with which we might decentre, alter, disorientate and

destratify the discourses of phallocentrism, prevalent within structuralist

thinking: to think perspectivally, machinically and transversally, rather

than structurally. Deleuzian concepts invite a rethinking of the very

process of thought itself and thus enable a total re-engagement with

how meaning is experienced and articulated within cultural formations

such as cinema. Similarly his work questions and rearticulates `subjec-

tivity' enabling a desubjectified conceptualisation of experience, through

an engagement with materiality. Post-feminism is also seeking to push

back the boundaries of thought and politics which have maintained the

significance of concepts such as `subjectivity'.

Second, why Deleuze and film theory? I am not within this project

offering a new theory of spectatorship, through Deleuze, nor am I

critiquing or explaining Deleuze's own concepts of the cinematic as he

explains them in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. I am rather thinking about how

we might experimentally imbricate the philosophical with film, moving

beyond film theoretical debates which have prioritised spectatorship and

subjectivity. I am using his ideas to enable a move towards rethinking

concepts such as `subjectivity', its distanciation, through affect and

sensation and terms like `body' and the role of that within the filmic

experience, exploring the significance of such a move to the creation of a

new discipline of film-philosophy.

This frame of questioning allows us to bring back the `body' into theory

and into a post-feminist theory, in a different and experimental way

which does not lock the definition of the `body' into old structuralist and

negative terms in relation to woman and nature. An emergent engage-

ment of woman and body is enabled which is not biologically determi-

nistic. The `body' can then be conceived outside the negative connotation

it has had in feminist film theory. Indeed, the very term `body' takes on

new and engaging prospects. If the `body' is conceived outside any

Cartesian epistemology, then the work of Deleuze must have relevance

to a post-feminist pragmatics, within which the concept `body' is yet

26 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
another element in an assemblage of processes. Deleuze and Guattari's

notion of the body as a set of continuous flows, energies, organs,

processes and affects has to be of relevance to those of us who are trying

to rethink `bodies', especially women's bodies, outside any polarisations

which have been placed on the body through binary structures of

thinking. Deleuzian ideas on the body provide a creatively innovative

perception of the body, in that there is an engagement with how bodies

`link', the relational quality of bodies, the linkages of the human body to

other bodies, human and inhuman, animate and inanimate, machinic and

non-machinic in a post-human trajectory. Thus the `body' of the cine-

matic relates and assembles with the bodies of those viewers/observers in

a web of inter-relational flows in material ways.

A theory premised on the micro-political or the pragmatic, rather than

the political, allows for the contingency of such encounters. It enables a

theory of film as an event across bodies, as a processual becoming, rather

than the filmic text as a system or form of representation. Thus a post-

semiotic and post-linguistic inquiry into the `event' of the cinematic

process provides a way forward in cinematic theory that questions the

prioritisation of the visual or the scopic regime. It offers in its place or at

24
least alongside it, a theory of a technologised or assembled `body', a

molecular body in the process of cinematic experience. Deleuzian ideas

about `body' then might establish a post-feminist pragmatics, a prag-

matics which establishes a new dimension for the `body' engaging with a

post-linguistic inquiry into the event of the cinematic.

To answer those who question the need for such a pragmatic man-

oeuvre, I would add that, at the dawn of a new millennium, the con-

straining ideologies of much feminist film theory have explored and

explained the filmic text through theoretical debate, but have never been

able to answer why it is that politically problematic films might also be

enjoyed. A Deleuzian engagement enables us to think through the

complexities of such encounters outside the containment of discourses

such as psychoanalysis, premised as it is on binary constructions of

language, thinking and the libidinal articulations of Freudian/Lacanian

and French feminist psychoanalytic analyses.

Questions of the body and subjectivity are, within film theory, in-

evitably concerned and explained through structures of desire and

pleasure. Deleuzian concern with desire, and his articulation of a `beyond'

of desire, can take us into different paradigms of thinking about the

cinematic encounter. Rather, other issues are at stake, such as affect and

sensation, instead of the concept of desire as such. Psychical depictions of

desire are thus set alongside a different rendition of desire as `process'

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 27

`aleatory' and `cultivational of joy'. This therefore brings into focus the

third element of connection between post-feminisms, Deleuzian concepts

and film theory. If film theory is to move beyond a questioning of desire

and the theatre of the `visual' in terms of psychoanalytic feminist film

theory, it might usefully employ Deleuzian ideas of desire as process, as an

immanent sense of desire as positivity, flux and machinic assemblage, a

process which has no `subject', a destratified or at least an hystericised

`subjectivity'. The `eye' thus is not just the `eye in culture', the I is not just

the I of the Imaginary, but the Eye/I is the embodied eye in matter.

Deleuzian perspectives on desire render psychoanalysis as insufficiently

effective in explaining the materiality of the filmic experience. A re-

engagement with the experience of the cinematic through a post-feminist

pragmatics needs to move outside the paradigms of cinema as a set of

representational images, through which we can relate to the concepts of

`identity' and `subjectivity' to a concern with experience, modulation and

expression (see Chapter 3, section `Deleuze on Pleasure and Desire'). The

book's alignment with Deleuze therefore, in Part Two, will outline a

range of concepts and images of thinking which are deemed appropriate

to a post-feminist pragmatics, specifically in relation to bodies, sexua-

lities, pleasures, desire and the cinematic experience as an aesthetic

engagement with material forces and as an event of process.

Deleuzian terminology is richly textured and often has been critiqued as

full of neologism, but there are significant terms which will be explained

and utilised; these terms, which rather than be critiqued as neologistic, are

used as a new vocabulary in contemporary film-philosophy. Such terms as

`becoming', specifically `becoming-woman', `affect' and the `bloc of sensa-

tion' create refreshing plateaus and different vocabularies for us to think

about film, beyond the more traditional notions of pleasure and desire,

which have been prevalent within psychoanalysis.

RETHINKING THE AESTHETIC

[T]he forms of force which manifest themselves in art are the forms of
25
force which manifest themselves in life.

[T]he only reality in life is sensation. The only reality in art is conscious-
26
ness of the sensation.

Political and ideological analyses of film have overshadowed the filmic

experience as one basically involving moving images of colours, tones,

lines, images and sounds of all kinds which actually impinge on the body/
28 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
mind/brain in a multiplicity of ways. I argue that the visual engagement is

but a pathway to other synaesthetic experiences such as tactility, or

hapticity, and proprioceptivity, for example. The question of subjectivity

in much feminist film theory has been confined to political discourses

which endeavoured to maintain some sentient notion of subjectivity as

existing through social, cultural, psychological or libidinal sources. I want

to project a neo-aesthetic and bio-aesthetic approach to film theory which

will enable a rethinking of how and why film is still enjoyed, why it still

impacts or resonates, or connects, outside theories of the visual, outside

psychoanalytic theories of desire, outside notions of gendered subjectivity

27
and despite political problematics.

The visual experience of the cinematic needs to be thought of as an

`experience' as a material capture, as synaesthetic experience in sensation,

not merely as representation. Thus an aesthetics of some sort needs to

come back into the equation, and I would deem this a post- feminist
aesthetics because it is founded on the same basis as post-feminism:

experimentation, pragmatics, transversal and perspectival thinking and

contingent processes of engagement. This relationship of concepts pro-

vides a creative, experimental set of discourses. I suggest post- feminism,

because what I am arguing for is a set of theoretical ideas which imbricate

post-structuralist discourses and yet take on board previous feminist film

ideas. I use feminist film theory as a starting point from which to develop

different strategies of thinking. So in this sense I would defend my term

post-feminist. Also this new paradigm of thinking will actually bring into
question whether gender and feminism, and specifically gendered sub-

jectivities, are necessarily the only issues at stake in the affective experi-

ences of the visual engagement with film. If something other than

subjectivity is at stake, or at least a differently conceived definition of

the subjective, then maybe the very terminology feminist film can be

distanciated. I don't of course wish to ignore the range of theory that still

operates as feminist film theory, and such analyses continue to be

liberating and thus politically important, but I am offering a different

set of ideas premised on aesthetics, alongside such perspectives. Indeed, in

a typically Deleuzian sense, it is what happens in the `in-between', or the

`interstitial spaces', that really matters. This set of ideas is engaging with

post-theory in ways that feminist film theory has not.

Furthermore, a post- feminist approach also involves what I shall refer

to as `becoming-woman', which might enable us to conceptualise a post-

feminist aesthetics which re-positions and rethinks the term `woman' in

terms of technologies or assemblages of meaning. Here the very term

`woman' is distanciated from any essential or intrinsic connection to the

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 29

way in which the term has operated in feminist theory. Rather, con-

temporary discourse, through Deleuzian philosophy, asks us to think

about such terms as part of contingent assemblages, machinic assem-

blages, and not as singular, identifiable terms. `Becoming-woman' then

has nothing to do with real, physical, lived beings. It is used as an abstract

term (see Chapter 4). This neo-aesthetics will argue that psychoanalysis in

feminist film theory has not allowed for a material aesthetic which

Deleuzian paradigms enable.

Deleuzian ideas enable an analysis of how desire and pleasure might be

theorised outside such paradigms. Maybe something more is at stake

rather than desire or pleasure. Something beyond these two terms? Here

the concept of sensation, and how sensation is premised within a dis-

course of a materialist aesthetic, that is an aesthetic which explains the

importance of affect and sensation as operating `beyond' any subjective

experience of that feeling, as `depth' or an `intensity' which is felt

primordially, in the body, but beyond subjectivity, is prioritised. Through

Deleuzian ideas, as I later argue, subjectivity is subsumed in a `becoming'.

Hegemonic formations are resisted through a flight away from subjec-

tivity. Subjectivity is retheorised through a more complex relationship

between the concepts of affect and sensation in `becoming'.

Rather than the subject having some coincidence with a specific

consciousness, Deleuze argues that the unconscious can be treated as a

field of `veritable becomings' (not locked into subjectivity) but a non-

coincidence of subject and consciousness. A redefinition of thinking and

the process of thought (a pragmatics, or a micro-politics) thus allows a

vision of subjectivity which is `subsumed' because it is accommodated

through a materiality, through the notion of affect and sensation as a

material state, not a psychic state. Subjectless subjectivity. A different

engagement with the term aesthetic. Subjectivity is subsumed through a

materiality where affects are `becomings' encountered through a `body'

which is both mind/brain and corporeal, flesh and blood body. This body,

however, is not the ordinary physical body, in its biological determinants,

nor a psychic body, but a complex set of intersecting forces.

How then do we bring back the aesthetic into film theory in a post-

theoretical climate which has challenged all the elements of modernist

28
conceptions of the aesthetic. In pre-modernist discourse aesthetics was

defined in two ways, in dualistic ways, premised on subjectivity and

objectivity. For example, in one sense aesthetics defined a theory of

sensibility as a form of possible experience. This provides an objective

element of sensation, which is conditioned by the significant elements

such as space, time and form. The second definition of aesthetics provides
30 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
a subjective element of sensation. Here the main concern is that art is a

reflection on real experience and it is expressed in the feeling of pain or

pleasure. Thus an objective and a subjective definition of aesthetic. Later,

modernist (modernism as an artistic movement at the beginning of the

twentieth century) conceptions of the aesthetic were premised on a science

of sensibilities, which encouraged a greater moral good. This conception

of aesthetics has its origins in Aristotelian claims that the objective aim of

art is beauty, which will produce in others `the same impression as derives
29
from the contemplation of beautiful things'. The beautiful was defined

by specific adherence to specific form. Form was a significant element in

that debate and the forms of works of art, films, poetry, novels, were

analysed for specific formulaic devices: use of tone, line, space, or colour,

for example. Proportion, line, colour, space and tone were stylistic devices

which were able to render a form `beautiful' by virtue of the way these

elements were used. The concept `aesthetic' then seems locked into

definitions within modernist and dualist discourse. The role of the artist

as supreme originator of meaning because of some innate gift of ability

was of course connected to `transcendent' notions of goodness and

morality, specifically within romantic discourse. This usage of the term

`beautiful', then, has its originations in romantic discourse, and is some-

thing I want to question and disorientate in the location of a neo-

aesthetics.

In post-theory, the `beautiful' is not necessarily consilient with good-

ness, the romantic, or transcendent notions, but to a feeling of duration,

30
movement and continual process: what Deleuze refers to as `haecceity'

or `intensity'. Neither is it defined as it was in modernism, as `individual

spontaneity' or `cultural imposition'. The anti-aesthetic of post-structur-

alism merely challenged those modernist ideas. I am not arguing here for a

return to the early definitions of the aesthetic, prioritised in the ideas of

people like George Moore, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, in the early part of

the twentieth century, but to rethink the term, through an engagement

with Deleuzian philosophy, in relation to a material aesthetic (an aesthetic

premised on the materiality of the body/mind/world as process, not an

aesthetic premised on set standards of taste and beauty within a mod-

ernist dialectic, or on the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity).

This innovative, emergent definition of aesthetics requires a redefini-

tion of the beautiful. Beauty, here, is not perceived in relation to good

form, but to a temporal element, or process, movement, dynamism ± a

`haecceity'. `Beauty thus pertains to a process that takes empirical pre-

31
cedence over form.' The beautiful, in this new definition, is a proces-

suality, a continual movement. The determination of beauty becomes

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 31

temporal, not reflective: an open-ended process, a feeling of flowing,

rhythm, or `becoming'. Indeed, a refreshing concern with sensation,

rather than desire or pleasure, requires us to think about sensation as

a rhythmical experience, not one of static shock of excitations on the

nervous system. It is much more complex than that, as I shall explore in

Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

The concept of the beautiful in classical definitions was premised on

an external opposition of object and subject, between objectivity and

subjectivity. A different definition of beautiful within a neo-aesthetic

involves a melding of these terms as inseparable elements of `matter'.

This new conception of the `beautiful' and sensation, then, within the

neo-aesthetic is not premised upon romantic, transcendent individual-

ism but it is based upon impersonal, biological, corporeal `matter' in

the material: what I shall later refer to as an immanence, or `becoming-

woman'. Thus `beauty' has nothing to do with `taste' or judgement of

taste, but is rather a felt `immediacy', `force' or `intensity' in process. A

neo-aesthetic in this sense then is an aesthetic as an abiding, a manner

of being in continual process, or `becoming', where subjectivity is

rendered subjectless, and the affective is a material state, as much as

it is deemed a psychic state within psychoanalysis. Deleuze writes of the

significance of this sense of `immediacy' or `force' as pertaining to all

the arts, `there is a community of the arts, a common problem. In art,

and in painting as in music, it's not a question of reproducing or

32
inventing forms, but of harnessing forces.'

I am merely setting up this debate in this chapter for later analysis. In

this neo-aesthetic paradigm, process then takes precedence over form.

The `beautiful' of the neo-aesthetic is contained in its autonomy. This

autonomy is a `subjectless subjectivity' that is expressed in the process of

perception. The filmic encounter involves all aspects of the body's

sensibilities, not just vision and brain: eye and cortex, but the entire

body, an integrating of the materiality of film and the environment.

Subject and object integrate into a larger autonomy of involvement;

matter and mind meld together, as a technic or as an assemblage. This

understanding of aesthetics is seen more as an empiricism than as

romanticism. Here the aesthetic experience involves a whole and total

engagement with molecular forces of being in the world. A complete

depersonalisation is involved, where subjectivity is rendered subjectless.

Barbara McClintock explains how this `depersonalisation' feels in de-

scribing her scientific work, `The more I worked with chromosomes the

bigger and bigger they got, and when I was really working with them I

wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system . . . As you look
32 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself. The
33
main thing is that you forget yourself.' Rather than a feeling being felt

then by some subjectivity, a feeling is not owned by a subject, but the

subject is part of the feeling. In other words, the `subjective encounter' is

experienced within the materiality of existence. `The world and I exist in

difference, in encounter. In the feeling, being is in sensation.'

34
I shall

explore this later in Chapter 5.

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa has described this experience of

impersonalisation or depersonalisation as a dynamogenic experience: one

outside of subjectivity, but premised upon a real bonding with the

molecularity of the world itself. This kind of depersonalisation is actually

similar to the `imagination' or is at one with the imagination. The

imagination is the `manner of subjectless subjectivity in continuity with

matter, as its first effloration in expression at its ``precise point of

35
emergence'' out of itself, into perception, by way of sensation'. Thus

in terms of arguing towards a different aesthetics of the beautiful, here in

a post-feminist aesthetics, the beautiful is experienced through the pro-

cessual, through movement, dynamogenic processes of the vitality of the

`material'. (Post-feminism is a term which I will use to describe a multi-

plicity of feminisms which imbricate and collude with post-theory, and

post-structuralism. It is not necessarily something that comes `after'

feminism, as the term `post' implies, but rather a merging with other

post-theoretical discourses, to present a series of vectors of meaning.) This

is an aesthetics of `intensity' and `becoming', not an aesthetics of good

form. The reason why I think this might be defined as post- feminist is that
it incites some interesting coagulations of woman, movement and pro-

cess, which might enable a reconceptualisation of and the valorisation of

other paradigms of experience outside of language. For example, how the

body, dance, movement and process might be ways of articulating ideas,

feelings, attitudes, experiences in ways outside of written or oral lan-

guage. It is this sense in which I shall be articulating a neo-aesthetics of

affect, as the processuality of the filmic process as a material capture of

matter, in relation to the material experience of individual imagination,

through sensation.

In conclusion to this chapter then, I am suggesting that there might be a

new language, a new formation of the affective and felt experience, in the

concept of sensation, which is beyond `subjectivity' and that which is

signified within formal structures of language formation, signification,

semiotics and regimes of meaning construction such as we might find in

psychoanalysis, for example. Contemporary post-feminist epistemolo-

gies, as we have seen, seek to disturb metaphysical notions such as

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 33

`identity' and `subjectivity' and dichotomous discourses within which

binary concepts such as mind/body, subject/object, rational/emotional,

male/female, animal/human, human/machine have been formulated, con-

cepts redolent of an Enlightenment and Cartesian tradition. This is

extremely important for any consideration of film, since film theory to

date has been formulated through languages which have clearly been

premised on such dichotomies.

Much film theory over the last two decades has appropriated the logic

of structuralism, semiology and the discourse of psychoanalysis for

formal analysis of films and the spectatorial relations with which they

engage. How can we offer, alongside such theories, a theory which

engages with the new discourses of post-feminism and post-structuralism,

in a neo-pragmatic turn from the political, and into the aesthetic, and in

so doing delegitimating the sentient `subject' and binary languages?

Without doubt, contemporary film theory has formulated new reading

practices that do profoundly transform earlier notions of film theory, but

they haven't gone far enough. Connections are needed with contempor-

ary theories or definitions of the `body'. More contemporary conceptions

of the `body' take us away from the merely phenomenological sense of the

body. Contemporary film theory needs to engage with such discourses.

Newer ideas in film theory should also take into account continental

philosophical analyses of the nature of materiality, and the machinic. It

also needs to engage with emergent theories of aesthetics (a neo-aes-

thetics) premised outside any notion of sentient `subjectivity'. The phi-

losophy of Deleuze and Guattari is the key to these new paradigms of

thought.

As David Rodowick has pointed out, `blocked by a formal conception

of text, spectator, and the relations between them, Anglo-American film

theory has not engaged with the implications of the new reading positions
36
offered within post-structuralist thinking'. A neo-aesthetic turn in post-

feminist film theory, in collusion with the anti-metaphysical and vitalist

thinking of Deleuze, might enable us to rethink the value of the aesthetic

within film theory. This may then lead to innovative conceptions of the

theory of affect and sensation through the processuality of becoming,

rather than pleasure and desire, thus taking us back to questions of the

value of film as an art form, no longer trapped within the reductionist

paradigms of sociological, semiological and psychoanalytical analyses.

Film theory may thus move away from perceptions of desire or pleasure,

premised on the visual and the scopic into a creative thinking of the

material capture of the cinematic experience or the cinematic event. Film

has suffered too much at the hands of sociological and ideological

34 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
analysis. I am not denying that film does in fact provide a significant

construction of ideology, but its role as an aesthetic formation, as an art

form needs to be revalorised. For too long the aesthetics of film has been

distanciated with sociological and empirical study. I want to reclaim film

as an art form. A reclamation of film as art, but an art which is

experienced through a materialist aesthetic and a bio-aesthetic is thus

the main concern here.

What follows in Chapter 2 is a preparatory and basic foregrounding of

the origins of the significance of desire and pleasure in film theory. In two

sections, it follows an exploration of how and why subjectivity was

relevant to film theory, specifically through its exploration of psycho-

analysis as a framework to theorise desire and pleasure. It presents a short

account of the role of subjectivity in cinepsychoanalysis and the inter-

vention of feminist film theory. The second part of the chapter provides

an explanation of newer approaches to theorising the cinematic encoun-

ter, which move beyond psychoanalysis. As such it provides a platform to

take my ideas (positive and aleatory concepts) forward through the

thinking of Deleuze, in relation to the concepts of pleasure, desire and

the ultimate `beyond' of pleasure, sensation, through affect and a `be-

coming-woman' of the cinematic, in Part Two of the book, Chapters 3, 4

37
and 5 on Deleuze.

NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze and Fe
 lix Guattari, What is Philosophy ?, p. 164.

2. Elizabeth Grosz, `A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics', in

Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the
Theatre of Philosophy , p. 193.

3. I am referring to the early decades of the twentieth century when writers like

George Moore and Roger Fry were concerned with `form' as that through which

an ethical sense of the `good' is achieved. That form would be premised on

balance, harmony and a relational of aesthetic characteristics producing a

harmonious `whole'. Definitions of modernism are problematic here, I acknowl-

edge, since modernism has been used to categorise a period of art as critique, for

example, the Frankfurt School, where distanciation in a work of art enabled a

political and ideological critique. I am not referring to this concept of modernism.

4. Pierre Giraud, Semiology , p. 67.

5. Marx based his analysis of society on the materialist conception of history.

According to such views, history was seen not so much as a recording of events

like wars, monarchs or statesman, but a recording of the ways in which people

organise themselves in order to provide and satisfy their material needs, of

clothing, shelter, food, etc.

6. Fe Chaosmosis
 lix Guattari, , p. 20.

7. La nouvelle vague of course was eminent in this area of experimentation with

directors such as Jean Luc Godard, and Franc

Ë ois Truffaut. Earlier directors such

as Eisenstein had similarly experimented with aesthetics and film form, in terms
 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 35

of politically charged meanings in film: Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin

(1925), or October (1928), for example.

8. For a detailed analysis of the trajectories of feminist theory see Linda Nicholson

(ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism.

9. Seyla Benhabib, `Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance', in L.

Nicholson (ed.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, p. 17.

10. Post-structuralism is a contemporary theoretical discourse which calls for the

dissolution of the fixed and sentient subject. The subject is seen as fluid, mobile,

transitional and fragmentary.

11. The debate about subjectivity and its construction is an important debate within

the context of this chapter, but I only tangentially position some of the main

theorists on this. I urge the reader to read further with recommendations as

follows. It is important, however, to acknowledge here that if subjectivity and the

subject have been fundamental concepts within film theory, then any new

perceptions emanating out of post-theory will have an important effect in film

theory. For an explanation of the heterogeneity of subjectivity, a post-structur-

alist vision of subjectivity, see Fe

 lix Guattari, Chaosmosis, ch. 1, `On the

Productivity of Subjectivity', in which he explains that subjectivity is plural,

and polyphonic, and is an amalgamation of machinic dimensions. According to

Guattari, semiological elements, like the family, education, fit alongside elements

constructed by the media, to the more a-signifying regimes. Here Guattari

identifies the importance of current research in ethology and ecology as a

requirement to understanding the complexity of `subjectivation' as a material

process, within the material formations of the cellular structures of the brain. (See

also Chapter 4 on Deleuze in this book.)

12. See for example the work of Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous, each of whom have

different perspectives, but who are prioritising feminisms which articulate multi-

ple and fluid subjectivities. Their work is, however, mostly premised on a

rearticulation of psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian. Thus their feminisms,

and I acknowledge there are differences across these three, are still premised on

psychoanalytic constructions of subjectivities. For a brief overview see Toril Moi,

Sexual/Textual Politics.

13. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Con-

temporary Feminist Theory.

14. Within contemporary feminist epistemology, the debate about the `subject'

proliferates. Writers like Irigaray and Cixous argue for a feminist subjectivity,

while Moira Gatens has positioned significant debates regarding conceptual

shifts in feminist thinking (M. Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and

Corporeality). Her politics of difference, drawing upon Foucault, explores the

micro-politics of power. For Gatens, the aim of feminist theory is to deconstruct

the webs across embodiment, differences and power, through a politics of

difference. Donna Haraway has also written on the potential of a liberatory

cyborgian `subjectivity' and Chela Sandoval offers an oppositional conscious-

ness, which articulates a differential subjectivity. See D. Haraway, Simians,

Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature and C. Sandoval, `New

Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed', in B.

Kennedy and D. Bell (eds), The Cybercultures Reader, p. 374. See also Nancy

Fraser, `False Antitheses' and `Pragmatism, Feminism and the Linguistic Turn',

Drucilla Cornell, `What is Ethical Feminism?' and `Rethinking the Time of

Feminism', and Judith Butler `Contingent Foundations' and `For a Careful

Reading' in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminist Contentions, for a thorough discussion

of the polemics of current post-feminist thinking and the contradictions across

their ideas.
36 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
15. Gatens, Imaginary Bodies. Grosz and Gatens embrace Deleuzian materialism.

16. See Barbara Kennedy, `Post-feminist Futures in Film Noir', in M. Aaron, The

Body's Perilous Pleasures, pp. 126±143, in which I discuss Haraway's relevance

to film.

17. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women.

18. The notion of `becoming' will be explored in Chapter 4 on Deleuze in more detail.

I wish to signpost it here only. The term is predicated on Nietzsche's concept of

`becoming'. For Nietzsche there is no distinction between the world in which we

live and any other transcendent plane of existence. For him there is no ultimate

truth, no metaphysical world to which we aspire through Being. There is only

ever the processual experience of the `real', the real forces of life and its natural

existence in its germinal and viral contingencies. (Premised on Darwin) `becom-

ing' epitomises that process of the affirmation of the dynamic of living in the real

world, an acceptance of the cruelty of life, the joy of cruelty in that existence, the

sheer ineluctability of life's transience. There is no other to which we can aspire.

The `real' is all there ever is and, within that, our experience of the real;

`becoming' serves to define life's ephemerality. Deleuze expands upon this notion

of `becoming'.

19. Of course I am not suggesting that ideology and signification are not still

significant discourses through which to theorise the filmic experience. I am

arguing that there are other paradigms as well.

20. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity;

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.

21. I want to highlight the term `machinic' as one which advocates creative possi-

bilities of connection: machinic in a positive and affirmative sense, and not in any

negative or entropic sense, as it might be perceived in its literal definitions.

Machinic in my use of the term is meant to denote openness, connectivity and

alignments of thinking, feeling and material assemblages. See also Guattari,

Chaosmosis, for discussion of the machinic, outside conceptions of this term as a

literal technological term.

22. Grosz, `A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics', in Boundas and

Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 193.

23. Deleuze and Guattari express the concept of `aparalletic evolution' as the `becom-

ing' that exists between two contrasting matters. As an example, I quote from Gilles

Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, p. 2, `There are no longer binary machines:

question/answer, masculine/feminine, man/animal, etc. This could be what a

conversation is, simply the outline of a becoming. The wasp and the orchid provide

the example. The orchid seems to form a wasp image, an orchid-becoming of the

wasp, a double capture, since, ``what'' each becomes changes no less than that

which ``becomes''. The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive organs at

the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. One and the same

becoming, a single bloc of becoming, ``aparallel evolution'' of two beings which

have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.'

24. I use this term in the Harawayan sense, and not in any literal sense of the word

technology. Here technology is a much more amorphous abstract concept,

meaning an assemblaging of components. Thus for example we can talk of a

`technologised' intellect or a `technologised' thought process, or a `technologised'

body. This does not necessarily mean any literal change to the body's outward

appearance, but describes a set of complexities which re-constitute the body in an

amalgam of different ways, physically, mentally, intellectually or emotionally, or

all of these. See also Rosanne Allucquere Stone's `Will the Real Body Please Stand

Up', in Kennedy and Bell (eds), The Cybercultures Reader.

25. Fernando Pessoa, A Centenary Pessoa, p. 254.

 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 37

26. Pessoa, A Centenary Pessoa, p. 254.

27. This of course begs the question as to how one `enjoys' without some sense of

subjectivity. I shall be exploring the idea of an existential integrity: that is, a sense

of self which is not premised on a sense of consciousness, in later chapters. I

merely add this here to indicate that this question is relevant to the claim of

enjoyment outside of subjectivity. The use of the term `impact' is perhaps

therefore more useful than enjoyment.

28. One could trace this dualism back to philosophers such as Kant who wrote about

this in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of Judgement. I do not

wish to engage with these ideas here, merely to initiate the derivation of the dual

conception of aesthetics.

29. Pessoa, A Centenary Pessoa, p. 254.

30. The word haecceity derives from the Latin form `haec' meaning `Thisness' and

was used in the texts of Duns Scotus and later the poetry of Gerard Manley

Hopkins, denoting an experience of `Thisness', an immanent sense of becoming,

nothing to do with a transcendent understanding of being.

31. Brian Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, p. 746.

32. Deleuze, Logique de la Sensation, p. 39, translated by Ronald Bogue, `Gilles

Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force', in Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p.

257.

33. Barbara McClintock quoted in Robert Root-Bernstein, `Art, Imagination and the

Scientist', in American Scientist.

34. Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in Canadian

Review of Comparative Literature, p. 765.

35. Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in Canadian

Review of Comparative Literature, p. 757.

36. David Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference, p. 3.

37. I emphasise the notion of tangential, since the chapter is only a brief and

simplistic trajectory of some elements of cinepsychoanalysis and its relevance

to feminist film theory, as a departure point for new ideas. It does not engage in

debates across different readings of psychoanalysis (but still acknowledges these)

and its appropriation by a wide range of different feminisms. It provides further

references for a fuller account for the reader. It does not give a total account of all

strands of feminist film theory, (mentioning only in passing the seminal work of

Laura Mulvey) nor can it do so in the constraints and the aims of the locus of this

book, which is to present a collusion between Deleuzian philosophy and the

filmic experience.
Chapter 2

From Oedipal Myths . . .

to New Interventions

FROM OEDIPAL MYTHS . . .

In the context of Chapter 1, it is apparent that subjectivity, the body,

pleasure and desire are critical concepts within a post-feminist prag-

matics, a pragmatics which enables a re-evaluation of the aesthetic or the

production of a `neo-aesthetic' in film culture. That neo-aesthetic can then

be considered as a micro-political framework which might provide

creative possibilities for the transformations of consciousness, outside

macro-political structures. A new set of concepts emanating from a neo-

aesthetic would be productive in understanding the cinematic experience

as an `event' or as `material capture' and a processuality which engages

with the notion of the material.

FILM THEORY AND A BRIEF INTERLUDE INTO CINEPSYCHOANALYSIS

Unlike mass audience study or sociological and empirical work in film

theory, cinepsychoanalysis premised the viewer as a set of conflicting and

fluctuating features. `If psychoanalysis can be said to address the problem

of ``interlocking subjectivities'', caught up in a network of symbolic

systems, psychoanalytic film theory addresses spectatorship as an integral

1
part of this complicated wave.' The construction of subjectivity and its

role within desire are crucial to this debate. Film theory used psycho-

analysis as a model through which to explain patterns of pleasure and

desire and how these are manifested to a spectator of a film, either within

the formations of the film as text, or within the cinepsychoanalytic

construction of the cinema-viewing `subject'. Cinepsychoanalysis desig-

nated the cinematic experience as a production of fantasy, identification

and, most importantly, a subjectivity, created through a series of primary

(that is, actually experienced by us as individuals) psychical processes.

The cinema was seen to construct a psychically produced `subject'. The

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 39

relationship between screen, spectator and manifestations of desire was

perceived as one involving several interlocking concepts: fantasy, the

scopic, identification and subjectivity. Films thus have meaning by virtue

of a fictive viewer. That `fictive viewer' is a psychically constructed

subject. His or her subjectivity and its role within the process of desire

is formulated through the manifestations of the cinematic text, in an

analogous relationship to the processes of the unconscious and the

development of the subject. Premised upon models of Freudian and

Lacanian discourse, cinepsychoanalysis argued that cinematic desire is

explained as a result of the fictive viewer's relationship with the film. This

was seen as analogous to the complex staging of events within the

unconscious, from early primordial originations of the organism, from

maternal plenitude, through to the acquisition of language within culture.

The first stage in this setting of unconscious processes is the state of

`unity' or `plenitude'. This incorporates a desire to be united within reality

and a desire for unity with those who provide a sense of identity with

one's self, where of course meaning and words provide some sense of

awareness of that reality. This desired state of meaning is a recuperation

of that state first experienced in the pre-Oedipal stage of maternal

plenitude and fullness. Cinematic desire establishes this through an

illusory state where the filmic experience offers a `womb-like' security,

[T]he totalising, womblike effects of the film-viewing situation represent

. . . the activation of an unconscious desire to return to an earlier state of

psychic development, one before the formation of the ego, in which the

divisions between self and other, internal and external, have not yet taken
2
shape.

The second stage for the organism is the entry into a stage of `illusory'

unity. This is an imagined unity and occurs in what Lacan refers to as the

mirror stage. Here the emergent subjectivity is provided by an `imaginary'

unity with its own image reflected in the mirror. But this is a fragmented

image, one first encountered by the face to face, mother/other maternal

stage. (This involved scopic processes, looking and being looked at in a

symbiotic relational.) The splitting of the self occurs when the ego

separates from the imaginary unity and the self-image at the Lacanian

mirror stage. Here, the infant has that first recognition of a distinction

between self and m(other)/mirror-image (self as other). Second, there is a

recognition of lack or absence, either of the mother or the gratification of

those early biological needs within the pre-Oedipal state, provided by the

mother. Replacing the infant's dependence on the (m)other with a self-

reliance, the mirror stage becomes the place for compensation for the
40 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
child's acceptance of its lack. This is however an illusory identification of

the infant with its visual `gestalt' in the mirror. It also marks those early

origins of separation within notions such as inside/outside, subject/object,

self and other. From now on, splitting, binary modes of thinking and lack

are the modes of understanding for the infant. This causes it to seek out an

identificatory image through access, first with image and later through

language. The infant has thus moved from an early maternal state of

plenitude, to an imaginary state, where images, doubles and `others' are

part of its visual identifications. As a result of this fragmentation and

splitting, the organism seeks to find a completeness, whilst accepting its

splitting. Thus the child becomes ensnared within a process of recognition

and misrecognition. An image of itself is both correct and yet also

illusory. An ambivalence presides within Lacan's account of subjectivity.

So, the infant recognises itself at the very moment it loses itself, in the

`other'. The subject's construction of its identity is therefore locked into

this dialectical model.

The significance for film theory is of course Lacan's prioritising of the

visual. This is because vision, more than any of the other senses, can be

split between the looked at and the looking. Tactility and the olfactory

cannot so easily be split into subject and object categorisations. Lacan's

mirror phase emphasises the scopic, a vision-centred mechanism, but as

Elizabeth Grosz argues,

Lacan's ocular centrism, his vision centredness, its complicity with

Freud's, privileges the male body as a phallic, virile body and regards

the female body as castrated . . . We should note that the female can be

construed as castrated, lacking the sexual organ, only on the information

3
provided by vision.

Psychoanalytic prioritisation of the visual (at least in Lacan) becomes

crucial within feminist film theory, especially in its relation to sexual

difference, through the castration complex.

As we have seen then, within the organism's reality, or the `infant's'

reality, unity and identity are only `illusions'. A third stage of events

involves the notion of `difference'. It is this crucial element of `difference'

which has caused so much debate within film studies, specifically around

the notion of gendered subjectivity, and explanations of gendered desire.

In this third phase, language becomes part of the complex explanations of

desire. Following the mirror phase, the infant can begin to distinguish

various elements of its world, people, objects, from its `self' whilst

simultaneously seeing a place of recognition of `itself' in the world,

and, at this stage, comes the notion of a sexed subjectivity, enabling a

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 41

sense of gendered identity. That notion of a sexed subjectivity comes from

the Oedipal complex.

This important `concept' of difference comes out of the axiomatics of

structuralist linguistics, premised on the work of Saussure, who argued

that language can only ever have meaning by virtue of `difference' but

difference in terms of oppositional difference. Psychoanalysis, then,

explains this first element of difference in that very sexual difference

through the `having or not' of the signifier, the phallus. Sexual difference

is thus marked through a division between `lack' or `not lack', whereby

the female equates with `lack'. Sexual difference is equated with the

notions therefore of absence or presence (of the phallus). For the emergent

subject, the only way to recuperate the plenitude is to return to those pre-

Oedipal moments. This is prevented by the intrusion of the third element

in the Oedipal triangle, the father, who symbolically represents the Law

of the Father (by virtue of the penis/phallus) takes over the mother,

possesses and takes away the maternal from the infant. This traumatic

experience, of sexual oppositions, establishes the castration anxiety in the

infant, and establishes sexual difference. Sexual difference equates with a

fear of the loss of the phallus, a loss of the signifier of power in the cultural

arena. This is important as it equates with linguistic difference, as a

constitution of human subjectivity.

Thus, the split subject in culture, who acquires language, through

acculturation following the symbolic order and mirror phase will seek to

recapture a lost plenitude of `unity' before the split, a return to origina-

tions, oneness with primordial and teleological originations. Desire is

constructed as the attempt to recapture this early stage. It is also a stage of

transcendence, in the Freudian sense of a return to origins, and return to a

stage of inorganic beginnings (see Chapter 3, section `Rethinking Pleasure

beyond Freud'). The subject can only do this through language; but the

problem is that language is insufficient, too static, too incapable to enable

this fluctuating and fluid experience. It cannot `speak' desire, because it is

restrictive and encoded in oppositional difference. So desire can never be

fulfilled, satiated, encapsulated. Language is always insufficient to ac-

commodate this. There is a continual mismatch or a constant area of the

`abyssal', an `unsurmountable lack', which constitutes desire. Whereas

Freud positions the formulae of sexual drives in ontogenesis and species

survival and predetermined biological development, suggesting that

drives are given, Lacan analyses sexual drives through the functioning

of language and linguistics. One is innately biological, the other cultural.

For Lacan, the drive is not to be seen as biological or real (as it is in

Freud), but is a function of the field of the `other'. It is based on language

42 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
and the symbolic: the cultural not the physical. `Desire', as such, comes

out of the gap which lies between what Lacan refers to as `need' (which is

fulfillable) and `demand' (which is insatiable). Desire is situated in the

dependence on demand,

which by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder

that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a

condition, both absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily

4
lacking, unsatisfied, misconstrued, an element that is called `desire'.

The reason why I emphasise this point is that desire is here determined

through processes which are negative, abyssal: a desire which is always

premised on lack, a need for satiation, for finality and satisfaction. Such

determinations cannot account for the viscerality and vitality of film as a

processual experience, encapsulated through movement and duration,

which is why we need to look for more complex accounts of cinematic

desire.

Therefore, if language is incapable of fulfilling this gap, in providing

this sense of desire, the image, it has been surmised in film studies, might

return the subject to its state of plenitude. So, the scopic/visual processes

of the cinematic encounter, argues cinepsychoanalysis, mimic early

psychic formations of pleasure through these interrelationships, inter-

relationships premised upon binary distinctions, and binary language.

Within that binary logic the main opposition of mind/body had been

clearly maintained in cinepsychoanalysis, such that the body was only

considered in relation to the biological difference between male and

female viewers as responsible for their psychical manifestations. Within

the arena of visual representation and the image, gender is a crucial

element, because of the image of woman, denoting a symbolic `lack'

through her anatomical `body' as lack. The phallus as signifier is

inherently located in the literal figure of the penis. Women have a major

role in the production of the symbolic (language and culture). However,

because of her `lack' woman can only have a negative position in culture,

in relation to the positive position of masculinity, premised on the

symbolic signifier of the phallus/penis. Woman cannot have access to

desire, in this scenario, because she represents `lack'. Female sexuality is

not allowed expression; it cannot be expressed through language, or

through iconic representation. The symbolic activity of both these arenas

annihilates the `lack' woman represents. She thus has no access to her

own desire; she is silenced, misplaced, out of the picture. So argues

feminist film theory from the 1970s and onwards.

However, this is too simplistic a reading of Lacan, and of course his

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 43

ideas do acknowledge that the phallus is but a signifier and is not in any

way a literal conception of penis. He categorically removes the equation

of the phallus from any anatomical or biological body, arguing that there

is a constant slippage between the signifier and the signified, an oscillation

that can never be fixed. This has provided the grounding for much

reconstitutive work by feminists, through Lacan and beyond Lacan

through French feminist psychoanalysis. Indeed, his distinction between

phallus and penis had enabled Freud's biologistic account of male

supremacy and women's state of `lack' to be explained in linguistic

and symbolic terms. However, there lies one of the many contradictions

in Lacan, because he states,

[T]he fact that the penis is dominant in the shaping of the body image is

evidence of an autonomous, non-biological imaginary anatomy. Though

this may shock the champions of the autonomy of female sexuality, such

dominance is a fact, and one which cannot be put down to cultural

5
influences alone.

Thus, I want to stage the problematic ellision of the biological penis/

phallus as the signifier of lack, as one which still haunts cinepsychoa-

nalysis, and despite the wide range of feminist film theory which has

reread and reappropriated psychoanalysis for women and to `speak'

women's desire, I want to move debates in film theory away from this

restrictive binarist use of language, and to remove the question of desire

and pleasure away from genital sexuality and a use of language which is

still premised on dialectical oppositions. Why should we be constrained

by a perception of `lack' premised still on a phallus/penis equation, and by

an inability to voice or have access to desire? The psychical explanation of

desire does not fit so easily with how we feel, how we experience a

material and aesthetic relation to the world. We can feel intense and

ecstatic resonances in an array of dimensions of experience, specifically

through dance, colour, tactility, movement and the rhythmical. Why then

should the iconic formations such as cinema be explained through

psychical constructions of desire, locked into binarist language, and

genital conceptions of sexuality or through the purely visual and scopic?

Cinepsychoanalysis has tried to explain the structures of cinematic

desire for several decades, and following several attempts to destroy a

perceived phallocentric pleasure, as Laura Mulvey argues in `Visual

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', feminist film theory appropriated a

range of different Freudian and Lacanian texts to enable a multiplicity of

readings of a pre-Oedipal subjectivity, for justifying a specific female

6
desire and a female subjectivity. Mulvey's seminal article `Visual Plea-
44 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
7
sure and Narrative Cinema' sought a destruction of film's processes of

pleasure, maintaining that this construction of cinematic pleasure was

formulated upon the masculine subject of desire. Woman, as we have seen

from the above discussion, was missing from the processes of desire.

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist theories of cinematic

desire were contained within a binary construction of difference in terms

of opposition, through which positive terms are produced only in relation

to negative terms. Sexual difference has been seen to be key to the

production of subjectivity, gendered identity and structures of desire.

Vision and binary oppositions are crucial to a theory of the gaze. Laura

Mulvey argued that psychoanalytic theory had positioned a cine-subject

which was very much a male subject and that the visual determinations of

the cinematic experience presented female images as `coded-in-to-be-

looked-at-ness' whilst man was `bearer of the look'. Such arguments

as outlined in detail in `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' are well

known within the auspices of feminist film theory.

However, despite the array of post-Mulveyan discourse, some of which

has reappropriated Lacanian psychoanalysis in reclaiming female desire,

and moving outside of a fixed notion of gendered subjectivity, there is a

crucial point which needs to be displaced and even turned around within

the mapping of cinepsychoanalysis. I want to take the selection of

concepts of desire, subjectivity and the body and rethink them in a

different sphere from the notion of genital sexuality, or morphological

notions of the body. Psychoanalysis has been too locked into the equation

of processes of desire with the body and an anatomical and genital

sexuality, despite Lacan's distance from Freud. It premises its whole

explanation of desire through anatomical difference. Desire is locked into

models which require a genitalised and specific anatomical relation to the

body of woman. The fact that she represents `lack' through a lack of a

specific organ has been used to provide the basis of the whole myth of

Oedipal scenarios. I want to rethink the very concepts used here, to

problematise notions of an `anatomical' body for example. Those Oedi-

pal myths have also been locked into determinations to return to tele-

ological inorganic plenitude, where a concern with the death instinct is

connected to the notions of the erotic (see Chapter 3, section `Rethinking

Pleasure beyond Freud'). Pleasure and death become equations in a search

for original unity, a transcendent notion of the subject.

What I want to do by setting up a collusion across post-feminist

pragmatics, Deleuzian philosophy and film theory is to argue that the

whole premise of desire need not be located within notions of transcen-

dent states, or an `anatomical' body, whatever that is, or with recupera-

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 45

tions for the subject, of lost empires in the mythical, psychical lands of the
inorganic. Indeed, the very language that we use, with terms such as
`body', needs to be rethought through different perceptions of language.
Sexuality may also lie outside/beyond configurations of a genitalised
experience, an orgasmic or blissful ecstasy of genital formulations, one
which imbricates the jouissancial pleasures of death in that moment of ` le
petit mort' (although it also resides deliciously there as well . . . perhaps!).
Rather desire may lie beyond, in a more complex explanation of the
`body' and `desire', beyond the anatomical and Oedipal restrictions that
we find within psychoanalysis. Desire does not need to be reliant upon
phallic determinations of a teleological satisfaction, premised upon such
equations with the genital.
I believe that aesthetic modulations, rhythm, movement, energy, dura-
tion and intensity and a wide range of aesthetic resonations provide vital
and creative cartographies and joyous spaces to which we might look for
new configurations of `bliss' beyond desire. Aesthetics `becomes' the new
sexuality; processes of movement, ecstasy, the durational and proces-
suality become the new dynamics, a new dance, beyond the scopic,
replacing that fixed and mythical theatre of Oedipal anxieties. Desire
premised upon genitality is too constrained by the binary, the dialogical
and dialectics of structuralist linguistics and restrictive definitions of the
body. Even French feminist discussions of a specifically feminine sub-
jectivity and desire have premised that `jouissance' upon a sexual rela-
tional within and through the anatomical female body, despite of course
more recent explanations of their work as being located through a
8
morphology, rather than a literal anatomical sense of the body.

PROBLEMATISING AND MOVING FORWARD

If we are to locate a new mind-set which emphasises the aesthetic as
`becoming-sexuality', through sensation, in relation to cinematic desire, I
want also to locate that within a further problematising of cinepsycho-
analysis and restrictive structuralist language which has prevented us
from using concepts in more fluid, assemblaged and machinic ways.
Cinepsychoanalysis has been too tied up with exploring the text and its
viewer as a cinematic process which is concerned with psychical forma-
tions of subjectivities and desire to explain a wider perception of film as
an aesthetic and artistic experience. If aesthetics `becomes' as it were the
new `sexuality', this has important implications for explaining the ex-
perience of film outside of psychical explanations of desire. Aesthetics, as
a processuality of molecular sexualities, moves beyond the notion of
gendered desire. Film studies has for too long been concerned with
46 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
textual/sexual operations, and the idea of a psychically constructed and

gendered viewer. Film is an excitingly visceral, vital and dynamic aes-

thetic experience, and wider frameworks of understanding are needed to

explain the aesthetic resonances beyond the restrictive codings so far

discussed, outside codings which locate a sexualised subjectivity. How do

we begin to understand the aesthetic experience of the `event' of the

cinematic, as a processual, material capture of experience, rather than

thinking of the film as a text which produces intellectual or psychical

formations of subjectivity and desire. Film energises, it mobilises, it works

as matter, in assemblage with other bodies of matter. It connects in

amorphous ways outside the merely scopic and psychical. Cinepsycho-

analysis merely accounts for psychical perceptions of the experience and

it clearly locates a gendered subjectivity and a split subjectivity as part of

that process, a subjectivity which is formulated through the very process

of the visual/scopic experience and a subjectivity that experiences desire

through Oedipalised mechanisms.

Subjectivity, as a term itself, however, is too complex a concept to be

completely explained through psychoanalysis, a framework locked into

binarism, and reductive accounts of the subject. If subjectivity is pro-

blematised and examined through wider philosophical discourses which I

introduce through Deleuze, then this enables a more creative explanation

of how the film, as an aesthetic process of sexuality, connects in more

amorphous ways, through the gestural, the mimetic, and the pathic.

Subjectivity and psychoanalytical explanations of desire are too limiting

to address how films work, connect, impact as material `capture', as an

aesthetic. Furthermore, psychoanalytical versions of desire lock the

concept into frameworks of negativity, need, demand and the scopic.

This does not explain the vitality, the viscerality and the processuality of

film in duration, in movement and force ± an ecstatic and vital play of

molecularities and intensities. A different understanding of subjectivity as

`subjectless subjectivity' which is located beyond frameworks of Lacanian

desire, and Freudian determinations of pleasure, would provide some new

and innovative thought about the aesthetics of the film as `event', as a

material capture of those aesthetic sexualities.

What is also problematic about Lacanian versions of desire is that they

confine debates within a linguistic mise-en-sce

Á ne and a language which is

very clearly formulated through binarisms; difference is discerned

through oppositions. This prevents any notion of desire or a beyond

of desire, which operates in ways outside of linguistic structures and

psychical versions of subjectivity: for example through the aesthetics of a

sensation/sexuality which is a machinic assemblage of the gestural, the

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 47

pathic, the affective. Within an aesthetics of sensation, the concept of

`affect' becomes a much more useful term than either pleasure or desire, as

I shall explore in Chapter 3. The concept of affect becomes more relevant

to the aesthetic experience than either pleasure or desire. Psychoanalysis

does allow for some consideration of the term `affect', and Elizabeth

Grosz states it has been perceived as a form of psychic discharge or energy

which effectuates some sort of emotional response. Writing in relation to

language and the unconscious, she states, `The quota of affect or energy of

the threatening experience, which is intimately connected to the drive, is

separated from the memory or image, leaving a smaller quota associated

with the idea. The idea continues to strive for conscious expression and

motility in the form of a wish . The wish is nothing but this process of

striving towards consciousness and motility or `` discharge ''. The drive is

thus bound up with representation or signification as soon as it is capable

of psychical registration. Indeed this is its condition of psychical exis-

9
tence.' This equates the affective as an ultimate satisfying (that is,

through discharge of desire). However, desire may be explained as

processual, without finality or satisfaction. Affect cannot be located only

in the psychical, but exists also within the materiality of the organism's

make up.

`Affect' has been seen by some versions of psychoanalysis as existing

within psychic states of the Imaginary; the verbal, voice, rhythm, tone and

colour are for example perceived as elements in a pre-discursivity, a pre-

Oedipal realm before language acquisition. But there are whole areas of

experience that lie outside the psychoanalytic model which have a major

place in the experience of the cinema, which cinepsychoanalysis claims to

explain. `Affect' is not merely psychical, but may be defined as material

energy, premised on a Bergsonian and Deleuzian conception. It may be

defined as material energy, based upon molecular structures of matter. To

argue that it is both psychical and the material enables a break of the

binary across rational, scientific claims on the definitions of pleasure and

humanist, idealist notions of pleasure. Affect is rather a coagulation of the

two regimes. It is significant that the concept of ` Aufhebung ', meaning

pleasure of the tactile/visual affect, has been theorised from Hegel to

Lacan as psychical, but through Deleuze, a

Á la Bergson, as positioned

within the material and the molecular.

Indeed, affectivity encompasses both the psychical and the material,

and is an important factor in rethinking the aesthetic/sexual experience.

The affective might occur at a deeper and more primordial level than the

psychical. This involves thinking about elements other than the psychical,

other assemblages outside of psychical or phenomenological formations.

48 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
The cinematic experience is more than just the scopic or the visual. The

aesthetics of the experiential are encompassed across the synaesthetic, the

kinaesthetic, the proprioceptive and the processuality of duration and

movement. The aesthetic then in this sense might be perceived as part of a

material emotion, felt at a level deeper than a psychically constructed

subjectivity.

This breakdown of the binarism across the meaning of affect is also

pertinent to a discussion on the concept of the `body'. Traditional

discourses of film theory and cinepsychoanalysis were premised on binary

language structures which firmly demarcated a disjunction between the

concepts of mind and body. The corporeal body, the flesh and blood body

of the literal spectator, was left out of debates which were more concerned

with the mind and its role in psychical accounts of subjectivity. The term

`body' equated with either male or female versions of human biological

construction: the `having' or not of a phallus/penis for example. Debates

within film theory, specifically feminist film theory, were replete for

several years with concerns with images of woman, determined purely

on this binary opposition of gender and sexuality. As a result of post-

structuralist discourse, post-feminist theory and cyberdiscourse, the bin-

ary construction of language, and conceptual thought, has been ques-

tioned. Thus the oppositional differences that had once been perceived,

within structuralist linguistics, between the concepts of mind and body

(and of course through a whole range of other binarisms, such as animal/

10
machine, nature/human, organism/machine) began to be considered.

The problem with cinepsychoanalysis is that it maintained a dependence

upon a link between psychical formations of desire, and the identification

with a specific gendered image on the screen or a specifically gendered

subject position as a psychically constructed spectator. It maintained a

notion of a `sentient' subjective vision of an image on the screen. Psycho-

analysis had no role thus for the body as a lived body or for any wider

conception of the term `body'. This term was restricted to its binary

opposite of the mind or to a notion of an anatomical body which has or

does not have a phallus. What has been lacking in psychoanalysis has

been a wider conception of the term `body'. Post-theoretical discourse has

problematised the concept to the extent that the body may now be

conceived, through theory, as part of an assemblage of meaning forma-

tions. The body might be perceived as aesthetic, material, technological,

biological or machinic, in the more contemporary meaning of the word

machinic. Both body and mind can be `technologised' in the abstract sense

of `fitting together as an amalgam of different elements, whether material,

biological, aesthetic, pharmacological or psychical'. `Body' itself becomes

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 49

a term of much wider conceptualisations. Psychoanalysis, despite its

reappropriations in multiple ways beyond early uses, did not allow for

theorising this complex assemblage of meaning for the concept `body'.

What, we might begin to ask, constitutes the concept `body'? How might

newer conceptions of the term `body' rather than `the body' involve wider

formulations than the corporeal, flesh and blood body. The body can also

be conceived as an assemblage, as a machinic assemblage in connection

with other assemblages. Bodies can also be defined as complex forces and

intensities that coagulate, oscillate and imbricate, as machinic assem-

blages of the molecular. The real, flesh and blood, technologised indi-

vidual, as part of this extended determination of `body', experiences the

event of the cinematic encounter in a variety of ways, outside (although as

well as) psychoanalytic mechanisms.

In relation to a post-structuralist and post-feminist pragmatics, then,

how can newer theories that develop the concept of the `body' outside of its

binary positionality in structuralist discourse be useful in film theory? The

term `body' might be deemed an abstract concept which describes an

interstitial space of the molecular, the technologised, the material and the

aesthetic, as I explore them throughout this book. A materialist aesthetic

and a neo-aesthetic, through Deleuzian philosophy, which rethinks the

`event' of the cinematic, might enable us to rethink the concepts `body' and

`sexuality' in relation to film aesthetics. I shall develop this in Chapter 4,

where I discuss the idea of `constituting bodies'. How then does `aesthetics'

become a significant concept in such post-theoretical frameworks?

As I argued in Chapter 1, film theory has for too long been concerned

with sociological and empirical research that its place within our aesthetic

sensibilities seems somewhat lost, confused and at times even ignored.

What I want to do through my imbrication with Deleuze is to bring back

debates about film as an art form, as an element in a wider understanding

of an aesthetic/sexual process which incorporates the `bodies' of our

material, technological, and molecular worlds, as well as rethinking

debates about the scopic and the visual. Cinepsychoanalytic notions of

`pleasure' presented a universal acceptance of what it is to be `pleasured'

and why certain images may be deemed pleasurable. Such debates were

premised on the scopic configurations of the filmic experience, and that

pleasure was related to structures of looking, the gaze, the visual and the

psychic. But, the scopic and the visual need to be rethought across a more

creative mind/body/brain and brain/body/world connection. The body is

both responsible, as well as the mind/brain, for the ways in which visual

elements such as colour, form, movement, rhythm are effectuated within,

through and beyond our consciousness.

50 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Considering such concepts will encourage a newer understanding of

aesthetic terms such as the `beautiful', but through a different perception

and understanding of the term, as I explained in Chapter 1. Re-evaluating

concepts such as the `beautiful' and `feeling' will incorporate different

theories of the body, in relation to mind and brain, through collusion with

Deleuzian thinking. This will present an understanding of film therefore

as a `material capture' occurring at levels beyond any perceivable sense of

psychically constructed subjectivities. Indeed, through these different

debates, desire and pleasure are dislocated from their position within

film theory (although not negated) to an innovative concern with `be-

coming' and `sensation' as a landscape for a neo-aesthetics. A neo-

aesthetics which effectuates a neo-sexuality.

The concepts of pleasure and desire, framed as they have been through

psychoanalytic configurations, are insufficient then for explaining the

aesthetic resonances of filmic experience: the processual, the affective and

experiential aspects of the cinematic encounter, the cinematic event. A

move to Deleuzian paradigms, through the concepts of becoming, affect

and sensation and a requestioning of subjectivity, will offer different,

creative and experimental frameworks which are also post-feminist as

they will pragmatically enable multidiscursivity. We live in a post-the-

oretical cultural eÂlan vital within which we are able to utilise, perspec-

tivally and contingently, a multiplicity of discourses from which to

explore and explain our experiences, to question metaphysical notions

such as the `subject' and to offer post-metaphysical and post-feminist

languages which invite redefinitions of terms like `body', `machine' or

`sexuality'. Within those post-metaphysical languages, new explanations

of the aesthetic may be explored through non-binary notions or identi-

tarian thinking which have prioritised subjectivity. This requires thinking

about the complexity of our lives, lived experiences, hopes, anxieties and

relations across bodies, power and differences and how these differences

are manifested within, but also beyond and outside, the cultural assem-

blages and other assemblages which are part of that lived experience.

Such assemblages are best explored, not through the psychical, linguistic

or cultural, but through what Deleuze calls the schizoanalytical. Such

ideas might thus forward a `materialist aesthetic' and a neo-aesthetic/neo-

sexuality outside psychoanalytic myths and theatres of the past.

TOWARDS NEW INTERVENTIONS . . .

Contemporary feminist film theory has moved on from those early

foundational and epistemological roots based within a radical feminist

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 51

political arena and within a definition of film as apparatus, as it has

moved on from Mulvey's early dialogue with cinepsychoanalysis. A post-

feminist film critique, rather than a feminist film critique, per se, is in a

position to ask different questions, but, as I do here, to use the same

concepts but in different ways and thus offer debates away from founda-

tional discourses. Those debates have fundamentally been based upon

ideological, libidinal, or cultural studies paradigms. Furthermore, fem-

inist film theory has been locked into binary systems of thought at all its

stages of history. The very use of psychoanalysis during this history

maintained a discourse premised on binary language. It was also premised

on the equation of desire with lack and the abyssal. It is now possible to

think of desire across more complex mechanisms of mind/body/matter

construals. The materiality of affect and aesthetic resonances of the filmic

process were obfuscated in a concern with `texts', which have a `meaning'

discernible through an array of Freudian/Lacanian game-playing and

language systems, based within Western, transcendental and Cartesian

frames of reference. Confirmation of binary and rationalist use of

language systems meant that theory was seen to be the territory of the

mind alone, and the body was accommodated only in relation to psychic

processes.

A post-structuralist and post-feminist pragmatics seeks an engagement

with the filmic experience which moves from debates which theorise

`representation' and the `image' and their concern with pleasure and

desire, to theories of `material affect' and `sensation' and `becoming' and

a neo-aesthetics as sexuality. Such post-feminist film theory needs to

question the very ontological and teleological foundations of language

use and meaning, to provide a fresh approach to what it is to `think' about

ideas and concepts outside the language construction as we know it. It

brings with it a refreshing return to aesthetics and a new consideration of

the concept of `body'. Subverting the primacy of any psychical interior,

the mind/body meld makes possible a materialist consideration of cinema,

one which had previously only been allowed to avant-garde texts.

We should be engaging with a material awareness of film, returning the

observer/spectator to an awareness of the materiality of the film, to its

molecular structure, in connection with the molecularity of those bodies

which view. I want to offer a theory of cinema as `becoming-woman in

sensation', which conceptualises new structures of desire outside struc-

turalist and psychoanalytic paradigms. New interventions in film theory

have begun to discover the significance of the material, matter, the

machinic and the embodied eye of vision. Jonathan Crary, Vivian

11
Sobchack, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, Miriam Hansen,
52 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
12
Anne Friedberg, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger and Camilla Griggers

have prioritised post-linguistic accounts of cinematic desire. But they

have not gone far enough to account for newly recognised structures of

experience emanating from `becoming' and the aesthetics of sensation,

the movements and energies of the filmic experience. Subjectivity and the

phenomenological `lived body', rather than a more complex understand-

ing of `body' as processes of congealment, imbrication, consilience,

assemblage, aesthetics and the molecular, are still prioritised in the work

of these writers. Nonetheless, they have begun to engage post-structur-

alist ideas such as the fragmentation and the reification of identity, the

ossification of subjectivity; the breakdown of binary languages and the

theatre of `representation'. As such they have paved the way for exciting

and experimental avenues of thinking in film aesthetics.

Writers like Crary have begun to delegitimate apparatus theory and to

proffer a concern with the `corporeality' of vision: an engagement, in

Crary's case, with a scientific interest with matter, optics and the body.

Crary's work has been one of the first to offer a model in which

boundaries between bodies and images, on the one hand, and the body

as a machine for viewing, on the other, are connected. He argues that

modernist discourses and technologies constructed `newly corporealised

bodies of observers', which have no precedent in the disembodied regime

13
of the camera obscura. Therefore, the long intellectual tradition of

mind/body dualism, which treated bodily sensations provoked by images

as suspect, has ended. Crary's work refuses psychoanalysis, since he

prioritises material and scientific discourses from optics, physiology and

neuroscience to explain specific filmic experiences.

Crary's intervention into film theory came with a move from the
14
`spectator' to the term `observer'. The `camera obscura' model of the

cinematic vision, a model premised on technologies of the `gaze' and

psychoanalytic configurations of desire, did not allow for the role of the

corporeality of the viewer/observer, nor for the corporeality of the body

of the film. Crary argues that a new model of vision began in the

nineteenth century, to supplant the older model of camera obscura vision.

The camera obscura model had operated between the late 1500s to the

1700s and was the dominant paradigm for a centred human subjectivity.

Vision, the filmic experience and spectator were imbricated within a

centred subjectivity. This has since been reinforced through psychoana-

lytic film theory. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of a model of

vision dependent on machines (the traumatrope, the phenatistiskope, the

stereoscope and the kaleidoscope). As a result, what took place was an

innovatively fragmented, subjective and machinic vision which was

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 53

different from that proposed by the camera obscura model. For the first

time, the body of the observer, both in actuality and in theory, was

significant in the overall desirous experiences afforded by the visual. The

earlier camera obscura model did not allow for a corporealised or a

materialised observer, or a newly corporealised viewer. The construction

of a `decorporealised observer' allowed for a vision of the world whose

objective truths could only be rationally known. This model of a singular,

and centred, point of view, prominent within theories of camera obscura

vision, prevailed across the philosophical views of writers like Diderot,

Descartes and Locke. Such a model was dependent on an act of idealised

seeing, and, furthermore, that ideality also depended upon being aside the

physical body of the observer. A new model of vision prioritised the

importance of the body of the observer as a surface of inscriptions which

has a whole range of multiplicitious and amorphous effects. With the

supplanting of the camera obscura model of vision, the viewer was

thrown into a connection with an immediacy of sensations. With this

breakdown of the camera obscura model, there begins to appear a new

model, where boundaries between bodies and the world fragment, and

where bodies become `machines' for viewing, within the overall machine

of desire. Crary's adaptation, then, of a Foucauldian concern with

`technologies' and the `body' began to provide a new understanding of

bodily sensation being generated by the image. Consequently, it follows

that the whole Cartesian duality that binarily opposed mind against body

could be abandoned, or at least moved away from.

This then allows for more interesting models of the filmic experience to

emerge, which move away from a concern with visual representation.

Instead, we can move towards an `aesthetics of sensation'. An `aesthetics

of sensation' describes the connections, the energies, the molecular

connections of consciousness and nervousness within the mind/body/

brains of those who experience film as a material encounter. In this

perspective, texts or films, it might be argued, are also bodies. Indeed, the

camera obscura model actually `decorporealises' the viewer, as one who

lives in a reality where objective truths can only be known through

rationality, through the mind. `Rationality', and Cartesian epistemolo-

gical prioritisation of `rationality', emerges as problematic to offering

models of the filmic desire outside of the visual.

Whilst I acknowledge that Crary's work is insensitive to considerations

of gender and sexuality, in relation to different observers, his work does

begin to provide for a better understanding of bodily sensation and a

`material emotion' articulated through the filmic experience. Indeed, in

his chapter on subjective vision and the separation of the senses, he

54 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
explains how Goethe's `Theory of Colours' has explored the corporeality

of visual experience. Goethe wrote, `Let the observer look steadfastly on a

small coloured object and let it be taken away after a time, while his eyes

remain unmoved; the spectrum of another colour will then be visible, on

the white plane . . . it arises from an image which now belongs to the
15
eye.'

Goethe explored how experiences in which subjective contents of

vision are disassociated from an objective world the body itself produces

elements that have no external correlates. Similarly, Maine de Biraine

explores the significance of the body in perception, explaining that visual

perception is inseparable from the muscular movements of the eye, and

the physical effort involved in focusing on an object. The eye, like the rest

of the body, requires the operation of force and energy. Reversing the

classical model of apparatus theory, as a device for the transmission of

images, both the viewer's sensory organs and their activity are inextric-

ably mixed with whatever object they see. As Crary argues, through the

work of writers like Goethe and de Biraine, observation is increasingly

exteriorised. Thus the `viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a

single field, on which inside and outside are confounded. Subjective

observation, then, is not the inspection of an inner space, or a ``theatre

16
of representations''.'

The corporeal aspects of an observing subjectivity, which are not

considered in the concepts of `camera obscura', now took on an im-

portant signification in which an observer is possible. The body, in its

contingency, and its specificity, then produces the spectrum of another

colour. The body has thus become an active producer of an optical

experience. In his argument, Crary utilises the work of several nineteenth-

century physiologists. One of these, George Fechner, engaged in experi-

ments of vision and perception which demonstrated empirically a func-

tional relationship between sensation and stimulus. Crary's work goes on

to outline models of vision which establish an absence of referentiality to

the visual experience.

This is a vital step to thinking new models of desire, which do not

prioritise representation or the image, but process and the role of

sensation within the processual. This very absence of referentiality is

the beginning of a new model of filmic experience which will construct for

an observer a new `real' world, experienced through a `materiality' of the

film and a concern with the imbrication of body/mind/brain in the

perceptions of the viewer/observer. It is a question of a perceiver whose

nature renders identities unstable and mobile, contingent and fluid, and

questions identitarianism and subjectivity.

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 55

However, it is important to state at this stage, that, despite a concern

with `bodies', I am not suggesting a phenomenological account of the

cinematic experience. What I am concerned to argue for is a melding of

the mind/body/brain with the image, in an assemblage of filmic sensation,

where `affect' affords the ultimate `material emotion' which is beyond any

subjective vision. The body, here, is not seen as responsible for a `natural

perception' as in Merleau-Ponty. Rather, it is profoundly assembled

within a machinic configuration of image: perception-image, action-

image and affection-image. So, we can see that Crary's work, because

of its engagement with optics, and the materiality of perception, has

already begun to disturb those fixed cinepsychoanalytic paradigms in

feminist film theory, which, as I have argued, have fundamentally

prioritised representation and signification, and within that have used

psychoanalysis as the main method of understanding structures of desire.

Crary's work, and its concern with the role of the body, is developed in

the more profoundly Merleau-Ponty-inspired phenomenological ap-

17
proach of Vivian Sobchack. However, any connection of the human

body with perception as organic is, in my argument, problematic. I shall,

rather, proceed from both Crary and Sobchack as starting points to offer

a model of filmic desires, outside of phenomenological premises. This

model will not see the body as separate from the mind, but mind and body

will be seen as part of a synthesising assemblage, an assemblage of

material, matter and molecularity: a materiality of perception premised

upon matter and energy.

Crary's work, then, has had profound implications for film theory. It

has disturbed that overarching division of twentieth-century art, includ-

ing film, into `classical mimesis and an elite avant-garde modernism',

which, `stands alone in its capability of returning the spectator to an

18
awareness of the effects of an apparatus'. The classical model of

spectatorship, in its prioritisation of ideology and psychoanalysis has

always prioritised a decorporealised, distanced, monocular eye, unim-

plicated in the experience of an image. Crary's work has been important

in disturbing this premise. The body is implicated, then, in the specular

economy of all films, not just the avant-garde. That body, moreover,

becomes a much more complex phenomenon in my theorising of the

filmic experience.

Vivian Sobchack has also been significant in her observations of the

role of the body. Like Crary, she engages with philosophy as a paradigm

for thinking about film. Her critique of classical and contemporary film

theory is that it has not addressed, fully, the idea of cinema as a mode of

`life-expressing life', or rather cinema as `experience'. Neither has it

56 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
sufficiently addressed the construal of perception (and the role of the

body in that) and expression, since it has always prioritised one (in

opposition) to the other. Thus, she argues for a semiosis of perception-

expression, rather than one or the other. She pre-empts my ideas of film as

experiential, then, in some ways, but she uses different paradigms of

philosophical engagement. Whereas Crary uses Foucault and a philoso-

phy of science, Sobchack turns to Merleau-Ponty as an inspiration for

new regimes of filmic pleasure as an embodied experience. I move further

into an imbrication with the continental and post-metaphysical philoso-

phy of Deleuze.

However, Sobchack's work is predominantly a phenomenological

explanation of the cinematic experience and whilst it provides a stepping

stone in my argument, it does not go far enough because it is based on a

theory of `natural perception' (that is the body and mind being separate

entities) rather than a molecular coagulation of perception and the

materiality of the brain/body/mind imbrication. Sobchack does, however,

break down the traditional oppositions between subject and object, mind

and body, the visual and the visible object, arguing that the film has

always been both a dialectical and a dialogical engagement of viewing

subjects. But this still maintains a concern with subjectivity, with `viewing

subjects'. It still is locked into identitarian thinking and concern with

psychic constructions of subjectivity as a fundamental element of the

filmic experience. Her main argument is that in all theories of spectator-

ship and pleasure, especially the models I have discussed earlier, the body
19
has been missing from debates. She is in some ways offering a model

which combined both perception and expression, whereas previous

models have prioritised one or other of these. However, she still does

not argue for a total assemblage across the machine of the cinematic, as a

synthesis across the mind/body/brain meld. She argues that the film is not

just an object for viewing, but that it is a `viewing subject', with both a

subjectivity that views and a view that is seen,

[I]t possesses sense by means of its senses, and it makes sense as a `living

cohesion', as a signifying subject. It is as this signifying subject that it

existentially comes to matter as a significant object, that is, it can be

20
understood in its objective status by others as sensible and intelligible.

She argues that the cinema uses modes of embodied existence, such as

seeing, hearing, physical and reflective movements, as the main compo-

nents of its language. However, she suggests that this has not been given

attention in theory which has always prioritised ideological and psycho-

analytic discourses. Film as `experience', whereby the film as well as the

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 57

viewer are embodied within the experience of cinema, represents a

dynamic across a set of relational elements, all of which constitute `lived

bodies'. Nonetheless, her argument is still in danger of maintaining a

prioritisation of `signification' and `meaning' and the fundamental im-

portance of subjectivity. She says, for example, `any film, however

abstract or ``structural-materialist'' presupposes that it will be understood

21
as signification'. I want to move further away from signification to

seeing film as `event' as `affect' or as `becoming'. In Sobchack a logic of

signification, rather than sensation, persists. This may be because her

definition of signification is distinct from representation. Film, she argues,

has been theorised through critiques of `representation' and in terms of

ideological and psychic formations, insufficiently theorised through sig-

nification. Signification to Sobchack lies outside of representation. In my

perspective, `signification' is inherently tied up with representation. Her

critique of a transcendental determinism in film is based in an argument

that signification is informed and predetermined by apparatus ideology or

psychic structures. My position will go further than this, to distanciate

subjectivity from the processuality of sensation, and thus distanciate

subjectivity from the equation.

However, Sobchack does argue for the dialogical process of spectator

and text. Through the address of our own vision, she says, `we speak back

to the cinematic expression, before us, using a visual language that is also

tactile, that takes hold of and actively grasps the perceptual expression,

the seeing, the direct experience of the anonymously present, sensing, and
22
sentient ``other'' '. However, this process had never been denied in

psychoanalytic and cultural studies' film theory. They also articulated this

`dialogical process' across spectator, and text. What is new, however, is

Sobchack's recognition of the `embodiment' of the film as well as viewer.

To Sobchack, the film is a `body' which also views; it is a subject which

also views; it has a subjectivity. The film itself, then, has its own locale, its

own perceptual and expressive functions. It both `represents' and `pre-

sents', in a performative way, as a body. But her definition of the

`embodied text' still hangs on to a sense of subjectivity which is a felt

experience, centred in an `intentionality' within consciousness, whether

that subjectivity is of the film or the viewer. The film becomes a sentient

`subject', a living body of expression, which `locates its own address, its
23
own perceptual and expressive experiences of being and becoming'.

Through an `address of the eye' we speak back to the cinematic expres-

sion, by utilising both a haptic, tactile and visual language. Consequently,

what happens is a `decentring' of the cinematic experience. There is what

she refers to as a `double occupancy' of the cinematic space, which does

58 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
not necessarily conflate the viewer and the film, but operates for both

`bodies'. She argues, as I have done, that classical film theory had

privileged psychic and ideological structures over the signifying `freedom

24
of the individual viewers'.

But Sobchack's argument remains teleological and does not address the

ontological or correlational nature of film. If the filmic experience is more

than the visual, the psychic, and the ideological, then, according to

Sobchack, we need to consider film as an intersubjective performance,

where the film is more than a visible object. It `performs' as a body, as a

`viewing subject' just as much as it is a visible and `viewed object'. This

`address of the eye' then posits an embodied, situated existence of the film

and the material world.

Thus, Sobchack brings the body and matter, in some initial ways, into

debates about filmic aesthetics. She does not prioritise `meaning' in the

text, as the fundamental structure of desiring processes. To be seen, the

viewing subject must be a body and be `materially in the world, sharing a

25
similar manner and matter of existence with other viewing subjects'.

However, she still maintains that there are two embodied acts of vision at

work, in the cinematic experience. Whilst this disturbs that monologic

vision of previous film theory, it admits to only two performative

processes. Sobchack argues that the cinematic vision is always doubled,

it `is always the vision of two viewing subjects, materially and consciously
inhabiting, signifying and sharing a world in a manner at once universal

and particular, a world that is mutually visible, but hermeneutically

26
negotiable'.

However, I want to argue that the filmic experience is an aesthetic,

machinic structure, which operates in processual ways, beyond `two

performative processes' which entails a structure premised on binary

thinking. There is another stage which Sobchack does not engage with,

one which opens up explanations of the aesthetic of film beyond her

restrictive formula. This is an aesthetic premised outside of intentionality,

which might implicate a wider definition of the biologically constituted

body, in relation to other bodies. Not only will I be concerned with the

body, in its Deleuzian sense of a `body without organs', but also the mind/

brain melding process of the viewing experience as one of desire in

sensation. Thus, I will be concerned in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, to present

27
cinema as `event' as a processual experience of desire, premised on

Deleuzian ideas of affect and sensation, rather than subjectivity and

desire.

Sobchack, then, has at least begun to initiate a concern with the

ontological nature of cinema as an `expression of experience by experi-

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 59

ence'. Most of film theory has condemned this ontological being of

cinema. If contemporary theory, influenced by post-structuralist and

post-feminist discourse, is to move away from ideas based upon a

transcendent consciousness, it needs to be located within a neo-aesthetic

discourse of immanence, process, movement, processuality and becom-

ing. It is in its modalities, its ontological modalities, that cinema offers us,

as viewers, and theorists, an interpretation of `sensation' rather than

pleasure or desire.

Miriam Hansen has also been prominent in considering how cinema's

structures of desire might function through the materiality of the filmic

process. What is significant in her argument, as also Tom Gunning's, is its

concern with how contemporary film is experienced in ways which are

similar to experiences of early cinema. Pre-classical narrative cinematic

desires were encapsulated through the `material' of the filmic process,

through its very ontology, in its ability to shock, to excite, disturb,

transform, stimulate, frighten, energise, or terrify, its audience. In an

article which critiques psychoanalysis, Hansen articulates a resurrection

of post-modernist or what she refers to as post-classical cinema, of the

28
film's power to shock. Sensation and kinetics affect the body, of the

viewer, and the observer, as much as the mind and the emotions. She

locates her argument within a post-modern cultural climate, where the

fragmentation of subjectivities and identities is manifested by new tech-

nological developments. Film is thus no longer experienced solely within

the film theatre, but through a wider range of settings. An aesthetics of the

`gaze' which we saw in feminist film theory has then been disturbed and

diffracted through new patterns of viewing, which renders the subject

outside any positionality in terms of identity.

What is important to my argument, here, then, is that she highlights

a concern with cinema as an `attraction', cinema as a presentational

medium and a process, rather than purely a representational medium.

Like early cinema, post-classical or contemporary cinema addresses the

viewer directly with an awareness of the filmic medium itself. If we are

to develop conceptions in contemporary film theory which look to-

wards a neo-aesthetics, then we need to account for this relationship

between film and viewer: a relationship which is a construal of mind/

body/matter in process. Thus new theories are not necessarily bound up

in reception theory or theories of subjectivity or identification. We need

to think about what a film `is' and how it `impacts' as an aesthetic

formation, and as a process of creative desire, rather than thinking of it

as a narrative construction or representation, alone. I am not of course

denying those realms are important, both politically and ideologically,

60 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
but we need to look at all possible conceptions. There are, then, some

epistemological connections here across the work of Crary, Sobchack

and Hansen, to do with the material emotions of the body. Crary's

scientific interrogations of the `body' as a machine for viewing and

Sobchack's concern with the film as an `embodied subject' with its own

body of materiality, expression and perception have progressed film

debates. Thus, a `body' of work is now beginning to be established

which takes distance from a concern of the 1970s and 1980s with the

political (ideological) and the libidinal (psychoanalytic). Instead, it

might be concerned with the schizoanalytical.

29
Tom Gunning's work describes the filmic experience as `vertiginous',

an experience produced by a mixture of pleasure and anxiety, which

could be labelled `sensation'. He defines this as an `aesthetics of attrac-

tions'. In terms of my argument, then, `sensation' has in many ways some

connection with `pleasure', but it is removed from psychoanalytic or text-

obsessed theories. Moving beyond Gunning, sensation, affect and the film

as `body', in its materiality, is the new framework I wish to consider in

relation to the `becoming-woman' of the cinematic.

Finally, Anne Friedberg's work has also made some move towards

these new theories of the filmic experience. Friedberg's work has been

significant because it locates film within a post-modern context, and

like Crary, she articulates the significance of the breakdown in classical

centred and univocal forms of vision. She still, however, keeps the

debates within the auspices of `vision' and the `gaze' ± arguing for a
30
matrixial gaze ± a mobilised gaze, thus disrupting the fixed, immobile

locations in earlier feminist film theory. She does not locate this

mobilised gaze within any psychoanalytical paradigm of exchange,

but reappropriates both Benjamin's and Baudelaire's work on the

flaÃneur. 31
She does take a `gendered perspective' on a new post-

modernist vision, within a post-feminist context. Like Hansen, she

connects new critiques of film to the notion of `experience' rather than

in connection with `mediated images'. Film experience then becomes a

more pertinent term than cinematic `spectatorship'. This experience, she

argues, is part of the late twentieth-century cultural arena of virtual,

electronic and mobilised gazes, incorporating video and technocultures.

Subjectivity, then, can no longer be conceived through an engagement

with `specific images'. Indeed, the capacity to manipulate time/space has

rendered an increasingly detemporalised viewer through a physicality of

sensations.

In summation to this chapter, the important trajectory within my

argument is that if we are to present a post-feminist pragmatics and a

 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 61

neo-aesthetic of the cinematic, then we need to move further than the

work of writers like Sobchack, Crary, Williams and Friedberg. Feminist

film theory prioritised psychoanalysis which could not consider the post-

feminist and post-structuralist concerns with the mind/body imbrication.

The current concern with `bodies', and what they constitute, has reso-

nances for new theories outside of those located within psychoanalytic or

semiotic paradigms. We need to engage in debate which continues this

move away from the role of subjectivity, or the defined positionality of a

viewing subjectivity, in relation to constructions of desire.

As I outlined above the main problems with much of this theory has

been in relation to the following areas: subjectivity, a limited definition

of bodies, the notion of binary language, the concepts of desire and

pleasure and the concept of the aesthetic. What I want to do through a

Deleuzian philosophy is to present a new concern with the `affect' to

argue for the `becoming-woman through sensation' of the cinematic, to

argue for a constitution of bodies, which presents film as a processual

experience, an `haecceity', an event and material capture. A neo-

aesthetic of the film as event (which will rethink some aesthetic terms

such as beauty and form) and as experience will sit alongside other

theories of spectatorship. Through new vocabularies emanating from

Deleuzian philosophy, we might recapture some sense of a neo-aes-

thetic, where concepts such as beauty, movement, time, space, sensa-

tion, affect and the processual and their interrelationship might be part

of a new structure of cinematic desire. This imbrication of new

vocabularies will project a theory of becoming, useful for film-philo-

sophy and for rethinking the filmic text. The concept of subjectivity will

be subsumed through becoming. Within Deleuzian ideas, psychoana-

lytic configurations of pleasure are rendered otiose, the subject is

rendered otiose, and instead notions of immanence replace a teleolo-

gical concern with transcendent principles.

Within this framework, representation may be distanciated by different

discourses which are concerned with the event of cinema as images in

movement. Rather the image becomes part of a processual engagement.

Desire is rendered processual and energic, not abyssal or negative. Rather

than thinking of film theory in terms of representation, signification and

semiotics and the roles of pleasure or desire, we can consider film in terms

of a neo-aesthetic of sensation and becoming. A neo-aesthetics of the

filmic experience will encourage resurrection of the aesthetic in film as an

arena through which to imbricate a new sexuality, rather than the

restrictive and reductionist concerns with ideology of semiotics or the

libidinal of psychoanalysis. Film will be seen as a process of desire, as a

62 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
machinic assemblage of desire, where subjectivity is subsumed to the

more profound concept of sensation: a rethinking of film as aesthetic

`event'. Part Two of the book takes us into those landscapes of sensation,

through the work of Deleuze.

NOTES
1. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (eds), New Voca-

bularies in Film Semiotics, Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond, p. 141.

2. Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis (eds), New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics,

p. 144.

3. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p. 39.

4. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 154.

5. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p. 123.

6. Writers such as Gaylyn Studlar, Joan Copjec, Constance Penley, Elizabeth

Cowie, Kaja Silverman, Griselda Pollock, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger have been

significant in reappropriating and rethinking psychoanalysis, both Freudian and

Lacanian, and through French feminisms, to accommodate the notion of female

desire, and gendered subjectivity. For example, Freud's text on `A child is being

beaten' has been used to argue for multiple gendered subject positionalities in

spectatorship, and Studlar's work on the masochistic aesthetic has enabled

different readings of psychoanalysis from those of Mulvey. I acknowledge

and pay respect to the work of such writers, but can only refer the reader to

their work, an analysis of which is outside the purposes of my project here.

7. Laura Mulvey, `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Laura Mulvey, Visual

and Other Pleasures, p. 14.

8. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, for a description of Irigaray's work. This

Sex Which is Not One argues that female pleasure, `jouissance' is premised on the

multiply sexed body of woman, her `two lips' replacing the monologic idea of the

phallus, signifier of male desire, and its unitary modelled phallic sexuality. Take

the `genitals' out of the equation, and the concept of body can be more creatively

explored beyond the confines of anatomical restriction. This is of course

explored, I acknowledge, through Irigaray as a morphology rather than a notion

of the body as anatomical.

9. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, p. 83.

10. Donna Haraway's seminal work on cyborg consciousness, the work of Chela

Sandoval and cyberdiscourse more generally have been fundamental in locating

debates which problematise oppositional discourse. See articles by both

Sandoval, `New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Op-

pressed', and Haraway, `A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', in B. Kennedy and D. Bell (eds), The

Cybercultures Reader.

11. See Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, Re-inventing Film Studies.

12. See Camilla Griggers `Goodbye America (The Bride is Walking . . .)', in Ian

Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory.

13. Camera obscura: Crary writes that `it has been known for at least two thousand

years that when light passes through a small hole into a dark, enclosed interior,

an inverted image will appear on the wall opposite. Thinkers as remote from each

other as Euclid, Kepler, Roger Bacon, Leonardo, noted this phenomenon and

speculated in various ways how it might or might not be analogous to the

functioning of human vision. The camera obscura was not simply an inert and
 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 63

neutral piece of equipment or set of technical premises to be tinkered with and

improved over the years. Rather it was embedded in a much larger, denser

organisation of knowledge, and of an observing subject. From the late 1500s to

the end of the 1700s the structural and optical principles of the camera obscura

coalesced into a dominant paradigm through which was described the status and

possibilities of the observer. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the

camera obscura was without question, the most widely used model for explaining

human vision, and for representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of

a knowing subject, to an external world' (Johnathan Crary, Techniques of the

Observer, p. 27).

14. Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

15. Goethe, `Theory of Colours', in E. Cassirer (ed.), Rousseau, Kant and Goethe,

pp. 81±2.

16. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 73.

17. See V. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in L. Williams,

Viewing Positions, p. 36.

18. Williams, Viewing Positions, p. 7.

19. See V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film

Experience, p. 40.

20. V. Sobchack, quoted in Williams, Viewing Positions, p. 9.

21. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in Williams, Viewing

Positions, p. 38.

22. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in Williams, Viewing

Positions, p. 40.

23. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in Williams, Viewing

Positions, p. 41.

24. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in Williams, Viewing

Positions, p. 47.

25. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in Williams, Viewing

Positions, p. 53.

26. Sobchack, `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in Williams, Viewing

Positions, p. 54.

27. Dudley Andrew notes that film theory has to date only been concerned with

signifying processes in terms of textual semiotics. It has not been concerned with

`signification' in any other way. To Andrew, what needs discussing is the `process

of its congealing and the event of its mattering'. (See `The Neglected Tradition of

Phenomenology in Film Theory', in Wide Angle, 2.2, p. 45±6.)

28. See Miriam Hansen, `Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public

Sphere', in Screen, 34: 3, pp. 197±210.

29. See Tom Gunning, `An Aesthetics of Astonishment', in Art and Text. In `An

Aesthetics of Astonishment' Gunning shows how early cinema was one replete

with visual shocks. The film±spectator relationship was specifically relevant to a

pre-classical cinema, based on shock, excitement and its power to affect, its

power to disturb the physical body of its audience. The cinema was a machine

which produced, by its very ontology, physical sensations. One is specifically

tactility. Gunning refers to cinema's power to `warrant closer examination and

the involvement of the sense of touch'. He defines the `cinema of attraction' as the

`aesthetics of attraction' as it addresses in an experience of assault. Rather than

being an involvement with narrative action, or empathy with character psychol-

ogy, the cinema of attractions solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film

image, engaging the viewer's curiosity. Most importantly, the `spectator does not

get lost in a fictional world and its drama ± but remains aware of the act of

looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfilment'.

64 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
30. Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger also locates the notion of the matrixial as a creative

adaptation of Lacanian psychoanalysis in visual cultures. See Bracha Lichten-

berg-Ettinger, `Matrix and Metamorphosis', in Differences, A Journal of Fem-

inist Cultural Studies, 4.3, p. 176.

31. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Post-Modern Condition.
Part Two
Chapter 3
From Abstract Machines
to Deleuzian Becomings

Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved. It

preserves and is preserved in itself ( quid juris?), although actually it lasts

no longer than its support and materials ± stone, canvas, chemical color,

and so on ( quid facti?). The young girl maintains the pose that she has had
for five thousand years, a gesture that no longer depends on whoever

made it. The air still has the turbulence, the gust of wind, and the light that

it had that day last year, and it no longer depends on whoever was

breathing it that morning. If art preserves, it does not do so like industry,

by adding a substance to make the thing last. The thing became inde-

pendent of its `model' from the start, but it is also independent of other

possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting

1
breathing this air of painting.

ABSTRACT MACHINES
Before introducing Chapters 3, 4 and 5 on desire, becoming-woman and

sensation, through these three chapters on Deleuze, I want to discuss how

Deleuze has been important in reconsidering the very act of thinking and

thought itself. His ideas on the complexity of thinking and thought are

useful in helping us to rethink some basic beliefs about language and its

possibilities. We can then take such ideas forward to rethink the voca-

bularies of film theory in a post-feminist pragmatic framework.

This first section will look at Deleuze's ideas on thought, and his

description of the `abstract machine', which he sets up as different from

structures, such as structural linguistics. I tangentially describe these

elements, not as a philosophical debate (this is after all not a book about

philosophy as such, more film-philosophy), but to give the reader some

way into understanding the complexities of how Deleuze asks us to think

about `the very act of thinking'. Deleuze provides us with a tableau of

68 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
ideas and new terminologies, which are innovatively exciting, for con-

ceptualising `thought' in creative ways. Deleuze conceives thought as an

effect or process which participates, colludes, or collides with other

processes to make up what he refers to as a `machinic assemblage'. These

processes function with other components, for example, time, space,

bodies, matter. Thinking in this way takes us out of the idea that language

is based in logic and can only be used in specific ways. This then might

open up debate to move beyond thinking about the cinematic experience

as purely focused in the image, since it might operate in other ways as

well. Film functions through an array of components, in what Deleuze

calls a `machinic assemblage'. An `abstract machine' is neither physical (a

literal technological machine) nor corporeal in character, but exists in

2
matter, in `aparalletic evolution' with other material. What this concept

enables is a model of cinematic desires in which corporealised spectators/

observers have a capacity for being affected by sensations that have no

specific link to a referent. Such models need to be explored as a newly

legitimated way of experiencing, as a newly conceived form of cinematic

consciousness.

Through Deleuzian ideas we can begin to present an `aesthetics of

sensation', where the cinematic experience is not necessarily one con-

cerned only with verisimilitude, subjectivity or with psychoanalytic

configurations of desire, but one involving transversal and perspectival

discourses, constructing the bodies of spectators/observers as a collection

of disparate, complex and decentred perceptions. Not only can we move

away from centred, unitary and disembodied models of vision, but we can

move beyond the visual, and theories of subjectivity, into a theory of the

cinematic which is `machinic' in several ways. Why is the term `machinic'

significant to this?

Deleuze argues that the `abstract machine' is a condition of existence

that exceeds what is perceived through language. It functions differently

from the conception of semiotics. Unlike the semiotic `sign', the

`abstract machine' does not function to represent, but rather it con-

structs a `reality' of a different order. A `reality' premised on the

material nature of experience. Writers such as Chomsky have consid-

ered language and linguistic structures as the main arena through which

we can understand the world, reality, and ourselves, within that reality

and within culture. However, verbal, literary, structured and organic

languages are too static, fixed and immobile. They are too sedimented

and not `abstract' enough to theorise how things connect outside of

`meaning' in a wide range of ways: feelings, connections, and flows,

between, across, and within bodies, the gestural and the pathic aware-
 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 69
ness within those bodies. Those bodies might be human or technolo-

gical or material, or all three.

But the very term `body' might also be explained and used differently

from its definition as a corporeal body, as we shall see in Deleuze's `body

without organs' concept. Deleuze argues that language is limited to an

articulate form of expression. An `abstract machine', however, has no

formal structure, in the way that language has. Thus it makes no

distinctions between expression and content. If an abstract machine does

not operate through semiotic mechanisms, then how does it function?

The `abstract machine' functions as a diagrammatic system, as in

systems theory, in which systems oppose structures. Similarly, the brain

patterns through which perception occurs operate in non-linear dynamic

systems. The abstract machine works as amorphous matter, not as a

substance with a function. Therefore, we can theorise cinema as an

experiential `abstract machine' by considering how it connects, as a

body, of matter, with other bodies and matter, through a consideration

of processes of consciousness within which sensation becomes an im-

portant element. Because a machinic system works through syntheses and

multiplicities, rather than binary ideas as we find in the axiomatics of

structuralist thinking, this enables a post-feminist and pragmatic theori-

sation about the impact of the cinematic experience. This post-feminist

and pragmatic theorisation moves away from thinking about subjectivity,

identity formations and the purely visual dynamics of pleasure and desire,

elements that have framed psychoanalysis and gaze theory for so long.

In theorising about language and ideas, the notion of the `rhizome' is

one of Deleuze's leading figurations. In place of the sign of semiotics,

Deleuze's conception of the rhizome enables us to rethink the questions

we should engage with as spectators of the cinema. Rather than think

only about the sign of the cinematic, or what a film `means', we can also

debate how the film connects across a diverse arena such as the mimetic,

the pathic, the gestural, the cognitive, the affective. Cinema operates in

non-teleological ways, as process, as movement, immanence, through

which newly configured desires are apparent that do not lock us into
3
thinking of `identity' or `subjectivity' as anchored by semiotic activity.

Because the `machine' offers different mechanisms of thinking outside the

restrictive codings of the `structures' of semiotics, this enables a micro-

political and pragmatic theory of the cinematic.

Deleuze suggests that it is force and intensity that establish ideas, as

opposed to images. Ideas are not necessarily the product of thought. Ideas

can exist without thinking. He argues that ideas are like events, lines, that

take us into a fibrous web of directions, much like a map or a tuber (in
70 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
terms of plant formations). Language entails not merely subjects and

objects, but a set of variously informed speeds, intensities, energies and

matters in molecular fusion. Language may also be visual, as well as

written and verbal, and this is specifically significant to a discussion on

the machinic materiality of the filmic experience. Deleuze and Guattari

express a concern with the differential and evolving rhythms and affective

intensities, rather than privileging identities and entities such as species

and organisms. Thus the `identity' of the cinematic might legitimately

be set in parallel with a concern with its `evolution' as a process of

affectivities, intensities, rhythms, matter, speeds and movements. As a

living system, the `machine' of cinema needs to be understood in terms of

its `relations' with other machinic configurations, such as viewers. `If

living systems are ``machines'' then they need to be understood in terms of

4
``relations'' and not of component parts.'

This provides an important development from Crary's ideas of the

spectator/observer as someone who `connects' in molecular ways, with

the cinematic process, rather than merely `seeing' the images in a specular

way. Deleuze's rhizomatic style foregrounds the affective foundations of

the process of thinking. It articulates a new definition of the activity of

thought (and philosophy) which might be described as nomadic, and thus

suited to a disjuncted `self'. Thus the classical notion of the `subject'

inherent in metaphysical thought is capable of being considered in ways

aside from identity. Consequently, this will have resonances for how we

think of gendered subjectivities in filmic representation. No longer are

such questions the most important frameworks to think about the

cinematic experience. No longer does subjectivity frame the main argu-

ments. If `identity' is delegitimated in favour of `movements' and `in-

tensities', then film theory based upon text as having meaning, in relation

to identity and subjectivity, can be expanded through different para-

digms.

For Deleuze, ideas are events: lines that point human thought towards
5
new horizons. Similarly, the desires of the cinematic experience, it may

be argued, emanate from the affective, rather than identification with

subjectivity or identity, sited in the image. Many contemporary thinkers

use the idea of the `affective' as a force capable of liberating us from

hegemonic ways of thinking. Affectivity can be said to be the pre-

6
discursive. In terms of film, then, a web of connections might be drawn

not only from the film-maker's `intention' and the viewer's reception, but

through a wider, more complex set of `machinic' interconnections.

In his early collaborative text with Claire Parnet, Dialogues (1987),

Deleuze explains three categories across which we might possibly func-

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 71
tion as individuals or groups. He suggests we are composed of a series of

lines, latitudes, lines of flight. The first line is what he refers to as a line of

`segmentarity'. This can be explained as a rigid, structured or fixed line,

or rather a molar line. This is something we use as a foundation or

structure to our lives. Elements such as family, class, religion, gender,

sexuality are regimes of this line.

Simultaneously, suggests Deleuze, we exist or have lines of molecular-

isation, or lines of the molecular, which veer away from the strict rigidity

of the segmentary line. Lines of molecularisation make detours: they

`sketch out rises and falls; but they are no less precise for all this, they even
7
direct irreversible processes.' There is, finally, the third line, or line of

flight, the nomadic line. This line enables a move away from the

segmentarity and the evanescence of the molecular into zones of experi-

mentation. It is on this line, Deleuze suggests, that we move away from

fixed positionalities. It is also the line of experimentation, excitement,

creativity, volition, flight, but also danger and risk, loss and possible

annihilation. Truly the line for the artist, the dancer, the thinker. But

Deleuze describes the attraction of this line as follows, it is, `the most

complex of all, the most tortuous: it is the line of gravity or velocity, the

line of flight and of the greatest gradient . . . this line has something

exceedingly mysterious, for, according to him, it is nothing other than the

8
progression of the soul of the dancer'.

I want to take this idea of a tripartite open structure, and the metaphor

of the nomadic `dance', as a figuration for patterning my sections on

Deleuze (see Chapters 3, 4 and 5). They will thus take the format of three

small chapters. As a choreographed dance and in its heuristic use of

philosophy, rather than an internal debate within philosophy, this pattern

takes a line of flight away from the stricter, more rational linearity of the

rest of the book. Instead, it offers a series of elements to be read

aparalletically, in collusion, in machinic assemblage, in synchronisation,

but also elements which can be seen as a pathway towards valorising the

concept of sensation and the nature of sensation. The aim is to offer a neo-

aesthetics of the filmic experience, outside notions of subjectivity and

desire. These three lines are immanent to each other, caught up in each

other, complicated and connected.

This cartography, or schizoanalysis as it has been referred to, opens up

new vistas for reconceptualising processes and forms of the cinematic. As a

political defence, the third line of flight is always somehow intrinsically

connected to the molar line. Thus there can never be total disengagement

with a search for autonomy, for example, in a feminist project. Rather, we

should see a new project which seeks to synthesise the engagement of both
72 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
the molar and the molecular lines of creativity, but not so much a

hybridisation, rather an oscillational `in-between' space, which has no

boundary, no positionality. Therefore, whilst Part Two outlines elements

of Deleuze's work which will appropriate new dimensions in aesthetics,

they will also enable post-feminist, pragmatic conjunctions along the way.

Furthermore, these new perspectives in film theory are not intended to

negate or displace contemporary film theory which is still premised upon

subjectivity, identity and ideology, but to offer other ways of understand-

ing experiences assembled through the cinematic. The pragmatic collides

with the political, but in such a way that the aesthetic line is never truly

alone, never truly abstract, but functional, providing what Guattari refers
9
to as `assemblages of enunciation' for a newly framed political encounter.

Part Two of the book contains a tripartite and triptychal system: desire and

pleasure . . . becoming and affect . . . to sensation . . . the three are never

10
separate and yet they contain an autonomous element in the aparalletic

and evolutionary nature of their connections.

DELEUZE ON PLEASURE AND DESIRE

Desire and pleasure, as we have seen in Chapter 2, have been fundamental

to psychoanalytic interpretations of the filmic experience, to explanations

of subjectivity and identity as they are manifested in the cinematic. One of

the main reasons for using the philosophy of Deleuze is that it offers

different ways of thinking of desire and pleasure and rethinking the

language around those terms. Deleuzian ideas provide ways of moving

beyond the concept of desire conceived within psychoanalysis, into other

vocabularies. However, it is important to establish at the outset that the

terms `pleasure' and `desire' are not to be conflated, and indeed Deleuze

has different definitions and understanding of these concepts. If we are to

discover a different paradigm to explain the experiential elements of the

cinematic impact, which is not premised upon transcendent notions of

pleasure, as we saw in psychoanalysis, then Deleuzian ideas might be a

good starting place.

Whilst `pleasure' to Deleuze operates outside any notions of a Carte-

sian `self' with a beginning in an inorganic state (a primordial death

instinct ± as we saw in psychoanalysis), it might seem problematic to

engage with such ideas to provide new models of filmic pleasures, since,

as I have shown, most film theory has been locked into definitions of self,

subjectivity, identity and representation.

However, I don't feel this has to be the case and whilst Deleuze's ideas

on pleasure need to be carefully thought out, they do ultimately enable a

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 73
move towards rethinking the experience of the cinematic impact, beyond

the idea of pleasure or desire altogether. This is because he is critical of

transcendent models of pleasure and subjectivity, and is more concerned

with the flux, the movement and the dynamism of immanence, and the

processual. Indeed, his ideas proffer different vocabularies with which to

rethink the event, the event of the cinematic, as affect, as becoming-

woman, as sensation. But before exploring these newer vocabularies, I

shall explain how and why his ideas on pleasure have been somewhat

problematic, at times almost contradictory, and yet also systematically

(openly systematic) creative and volitional.

RETHINKING `PLEASURE' BEYOND FREUD

In Dialogues, Deleuze suggests that when we think of `desire' that we

should not automatically think of `pleasure'. While agreeing that pleasure

is itself an `agreeable' state that we would obviously wish for, and that `we

move towards it with all our might', he argues that pleasure comes only as

an `interruption in the process of desire'. Rather, pleasure is he suggests,

the `attribution of the affect, the affection for a person or subject, it is the
only means for a person to ``find himself again'' in the process of desire
11
which overwhelms him'. Thus, pleasure, for Deleuze, has nothing to do

with an ultimate death instinct or ultimate desire for finality or closure as

Freud exemplifies.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud explains that repetitious

psychical patterns within the human psychic behaviour are primary

processes that `bind' (draw together or coagulate) mobile energy into

12
a constant state situation, which is required for pleasure. Its opposite

(notice the binary terminology) is `unpleasure'. Thus he has postulated

that human psychic behaviour is motivated ultimately by what he refers

to as the `pleasure principle'. By this he means that the human psyche is

driven towards the state of pleasure, defined as the `binding' (a drawing

together, or a coagulation) of excitations on the ego. The level of

excitations effecting the ego determines either pleasure or its opposite,

unpleasure. The higher level of `binding' of the excitations increases the

amount of pleasure.

However, Freud suggests that in order to maintain the stability of the

ego, to maintain some sense of stable ego formation, the pleasure

principle has to be offset by a `reality principle', an acceptance of the

real, material and economic conditions of our existence in a social,

cultural and psychological experience. This is required as a balance to

the `pleasure principle'. Consequently, `pleasure' becomes relegated to the

74 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
arena of wish-fulfilment. It is also bound up with a desire to return to an

inorganic state, before birth, a moment of inorganic, and primordial, being.

Freud relates this desire as the `death instinct', or Thanatos. Its opposite is

the life force, or Eros. Eros, or the `life drive', serves to restore the primal
13
unity of the inorganic state ± to rediscover a lost unity. In Freud's

discussion of our need for repetition, or compulsion behaviour ± by which

we strive to repeat patterns of behaviour and to repress specifically sexual

forms of behaviour ± pleasure is caused by the organism's needs to go back

to that ontological state of being, to an original sense of plenitude. That is,

that inanimate state in death. Here, there is a final location for the human

organism in its sentient being of oneness in Death; an ultimate ontological

notion of a finite locus for the self/ego. Ultimately, Freud suggests, the

desire to return to an inorganic state of being is what `drives' the human

organism, in terms of its psychic processes.

As Freud suggests (and he does not say these ideas are incontestable) `a

drive is a desire to return to an original state'. But the main point about

this description of the basis of pleasure is that it ties pleasure into the

realm of transcendence, a subjectivity that is located within a transcen-

dent subject. It is a transcendent understanding of pleasure. By this I mean

it assumes there is a final moment of being (equated with death) which is

attainable, and thus pleasure is located within a transcendent formula.

However, Deleuze's ideas on both pleasure and desire, and his move

beyond these concepts to becoming and sensation, enable a move away

from thinking through transcendent perspectives, and so enable different

explanations of an aesthetic process. Film theory can benefit from such

new vocabularies.

In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze discusses, instead, what

he refers to as the `Three Syntheses of Beyond the Pleasure Principle', in

response to Freud. To Deleuze, the ultimate `beyond' of the pleasure

principle is not Death, as a transcendent state of Oneness, as Freud poses

it to be. Rather, Deleuze's definition of the `beyond' of pleasure is one

which determines no material, fixed or ontological state as such; rather,

the beyond is simply a `principle'. He argues that the problem with

Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the concept of the `death

instinct'. This serves in Freud as a positive, originary explanation for

the human need to repeat. Thus, its role in Freud has a transcendent

function. Deleuze argues that pleasure cannot be connected to this death

instinct, since death has nothing to do with a material model. There is no

first term which can be repeated; there is no original state of being. The

`beyond' in a Deleuzian sense refers to a much more complex concern

with repetition and difference. He suggests that whether pleasure is itself

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 75
effected by a contraction or a relaxation, as Freud states, is not really the

issue. He suggests that elements of pleasure may in fact be found in the

succession of relaxations and contractions, in the sense that Freud

suggests, produced by excitations. But Deleuze argues, it is actually a

different question altogether to say why pleasure is not simply an element

within our psychic life, but is rather a `principle'. In other words, we do

not simply receive, or attain pleasure, by returning, as Freud suggested, to

an originary lost `beyond', but by acceding to the beyond of the `death

instinct' through materiality and notions of habitual matter. Those

notions of habitual matter are located within the differential relations

and singularities prior to any subjectivity, as I shall explain in the

following chapter.

Deleuze argues that, as humans, we are a collection of sensory and

material elements. We are simply organically composed of matter, air and

water and it is the repetition of different elements of our sensory-motor

states which brings about pleasure, through a material emotion of the

contemplation of those states `Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the

emotion of a fulfilling contemplation which contracts in itself cases of

relaxation and contraction.'

14

Deleuze posits the concept of `repetition' as a form of displacement,

and disguise, as functioning as the ground of pleasure. Not a repetition in

the sense of the repeating of an original state, but a repetition in

difference. Drives, in other words, which Freud explains are `bound

excitation', according to Deleuze are accommodated through `differen-

ciated' forms of material elements, molecular elements of our make-up.

We are simply made up from organic syntheses, which are like the

sensibility of the senses. According to Deleuze, `We are made of con-

tracted water, light, earth, and air ± not merely prior to the recognition or

representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in

its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of
15
contractions, of retentions and expectations' ± a vital sensibility.

In his `Three Syntheses of Beyond the Pleasure Principle', Deleuze

appears to negate the fundamental and sentient ontological being of

`pleasure' as it pertains to an instinctual state within consciousness, where

unbound excitations are `delimited' to the opposite, `unpleasure', where

excitations are less bound. If Deleuze's philosophy of anti-humanism and

anti-Platonic thought is a rejection of Freud's notion of `pleasure' as

located in a fixed transcendental locus, then there appear to be some

contradictions which need to be examined.

I want to establish four points of discussion on this, which might

appear to be an internal philosophical debate. This is not meant to take

76 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
the argument into the bounds of philosophy, in the pure sense of the

word, but it is important to follow the reasoning to understand how and

why sensation becomes a more appropriate concept than pleasure. This

will then enable different vocabularies and methodologies of enquiry into

the impact, or the event of the cinematic engagement, outside notions

premised upon subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

First, if Deleuzian philosophy is premised upon anti-humanism and a

rejection of the concept of an essential organism, which originally has

Eros and Thanatos connected through the death drive, one could ask why

he therefore proclaims that `Doubtless all desiring-production is, in and of

itself, immediately consumption and consummation, and therefore, ``sen-

16
sual pleasure''.' What, we might ask, does he mean by sensual pleasure?

It seems that there is after all some concern with the senses, with feeling.
Why does he use the word `sensual' when it has such Freudian determi-

nates? Indeed, Freud states that the senses arise where a highly developed

organism, the highly receptive cortical layer, has been withdrawn into the

depths of the interior body, with only a portion left at the surface. These

are the `sense' organs. Senses and sensuality are certain specific effects of
17
stimulation or `feelers'.

However, Deleuze's perception of pleasure is one innately bound to the

materiality of the organism, felt at a level beyond any subjective sense of

self, beyond traditional conceptions of subjectivity. It is rather felt at a

pre-subjective level within an existential integrity, a concept which I

explore in the following chapter. In tracing his understanding of sensa-

tion, I shall be distinguishing how affect and becoming trace a path away

from pleasure and desire, towards sensation. Sensation might therefore be

a more appropriate term to follow, in relation to the cinematic impact.

Second, Deleuze argues that `A genuine consummation is achieved by

the new machine [that is, the process of desire as production, not as lack

or negativity], a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather

automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant

ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited

18
forces.' This autoeroticism is experienced via intensive states, what he

later refers to as `haecceities' and not `subjectivities'. He refers to this as

an intense feeling of transition: `There is a schizophrenic experience of

intensive quantities in their pure state, to the point that is almost

unbearable ± a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like

a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition,

19
states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form.' There is

no static final positionality, as we see in psychoanalysis.

Third, in exploring Deleuze's definition of `feeling' I want to refer to his

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 77
description of intensive states, which he discusses in Anti-Oedipus. He

describes these states as `hallucinations' and `delirium'. `These are often

described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of

hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think

. . .) presupposes an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucina-

tions their object and thought delirium its content ± an ``I feel that I am
20
becoming a woman'', ``that I am becoming a god'', and so on.' Thus,

there is an acknowledgement of `feeling'. Deleuze, as we see, refers to this

`feeling' as a state existing at a fundamentally deeper level. He even refers

to this state as `I feel that I am becoming-woman'. This is a crucial line

from Deleuze which I shall later frame as part of my move towards a

materialist aesthetic. I later explore how `becoming-woman' might be

used as a term to express the beyond of subjectivity, through affect

towards sensation.

In talking of the eroticism of the machine, Deleuze appears to be

acknowledging the presence of Eros as a life force, which, he says,

liberates other forces, based upon `feelings' at a deeper level. That `deeper'

level then may exist, not as a fixed place of plenitude, and being, or

fulfilment as in psychoanalysis, but a place which is immanent, con-

tingent, in movement and flux, not in fixity or finality. He suggests that

this `I FEEL' is only secondary to the really primary concept of emotion.

This emotion is experienced across the machine of desire. So, whilst I am

not entirely dispelling Deleuzian negation of finitude and transcendence

as found in Freud, nonetheless, I am suggesting that there is some concern

with sensuality, and the senses, and `feeling' which provides a way

forward to think beyond the subjective, into a definition of feeling as

a material state, as I later exemplify.

Fourth, Deleuze is critical of Freud's ideas about the death instinct.

However, Deleuze's understanding of the `beyond', whilst rendering the

subject otiose, and the notion of the death instinct as a transcendent state of

the subject, nonetheless might be problematic. Deleuze's understanding of

`beyond' attests to an ontological state of `being' in the `habitus' and, as I

stated earlier, in `repetition'. This aesthetic, however, is reappropriated in

Deleuze through the sovereign state of an aesthetic of sensation. Sensation

then is the `beyond' of the pleasure principle, rather than the death instinct.

How sensation works is later explored in Chapter 5. As such, `sensation',

unlike pleasure, or desire, does not need any satiety or satiation. Thus,

pleasure is replaced, Deleuze articulates, by a `materiality of emotion'

through sensation. The materiality of emotion is theorised through the

following stages of the chapters: in affect and becoming-woman. Deleuze

refers to the experience of autoeroticism as a pleasure felt within the

78 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
materiality of a pre-subjective state. This autoeroticism is experienced via

intensive qualities, or what he calls `haecceities', not `subjectivities'. The

desiring machine, as Deleuze postulates in Anti-Oedipus, is material, not

personological. He thus replaces `pleasure' felt by any desiring subject, with

a material emotion, a flux of forces and intensities, not felt by any

subjectivity. This is not pleasure `felt' by any desiring subject, but a range

of forces oscillating and circulating. The circle of that range of forces

completely abandons the ego/self. Deleuze argues in Anti-Oedipus that the

emotions as such are experienced through a plane of intensities, on a plane

of immanence, where pleasure is not `felt' by any subject. Rather, a range of

forces, oscillating in a circular framework produces an `affect'. Here,

Deleuze refers us to Klossowski:

The centrifugal forces do not flee the centre forever, but approach it once

again, only to retreat from it yet again: such is the nature of the violent

oscillations that overwhelm an individual so long as he seeks only his own

centre and is incapable of seeing the circle of which he himself is a part: for

if these oscillations overwhelm him, it is because each one of them

corresponds to an individual other than the one he believes himself to

be, from the point of view of the unlocatable centre. As a result, an identity

is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must be undergone

by each of these oscillations, so that as a consequence the fortuitousness of

21
this or that particular individuality will render all of them necessary.

Deleuze continues with,

The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle,

the centre of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the centre is the
22
desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return.

Consequently, it might seem that the concept of `pleasure' to some extent

becomes less of an issue, in theorising the experiential elements of the

cinematic. But desire, as Deleuze explores it, also has its role in offering

different paradigms of subjectivity or the subject, from Freud and Lacan.

RETHINKING DESIRE, THROUGH DELEUZE

Deleuzian ideas about desire lead towards affect, sensation and a new

concern with the body, but in a totally different way than we saw in

phenomenological accounts of the body, used by Sobchack or Crary in

their work. Deleuze is critical of the Freudian psychoanalytic configura-

tions of desire, arguing that psychoanalysis `talks a lot about the un-

conscious ± it even discovered it. But in practice, it always diminishes,

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 79
destroys and exorcises it. The unconscious is understood as negative, it's
23
the enemy.' He argues that what psychoanalysis calls production or

formation of the unconscious are `failures, conflicts, compromises, puns.

24
In the case of desires, there are always too many for psychoanalysis.'

Psychoanalysis is replete, he argues, with `lack', `culture' and `Law', and

he suggests that metaphor and metonymy signify within psychoanalysis a

narrative which is confined to an explanation for behaviours. This

narrative always has its origins in the Oedipal scenario, in Oedipal myths

and familial stories. He is thus critical of psychoanalysis in its inherent

abyssal and negative connotations, failures, conflicts, compromises, and

he is scathing of its exploration of sexual behaviours as somehow the

outcome of pre-Oedipal scenarios of plenitude and fulfilment, satisfaction

and internal drives. Instead, he argues, the unconscious is something

which can be produced. Whilst of course in Freud and Lacan the

unconscious is also `produced', the nature of this production and what

it contains are problematic. That is, it is only understood in terms of

Oedipal structures. In Deleuze, the unconscious is not a metonymnic

`text' or a `narrative' with specific signifieds, or referents, but is a

`production', a vitalist, and dynamic process of forces and intensities.

`The unconscious is a substance to be manufactured, to get flowing ± a

social and political space to be conquered. There is no subject of desire,

any more than there is an object. There is no subject of enunciation.

25
Fluxes are the only objectivity of desire itself.'

If this is the case, then, there is much purchase from Deleuzian ideas of

production for the aesthetics of film theory. The idea of a productive,

positive and aleatory concept of desire enables a move away from the

negative and abyssal psychoanalytical versions of pleasure and desire,

and their relevance to construction of subjectivity. It enables different

vocabularies of the filmic experience to be opened up, since it brings into

focus the idea that cinema works as a rhythmical, processual and moving

form; that we need not necessarily relate to it through a subjectivity, nor

that we should have a subjectivity that is formulated through it. Sub-

jectivity and the aesthetic process, or event, might instead be problema-

tised and rethought, something which is also happening as I explained

within a post-feminist pragmatics. Deleuzian ideas also enable thinking of

the ontological nature of film itself as a `body' which moves in connection

with other bodies. But that definition of bodies is further expanded in

Deleuze, offering a closeness in relation to a post-feminist pragmatics

which seeks to undermine the binary of mind/body. Rhythm, process and

non-fixity thus provide different lines of enquiry into the impact of

cinema.
80 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Deleuzian ideas on desire enable us to critique subjectivity and the role

of the subject in the visual engagement with the screen. He argues that

there is no subject of desire, any more than there is an `object' as we see

in psychoanalysis. There is no subject which enunciates, or originates, the

narrative. Rather desire is an `effectuation'; that is, something which is

transiently in process, as opposed to a satisfaction. In other words, desire

is something in continuum, in movement, in process, with no final

satisfaction in endings. As we saw in psychoanalysis, desire was always

tied up with Freudian ideas of final inorganic resolutions, in the death

instinct. This created a transcendent notion of desire, rather than an

immanent notion. Desire, suggests Deleuze, lies outside the coordinates of

persons, subjects and objects. Rather it is seen as a process that is

articulated on what he refers to as a `plane of immanence' or a `plane

of consistency' criss-crossed by fluxes and particles which break free from

subjects and objects. For the purposes of this chapter I shall define that the

term `immanence' is used in contrast with transcendence. This is a

simplistic and residual explanation and is not an extensive definition

which we might find in philosophy per se. But the term immanence is

located within Deleuzian ideas of desire and becoming. Deleuze argues, as

we have seen, against any psychoanalytic frameworks of desire. He

argues that psychoanalysis is premised in Freudian notions of desire,

emanating from the need to return to a lost state of plenitude, a finite

sense of oneness in death. This is a transcendent model of desire, where

there is a constant wish to repeat and a compulsion to move beyond death

to this transcendent state. Alternatively Deleuzian debate proclaims that

desire is processual, immanent, productive and energic, and has nothing

to do with forces of transcendence, or a return to a lost plenitude, through

death. Desire is rather aleatory, processual and constitutive of joy. Desire

is produced, it does not emanate from lack. It is immanent. It is energic,

and dynamic joy lies in its immanence, a continual process of contem-

plative and productive forces, `Desire is therefore not internal to a subject,

any more than it tends towards an object: it is strictly immanent to a plane

which it does not pre-exist, to a plane which must be constructed, where

26
particles are emitted and fluxes combine.'

This idea of a `plane of immanence' becomes crucial to Deleuzian ideas

on the beyond of desire, through sensation. Alongside the `plane of

immanence' Deleuze posits a `plane of organisation' (a molar line)

consisting of forms, the formation of subject, object, themes, motifs,

personages, structures, the Law, the State, on a structural and genetic

27
plane. Deleuze refers to this as the `molar' plane. Such a plane is a

structured, transcendent plane, a design which when deconstructed is

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 81
shown to be bound up with myths of origination, finality and psychic

structures of subjectivity. Immanence, what Deleuze also refers to as

`becoming', is of an entirely different nature. The plane of immanence, or

becoming, `is a question not of organisation but of composition; not of

development or differentiation but of movement and rest, speed and

28
slowness. It is a question of elements and particles.'

Molecularity, matter, particles and even fibres become more pertinent

to mechanisms of desire than the molar plane of psychoanalysis. It has

nothing to do with `subjectivities' but exists through `movement, process,

rhythm, forces'. The plane of immanence is replete with haecceity.

`Hecceities are simply degrees of power which combine, to which corre-

spond a power to affect and be affected, active or passive affects,

29
intensities.' This paradigm is a different framework from psychoana-

lysis. Rather than Oedipal or Oedipalised notions such as the structures of

school, nation, family, church, state and self, Deleuze prefers to talk

about deterritorialised or molecular planes of fluxes or flows, machines

rather than structures `the flows that have not been reduced to Oedipal

codes and neuroticised territorialities, the desiring-machines that escape

30
such codes as ``lines of escape'' (flight, velocity) leading elsewhere'.

Here, there are no forms, no subject, but there are individuations,

without subjectivity. Nothing becomes subjective, but there are non-

subjective powers of affect. A plane of immanence is thus defined through

lines of flow, lines of longitude and latitude, and replaces the theatre of

the subject, the point, the origin, the organism. Here, the line of velocity,

becoming and intensity replaces the `drives' and the `pulsions' of Freu-

dian/Lacanian scenarios which are embedded in lack, negativity and the

teleology of the Oedipal drama. The teleological characteristics of psy-

choanalysis are set alongside an immanence through which desire is

produced. Deleuze suggests that this plane of immanence or `becoming' is

replete with `speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane itself is

perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the imperceptible

31
(the microplane, the molecular plane)'.

This is the crucial element in terms of `becoming'. It is this concept of

`affect', dislocated from its Freudian and psychoanalytic connotations of

the `release of psychic energies which effects emotional states' and

connected, rather, with emotion and sensation rather than the organism's
pleasure, which becomes central to this project. The foundations of

Deleuze's concept of `affect' comes from both Bergsonian and Spinozist

legacies, and are located within the `material' configurations of energy

and matter, not in psychic formations. A materialist aesthetic might be

premised on such foundations. It is nonetheless constitutive of an aes-

82 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
thetic emotion, but one premised in sensation. Sensation, and my use of

this term in the book in relation to the cinematic engagement, is premised

on Deleuzian ideas of affect, movement and intensity, as I explore in the

proceeding chapters.

Already we can determine, then, a useful set of ideas which will address

those issues earlier problematised in Chapter 2: binary thinking, desire,

pleasure, subjectivity, notions of the body and rethinking the aesthetic.

These new ideas enable a breakdown of the binary categorisations in

which psychoanalysis framed desire and simultaneously considers a

material aesthetic premised upon molecularity, and matter, an assem-

blage of machinic connections. This therefore opens up experimental

ways of dealing with the aesthetics of film. Deleuze continues that if it is

not the Oedipal scenario which is the problem, psychoanalysis is still rife

with concepts of castration (a term which in film theory has been utilised

to explain certain images of women, such as the femme fatale in film noir)

and the death drives, and how they are connected with pleasure and

desire. Psychoanalysis merely reduces sexuality to myths, argues Deleuze.

Any concern with the affects of the screen thus needs to engage with

Logique de
forces beyond the represented image on the screen. Deleuze's

la Sensation takes up this argument. A philosophy of expression offers

instead a new aesthetic paradigm, an aesthetic experience which, to quote

Pessoa, is a `dynamogenic' experience. By this he means that the experi-

ence of the filmic encounter is an absolute continuum of depersonalisa-

32
tion, where the cogito (I think) becomes a sentio (I feel). Deleuze argues

in Logique de la Sensation that we cannot separate the two. All the

aesthetic practices, including I would suggest cinema, participate in a

common activity ± of force and sensation. Sensation becomes a more

appropriate word than either desire or pleasure, since it enables a

consideration of the beyond of psychic structures found within psycho-

analysis. This presents a logic of sensation which is not fixated in any

death instinct, but a realm of pure force, movement and becoming. A total

denial of Freud's pleasure principle.

Deleuze's ideas on desire enable a move into theories which further

distanciate the subject and subjectivity. Instead, subjectivity becomes

subsumed by an occurring process of difference and repetition beyond

subjectivity, through affect and becoming and sensation, into what

Deleuze refers to as haecceities. Such language offers a whole new

paradigm through which to discuss, think about, articulate, connect

and experience the aesthetics of the filmic, a paradigm which moves

away from psychoanalytic descriptions of desire and beyond the phe-

nomenological explanations we saw in Sobchack, to more contemporary

 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 83
philosophical trajectories ± film-philosophy. This enables a re-engage-

ment with film as an art process, as much as it is an ideological formation,

bringing back the political through the aesthetic; a revalorisation of the

aesthetic in a post-structuralist age. I want to explore, in Chapter 4, how

Deleuze takes us from subjectivity, moving beyond subjectivity, subsum-

ing subjectivity through the thinking of affect and becoming-woman, and

beyond into sensation.

NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze and Fe
 lix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 163.

2. See Chapter 1, note 23, for an explanation of the term `aparalletic evolution'.

3. Semiotics, here, is being interpreted as a theory of meaning of the sign.

4. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman

Condition, p. 140.

5. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Con-

temporary Feminist Theory, p. 101.

6. See discussion of affect in Chapter 4.

7. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 124.

8. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 125.

9. Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 26.

10. Again, see Chapter 1, note 23, on `aparalletic evolution'.

11. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 99.

12. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition, p. 3.

13. Brooks, Freud's Master Plot, pp. 290±1.

14. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 74.

15. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 74.

16. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 16.

17. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition, p. 22.

18. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 18.

19. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 18.

20. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 18.

21. See Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le circle vicieux.

22. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 21.

23. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 77.

24. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 77.

25. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 78.

26. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 89.

27. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 128.

28. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 255.

29. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 92.

30. Deleuze and Guattari, introduction, Anti Oedipus, p. xvii.

31. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 267.

32. F. Pessoa, A Centenary Pessoa, quoted in Brian Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and

the Philosophy of Expression', in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature,

p. 23.
Chapter 4

Constituting Bodies ±

from Subjectivity and Affect

to the Becoming-woman of the Cinematic

This chapter expands upon the notion that the aesthetic experience of the

cinematic encounter is felt at a level beyond that of the `subjective',

beyond a subjectivity constructed within the psychic scenarios of cine-

psychoanalysis. I shall outline and explore Deleuze's concept of becom-

ing-woman and how this is connected to the concept of affectivity and

sensation. This chapter then explores how subjectivity, mind/brain and

body become imbricated in the process of the cinematic encounter; how

the impact of the cinematic encounter operates through the `beyond' of

subjectivity. This encounter is felt within the realms of the pre-personal,

the autopoietic realms of a material state, where affect and intensity take

us into a processual immanence, the `becoming-woman' of the cinematic.

1
Taking a lead from a contemporary writer, Edward Wilson, there is, I

believe, a possible consilience across the arts and sciences, provided by

plateaus of philosophical engagements. In their final collaborative text,

What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write that science, art and

philosophy as forms of thought or creation have the brain as the junction

of all three. This consilience might provide a contemporary way forward

in moving beyond the boundaries of subjectivity, locked as it has been

into the machinations of sociological or psychoanalytic mechanisms. The

boundary that has traditionally separated the natural sciences from the

humanities and social sciences needs to be rethought. A new conception

of materialism, and a new concern with matter as it functions within the

production of an emergent, pre-personal state, might help us to move into

more creative considerations beyond subjectivity, into subjectless sub-

jectivities. As I argued in my introductory chapter, new collective assem-

blages of enunciation are needed across the arts, sciences and philosophy,

in a neo-millennial culture, a rethinking of some lost and forgotten

aesthetics, but positioned in a new engagement with post post-structur-

alist thinking. In a new-world disorder that finds no answers to famine,

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 85

ecological disasters, political stasis and a productivist economy, where,

asks Guattari, is the potential for a re-enchantment of an aesthetic which

2
might create a new sense of being and harmony in the world?

If we cannot conceive of solutions in a macro-political sense, maybe

there is a micro-political way which through a mutation of mentalities

might promote a new sense of being in the world, through a neo-

aesthetics? From Appollonian law to Dionysian spirit, the line between

the two domains of science and art can easily be crossed back and forth.
3
And so it is with Nietzschean resonations that we can begin to work

towards an integrational bio-aesthetics, through Deleuze, a bio-aesthetics

which commingles the material world with the aesthetics of film theory. A

`becoming-woman' of the cinematic crosses the material nature of the

`affect' towards sensation, in enabling a reconsideration of film as

material encounter, body, event, an `haecceity' and not merely a `repre-

sentation'. Indeed, there is no representation of one world, but only the

4
multiple worlds our brains achieve.

To trace the thinking of affect, becoming and sensation, I look briefly

and only tangentially at the influence of Nietzsche on Deleuze. What

follows provides a tangential discussion of some philosophical terms to

enable a new vocabulary for film-philosophy.

FROM NIETZSCHEAN ORIGINATIONS

[A]rt excites an affectivity or what Nietzsche calls a `will to power' which

maintains the desire to overcome the organism and unfold subjectivity in

5
material expression.

I begin with this quotation because it contextualises what is the essential

core of this project: the subsuming of subjectivity, beyond any sense of

desire premised within the organism, but rather beyond that in material

expression. Nietzschean resonances are replete within Deleuze's work,

and frame the origins of my own ideas on the beyond of affect, and

becoming-woman. How then does Nietzsche have a relevance to these

ideas?

Following Schopenhaurian influence, Nietzsche was concerned with

the irrational and the subconscious as the source of human motivation.

His anti-metaphysical claims are concerned with what cannot be ex-

pressed through language. His work provides instead a belief in the

`reality' and the sheer physicality of natural existence, a belief in the

profundity of the natural and a belief in the sheer contingency of the

natural. Thus, for him there is no state of transcendence, to which we all

86 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
aspire. Rather, there is only the sheer transience of time and the natural

forces of nature; for `there is no transcendent order or form to the world, no

law governing nature; there is no total system or any divine teleological

6
pattern guiding activity'. Only diversity and difference within the natural

world. There is no wholeness or unity but a totality of different energies

and forces. There is no other `place' to which we can aspire. Belief in such

metaphysical Being has only served to prevent humankind from accepting

the sheer brutality, pain and transience of the `real'.

Within our `real' experiences, however, Nietzsche has proffered an

acceptance of the sheer vitality, force, movement and dynamic of `be-

coming'. All we can ever experience in life is the vitality, force and

movement of transient existence, a belief in the sheer natural force of

7
existence, and an acceptance of the `cruelty' of life's intransigence. This

primordial sense of what it is to just be in the world has an important

resonance for understanding how `becoming' is used as a phrase to

articulate the `forces' of `life' as opposed to the power of language. It

is this concern with `life' and the non-linguistic force of reality which are

fundamental to an understanding of the concept of becoming.

Indeed Nietzsche suggests, as does Deleuze (we saw earlier how

Deleuze refers to the abstract machine as opposed to structural linguis-

tics), that language is too inarticulate to explain the sheer vibrance,

force, intensity and creativity of life. Language distorts because of the

way in which it is inextricably tied to metaphysics and presence. `In

Nietzsche's view, language and the judgements we form in language

falsify life, either by simplifying the complexity of living processes or by

8
distorting and overlooking the unique character of our experiences.' It

transforms what are really unique experiences for us as individuals, into

universal characteristics. It cannot capture the uniqueness and speciality

of experience. Language does not express the sheer flux, instability and

profundity of life's ineluctable chaos because it structures the world as

stasis. Words can only be used to explain, in restricted logic-based

formats, universally shared perceptions, and not the individual experi-

ence or encounter. What is really important in Nietzsche's scheme of

things are the senses.

Linguistic means then are not sufficient to explain `becoming'. Lan-

guage, and specifically the way it is used in grammatical structures,

organised by subject and predicate, explains experience through a notion

of subjectivity, originating from a subject. Such thinking presupposes an

agent, as subject of an action, some sense of ` subjectivity' with an

intentional consciousness. Language operates in a fixed grammatical

form and does not allow for an understanding of the creativity of

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 87

experience. Nietzsche wants to eradicate a belief in language, and to

acknowledge that there is something more primordial beyond any sense

of a natural or human self. Indeed, these are products of metaphysics.

According to Houlgate, there is, for Nietzsche, `no substantial being or

essence beyond our reach: ``the world that we have cannot be reduced to

our being, our logic and our psychological prejudices, it does not exist as

a world `in itself': it is essentially a world of relationships . . . its being is

9
essentially different at every point'' '.

The concept of `becoming' is what exists as the `real' for Nietzsche:

sometimes referred to as multiplicity, change, world, life, or flux, `be-

coming' exemplifies a continuum, a constant process of movement and

changing volatilities and dynamisms. `Becoming is restless primordial

indetermination.' The concept of `becoming', then, equates with a

worldly, biological life. Nietzschean criticism of language and conscious-

ness rests on intuition, sensation and feeling. `In On Truth and Lie in the

Extra-Moral Sense, for example, Nietzsche states that the free mind is
now ``guided by intuitions rather than by concepts'': in passages from the

Nachlass he exposes what he sees as the falseness of our conscious

experience of ``things'' by comparing that experience directly with the

formless, unformulable world of the chaos of sensations or with the

10
``medley of sensations''.' Language and the intellect then are set aside in

favour of the `felt', the unformed, feeling, intuition and sensation. He

believes that we can experience life at a pre-linguistic and primordial

level, before language ± outside of language. As Nietzsche explores in

11
Daybreak and Twilight of the Idols, this primordial level is a `world of

unworded experiences' or a `pre-linguistic insight into life', and it is the

senses through which this experience or `becoming' is articulated. Thus,

`becoming', or `transience', implies that sensation reveals the nature of

reality in a purer way than the reflective and rational consciousness and
12
language. This world of `becoming' is predicated upon the sensual,

through the body. The body is, then, effectively a much richer arena of

experience than consciousness/mind. This body, however, is not fixed in

any singular identity. There is according to Nietzsche no fixed identity or

form to the concept of `body'. All we are is body, a multiplicity of

changing desires, sensations, instincts, some purely physical, some sub-

limated. He believes that such forces operate through a multiplicity of

`selves' and `many mortal souls' as opposed to the soul of the transcen-

dent Being. Rather than transcendence, `becoming' is expressed through a

sense of `immanence' or a processual continuum of movement and flux.

Consciousness and language are transfixed in a world of Being and

transcendence. `Becoming' is, by comparison, a process of immanence.

88 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

DELEUZIAN `BECOMINGS' . . . THE PROCESS OF DESIRE

In exploring the concept of `becoming', it will be necessary to try to

understand some challenging philosophical ideas in Deleuze's work re-

garding `subjectivities'. This section is not meant to be a philosophical

debate, per se, but is required to enable a new understanding of affect, and

how that understanding of affect might lie outside psychical structures.

The concept of `becoming' is one of the most significant elements of

Deleuze's work. It is connected to his aim of imaging the process of thought

in different ways. His notion of `becoming' is, like Nietzsche's, profoundly

anti-Hegelian and anti-metaphysical. Thus, fixed identity and teleological

order are replaced by a flux of multiple `becomings'. The concept of

`becoming' in Deleuze's work operates somewhat differently from a

Nietzschean perspective, though it has its origins in Nietzschean ideas.

Deleuze's perception of desire, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is not one

premised upon the psychoanalytic subject of desire. Rather, it is premised

upon the processuality of the affective forces of materiality, a materiality of
bodies in assemblage with each other, as molecular forces in coagulation.

To Deleuze, `becomings' are the process of desire, and the term `becoming'

cannot be explained as purely natural or biological. Deleuze suggests rather

that `becomings are molecular'. `Becomings' are seen as `affects' and it is

the subsuming of subjectivity through the notion of a material affect that is

central to a neo-aesthetics of the cinematic. Deleuze states:

[A]ll becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is not to

imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion

formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to

becoming: neither the imitation of a subject nor the proportionality of a

form. Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one

has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between

which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and

slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one
becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire . . .

Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement

13
and rest because they enter into a particular zone of proximity.

Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one

becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects,

objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize from
14
experience, through science or by habit.

How can we begin to explain the concept of the molecular, and the idea
that subjectivity is subsumed through a materiality within the molecular?
 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 89

This discussion will be based upon an analysis of a pre-personal level of

experience, within a proto-subjectivity, and a realm of autoconsistency,

before and beyond the `subject' of structural linguistics or psychoanalysis.

This therefore redefines the subjectivity which is part of phenomenology

or psychoanalysis. Within Deleuze's work, subjectivities are part of a pre-

personal state, existing outside any sense of self, and are multiplicitous.

Like Guattari, Deleuze posits the existence of proto-subjectivities as a

realm of autoconsistency, before and beyond any `subject'. Rather, there

exists what Deleuze calls an autopoietic state of being, before the social

and cultural world of language structures, and before an emergent sense

of a psychic self. The term autopoietic is used to define a state of

autopoiesis or `self-enjoyment', and comes out of Deleuze's ideas of

the pre-personal where there exist what he refers to as absolute inter-

iorities. This pre-personal exists as a kind of field of different forces or

intensities, what C. Colwell refers to as wills to power, `that resonate with

one another, that interact in ways that produce effects on one another.

Sexual drives, the surfaces of bodies, aggression, one's internal organs,

15
emotions, experiences, sensations are all prepersonal.' The pre-personal

then is that which contracts a habit and is therefore a form of repetition.

But these pre-personals are not experienced or `had' by a Self, a subject or

a person, but are instead constitutive of the self. The pre-personal remains

an impersonal state. Pre-personal is often referred to as singularity in

Deleuze. Singularities are points that produce effects of transition. The

ways a painting affects us individually, for example. `The difference in the

ways that Ce
 zanne's or Duchamps's works affect us depend not on their

abilities to capture different extensive orders of reality (as would a

Platonic form) but on the intensity by which they affect our sensibil-
16
ities.' Both Deleuze and Guattari suggest that there is a sense of inert

`aliveness' associated with this emergent state of being, which is felt

through the materiality and molecularity of its material being, in and of

itself. This emergent self is atmospheric, pathic, fusional and transitivist,

ignoring any positionality of subject or object, masculine or feminine, and

17
certainly it has no truck with Oedipal or matrixial configurations.

Whilst Deleuze has obfuscated the sense of subjectivity as fixed or

formulated within psychic structures, nonetheless his proposal of a

schizoanalytic subjectivity supposes that there is a range of strata of

subjectivation which exist in a multicomponential format. This is differ-

ent from that proposed by the conscious±unconscious mechanisms of

Freudian psychoanalysis. But Deleuze's ideas do not actually reject

individuation as such, but suggest that `subjectivities' are formulated,

produced at an earlier stage than any self, through pre-verbal intensities.

90 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
These pre-verbal intensities are called `pathic events', or prehensive

events. Rather than a unity, as in a phenomenological or Cartesian sense,

these events operate as a `multiplicity'. This notion of events occurring on

multiple strata explains how experiences can occur through feeling,

empathy, affective and pathic awarenesses rather than logical thought

or discursive schema such as psychoanalysis. In other words, some things

can only be `felt' at a deeper level of the proto-subjective. This concept of

a multiplicity is further defined by its qualitative components. Multi-

plicities are `qualitative', rather than quantitative. Duration, movement

and process are intrinsic to this qualitative sense of multiplicity. A

qualitative multiplicity is therefore not an average of numerical parts,

but is what Deleuze calls an `event', a `haecceity', and what Bains refers to
18
as an `actual, felt occasion of experience'. A processual, transitivist and

fusional intensity. The processual is determined by this qualitative multi-

plicity of proto-subjectivities.

For Deleuze and Guattari, human subjectivity or interiority emerges

out of what they call self-referential territories. Although the individuated

psyche is generated from a pre-individual autopoietic or self-referential

node of `events', these events themselves are actually subjectivities which

have an existential integrity, an autonomy, an autopoietic `realm'. This

unites mind, brain and body. The actual brain, in its material and

molecular structure, is part of the process. There is a level beyond and

prior to any sense of subjectivity, felt at a level of proto-subjectivity,

which involves the materiality of the brain in connection with both mind

and body, a molecular coagulation.

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari provide the most

important concept of this arena of proto-subjectivities, as existing in

the intersection of mind/brain where the brain becomes a `subject' in

absolute survey, an auto-possession, or self-enjoyment, prior to the

emergence of the phenomenal perceptual field. Raymond Ruyer was

specifically influential in determining this sense of a subjectivity which

is different from that of phenomenology or psychoanalysis or Cartesian

19
accounts, accounts which have surfaced through film studies. By

utilising a different perception of subjectivities, then, we can begin to

discern different vocabularies for the filmic experience. Ruyer's work has

specific purchase in how visual perception is conceived as an in-itself

outside of the scopic action of the eye±I relationship. Deleuze's notion of

autopoiesis, the self-enjoyment of the transitivist and emergent self, the

absolute interiority, is premised upon both Stern's and Ruyer's work.

Deleuze's notion of a schizoanalytic subjectivity suggests there are multi-

ple strata of subjectivation in a multicomponential cartography. This is

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 91

opposed to the conscious±unconscious formations of psychoanalysis. It is

not so much a total denial of subjectivity as such, rather a recognition that

it exists in pre-verbal and pathic consistencies and these lie beyond the

individual. These pathic events or consistencies are often referred to as

multiplicities. It is of course difficult for specifically rational discourse to

acknowledge a notion of a non-discursive affective or pathic awareness.

But this is really crucial to understanding the `affect' as entity, as some-

thing beyond psychic structures. Ruyer's biological philosophy proposes

a connection between mind and matter which does not distinguish these

as separate entities. Bains highlights Ruyer's notion of `an absolute ``true

form'' which is an absolute consistent form that surveys itself indepen-

dently of any supplementary dimension, which does not appeal therefore

to any transcendence, which has only a single side whatever the number

of its dimensions, which remains co-present to all its determinations

without proximity or distance, traverses them at speed, without limit-

20
speed'. The main point about this is that Deleuze's work proposes an

ideality that is a dimension of matter. All things are material. He says, `I

see no reason to refuse the existence of the equivalent of a subjectivity or

21
proto-subjectivity to material and living assemblages.' Deleuze seems to

be looking for a sense of subjectivities which is not based on a subject, or

intentionality, or psychoanalytic perceptions of subject/object coordi-

nates. He is suggesting, and this can be seen in Cinema 1 and Cinema

2 and in the final chapter of What is Philosophy?, that there is an auto-

possession, an autopoiesis or self-enjoyment felt through the brain/body,

prior to any emergence of a phenomenal field. In other words, the brain is

the `mind'. All we ever are is brain/mind meld. Images thus exist within

this brain/mind/body meld, not outside in the world itself. Obviously,

such ideas enable different definitions of the concept of affect, and allow

us to rethink the visual experience of the cinematic as effecting different

experiential modes of existence. Rather the pathic and the felt can be

theorised outside of phenomenological accounts of subjectivity.

An entire meld of brain/mind and body is thus pertinent to an under-

standing of the molecularity of `becoming'. Thus images which we

experience or see and affects that we feel are not out there in the world

as such but exist within our brains' formations, within the primary true

forms of an emergent and transitivist existential integrity.

BECOMING-WOMAN

Deleuzian ontology, I think, presupposes an `in-between' of subjects

and objects. His work along with Guattari poses the notion of an
92 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
autopoietic or self-referential production of subjectivity. This existence
22
of an existential integrity has its own endo-consistency, in and of

itself. Subjectivity is not just in flux, and in multiplicity, but is displaced

through immanence, through a pragmatics of `becoming'. Molecularity

is the key to this definition of `becoming'. To Deleuze and Guattari it is

the process of what they call `becoming-woman', which is key to all

other becomings. The process of `becoming-woman', for both men and

women, is perceived as a molecular process, releasing minoritarian

fragments or particles of sexuality (but a sexuality that is no longer on

the level of unified and genitalised sexed body) which break down the

binary aggregations. The process of `becoming-woman' is not based

upon any recognition or identification with an actual entity, as a

`molar' entity of woman. The process of `becoming-woman', for

men and women, is a destabilisation of the molar identity and as such

is a marker for a more general kind of transformation of process,

through processes of the molecular:

What we term molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her

form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned a subject. Becom-

ing-woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it

. . . but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or

the zone of proximity, of a micro-femininity, in other words, that

23
produces in us a molecular woman.

However, if we are to engage with these ideas within a post-feminist

pragmatics, it is important to understand the problems for feminist

discourse. What has been problematic for feminist discourse has been

this generalised use of the word `woman' within a process of transforma-

tion. It has been argued that it seems to be locked into essentialist

categorisations of woman determined by cultural and ideological sig-

24
nifications of the term `woman'. According to traditional feminist

thinking, the term `woman' through Enlightenment epistemology has

been equated with `other', man being firmly located as the norm, the Law

or the locus of thought and culture. `Woman' as a term has been encoded

as `essence' or `bodily zone of transfiguration', a defining of woman as

nurturer, or carer and `woman' as nature rather than culture. This

definition has been criticised for implying that woman's bodily essence

is responsible for her creative, nurturing and thus transformational

properties. However, if the radical democratic principles of a feminist

politics are not to be sacrificed then the very category `woman' itself needs

to be rethought and understood in different and creative ways, providing

a new site for political contest. Furthermore a rethinking of the term in

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 93

a Deleuzian sense will provide a post-feminist pragmatic account of

`woman'.
25
It could be argued, as Jardine and Braidotti do, that Deleuze's use of

`becoming-woman' is in danger of using the term `woman' in its essenti-

alist categorisation of woman as `body' and woman as nature, in contrast

with man as mind and man as culture. Why, for example, is `becoming-

woman' privileged in the idea of becoming? This suggests that in order to

`become' one must first of all take on board the categories of womanhood

associated with that binarily opposed position within phallogocentric

thinking: that to `become-woman' requires of men an appropriation of

the `body' of woman, or the idea of woman. This position does not offer

any criticism of a patriarchal subject position of woman from the dualistic

structures that oppose it to the masculine norm. Why does Deleuze not

simply explain his ideas in terms of merely `becoming' without the

resource to the term `woman'?

But to be concerned with such questions is to maintain binarily

constructed debates, which do not take into account molecular, rhizo-

matic, or assemblages, contingent thinking or transversal processes of

thinking. A more pragmatic, post-feminist account considers the wider

question of abstract machines, assemblages and perspectival thinking.

`Woman' thus might be perceived as part of a molecular process, within a

machinic assemblage of technological, material, social and other forces,

not just the cultural or biological.

Deleuze articulates these ideas in his use of the term `becoming-

woman'. His ideas are useful in presenting a pragmatics, then, as opposed

to a politics, and also, by extension, in presenting a new paradigm shift in

rethinking aesthetics in contemporary film theory. This is because he is

arguing for a desubjectivication of the gendered `entity' of woman.

Deleuze does not display `becoming-woman' as a concept within a

feminist political theory, as a theory of `woman'. He uses the concept

in a rhizomatic way, within a pragmatics, not a politics. The `subject' is

not the point in question. If women's history has been connected with

their relation to a `subject' then we need to change the elements in relation

to how the term `woman' is understood for it to have any significance

outside of a teleological political position in a molar politics of feminist

theory.

Following on from Nietzschean originations of `becoming', Deleuzian

`becomings' are desubjectified affects, not subjectified stages towards any

positioning of an autonomous subject or agent. Becomings are desub-

jectified affects. `Becoming-woman' has nothing to do with real women,

or the entity of `woman' in any biological, cultural or psychoanalytical
94 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
definition of the term. The idea of `body' is denaturalised and instead

reconceived as a series of flows, particles, in assemblage with other

bodies. The question of a gendered subjectivity in each stage of a

`becoming' is not the issue. Subjectivity is replaced by a pragmatics of

becoming. Becomings are molecular, traversing molar unities. The pro-

cesses of becoming-woman involve a series of movements outside or

beyond the fixity of subjectivity and stable unities. It is different from the

systems of binary polarisation that privileges men over women.

Using the term `woman' then in Deleuze is not to maintain essentialist

definitions of the term `woman', but to rewire the term in molecular

rhizomatic assemblage, not as a literal definition of the molar `woman'.

Camilla Griggers provides an example of the social and machinic assem-

blages of `becoming-woman' when she describes how woman's lived

experiences of the 1990s are rewired as assemblages of body/mind/matter

± and the molecular. In her work Becoming-Woman, she introduces the

preface as follows,

This book is about what woman is `becoming' in US culture at the end of

the twentieth century. She is becoming predatory (in 1991, Aileen

Wournos became America's first female `serial killer'); she is becoming

depredatory (by 1985, US women were aborting 1.5 million fetuses per

year). She is becoming militarized (in 1990, Linda Bray became Amer-

ica's first woman in combat). She has synthetically altered personalities

(6 million Americans were on the neurochemical Prozac by 1993 ± the

majority women); she has prosthetically altered body parts (some 2

million American women had received breast implants by 1994). She has

had her biological functions exchanged on the open market (in 1992,

there were 4,000 surrogate births in New York state alone). She is

becoming publicly lesbian (lesbian chic is in vogue in fashion). She is

becoming despotic (black men dragging the face of white femininity are

the US media's darlings while images of white women are exported

around the globe for mass consumption). And she is becoming at the

cellular level a toxic site, ripe for neoplasty (by the end of the millennium,

an estimated one in three American women will be diagnozed with some

26
form of cancer).

In terms of a molar politics for feminist theory, it is no longer possible to

define the concept `woman' as having any universal value, or having any

essential values. If we are to take on board the philosophical premise of

assemblage, of molecularity, then the term `woman' can no longer be

conceived through binary terminology. `Woman' cannot merely be

described as part of a binary, but a part of an assemblage of processes

connecting and forming in new alignments within culture, across the

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 95

social, the libidinal, the material, the psychological, the biological, and

personal spaces of our existences, as Griggers exemplifies.

Deleuzian use of the term `becoming-woman', then, is part of a

rhizomatic conception of thought which does not premise definitions

in fixed and binary ways. Such rhizomatics, even though they may not

directly support feminist political struggles, in a molar sense, nonetheless

help to open up possibilities of thinking in new ways. This is not a denial

of the political category of `woman' altogether. The term `becoming-

woman' is used as a molecular way of thinking, a part of a micro-politics,

not a molar way of thinking. `Becoming-woman' involves a series of

movements and processes which are outside the fixity of molar concepts

like `subjectivity'. Instead it is a term which is connected to that beyond

subjectivity, in the materiality of an asexual, a non-human primordial and

existential integrity, within the pre-personal. It is thus an escape from

binary concepts that privilege issues like gender. `Becoming-woman

means going beyond identity and subjectivity, fragmenting and freeing

up lines of flight, ``liberating'' a thousand tiny sexes that identity sub-

27
sumes under the One.' It is rather a neo-pragmatic turn on subjectivity.

Subjectless subjectivity. The `becoming-woman' is the realm of the pre-

personal, the affective, the transitivist and the fusional.

`Becoming-woman' is a tracking of woman as a `function' of a series of

processes which have no referent to transcendent entities or agency.

Rather, these processes function or operate at a molecular level, at the

level of material production, in the realm of the proto-subjective and pre-

personal. Braidotti's critique that Deleuzian `becomings' offer no space

for a specifically feminist subjectivity might then be answered with the

argument that Deleuze's work is to explore those very mechanisms which

produce such transcendent notions. His aim is to rewire and deploy the

concept of `becoming-woman' as particles or as fibres, as an element

within a critical neo-pragmatics.

If women's history has been concerned with feminine agency and

subjectivity, and feminist film theory has been concerned with a molar
sense of `woman', Deleuzian ideas enable a rethinking of the very

elements in relation to which woman is understood. This questioning

and relocation of subjectivity enables a fresh approach to film theory

where subjectivity, as we saw in Chapter 2, has dominated debates. The

cinematic experience might be theorised through different vocabularies,

which try to explain the impact, the resonance, the modulations of the

cinematic outside any notion of, or at least a `fixed', subjectivity and

certainly any gendered subjectivity. Affect and becoming-woman move

into the beyond of sensation, as I explain in Chapter 5. Thus a `becoming-

96 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
woman' will enable a move away from all those reductive and static

concerns with subjectivity and agency maintained in a macro-political

dialectic.

The position of woman in relation to the `subject' has remained fairly

consistent. Philosophy has reflected woman as `other' through a wide

array of discourses. Irigaray has specifically referred to the notion of an

abstract immanent principle of woman in This Sex Which is Not One, in

which she describes woman's subjectivity as multiple, diffracted, mod-

elled on the very physicality of her sexual corporeal body. However, such

a view of `woman' consistently sees woman in the position of `other' and

as a function of subjectivity. What `becoming-woman' in Deleuzian terms

does is enable a view of woman in relation to the elemental, the material,

the local, forces (matter, passion, chaos, affection and affect) where

subjectivity is replaced through a materiality and a molecularity of

`becoming', in a Nietzschean sense.

This materiality, however, requires a new conception of the term `body'

which is beyond those defined by binary discourse (body and nature as

female, mind and culture as male). Deleuzian conceptions of the body,

based on Spinozist ideas, rethink the body outside of its configurations in

such binary discourse. Spinoza states that `bodies are distinguished from

one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slownesses, and not
28
by reason of their substance'. According to Deleuze, following Spinoza,

the `body' is perceived as a set of forces, intensities, processes, molecular

and fibrous particles in connection with other forces and in consilience

with the materiality of the brain. Nature, matter, affection and passion

are not here perceived as static or negative terms, but flowing and

relational, changing and creative, and so their connotations in relation

to `woman' no longer have the earlier connotations of `otherness'.

Deleuze and Guattari's idea of `becoming-woman' provides those

materials for a reformulation of the `body' itself and, with that, a

rethinking of the `body' in relation to aesthetics and the cinematic.

Woman is not conceived as a `concept' or an `image' but part of a set

of relations in process and assemblage. This is a philosophical turn on the

definition of `woman' away from transcendent definitions. Here, `wo-

man' functions differently. A new philosophical positioning of `woman' is

definable as the processes and orders into which she is installed, just as

Griggers shows in Becoming-Woman. The critical question then for

feminism and post-feminism, now, is not whether this is a politically

transgressive or liberatory trope of `woman' in representational terms,

but what processes are involved in the production of `woman'.

The history of feminism has been to analyse the problems of a political

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 97

positioning of woman, and so it continues to repeat binary debates by

trying to appropriate `agency' and `subjectivity' for women. But Deleuze's

notion of `becoming-woman' implies a relation between material pro-

cesses and woman as she functions outside of any notion of subjectivity or

agency. Instead, woman is part of an arsenal of pragmatics in rethinking

`becoming' instead of subjectivity. Thus `becoming-woman' is not cap-

tured or restricted within a specific physical form. It is not chromoso-

mally, psychoanalytically, biologically, culturally, libidinally or socially

defined. Neither is the concept part of gender politics, or gender theoris-

ing. Gender politics is specifically concerned with formations of socio-

political and cultural areas which may or may not be articulated through

an idea of biological femaleness. `Becoming-woman' is nothing to do with

a politics. It transforms concepts of `femaleness' and `gender' into new

sets of relations, into material flows of molecularity. Griggers explains

how the pharmacological industry and its use of drugs has created a field

of `becomings' which is molecular, machinic and assembled, outside the

categories of gender, class or other molar categories. This rewiring of

processes is therefore immanent to material flows. Such flows are not

conceptually driven, but affectively driven. If we take this idea into

thinking of the cinematic, as I have been arguing, then we have a new

set of vocabularies, where affectivity/feeling/intensity become pertinent as

processes of molecular, and material, flows. Such vocabularies enable

different ways of thinking, outside the conceptual, or the representa-

tional, of the cinematic experience. The term `becoming-woman' is a

process of affectivity, not a phrase which describes a move towards a

political agency or subjectivity.

BODIES WITHOUT ORGANS

To explore how Deleuze and Guattari connect this concept of `becoming-

woman' to affectivity, it is important to consider their idea of `bodies

without organs'. As I explained in Chapter 2, one of the problems with

current thinking in film theory, and structuralist thinking, has been the

fixed positionality of the term `body', versus mind, in critical theory.

Within post-structuralist thinking, this binary is rethought, and criticised.

Rather, there is a more complex imbrication across the two terms.

Deleuzian thinking about the `body' opens up new definitions of the

term itself, and these newer definitions help us to think about what we

might mean by the term, body, rather than a body, in a much more

complex, situational, and contingent form. Bodies are no longer perceived

as just corporeal, flesh and blood bodies, but the concept takes on a more
98 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
complex, technologised and assemblaged notion. Therefore, we can move

away from the phenomenological accounts of film and the body, which

we saw in the work of Sobchack into much more experimental avenues of

29
thinking. The formulation of `body' in Deleuze takes it outside its

definition as a set of organs, blood, bones, and so on, and in opposition to

mind and consciousness. In Deleuzian terms `body' is conceived differ-

ently.

The concept of `body without organs' is an attempt to denaturalise the

body. Rather than see the body as a corporeal element, Deleuze and

Guattari describe the body as a set of variously informed `speeds' and

`intensities'. It is conceived in relation to other bodies, particles of other

bodies or entities. In an interesting recent documentary, film-maker David

Lynch talks about his concern with the speeds of the body and the speeds

of space. He explains that a person can be fast or slow, just as a space can

be fast or slow, or a range of perspectives in-between. That person will

then interact with the space and time around him or her, a space and time

which also have different `speeds'. He then locates that metaphor to his

visual language of film, and explores this interrelationality within the

diegesis of his texts. He suggests that this relationship of speeds between

`bodies' is what gives specific scenes in films that `unexplainable' in-

tensity. An example he uses is the song sequence `In Dreams' in Blue

Velvet (1986).
Within Deleuzian conceptions, bodies might be technological, material,

organic, cultural, sociological or molecular. `Body' becomes a more

composite, machinic, technologised term, dissolved from any formulaic

interpretation based upon biological terms. This is premised upon Spi-

nozist conceptions of the univocity of being: that everything has the same

ontological status. In terms of particles, and fibres, and molecularities, all

the world is composed of similar matter, a combination of atoms,

particles and fibres, but in different formations and patterns or equations.

Therefore the body and mind are `modifications' of the same substance.

Thus, all of life, in a sense, becomes `body' in material and molecular

connection. Therefore the body without organs refers to all bodies:

animate, inanimate, human, inhuman, textual, social, and cultural as

well as biological. The body without organs is a body which is disinvested

of any psychical fantasies as we see in psychoanalysis. Again, this enables

us to create new ways of thinking how the term `body' has been used in

film theory, and opens up refreshing, neo-pragmatic turns on that

definition, suggesting `bodies' of the filmic process, in the way in which

David Lynch uses the term. This body without organs is an abstract

notion, then, a concept or thinking of the body as a limit, or a tendency ±

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 99

a becoming. As Liz Grosz indicates, `It is the body before and in excess of

the coalescence of its intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful,

functional, organised, transcendent totalities . . . a point or process to

which all bodies, through their stratifications, tend; a becoming that

resists the processes of overcoding and organisation according to the

three great strata or identities it opposes: the union of the organism, the
unification of the subject, and the structure of significance.' 30

This body without organs is not a place, or a scene or an actual `body'.

The body without organs is a field for the production of the process of

desire. It is what Deleuze calls the `plane of consistency' or `plane of

immanence' as opposed to the plane of organisation. The plane of

organisation is that area of our lives through which we are structured

into behavioural roles, through specific moralities and principles; the

molar line ± the family, law, the state, education ± where things have

specific values and a specific place. The plane of consistency operates

alongside the plane of organisation, in a molecular coagulation with it,

melding and in collusion. If the body without organs is the space of

`becomings' it is important to see it in this abstract way, not as a defined

expression about the physical, lived `body' of phenomenology.

Bodies, then, are not stable units, but become elements in assemblage,

fluid and mutable, constituting life through `becoming'. This is an

abstract level of description from the body as perceived in binary

discourses or phenomenology. Deleuzian conceptions of body convey

the main features of `bodies' as openness, change, mutability, fluidity,

feedback, complexity. Through the `body' then an immanent self-orga-

nisation replaces transcendent principles, determining the value of `body'

as distinct from binary divisions. Thus, `becoming-woman', in relation to

the body without organs, is not an expression of `real biological bodies'.

`Becoming-woman' is a process of immanence, a description of a pro-

cessual experience of the affect, as opposed to the subject. Becomings are

always specific movements, forms of rest, motion, speed, and slownesses,

points and flows of intensity. Such flows of intensity operate outside

subjectivity and gendered subjectivity through affect. Those affective

processes at work in the experience of the cinematic are thus effectuated

through an `unthought', through the plane of consistency, through the

material of the body/brain at a deeper level than the subjective. This other

realm operates through the deeper level of the proto-subjective, in the

affective realms of becoming. The unthought is felt, at this level, as

intensity, as becoming in a molecular connection, beyond any notion of

an individuated `body'. I think what Lynch is trying to explain is that

there are certain moments in certain sequences in films which have a

100 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
specific intensity and an effect on the viewer that is almost inexplicable;

indeed to explain it is to take something from it. A feeling resonates and

reverberates between the viewer and the text in ways which cannot be

articulated through speech or verbal language. They are felt within a pre-

personal state. The effects of such sequences are usually triggered by a

specific equation of sounds, textures, spaces, rhythms and movements

across that specific frame or series of frames in question. Again, the

Dreams example is perhaps the most well known.

Deleuze writes in Cinema 2,

`Give me a body, then': this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The

body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that

which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which

it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is

life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to

think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life. Life will

no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will

be thrown into the categories of life. The categories of life are precisely the

attitudes of the body, its postures . . . It is through the body (and no longer

through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with
31
the spirit, with thought.

This almost appears to be a contradiction in terms. I have argued so far,

that the `body' in Deleuzian conceptions is not the phenomenological,

corporeal lived body, but is an assemblage of forces, intensities and so on.

And yet in Cinema 2 he talks of the `body' being the space where the felt
and unthought are experienced. I understand this apparent contradiction

as an exemplification of Deleuze's ideas of the `interstitial' or the `in-

between'. So that this definition of `body' is really no longer seen in either

singular categorisation, but a complex of both and more. The body is the

unknown space of the molecular; it incorporates the mind and the brain.

It is not definable as a singular entity. It cannot be constrained to the

individuated body of flesh and blood, as opposed to mind/brain. Rather it

is an amalgam, but not necessarily a `whole' notion of all these. `Body' in

this sense has a new and fluid dimension which encompasses all indi-

viduated, social, cultural and affective spaces. This is a reformulation of

life as `body' ± body as life. It is `intensity' and `affect' which molecularly

constitute this Body of life.

Through Deleuzian ideas we can offer a pragmatics of becoming with

which to replace the concept of subjectivity. Any call for a politics of

becoming is, I acknowledge, in danger of hypostatising that very politics.

But a pragmatics of `becoming', instead, uses contingent assemblages of

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 101

thinking processes through which to distanciate the concept of `subjec-

tivity'. Subjectivities can be determined as merely simulacra, which are

subsumed to a more profound engagement with forces of `becoming',

material, molecular and fibrous forces, rewired, as I indicated earlier,

across new assemblages outside of language construction. A post-feminist

agenda in film theory, as a political and ethical framework, engages with

thinking `outside' the boundaries of epistemological, Cartesian thought,

through a pragmatics of becoming.

This engagement with cinematic experience thus proposes to consider

cinema as `affect', as `body' (see Chapter 5), where affect operates beyond

subjectivity within the materiality of the film itself, through an imma-

nence of movement, duration, force, and intensity, not through a semiotic

regime of signification and representation, but in sensation. Questions of

desire are relocated or rather dislocated from sentient identification

within semiotic signification, psychoanalytic or subjective, and gendered

reading positions. Rather desire is rendered processual, immanent, cre-

ated through a modulational and vibrational expression of the affect in

sensation.
It is difficult to explain the concept of affect, since there is no cultural

paradigm or vocabulary that is specific to affect. Texts, visual or literary,

have until most recently been explained, explored, theorised and critiqued

through theories of `signification'. How can we begin to explain how affect

has become more significant to visual cultures than theories of signification,

if we are constrained to work within structural linguistics? Affect has been

defined or loosely seen to describe emotion. But there is a discernible

difference between these two terms. Affect and emotion are not synony-

mous, although they may be conjoined. They have different orders of being.

An emotion has a `subjective' content . . . a subject operates as the experi-

encer at an individuated level, of the emotion . . . a personal experience. It is

thus owned by an agent, by a subject. It is crucial to a Deleuzian semantics, to

theorise the difference between emotion and affect. Affect is not ownable, by

an individuated agent, in the same way as emotion.

The question one might argue, then, is how can we critique affect if it is

indiscernible to an agent, to a subject? Deleuze uses Spinoza's `Ethics' to

ground the term affect. Spinoza's philosophy explores the difference

between affect and emotion. He explains that affect has an irreducible

bodily and autonomic nature. (Autonomic here is defined as purely a

physical response to something: sensual responses, for example, the skin

32
getting warmer, or the heart beating faster.) Affect is a suspension of

action±reaction circuits and linear temporality into what might be called

`passion'. This distinguishes it from passivity or activity.

102 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Furthermore, Ruyer's work, as I explained earlier, gives us an under-

standing of affect as a state of subjectless subjectivity. The affect exists,

according to Ruyer, in the materiality of the brain/body consilience at a

molecular level. At this level of the non-human, proto-subjectivity, the

molecular describes a state which has an understanding of its own

existence, what Ruyer refers to as `equipotentiality'. Quantum physics

is currently looking into the existence of what are called `microtubules',

which exist within the emergent sense of all organisms. These micro-

tubules determine within molecular organisms a sense of `aliveness', an

existential integrity, or being in the world, outside any sense of intentional

33
consciousness. Thus affect is an emotionless state, but still a state of

`feeling'. Rather there is a pathic, proto-subjective state which is not

owned by the subject. Therefore we can argue that aesthetic desires are

`becomings' and they cannot be fixed or positioned in terms of extrinsic

systems of reference. Rather, they can be articulated through an appre-

ciation of transitivist, transversal and pathic consistencies. As Guattari

writes, `one gets to know them not through representation, but through

affective contamination'.
34

In his ideas on thought and cinema, Deleuze explains the difference

between classical and modern cinema. The so-called classical cinema

works, according to Deleuze, through the linkage of images, and sub-

ordinates edits and cuts to this linkage. The harmony of classical cinema

is achieved by rational cuts, edits which always produce logical relations

between images. Modern cinema, or what I would see as post-classical, on

the other hand, provides a reversal. Images are not always linked; cuts

and edits have little significance in themselves. What emerges is often a

kind of `non-commensurability' of relations between images. Images are

not totally abandoned, but relinkages are subject to techniques of cutting,

thus producing irrational cuts. `There is thus no longer association

through metaphor or metonymy, but relinkage on the literal image; there

is no longer linkage of associated images, but only relinkages of inde-

35
pendent images.' The filmic experience has evolved through a whole

new idea of the processuality, the rhythm of the film as a set of bodies, in

motion, producing a new cartography of the visual. The film does not

record images, or convey representation. It acts, it performs, as a `body'

with other bodies, in a constituted body, a molecular body, through the

affective.
 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 103

FROM BECOMINGS . . . TO AFFECTS . . .

AND THE BECOMING-WOMAN OF THE CINEMATIC

In his ideas on modern cinema Deleuze explains how modern cinema is

concerned with three major elements: the image, the concept and the

affect. But they function contingently, pragmatically, to produce a

creative and mutational element in the visual experience. This tripartite

relationship constitutes a harmonics, a `whole' system of harmonics

which creates a nervous `vibration' (see Chapter 5). In this way, the I

SEE and the I HEAR are actually subsumed across the concept of the I

FEEL in the affect. An I FEEL, a totally physiological sensation, one felt

beyond or prior to subjectivity, in the pre-subjective level, in which body

and world cannot be distinguished separately, is experienced through a

`malleable mass' of images. If cinema is a `belief in a world' accommo-

dated across a relationship of image±concept±affect, then that movement

is experienced before language, before discourse.

In this sense, Deleuze follows Artaud's belief in the ineluctability and

insufficiency of `language' to articulate the experience of `reality'. Deleuze

says,

Because the point is to discover and restore belief in the world, before or

beyond words . . . It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving

discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before

discourses, before words, before things that are named: the `first name',
36
and even before the first name.

The `depth' of that primordial body becomes a significant element within

a trajectory of `becoming-woman' where woman's body is rewired,

reconfigured and rethought beyond discourse, through the affective

and outside any gendered subjectivity.

The belief in the `body' is fundamental to Deleuzian aspects of post-

classical cinema. By dislocating discourse, semiosis, metonymy and

metaphor, a `deeper' level of engagement is proffered, which articulates

a profound relation of body±brain±world connection. The relationship

then of image±concept±affect is rethought through a new perception of

the `whole', which incorporates the role of `body' and the `body' as the

`whole'. The question is no longer that of an association of images. What

matters is the `interstices' or the `in-between':

It is not a matter of following a chain of images, even across voids, but of

getting out of the chain or the association. Film ceases to be `images in a

chain . . . It is the method of BETWEEN, `between two images', which

does away with all cinema of the One. It is a method of AND, `this and
104 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
then that', which does away with all the cinema of Being = is. Between two

actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two

visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the

six fois
visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible . . . (

deux) . . . The whole thus merges with what Blanchot calls the force of
37
`dispersal of the Outside'.

Thus various interstitial elements become `bodies' which make up a new

perception of the cinematic body. Generic characteristics no longer hold

the only validity. Instead, categories, words, sounds, refrains, colours,

tones, fill the in-between spaces of the filmic text. The `body' is perceived

as fundamental to this affective and aesthetic process, and equally this

process constitutes a `body'. The `becoming-woman' of cinema is this

process of the affective . . . towards sensation.

The `becoming-woman' of the cinematic is a phrase which I wish to

foreground as part of the aesthetics of sensation. It operates in post-

feminist film theory and generates from a synthesis of Deleuzian ideas on

`becoming', `affect' and sensation. It enables a move towards thinking

beyond gendered subjectivities, through a corporeal and material sense of

connection with the movements of the filmic body. Desire is experienced

through the molecular, material emotion, through the processuality of the

affects of the film as body, with other bodies: the ways in which colours

vibrate, clash, coincide, resonate; the dimensions of their tones; the

blurring of their boundaries; the linearity across and within the frames;

the rhythms and movements felt across the screens; the role of sound

within this experience. Not in any psychic or libidinal way as we saw in

psychoanalysis, for example, but through the materiality of the film, its

compositional elements, connecting with other bodies, corporeal, mate-

rial, molecular: bodies as life, bodies constituting life. Such bodies are

made of `water, air and matter' as Deleuze indicates in his Three

Syntheses of the Beyond. 38

The `becoming-woman' of cinema entails processes beyond corporea-

lised vision into a concern with movement-image, affect, haecceity,

synaesthesia and kinaesthetics: a coagulation of cinema as machine, as

a body of sensation. For Nietzsche as we saw earlier, there is no

distinction between the world in which we live and any other `transcen-

dent' world. There is no ultimate truth, no other metaphysical world to

which we can aspire. Rather there is only ever the processual of the real, in

time, the real forces of life's natural existence in its germinal and viral

contingencies. `Becoming' epitomises that process of affirmation of the

dynamic of living in the real world: an acceptance of the cruelty of life, the
 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 105

joy of the cruelty of that existence, the acceptance of the ineluctability of

life's transience. There is no other to which we aspire ± all there is is the

real, and within our experience of the real, the concept of `becoming'

serves to define life's ephemerality, life's ineluctability and sheer vibrance

of rhythmic movement, force and dynamism. Thus `becoming' in Deleuze

may be described as an affirmation of the positivity of life's `differences'.

Consequently identity is never singular, and does not exist as a determi-

nate factor in our existence. Identity is in constant flux and process,

continually swirling through a vortex of molecularity. With this emphasis

on processes, affirmation and movement, Deleuze's notion of `becoming-

woman' offers the existence of fluid boundaries in a materialist and

vitalist sense of immanence as opposed to transcendence.

A `becoming-woman' of the cinematic, then, is an exploration of the

affective, processual, the dynamic and the aleatory vitalism of the forces

felt across a variety of bodies. If we can move away from thinking about

`becoming-woman' as a description of an entity, then the term enables a

transformation from image, or concept, to affect. The `becoming-woman'

of cinema describes the affective process of the cinematic experience

where the affective is constituted through a materiality of emotion, a

material sense of depth and process, through affect and sensation.

NOTES
1. See Edward Wilson, Consilience. Wilson writes that there needs to be a new

understanding across paradigms of knowledge, of a `consilience' across the

sciences, humanities and social sciences. His work seeks to provide a coherent

thesis premised upon a bio-aesthetic conception of knowledge, within the arts,

one which takes its foundations from genetic and genetico-cultural foundations.

2. Fe
 lix Guattari, Chaosmosis, pp. 99±118.

3. See Paul Valadier, `Dionysus versus the Crucified', in D. B. Allison (ed.), The

New Nietzsche. I mention Nietzsche here since his ideas have had a profound

influence upon Deleuze, and to some extent we need to see from where those

ideas originate, in order to understand the nature of `becoming' in Deleuze's

work.

4. See Paul Bains, `Subjectless Subjectivities', in Massumi, Canadian Review of

Comparative Literature, p. 519.

5. See Stephen O'Connell, `Aesthetics: A Place I've Never Seen', in Canadian

Review of Comparative Literature, p. 486.

6. Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, p. 42.

7. The word `cruelty' is not to be seen in the sense of physical or emotional cruelty to

humanity, but is used here as a word which defines a flux, a dynamism, a sheer

ineluctability about the natural world that can only be sensed and not described.

Cruelty as a term takes on a different definition, and I emphasise it is not to be

defined here as cruel in the sense of hurt, pain or torture. Cruelty here is more

akin to a kind of excitement, creativity, indetermination. It is of course to some

extent tied up with the kind of `pain' one receives in experiencing the sublime or
106 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
that which cannot be described: the forces of nature for example in storms,

earthquakes, etc, where the imagination is not able to comprehend the reality, so

that what is felt is a kind of cruelty or pain, but is also a beauty which is

indescribable. Of course any discussion on the sublime is, purposefully, outside

the parameters of this project and will not be part of my discussion. Cruelty, then,

in my sense of the word, is meant to explain this indescribable sense of vitalism

and dynamism.

8. Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, p. 45. See speci-

fically ch. 3, where Houlgate refers us on p. 46 to Nietzsche's essay, `On Truth

and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense', as an exploration of the ideas of the falsity of

language.

9. M. Haar, `Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', in Allison (ed.), The New

Nietzsche, p. 11.

10. Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, p. 51.

11. See also Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, p. 51.

12. See Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, p. 51.

13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 272.

14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275.

15. C. Colwell, `Deleuze and the Prepersonal', in Philosophy Today, p. 18.

16. C. Colwell, `Deleuze and the Prepersonal', in Philosophy Today, p. 19.

17. Deleuze and Guattari based these ideas upon the work of Daniel Stern's The

Interpersonal World of the Infant. This explores in detail the existence of a

transitivist and fusional emergent self, a self which ignores oppositions such as

subject/object, and masculine/feminine. See also Brian Massumi, `The Autonomy

of Affect', in Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 217±39, where similarly

he describes the sense of `aliveness' as being a continuous non-conscious self-

perception. It is the perception of this state that enables `affect' to be analysed, as

something which is outside the psychic and lies within the material and the

molecular. See also Chapter 2, note 29, on the matrixial and Lichtenberg-

Ettinger's work in relation to Lacan.

18. Bains, `Subjectless Subjectivities', in Massumi, Canadian Review of Comparative

Literature, p. 514.

19. On the survey, subjectivity and absolute surfaces, see Raymond Ruyer, Neo-

Finalisme.

20. See Bains, `Subjectless Subjectivities', in Canadian Review of Comparative

Literature, pp. 519±24.

21. Deleuze quoted in Bains, `Subjectless Subjectivities', in Canadian Review of

Comparative Literature, p. 516.

22. An endo-consistency describes a state which has no vortex, or end state. It can

only be understood or defined as relational, or fluid . . . in connection with

surrounding particles.

23. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275.

24. See Rosi Braidotti, `Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or,

Metaphysics and Metabolism' and Elizabeth Grosz, `A Thousand Tiny Sexes:

Feminism and Rhizomatics', in Boundas and Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and

the Theatre of Philosophy, also, Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of

Woman and Modernity.

25. For Rosi Braidotti, the problem for feminists is how to free woman from the

`subjugated position of annexed other, so as to make her expressive of a different

difference, of pure difference, of an entirely new plane of becoming'. See Braidotti

Toward a New Nomadism', in Boundas and Olkowski (eds), Deleuze and the

Theatre of Philosophy, pp. 159±82.

26. Camilla Griggers, Preface, Becoming-Woman, p. ix.

 Constituting Bodies . . . to the Becoming-woman 107

27. Grosz, `A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics', in Boundas and

Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 207

28. Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, p. 109.

29. See for example the work of Stephen Shaviro, The Cinematic Body.

30. Grosz, `A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics', in Boundas and

Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 201.

31. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 189.

32. See Brian Massumi, `The Autonomy of Affect', in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A

Critical Reader, p. 217.

33. R. Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, p. 128.

34. Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 92.

35. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 214.

36. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 172.

37. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 180.

38. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 73.

Chapter 5
Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation

Affect goes beyond affections.

[A]ffect is not the passage from one lived state to another, but man's

nonhuman becoming.

Becoming is neither an imitation, nor an experienced sympathy, nor even

an imaginary identification. It is not resemblance, although there is a

resemblance. But it is only produced resemblance. Rather, becoming is an

extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sensations without resem-

1
blance.

Artists are presenters of affects, inventors and creators of affects. They not

only create them in their work, they give them to us, and make us become

with them . . . whether through words, colours, sounds, stone, art is the

language of sensations. Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple

organisation of perceptions, affections and opinions, in order to substitute

a monument composed of percepts, affects and blocs of sensation that

takes the place of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a

syntax that makes them pass into sensation, that makes the standard

language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the `tone',
2
the language of sensations.

Sensation operates as the beyond of subjectivity, through `becoming-

woman'. Its being lies in the beyond of any fixed subjective positionality.

If film is an art form which resonates as experience, as a pure form of

`becoming-woman', then Deleuze's ideas on art and the aesthetic, in terms

of the concept of `sensation', are a significant development in thinking

about the cinematic impact through affect. They enable us to conceptua-

lise a theory of aesthetics which is outside of representation, and is

premised upon the intensity of sensation.

Deleuze's theory of sensation brings together previous and more binary

 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 109
3
perceptions of sensation. Deleuze initially describes sensation as having a

subjective and an objective element, as perceived in the work of writers like

Kant but also, `it has no sides at all, it is both things, indissolubly, it is

being-in-the-world as the phenomenologists say: at the same time I become

in sensation and something arrives through sensation, one through the

other, one in the other. And finally, it is the same body that gives and
4
receives sensation, that is at the same time subject and object.' It is a
5
fusional world-body of sensation. Any discussion of an aesthetic must

take into account two types of sensation. The first, premised upon Plato's

original conception of sensation, suggests that sensations are recognisable

and objective. Common sense tells us that when we look at a hand, for

example, we acknowledge its objective functions. We recognise some form

of action and objectivity to the sensation of looking at a hand. But there

exists (according to Plato) a second form of sensation which is to do with

the relations into which that form merges. For example, a hand is either

larger or smaller, fatter or thinner, and therefore the sensation actually

forces the perceiver to think about other elements in the equation.

DELEUZE'S THEORY OF SENSATION

Daniel Smith writes that, `The most general aim of art, according to

Deleuze, is to produce a sensation, to create a pure ``being of sensation'',

a sign. The work of art is, as it were, a ``machine'', or ``apparatus'' that

6
utilizes these passive syntheses of sensation to produce effects of its own.'

Deleuze's theory is premised on this second type of sensation, on what he

refers to as `signs'. He sees signs, not as semiotic tropes, but as forces of

encounter, or objects of fundamental encounter. An encountered sign has

no fixity or objective form of recognition, which can be imagined,

reconceived or remembered. Rather an encountered sign exists in pure

movement, duration and rhythm. Thus sensation in Deleuzian argument

exists outside any form of recognition or common sense, but in a realm of

force, rhythm and encounter. In contrast to the phenomenologists' account

of sensation, Deleuze's definition is one which removes sensation from any

presupposition of common sense or recognition, where subjectivity is

transcended. Indeed sensation operates beyond any subjective position-

ality. As Daniel Smith states, `By taking the encountered sign as the primary

element of sensation, Deleuze is pointing, objectively, to a science of the

sensible, freed from the model of recognition and subjectively, to a use of

7
the faculties freed from the ideal of common sense.' Our faculties of

sensibility, memory, imagination, reason and cognition are not necessarily

linked in any perception we might have of a specific object. These faculties

110 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
operate, according to Deleuze, as differential elements, which do not need
to have a conjunction in order to have meaning. Each faculty has a

differential limit or tendency. Something might be communicated from

one faculty (for example, imagination or cognition) to another, but does

not necessarily constitute common sense. This sensibility is one which

perceives signs, in the Deleuzian sense of an `encounter' rather than a

`meaning'. Therefore, the sign in Deleuzian ideas suggests an aesthetic

which is not dependent upon recognition or common sense. It operates as a

8
`force' and as an `intensity' in a differential relationship. A sign then is an

intensity which is produced by differential relations. Sensations, therefore,

refer to a whole range of differences of perceptions of consciousness, at a

level beyond subjectivity. These intensive forces cannot be understood by

any empirical senses. With the notion of intensity, sensation ceases to be

representative and becomes `real'.

This has significant resonance for thinking of the cinematic encounter.

What we see on the screen may not operate merely as `representation' but

as signs of material encounter, as sensation. The cinematic experience

becomes `event' as well as representation. To explain this more thor-

oughly Deleuze's work on Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation is

illuminating. Deleuze indicates in Logique de la Sensation how Bacon's
paintings evince pure movement, force, modulation and process, because

of the nature of their multiple images. The images are formulated across a
9
triptychal structure. They function as material forces, rather than as

singular representational paintings. They are material forces, not figura-

10
tive images. Deleuze takes from Lyotard the notion of the `figural' as

opposed to figuration. Figuration, or representation, has meant an image

which is both representational and narrative. It relates the image to a

particular object of recognition. It thus loses any intensity in sensation.

However, Deleuze differs from Lyotard, in his belief in the role of

psychoanalysis as the framework of understanding this Dionysian

anti-art form, of the visual engagement. Lyotard's psychoanalytic inter-

pretation is too dependent upon transgression, deformation and the

negativity of unconscious processes as perceived in Freudian formulae.

Deleuze utilises the figural without the Freudian apparatus that Lyotard

employs. In Deleuze, the figural, is the concept of an immanent process of

forces. Sensation operates on a plane of immanence, through the pro-

cessual, and intensity. According to Deleuze, Bacon defigures representa-

tion and breaks the figure away from representation, with the aim of

rendering `sensation' as more significant. This method of defiguration is

used to achieve pure force and intensity, through the figural. In discussing

Bacon's paintings, Deleuze argues that the represented image of the body
 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 111
in pain and torture need not be read as that. Rather the images on the

canvas exist, not as `figuration' but as the figural of rhythmic movement.

The prostheses and the mutilations that the body undergoes in Bacon's

paintings are not read as a `trope' of horror (although they may of course

operate as such a metaphor) but as transitions, pulses, elements that allow

variations into paintings to thus allow endlessly changing `locomotions':

the body in `locomotion' rather than as a representational image. Polan

writing in his article on `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation' quotes

Deleuze: `What is painted in the tableau, [or, as I would say, what we see

on the cinematic screen] is the body, not insofar as it is represented as

11
``object'' but in so far as it is lived as experiencing sensation.' This has

significant reverberations for how we interpret the `image', say, of

`woman' on the screen. She may exist as figural, not as figuration,

and thus the `image' of woman might function as force, intensity.

How can the figural then epitomise force, and intensity, whereas

figuration is manifested through representation? To Deleuze, the figural

is the space of intensity. Deleuze explains how both abstract art, for

example, with artists such as Mondrian, and expressionist art, with the

work of Pollock, tried to refine sensation, by dematerialising it to a

specific optical format. Pollock, for example, in his work dissolves all

forms through a kind of fluid mixture of lines and colours. Such artists

have moved `beyond representation' by breaking with what was known

as a hylomorphic code. This is the code which explains how art is about

the imposition of form upon matter. But abstract art was about freeing up
form, while expressionist artists wanted to free up matter through chaotic

use of colours and lines (Pollock). But, what is missing from this model is

that form and matter are in fact not so easily separable: they are more

interestingly connected. They cannot just be isolated as separate terms.

Matter is not just a simple, and singular, substance that can be `formed'

into something. It is something which is mutable, kinetic, moving, malle-

able and never fixed. In other words matter has `singularities' (see

Chapter 4). The materials that artists use in forms, whether in art or

in film, are actually complexly mutable (for example, iron might melt at

specific temperatures; water will change states from liquid to solid). This

exemplifies Deleuze's notion of `intensity'; all matter exists in modulation

with the forms imposed upon it. `Beyond prepared matter lies an energetic

materiality in continuous variation and beyond fixed form lie qualitative

processes of deformation and transformation in continuous develop-

12
ment.'

In summary, the artistic venture, whether painting or film-making, is

no longer just a matter±form relation. What is significant in the event of

112 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
this process is a material±force relationship. Sensation, says Deleuze, `is

not realized in the material without the material passing completely into
13
the sensation, into the percept or affect'. `So long as the material lasts,
14
the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments.' The artist or

the film-maker takes a specific type of material, which has energetic

elements, or molecular elements, and synthesises the disparate elements in

such a way that the form captures these intensities. Film may equally

capture this modulation of material±force.

Polan states in his article that `Beyond figuration and representation,

then, sensation comes from a pure power that overflows all domains and

traverses them. This power is that of Rhythm, which is deeper than vision,

audition, etc. . . . ``A logic of the senses,'' Ce

 zanne said, ``that is non-
15
rational, non-cerebral.'' ' This is of course a major overturning of

phenomenology's emphasis on subjectivity. If I were using Merleau-Ponty

and phenomenology to explain the cinematic text and how it impacts, as

16
Vivian Sobchack does, then there would be an engagement with the

subject as centred and fully formed and integrated with a `body' of text. I

prefer to use Deleuzian ideas on intensity and sensation, through which

the subject is subsumed in the beyond, through becoming and sensation.

The subject is, as it were, `hystericised' or subsumed through intensities,

rhythms, flows and energies. The visual act of seeing with a physical eye

ceases to be a merely organic activity. As Deleuze says, `our eye ceases to

be organic to become a polyvalent and transitory organ; objectively it

holds before us the reality of a body of lines, of colours, liberated from

17
organic representations'. All the modern and post-modern arts, and

especially cinema, can share in this search for a discourse of sensation

where representation is not necessarily the only framework through

which to explain the event, impact, or resonance. Sensation is the

climactic, but processually climactic, element of desire in process. The

beyond of desire and affect lies in sensation.

Within sensation, vibration and rhythm come together to produce a

`vibratory facticity'.

Sensation is no less brain than the concept. If we consider the nervous

connections of excitation-reaction and the integrations of perception-

action we need not ask at what stage on the path or at what level

sensation appears, for it is presupposed and withdrawn . . . Sensation

is excitation itself, not insofar as it is gradually prolonged and passes into

the reaction but insofar as it is preserved or preserves its vibrations.

Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or

in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when
18
what follows appears.
 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 113
Sensation passes through different stages, under the action of the forces of

the material. When there is a confrontation of sensations, then their

respective communications and intensities produce vibration and ulti-

mately resonance. Deleuze discusses sensation through three specific

stages.

In stating that the aim of all art is to `wrest the percept from percep-

tions, and the affect from affections, to extract a bloc of sensations';

Deleuze describes three varieties of sensations, where the sensation take

place at a pre-subjective level, at the engagement of body, brain and

world. As I argued earlier, it is through the body without organs that

sensation is accessible, through the pre-subjective state of materiality. The

essence of sensation is rhythm, and the three compounds of sensation are

imbricated through rhythm.

First, Deleuze refers to the ` Vibration'. This characterises a simple

sensation, which `follows an invisible thread that is more nervous than

19
cerebral'. This synthesis is a simple sensation. But it is nonetheless also

composite in that it is determined by a difference in intensity that either

falls or rises, decreases or not, a `pulsation' that is more `nervous' than

cerebral. An example of this is in a Bacon painting (evident also in the film

Romeo and Juliet ± see Chapter 8), where the various colours and their

intensities `vibrate' in a complex format, thus creating a sensation which

is felt at a nervous level, a level of excitation upon the nervous system.

`Vibration' is created by the rhythmical oscillation of different colours.

For example, grass which has a variety of colours in it other than green:

red, blue, violet, even yellow, will be part of the final `green' of the painted

grass. This modulation of colours creates the `vibration'. `Vibration' is the

ultimate molecular image.

Second is ` Resonance', or what Deleuze terms the embrace, the clinch,

when two sensations resonate together, by tight embracing as if in a state

of symbiotic energies. Two simple sensations then come together almost

like wrestlers in combat and they resonate off each other, in a molecular

way. Their singularities, their intensities energise. Bacon's paintings very

clearly exemplify this, as do several films under scrutiny in Part Three. For

example, if we look at the way Bacon uses two human bodies in a

painting, they very often are commingled in some mutated fashion,

entangled, embroiled, resonating off each other, and not offering singular

identities.

Third is the synthesis of ` Forced movement', or as Deleuze states in

What is Philosophy?, withdrawal, distension, division, `when on the

contrary two sensations draw apart, release themselves, but also now

to be brought together by the light, the air, or the void that sinks between
114 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
20
them'. To explain this it is useful to draw on Bacon's use of the triptych

as a form for his painting. A triptych incorporates three separate can-

vases, placed and viewed together and experienced as a synthetic unit. But

within the triptych individual vibrations seem to undergo a type of

movement which creates a rhythm across the entire three canvases as

one. Sensation is therefore not necessarily dependent upon one element,

but a set of elements across the whole: the Figure. The rhythm works

across the entire triptych. The interstitial elements of light, air, colour,

tones (in the case of film, we might add, sound, music, point and

counterpoint) between the three canvases become rhythmical forces that

connect the triptych as a unit. It is as if the air itself becomes a molecular

element in their connections. In this way, Bacon was able to produce a

work of art which is more than a representational image. Rather, art here

functions as vibration, resonance, force: as sensation. A `pure being of

sensation'. In other words, the work of art functions as a machine, a

machine which produces effects of vibration, resonance and movement.

This therefore elicits the quest which has predominated the book so far:

we can theorise the experience of the cinematic; we can think of the visual

experience of the cinematic, not only as a representation of something

with a `meaning', but also as an aesthetic assemblage, which moves,

modulates and resonates with its audience or spectator through processes

of molecularity. It connects. It works through affect, intensity and

becoming ± and ultimately through sensation, not necessarily through

subjectivity, identity and representation.

TOWARDS A NEO-AESTHETICS OF SENSATION

It is through style
, through elements such as consonance, dissonance,

harmonies of tone, line, light, colour, sound and rhythm that sensation is

manifested. Visual and aural affects, like the cinematic, involve a certain

style, through which sensation is accommodated. In each case (in art)

argues Deleuze, `style is needed ± the writer's syntax, the musician's

21
modes and rhythms, the painter's lines and colours'. Even characters

within a specific narrative, whether in literature or in film, become as it

were elements in the compound of sensation, a figural, rather than

existing as representatives of a specific dialogue within a narrative. An

example of this is perhaps the novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. In

this novel Clarissa walks through the town, and passes into the town `like

a knife through everything' and becomes imperceptible herself. As De-

leuze indicates, ` Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man ,

just as percepts ± including the town ± are nonhuman landscapes of

 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 115
22
nature.' This exemplifies the molecularity of the experiential. `We are

not in the world, but we become with the world, we become by con-

templating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes.

23
Becoming plant, animal, molecular, becoming zero.' How do the

elements of style articulate the three compounds of sensation?

In discussing style I suggest that what we can present through Deleuze

is a neo-aesthetics and a bio-aesthetics premised upon sensation and

affect, rather than on subjectivity: a sensation which is based upon the

molecularity of matter, and functions through the materiality of the body

of work in relation to other bodies. If we take this logic of sensation we

can construct a theory of communication that would respect gradations

of signification (Deleuze does not argue for a complete deterritorialisation

from the molar: that is, the line on which ideology functions), which

would not limit meaning but would present a different semiotics from the

structural semiotics which we find operative in formal film theory. More

innovatively, we can begin to think about the film as an aesthetic

experience, but not in terms of the aestheticism of modernist or romantic

traditions. Here a neo-aesthetics is taking into consideration a biological

element within the aesthetic experience. Rather, Deleuze offers a kind of

`fluid semiotics', concerned less with signification or distinct elements,

than with tonalities, rhythms, shifts of force and energy, movement and

the materialism of a cinematic body that exists as matter. In this model, a

`becoming-woman' of the cinematic, where sensation replaces desire, the

image can `vibrate' with layers of intensity, since the image is not a single

unit, but a graded richness, resolute with modulations across a time-scale

from past, present and future. Modulation replaces representation. Film

can be seen to impact, as an aesthetic form, not as an encoder of

experience but as a modulator of experience. Within the modulation,

the following, molecular elements function to signify and produce a

specific style.

Colour functions as the main modulator of sensation. The colour green

acts as the prime spectrum for the eye±brain. This is because the human

eye±brain's genetic structure evolved around energy conserving processes

with respect to an environment dominated by the reflection of green

wavelengths. In connection with green, other colours enter different fields

within the eye±brain activity and will cause different affects. This change

in the semiotic state requires an energy expenditure. Affect, then, becomes

energy, force, modulation and sensation. `Within the green fields of

Deleuzian grasses the white butterfly's movement captures: aparalletic

evolution, the wasp and the orchid.' The visual experiences of the

cinematic are not necessarily prioritised through visual energies, but

116 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
other modulators, other energies, other captures. There is more than

colour that causes a sensation. The eye will also engage with other

processes. The first of these is motion, process, movement. The eye will

connect across several distinct, but overlapping fields of view. These are

basically a central focus, with left/right edges, and top/bottom thresholds.

Anything, any object, force, energy, that crosses these areas will be

detected by the eye±brain and this causes an instant cerebellum±efferent

motor response. Thus the eye can trigger, instantly, a response without a

thought . . . an intensity, an energy. Response can be evoked without

image, without representation. Bergson indicated that afferent nerves

transmit a disturbance to the nerve centre. `The efferent nerves which start

from the centre conduct the disturbance to the periphery, and set in
24
motion parts of the body or the body as a whole.' If the body is also an

`image' as we might find in film for example, then external images

influence the body in synaesthetic ways, through the efferent nerves,

and they thus transmit movement to it. Thus the body simultaneously

influences the external images; it gives back movement to them. Bergson

writes that, `here are external images, then my body, and lastly, the

changes brought about by my body in the surrounding images. I see

plainly how external image influence the image that I call my body: they

transmit movement to it. And I also see how this body influences external

images: it gives back movement to them. My body is, then, in the

aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images,

receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only,

that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in

25
which it shall restore what it receives.' Through this process of move-

ment, the `beautiful' can be newly discerned as a notion of duration and

brain formations. How is the beautiful accommodated through move-

ment and motion? Various forms of `motion' are more appealing, more

alluring, more beautiful to the eye±brain.

For example, the pathways of the flight of a butterfly will produce the

most invigorating, beautiful and captivating pathways of motion, a

cartography of visionary dance across the eye±brain, but also an amor-

phous fragility within the tactility of the image. The highly variable

trajectory of the butterfly will make the brain continually break and form,

break and form, breaking any symmetry, thus engaging all three fields of

view of the eye. The `eternal return' of the eye±brain activity (and the

butterfly) creates the kinaesthetics, wherein the brain's activities are

26
beyond the merely visual, but become tactile, fluid, in process. (As

Massumi argues, `beauty pertains to a process, not to a form'.) Other

forms of motion that break, lock and entrain the brain are spinning, the
 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 117
flowing of water, rolling motion ± wheels of any kind and explosions.

Filmic experience offers a whole range of such forces on our efferent

nervous systems. The borders of sunlight and shadow, for example, will

cause the eyes to flicker, to blink and cause the same tensing of the efferent

pathways as actual motion ± an ecliptic. (At the time of writing, the total

eclipse has caused such experiences for those brave enough to view.) So in

filmic experience, specifically in some of the films I discuss, such as

Strange Days and Romeo and Juliet, the sensation is felt through such a
mind/body/brain assemblage, a veritable `becoming-woman'.

Movement is also connected to colour. Deleuze explains that colour

operates as force. Each tone or modulation of colour exercises a force

upon a corresponding body, both in and outside of any text. It is colour

27
and the `relations' of colour that provide a `haptic' world and meaning.

This haptic world is felt as a function of hot and cold, of expansion and

contraction, through the hapticity of eye into hand. According to Deleuze,

It is color, it is relations of color that constitute a haptic world and

28
meaning, as a function of hot and cold, of expansion and contraction.

He refers to the intense force and connection of the visual and the tactile

sensations, the synthesis of the optical and the tactile as a `haptic' sense of
29
vision. This hapticity is simultaneously optic and tactile. The visual

becomes `felt'. The felt connection between eye and hand is felt, in

coagulation, an evolution of hand into eye ± into an Hegelian ` Aufhe-

bung' or `de
 passement'. Deleuze explains this hapticity as follows,

To characterise the connection of eye and hand, it is certainly not enough

to say that the eye is infinitely richer and passes through dynamic tensions,

logical reversals, organic exchanges and vicariancies . . . we will speak of

`haptic' each time there is no longer strict subordination in one direction

or another . . . but when sight discovers in itself a `function' of touching

30
that belongs to it alone, and which is independent of its optical function.

It follows from these ideas that Deleuze presents an aesthetics of

sensation which is premised upon a pedagogy of the image, but a pedagogy

which is formulated on movement, and process, on machinic connections

of film as assemblage, an assemblage of new formulations and new

vocabularies, or a semiotics outside of structuralist semiotics. This peda-

gogy of the image pares down the representational into sensation, as we

have seen through a processual effect of different elements. Within this

pedagogy of the image, movement, then, is an essential element of sensa-

tion (forced movement, vibration and synthesis all involve movement). In

theorising the filmic experience, images that might be deemed representa-

118 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
tional are in fact `movement-images'. They do not exist as static forms in

themselves, but are experienced as images-in-movement, in process, in

sensation. Images do not exist in isolation, in the filmic experience. Rather

Matter and Memory

they are poses and become an ordered set of poses, with movement,

relating to change over time. As Bergson indicates in

(1988), there are not only instantaneous images, and immobile sections of

movement, but a coagulation of the two, into movement-images. This

perceptual movement happens in the glance, or the eye. The `eye' is not the

`too immobile human eye': it is the eye of the camera, in matter. This is

because of the nature of the `shot'. Movement has two elements. The shot

acts like consciousness. However, the sole cinematographic consciousness

is not us, the spectator, nor the image on the screen. It is the `camera',

which, Deleuze argues, is human, sometimes inhuman, even superhuman.

The shot, in other words, traces movement. It is movement itself which is

decomposed and reorganised into movement-image. As Deleuze indicates,

Epstein has poetically compared the shot as pure movement, with a cubist

painting or a simultaneist painting. Here `all the surfaces are divided,

truncated, decomposed, broken, as one imagines they are in a thousand

faceted eyes of the insect . . . descriptive geometry whose canvas is the limit
31
shot'. Bergson indicates, `image equals movement and every image is

indistinguishable from its actions and reactions: this is universal varia-

32
tion'. We can consider images, then as matter, in the same way that the

body is both matter and image:

My body is an image, hence a set of actions and reactions. My eye, my

brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images

since it is one image among others? External images act upon me, transmit

movement to me and return movement: how could images be in my

33
consciousness, since I am myself image . . . that is . . . movement.

If movement is the prime element of sensation, how is movement con-

nected to the materiality of bodies? Bergson argues we cannot separate

the `ego' from the eye, the brain or the body, since all are a complex

gaseous state of matter. Rather, the body is a `set of molecules and atoms
34
which are constantly renewed'. In a construality with this body,

external objects make a disturbance in the afferent nerves. This distur-

bance passes on to the centres of the body/mind/brain, into the centres of

the body that are molecular, as Bergson says, `the theatre of the very
35
varied and molecular movements'. Perception, then, becomes depen-

dent upon the relation of external objects and representation to the body.

`Change the objects, or modify their relation to my body, and everything

is changed in the interior movements of my perception centres. But

 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 119
everything is also changed in ``my perception''. My perception is, then, a
36
function of these molecular movements.' It actually depends on the

molecular movements of cerebral substance. The perceptive faculty of the

brain exists through the spinal cord. This in turn transforms into move-

ments, the stimulations received from images. Therefore, any perception

of the universe appears to be dependent upon internal movements of the

cerebral substances, fibrous, energic and fluid substances: material of

molecular matter. Perception, then, and within this I refer to visual

perception of the cinematic experience, is a molecular vibration of cortical

substance.

However, such perception does not only depend upon molecular

movements of cerebral mass of atoms. Perceptions `vary' with other

molecular substances of the material world. If atoms are condensed into

continuous fluids and movements, then the centres can only be deter-

mined in relation to some form of `touch' or impulsion. Our nervous

systems interpose between the objects which affect our bodies and those

which our bodies can influence. The body becomes a conductor for

transmitting movements. As a composition of fibrous threads, stretched

across the universe of space, time and duration, the `bodies' of filmic texts

and the `bodies' of those who view are a series of affections, which,

through a becoming-woman of the cinematic, are experienced as sensa-

tion. The sensations are not images perceived by us `outside' of our body;

but rather affections localised within the body.

Images in movement constitute what Deleuze refers to as a plane of

consistency, or immanence. On this plane of immanence, the image exists

as matter, image and movement together. On the plane of immanence,

perception is defined in two ways. First, what can be described as liquid

perception. This describes a perception that is subjective, and in which

images vary in relation to a central image and privileged image. The

second is an objective perception, where all the images vary in relation to

one another. Liquid perception is so defined because of the metaphor of

water. Water, according to Deleuze, is the most perfect environment in

which movement can be extracted from the thing moved. This is why

water is so important to research on rhythm. The liquidity of the

perceived image is diffused in all directions, into vibrations, just like

the ever-increasing circles in a pool into which a pebble is thrown. Thus,

the perception-image is split into two, liquid perception, or the molecular

and the solid perception, the molar. An image on screen then can be said

to become `liquid' through the molecularised use of the shot. The film-

maker Vertov has been significant to these ideas. For Vertov, the idea of

liquid perception did not go far enough. He said we should also think of
120 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
gaseous perception. The liquid image is inadequate as it fails to reach a

particle of `matter'. Instead, Deleuze says, `Movement must go beyond

37
itself, but to its material, energic element.' Therefore, logically, if we

determine a perception which is no longer liquid, but gaseous, if we start

from a solid state, where the molecules are not free to jostle, around

(molar) we can then move to a liquid state, where molecules can move

around and even merge together. Ultimately, by this logic, we reach a

final gaseous state of the image, this being defined by the `free movement

of each molecule'. Consequently, the flickering, luminous, vibrational

elements behind the image produce vibration, and rhythm, a stage beyond

movement. This determines that we can argue for the formation of the

`image' defined by molecularity, not by visual figuration. Sensation is

accommodated through such molecularity.

In the proceeding chapters, I want to explore a range of films across

such Deleuzian ideas, to explain how we might bring to film theory a

reconsideration of aesthetics but a materialist neo-aesthetic: an aesthetics

of sensation. These ideas are not premised upon structuralist semiotics,

linguistics, and psychoanalytical interpretations of desire. The filmic

experience involves a much wider range of forces, oscillations, intensities

and energies. Furthermore, subjectivity is not necessarily the issue at stake

in determining the `felt' experience of the cinematic. Deleuzian ideas

enable us to offer a different set of vocabularies with which to formulate

an aesthetics of sensation of the filmic event, and enable us to offer

possible solutions to questions of the body, the machinic, desire and

aesthetics, which were problematised in Chapter 2.

NOTES
1. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 173.

2. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 175.

3. Theories of aesthetics have traditionally been couched in binary languages as we

saw in Chapter 1. Aesthetics since Kant has been described, first, either as a

theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience, or, second, it has been

seen as a reflection on real experience. The first of these elements composed an

objective element of sensation, governed by specific forms of time and space

coordinates. The second is more of a `subjective' element, created through

feelings of pleasure or pain. Deleuzian ideas on aesthetics attempt to merge

or overthrow these ideas. For a sustained argument see Daniel Smith, `Deleuze's

Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality', in Paul Patton (ed.),

Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 29.

4. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, p. 27, trans. Ronald Bogue,

`Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force', in Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical

Reader, p. 260.

5. It was phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, Maldiney and Erwin Stauss

 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 121
who had originally developed theories of sensation which were distanciated from

any presupposition of recognition. Sensation was in their perspective inevitably

tied up with the physicality of the body, and an intentional consciousness of a

`lived body'.

6. Daniel Smith, `Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality',

in Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 39.

7. Smith, `Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality', in

Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 33.

8. Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition is beyond the scope of this book, but

to understand the notion of differential relations is perhaps pertinent to this

understanding of the encountered sign of `sensation'. For example, a differential

relation is that which provides two different elements, e.g. the colour green is

made up of the differential relations of blue and yellow. The point where they

become indiscernible, in the colour green, is the point of differential relation.

They are made up from different molecular structures, and yet come together in

the colour green. As Smith relates it, `a clear perception green is actualised when

certain virtual elements (yellow and blue) enter into a differential relation as a

function of our body, and draws these obscure perceptions into clarity': Smith,

`Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality', in Patton

(ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 35.

9. The word `triptych' denotes a three-part form of painting, where each part is

separate, but still is relevant to the whole piece of work. It was a common form of

art in Byzantine and Early Renaissance religious painting, which were formed

into three separate units, which could actually be folded together. This was so the

work could be carried, opened up and used when required for prayer and

contemplation. The word is used in Deleuze to explain a `three'-part relationship

across elements.

10. Ronald Bogue writes, `According to Lyotard conventional visual representation

represses the anomalies of sensation, the deformations and violations of ``good

form'' that disturb the eye. In undoing the good form of representation, however,

the artist also engages with invisible forces that never become directly visible,

those of the unconscious, which are fundamentally forces of deformation. The

``space of the invisible of the possible'' then is an invented space traversed by

unconscious forces that render visual what Lyotard calls the ``figural'' ± a domain

of Dionysian art-form that can play through the images of figurative and abstract

art alike.' Bogue, in Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 259.

11. See Dana Polan, `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas and

Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 239.

12. Smith, `Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality', in

Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, p. 43.

13. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 167.

14. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 166.

15. See Dana Polan, `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas and

Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 240.

16. See Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye.

17. Deleuze quoted in Polan, `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas

and Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 241.

18. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 211.

19. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 168.

20. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 168.

21. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 180.

22. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 169.

23. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 169.

122 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
24. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 18.

25. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 19.

26. John D. Norseen, `Images of Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet', American Computer

Scientists' Association.

27. Haptic: this term describes the collusion between the seen and the felt, an

imbrication of experience across the two senses.

28. See Polan, `Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas and Olkowski

(eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 250.

29. Thus, even though from Bergson we can deduce that cinema is matter and

material, nonetheless, the connection between the material and the spiritual is

evidenced in this hapticity. This haptic sense of feeling is part of the `perceptual

semiotics' that Deleuze expresses. Within a perceptual semiotics, a haptic sense of

feeling is `immanent' and not `transcendent'; what Deleuze refers to as a

`haecceity' or as an `event'. `An haecceity can last as long as and even longer

than the time required for the development of a form and the evolution of a

subject . . . Haecceities are simply degrees of power which combine and to which

correspond a power to affect or be affected, active or passive affects, intensities'

(Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 92).

30. Polan, `Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas and Olkowski (eds),

Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 252.

31. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 23

32. Bergson, Matter and Memory, ch. 1, quoted in Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 58.

33. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 58, quoting Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 31.

34. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 58.

35. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 22, 31.

36. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 22.

37. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 84.

Part Three
Chapter 6
Orlando ±
Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence

There is a pure plane of immanence, univocality composition, upon which

everything is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance

that are distinguished from one another only by their speed and that enter

into this or that individuated assemblage, depending on . . . their relations

1
of movement.

Orlando . . . does not operate by memories, but by blocks of ages, blocks

of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so

2
many becomings between things, or so many lines of deterritorialisation.

Sally Potter's film of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando , which narrates the

historical account of Orlando's journey through time, as both male and

female, is well documented in feminist film theory. But Potter's intentions

it seems, as argued in feminist film theory, in terms of avant-garde cinema,

were to present a feminist text which exemplified the constructions and

patriarchal constrictions of societies across generational boundaries,

cultures, time zones ± a historical account of the strictures faced by

the female sex. In choosing to use this film here, I want to explore the film

in a different way, to present a pragmatic and post-feminist formulation

of the aesthetics of the film through a Deleuzian framework; this frame-

work is certainly not constrained by ideological and political readings of a

text.

However, there still remains a plane upon which the significatory

3
cannot be denied. The structural semiotics of Metzian film theory meld

between and across different assemblages of enunciation. Consequently,

the reader will find reference to `image' and to `representation' but only as

part of a newer, fluid approach which is more concerned with the

processuality of the film as an assemblage, as a becoming-woman.

126 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

DEATH
Structurally, the film is divided into sections, each section indicated by the

titles: Death, Love, Poetry, Politics, Society, Sex and Birth. The main

protagonist in the film, Orlando (Tilda Swinton), is presented as an

androgyne: in the first half of the film as a male and the second half

as a female. So much is simplistic in the extreme; in terms of traditional

film theory, using paradigms of representation, subjectivity and identity,

the film might be read, and has been read, as a feminist tract, across

a series of concepts, through which the political, personal and cultural

resonances of specific periods of historical and cultural zones are ex-

plored through the textuality of the film's `aesthetic', visually and

aurally.

The sections present a form or structure to the narrative, while the time/

space trajectory is complexly fractured and non-linear. Certainly the film

utilises all the conventions of avant-garde cinema in its break from the

normal patterns of linearity, narrative structure and characterisation.

Each of the tableaus of Death, Love and so on has Orlando as the main

character as part of a social, cultural and libidinal process. Using formal

film theory which prioritises reading spaces for gendered subjectivities,

desire and pleasures might be explained through a series of theoretical,

psychoanalytic and structural conventions. The subjective pleasure of the

female audience for example might arise from `identifying' with the

ideological meanings read through the imagery within the film's visual

format. (For example, the entire sequence entitled `Society' is a wonder-

fully parodic version of the `problems' of being female.) And certainly

there is no shortage of possible psychoanalytic interpretations of desire

throughout the film, most specifically in the tableau entitled `Sex' (for

example, the cliche

 of the romantic hero, Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), the

symbolic and psychoanalytic interpretations of romantic tropes: the

horse, the mists of time and the transcendent nature of romantic love).

Such motifs which might be amenable to psychoanalytic readings (and I

don't intend to give detailed versions of these here) limit the film as a

plane of organisation, through which transcendent notions of desire are

encapsulated.

If we read Orlando through motifs within a psychoanalytic frame-

work, then we can see a trajectory of Freudian ideas on originations,

repetition±compulsion strategies, the death instinct and its allegiance to

desire as the need for a return to lost plenitude; the entire film has reversed

the process from birth to death, and so establishes some identification

with the formal processes of a linear time-scale of existence. There may be

 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 127
a reversal of the states, but this still nonetheless constrains the film's
diegesis within the bounds of transcendent notions of being, of journeys
to origins. Desire entrapped within a trajectory towards fulfilment,
endings, satisfaction. The entire film is about a journey, life's journey
from birth to death, and the major life `events' (ironically) on that
journey. But here, `death' opens up the film with birth as the end state
. . . a neat reversal of the Freudian scenario, but still the same scenario . . .
originations, familial connections . . . daddy, mummy . . . me! I exist,
therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum. (We see in the final sequence the small
child, significantly a female child, who is both woman and man in terms
of life's journey.)
However, such readings of the film are too reductive to explain the
forces which impact, or resonate, as event or as haecceity. Such readings
are concerned with the molar plane of organisation in a film, as opposed
to the molecular plane of immanence, or the perceptual and fluid
semiotics from Deleuzian philosophy. The film is not only a semiotic,
or metaphorical, account of the complexities of gendered subjectivities or
the role of psychoanalysis in gendered accounts of sexuality. If we think
of the film as an assemblage, as a becoming-woman, as a processual state
of immanence, then we can discern a different mind-set of the aesthetics of
the film through a wider range of vocabularies which might explain the
resonances outside signification, semiotic or psychoanalytic explanations.
If we remind ourselves of Deleuzian words, in comparison with the plane
of organisation, the plane of immanence has `only relations of movement
4
and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements', then we can
begin to detect different and more creative pragmatic interpretations of
the film as event, as `haecceity', as `becoming-woman'. If we think of this
quotation in terms of Orlando as a film, then molecularity, particles,
fibres become more relevant to the resonances generating across the
bodies/mind/brains of those who view the film. Subjectivity is distan-
ciated, or subsumed, through a process of flux and oscillation of forces,
rhythms, movements and intensities. It is not located in the singular
regime of a gendered psyche, fluctuating though that may be, as we see in
psychoanalysis. Haecceities proliferate the totality of the filmic event of
Orlando. The most significant haecceities emerge as specific moments of
intensity.
We are introduced to Orlando through an opening sequence which has
Orlando sitting reading poetry; a voice-over follows the words of his text;
the diegetic music, violas, cellos, Elizabethan harpsichord tonalities,
pervades the scene. The camera pans slowly from left to right, echoing
the frontal gaze at Orlando, thus distanciating the audience from the
128 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
scene. The very objectification of the scene through the use of this obvious

camera movement creates an almost Brechtian distanciation. The camera

moves purposively, slowly, delicately, calmly, with precision, but with a

gentle, direct and precise balanced movement. Camera set-ups and move-

ments are important throughout the entire film in terms of how they

impinge upon the efferent nerves of the viewer; calm, linear, balanced,

controlled and harmonious panning movements are reassuring, quieting,

and balancing to the brain/body/mind connections. A close-up of Orlan-

do indicates the period, style and narrative context of the film: that is,

sixteenth-century Elizabethan England. Close-ups figure significantly

throughout the film, especially close-ups of faces in shot-reverse-shot

positions. Jimmy Somerville's voice reverberates through his song `Eliza':

a gentle, melodic, and fluid accompaniment to the visuals. The sequence

evinces a series of parallels and symmetries through the tableauesque

frames: almost like a sequence of still paintings, ordered, and fixed in

contrapuntal relationship with the music to create a sequence of har-

mony, order, reason and serenity. The lighting, again symmetrically

evoked, uses candles to provide the soft-focus low-key lighting, which

predominates much of the movie. Close-up shots of the oars in water ±

fluidity, liquid, glistening ± echo the candles as they flicker in movement

to the sound of the rain. This contrasts with the earlier slow, precise

panned camera movements, now changed to multiple angles and a

complexity of different camera positions. This change of positionalities

and the pace of the cutting and duration creates a different intensity. With

the change in camera movements and cuts in duration come a feeling of

nervousness, tension, volatility and tense excitement, in contrast with the

slow, meandering shots of the river. Elizabeth is presented, grandiose and

royal, majestically floating into view from right centre frame, the camera

panning across the screen to echo the movements and intensities of the

water itself. The `beautiful' resides in the processuality of the water's

movements, much like the way in which a butterfly's flight impinges upon

the efferent nerves within the body which `views'. Beauty thus pertains to

a process, and is explained through a materiality of body/brain and mind

consilience, across molecularity. Similarly, in terms of the auditory senses,

sound impinges on specific nerves of the cerebral chords. The music of

violas, and harpsichords creates a mood of quiet elegance, insouciance,

incipience and delicate anticipation ± the regal, the majestic, the stated.

The flickering of the lights along the shoreline contrasts in dissonance

with the verticals and horizontals of the oars as they are carefully

positioned. The static nature of that movement is set in contrapuntal

distinction with the movements of water and lights. Vibration, forced

 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 129
movement (see Chapter 5) and synthesis are all modulated within this

sequence. Semiotically of course, the aesthetic resonance is enhanced

through a specific style: through the tactility of the richly textured clothes,

the reds, golds and plums of regal costume and sensuous brocades. Ironies

abound, of course, in that Elizabeth is played by Quentin Crisp, whilst in

contrast, Orlando, here as a man, is in fact played by a woman; a quietly

ironic reminder of the exigencies of Elizabethan drama and its acknowl-

edgement is an intellectual pleasure. This juxtapositioning of sexualities is

ironically counterpointed throughout the film and especially has signifi-

cance in a later scene where Orlando comes upon a sequence from

Othello . In this scene, men are both women and men in terms of the

play's characterisations. This paradoxical gender boundary crossing

might of course be part of a gendered reading of the film but it also

points to Deleuzian complexities about the multiplicity of sexualities, the

molecularity of sexuality, outside of gender. Indeed, Orlando is the

veritable `trickster': `the trickster is of indeterminate sex and changeable

gender who continually alters his/her body, creates and recreates a

personality . . . and floats across time from period to period, and place
5
to place'.

As the `trickster' Orlando figures throughout the film as the veritable

`figure' or figural in a Deleuzian sense. Rather than perceive her/him/it as

a character, s/he/it functions as a `figural', in terms of bringing together a

set of movements, colours, tones, resonances across the canvas of the

screen. This is evident in the first sequence, when Orlando rushes down to

be greeted by Elizabeth. The force and rhythm of his steps, the facial

expressions, lines, gestures and body movements function as a force, as an

intensity of `feeling' which resonates within the mise-en-sce

Á ne as a

rhythmical movement. This is encapsulated by specific types of camera

movements and angles. No longer the controlled right to left panning of

the earlier sequence, the camera editing is now disjointed, dynamic,

fluctuating and rhythmical, creating a dissonance with the still, lingering

shots of the river earlier.

We cut to Elizabeth, bathing her hands in a bowl of water ± reminiscent

of the oars of the river sequence. Water functions to bring together the

resonances set up by Orlando the `figural'. The resonances of this

sequence are further stylised through the use of chiaroscuro lighting,

dark shadows and low-key lighting. Elizabeth at the banquet is the central

image and figure of the scene, in that the close-up of her face is juxtaposed

in shot-reverse-shot sequence with Orlando. Such is the effect that we feel

an intensity of something `in-between' the figures of both Orlando and

Elizabeth. This intensity is of course translated into the concept of death,

130 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
decay, ageing and loss, through the dialogue which fixes and positions the

dynamics of the visuals. `Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old . . .'

says Elizabeth. Ageing, decay, withering and death are effectuated as the

opening aegis of the film; but of course such concepts are redolent of

Freudian paradigms of finality, and returns to states of originality. A

notion of transcendence is set alongside a plane of immanence, through

the movements of the film's aesthetic resonances. The dialogue is almost

parodied through the beauty of the aesthetic resonance, so that the film

itself is nowhere near a death-like metaphor, but rather an `event' of the

beautiful, and the immanent. The shot-reverse-shot mechanism from

Elizabeth to Orlando juxtaposes a dream-like beauty and serenity

through the faciality of those images. But this is perhaps too restrictive

a reading. Rather the sequence enables a questioning of the binaries of

life±death, beauty±sterility, where life and beauty are part of a processual

element of immanence. The immanence of `becoming-woman' of life's

events, the event of the experience. To quote Virginia Woolf, `life is not a

series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-

transparent envelope, surrounding us from the beginning of conscious-

6
ness to the end'.

It is, in other words, rich at every moment of being, in its evanescence,

and evanescence is correlative to a `becoming-woman'. Sterility, death,

fixity, urbanity are effectuated through the style of the geometric and

coordinated symmetrical lines across the screen in certain frames. For

example, the central shot of Elizabeth is always centre frame. Elizabeth

and Orlando become mutable `figures' in this sequence through fluctuat-

ing, heterogeneous shots, so that rather than identifying with a `char-

acter', we experience the resonances of the film through its immanence,

an aesthetics of `becoming-woman', where the characters perform as

`figurals'.

Elizabeth's boudoir, darkly lit with flickering candles and chiaroscuro

has shot-reverse-shot of close-ups of faces. The whole mise-en-sce

Á ne

flickers: gestures, silent gestures, slow pulsating, lugubrious and loqua-

cious body language; delicate, gracious movements are captured by the

camera and so display a delicacy and evanescence of movement, as

perception, in collusion with each other. Harmony, as Deleuze indicates,

harmony of music with the close-up of Orlando and gentle camera

movements, creates the intensity of this frame. Elizabeth recounts `Do

not fade, do not wither, do not grow old . . .' This ironic juxtaposition

enables us to move away from thinking about the film's `meaning' to

enjoy the film's `connections'. This is of course exemplified in the rest of

the film.
 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 131
Death and decay continue into the following sequence: the burial scene.

We cut to a very stylised frame, almost a freeze frame, given the stillness

and serenity of the mise-en-sce

Á ne. The panning camera crosses the canvas,

or screen-scape, as though the scene were a pastiche of tableaus from any

one of a series of paintings (Gustave Courbet's The Burial of Ornans

(1849±50) comes to mind). It is as if we ourselves are part of the funereal

cortege. A pattern is choreographed across the landscape of the entire film

from this cortege. Here, the pattern is initiated into motion through a

range of lines of longitude and latitude. Latitudes of camera movements,

tracking shots from right centre frame, from right to left, echoing and thus

patterning, function like lines on a Mondrian painting: an ordered and

punctuated dynamic which is also static. This `motionless' movement is

articulated through colours, as much as the angles and lighting. Black and

white exude, with textures of delicate satin, lace and soft velvets, inducing

the hapticity of the `felt' immediacy of this framed shot.

Figures of mourners appear like black dots on a white canvas. The

beauty of their being lies in the meandering delicacy and pace of their

movement. The characters again `figure' as lines in a painting, rather than

people in a narrative. It is almost as if they are floating in thin air across

the snow-scape. Their clothes, rich, black velvety hues, and awesome,

heavy shapes contrast in dissonance with the crisp, white snow, echoing

the linearity of the trees; people becoming-trees, becoming-landscape.

The characters function as lines across the canvas, producing a landscape

of silence, which evokes the death-knell of its context. But `meaning' need

not necessarily be discerned at the expense of `connection'. Such scenes as

this connect amorphously, as gestural, aleatory, pathic and haptic con-

sistencies, with other similar sequences from other movies. I am thinking

for example of the desert scenes in The English Patient and of course
Bertolucci's scintillatingly beautiful The Sheltering Sky (1990). Something
grand, intangible and molecular is emitted across the gestural movements

of the screenic event. The emptiness and solitude of the landscape enable a

connection of intensities which are about process, continuums, becoming,

and ironically are far removed from transcendent notions of inorganic

origins, death and fixity. Art becoming-nature: nature becoming-art.

The intensities of this specific sequence are articulated through the

dynamics of camera actions, movements, planes, together with the use of

black and white cinematography. A strange, ethereal and iridescent calm

is experienced through the plane of consistency here encapsulated

through shots, movement-images and sound molecules, in collusion.

How does this impinge upon or connect as assemblage, as `body' with

other bodies, and those who view?

132 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
First, the delicate, slow, almost static and profound eloquence is

articulated through a tragic and resonant stillness ± art becoming-nature.

Intensity and becoming are felt at a level beyond subjectivity, through the

affective. The sequence exudes a frozen and disconsolate frigidity, a

starkness and yet beautifully amorphous fragility of landscapes of silence.

Silence breathes an air of acceptance, acknowledgement and tender

cruelty, through the stillness of the camera shots, through a hapticity

of `image' into movement. But this image is rendered tactile by virtue of

the effect on the efferent nervous system of those who view. We literally

want to reach out and suffocate within the snow (later echoed in the final

sequence with beautiful sail-like billows of canvas on the lawn of

Orlando's modern-day home). So that what we see is not represented

as `image' but snow as it is evoked as a `modulation of image'. It is not a

represented image, but movement-image, on the verge of existence,

fragments and fugitive thoughts. Landscapes of silence are the becom-

ing-woman of this film. A silence which is also a void, but not only a void,

but a space, an emptiness, a void which is replete with molecular

resonance, resonance of material emotion. To quote Cioran, `Nothing-

ness does not have the rather grim signification we attribute to it. It is

identified with a limit-experience of light, or, if you like, with a state of

7
luminous absence, an ever-lasting radiant void.'

The camera pans across the funeral scene to the isolation of Orlando's

grief. This scene of death's finality is counterpointed, in rhythmic counter-

point, with the tableau `Love (1610)', both of course part of the same

tragedy of nihilistic encounter.

LOVE
The complexities of love are experienced through various levels in the

film. Here, the `becoming-woman' is the beyond of desire at a subjective

level; the forces felt at a primordial level are a form of love in this sense. So

whilst the sequence explores the finer contradictions of definitions of love

± sexual, romantic, idealistic (wrapped up within a construction of

patriarchal versions of female/male dynamics) ± in fact the sequence

works on a more abstract level. Here, love is encompassed as the

processual rhythms of nature, forces of the seasons, temperatures, where

love is outside gendered or genital sexuality, but functions through

multiplicitous molecular connections, `knowing how to love does not

mean remaining a man or a woman; it means extracting from one's sex

the particles, the speeds, the slownesses, the flows, the n sexes that

constitute the girl of that sexuality'.

8
 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 133
These sexualities are evinced across the dynamics and energies of the

natural, material world. Love moves beyond the binary boundaries of

gendered subjectivities or sexualities. Sexuality becomes an abstract and

aesthetic phenomenon, through the sheer vibrance, contingency, ener-

getics, molecularity of the natural: snow, ice, heat, warmth, flowing

rhythms, a natural flow of sexual exorbitances beyond anything to do

with gender. The way the snow is depicted evokes both a liquid and

molecular perception, and is reminiscent of the chase sequence of the

replicant Zhora in Blade Runner by Deckard, and more recent films such
as The Winter Guest (1997), a film where love is experienced through the
vibrational and desolate landscapes of a frost-bitten Northumbrian

village. The coldness and cruelty of a masochism premised upon the

sheer viscerality of temperatures. `Love' therefore might be the linguistic

and structuralist concept depicting this sequence, but a `becoming-wo-

man' of this sequence opens up the `event' of that visual experience into

the realm of nature becoming-sexuality. Molecular, fibrous and trans-

versal connections.

Love, death and melancholy are encapsulated in the image of the child,

frozen in time, in space, in being by the cold cruelty of the winter's

ravages. That fixed moment of death again recalls the final moments of a

desire fixed in finality, reconstituted through a final moment of death. But

here that image performs as part of a trajectory towards an understanding

of life's processuality and ephemerality; nothing is fixed, nothing is finite.

The child is captured by nature's cruelty, locked into the fixed moment of

death within the water's icy fragments, beneath a surface which is both

mirror, and enclosure. The shock of realisation impinges upon the

nervous system of the viewer, as excitation±reaction. This takes us into

the sequence on the contingencies and inconsistencies of love, in contrast

with the previous sequence on death. Love is here in contrast with, but

also collusion with, death. Love is part of the same panoply of desire, an

unfulfilled desire which psychoanalysis might read as a need±demand

equation.

However, the sequence does not have to `mean' but perhaps it con-

nects. It also operates outside any positionality with regards to metaphor,

allusion, or semiotics in a Metzian sense. It can be understood through

more aleatory trajectories, through desire as processuality, as `becoming-

woman'. Here, love is not relegated to the same paradigm as death, but is

part of the same intransigence of life's primordial duration and intensities.

As a sequence, a literal reading might evince a tale of the foreboding,

negativity and sickly claustrophobic tenacity of romantic love, replete

with melancholic effusions of jealousy, enduring obsession and misery in

134 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
its masochistic maladies. Orlando falls `in love' with Sasha ± any feminist

reading detects a critique of patriarchal, cultural values which have

encouraged masculine notions of possession, ownership and sovereignty

over the female. Such a discourse is locked into the trajectory of mono-

gamy, marriage and the claustrophobia of Western transcendent ideal-

ism: man and woman bound together through the chords of matrimonial

law, law of the Father, phallic possession and a repudiation of the

freedom and liberty of the individual. Later, of course, Orlando is

replaced through Shelmerdine, romantic hero, but also signifier of free-

dom, emancipation and individual liberty.

The sequence begins with a close-up shot of a child trapped in the

frozen waters. From the icy entrapment of the infantile image, locked

into fixity within the fluidity of the ice, the camera tilts upwards,

revealing the frivolities of a Muscovite welcoming party. Delicate

snowflakes waft across the screen, again reminiscent of sequences in

Bladerunner. Such connections provide in a Deleuzian sense assemblages

of `becoming'. Something connects across the dynamics of different

texts, different films in this case. Specific speeds and movements coerce

and collide. Such connections provide an intensity and assemblage

across the bodies of both films and those who view. The mise-en-sce
Á ne

is pervasively gloomy, dull, overcast and grey. The danger here of course

is to resort to semiotic description of the `meaning'. Character, dialogue,

narrative read through a molar structure. What about the line of

molecularity, the lines of flight which take us into the plane of con-

sistency and immanence? How might these be discernible across the

experience of this sequence?

The depths of winter (following the death sequence) are oppressively

modulated through the perception-images and movement-images: right

to left camera movements echo earlier patterns of linearity. Slow, lugu-

brious, heavy and awesome movements articulate a sterility in Orlando's

`being'. Here, movement, dynamism, volatility and viscerality introduce

Sasha, who enters from left frame, through a delightful, delicious and

delirious circularity of skating movements. Such movements echo the

flight path of the butterfly, entrapping and entraining the brain's cerebral

pathways through a discernible beauty. She swirls, sways and seduces her

pathway across the plane of sterility. Such intensities and energies are

`felt' across the `body' of the film, through perception-image and move-

ment-image and their imbrication with the bodies of those who view;

brain/body/image are coagulated into a malleable set of images, into a

materiality of emotion. What is felt is not necessarily a subjective or

gendered positionality, but an affective `contagion', a material response

 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 135
to energies and a dynamics of processuality. The body in motion, in
locomotion, connects with the bodies/minds/brains of those who view the
film. It is almost as though we want to echo that joyful becoming of the
dance: exuberance, vitality, embraced through the `figure' of Sasha, not
the character of Sasha. She is simply a delight. But that delight emanates
from the `figurality' not the characterisation. Of course, on a semiotic and
narrative level, her sincerity, serendipity and seductiveness are embraced
by Orlando; he is truly smitten! The traumatic romanticism of love is
pervasive through the context of the dialogue. French is spoken only by
Sasha and Orlando, excluding lady Euphrosyne to the point of rejection.
Within the panorama of romantic and arranged love (Sasha and Eu-
phrosyne) we are constantly reminded of the fragility, the evanescence
and ephemerality of life. Talk of a young girl having been turned to
`powder' by the winter's ravages, the fragility of the body in collusion
with the natural world echoes in ironic and parodic detachment the
uncertainty and fragility of romantic love, love which is not given a
chance to develop, fluctuate, resonate or flourish. The semiotics of
representation meld with the fluid semiotics of Deleuzian `affect'. The
affective is modulated through a complexity of resonance, dissipation and
forced movements.
In terms of the technicalities of filming, the sequence again uses left
to right panning devices, echoing earlier sequences and providing a
rhythmical effect of linearity in terms of organised movements. This
organised movement is broken up, traversed, by a cut to the following
day, when skating is the main activity: courtship rituals are part of the
`content' of this mise-en-sce
Á ne. But in terms of `action', `passion' and
`intensities', this scene is intensified by the correlation of both Sasha
and Orlando functioning `outside' the constructs and strictures of an
organised, sterile, fixed community. This is evinced through their
movements, conveyed by the camera mobility and montage. Both
Orlando and Sasha (`She's a foreigner', shouts one person, indicating
Sasha) resemble a line of flight, a line of velocity or becoming, beyond
the segmentary. They function in terms of what Deleuze calls the
`anomalous' or the outsider: l'e
 tranger. Sasha floats in, through and

beyond the proclivities of an ordered culture and society, evincing a

delicate dream-like sensuality on all around, especially Orlando. For, as
Deleuze indicates,

It is evident that the Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not
only does it border each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary
or local stability (with the highest number of dimensions possible under
136 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
the circumstances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance neces-

sary to becoming, but it also carries the transformations of becoming, or

9
crossings of multiplicities always farther down the line of flight.

The entire sequence then is an assemblage of haecceities. Deleuze in-

dicates that such haecceities are `degrees of power which combine, to

which correspond a power to affect and be affected, active or passive

10
affects, intensities'. Becoming-woman is this process of immanence,

where becomings are specific movements, forms of rest, motion, speed,

slownesses, points and flows of intensity. Such is experienced in this

sequence. Such flows of intensity work outside any notion of gendered

subjectivities or identity. They work through a materiality of the brain/

body at a deeper level, in the proto-subjective, in the affective realms. The

film's style articulates those `affective intensities' in the ways it moves and

vibrates. It works as molecular assemblage. Sasha, then, rather than being

`read' as a character, with a narrative trajectory and function, works as a

`figural' by means of which she brings together different elements of the

material process of the film. She functions in locomotion, not as fixed

locus of identity, as an abstract force, just like the Baconian figures in his

paintings (see Chapter 3).

This is most poignantly effectuated in the seduction sequences. Sasha

operates not only as the `anomalous' but also as the `figural' across the

body of the screen. Through attitudes, gestures, postures, rhythmical

sways, dissonant movements and consonant assemblage with other

`figural' elements such as the `Orlando' character, she figures as `life'.

She presents a `feeling' of vitality and dynamism through the joyousness

of her movements. A truly passionate exemplification (in a Spinozist

sense). In this way, the `image' of Sasha becomes a `movement-image'

which functions as a performer, a body, a constituted body of molecu-

larity which functions through the `affective'. Indeed, a `malleable mass of

images' provides a harmonics which creates a nervous vibration through

the visual and the aural. A totally physiological sensation, outside of

subjectivity. Thus by dislocating, but not necessarily ignoring, semiotics,

metonymy and metaphor, a `deeper' level of experience or impact is

proffered which articulates a profound relation of a brain±body±world

connection. As we saw in Part Two, what happens in the filmic experi-

ence, as I have just described, is a perception of whole, a totality which

incorporates the `body'. The question is no longer one of association of

images. The film leaves the scenario of `image-formation' and functions as

`states' in motion. What matters is the interstices of those states, the

interstitial, `It is a method of between . . . it is a method of AND . . .

 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 137
between two perceptions, between sound and image . . . the whole thus
11
merges with what Blanchot calls the forces of the Outside.'

Consequently, within this `body', or cinematic body, what matters is

not so much generic elements, characters, events, narrative, place, and so

on, but, instead, words, tones, sounds, colours and refrains: the `in-

between' spaces of the film as text. Within this sequence, dancing

provides a range of mobilised gazes, through mobilised camera angling.

This range of lines projects lines of longitude and latitude, which echo the

lines of flight taken by the `figural' of Sasha. Through the geometrical and

symmetrical sterility of the English courtiers, the dancing evokes different

types of energy. There is a definite left to right symmetry in the courtiers'

dancing, with a definite camera symmetry of left to right action. In

contrast, Sasha's `figural' or `movement-image' encircles the sterility with

lively, energetic and vivacious beauty, exhilarating and dynamic, epito-

mised by Orlando's words, `I'm only interested in love.' This is evoked of

course by the `passional' energies of Sasha's vitality. Her `spirit' and `fire'

are set in dissonance with the static dance of Euphrosyne, Orlando's

betrothed. On a narrative level, Sasha functions as an emblem of freedom,

spirit, and liberty ± a freedom which cannot be contained, cajoled or won

over by the auspices of romantic love and the possessiveness of patri-

archal order. Sasha's skating evokes the figural as opposed to the

character, in that her movements contrast and collide with the static

movements, the horizontals and the verticals of the orderly dancing. The

meandering, chaotic pathways of the skater provide a collusion of lines of

intensity across the screen. These lines contrast in dissonance with the

sterility evoked by the courtiers, and Orlando's dance. Such movements

are experienced through the eye±brain and emit specific resonance to the

nervous system, such that different levels of excitation are felt at a

molecular level. Sasha joins the dance, with Orlando, who is warned,

`You are in danger of becoming a fool.' The fool and the lover are only

too closely connected, as Deleuze writes,

Make consciousness an experimentation in life, and passion a field of

continuous intensities, an emission of particle-signs. Make the body

without organs of consciousness and love. Use love and consciousness

to abolish subjectification: `To become the great lover, the magnetiser and

catalyser . . . one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an

12
utter fool.'

Glances, eye movements, body language, heads, faces and arms waft

through a textured scene of velvety fabrics, furs, silks, rich and dusky

chromatic tones, creating a tactility of the image, a hapticity. `A man must

138 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
follow his heart,' says Orlando, in complete parody of course, given that

Tilda Swinton is `playing both the fool and the man' here. But of course

she is later to `become-woman'.

Cut to Orlando and Sasha on a sleigh journey to Orlando's home. Once

again the mise-en-sce

Á ne repeats former sequences through the scintillating

snow-scapes, evoking similar resonances for the viewer. A soft, muffled

snow-scape evokes landscapes of silence, stillness and serenity within a

dangerously lurking coldness; the coldness and cruelty of a love which is

to be spurned. The intensity of the cold is evoked through the molecu-

larity of the perception-image, not in any phenomenological sense, but

through a molecularity of perception across atoms, fibres, molecules. A

rich and crystallised sensuality is articulated, which `melts' into narrative

romanticism, when Orlando peels away Sasha's glove to imprint a

delicate kiss (much resonant of Daniel Day-Lewis's similar sensual

moment of kissing hands, in Scorsese's Age of Innocence (1993)) the

lingering intensity of a desire unfulfilled, the intensity pervades through

this lack of fulfillment, which if consummated would lose its immanence,

its passional intensity. Sensuality pervades the sequence, specifically

where Orlando reaches for Sasha's delicate and porcelain-like hand.

The texture of the glove against the fleshy fragility of her skin is

encompassed through a multiplicity of aesthetic resonances: the warmth

of flesh against the coldness of the snow; tones, colours and perceptions

impose upon the senses, in collusion with the gentle movements of face

into hand. He kisses her hand, her cheek . . . her mouth.

What is it to kiss . . . In Blade Runner, Deckard kisses Rachel . . . The kiss

. . . butterfly kiss, kiss of death, eternal kiss, kiss of . . . the spiderwoman?

Spider, insect . . . insectoid . . . viroid . . . mantis religiosa . . . mantis-

machine . . . Rodin's kiss? The kiss testifies to the integral unity of the

face/mask and inspires within it the rest of the body . . . that facialised

body. Rachel says, `Kiss me . . . put your hands on me . . .' The tactility

and sensuality of his kiss are facialised through her body, outside of the

mask, beyond the simulacrum of her face, a contamination of erotogenic

zones, aparalletic evolution. Desire disperses from the Metropolis, but

there is no becoming without the wasp and the orchid.

Such eroticism and sensuality are cruelly knocked back into the `real'

through the image of a beggar carrying wood across the lake semiotically

depicting a foreboding doom and melancholy. Orlando prophetically

announces, `Nothing separates melancholy from happiness.'

The jealousy that Orlando feels is part of romantic and idealistic love,

which is also wrapped into a transcendent idea of being: the soul being
 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 139
connected to another person's identity in some way is possibly a romantic

love which is not liberating to the autonomy and autopoiesis of the

individual in any way. In contrast love might be encompassed within an

immanence, through a becoming-woman, where processuality and in-

tensity of the moment are intrinsically more joyful than a possessive grasp

of the innately jealous and transcendent notion of monogamous, Chris-

tian versions of love. Eastern perspectives on love in a wider sense

encompass love of others outside such restrictive formulae. Western

versus Eastern philosophies specifically illustrate this idea. Orlando says

to Sasha, `But I love you. Our destinies are joined.' Any notion of `destiny'

replete with Freudian determinations of origins and beginnings delimits

the durational and vital joy of becoming. This is finely exemplified by the

dramatic act from Othello , witnessed by Orlando. This is an act of death,

melancholy, negativity, and all that is constitutive of death: stillness, void,

loss of volition and creativity. In his murderous fit of jealousy, Othello

cries over the body of Desdemona, `of one who loved not wisely but too

well, and in so doing threw a pearl away worth more than all his tribe'.

Orlando speaks to camera `terrific play'. An ironic comment on the

problems with jealousy, but also a sincere remark on the pain involved in

such egotistical and restrictive notions of love.

The `Love' sequence is finalised with negative imagery: rain, harsh

images of glaring faces, against a landscape of death, the death of

romantic love. Lightning, rain, the cold, and thunder are conventional

tropes of romantic narrativity. If we take these outside of the context of

representation, such imagery works as vibration, resonance and forced

movements, through specific perceptions. Liquid and gaseous perceptions

accommodate a `feeling' felt at a primordial level beyond subjectivity,

emphasising the sterility of love which is not joyous and free in its energic,

creative alignments with nature. Thus, we read nature as it epitomises in a

Freudian sense negativity, lack, the crack-up. (The ice literally cracks up

under Orlando.) Sasha, however, is not going to succumb to the pressure

of an emotionally charged romantic love, a possessive and jealous

manifestation of obsession. Orlando states, `Sasha, I cannot think of a

life without you. We're linked, our destinies are linked. You're mine.

Because I adore you.' The aesthetic resonances of this sequence articulate

an affectivity replete with despair, melancholy and trauma: the chiar-

oscuro lighting, the crack-up in the river flow, the camera-movements

across the icy river, to the close-up of Orlando's face, which is a

realisation of loss, as Orlando recognises the death of romantic love

and the treachery of women/men. Orlando sleeps for seven days.

140 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

CUT TO 1650 ± POETRY

The poetry sequence functions as a comic and parodic piece, parodying
the nature of romantic love, whilst also functioning in dissonance with
both the previous and the following tableaus. Most of the sequence is a
narrative about poetry, its role in language, and its usefulness as a vehicle
of expression. Visually, the sequence exudes irony through the use of
performance styles, acting and directional techniques which provide
humour. Orlando's pursuit of Greene through the gardens is a visual
delight. Orlando's awkwardness is epitomised in the clumsiness of his gait
and the sense of helplessness and anticipation in his body language also
adds to the irony. Here, movement and rhythm operate to expose
fickleness, distanciation and irony. The music, in its light-hearted and
gentle delicacy, works with the movement-images, to create ironic dis-
tanciation. The sequence functions then as dissonance in counterpoint
with both previous and following sections. The most enjoyable (purely
`subjective' in an ironic and parodic sense of course!) sequence of the
movie follows.

1700 ± POLITICS
This sequence has Orlando as ambassador in Turkey. It projects the
epitome of cinema as `event', as haecceity, as `becoming-woman'. Ques-
tions of love, integrity, sovereignty, honour, loss, ownership, possession,
betrayal and origins (themes equally resonant in The English Patient, and
thus connects with that movie in several ways) are highlighted, through
the plane of organisation and metaphor in this most beautiful of desert
scenes. But here, such `meanings', elements of the `molar' semiotics of the
film, become part of the assemblage of `event'. In other words, the very
process of the film as movement-image bequeaths a material emotion to
such concepts. They are imbricated within the process of the film's
duration, to the extent that the film's beauty is created from the reso-
nances of the film's materiality, in duration, not necessarily meaning
construction. Here, quite literally East meets West, Turkey providing the
literal `territoriality' which is to be deterritorialised: a political `inter-
stitial' space. However, this is also an evolution of two separate elements
of experience: the transcendent culture of Western civilisation and
ideology, set in contrast with the forces of immanence; and Eastern
philosophies of immanence, becoming, and the processual. East becomes
West. In their imbrication, erupts the event of `becoming-woman'. Quite
literally, the becoming-woman functions as part of the semiotic construc-
 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 141
tion within the narrative. Orlando really does `change' here, in this

sequence, from male to female. Boundaries are melded, merged, colluded

and reassembled, producing a molecularity of sexualities, cultures and

bodies. A series of `becomings'.

The narrative trajectory shows Orlando as ambassador to Turkey, for

the King of England, but Orlando functions outside the role of `char-

acter'. As Deleuze indicates, `what matters . . . is not the opinions held by

the characters, in accordance with their social types and characteristics,

but rather the relations of counterpoint into which they enter, and the

compounds of sensations that those characters either themselves, experi-

13
ence, or make felt, in their becomings and visions'.

The relations of counterpoint into which Orlando enters are imbricated

with those `energies', `intensities' and `singularities' of the Khan (Lothaire

Bluteau). As a result, a melding, another space, another `zone' is dis-

cernible which takes from both Western and Eastern philosophies,

cultural values, ideologies and libidinalities, and offers another `in-be-

tween' state, the `aparalletic evolution' of Western and Eastern, masculine

and feminine, transcendence and immanence. Both `characters' might be

male: the irony is that we `know' that Orlando is actually `female' in

reality, and narratively is both male and female, as androgyne. But he/she/

it functions within this sequence to distanciate that fixed subjective and

gendered positionality. As Orlando states in the most beautiful sequence

of the movie, `same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex.'

Orlando arrives in Turkey, an honourable and respected member of the

British establishment, dressed in ludicrous regalia of Georgian style: lace,

velvet and adorning wig. This symbol of Englishness is totally out of place

in the Eastern ambience of pure simplicity, gentleness, sincerity and

fluidity. On a semiotic level, such signs function as cultural tropes.

However, on a Deleuzian paradigm, we can understand this sequence

in more resonant ways. Indeed, there is a `becoming-other' of the two

cultures, which is visually and haptically manifested. Here, the Khan

greets Orlando. The scene is one of calm, stillness, warmth, esoteric

beauty, swaying movement. The words the Khan utters, implicate,

imbricate and oscillate this sense of immanence. `To the beauty of women

and the joys of love . . .' The ambience of the scene is modulated, as

material emotion, through specific filmic devices. Specific, individual

shots highlight the isolation of the two main `figures': Orlando and

the Khan. Their isolation and difference is exacerbated by their position-

ality in relation to the desert. They perform as `figural' elements in a

landscape of silence, of acceptance and acknowledgement. On a narrative

level, there is no sense of judgement, power or confrontation, although

142 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
the Khan's power is implicit. Rather an atmosphere resonates with

`becoming-woman'. The lighting is suffused; the gentle rhythms of the

desert landscape with deftly and delicately wafting grains of sand evoke a

gentle warmth. Flames of fire light up the desert during an evening's

repartee; flames flicker in a `becoming' with the notes and tones of the

diegetic music. Harmonies and tones of voices meld in vocal discord,

which is simultaneously a harmonious discord. An Eastern evocation of

the molecular.

Complexity is formulaic here in that the sequence does show us a literal

`becoming-woman' when Orlando changes gender and yet the sequence

also functions as the epitome of `becoming-woman' of immanence. If we

relate this to the forces of Western and Eastern beliefs, what emerges is a

valorisation of the imbrication across those spaces. But, I feel there is

much more resonant beauty in the immanence of the Eastern. In terms of

`sensation' two discrete and separate intensities are here felt in synthesis.

An embrace, or a clinch, of two different states of being is evoked: a state

of symbiotic energies. The singularities (see Part Two) of each state

energise and collide. But there is also a form of `forced movement',

which, as Deleuze indicates, occurs when `. . . two contrary sensations

draw apart, release themselves, but also now to be brought together by

14
the light, the air, or the void that sinks between them'. Both forms of

sensation are manifest through the film style, a style which uses suffused

lighting, long-shots of the desert-scape, gently swaying rhythmic move-

ments resembling the wind and other natural elements, evoked through

the flames of the fires. Through the aesthetic resonances of the film, the

`void' or the intransigence is `felt' between the two elements of different

cultures. A differential relationship.

There is a `becoming-other' which is felt through the molecularity of

the sound molecules; the way in which certain sounds are heard in

synthesis with particular movement-images. For example, the body

movements of characters become `figures' within the landscape, oscillat-

ing in rhythmical sway with the beauty of the desert. This is most

preciently obvious in Orlando's relaxing into Eastern belief, style, posture

and reclination. His `figural' operates in a liquid, ephemeral and evocative

pose, across the entire screen, a pose which displays the delicate, sensuous

lines of curvature across the body, through to the stance, and position of

his head. Orlando reclines, relaxes, throws back her/his head in a pose of

tranquillity. The colours and the textures provide both a visual and haptic

sense, engulfing the frame: delicate hues of white, ochre, greys blend with

the suffuse lighting and soft focus. The still shot provides a tableau in

itself. As a `figure' rather than a character, Orlando functions to modulate

 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 143
the becoming of this entire sequence. As such it serves to provide a critical

turning point within the narrative and diegetic trajectory. The posture of

Orlando is echoed in harmony in the later sequence, `Sex', where Orlando

is making love with Shelmerdine. The desert sequence exemplifies the joy

of becoming, through an Eastern landscape, which in terms of fluid

semiotics proposes a philosophy of becoming: a philosophy of the

immanent. This is further exemplified by the dress codes. The Khan of

Turkey epitomises in style, grace and demeanour the very essence of

`becoming' and hence is sensually premised on the existence of processual

feeling ± no finality, no endings, no fixed orgasmic point of closure. Such

sexuality scintillates in total flux: no ending, no consummation, no

fulfilment of desire, but a desire in process. In comparison Orlando,

dressed in garish, awkward clothes and long inelegant wig, looks awk-

ward, overpowered with redundant garments. They jar with the melodic

and desultory visuals of the desert landscape.

When the Archduke returns for Orlando's investiture, he finds him/her

a `changed' person. Ironically, we know that this change is almost a literal

account of what happens to him. Of course, all that is gentle, fluid,

rhythmic within the Turkish culture is also completely filled with resolute

determination, power and control. In the Kahn's asking for English

support in battle, Orlando is compromised and finds all her/his desire,

feelings, emotions, contradictory and oscillating. When he/she discovers a

dying man, his/her reaction is to help, regardless of the status of the

enemy. Such actions might be read through essentialist feminist debates

around gender qualities ± female or male ± but this is too binary a reading,

too static and reductionist a model. Death, loss and decay are redolent of

a Western cultural belief in transcendence, finality, a return to fixed

originations and centres of inorganic being. The slow, pulsating music

with delicate tones set in point-counterpoint play in harmony with the

fluid camera shots. Water functions in this sequence to provoke a liquid

perception of the movement-images. The `image' of Orlando floats

through the molecularity, like the `trickster'. Our perception of this image

is determined via a resonance of eye±brain movements. The eye±brain

connects across several elements. An instant cerebellum efferent motor

response is modulated, which in turn effects a disturbance felt at a deeper

level than subjectivity. It is felt at a molecular level, in the proto-sub-

jective. The image that we see of Orlando, in transition, in transforma-

tion, influences the body/brain/mind in synaesthetic ways, through the

kinaesthetics of filmic techniques, and provides a newly defined notion of

the beautiful in the sense of beauty as a time-concept or triage, and not

a concern with form and space. Indeed the scene evokes a new and
144 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
disturbing notion of the beautiful. How is this scene beautiful? Why is this

scene beautiful? The beauty does not lie in the `form' of the images, or the

tones and colours alone, but in the movements, the various forms of

motion (one instinctively is reminded of David Lynch's description of

`speeds' in his most resonant sequences), which have been scientifically

proven to be more appealing and alluring to the eye±brain. Like the

pathways of the butterfly as I mentioned earlier, the camera shots here

oscillate and weave a visionary dance across the eye±brain. This makes

the brain continually break and form, break and form, like a series of

waves, breaking from any symmetry. It is the motion that locks and

entrains the brain that creates the allure and resonance of the sensation in

this sequence. Similarly, the lighting causes a flickering of the eye, a

delicate and insouciant movement, providing an ecliptic experience. The

camera shots trace movement, such that the `image' is `matter'.

The sequence ends with Orlando, now Lady Orlando, travelling across

the desert, away to the future, and back to the West, the transformation

having been emanated through a literal `becoming-woman'. Transcen-

dence and immanence are binarily opposed and yet joined together:

transcendence projecting a locus in an essential core, an inorganic sense

of oneness in death; immanence reflecting the evanescence of life's

ephemerality. In the `in-between' spaces, where subjectivity is rendered

subjectless, but not without feeling, and emotion, is the newly molecu-

larised space. As a film, Orlando exemplifies this `in-between' state in so

many ways: the `interstitial' states. Emotion is not thus totally negated

and semiotics are not completely disregarded, but all are operative at a

level of machinic assemblage, working at a level outside and beyond

subjectivity.

Cut ± to the second part of the movie with Orlando as female Lady

Orlanda, in 1750s society. The `image' of woman very clearly implied in

the costume, dress and body language. Acting styles, performance style,

the walking, gestures and body language of Orlando, epitomise the

critique of masculine notions of femininity, and patriarchal conventions

of female `form'. Potter purposely uses such a style to present an

ideological statement in the film. Once again, humour functions in this

sequence to contrast and distinguish it from the previous sequence.

Indeed, on a level of structuralist semiotics, the entire sequence `Society'

exemplifies a particularly static feminist stance.

Visually, the sequence is overly detailed and a variety of rich textures

and colours, tones of blues, lilacs and whites, unites with the tactility of

Orlando's dress. The beautiful white dress she wears is both a trope of

those feminist debates, and yet is also an enigma, in its beauty. The
 Orlando ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 145
carnivalesque, the masquerade, the simulacra are all pertinent to an
understated beauty of the dress. Its colours, delicacy of frothy, white
textures and sheer exuberance epitomise a desire to feel, in a sensuous
tactile and visceral way, the experience of actually wearing it. (Of course
now I will get a backlash from all sorts of feminist circles ± who could
possibly want to wear such a monstrosity? But who has not truly wanted
to wallow in the finery of such rich `costume' and `display', to truly
masquerade in simulation and seductive simulacra? The erotics of ex-
15
hibitionism. ) The butterfly really does float through the gardens, here in
the guise of Orlando. The hapticity of the image is one of sheer resonance.
Texture and sight merge in fusion. As a `figural' Orlando floats across the
screen, quite literally, like a butterfly, evoking the pleasures of rhythm,
movement and duration. As Virginia Woolf states, `the sequence provides
16
a bloc of ages, a block of epochs' which are bound by the duration of
linear time-scales. But the significance of Orlando (the movie) is that it
reflects the formality and rigidity of a time-ordered set of beliefs and time-
space sequentiality. Birth and death are reversed as `orders of being' and
life's evanescence is explored across the zones, across cultures, where
connections and assemblages function in dichotomous arenas. Orlando
`acts' the figural, drawing together the movements, much like the Baco-
nian figure of the triptych.
The fifth sequence, `Sex' (1850), takes the narrative into Victorian
England. Emerging from a maze in Victorian dress, Lady Orlanda falls to
the ground. Piano concertos express the parody of the overt romanticism
in this sequence. She falls at the feet of no other than Shelmerdine (a
delicious and delirious Billy Zane), who emerges like an elusive romantic
hero, replete with horse, from the `mists of time'. What woman has not
truly been in awe of such a figure (parodic or not? ± romantic and
Bovarian even? Such dishonesty!)? A sequence rich in a simultaneous
parodic/pleasurable exploration of romantic and cliche
 d love, the scene
serves to project Orlando into a `future zone', where the infallibilities of
love are distanciated through the beauty of a zone without `gender'. The
future looks blissful but paradoxically uncertain in a world in which the
intransigencies of binary sexuality and power are diffracted through a
landscape of aesthetically sensuous movements, speeds and nuances. A
future of hopeful becomings, joyful cruelties and imperceptible zones.

NOTES
1. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 255.
2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 294.
146 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
3. See Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cineÂma; Film Language: A
Semiotics of the Cinema; Language and Cinema; `The Imaginary Signifier', in
Screen; and The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.
4. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 266.

5. Carol Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, p. 291.

6. Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction: The Common Reader, p. 189.

7. E. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, p. 4.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 277.

9. Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, p. 249.

10. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 92.

11. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 180.

12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 134, taken from Henry Miller,

Sexus, p. 229.
13. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 188.

14. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 168.

15. See Dot Tuer, `Pleasures in the Dark: Sexual Difference and Erotic Dev-iance in

an Articulation of Female Desire', in Cineaction,

16. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 236 (Wednesday, 28

November 1928).
Chapter 7
The English Patient ±
Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence

we die, we die rich

with lovers . . . tastes we have swallowed,

bodies we have entered and swum up

like rivers,

fears we have hidden in

I want this marked on my body

where the real country is,

no boundaries or properties

of powerful men

that's all I ever wanted . . .

to walk in such a place with you.

With friends, an earth without maps.

. . . the light's gone out and

I am writing in the darkness.

Maps, mapping and rhizomes offer a creative and experimental panoply

in the light of Deleuzian ideas, and yet maps also resonate across the

narrative trajectory of the filmic experience in The English Patient. In this

chapter I want to imbricate both a reading of Deleuzian mappings

through the film and a reading of the film through Deleuzian ideas. A

complete travesty it might be argued, given the post-humanism of his

thinking, the coldness and cruelty of his rejections. A melding of two

perspectives. What appears to be delirious and overindulgent narrativity

is a serious inception to rethinking the trajectories of `love' in a post-

humanist vision. A map, not a tracing, suggests Deleuze, is how we

experience existence, how we articulate and `feel', albeit at a proto-

subjective level, within the molecular structures of the autopoietic realms

of our being, our `becoming' with the world.

148 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
[T]he rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a
map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp:

it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map

from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in

1
contact with the real.

In narrative terms to The English Patient, maps and mapping are

essential elements within a plot which centres around the memories of a

mortally wounded and burnt war veteran and map-maker, Count Alma
 sy

(Ralph Fiennes). On a level of structuralist language, and within a plane

of organisation (as opposed to a plane of immanence ± the molar rather

than the molecular), the film juxtaposes elements of time, memory, place

and identities through a variety of technical methods: specific forms of

camera angling, fades, wipes, flashbacks and dissolves, all have a creative

role to play in the relating of Alma

 sy's narrative. The injured patient had

been a member of the Royal Geographical Society, responsible for map-

making prior to and during the first stages of the Second World War. The

narrative juxtaposes his experiences and his tragic love affair with

Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) both through, within and across

the landscapes of war-torn Africa and Italy. Together with his colleague

map-makers, Count Alma

 sy quite literally creates `maps' from their

research into the terrain of the African landscape, searching and con-

textualising new discoveries from caves of repute to plateaus of meta-

phorical significance. The discoveries are both literal and metaphorical.

Mapping the emotional and the relational as much as the spatial. Maps,

then, per se, are profoundly significant both literally within the diegesis of

the film and its narrative and ideological plateaux. Their purposes to both

the Germans and the Allies within the movie become important elements

within the plot, and Alma

 sy's role within that.

But maps too readily speak of ownership, territory, possession, sover-

eignty, boundaries, containment and reclamation. The body, however, to

refer us back to Katharine's dying words, is that which cannot, should not

and will not be claimed, owned, possessed, just like the mind with which

it is imbricated. Indeed it is the body without organs through which we

can discern a sense of `becoming' with the world, and Katharine's final

words, resonant also in Alma

 sy's words to her during one of their love

sequences, direct an understanding of the exigencies of individual auton-

omy, freedom and `becomings' beyond the confines of ownership through

a collusion across subjectivities or identities between people. Becoming is

beyond subjectivity: beyond any self/other relational. There is, through

the processuality of `becoming' and specifically becoming-woman, an

 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 149
autonomous, autopoietic level of existence through which life is lived and
experienced at a molecular level, outside the exigencies of self to other
relations, a purely viral and genetic evolution of life, in a truly biological
or germinal sense: mind and body becoming with the world, in true
autopoiesis. A vital sense of who and what we are (see Part Two).
Dialogue in the film provides an auditory `map' through which we
might connect with these ideas. Katharine's words become almost an ode
to `becoming-woman', where subjectivity is relinquished or subsumed to
a sense of `becoming' with the world itself, in a truly molecular sense.
Obviously, what I am doing here, I have to acknowledge, is partially
reading the film `through' some Deleuzian ideas, across the auspices of
filmic spaces, and I can detect voices of disapproval which will display
horror at the thought of `using' Deleuze in any way at all. I defend this by
merely implicating and colluding with his ideas, across the molar readings
of the film, through more ideological, structuralist, and metaphorical
approaches. I want to discern the `in-betweenness' of the molar and the
molecular, to try to offer an innovative way of articulating the filmic
experience, beyond the arenas of psychoanalysis, replete, as I have shown
with a self/other relationship to issues of subjectivity and identity. This
`in-betweenness' both acknowledges and, yet, deterritorialises the molar
elements of film `readings' in a collaboration with the molecular and
material elements of bio-aesthetics, sensation, affect and becoming-wo-
man. A richer and more contingently textured expression of the `haecce-
ity' of filmic worlds.
I am not, of course, negating the significance of the film's semiotic and
structuralist planes of being, the plane of organisation in a Deleuzian
sense, through which we, as viewers, discern a specific set of narratives,
played out through a group of characters, within and across a complex
time/space zone. Neither am I suggesting that all those who view will
necessarily discern the Deleuzian resonances throughout ± such readings
come with a required understanding and reading of the philosophy itself,
or of course reading books like this! But one can excite, enrich, collide,
indeed, meld with the other to open up new vistas of awareness and
becoming. Deleuzian ideas, both in their philosophical explorations of
becoming as the beyond of subjectivity and in explorations of the affective
state as existing beyond any subjectivity, within the singularities of a
proto-subjective state, enable us to consider the film as molecular body, in
collusion with other bodies, creating a body without organs, an event, a
haecceity.
I ask my reader, therefore, to go with my lines of flight, between, across
and beyond the molar, and into the molecular, to both read Deleuze
150 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
through film and film through Deleuze, as a form of film-philosophy, to

discover a richer and more intense sense of the `haecceities' of the filmic

event and Deleuzian vitalism: an understanding of film aesthetics as the

in-betweenness of a bio-aesthetic of sensation, and an event of `becoming-

woman'. A film, then, about map-making and literal territorialisation,

nonetheless draws another `map' in a vital (Deleuzian) sense; it connects,

it melds and collides both the molar with the molecularity of `becoming-

woman' through immanence and a neo-aesthetic of sensation. That neo-

aesthetic is premised on a biological notion of a pre-existing sense of

existential integrities, outside of subjectivity, where indeed the brain is the

subject itself. The brain is the centre of any sense of singularity outside a

subjective state (see Chapter 4).

My exploration (and I purposely choose not to use the word `reading'

as this is too narrow a term) of the filmic event of The English Patient

moves through the interstitial spaces of molar and molecularity. `Becom-

ing-woman' is a process of immanence, a description of the processual

nature of affect, as opposed to subject. If `becomings' are always specific

movements, forms of rest, motion, speed, slownesses, such flows of

intensity operate beyond any subjectivity, through the proto-subjective

realm of an autopoietic state, through the `unthought' or plane of

immanence, which imbricates the material of the brain/body/mind at a

deeper level than the subjective encounter. I write about The English
Patient, then, from this `in-between' or interstitial state.
Once again, I begin with endings. But the end is also the beginning.

Katharine's dying words in the Cave of Swimmers provide a funda-

mental core to the affective spaces of The English Patient. Rich in a

variety of tonalities, vibrations and syntheses with Orlando, the film's
haecceity is expounded through both teleological and non-teleological

elements. Love, death, sovereignty, ownership, possession, betrayal,

loss and the exigencies of `life' lived through `becoming' connect

across the visual, aural and the material pathways of the film, creating

an architecture of encounter beyond representation, felt within the

cellular structures of the brain's synapses and cellular structures, as

much as within the emotions. I don't want to eradicate any concep-

tion of the emotional as having an important role to play in our

experience of movies, but to suggest that there are other forces, within

the biological make-up of our brain cells, that impinge on perception

2
and consciousness. What I am concerned with is affect, rather than

emotion. The emotional might be discerned through the narrative

structures of filmic events, in the sense of plot, for example. But as yet

neuroscience has been unable to detect or explain how the emotions

 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 151
are triggered within brain patterns, as a result of specific experiences
such as film.
Thematically, the film depicts a love story (ironies, of course, abound,
since any notions of love premised on a self±other dichotomy, where
subjectivity is premised as part of that binary relationship as we see in
psychoanalytic discourse, are critiqued with Deleuzian resistance of such
romantic and transcendent concepts). In Deleuzian terms, love might exist
through finer, more deeply felt resonances of `becoming' beyond any
sense of self±other dichotomy, within, instead, the intensities of a pro-
cessuality, a sense of evolution, a love of life's fuller, and finer, potenti-
alities, its singularities: a `different' love from the romantic, possessive
self±other relational. In a sense, then, the film does explore, narratively, a
romantic tale, but within that is the discernment of possessive love,
ownership and `territorialisation' through Alma
 sy's relationship with
Katharine. His words `I hate ownership' are a response to her `I hate
a lie'; both are resonantly critical of cliche
 d `romantic' love. Both,
however, are caught up in a web of ownership, possession and lies in
the intensity of romantic, adulatory and passionate love. In narrative
terms, maybe their love is genuine, intense, profound and deeply mutual,
and yet such a love brings with it lies and deceit, denials and regrets, pain
and torment, as both Katharine and Alma
 sy struggle with how to allow
their love to have any resonance within the confines of a world con-
founded with binary moralities, fixed positionalities: no Spinozist ethics
here! But at least Katharine tries to discern her love for Alma
 sy as
`different': `Here I am a different wife, in a different life.' Their affair,
like all affairs outside the structure of monogamous and `moral' confines,
has to be doomed (this is a film after all) to tragic failure. This is what
makes it romantic. The romance lies in the tragedy. The `lie' is also of
course to negate the potentialities of a richer self-love, of autonomy, of
autopoiesis, which exist beyond the constraints of a self±other relation
and yet enrich the experience of `living' beyond subjectivity. That
enrichment can of course feedback into relations with others, not just
a self/other, in a truly Deleuzian vitalist sense. Katharine's first appear-
ance in the movie foregrounds, through her words, the significance of
different `loves'. `Romantic love, filial love, Platonic love. Surely not the
same thing?' She seduces Alma
 sy. The film narratively depicts the themes
of love, impossible love, the boundaries of forbidden love, and the
consequences of tragic love. The heart, suggests Hana in one sequence,
`is an organ of fire', and should have an acknowledgement within any
sense of a beyond of the subjective. Where is the `heart' within the finer
molecular structures of singularities?
152 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Set in 1939, the story unfolds of the disastrous, passionate and

obsessive love affair between Count Alma

 sy and Katharine Clifton, set

within the confines of a world fascinated by, embroiled in and organised

through `territorialisation'. Map-making, sovereignty and ownership are

highlighted through acts of sanctioning, sectioning and segregation across

endemic moral codings. On a narrative and semiotic level (molar) the film

offers a wealth of possibilities in terms of ideological readings: the

auspices of political embroilment, through which the individual loses

all sense of integrity, self-hood and autonomy.

We are taken into the movements and rhythms of the film through an

opening shot which provides a Deleuzian sense of collusion at that point

between the material and the sensation: `The material is so varied . . . that

it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and the sensation
3
begins.' An artist's paintbrush is tracked across the screen from left to

right, delicately tracing the liquidity of paint on to canvas (rock) of the

screen, the imprints of colour, a rich, dark, crimson red; then it sweeps

across the spectator's visual pathway from left to right. The processuality

of such devices portrays the dynamic and processual beauty of The

English Patient from the outset. This first sequence, together with the

diegetic rhythms of Hungarian folk music, evokes a synaesthesia of

colour/sound synthesised by the visual rhythms of the camera move-

ments, which echo the former brush strokes, strokes which create tiny

sculptured images: elongated shapes of swimmers, or maybe those in

flight, across a spatial/time zone unknown, but foregrounded as a

significant archaeological find. The elongated shapes of swimmers could

also be flying, escaping across the rock/cave face/canvas across different

time and spatial zones. Swimmers who take us, quite literally, in terms of

the camera's directional movements into the movie, and simultaneously a

flight through the depths of life's intransigencies, sexualities, death, love,

betrayal and contradictions. Orlando collides already from the beginning

of the movie.

The harmonies of the Hungarian folk music both echo and complement

the possible Eastern origins. The melodic sounds counterpoint the die-

getic rhythms and notes from the tinkling bells, birds and camels baying.

A variety of tones and melodic intonations affect the nervous system of

the viewer/observer/spectator at a neurological level. This neurological

level exemplifies that intertwining of brain/mind and body which is the

arena of an autonomous and autopoietic sense of self, the brain as

absolute survey. Sounds impinge upon the body through the labyrinthine

mechanisms of the hearing system, into the wave patterns within the

brain's neurological make-up. These affect the nervous system as a

 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 153
vibrational force through the cerebral cortex, into the mind/body/brain

through the molecularity of the body. In rhythmic synchronisation with

these sounds, the camera pans from left to right . . . an aerial shot across

the desert-scape revealing a plane, gliding across the frame. Chaos

emerges in the proceeding attack. Visually, the desert landscape wavers

with soft undulating curves, contrasting in dissonance with the harsh,

clinical lines of metal, weapons, armoury ± the cacophany of the war-

machine of the previous sequence. The narrative offers a comparison of

healing scenarios between the army's methods and those of the nomads.

An eclecticism of camera angling in the military convoy sequence and

usage of diegetic sounds contrasts with the Eastern voices and chantings

of the Arabian healers, as the film cuts across the desert-scape. Slow,

haunting chants and a delicate air of gentleness pervade the scene, and

contrast therefore most resiliently with a painfully visceral image of the

patient, burnt to the point of non-recognition (all identity deterritorialised

± subjectivity distanciated). Already, the intensities and energies of the

movie as `matter' are effectuated through the hapticity of the movement-

images. The smoke, flames and chaos of the Western war-machine are set

in dissonant contrast with the lingering long-shots of the desert and its

Eastern (immanent) resonations. The former is replete with harsh angles,

eviscerating textures, discordant tones and sounds which collide and

grate; the latter is smoother, undulating, gently rhythmical and flowing,

synaesthetically drawn together by the resonant chanting. The sounds of

tinkling bells, medicinal phials and drinking bottles collide with the

shifting noises of camels baying. The camera movements work in sym-

biotic resonance, as an embrace, as a forced clinch of vibrations. The

glistening jewel-like radiance of liquids, purples, pinks, rubies and emer-

alds contrast in forced movement with the sounds of the chanting and the

haptic image of the `burning' face. The close-up of Alma

 sy's face, with the

healing hands gently administering some sort of ointment, is painfully

visceral.

Narrative action cuts to Italy 1944, and so the rest of the movie

progresses through a series of flashbacks, between war-torn episodes of

Alma
 sy's past, and the present scenes depicting his death's progression in

the monastery in Tuscany with Hana (Juliette Binoche), who nurses him

through to his death. It is 1944, Italy; the patient is interrogated about

his past, his position in the war, his nationality and identity. The

flashback creates a structure which maps out the territory of resonances

and intensities of affective experiences in the film. By contrast, and

collision, the flashes are forced movements which resonate a harmonis-

ing rhythm to the entirety of the film's process. But movements and
154 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
rhythms are imbricated with the stillness and silence of specific frames

and shots.

For example, the death of Hana's friend, Jan. The sudden explosion of

Jan's military truck as it overtakes the rest of the military convoy is a

shock both intradiegetically and to the audience. Hana's immediate

response is to run to Jan. She is restrained, and held closely by Hardy.

Hana's stationary, fixed stance, set against the flat landscape, exaggerates

the horror and desolation of the scene. This stillness, as opposed to the

movements of `becoming' throughout the film, is emphasised by the

camera's long-shot, the desolation of the landscape created through the

blocks of colour, in contrasting bands of green and blue: earth and sky.

The `in-betweenness' enervates the pain, shock and silence of the stillness

in death. Exaggeration is created by stylistic means of such clashes, or

vibrations. But a richer understanding of the film as `experience' must

bring together the `in-betweenness' of molecular and molar elements,

linking narrativity, linearity and molecularity of a neo-aesthetics pre-

mised upon neuroscience. `But the results of these experiments give us

powerful hints about the way in which the visual brain works. They

provide compelling evidence to show that different processing systems

take different times to reach their end-points, which is the perception of

the relevant attribute. This in turn suggests that the processing systems are

also perceptual systems, thus allowing us to think of several parallel

processing-perceptual systems . . . By definition, perception is a conscious

4
event.'

The narrative, then, is part of the total assemblage of the film's

movements. Hana, after Jan's death, says, `I must be a curse; anybody

who loves me dies,' as she looks towards the monastery, which is to

become the resting place for Alma

 sy to his death. Hana wanders up into

the hillside to view the monastery. Contrasts, collisions and forced

movements are epitomised by the dissonance of sequences here: the gory,

bloody sequences of the hospital convoy are contrasted with Hana's walk

through the minefield's landscape of both terror and silence. In further

contrast, when Hana goes out to look at the monastery in the hills, we feel

the delicate insouciance and silence of the wind's gently molecular

movements across the wispy grasses, ferns and flowers: the rippling

motion of the water with its reflections fibrillates a motion, a controlled

motion which creates a tranquillity to the brain/mind/body of the viewer.

This motion resonates with the colours, tones and textures of this

sequence, beautifully climaxed, both visually and aurally, in Hana's

discovery of the derelict monastery and the old piano ± no dialogue,

no diegetic music, pure cinema (in a Hitchcockian sense ± that is, the very
 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 155
absence of sound is part of the drama). This is broken, or rather eclipsed,

by the enchanting sound of Hana's piano playing; the celerity and timbre

of the notes harmonise and, through the effectuation within the brain's

cellular structures, simultaneously create an equal dissonance with the

textures and colours of the landscape. Such colours are subsequently

contrasted with the grey, subdued, cold, sultry tones of the monastery's

interior; dusty, ancient frescoes gently meld with the emptiness of the

room; echoes and distant ghosts pervade the ambience of the sequence.

Slow, controlled panning of the camera projects the grey, white, pale and

dusky-coloured marble textures of the monastery . . . in rich contrast

with the earlier vital, and verdant, beauty of the natural world.

Sensuality pervades the ensuing sequence, not only visually and aurally,

but within the performative actions of the actors, as `figurals' across the

canvas of the screen. Hana leans forward to feed her patient with rich,

juicy plums. A close-up of fingers-into-mouth evocatively embraces a

richness of texture, tactility and indeed taste. `A very plum, plum,' states

the patient. Such simplicity is captured by Hana's words, `I don't know

anything', in reply to Alma

 sy's questions about history and Herodotus.

Woman's body functions as `figural'. Hana's body, in her movements as

nurse to Alma
 sy, in her dancing, in her playing the piano, in her

relationship with Kip, in her innocent sense of awe and wonder at the

frescoes in the Italian church, is paralleled with, and also contrasted to the

quietly sedate, controlled, and yet erotic performativity of Katharine.

Both women function as `figurals' across the canvas, providing different

but colluding resonances of `becoming-woman'. Both women are part of

the trajectory of a `becoming-woman' of the movie. Indeed, the beauty of

the female body is narratively foregrounded in the Herodotus extract

spoken by Katharine, the tone, delicacy and rhythm of her words evoking

the beauty of `woman'. Katharine suggestively and seductively glances at

Alma
 sy, as he visually responds to the words from the Herodotus text. In

this, Gyges, the King, loses his wife to Candaules, a suitor for the King's

wife. Her `body' becomes the catalyst and precursor to romantic and

uxurious love, foregrounded in the film through Katharine's relationship

with Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth), her husband, in contrast to her

passionate, illicit love for Alma

 sy. Woman's body is a symbolic territory

within the movie, from the landscapes of the desert, and the `shape of a

woman's back' as Alma

 sy describes some mountain formations, to the

ethereal and fluid images in the Cave of Swimmers. It is woman's body,

performing as `figural', not as representative image, either through Hana

or Katharine, which carries the movements of becoming throughout the

movie. This is most apparent in both the dance sequences and the erotic
156 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
love sequences. Such sequences function as contrasts in dissonance with

the war/death sequences.

The entire film performs as a choreographed dance of memory: past,

present and future. The female body performs as movement-image

through several dance sequences. First is the dance at the luncheon club

of the Royal Geographical Society, where Alma

 sy first falls in love with

Katharine. The intensity of their mutual passion is finely silenced in its

illicitness, the passion all that more electric, through their first dance

together. Looks, glances, silence and insouciance characterise the body

language and patterns of looking between Alma

 sy and Katharine. The

febrile and delicious erotics of their movements are encapsulated by the

circling camera movements and the rhythms of their dancing. The silence

between them is all that more intense and vibrational.

Many of the desert sequences recall Orlando , providing links across the

two films, thus providing a resonance and vibration of intensities across

and between texts, which we can read together and in opposition. The

first desert sequence introduces Katharine and Clifton into the narrative.

The beauty of the movements of the camera provide a dissonant experi-

ence for the viewer, by virtue of the effects on the visual system of the

cerebral cortex. A discussion about love, romantic love, filial love,

Platonic love or uxorious love highlights a sequence which is then

followed by rhythmical, undulating and sweeping camera movements

of planes in flight, twisting and turning in tune to each other, with shot-

reverse-shot camera actions between Alma

 sy and Katharine hinting at an

inferred romantic connection. The plane's flight patterns, the undulating

lines of the sand dunes and the spatial expanses of the desert sequence
5
evoke, through a neuro-aesthetic effect upon the brain, a feeling of

pleasure, through the processuality of the camera's movements. This is

imbricated with the colours, which visually impact upon certain sections

of the brain in particular pleasurable ways. The flight of the plane

through the desert then evokes a becoming through its effects on the

brain/body/mind. Certain sequences around the campfire collide with the

earlier sequences in the desert in Orlando , reminiscent of Eastern resona-

tions of immanence and becoming as opposed to Western vagaries of

representation and being, in a transcendent sense. Such desert sequences

occur in contrast and resonance with other sequences. For example, the

medical convoy train is contrasted with the desert scene where the

nomads tend Alma

 sy. Shapes, colours, tones, lines, rhythms move in

delicate contrast with the chaotic movements of the war scenes. Wherever

there is a desert sequence, this is stylistically created with patterns of lines,

tones, rhythms, shapes which contrast with both preceding and succeed-
 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 157
ing sections of the movie. The beauty of the desert contrasts with the

horrendous death-like image of the burnt and dying body of Alma

 sy in

the monastery.

The desert sequences also contrast in resonance with the Tuscan

landscapes of beauty. This is specifically apparent at the end of the film

when Hana looks inspirationally towards a future, a new becoming,

outside and beyond the confines of the war-torn Tuscan landscapes that

she has experienced. Her future inspirational outlook is filmically con-

veyed through the intensity of the bright colours, blues, reds, greens, the

camera's movements, the lighting, flickering sunlight projected through

the trees, as she looks towards the young girl, an indication of the

positivity of her unknown, but potentially joyful future. The joys of

6
becoming-girl. To follow a scene on the discussion of love with such a

beautiful display of movements, tones, colours and processuality colludes

two paradigms for the viewer, thus possibly impinging on the emotional,

but through the affectivity and molecularity of the film's movements,

speeds. What I mean here is that the flight sequences are quite beautiful to

view and to feel (process not form), but following from the previous

sequence, such affects resonate with the molar experience of the film's

narrative and molar plane of organisation, characters, dialogue and so

on. But there is an `in-betweenness' which explains that space between the

molar and the molecular. The viewer is affected in a neuro-aesthetic way,

but also in an emotional (and the emotions have not yet been adequately

explored within neuroscience to suggest that there is biological explana-

tion for their behaviours) way. Thus the affective level through mind/

body and brain functions alongside the emotional level imbricated

through dialogue and narrativity. The `in-between' space of the molar

and the molecular evokes a richer engagement with the body of the film.

In terms of the haecceity of sensation the film works as a machinic

opera, assembling consonant or dissonant rhythms, cadences as se-

quences which act as either vibration, resonance or a distension of forced

movements. For example, colour operates as the modulator of such

sensations. The desert and love sequences, which render the beautiful

as processual, as movement, incorporate colour as a major element.

Katharine, in all the erotic sequences, wears white, usually of a delicate

texture, muslin, silk or some other `feminine' evocation. In contrast, she

wears red flowers and ornaments in her hair or on her dress (in one

sequence, all that is red is symbolic both of the Christmas festivities and of

her passion for Alma

 sy). The silk texture of her stockings against her flesh

and the silk underwear against her shoulders emphasise a romantic

femininity, and their undoing is a delicious venture into the erotic.

158 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Nothing blatant: febrile sensuality. Hana's blue floral dresses flow with a

liquid movement across all her performances. Her dancing, with both

Moose/David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) and Kip, and her running

through the rain, complete with umbrella to the sounds of `Heaven,

I'm in Heaven', provide lines of intensity across the canvas of the screen

which are inspirational and beautiful. The earlier scene where she cuts off

her hair and changes from the military dress of war-time to more ethereal,

fluid and colourful clothes provides a symbolic reversal of personae: from

soldier to woman. Her dress becomes part of her, just as Katharine's is

part of her. The colours, textures and flows of their clothes are part of the

beauty of their movements.

As a triptychal structure, specific sequences evoke a forced movement

across their three visual/aural planes. Aurally, the song `Heaven, I'm in

Heaven' links three such sequences, which are then read or at least

connected together. First, the music is heard when Alma

 sy is returning

with Katharine following their second love sequence at his apartment;

after a trip through the bazaar, Katharine returns to Clifton; second, a

flashback through the intradiegetic music takes the audience back to

Alma
 sy, the patient, listening to the music in his room at the monastery

. . . his memories and dreams having been fed through the present tense

and present sounds played by Caravaggio. The third time this music is

heard is in the sequence following the end of the war: both Caravaggio

and Hana dance to `Wang, Wang Blues'; the rain pours down, and Hana

inspirationally leaps up with Kip, Hardy and Caravaggio to take Alma

 sy,

complete with bed, out into the refreshing rain. This sequence exudes

with passion, exhilaration, and yet also a tenderness which is evoked

through the recognition of Alma

 sy's dying wish ± to feel the rain on his

face. Hana's body and her movements become part of a dance around the

grounds of the monastery, thunder and lightning, and rain imbricating

with the lyrics of the song. The lyrics of `Heaven, I'm in Heaven' work as

a form of aural intensity, across a triptych of sequences. The music

connects the modulations as much as the colours and tones: the blues,

purples, flashes of light, thunder and music together.

The seduction scenes function in a similar way, with colour, music and

body language providing similar intensities. Harmonies of tone, line,

rhythm colour and light figure across the three separate events of

seduction. First, Katharine turns up unexpectedly at Alma

 sy's apartment.

The scene is back-lit, which highlights Katharine's pose, as she stands

erotically in the doorway, wearing a provocative, transparent muslin

white dress. Body language, warm tones of oranges, yellow, ochres and

amber filter the textures of sunlit fabrics, gently flowing muslins and
 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 159
brocaded blinds. Slow-panning camera movements flow from the image

of Alma
 sy on his bed, to Katharine standing in the doorway. No dialogue,

no music, but echoes from the Arabian market outside. Intense, erotic and

sensual, Katharine and Alma

 sy make love for the first time. They linger

together, bathe and talk of personal loves, desire, fears and dislikes. It is

here we discover Alma

 sy's fear of possession and ownership and Kathar-

ine's dislike of lies. Both become embroiled with their own dislikes and

fears.

As a sequence it preludes the following seduction scene, this time at

the Christmas festivities. Again, Katharine wears white; similar colours

and sounds pervade this scene, only here the seduction is much more

forceful, more erotic, and its illicitness enhances its eroticism. The third

love sequence is again in Alma

 sy's apartment. Katharine this time stays

the night; reclining in Alma

 sy's bed, they discuss, again, ownership,

possession, difference, as Katharine says, `Here I am a different wife, in a

different life.' to justify the seriousness of her infidelity, which is a

paradoxical fidelity to Alma

 sy. This difference reflects a closeness, an

attachment outside the molar categorisations of monogamous marriage

constraints. It is more of a molecular understanding of `love' outside the

constraining parameters of Western, transcendent ideals of love, own-

ership and possessiveness imbricated within a Western Christian theo-

logical tradition (emphasised by the Christian ritual of Christmas in this

film). Eastern, immanent and anti-metaphysical concerns with love are

freer, finer, more molecular. The eroticism of the sequence is manifested

through subdued lighting, the camera echoing the lines of Katharine's

feline-like and languid body: long, linear, ethereal lines are followed

through and echoed by the camera's panning movements across the

screen. Hungarian folk music provides an ambient air of Arabian-

sounding vocals, as Alma

 sy recounts a folk tale of love and ownership.

Alma
 sy himself professes to `owning' part of Katharine's body. `The

Alma
 sy Bospherous', he claims, is his. Similar resonances echo through

Orlando , where Orlando claims Sasha as `his' (`because I adore you')

and for no other reason. The synaesthesia of sounds and the colours

meld into a feeling of sensuality and calm. This provides a direct

contrast and sense of dissonance with the sequence where Caravaggio

is tortured and has his thumbs cut off, in the German-occupied village.

War scenes are directly juxtaposed, through past memories and present

scenes in the monastery, with Hana and Caravaggio. The most sig-

nificant resonance of contrasted scenes is the wonderful liberatory scene

of dancing through the rain, followed by the torture scene of Cara-

vaggio. Both the seduction scenes and the dance sequences then function
160 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
in juxtapositon and in dissonance, acting in vibration (see Chapter 5)

with each other, but against the war sequences and the bomb-searching

sequences (in these the camera movements work in a different way; they

are much more chaotic, creating a `busy' mise-en-sce

Á ne of confusion and

complexity). Visual elements such as colour, shape, body movements,

tones and lighting effect the cerebral cortex of the viewer in a similar

way in which sound acts on the labyrinthine mechanisms of both body

and brain. A neuro-aesthetic works alongside the emotional elements of

the film's narrative. The characters become elements within the aesthetic

of sensation. They function as figurals, as we saw earlier with Hana and

Katharine. Hana works as an inspirational figural across the sequences,

joining them in terms of past and present and, as we detect in the final

sequence, the future. All that is vital and natural in life is inspired and

nurtured by her: she is seen feeding birds, tending to plants, cooking for

and indeed caring for the patient. Her `image' in the final sequence, as

we have already seen, is an image which vibrates with layers of intensity,

a `graded richness, resolute with modulations of past, present and

7
future'. A movement-image, but also a figural within the aesthetics

of sensation. Through Hana, we have an inspirational resonance to-

wards the beyond of `becoming-woman' into the girl; for ultimately `It is

not the girl who becomes a woman: it is becoming-woman that produces

8
the universal girl.'

The body is stolen first from the girl, stop behaving like that. You're not a

little girl any more, you're not a tomboy. The girl's becoming is stolen first,

in order to impose a history, a prehistory, upon her. The boy's turn comes

next, but it is by using the girl as an example, that an opposed organism, a

9
dominant history is fabricated for him too.

Deleuzian discussion of becoming-girl offers an understanding of how

dominant structures of socialisation and culture have encouraged the loss

of an essential core, an essential `autopoiesis' or `becoming' which is

eradicated out of us through social processes. First, through constructions

of gender, masculinity and femininity, the `singularities' of the proto-

subjective state are `ordered' into a fixed sense of gender. The `becoming-

girl' is the means through which we can strive to resist such gendered

categorisations of structured social processes. It is `becoming-girl' which

enervates a positivity in the joys of becoming, a vitalism and freshness,

beyond any sense of gendered subjectivity. Indeed, `becoming-girl' has

nothing to do with the sexuality of a specifically biological girl but it is the

autopoietic element of all who experience the joys of life lived through

becoming ± a vital life ± sexuality outside of gender.

 The English Patient ± Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 161
Of course, this exploration of the movie is using the film to explore

some philosophical resonances in Deleuze, but I never said this was an

impossibility; all possibilities collide through a Deleuzian assemblage

which imbricates film and philosophy, into film-philosophy. Connections

are made across, within and between the spaces of the film's diegesis, but

also across other spaces, texts, into more complex `bodies'. Various

frames, sequences, as we have seen, resonate, bounce off each other,

distort or divest each other. The elements of sensation are stylised through

compositional elements like tone, line and colour. They are stylised

through structures of contrasts, similarities and juxtapositionings. More

than colour produces sensation. The eye engages with motion, process

and movement, after it has connected to colour and form, but across

different planes, and through different elements of the visual cortex. The

central focus, left to right and top to bottom thresholds, as I explained

earlier, demarcates the patterns in which the brain understands motion.

Forms of motion that are alluring or beautiful or pleasurable to the eye±

brain usually involve an equation of these different pathways. If we take

the scene where Hana is taken to view the frescoes in the Tuscan church,

we can discern how this processual beauty is understood through brain

patterns, in a kinaesthetic visionary process. In this sequence camera

angles follow the flight paths of Hana as she quite literally flies (by means

of suspension from a rope hauled into position by Kip) across, through,

besides, up and down, her face almost touching the representational faces

of gods and saints in the frescoes. The colours and textures are dissipated

through lighting, which emulates the torch-lit sequence. Hana swirls,

sways and joyously wallows in the experience, feeling, touching, seeing

and connecting with the Renaissance images. They become part of her

reality. As spectators we collude with those resonances, through our

brain's qualitative multiplicities (see Chapters 3 and 4); the brain is quite

literally a `subject in absolute survey'. Once again, contrast, through

dissonance and vibration, is encompassed by the juxtaposition of this

sequence with the following one, where Kip has to defuse a bomb found

under a bridge, which is about to be crossed by demob-happy troops. In

this sequence, the same music, `Heaven, I'm in Heaven', resonates, thus

linking, in a tryptichal way, earlier sequences, through an aural con-

nectivity. Furthermore Hana's body works again as figural, but also as a

nomadic force, or intensity.

[A] woman's body achieves a strange nomadism, which makes it cross

ages, situations, places [as we saw in Orlando ]. The states of the body

secrete the slow ceremony which joins together the corresponding atti-
162 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
tudes and develops a female gest which overcomes the history of men and
10
crisis of the world.

Deleuze continues, in A Thousand Plateaus, that the reconstruction of the

body without organs, an anorganism of body, is actually inseparable

from a becoming-woman or the production of molecular woman. Mo-

lecular woman is the `girl' herself. Such ideas on the significance of the

`girl' in molecularity collide and resonate with my final chapter on Leon

(and to some extent incorporate the `child' through Romeo and Juliet and
even Juliette Lewis's nymphette in Strange Days in the following chap-

ters).

NOTES
1. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12.
2. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Zeki explains, in
this text, how in fact the brain is the arena through which we make sense of the

world. Vision is not a passive process but is an active engagement of the brain's

molecularity, or as Zeki calls it modularity. Vision, for example, and seeing are

effectuated at a biological or molecular level through various cellular operations

at different parts of the brain. The actual act of seeing is carried through to the

perceptual centres of the brain through areas which Zeki refers to as V1, etc.,

each of which is responsible for a particular element of the visual experience.

Colour, form and motion therefore are effectuated in the brain through these

cellular centres or molecular cells. Colour for example does not exist `in the

world' or in the `image' we see but exists in the brain itself. This has a connection

with the idea of the brain as the arena of the subject in `absolute survey'; see

Bains, `Subjectless Subjectivities', in Massumi, Canadian Review of Comparative

Literature, p. 511. It is the brain, and the functions of the brain itself, which

enables perception of experiences. Such experiences, whether visual, auditory or

tactile, exist in the brain formations, not out there in the world.

3. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 166.

4. Zeki, Inner Vision, ch. 7, p. 67, and also p. 2, where he discusses what he means
by neuro-aesthetics.

5. Zeki, Inner Vision, p. 131.

6. See Chapter 10 on Leon.

7. Polan, `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas and Olkowski (eds),

Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 248.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276.
9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 277.

10. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 196.

Chapter 8
Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations

[O]f all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very

heart of truth, so much as fits of unaccountable despair, compared to

these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and

1
interest.

[T]his other plane [of immanence] knows only relations of movement and

rest, of speed and slowness, between unformed, or relatively unformed,

2
elements, molecules or particles borne away by fluxes.

Two contradictory quotations: like the two contradictory houses of

Capulet and Montague. How can we reconcile the sentiments of both,

the integrities of both, the finesse of both those positions? Cioran's words

seem to enthral with their respect for emotion, their respect for the finesse

of life's truly important parts, the heart, the emotions, despair, the beyond

of self-pity. Subjects relevant and pertinent to a tale of impossible and

forbidden love and its tragic consequences. And yet, Deleuze's words

seem to present, as we have seen through much of the book, a concern

with the `outside', with the `immanent' and not with transcendent notions

premised within a self±other relational, subjectivities dependent on an-

other's dasein, another's integrity. Love of the self, through a narcissistic

display of love of the other. Desire is replaced through Deleuzian ideas

with the beyond of subjectivity, in becoming.

Romeo and Juliet is an interesting film to consider in the light of such

contradictory or, rather, paradoxical positions and I want to take the

reader back to Chapter 4, with its discussion of the proto-subjective state,

where feeling resides in an existential integrity, outside of any emotional

regime. Contradiction/paradox will abound in what follows. But paradox

is sense and sense is paradoxical. Deleuzian philosophy, premised on

Nietzschean belief in primordial indetermination and `life' lived outside

the exigencies of subjectivities, and self±other relationals equates `becom-

164 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
ing' with a `worldly biological life'. The free mind, he argues, is built upon
an autonomous and autopoietic realm, outside of any self±other rela-
tional. Life, rather, is experienced differently at each moment and each
individual's becoming in the world is connected with his or her volitions
with the natural world.
If we take this into thinking about the movie, Romeo and Juliet, then, at
a narrative and ideological level, Deleuzian paradigms seem to discredit,
and distanciate, affairs of the heart, affairs of romantic love, which is
premised on a self±other relational, subjectivity being an important
element of that, as we saw in psychoanalysis. But it seems that there
is an interesting tension at work between a narrative which seems to
3
parody romantic love, through a post-modern pastiche style, and an
aesthetic which articulates brilliantly an example of Deleuzian under-
standing of the beyond of desire through becoming and `sensation' in the
way that the film connects as a set of intensities, speeds and haecceities.
This tension might be perceived as the space between the molar and the
molecular, the space of the `unthought'.
In this exploration of the movie, I want to suggest that despite the film's
exemplification as a post-modern parody of romantic love (and of course
we can suggest that the movie is a trendy, contemporary and colourful
piece of MTV, produced to sell a commodity or a set of commodities ±
such reductionist views, albeit they may have some validity), it simulta-
neously valorises `love' through a neo-aesthetic beyond subjectivity,
through a becoming-woman, which is presented through a new con-
sideration of the `beautiful'. A different concern with love? What con-
stitutes beauty through a variety of processual elements in the film
`becomes' an exemplification of love in an organic sense. The heart as
an organ may indeed play a role in the biological field of proto-subjective
states, despite Deleuzian ideas of the body without organs. Here is the
contradiction: the heart as an organ, as part of a body without organs?
Where is the heart? How does it function as a `biological' organ? Or does
it merely function in the arena of `love' through chemical and hormonal
effects distributed by the brain? Contemporary science seems set to argue
that love only exists because certain neurotransmitters within the brain
effect specific hormonal and chemical changes to the body: for example,
serotonin or oxytocin produce, because of biological and evolutionary
needs, the `feelings' of love, warmth, connectivity, commitment even, as
part of man's natural survival needs. Now there lies naivety!
A refreshing and tender, if somewhat sentimental and mythical, tale
of courtly love, on a narrative level Romeo and Juliet gently disperses
such post-human notions, and yet as I said it is also a parody of such
 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 165
4
sentimental and courtly love, ideas that are outside this book, but
nonetheless worth thinking about, given the parodic nature of the movie.
Is there a role for the organ of fire (heart) in a body without organs?
Indeed, C. Colwell seems to suspect that the organs of the body are part of
5
the proto-subjective. I refer the reader back to Chapter 4 to the discus-
sion on pathic events, or prehensive events. In the pre-personal state,
Deleuze's understanding of schizoanalytic subjectivities suggests that
experiences are `felt' at a level deeper than the subjective, indeed at a
level of singularities. Singularities are points that produce effects of
transition, but they are not `felt' by a subject. They are constitutive of
the self. Since multiplicities are defined as qualitative, duration, move-
ment and process are intrinsic to them. Such qualitative multiplicities are
called `events' or `haecceities', effectuated through the processual, the
6
transitive and fusional intensity. In other words, the `processual' is
determined by qualitative multiplicities of proto-subjectivities. It is in
this autopoietic realm that we have a unity of mind/brain and body, prior
to any phenomenological field, or subjectivity.
Consequently, a movie like Romeo and Juliet, which works and
connects specifically through movements, processuality, duration, inten-
sities and rhythms, expresses a Deleuzian sense of `becoming-woman'
(whilst simultaneously evoking a concern with its narrative and ideolo-
gical concerns with romantic love ± such delicious duplicities!). Becom-
ing-woman is that process of immanence, a description of a processual
experience of affect as opposed to subject. The molar and the molecular in
coagulation, in collusion. But I do want to remind the reader that, as yet,
scientific evidence is yet to be formulated which denies the role of
emotions within the brain's functioning. Any valorisation of a neo-
aesthetics or materialist aesthetic, which functions within the pre-perso-
nal realm of becoming, such as this book is presenting, does not need
totally to deny or distanciate an aesthetic premised on the emotions.
(Indeed, it should sit alongside all those other realms of film theory, as a
perspectival paradigm for film studies.) Indeed, where is the space
`between'? Perhaps that is what the future of film theory may develop,
and is one of the consequential possibilities of my research.
An imbrication then of the narrative molar level of engagement with
the film's diegesis, mise-en-sce
Á ne, plot, its `plane of organisation' is to an
extent constituted through a more fibrous molecularity: its aesthetic
configurations. Through its aesthetics, the body of the film works as a
`body' in collusion with other bodies. Its `body without organs' might,
parodically, evoke an emotional concern, with love, in a post-modern
climate, which is both parodied and substantiated. A total complexity in
166 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
its denial and acceptance of the primordial world of `unworded experi-

ences' and a `pre-linguistic insight into life'.

In exploring Romeo and Juliet through an aesthetics of sensation, I

recall Deleuze's point in Logique de la Sensation, conveyed here by Dana

Polan, that,

Beyond figuration and representation, then, sensation comes from a pure

power that `overflows all domains, and traverses them. This power is that

of Rhythm, which is deeper than vision, audition etc.' . . . A logic of the

7
senses, Ce
 zanne said, that is non-rational, non-cerebral.

Romeo and Juliet resonates with multiple rhythms. Its very visual display

is rhythmical (I mean that the visuals themselves are effectively `rhyth-

mical' before any musical connection) with a variety of specular effects

enhanced by a variety of different musical genres, in different tempos,

cadences, modulations and melodies. The subjective encounter is indeed,

8
hystericised beyond subjective spectatorial (gendered, cyborg, oscillating
9
or matrixial ) perspectives. The subjective is subsumed by forces of affect,

through the elements of sensation: intensities, rhythms, flows of energy,

lines of flight. Energy resonates vibrantly, passionately, incisively,

through the scintillating score and visceral mise-en-sce

Á nes. This energy

is most apparent through the musical elements in collaboration with the

patterns of lines of longitude, latitude, and diagonals, much like the

paintings of Mondrian or Kandinsky, traversing the frames of various

sequences. A veritable moving canvas. Much of the film works like their

paintings, with lines of flow, rhythmically moving across, through, above,

within, and beyond the frame of the screen. These patternings of line are

operative through specific sequences in the film and they function in

contrast with and in vibration and resonance with the more fluid, gentler

and softer sequences, where colour functions prior to line and dynamics.

Semir Zeki, in his book Inner Vision, explains how, within the brain,

there are five specific areas in the cortex, where the visual image, received

by the ocular nerves, is translated differently, by virtue of specific cells

within the cortical structure. He explains these as separate elements, from

VI to V5, where colour, form and movement are differently discerned. He

suggests that there is a range of varied signals which are related to colour,

motion, depth and luminence. Certain cells which take signals which

relate to different characteristics of vision are grouped accordingly in

certain compartments. Different visual signals are sent to different visual

areas I to V in the cortex. The visual brain therefore is a collectivity of

multiple visual areas. These depend on the type of signal received. His

argument is that vision is a modular system, that the brain handles

 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 167
different attributes of the visual frame in a variety of subdivisions. It is
therefore seen as a parallel, modular system. Thus, he argues, aesthetics
itself is modular. As a result of such processes, colour becomes a
construction of the brain. Zeki argues that colour does not exist outside
in the world, but in the brain's formations. It exists within the V4 area,
10
whilst movement, for example, is detected in V5. The `subject' then is
subsumed in the beyond of becoming, in sensation. The visual act of
seeing ceases to be a merely organic activity, `our eye . . . ceases to be
organic, to become a polyvalent and transitory organ; objectively, it holds
before us the reality of a body, of lines, of colours, liberated from organic
11
representations'.
This quotation is so specifically relevant to Romeo and Juliet. A
vibratory facticity, a connection of sensations, vibrations and rhythms
come together in the `haecceity' that is Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, we
should here remember Deleuze's quote that `sensation contracts vibra-
tions of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what
12
comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears'.
How then does the film exude such haecceities?
Baz Luhrmann's richly textured, erotic and visceral post-modern
rendition of Romeo and Juliet takes the original Shakespearean text as
its script, but fractures it through an exuberant choreography of dizzying
visuals and auditory rhythms, tones, nuances: a veritable sensory delight!
Contemporary popular music, classical music and opera create an eclectic
pastiche of sounds which eclipses each and every visual moment of the
movie. Indeed, the film was, on release, marketed and promoted through
its soundtrack. Music `performs' as a fibrous core through the text,
creating a post-modern opera, through an assemblage of different sounds,
diegetic and non-diegetic, evoking the concerns of love, sexuality (but a
sexuality outside the confines of gender; the film is in its processuality
very sexy!), death and tragedy. Indeed, sounds become gestures, which
are also vocal, as Deleuze writes in Cinema 2,
Where the visible body disappears . . . What is freed in non-desire is music,
and `speech', their intertwining in a body which is now only sound, a body
of new opera. It is no longer the characters who have a voice, it is the
voices, or rather the vocal modes of the protagonist (whisper, breathing,
13
shout, eructation) which become the sole true characters.

A very different film from either Orlando or The English Patient,

nonetheless Romeo and Juliet takes as its thematic narrative a tale of
romantic love and the ensuing tragedies. In the exploration of young
romance lies a parodic and post-modern discernment of such concepts.
168 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Death of the subject and the death of history also seem to relay the death
of love.
The mise-en-sce
Á ne is set within a contemporary American/Brazilian
cityscape ± in fact from the statue of Christ which looms out and provides
an ambivalent icon of both love and death, we can see this is set in Rio de
Janeiro (a Westernised Verona in several senses of the word). Here,
Shakespearean lords and kinsmen are replaced with a sexy, colourful
array of young popular dudes, straight and gay, transvestites, bisexuals,
transsexuals, punks, bikers and sado-masochists. We are given charac-
teristic emblems of the contemporary world of corporate finance (Paris)
or else exotic, plumed and pulchral visions of excess and the carnival-
esque (Mercutio). Romeo (Leonardo di Caprio) seems to fit somewhere
inbetween, but his tendencies towards romantic love render him an
innocent among such company! An innocent who nonetheless finds
himself guilty of murder. Love and hate are yet part of the same equation
of passion. However, that charming, witty and parodic post-modernism
merely enthrals in its parallelism or repetition in difference of love,
tenderly and sensitively enacted through the innocence of youth (Claire
Danes as Juliet and Leonardo di Caprio as Romeo). The cynicism of
parody is thus tinged with the proverbial delights of a `neo-romantic'
venture as a reply to the horrific renditions of a culture embroiled in the
sometimes bereft despair and ugliness of irony, parody, deceit, critique
and an all-pervading fear of the existence of `love', or what that might
mean in a post-post-structuralist climate! Fear of tradition, a disrespect
for originations, a disdain for `depth' and `meaning' are ironically
juxtaposed, becoming simultaneously a respect for a text and language
that does speak with metonym and metaphor ± a denial of everything
Deleuze stands for. Such contradictions. The movie is both post-modern
and yet post-post-modern in its forces, intensities and resonances of
haecceity. Shakespearean language, taken out of its traditional literary
context, becomes part of the `energies' as it colludes and collides with
contemporary sounds, diegetically and non-diegetically, through which
the film impacts. Meanings, whether parodic or not, are actually not what
concerns this Deleuzian exploration of the `event', the `haecceity', the
`becoming-woman' of the film.
There is across the movie a repetition-in-difference of all the various
elements: generic characteristics such as character, plot, narrative, but
also in terms of time and spatial zones. A difference-in-repetition across
visual and aural `affects' through `becoming'. A neo-aesthetics, here, is
explored through differential relations ± unlike Freudian psychoanalytic
ideas on pleasure (tied up with inorganic death originations) and `bound
 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 169
excitation'. Deleuze refers instead to `differential relations', differentiated

forms of material and molecular elements of our make-up. So the generic

characteristics no longer hold the only validity for understanding the

impact of the cinematic event. Instead, other categories impose: colours

and sounds fill the in-between spaces of the filmic text. The ways in which

the colours clash, coincide, resonate, the dimensions of their tones and

blurring of boundaries, the linearity across and within the frames, provide

rhythms and movements across the screen, and this functions as sensation

as opposed to `pleasure'.

Rather than think of the movie as a filmic version of the famous

romantic myth, I want to explore how Romeo and Juliet works as a

rhythmical, processual and moving set of energies and intensities. It is an

intensely rhythmical experience, set within a variety of different intona-

tions of metre, timbre, pace, tone and voice. Certainly it does operate at

the level of the molar, or semiotic, and the ideological and psychoanalytic

readings could be a mechanism through which to explore its text. Such

possibilities are inherent in the textual elements. (For example, the scene

where Romeo and Juliet meet is replete with looks, gazes, returned stares

between glass, screens and/or mirrors. Also, the Boschian-like party

14
sequence has some beautiful characters straight out of Freud's `un-

canny'.) However, the entire experience, as a two-hour event, works as a

`body' in connection with a rhythmical set of performances, resonant

through a varied display of musical notations, scales, cadences, contra-

puntal nuances, dissonances and lyrical patterns which collide and

vibrate with both dialogue and visuals.

The music, I feel, provides the main structure to the film. We can

discern a set of sequences, clearly defined across the different types of

music. Through the music as an overall structuring fibre, we find a neo-

aesthetics at work in this film. When our bodies absorb the movements of

the screenic images, instead of reflecting them, our activity can be

described as effort, or, as I have outlined in the book so far, as `affect'.

The `affect' replaces or at least is simultaneous to representation. One of

the most exciting films which epitomises the `becoming-woman' of

sensation, and performs as a body, in locomotion, as a concept-image-

affect, Romeo and Juliet produces a theatricality of the cinema which is

totally distinct from the theatricality of the theatre. As Artaud and the
15
film director Carmelo Bene suggest, the cinema can bring about a more

profound theatricalisation than theatre. Here bodies embrace, entwine

and intertwine, bodies which animate the scene, as Deleuze states, `each

body has both space and light, the body is also sound as well as vision, all
16
components of the ``image'' come together on the body'. We see this at
170 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
work equally in Luhrmann's film Strictly Ballroom (1992). Other direc-

tors, like Scorsese, have also portrayed this `gestural' or `pathic' con-

stitution of bodies in their films. I am thinking here of Scorsese's Age of

Innocence , where the camera movements are a beautiful choreography

through colour, texture, space and sounds, providing a bio-vital aesthetic

which ennervates the emotionality of the film. Sounds and colours

become attitudes of the body, gestures, categories constituting new bodies

in neo-aesthetic consilience.

Any first viewing of Romeo and Juliet is set to blow the mind/body.

Senses reel, distanciating any gendered subjectivity and fragmenting

subjectivity beyond any sense of identity. The `depth' of this neo-aesthetic

experience is articulated through a sheer materiality and viscerality of the

affect and sensation. This is accommodated through the many rhythms,

spaces and interstices of the movie, as a `body' very much relating to a

wider body. But not the phenomenological `lived body,' the corporeal

human body, but a body at a deeper level, at a level of felt intensity. An

intensity which is in and of itself, a material sensation. There is a `non-

commensurability' of the various images. What force enables, produces

and evokes such intensities ± a desire felt outside any positionality,

outside any psychoanalytic, libidinal, semiotic or cultural formations

of desire? Such force is felt within the depths of the body without organs,

within the joyous realms of the processual, on the plane of immanence,

not within any lived or phenomenological body. What is experienced is

sheer nervous vibration. Here is the real `becoming-woman' of the

cinematic, where depth and processuality of the material emotion are

emergent through a technologised body of the screen. That screen is also a

facialised body.

The film quite literally begins with a small television screen, centre

frame. A face (the screen is face, her face the screen) of a female presenter

introduces us to the narrative of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . From

an instant image of a television screen displaying a face, we are carried

into the spaces of the film's mise-en-sce

Á ne. The face/screen becomes a

body through a vibrant choreography of camera and cinematographic

rhythms and cacophony of sound. The film displays a vast array of forces,

sheer velocities and movements, which are dynamic, ecstatic and jouis-
17
sancial in their fluidity ± a fluidity which is both static and dynamic.

Take, for example, the opening shots of the movie. From the small

television screen the camera pans out in vast sweeping gestures, as though

carried on a helicopter, which then becomes part of the image.

We are carried, cinematographically, into the screen, on the helicopter,

taking us into a contemporary Brazilian/American city/beach esplanade,

 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 171
juxtaposing sixteenth-century Verona, through sweeping rhythms of the

camera, flying across, through, from all angles and positions, in a

dizzying choreography of chaos. Still, blank screens with the words `In

Fair Verona' or `A pair of star-crossed lovers' are juxtaposed with the

action shots. The materiality of both sound molecule and the felt, haptic,

experience of the visual collide to carry us outside of our fixed bodies, to

the extent that we feel that we do actually move, fly, swim, with the

camera, in a dizzying disorientation. The heart literally races (remember

the definition earlier of the affect as an autonomic physical response) with

the viscerality of this sequence. We really do, as Deleuze indicated, occupy

the interstices of the edits, cuts, wipes and fades of the camera, becoming

part of the cinematic body and constituting a wider `body' of world/body

18
connections.

We feel the energy exacerbated through images of heat, death and

destruction. A dramatic intensity proliferates the screen. Signifiers on

billboards indicate contemporary destruction. Stills are framed in close-

up shots, alongside wipes and fades. The Capulet Boys and the Montague

Boys invade/seduce our space on the screen, parading their sexy, angular,

Romanesque bodies through a palette of exuberance: cobalt, ultramar-

ines, violets, blues, rich warm yellows, passionate and exotic reds. Flames

engulf the screen in several places, creating a haptic scenario of passion

and danger together. Textures of diamond-studded metal guns/swords,

gleaming, feral, feline teeth, snarling, glowing bodies in armour seem to

come straight out of a neo-western, replete with Sergio Leon-esque music.

The hero's cowboy image is replaced with the majesty of the Roman

centurion. Tybalt's erotic bodily display is matched by his equally

intense and dynamic words, `Peace, I hate the word . . .' His words

act as a figural gest, in terms of the pitch, intonation and tone, as a

cadence with the music, to present a poetic vibration with the diegetic

musical sounds. The intensities of the movie are felt through its processual

rhythms of colour, movement and sound. The flow and rhythm are so

important to the diegesis of the film as are the feelings of openings,

floating and flying, effectuated through diagonal, vertical and other lines

of movement.

The performativity of the film is indeed very beautiful. But not in any

romantic sense of the word `beautiful'. The processuality of the film takes

over the formality of the aesthetic form of narrative closure. Things just

`flow'. The eye of the spectator moves in a dance of its own, in matrixial

ways, imbricating the tactile within the scopic, a haptic sense of `rela-

tionality'. This relational space is at the interstitial space of the subject

and object, the in-between as I mentioned earlier. Such eroticisation of the

172 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
eye means that the spectator's gaze functions processually to incorporate

a synaesthetic assemblage: a `felt' experience. The beautiful, as Brian

Massumi suggests, `in this view of aesthetics, is the incipient perception of

19
the vitality of matter, its dynamogenic strength or force. Its autopoiesis.'

Post-modern in its eclecticism, pastiche and parody, the diegesis pre-

sents choreographed bodies, flying, dancing and elegantly displaying and

performing, such that we experience the totality of the screen as a body in

movement, constituted from several bodies in locomotion. Some of the

most evocative scenes are the fight sequences, where guns/swords are

projectile prostheses and become part of the owner's performance, deftly

choreographed to the point of vibratory exhilaration (one recalls a similar

erotic sword sequence in Terence Stamp's performance in Far from the

Madding Crowd (1967)). Symphonies of classical music, Mozart's 25th

Symphony and at times operatic music from Tristan and Isolde, drift into

street style, bombastic rapper riffs and chords. Repetitious chords and

riffs frisson through the body's depths. We are literally carried into the

movie through sound as much as image. We `become' part of the

processuality of the film's movement, into a filmic body, as a whole

harmonics of performativity. This sequence ends with the police warning

the two houses of Capulet and Montague, of ensuing catastrophe in the

light of their continued aggressions.

We cut to a more serene, calm and gently flowing camera action, as we

follow the Montagues in their car searching for Romeo. The music of

Radiohead (popular band of the 1990s) languorously drawls from their

emotive lyrics: `You want me . . .' Our first glimpse of Romeo is enhanced

by the melancholy and soporific lyrics of Radiohead's music. Romeo is set

against what looks like a mock cut-out image of an old dilapidated

proscenium arch theatre in Sycamore Grove, which becomes a pastiched

platform, as a theatrical stage: a stage, within a stage, within a world, for

the setting of several sequences across the rest of the movie ± most

evocatively the death of Mercutio and the ensuing death of Tybalt. Here

we have Romeo, his figure set in contrast with the splendour of the

elements, stunning orange and apricot skyline set against threatening grey

clouds, all encapsulated within the proscenium arch of a `theatrical,

dramatic stage'. This scene acts as a forced movement, the pace and

rhythm of music, camera movements and edits, changing, as a contrast

with the prior sequences. Images oscillate (for example, the hooker who

erotically seduces those who merely stand and stare) in gentle, erotic,

slow-motion rhythms to the sound of Radiohead, enhancing the distan-

ciation and collisions with the prior sequence.

Comedy, and carnivalesque style, in the form of the Capulet mansion

 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 173
sequence, works as resonance with the previous sequence. Suddenly we
are presented with a different film style. Camera movements echo silent-
cinematic techniques, where characters' movements are comedic and
farcical because of the stark linearity, awkwardness and sterility of the
body language. Juliet's mother beautifully epitomises this in her distrac-
tion and agitation. Repetition of Juliet's name, screamed at different
pitches and timbres, by both nurse and mother, resonates (in the Deleu-
zian sense of the word) with the actions to the point of delirium, providing
a contrast with the serenity and tenderness of the previous scene with
Romeo in distraction over unrequited love. The sound works as a pattern
across the accompanying images, effectuating a comic style. Such comedy
is beautifully counterpointed with classical music, colliding with the
images to present movement-images in patterns across the screen. Pat-
terns of linearity and stark, harsh shapes, tones, colours and textures
create a `malleable mass' of images, perceived as movement-images, `the
whole is no longer the logos which unifies the parts, but the drunkenness,
the pathos which bathes them and spreads them out. From this point of
view, images constitute a malleable mass, a descriptive material loaded
20
with visual and sound features'.
Juliet's mother, for example, displays a classical masquerade as Cleo-
patra, replete with exotic dark wig, but parodied by her prior parading
around, dressed and made up like some clown out of a pantomime. In
contrast with this, she splendidly leaves the room, elegant and monu-
mental in gold-sequinned dress, tightly bound by breath-taking (literally)
corsets, hair and dress enhanced with feathers, with the following words,
`Juliet . . . ugh!' A moment of pure delight. She performs as some sort of
figural action, rather than as a character.
Cut to different music . . . `Angel', a gently rhythmical piece, augmen-
ted with a stunning colourful mise-en-sce
Á ne, brightly highlighted with
fireworks of purples, pinks, turquoise and gold at Sycamore Grove. This
is followed through with the move to the party scene, following Romeo's
scene with Mercutio where they both indulge in drugs. Mercutio's speech
to Romeo on `love' in its lyricism, rhythm and volatility designates an
hysterical madness, whilst performing as an intensity, a volition within
the patterns of sounds, resonating and bouncing off from the previous
music. What follows is a beautifully choreographed and colourful drug-
induced hallucination: Catherine wheels swirl in colourful resonation in
rhythm with the camera movements, circular tracking shots, which
provide a reeling motion. This action, together with the primary colours,
impinges on the brain/eye movements in specifically pleasurable ways;
there is nothing fixed, nothing angular. All is rhythmically and beautifully
174 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
choreographed providing a processual experience. Colour is experienced
21
before form, movement before form. But only ever so gently mediated,

that the process is almost instantaneously `felt'. The variation of rhythms

in the sequences contrast, complement and disrupt others, or else they

work as prosthetic assemblages.

The highlight of the party sequence is Mercutio's erotic display of

cross-dressing, resplendent in white-sequinned corset and stockings (con-

trasting with the deep purple of the other dancers), white wig resonating

against the masculinity of his moustached and dark, passionate, rich

22
features. A delicious delirium of erotica. He descends the staircase to the

vibrant sounds of Kim Mazelle's `Young Hearts' (parody intended of

23
course). His/her dance is part of different dance modes in the film. In

contrast with the earlier frenetic displays of flying bodies, his musical

sequence gives a gentler swaying and creatively sculptural quality to its

bodies and to the body, the wider `body' constituted by both film,

spectator and world. Bodies weave, collide, connect, oscillate and inter-

relate through a diegesis of `malleable images'. Visions of excess, tactility,

sensuality and the frisson of sexual exorbitance and transgression are

visualised and hapticised (from the word `haptic') through shapes,

colours and tones moving in time, but also dislocated from time. Demons,

angels and whores become tropes from mythical fables and fabulations.

Cleopatra to Caesar are masqueraded within the vibrance of the mise-en-

sce
Á ne and seem to come out of Freud's `uncanny'. This is, of course, all a

hallucinatory dream, induced by drugs, but as a film it works on the

24
brain, as a form of altered state. Just as drugs work on the brain in

chemical ways which affect the synaptic and neuronal mechanisms of the

cellular structures, so too film as matter works on the brain in similar

ways. Thus, such images are not purely `images' (yes, of course they do

also operate `as' image seen by the eye, but the eye/I is not a passive vessel

of visual stimulants). Images are not merely representations, for inter-

rogation, but `elements of sensation', as the `stuff' of matter, or brain

formations. The colours, movements and oscillations generate/compose

the brain's active processes. The act of `seeing' is not a passive thing,

neither is it only an eye/I relational of psychic manifestations (although of

course there is still a role for psychoanalysis and the more recent uses of

psychoanalysis through the work of Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger; see the

Bibliography for details of her work). I am not trying to suggest we should

deny this, but to suggest other frames in which film works on the brain.

The brain actively creates the perception through molecular and cellular

actions. Percept and affect form as a block of sensation. The `aesthetic

composition . . . agglomerates in the same transversal flashes, the subject

 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 175
and object, the self and other, the material and the incorporeal, the before
and the after . . . in short, affect is not a question of representation and
25
discursivity, but of existence'. Indeed, it is this rich body of percepts and
affects that displaces any fixed idea of identity and thus makes room for
richer creative tendencies, accommodated through the imbrication of
brain/mind and body, in collusion with the wider molecular and cellular
body of life.
Juliet is introduced through her angelic costume, virginal white and
delicately textured, marking the ethereality and chastity of her innocence.
This works both as parody and yet is in its symbolism, tenderly sincere.
Metaphorically and metonymnically then, the film does have many
resonances. But in a Deleuzian sense, the film impacts as matter, as a
processual `event' in ways outside of representation, metaphor or ima-
gery. It connects; it constitutes a `worlding' process. It is a total worlding
of experience of molecular forces through a materialist aesthetic.
The party mood is counterpointed by Des'ree singing the popular track
`Kissing You', with its romantic, soft and delicate rhythms and intona-
tions, romantically bringing Romeo and Juliet together for the first time,
but distanced through the screens of a vast aquarium. The languorous
liquidity and fluidity of the colours and tones lend a sensuality to the
mood and feel of the sequence. The swaying rhythms of the music are
echoed through the movement-image as liquid perception in the image of
the fish, swimming and wafting in the rippling water. Water provides
again one of those molecular ways in which matter effectuates brain
mechanisms. Pleasure is evoked by the gentle fluidity of rippling effects.
Colours ± greens, turquoises, blues, opals, lavenders ± are painted across
a canvas which fades and wipes into a liquidity of sensuality and
sensation. Dissipated lighting and rippling shades enhance the transience
of the scene, highlighting the ephemerality and processuality, not only of
this sequence, but the very image-concept-affect of `love'. This is further
enhanced by a display of camera movements, in a different dance
structure: a swirling set of bodies, which reflects a charming and tender
pattern of gazes, glances, looks, gestures, smiles and eye contact, with
matrixial patterns of looking across and between Romeo and Juliet, as
Juliet dances with Paris. (Remember the dance sequence between Alma
 sy
and Katharine in The English Patient, which has similar resonances.) The
dance itself is a gentle, romantic, slow, delicate and controlled action of
bodies and faces, close and apart, resonances of ambiguities, sensibilities
and sensitivities across two bodies which are eloquently apart ± inter-
estingly one looking, the other looked at! The depth of material emotion
is part of the same canvas as romantic love. Of course, one might argue
176 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
that this is all parodic in intent, pastiched to the point of ridiculing the

convention of romantic love. Such cynicism is justly valid, and yet it could

be argued that this view is naively resistant of an understanding of love,

26
and the realities of love in a wider sense. Such cynicism perhaps fails to

engage with the depth of emotion felt in the primordiality of the body's

and brain's physical experience of sexual encounter. Yes, of course,

bodies collide, and resonate, chemically and hormonally effectuated,

or not, but maybe, just maybe, there is something deeper, felt within

the depths of a primordial state. Why else is there discrimination and

distinction? It cannot all be merely biological. There is a connection at a

primordial level. Everything connects. Only connect. Is it justHowards

End? But, it depends on the two bodies/brains/minds in collision (that is,
discrimination and distinction). The film works on a multidimensional

level. It literally engages the technologised body (the act of watching a

film is a technologised experience, an altered state as much as sex or drug

taking) in assemblage with the sensual, the pathic and the intellectual, as

much as the arena of sensation.

The famous balcony sequence offers much in the way of vibrant move-

ments, oscillations of lines, rhythms and resonances. A haptic sense of vision

is created through the liquidity of the images, and the tactility of textures.

The curtains sway eloquently, softly evoking haptic sensuality. The two

bodies literally collide, resonate, and force each other apart here, swimming

under water, and exhilaratingly in and out of each other's consciousness.

Again, reflection, colours, tones and movements work together to create the

undulating sensuality of the scene. The bodies in the water modulate,

through both movement and colour, a liquidity of perception, where the

perceived image is diffused into vibrations, so that the liquid movement goes

beyond itself into a material, energic element (see Chapter 5). The formation

of the `image' is defined by molecularity, not by visual representation.

Sensation is accommodated through this molecularity.

The lyricism of Shakespeare's words works in delicate contrast to the

post-modern parody of a 1990s pastiche. The film continues to impact

through the `unthought' interstitial spaces, through the molar and the

molecular. Juliet's initial speech, the famous `Romeo, Romeo . . .' speech,

works as a lyrical musical refrain, setting in counterpoint, the flickering,

visual movements of the camera. It also works as a delicate parody, given

the humour and comedy of the acting styles here ± comic, awkward,

angular and farcical at times. Romeo continually falls over, colliding into

things. The sequence ends with Romeo rushing off to Father Lawrence's,

to the track, `You and Me, Always, and Forever', a light-hearted and

uplifting lyrical piece.

 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 177
Music continues to provide the fibrous tissue for the film's diegesis and

impact. In the rest of the movie, the variety of tones, lyrics and melodies

of the musical notation provides vibrational contrasts across and be-

tween sequences. The marriage of Romeo and Juliet is played out to the

track `Everybody's Free to Feel Good'. But the following death of

Mercutio and Romeo's revenge on Tybalt are set in counterpoint and

resonance with the marriage sequence by the dramatic operatic music.

Romeo's ensuing madness and banishment are further enhanced through

the musical score, with intradiegetic music effecting its force upon our

experience of the movie. Flash lightning, chaotic camera angling, un-

controlled fits of passion and despair from Romeo's words (first when he

realises the severity of his killing of Tybalt and echoed again when he

hears of Juliet's death) vibrate through the sound molecules of the

soundtrack, all in contrapuntal collision with the earlier, delicate and

joyous sequences. But such resonances (and I use the word resonance

here in the Deleuzian sense) don't merely provide diegetic elements to a

narrative. In Deleuzian paradigms of the `beyond of desire' they impact

with the molecularity of the brain to provide the processuality of the

beyond of subjectivity, the becoming-woman of the cinematic, the

aesthetics of sensation. In terms of my overall argument, then, the

cinematic experience is something beyond the purely representational.

If film theory has located debates within representation, semiotics and

theories of desire premised on some sort of visual encounter with identity

and subjectivity within that scenario, then to date such film theory has

omitted to consider the wider impact upon the minds/brains/bodies of

those who experience film. It works as sensation, as an experiential event

of becoming. The becoming is modulated through the processes of brain/

mind/body formations in collusion with the visual and aural elements of

the textual format.

The final sequence of Romeo and Juliet's romantic death effuses bright

colours: blues, golds and silver and sensual lighting is diegetically created

within the mise-en-sce

Á ne through candlelight. Such colours collude,

vibrate with the musical score, with the notational elements of the

music, within the synapses of the brain's functioning processes. Of

course, the emotional nuances also impinge (or maybe they are created)

through the totality of the experience, a commingling of sensation, and

total imbrication of molar and molecular elements. Indeed, scientific

research has not yet been able to totally explain the ways in which

emotion is effectuated within the brain's cellular functioning patterns. It

is within the molar and the molecular perhaps. Consequently in rethink-

ing any aesthetic within film studies, it might be pertinent for us to

178 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
engage with this imbrication of ideas ± not opposing, but conjoining

perspectival views.
27
A neo-aesthetics of sensation or a neuro-aesthetics (Semir Zeki refers

to a new perception of aesthetics as neuro-aesthetics) then is premised, as

we have seen here, on affect and sensation, rather than a subjectivity.

Such a neo-aesthetic works through the molecularity of matter. Within its

modulational elements, colour, as I have explored above, is specifically

significant, and is the first impact within the brain's cellular functioning.

Colour is extremely resonant in Romeo and Juliet , and it operates across

the canvas of the film as a certain energy expenditure, conceived through

certain cellular activities. Visual experiences are not necessarily premised

on the mechanisms of the eye as such, or on seeing. Sensation is

accommodated within the brain's functioning. Norseen's description

of the instant cerebellum efferent responses is specifically appropriate

28
to the party sequence described above. The various forms of motion,

which are referred to as processual, and therefore pleasing to the brain's

mechanisms, are prevalent throughout the movie. Gyrating wheels,

circular camera movements, circular tracking shots echoing spinning

wheels, swirling bodies, heads, arms, legs, shapes in collusion with the

sounds are molecular elements of sensation.

Post-modern parody it may be, but Romeo and Juliet operates as a

veritable `becoming-woman' through its forces of sensation. In some

ways these patterns are also discernible, but differently so, in the next film

under discussion, Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days .

NOTES
1. Cioran, `Meetings and Movements', in Anathemas and Admirations , p. 148.

2. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues , p. 92.

3. Pastiche here is defined as a conscious imitation. Pastiche incorporates the

knowledge that the imitation is enjoyable, but understood for what it is:

enjoyable cliched imitation. This enables fun to be poked at romantic love while

also inviting us to enjoy it.

4. To each his or her own reading.

5. `Pre-personals exist as a kind of field of different forces or intensities, wills to

power, that resonate with one another, that interact in ways that produce effects

on one another. Sexual drives, the surface of bodies, aggression, one's internal

organs, emotions, experiences, sensations are all pre-personal' (C. Colwell,

`Deleuze and the Prepersonal', in Philosophy Today , p. 18).

6. Deleuze relates Bergson's definition of qualitative multiplicity as follows. `A

complex feeling will contain a fairly large number of simple elements; but as long

as these elements do not stand out with perfect clearness, we cannot say that they

were completely realised and as soon as consciousness has a distinct perception of

them, the psychic state which results from their synthesis will have changed for

this very reason'; see Deleuze, Bergsonism , p. 42.

 Romeo and Juliet ± Deleuzian Sensations 179
7. Dana Polan, `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas and Olkowski

(eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 240; his reference is to

Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logigue de la sensation, p. 31.

8. See Cyborg spectatorship in B. Kennedy, `Post-feminist Futures in Film Noir', M.

Aaron (ed.), The Body's Perilous Pleasures.

9. Matrixial is a word which has current purchase in contemporary film theory. It

has been theorised by several film and art theorists, for example Bracha

Lichtenberg-Ettinger in her insightful work beyond Lacan. See Lichtenberg-

Ettinger's work `Matrix and Metamorphosis', in Differences, A Journal of

Feminist Cultural Studies.

10. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision, ch. 9, esp. pp. 59, 83.

11. Polan, `Francis Bacon', in Boundas and Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the

Theatre of Philosophy, p. 241; Polan translates here Deleuze, Francis Bacon:

Logique de la sensation, p. 37.

12. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 211.

13. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 191.

14. As in Hieronymus Bosch's paintings of the underworld.

15. Bene, according to Deleuze, is closest to the work of Artaud. Deleuze discusses

Bene's work in Cinema 2, p. 191.

16. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 191.

17. Jouissancial is a French term which refers to orgasmic bliss and pleasures felt

through specific experiences. See B. Kennedy, `Post-feminist Futures in Film

Noir', in The Body's Perilous Pleasures.

18. Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 191±223.

19. B. Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in Canadian

Review of Comparative Literature, p. 16.

20. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 158.

21. Zeki explains how the brain responds to colour prior to form or movement, but

so acutely close are these mechanisms, that they seem almost instantaneous. In

fact, they are not. Colour is recognised as primary to form. (See Zeki, Inner

Vision, ch. 7, p. 58±69).

22. Antipodean cinema in the 1990s has shown a love of parody, pastiche, cross-

dressing, and masquerade. Films such as Strictly Ballroom and Priscilla, Queen

of the Desert (1994) are fine examples. Both are dynamic and visceral films.

23. Dance often functions in film as a way of distanciating any fixed or gendered

spectatorial positioning. It articulates a matrixial space, or a matrixial gaze,

where gendered identity is unfixed and oscillates. See descriptions of Basic

Instinct (1992) and Romeo is Bleeding in B. Kennedy, in `Post-feminist Futures

in Film Noir', in M. Aaron, The Body's Perilous Pleasures.

24. See Anna Powell, Transformations: Altered States in Film.

25. F. Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 93.

26. There has been a whole arena in feminist theory which has reconsidered and

valorised the notion of the `romance' and its validity as a reality of life.

27. Zeki, Inner Vision.

28. John Norseen, `Images of the Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet'.

Chapter 9
Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

1
Are full of passionate intensity.

There is a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon

which everything is given, upon which unformed elements and materials

dance that are distinguished from one another only by their speed, and

that enter into this or that individuated assemblage depending on their

2
connections, their relations of movement.

What could Yeats have meant when he talked of the worst being full of

`passionate intensity', when in a Deleuzian sense, intensities are the very

essence of becoming-woman through sensation? Should passionate

intensity denote negativity, as it seems to in Yeats's poem, or is there

an intensity which, in its very passion, is full of positivity, life, hope and

new beginnings? This is the sort of intensity that vitally courses through

the diegetic veins and body of Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days , a violent

and visceral movie by all accounts. But through that violence flows a

dynamic and emphatic resurrection of life's positivities, energies, be-

comings ± a terrible beauty? In the chaos of imagery and a mise-en-sce

Á ne

which is disturbingly violent lies a rich, effusive and contagious con-

firmation of hope, life's volatility and germinal possibilities. Life con-

tinues and evolves, despite and indeed because of the horrors, and

pleasures, of the diegetic imagery. Certainly Yeats's very Catholic poem

was an apocalyptic vision of the Second Coming, the end of a Christian

era, brought about by an increasingly secular world, replete with greed,

selfishness, materialist pleasures and a denial of the spiritual. But what

 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 181
relevance do such words offer in today's vision, a secular world which

has managed through science to prioritise the secular and the natural, to

question anything outside of a real and natural existence, and to

dissipate the world of transcendent values? The joyful cruelty of becom-

ing and a valorisation of immanence as opposed to transcendence.

Transcendence is replete with teleological endings, with sources of

origination premised in some other zone of being, for example, a

spiritual zone ± desire effectuated through a need to return to that

original inorganic moment. A desire premised upon some sense of

satisfaction and containment through endings and satiation. The realm

of immanence offers no teleological endings, no satiation, no concerns

with original sources or inorganic origins, through which the death

instinct is connected to desire. The realm of immanence is in and

of itself a processual effectuation of transition and creative evolution.

It is a continual evolution of life's positivities, possibilities and becom-

ings. A denial of the spiritual need not negate the positivity and joy-

fulness of life's evolution, life's becoming. Indeed, the plane of

immanence is a continuum of forces of desire, as Deleuze argues,

existing as speeds, intensities, fluxes, outside any teleological end points,

and outside any psychoanalytical frameworks and their notions of

subjectivity.

Writing this chapter only days before the actual (real time) as opposed

to virtual millennial celebrations (seen continually on television and the

internet) and experiencing the cultural euphoria and endemic exhilaration

at this very moment of watching/writing, I don't want to offer any

ideological readings of apocalyptic doom (such visions are obviously

apparent throughout Bigelow's movie) premised on such effete and,

indeed, well-known forebodings, such as the end of the world, the

beginnings of a new form of Enlightenment. Such ideas are still of course

redolent of a culture premised on origins and endings, on linearity, on

goals, on psychoanalytic versions of the unconscious, on Oedipal con-

figurations of desire; no process, no beauty of processuality, ephemerality

and becoming. Although I intend to look at this movie as a haecceity, as

an `event' of movement and becoming, rather than as a text with a

meaning, through Deleuzian aesthetic frameworks premised on processes

of becoming-woman, as a body without organs, I have to first acknowl-

edge that as a text, there is a powerful molar politics at work within

Bigelow's film; and any experience of the film as `event' or `haecceity'

imbricates an awareness of the molar within its molecular resonances.

Psychoanalysis still has its role to play in any analysis of textual forma-

tions, and I don't wish to deny those possible interpretations of a movie as

182 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
text. I aim merely to offer different paradigms for engagement. The film is

indeed a violent movie, textually. But critiques of the aestheticisation of

violence fail to consider how the film impacts, vibrates and connects

through its aesthetic resonances, as a powerfully moving (emotional,

psychological, biological and literal) canvas, and indeed body, outside its

representational images. Bigelow's film offers an experience of a neo-

aesthetic engagement which impacts on the consciousness through brain/

mind/bodily assemblages, as a newer body, into a potentially political

frame. The affective spaces, as new enunciative processes of the film,

contaminate and thus might effectuate change in mentalities. Guattari's

belief in Chaosmosis , as we saw in Chapter 1, establishes a new concern

with aesthetics as a way of re-engagement with the world, outside of any

molar political programmes. Certainly, through the plane of organisation

of the film, one can discern a powerful and moving condemnation of a

racist American culture which brought us the horrors of the Rodney King

killing, emblematic of a history of racist, white, imperialist intransigence,

ironically formulated within a so-called `Christian' and interestingly thus

`transcendent' ethic. The death of such history is a welcome beginning for

a new millennium. If read through a framework of ideology and repre-

sentation, Bigelow's movie does much to bring home the horrors of

contemporary racism, and indeed sexism, as it pervades our culture still,

and I don't wish to deny those reductionist but still important textual

`readings' of the film. A basic, reductionist, structuralist and semiotic

reading of the film is replete with metaphorical displays of degradation

3
and torment, providing vibrant analogies of a racist, sexist, oppressive

culture. But what I am suggesting is that those very political reverbera-

tions are to some extent effectuated through a plane of consistency,

through the elements of sensation that resonate through the `event' of the

film as experience, not merely as representation.

Contemporary movies display a diversity of narratives depicting apoc-

alyptic visions, nightmare scenarios of death, destruction, despair, nega-

tivity and repulsion. From Twelve Monkeys (1995), through to The End
of Days 4
(1999), Hollywood seems to provide familiar horrific future

visions: the end of time, the end of history; but that end of history,

projected through post-modernist discourse, is merely a blip in a time

loop which is eternally returning, in gyration, in vortical movement and in

processual becoming ± a time outside `time' in any diachronic sense, a

synchronic time which is different at every moment of its being, in

continual processuality. The volatility and creativity of Strange Days

lies in its `becoming-woman' and sensation, in its processuality and its

terrible beauty: a beauty which pertains to a process of time, not to form.

 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 183
A very different film from Romeo and Juliet , nonetheless Strange Days
works through similar patterns and vibrational resonances to impact
upon both the brain/mind and body. Like most of Bigelow's films, there
seems to be an overt theatricality of thrillingly visceral action-packed
5
visions. My choice of the film has been disturbingly ironic, ambivalent
and confrontational for my own consciousness, given that I am trying to
position a neo-aesthetic which might become a pragmatic move towards a
change in consciousness outside of any politic, but through an aesthetic. I
purposely chose not to position a specific genre. But to look at a cross-
section of different film genres. Films like Orlando and The English
Patient quite obviously offer more `peaceful' diegeses, whilst Romeo and
Juliet
, in its post-modern delights, is refreshingly innocent. How can a
violent movie like Strange Days effectuate a similarly transformational
framework for humankind's future becomings, resonances and creativ-
ities? This, therefore, is a difficult rhizome to explore, which must take on
board the imbrication of molar regimes, like psychoanalysis, like semio-
tics and textual understandings and more interestingly, in my opinion, the
molecular.
Narratively the film is set just before the end of the millennium party
celebrations (Y2K) in Los Angeles (for Los Angeles, of course, read all
those analogies of the death of history, the death of `man' and the death of
the subject redolent in post-modernist discourse ± the death of the real,
6
and the exigencies of the hyperreal, of which Baudrillard so effectively
makes us aware). In this Baudrillardian sense the film is very much `not
real' but hyperreal in its graphic depictions of chaos. It is in this post-
modern Los Angeles, two days before the final catastrophe/euphoria of
Y2K, that the plot unfolds. Ralph Fiennes plays ex-cop Lenny Nero, who
makes his living selling `clips', or miniature recordings of experiences,
which can be played back through the `SQUID' (super conducting
quantum interference device) devices placed on the head. Man/woman
is quite literally `wired' for `life', usually a piece of somebody else's life!
The narrative makes a neat and clever (although this does not justify for
one moment, I feel, such viscerally violent and pornographic images as the
rape scene, which I describe below) analogy for philosophical considera-
tions of the constructions of consciousness: the realm of the actual versus
the virtual, the ways in which the mind might be disturbed, refracted, re-
created, by a variety of technological energies and wavelengths through
the cerebral cortex's transpositions by means of electrical impulses to
synaptic tissues and cellular matrixes, not to mention the role of sub-
jectivities or singularities within the auspices of consciousness. (It is a
matter of fact, now well substantiated scientifically, that drugs like LSD
184 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
have had similar liminal effects on the brain's mechanisms, its cellular

structures and synaptic mechanism.) The very realm of fantasy becomes

mind-blowingly (literally) real, in the possibilities for mind distortion and

virtual engagement beyond and outside the exigencies of the real. The

techno-euphoria of cyberspacial virtual reality (teledildonics with head

set and data gloves) and video playback are taken one step further and

played through the direct mainlining of the cerebral cortex, rather than

the computer or TV screen, as hardware. The cerebral cortex becomes the

body, becomes the machine, fed by the arteries/cerebral tissues, which

operate as channels, tuned into the drug-like contamination of the soft-

ware clips, played through a miniature play-back device, as small as a

computer mouse. Drugs through cyberspatial technologies ± a literal on-

line source.

However, in one violently disturbing sequence, a rapist has his victim

wear a SQUID device, thus enabling her to see and feel someone actually

experience her own fear, as she sees and feels the experience `through'

that of her rapist/killer, as he perversely records the experience for `play-

back' ± `black-jack clips', snuff movies taken to even more sadistically

7
disturbing extremes. The rapist thus feeds gratuitously off his victim's

fear, heightening his own vile, sadistic pleasure in her vulnerability,

fragility and weakness. Who `owns' the experience? Is there any mutual

experience? Has she been psychologically, and emotionally, raped and

violated (we could of course argue that this is possibly the felt experience

of those who view) as much as physically violated? A total violation of her

personae. Whose experience is this, the killer's or the victim's? An

intensely chilling, and disturbing scene ± viscerally as well as psycholo-

gically and morally nauseating. (The perpetrator is justly punished in the

course of the film's narrative trajectory.)

How can a film with such representations hold any experience which is

inspirational and transformative? How can this film exist as haecceity,

and becoming? Is there a terrible beauty at work? I ask the reader to try to

open up the `mind' to the wider scenarios outside the representational to

consider the aesthetic resonances for the film as a framework for

transformations. But I don't negate the horror of the disturbing myso-

gynistic scenes which are part of the molar frame of the film's plane of

organisation. This is not to justify such scenes, but to acknowledge them

as disturbing whilst simultaneously part of the very critique that is

generated through an `in-between' state of the molar and the molecular.

The whole moral and ethical questioning about mind-control and

perversion of consciousness is interestingly apparent though visually

disturbing and problematic. Lenny's peddling of such pornographic

 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 185
8
software ironically leads him into the search for the killing of Jericho 1, a

black activist leader, and his friend, by two white cops ± obviously a

direct reference to the Rodney King killings. With the help of his friend,

Macey (Angela Bassett), he becomes ensnared in the underground sado-

masochistic and fetishistic world of Philo Gant (who, it transpires, is

behind the surveillance and killings of black rap stars like Jericho 1) and

his ex-lover Faith (Juliette Lewis). Ironically Lenny is a romantic and

innocent lover, who cannot relinquish the unrequited love he feels for

Faith (symbolic?). Sexuality, love, death and the perverse resonate across

a diegesis about racial and sexual tension and social disintegration.

Dancing to P. J. Harvey's music, Faith sings . . . `I can hardly wait . . . I

can hardly wait' . . . waiting, within . . . without, in circular, spiralling

ecstasies of technic modalities. She sways, swirling, synthetic, spiralling

synergistic energies of molecular sexualities. In her hot, white, erotic and

visceral movements, she collides in and against time, through time,

rhythmically immanent, to the ebb and flow of the waves: the sound

of the music colludes with waves of vision: the surface of the sea slowly

becomes transparent, rippling, relaying, reverberations, until . . . slowly

. . . her melting rhythm slowly fades to the earthy particles of the lotus,

locust, locus . . . locomotion . . .

According to Deleuze, waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines, in-

scribed on a plane of consistency. Strange Days, set then in 1999, the

apocalyptic euphoria of the end-of-the-century party provides, as I have

explained, a narrative of politico-racial tensions, exacerbations and

questionings. A film which disorientates and distanciates the gaze of

spectatorial identifications and representations, simultaneously, as we

have seen, accommodates a neo-Marxist critique of late-capitalist pomo-

distillation and disintegration. The neo-noiresque mise-en-sce

Á ne provides

a panorama of techno-furious culture, enhanced, encased and endangered

within its own techno-euphoria. Mind, memory and matter meld in a set

of discursive patterns of techno-post-modern angst. But such descriptions

purely explain the film through a plane of organisation ± an ideological

paradigm. Kathryn Bigelow's style presents a different panoply for

consideration. Strange Days creates a rhizome, or a cartography, of

visionary dances. Forms, subjects, identities, representations merely re-

plicate ideological structures and molarity. Molar lines or strata of

segmentarity confine us to the ideological entrapments of State Apparati,

filial, conjugal and gendered hierarchies: a Cartesian/Hegelian frame-

work within which our bodies/minds are enshrined in ideological en-

casement.
186 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
But Deleuze suggests we should destratify; we need to open up beyond

seeing our `selves' as `identities' as `subjectivities' entrapped within the

molar prisms of a capitalist, phallocentric world, the world which main-

stream Hollywood dictates. Instead, molecularity enables a destratifica-

tion beyond the processes of gendered or ideological subjective readings.

We can connect, instead, through a mind/consciousness meld, with the

molecularity of the film. Film as haecceity and sensation, rather than

representation only. Film as abstract machine, as an assemblage of

molecularity within and across a plane of consistency. Strange Days is

not just a tale of apocalyptic visions, a narrative of filiative regimes of

family, class, religion or race, or a set of symbolic and metaphorical

analogies of post-structuralist or post-modern discourses. (It is, of course,

all of those things.) It is rather, and more creatively, a process of

`becoming', an apparatus of capture, a modulationary experience of

neo-synaesthesia and hapticity of consciousness. `Becoming' is not about

`forms' and `objects' or narrative, it is constitutive of immanence. Where,

then, in the film are such resonances, such `becomings' effectuated? The

borderlines between the molar and the molecular.

Visually and aurally, the film exudes a mise-en-sce

Á ne which vibrates

and resonates in a variety of contrasting rhythms. The pace of the entire

movie oscillates and sets up a resonance with the body and mind of the

spectator. Sequences of total disintegration and chaos are created through

an exciting array of camera movements, trajectories, lighting and use of

colour. The opening sequence takes us into the mind-set of a `clip'

performing the (disturbing) fantasy of a violent robbery. Erratic camera

angling, tracking shots, panning and hand-held camera techniques are

evident here, as the camera tracks one or other of the robbers. Colours

and lighting are subdued and dour: no intensity, no warmth, complete

coldness and cruelty. The scene is reminiscent of the opening of Nikita .

Cut to Lenny ripping off the SQUID device, leading us into the narrative ±

we learn that this was a fantasy peddled to punters as on-line, mind-set

drugs. Cut to street-life culture, with images of chaos, destruction and

havoc ± burnt-out cars, muggings, killings, and general mayhem ± set to

regular rapper-style music. Contemporary musicians like Tricky and

Massive Attack provide much of the soundtrack, thus effectuating a

contemporary resonance of political and racial tension to the film's

aesthetic. This is the night before New Year's Eve 1999. The camera

pans from right to left, taking us across a panoply of devastation. Swirling

camera actions track helicopters from a variety of angles, as in Romeo

and Juliet , the sound of the blades becomes part of the intradiegetic

cacophony. Chaotic and erratic illogical cutting gives way to slow-motion

 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 187
superimpositions ± Santa Claus is mugged! Complete denial of the
fantasy, the origin, the legend. Costume, uniform, personae are defused
from reality, diffracted into a hallucinatory dreamscape. LA city police-
cars (and men) become evanescent, surreptitious movement-images
which float across the entire frame of the movie, almost pervading every
sequence, performing as a figural movement-image. Whilst not acting as
`representational' symbols, they perform across the synaesthetic scopic
matrix into the depths of a liminal space in our consciousness.
Early on in the film, we witness Iris, flying through the frames, erotic
dark-blue sequinned outfit transiently displaying a masquerade of fe-
tishistic glamour, a creature out of Bladerunner, trying to escape the
threat of the cops as they hound her. (We later learn that they are
anxious to retrieve a SQUID of a killing for which they are responsible.)
The chase sequence has the camera floating, running alongside, changing
speed, direction and angles of vision continually as it tracks Iris; we
witness the effect from her point-of-view shot. Bigelow adeptly and
chillingly conveys the terror, but beauty of a stillness, in contrasting
resonance with the cacophony of the chase, at the subway station,
through the aesthetic modulations. Vibration and resonance are effec-
tuated through a variety of techniques here. Following the ecstatic and
dynamic camera tracking of Iris, we are taken into the subway. The
diegetic music stops; the cameras slow down to a state of febrile tension.
That febrility is felt in the depths of a body without organs, through
matrixial spaces, natal and pre-Oedipal, and within a primordial state
beyond any `subjectivity'. A frame of the subway shows the cold, stark,
angular grey platform and train, in stillness, in silence. The shot is held
for a couple of tense and meaningful seconds. Suddenly Iris lurches
across the frame and shoots, like a liquid effusion of paint or light, into
the train. Visually she functions as a literal shot of liquid blue across the
still, grey, insipid canvas of the platform. A veritable liquid perception.
This is eclipsed by the following shots which frenetically display Iris
screaming hysterically in the train carriage with the police in violent
pursuit. Such terror, noise, colour and action vibrate resonantly with the
preceding shots of the silent subway platform.
Later in the movie, one of the same cops accused of murder drags his
shackled body across the frame and lunges to shoot Macey ± a beast
straight out of Yeats's poem `The Second Coming' . . . slouching towards
Bethlehem? Indeed, the very slouching movement of his body language
contrasts in a Deleuzian sense, as a vibration, with the earlier movement-
images of Iris, Faith and Macey (interestingly `woman' and not `man')
which float, run and dance across the diegesis. This black/white and
188 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
striped phenomenon (policecar/man) performs a lively dance throughout

the script, engaging us in a subconscious submergence.

Lenny, meanwhile, drives nonchalantly amidst such fantasies, simul-

taneously talking on his mobile to possible clients. The mise-en-sce

Á ne is

both reality and fantasy conjoined. Vibrant colours, reds, blues and

yellows splatter our visual senses, imbricated with a montage of non-

diegetic opera, and diegetic rap and rock music, all of which disorientate

our sensory equilibrium. The mind/body/brain is already in a state of

disorientation this early on in the movie.

Bigelow thus paints a visually and aurally rhythmical moving canvas,

which provides a mind-blowingly chaotic mise-en-sce

Á ne all the way

through the movie, through a vibrant display of erotic costumes, jouis-

sancially delightful but simultaneously dangerously deranged. The fetish

club, where Faith performs her erotic dance, is perhaps the most sig-

nificant of these sequences. Faith's performance is scintillatingly erotic

and beautifully choreographed, her body swaying through undulating

curvatures and circular motions in tune to the crystalline lyrics of P. J.

Harvey's `I Can Hardly Wait'. Dressed in exotic chain-mail dress, which

seductively clings to her body, she functions in a haptic sense, not so much

as `woman' but as `force' as `the anomalous' as Mona does in Romeo is

Bleeding. 9
Later she performs a similar dance, both violent and gentle, in

contradistinction and contrapuntal nuances, with the lyrics `You're not

rid of me . . . no you're not rid of me . . .' similarly providing a contra-

dictory erotic and disturbing figural across the film's diegesis. She per-

forms as an anomalous `figural' and `outsider' modulating the haecceities

of the music into and across the various rhythms of the film. She performs

and becomes a contrasting, vibrational line of flight from those of Macey,

and yet, in doing so, she enables such lines taken by Macey to effectuate

change and positivity. Life's positivity, force and vitalism are aesthetically

modulated through the circularity of camera angling around Faith's

dancing, and indeed her general bodily movements within the rest of

the film (for example, when she seduces Lenny). Such movements are

resonated in complete contrast with Macey's static, electrifying, angular

movements, latitudinal and longitudinal, in self-defence action sequences.

Macey's body functions in martial combat, a terrifying machine, a black

line, but a different black line from the white police/men/cars, quite

literally figuring across the canvas in synchronisation with Faith's deli-

cacy and evanescence. A bold contradistinction to the black line of the

policecars and cops which weave and collide throughout the mise-en-

sce
Á ne. The bodily performativities of both Faith and Macey, one in

circularity, the other in linearity, act as lines of movement, as move-

 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 189
ment-images which evoke, through the molecular, the sensations created

through resonance, vibration and forced movements across and within

the screen. Cleverly patterned fight sequences enhance the linearity and

Pollockian definition of such scenes. A Pollockian canvas come to life, as

it were ± a body which assembles through its body without organs, with

the bodies/minds/brains of those who view.

In several sequences, specifically the fetish club scenes, neo-fetishistic

costumes straight out of cyberpunk fictions, and aberrant styles of sado-

masochistic delights and desires, infuse our visual space, visually and

haptically stunning in their textures of silks, leathers, satins, metals and a

variety of tropes of erotica. As fantasy, they effect the brain's visual spaces

through colours and tactility. The music resonates with such visuals to

vibrate, and disorientate both brain and body at a molecular level. On this

affective level, the brain/mind is overloaded with data to the visual

cortical area: colour, motion and sound collide in sequence. In this

way, what is `representationally' disturbing can at the same time be

rhythmically quite beautiful (for example, the mugging of Santa in tune to

operatic crescendos) and perform as liquid perception within the brain.

One is here reminded of Scorsese's beautifully choreographed boxing

sequences in Raging Bull (1980), which far from being violent (although
of course they are violent on a visceral level) render a terrible beauty in

their rhythms and flows, a beauty which serves through vibration to

highlight the emotional traumas of his personal life and inner conscious-

ness. In this way, the molecularity of the film as `event' merges with the

film's molar trajectory ± its characters and their narrative.

In this way, Strange Days similarly `connects' right through its diegesis,
rather than `means'. It can be thought of as an event of experience, rather

than a text as such. In Bigelow's movie, this imbrication of disturbing

images with a processual beauty serves to offer a creative connection for

the viewer, which might just disturb enough to affect mentalities in a

Guattarian sense ± could this be new enunciative processes at work? This

is especially apparent and exemplifed in the very touching and beautiful

sequence where Macey's young son dances innocently to the gentle ballad

rhythms, swirling and enjoying a poetic autoeroticism in his unacknow-

ledged pleasure as he floats his sparkler through the darkness. The

sparkler leaves traces of its own (but not his own as it is the brain's

formation) colour and light (can we remember such fascinations as a

child: how a hand-held sparkler, when moved through the dark space of

the night, leaves traces of purples and lilac molecules, the brain's own

creation of movement-images?). Movement and colour within the brain's

cortical mechanisms effectuate a stillness, a calmness and serenity. Any

190 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
`form' that is simulated from such cortical configurations quickly dis-

perses into the ether. As a sequence this innocence and beauty, capturing

affect and becoming, counterpoints the violence and degradation of the

rape scene and the violent killing of the black activist leader. The horror

of both the rape and the killings is effectively enhanced and distanciated

by a process of forced movements within the scene centring on Macey's

son. Whilst the innocence of childhood is effectuated through a resonance

of colour, movement and rhythms, Lenny, in the background, concen-

trates on the visuals of the clip in which the black activist is murdered.

Counterpoint and distanciation effectuate an aesthetics of transforma-

tion. A new enunciative process of aesthetics effectuates a change in

mentality for the viewer. A micro-politics and ethics. A vibration is at

work across these two scenes. The killing of the black activist Jericho 1,

which Lenny replays whilst Macey watches her son (imbricating the

resonances across three positionalities), is set within a mise-en-sce

Á ne of

detritus and squalor. Two white cops humiliate and degrade, their bodily

performativities erect, violent, upright, horrific and intransigent, against

the subservience of the kneeling activists. Subservience, truth and justice

are raped by a cowardice parading as strength and virtue. Weakness

becomes strength in its annihilation. Visually the scene exudes horror, in

terms of chaotic camera movements, the sound of the voices and screams

in relation to gunshots and non-diegetic music. The figurality of the cops

in uniform presents a line of annihilation and horror both here and across

the entire canvas of the movie; this line is counterpointed by the more

sensual and gentle rhythms of the dance we see from Macey's child ± the
10
creativity, positivity and germinality of becoming-child. The compar-

ison of these two sequences on a neo-aesthetic level determines a true

micro-politics at work, a pragmatics of becoming.

In Macey's delightful vision of her son, Macey's vision is also our

vision. The pattern of gazes across and between Macey (her son is quite

oblivious, however, to her gaze, thus enhancing the autoeroticism and

delicate beauty of the scene) and her son, his movements, are beautifully

choreographed through the camera's swirling back to Macey's subjective

point-of-view shot. This creates a choreography and matrixial web of

gazes, which becomes part of the processuality of the film's haecceity ±

and through that haecceity and sensation a molecular politics is discern-

ible. A pragmatics of becoming.

But on a narrative level, ironically, the synaesthetic delights of the fetish

club and similar sequences of sado-masochistic pleasures highlight the

disturbing, suspect sexual and racial politics which permeate the movie.

Bigelow, I feel, is both parading and yet questioning those pleasurable

 Strange Days ± Deleuzian Sensations 191
and dangerous spaces of the erotic. This is not a condoning, but a creative

immersion. In a Chekovian way, Bigelow presents, she does not judge, or

11
comment. She offers up a panoply of life's exigencies. Like Cronenberg,

she take us into our own mind/brain/bodily zones, frighteningly and

chillingly confronting the contradictory spaces of fantasy, reality, and the

erotic ± where they combine and where they disperse, where they meld

and where they assemble ± rhizomatically evoking a confrontation with

one's own ghosts. Psychoanalysis might well provide some exploration of

the erotic and the exotic in the movie. But the aesthetics at work in the

mind/brain, whilst `felt' at a level beyond subjectivity, at the point of the

microtubular, can also invoke, prosthetically, mechanisms which lure the

emotions into play ± the space `between' the subjective encounter and the

non-subjective space of pre-verbal singularities, the `depth' of that pri-

mordial sense of aliveness ± autopoiesis.

NOTES
1. W. B. Yeats, `The Second Coming', in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.

2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 255.

3. I am of course taking a simple approach to the issue of sado-masochism. The

film's depiction, at a narrative level, of sado-masochistic life styles is of course

both problematic and yet simultaneously liberating. Debates abound around the

discourses of sexuality, and the possible liberatory discourse within sado-

masochistic depictions and dangerously erotic imagery has been well written

about in feminist film theory, e.g. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine,

Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, Michelle Aaron's collection on The

Body's Perilous Pleasures. I don't want to engage with those debates here, but

merely to acknowledge the breadth of theory around such filmic imagery.

4. It is interesting to note that Kathryn Bigelow's film well precedes the accolade

accorded to this most recent Arnold Schwarzenger film and did not receive the

acclaim it deserved at the time. Female directors continue to be perceived

differently from their male counterparts.

5. See for example Near Dark and Blue Steel.

6. See Baudrillard's America.

7. Thankfully Bigelow has us spared the explicitness of the physical violence, but it

is still nonetheless very disturbing, specifically from a woman director, and I

personally have had problems in defending this sequence.

8. Ironically, the same software which produces the degradation and violence of

pornography has also enabled the entrapment of the two racist murderers. A

problematic irony in the technology's potentialities for good or evil. The

technology alone is innocent. It is, of course, those who use the technology

who produce the manifestations of its possibilities.

9. In Peter Medak's film Romeo is Bleeding, Mona is the third line of flight outside

the lines of Natalie, the faithful wife, and Sherry, the mistress. Mona's disor-

ientational activities confirm her action as figural and anomalous, and outsider ±

a monstrous force for change and disorientation.

10. Deleuze writes that the beyond of becoming-woman is becoming girl. Through a

becoming-girl we reach the vortex of processuality and becoming through that

192 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
which has not yet been Oedipalised or hierarchised through social or gender

structures.

The following film, Leon , attests to a becoming-girl through the expedience of

becoming which distanciates the violence and horror of the narrative and

teleological level of the film's plane of organisation.

11. See Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982) or Crash (1996).

Chapter 10

Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian

Travesty? Leon and a Molecular
Politics via the Girl and the Child

AN EXPLORATION OF LEON

OUTLINING THE STRUCTURE ± DEFINING THE `GIRL'

Knowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a woman: it

means extracting from one's sex the particles, the speeds, and slownesses,

the flows, the sexes that constitute the girl of that sexuality. It is Age itself
that is a becoming-child, just as Sexuality, any sexuality, is a becoming-
1
woman, in other words, a girl.

[B]ecoming-woman or the production of molecular woman is the girl

herself. The girl is certainly not defined by virginity: she is defined by a

relation of movement and rest, speed and slownesses, by a combination of

atoms, an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases to roam upon a

body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. The girls do

not belong to an age group, sex, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere,

between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the
2
line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through.

In terms of a post-feminist politic, Leon (1994), like other films such as

Nikita (1990), 3
offers new spaces and representations of woman as `war-

machine' (the image of woman as strong, assertive and autonomous, a

rather reductionist and binary explanation of visual imagery). But, of

course, `representation' has never been my major concern for writing

about film in this work. However, what I want to do in this chapter is to

explore a molecular politic, to take a `tangential' move away from

Deleuzian ideas on `sensation' to some extent, and I emphasise the

proviso `tangential', to explore the Deleuzian concept of the `girl' in

relation to `becoming-woman'. Of course there is in a way an ironic twist,

in that Deleuze himself rejects metaphor and metonymy and there is,

perhaps, an audacity and irony in utilising metaphor in imbrication with

194 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
Deleuze. But I am only doing that which Deleuze himself does in his
exploration of literature and art; paradoxically developing a rhizomatic
format of creativity, which connects and imbricates works through
4
machinic assemblage. This is not about analysis, but about assemblage:
film as an experience, as event, as consciousness formation, not purely a
text. But the text is and has to be part of that machinic body.
However, in this chapter, as opposed to those so far under scrutiny, I
use those very elements (metaphor and metonymy) of narrative play to
explore some Deleuzian thoughts. I ask the reader therefore to abandon
molar critique, and to explore creatively Leon in a somewhat different
way from those above. To move, but only tangentially so, `outside' the
earlier chapters of this book which have framed the `haecceity' and
`event' and to some extent to move back into frameworks of textuality,
metaphor and metonymy. Abandon the machine, to present a more
heterogeneous machine. However, it is important not to revert (bina-
rily!) into those arenas without the hindsight of `haecceity'. Having
read Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9, which deal more specifically with the
haecceity, these should heterogeneously collude with this chapter. On
the contrary, this exploration will not dispense with my argument of a
neo-aesthetic at work in the experiential element of film, and I intend to
show how this imbrication of a neo-aesthetic alongside an analysis or
reading of the movies through the notion of the Deleuzian `girl' can
offer creative and refreshing understandings of the impact of such films,
working as a `body' in a molecular sense. A true `in-between' of
representation and haecceity. A molecular politic and a post-feminist
pragmatic methodology which re-establishes aesthetics as a possible
micro-political arena.
So far, then, I have considered how we might utilise Deleuzian ideas on
the beyond of subjectivity and the beyond of desire, through sensation,
affect and becoming-woman, as ways in which to consider film as an
event, as a `haecceitas' formation, and I have looked at how we might
analyse the ways film modulates and connects through those spaces of
Deleuzian philosophy. What I want to do in this chapter is slightly
different but it projects an interestingly conclusive development out of
the work done so far.
In this concluding chapter I shall take the Deleuzian concept of the `girl'
and its place in `becoming' to read the film. Deleuze discusses becoming-
girl as an abstract concept within his arsenal of ideas on becoming. It is
part of the same assemblage as becoming-woman. It does not refer to any
literal image, or definition of an actual molar girl, just as becoming-
woman is not about real, molar women as such. Rather, becoming-girl is
 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 195

the ultimate molecular becoming of woman, in an abstract conception of

those terms. However, in an ironic way, I am using an actual image of the
girl, within the film (in the case of Leon, the character of Mathilda, and in
Nikita, of course Nikita, a very different girl from Mathilda) to focus and
5
develop an understanding of the abstract concept of `girl' in its Deleuzian
sense, but in a way which enables a micro-politics to emerge. That micro-
politics is in fact premised on both the molecularity of `becoming-girl' but
also the neo-aesthetics of the films. I don't want to lose a sense of what the
book has so far argued, that film `works' as a machinic assemblage, as a
molecular body with other `bodies'.
Rather than losing that argument, and backtracking into theories of
representation and the molar, what I am doing is actually taking that
argument further, to open up fresh possibilities for film theory. It must
not be forgotten that I am also reading the film through an apprecia-
tion of the neo-aesthetics of sensation, to see how the aesthetic
reverberations and molecularities enable and stimulate the molar read-
ing. What should emerge is an example of that `interstitial' space,
which Deleuze argues is truly the molecular space of creativity and
`involution'. In the `in-between' spaces of molecularity and molarity is
6
an aparalletic evolution of two sensations. This does not suggest a
hybridisation of perspectives, but a continual machinic evolution be-
tween perspectival ideas. `The only way to get outside the dualisms is to
7
be between, to pass between, the intermezzo.' First, I shall provide an
exploration of the film through a molar reading, and second, in relation
to aesthetic molecularities.
We should therefore be able to discern a micro-politics at work, which,
as I argued in Chapter 1, might enable a reconnection with the political,
through the aesthetic. So, in a sense, this chapter functions as a `coming-
together', `becomings', but in a machinic way, not in a hybrid way, of
molarity and molecularity, as a way of arguing for a new assemblage of
enunciation to take us into micro-political and pragmatic considerations.
The aesthetic, the pragmatic and the micro-political are conjoined
through the film's assemblages.
Such micro-political questions, in Leon, are highlighted around violence,
and its opposite: ideas of fixity, transition, change, stability, mobility,
and ethical frameworks of love, validation, integrity and worth. What
appears to be a film replete with violence and images of death, sadistic
pleasures and horrific brutality (Gary Oldman as the DEA cop, Stansfield,
presents and performs a horrific trope of all that is evil, menacing and
sadistic, yet also that which is delicious and seductive!), Leon actually
works to assuage those very negative elements of experience, in validation
196 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
of the positivity of life's becoming, life's joy and germinal possibilities in

`becoming' rather than a desire locked into teleological and psychological

frameworks of conclusions, endings and satiation. This `becoming' is

effectuated as processuality through the idea of the machinic elements of

`girl'. Like Hana, in The English Patient Romeo and Juliet

, like Juliet in ,

like Sasha in Orlando, like Faith Strange Days Leon

in , 's heroine

Mathilda works as a female, child, character (as representational image)

but also as a figure or figural ± a `movement-image' ± within the haecceity

of the film's assemblage. It would be simple in the extreme to suggest that

Mathilda `represents' a girl and what I want to develop from that,

through the aesthetic modulations of the movie, is how `girl' functions

as an abstract concept. She functions as movement, as a molecular `body'

in machinic connection with other bodies, within the diegetic patterns of

the narrative (on the plane of organisation and transcendence) but also

through haecceitas formations, on a plane of immanence and consistence.

This complex route away from, but including, the `represented image' is

sustained by my argument that subjectivity is rendered subjectless, and

thus the experiences `felt' in this movie are `outside' any fixed position-

ality. They exist in the proto-subjective states of the brain/body/mind

assemblage. All three come together, as Deleuze indicates, in the brain

itself ± in autopoiesis.

In a brief aside for a moment, how can we begin to understand

Deleuze's abstract concept of `girl?' As I argued earlier, `becoming-

woman' is, for Deleuze, the first element in a processuality of `becoming'

which operates differently and beyond a desire premised on satiation. It is

`becoming-girl' which is essentially the molecular woman and `haecceity'

itself. Let's look, first, at how Deleuze connects his ideas on immanence

and haecceity, which we saw in earlier chapters and evinced in the films

Orlando and Romeo and Juliet , to the `girl': `There is a mode of

individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or

8
substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.'

Deleuze, with Guattari, indicates that we pass from one plane (orga-

nisation) to another (consistency or immanence):

[W]hy does the opposition between the two kinds of plane lead to a still

more abstract hypothesis? Because one continually passes from one to the

other by unnoticeable degrees, and without being aware of it, or one

becomes aware of it only afterward. Because one continually reconstitutes

9
one plane atop another, or extricates one from the other.

This is vitally important to my argument, because whilst I am arguing

and positioning a concern with cinema as experience, as event and as

 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 197

material capture, there is a way in which the molar and the plane of
organisation of the movie, its narrative forms, its characters, its diegesis,
its molarities of sound and image, are also part of the `event' itself. A
denial of the plane of organisation would negate the concept of machinic
heterogeneity ± a machinic assemblage which occurs through the hetero-
geneities of the molar and the molecular, between the spaces of the plane
of `immanence' and plane of `organisation'. All the elements which
constitute those planes will dance, mingle, coalesce and `become' across
any fixed or even hybridised positionality (since hybridisation is still too
10
fixed, too static) . . . a dance of the atoms. This space of the inexplic-
able, which resides outside of hybridisation, is a fugitive space, the space
of the `girl'.

What is a girl, what is a group of girls? Proust at least has shown us once
and for all that their individuation, collective or singular, proceeds not by
subjectivity, but by haecceity, pure haecceity. `Fugitive beings'. They are
pure relations of speeds and slownesses and nothing else. A girl is late on
11
account of her speed.

Deleuze explores how social and cultural forces actually `rob' the literal
girl of her own `body' as it were, by virtue of the fact that socialisation
processes force her to behave in specific, appropriate and acceptable
12
ways. `Stop behaving like that, you're not a little girl any more.' And so
I have to keep telling myself, especially when I fall in love!
The autopoietic, non-gendered, proto-subjective and non-subjective
forces, energies and volatilities are in fact socialised out of her by the time
she has to become a woman. Her `becoming' is thus stolen, first, from her,
in order for her to be `culturally and ideologically positioned' as `woman'.
She thus loses the vitality of the pre-symbolic state. The boy's turn comes
next, as his socialisation is premised upon acknowledging his `desire' for
the other, where the girl becomes an object of desire for the boy. The girl
is `robbed' of her body without organs, and so needs to reconstitute that
as inseparable from a process of `becoming-woman'. In order to recon-
stitute the body without organs, that abstract concept which imbricates
volatility, vitality and processuality, in order to live through `becoming'
and not transcendent notions of desire, the anorganism of the body needs
to be accommodated. In other words a molecularity of being needs to be
effectuated: to reclaim those intensities, energies, lines of flight, velocities
of `girlishness'. I use the word `girlishness' here as a similar word to
`thisness', which comes from Duns Scotus's ± and thereafter, Deleuze's ±
definition on haecceity. Scotus takes the word `haecceity' as premised
upon the Latin word `haec', which means `this thing'. `Girlishness' then is
198 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
similarly derived as a `thisness of girl'. As Deleuze and Guattari indicate,

it is `doubtless, the girl becomes a woman in the molar sense, or organic

sense. But conversely, ``becoming-woman'' is the ``molecular-woman'', IS

13
the girl herself.' It is certain, asserts Deleuze, that molecular politics

proceeds via the girl and child. This is why, in this final chapter, I want to

take this abstract concept of the `girl' through which to position a

molecular politics; a politics of heterogeneity, beyond hybridity but

through a machinic heterogeneity of aesthetic modulations in relation

to film. Molecularity enables a micro-politics which is evidenced through

a neo-aesthetic. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the writer Trost, who

painted a picture of the girl as `linked to the fate of revolution; her speed,

her freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract line of flight, her

molecular production, her indifferences to memory, her non-figurative of

desire. Joan of Arc? The special role of the girl in Russian terrorism, the
14
girl with the bomb, guardian of dynamite?'

THE `BECOMING-GIRL' IN LEON

In Leon as much as Nikita, the `girl' is quite literally, the machinic, post-

human image of locomotion. This is perhaps more evident in Nikita,

where Nikita quite literally becomes an assassin, a killing machine of the

first order. She is l'e

 tranger, the anomalous, the threshold, the borderline.

Like the `girl' in Leon, she functions as force, affect and movement-image,

as a veritable figural across the texts. Deleuze writes,

[T]he movement of the infinite can occur only by means of affect, passion,

love, in a becoming that is the girl, but without reference to any kind of

`mediation'; and that this movement as such eludes any mediating percep-

tion because it is already effectuated at every moment, and the dancer or

lover finds him- or herself already `awake and walking' the second he or

she falls down, and even the instant he or she leaps. Movement, like the
15
girl as a fugitive being, cannot be perceived.

Once again, this is relevant to my argument, that the in-between states

of the molar and the molecular of the filmic experience reside within

the `girl', within the fugitive spaces of her becoming. We cannot discern

a totality of `meaning' from either/or positionality from the plane of

immanence or the plane of organisation, but a space which is some-

where else, and not somewhere else, because it is a fugitive place: a

`girl'.

Narratively, Leon explores the story of a New York hitman of Italian

origins, Leon (Jean Reno), a rather simple, uneducated, but a physically

strong and dedicated guy. He befriends a young twelve-year-old girl,

 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 199

Mathilda, recently orphaned as a result of the murder of her family by

DEA personnel (Gary Oldman leading the team) in a case of drug-

dealing and police retribution. The drug-ridden and violent streets of

Little Italy provide a chaotic, dangerous, but exciting mise-en-sce

Á ne,

within which the relationship of Leon and Mathilda poignantly and

sensitively evolves.

But how can `sensitivity' be operative in a Deleuzian frame of non-

human prescriptions? What do we mean by sensitivity here? It does not

function as a romantic notion. What I want to explore is how we might

16
think of `sensitivity', love, as a state-in-process, not `of being', an

acceptance of a non-satiable space of `desire'. Desire in process, not in

finality or satiation. This processual state is accommodated through the

body without organs of the proto-subjective state, and exemplifies the

`girl' of `becoming-woman'. It is created through aesthetic resonances,

through `sensation' in a Deleuzian sense, as much as through the diegetic

narrative, characterisation and generic elements of the film's plane of

organisation. Leon , like Strange Days , is violent and replete with horrific

`representations' deriving from a diegetic scenario which tells the tale of

love, a valorisation of joy and vitality, through an understanding of

17
innocence, naivety, fragility and a strength within that fragility. Non-

fixity: in other words, process. Neither fragility nor strength but an in-

between or an aparalletic evolution of the two states and a paradoxical

understanding of the strength within fragility, and fragility in strength.

The film nonetheless also functions in a micro-political way, through its

aesthetic, in collusion with the plane of consistency, to present an

inspirational understanding of the vitality of `Life'. A different under-

standing of the concept of `love'.

Whilst Mathilda functions as a girl, as a `character' in a narrative, with

relationships across the text of the movie, the idea of the `girl' in a

Deleuzian sense enables us to consider the intensities of that concept, as

an abstract concept. What I want to do is to elide these two perspectives

to see if we can discern an aesthetic which rests upon abstract terminology

and yet also uses an `actual' image, or rather a movement-image, of a `girl'

through which to think through that abstraction. That abstraction is

premised upon characteristics of vitality, dynamism, movement, joy,

exuberance, and a sense of germinal and positive forces emanating from

an autopoietic sense of aliveness and existential singularities. Whilst it

seems a travesty to discuss `love' in a Deleuzian landscape, in fact this

abstract concept of the `girl' comes very close to a reconsideration of love.

Deleuze offers different perspectives. This is a love outside the exigencies

of romantic, sexual or self/other relationals, subjectivity premised on a

200 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
valorisation of the self in relation to the Other and the forces of psycho-

analytic regimes. It is the `molecular love' accommodated through a body

without organs, the awareness of `Life' as force, vitality and becoming.

Deleuze himself refers to this, as we see in the first quotation at the

beginning of the chapter. This philosopher of monstrosity and the post-

human actually enables a reconfiguration of love through abstract con-

cepts such as the `girl'.

How then is this concept both an abstract concept and an actual molar

image functional across the diegetic scenario of Leon? And how do the

elements of sensation work to bring about this notion of the `girl'? I shall

explore several sequences of the movie, and discuss them through the

abstract concept of the `becoming-girl' but also taking on board the

notion of sensation, as it is accommodated through the three modes:

vibration, resonance and forced movement. By establishing how the

sequences relate in juxtaposition, how they move through frame-by-

frame choreographies, how certain molar elements like `characters'

can function in molecular ways as figurals, lines and forces, then we

can discern how `sensation' in the Deleuzian sense is operating through

the rhythmical movements of the sequences, either in contrast, compar-

ison, or in juxtaposition with each other.

This interrelationality enables us to consider the abstract concept of

`becoming-girl' because it echoes those characteristics of `vitality, dyna-

mism and energy' emblematic of `girlishness'. It is the interrelationality of

styles in the movie which creates a rhythmical and processual notion of

the beautiful; but it is a different type of `beauty': beauty as a `process' and

not an aesthetic premised upon `form'. This different and neo-aesthetic

definition of beauty (as opposed to romantic notions of beauty, which are

premised on form, tone, shape, colour and so on) is determined by the

concept of `time' in terms of the sequentialities, movements and intensities

working across, between and through the different sequences. Beauty,

therefore, pertains to a time-factor, a temporal notion, a processual

`opening out' into another space, another moment, in the future, before

the present has actually become the past, so that past, present and future

are, as it were, contained in the one movement. As Deleuze indicates in

Cinema 2, the notion of time does not exist as a linear projection to or

from specific points, which have beginnings, middles and ends. All

moments of time are moments in collision:

indifferently divisible and possibly connectable, as if laid out on a single

surface of availability, indeterminate until a contingent encounter makes

one moment stand out or fall. Beauty pertains to a process that takes
 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 201

empirical precedence over existing formed things and their narratively

18
closable coursings.

The consciousness perceives this process before form, because this is how
19
the brain accommodates the world around it.

I want to begin by exploring the film in a textual way, but I shall

develop from this to expose how these textual elements work, in terms of

Deleuzian aesthetics of sensation. The establishing shots of the movie in

many ways echo those of Romeo and Juliet. Except here gentle violin

music accompanies an aerial shot across Central Park, the camera

zooming into centre frame, into the diegesis of the narrative's mise-en-

sce
Á ne: Little Italy, the heart of New York. Narrative cut to Leon and

Tony. Eyes, faces, the hands and the look become significant elements in

the relationship between Leon and his Mafia boss, Tony, as the camera

oscillates across and between the gazes of each in a pattern of disconcert-

ing effects.

Fragmentary shots of Leon are all we have in the following sequence.

Drug-peddling gangsters are warned off through Leon's threatening

assault, but already we can establish an identification with Leon, because

of the way in which he has been introduced. His `alien' or `loner'

characteristics are clearly exemplified through his concealment of identity

± the dark glasses concealing the eye from any close encounter. So we

actually see Tony reflected in Leon's glasses in a close-up shot. An

innocence and gentleness is acknowledged because of his style and body

language: his lack of English, his inability to read, his doleful eyes (both

threatening and simultaneously innocent and reflective), his trademark

glasses, and woolly hat, his long, dark overcoat and his angular and

awkward gait.

Leon and Mathilda first encounter each other when Leon returns to his

apartment, following his recent `cleaning job' (contract killing). The

camera slowly tracks Leon. We then have a sequence of images, which

through controlled camera movements, made in time to non-diegetic

delicate riffs from guitar and xylophone, modulate the abstract concept of

`becoming-girl'. How is this done? The camera pans from a still image of

Mathilda's right foot, swinging gently, to reveal both feet, centre frame,

clad in huge, brown, leather boots, swinging in contrapuntal time to the

music. (In several frames in the film, this pair of feet is centrally located

within the frame, in contradistinction to Leon's, with significant rever-

berations of contrast, dissonance, and similarity-in-difference.) Their

cumbersome look is paradoxically gentle and awkward because of the

way in which the sound and vision are here edited. The next frame shows
202 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
the camera tilting (a shot reminiscent, it will be detected by film students,

of similar craning shots from Citizen Kane ) upwards over Mathilda's

body, her clothes, white lacy bolero, velvet choker and pink patterned

leggings, textually and evocatively `feminine' in their tactility and colour-

ful tones. All is belied by the cigarette so naively but eloquently held from

Leon's view at arm's length. An interesting and paradoxical trope of

eloquence, sophistication and maturity disguised by her innocent exter-

ior. Non-fixity, complexity, a multiplicity of personae. It is this multi-

plicity, together with Mathilda's function as figural, and vitalism (as we

see in later sequences), which disorientates Leon's apparent masculinity

(so obviously represented by his physique, which is muscular, robust and

totally fit as he carefully follows a regime of fitness exercise to maintain

his stamina) and resilience, thus establishing his `becoming-girl'. The

following shot cuts to Mathilda's face, framed and yet contained behind

the intricacy and delicacy of the lace-patterned wrought-ironwork. Her

pale face is part of the rhythmical swirls in the wrought-iron patterning.

The angle of her face is pieta

Á -like, in its angelic and Madonna-esque

nuances, as she inclines gently to the right, an innocent and sympathetic

and paradoxical expression of hope, and forlorn anxiety. But also

provocation. This provocation is in no way Lolita-esque, and I don't

read the film as sexual in a molar way at all. Its sexuality is purely in its

molecularity. That `thousand tiny sexes', which Deleuze relates in A

Thousand Plateaus . The provocation is less `sexual' than `molecularly

sexual'. It is replete with singularities of `girlishness'. This innocence/

maturity is evoked by the still frame: the camera maintains this shot for

three seconds. This is followed by a shot which is held for six seconds, of

her face, and hair, emphasising the intricate and balanced movements,

through close-up of her eyes, nose and delicate mouth. The beauty lies in

the processuality and hapticity of those movements, not in the form itself.

It is the body and facial movements, the hand which becomes face, the eye

which becomes nose, becomes mouth, which modulate the `girl' in the

abstract sense, evoking the vitality, and joyousness of her `becoming'. She

surreptitiously hides the cigarette, while the camera pans up, from a low

angled shot, and from Mathilda's point of view, up to Leon's face. Thus

follows a close-up shot of Leon and Mathilda, with intricate and

prolonged shots and close-ups of eyes, to eyes, shot-reverse-shot edits.

Eyes and head movements, micro-movements, modulate a `rhythmical

beauty' (in the processual sense of the word beauty) across the screen. The

sequence ends with a close-up centre-framed shot of Mathilda, then Leon,

significantly followed by the first image of Stansfield (Gary Oldman), the

DEA cop with, yet again, a close-up of feet introducing the macabre and
 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 203

evil character. Consequently, the cut to the following sequence conveys

the cacophony and chaos of Mathilda's home apartment, highlighted

when Stan erupts, threatening her father.

Leon already shows signs early on in the film of being a loner, but with

a sensitivity which belies his macho and gangster-like image. The film

conveys this through specific shots, for example, of the plant which Leon

tends with affection and regularity (he tends to his weapons with equal

care and affection), moving it into the light or out on to the ledge for air. It

becomes a trope of life, growth and germinality throughout the movie.

This is seen for example in another sequence. Leon watches Mathilda,

punched and kicked by her father, following his own abuse at the hands

of Stan and his colleagues from the DEA. The image cuts from this scene

to Leon's plant, providing a contrasting connection across the two types

of behaviour. The mise-en-sce

Á ne of Leon's room is sparse, but carefully

tended, white flowing curtains waft in the air, as he moves the plant out

into the sunshine. He slowly and purposively folds his clothes: neat,

folded, organised. Static, slow, controlled and angular body movements.

No dialogue, no voice-over, but a non-diegetic symphony of classical

music, violas and other strings crescendo with a beautiful shot, held for

three seconds, of Leon taking a shower. His body angle, the gentle

expressions of delicate insouciance, the angle of his head against the

wall (echoing Mathilda's earlier pieta

 look), the gentle rhythm of his arm

movement across his body, the movements of the water flowing across his

body, work in tune, rhythmically to the music, and in paradoxical

contradistinction with the images of him wiping his weapons, cleaning

his guns and that static controlled movement of purposive order and

functionalism.

This scene exemplifies a Deleuzian hapticity of movement-image and

liquid perception: in other words, the feeling of being able to touch and

see at the same time. To feel a specific tactility, to want to reach out and

feel with the hand, within the movements in the image itself. The fluidity

of the shot is evoked through the liquidity of water flowing in tune with

the music's tonalities. Sound and image in total imbrication, through a

liquidity of perception. In molecular terms, the brain's acknowledgement

of what it sees and hears is first activated across the cerebellum and

efferent motor responses of the brain, by the movement, the process,

then the sound and image. It is the liquidity of the movements which
20
creates the notion of the `beautiful' here. The brain, as Norseen argues,

perceives such movements in a specific way which impinges upon the

cerebellum in pleasing formations. It is this processuality, premised on

`time', of things `flowing', the feeling of experiencing the `now' when the
204 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
`past' has not yet disappeared, the micro-movements of Leon's body

(and the shots by the camera) and the `hapticity' of the `movement-

image', which effectuates a beautiful gentleness. This continues in the

shot of him ironing his clothes. A gently rhythmical movement across

the ironing board, a right to left movement, which takes the eye across

and through the scene. The very stature of his body is itself fluid, and

flowing; there is a distinct rhythmical line across the contours of his

body, into iron, into the clothes he irons. One begins where the other

ends: processuality. This gentleness pervades Leon's overt, stereotypical

masculinity and the sequence provides a Deleuzian sense of `sensation' in

its vibration and resonance with other sequences, as I shall exemplify

below. It is these elements within Leon which connect him through

Mathilda's `girlishness', into something which ennervates them both.

The `becoming-girl'.

This `becoming-girl' is further evident in the following sequence, where

we see Leon in his apartment the next morning. Cut from his apartment to

Mathilda's: Leon exercising contrasts through edits with the violent sister

who batters Mathilda, phone ringing, TV blaring, and general mayhem.

Mathilda talks to her headmistress of her mother, and thinking of herself,

says `She's dead.' Her pain and the pain epitomised by the close-up shot

and music here are diametrically contrasted with the previous sequence of

tranquillity and the rhythmical beauty of Leon. He leaves the apartment,

to walk down the street.

The narrative cuts to a close-up central-framing shot of Leon's face: a

static vibrational shot as it is in contrast with the previous sequence. His

eyes are staring, mouth smiling, at some off-screen stimulus. He turns his

head ever so slightly and innocently to the right, as the diegetic music

from the film he is watching, `Love has made me see things in a different

way . . .' pervades from Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain ; Leon's

`becoming-girl' is envisioned through this close-up shot. This `becom-

ing-girl' is effectuated through the film's technical and aesthetic processes

in the following edits. The scene proceeds with a luminously fluid

dissolve, effectuated as much through the music as the tones, shapes

and lines of the visuals, from Kelly's flowing movement left to right of

screen, pure movement, pure processuality, into a right to left aerial shot,

which tracks Leon up the apartment stairway. Here he finds Mathilda

crying: he gives her a tissue. She continues the gesture of friendship and

leaves to buy Leon his milk.

On her return, she encounters the DEA cops, and the killing and

decimating of her apartment. Gently, in slow-motion camera movements,

from right to left of screen, Mathilda floats towards Leon's door. Her
 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 205

delicacy, fragility and vulnerability are aesthetically created by the

camerawork. She looks pathetically innocent and fragile as she is posi-

tioned, a tiny creature, centre frame, knocking at Leon's door. And yet the

music belies that stature. Rather it presents a magnificent gesture of

strength, hope, courage and belief; utter positivity, from Mathilda. She

looks upwards; the camera shows a full frontal close-up of her, but from a

high camera angle, thus emphasising the paradoxical vulnerability. A

long-shot, behind her, down the corridor points to the place of violence

from which she is trying to escape. Her vulnerability is highlighted, and

yet simultaneously denied (and this is an example of the idea of sensation

operating through resonance; two elements, one the visual track, one the

soundtrack, work together and bounce off each other) by the music,

which crescendos with a simultaneous full key lighting effect as Leon

finally opens the door, emblematically both saving her and providing the

way forward to both his own `becoming-girl' through her influences, and

Mathilda's own progression towards maturity.

The scenes between Leon and Mathilda continue to epitomise the

`becoming-girl' of Leon. The first time in his apartment, Mathilda, crying

and bleeding, is shown with a close-up of her face, as she looks down.

Shot-reverse-shot follows, with Leon similarly tilting his head lower to

echo, as a choreography across the two, his and Mathilda's facial

expressions. Her words become as tender and evocative as her image,

here operating in vibration, rather than resonance, with the image: `They

killed my little brother . . . he was only four years old . . . all he wanted to

do was to cuddle.' A close-up of Mathilda's face shows her changing

moods when Leon begins to cajole her with games and comic gestures; he

tenderly plays a game of puppets, using his oven cloth as a `pig' which

Mathilda watches in earnest: her smile, eyes and countenance change

accordingly. That discrete movement of different facial intonations ex-

emplifies the forced movement. Close-up shots convey the intensities of

these micro-movements in her facial expressions. She stares, open-eyed, at

Leon, as she responds with `Cute name'. The words belie the innocence of

the image. The edits create lots of eye contact across the two; slow camera

movements collide with classical music, as a gentle connection is evi-

denced between them. A gentleness counterpointed by the discussion of

weapons, guns, and his job as a `cleaner'.

The most tender of all sequences between Leon and Mathilda is the one

in which the soundtrack is Bjo

È rk's `Venus as a Boy', itself a melodic and

plangent refrain, the lyrics of which can be read alongside the images we

see, in productive ways. For example, sings Bjo

È rk, `He believes in beauty

. . . Venus as a boy . . . he believes in beauty . . .' This plays as non-

206 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
diegetic music, whilst the screen gives a series of actions and movements
that cement a bonding between Leon and Mathilda. In a sequence with
hardly any dialogue, Leon teaches Mathilda about weaponry and in
return Mathilda cleans and helps Leon with his reading and writing.
`Pure' cinematic technique again: image and no dialogue. They exercise in
unison: they work in unison. The camera pans from right to left,
following Mathilda's gait as she slowly teaches Socrates to Leon. Their
closeness is then cemented when they play a series of masquerades:
Mathilda dresses and sings as Madonna, and as Marilyn Monroe ± Leon
innocently fails to recognise these. (I could provide a whole range of
intertextual readings around these images, in another context `Mathilda±
Madonna±Monroe' ± emblematic of a distanciating and cajoling notion
of femininity upon the stature of masculinity.) He does, of course,
recognise Gene Kelly when Mathilda sings, `I'm singing in the rain
. . .' Leon tries to play John Wayne (now there's an image of masculi-
nity!), his body movement exaggerated to the point of parody. Contra-
diction, and paradoxes, abound.

BEYOND SUBJECTIVITY ± TO HAECCEITIES OF SENSATION

± THE AESTHETIC OF SENSATION
However, to explore the notion of `becoming-girl' the analysis so far has
been largely premised upon style, semiotics and technicalities, which
formal film theory has always enabled to a certain degree, and certainly
psychoanalysis developed upon those textual elements of film theory to
provide more sophisticated ways of understanding subjective readings, or
the perception of a subjectivity created by the film's visual elements. I
have purposely used a descriptive, semiotic and textual reading, so far, to
exemplify the `becoming-girl' of Leon, at times ennervated by the De-
leuzian elements of sensation. But how has Deleuze enabled a different
way of understanding film and such stylistic elements to become part of a
`haecceity' or an event? To think about film as an experience, an event,
not as a representation. To move away from subjectivity and desire.
Indeed, that very haecceity of the experience of a movie, is also part of the
`becoming-girl'. This is because `becoming-girl' is predicated on hetero-
geneities, not hybridities, movements, intensities, energies, volatilities,
which are elements of processuality, fundamentally within the brain's
processes. Processuality is a description of the `movements' which make
up what I referred to earlier as `qualitative multiplicities'. Those quali-
tative multiplicities are part of the beyond of subjectivity. They function
as a continual processuality outside of subjectivity. Qualitative multi-
 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 207

plicities operate beyond the subject of any phenomenological notion of

subjectivity. They exist within the singularity of a multicomponential

state, that pre-subjective, or proto-subjective state, in the very molecular

movements of microtubular action: that is, within the brain itself. The

brain's own sense of itself (what Deleuze refers to as absolute survey or

true form) is operative in creating qualitative multiplicities. Thus there is

subjectless subjectivity which is premised on movements, things flowing,

and moving, at a deeper level than subjective awareness. Affective

awareness is thus not necessarily a psychic state. The `feeling' lies beyond

any subjective awareness. Haecceity rather than subjectivity. Thus the

film impacts as a modulation of haecceities, rather than through sub-

jectivities.

What I want to explain now is how these sequences, whilst evoking the

`becoming girl,' work in this way because of certain elements of sensation,

premised upon states of singularity and subjectless subjectivity (through a

plane of immanence and consistency) alongside any reading premised on

the plane of organisation that we have seen above. They work as a

concerto of rhythmical voices or bodies, as `sensation', the haecceitas

beyond of any subjective encounter, which is effected through the brain/

mind and body meld, in the Deleuzian sense. In other words, these

sequences function in three major ways: as vibration, resonance and

forced movement. These three elements bring about `sensation', the

beyond of subjectivity, as the energies are effectuated through the brain's

(of the viewer) cerebral activities and through those regions of the non-

subjective state: the proto-subjective or the `non-subjectified affect' in the

auspices of singularities. Here, processuality is effectuated through micro-

movements of molecularity in the multiplicities which make up those

singularities (see Chapter 4 for clarification). Perception of the movie is

dependent upon the micro-molecular movements within the brain's

functioning as much as the mind and the body. Those movements are

of course assemblaged into motion by the modulations of the film's style.

Therefore, the aesthetic and the affect might be `felt' but they are felt

beyond the realm of a subjective encounter. The encounter is beyond

subjectivity, in `sensation'.

First, then the element of vibration, as Deleuze describes it in sensation,

works as a `power that overflows all domains, and traverses them. This

power is that of rhythm.'

21
How then does the film Leon work as a

rhythmical event? Its rhythms are evinced through the differential rela-

tions across sequences. For example, the scenes described above between

Leon and Mathilda are juxtaposed in a rhythmical way with sequences

which vibrate or resonate through their intense differences in technical-

208 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
ities, visual aesthetics and sounds. An example of these more violent

scenes is where Mathilda's family are murdered, and the scenes towards

the end of the movie, where Leon is hounded by the `feds' (FBI). More

significantly, the scenes in which Oldman plays the cruel cop Stansfield, a

sadistic, evil and menacing creature who takes pleasure in destroying

innocence, and terrifying the vulnerable, exemplify vibration. An example

of this is the scene in the DEA toilets, where he threatens Mathilda with

the horror of his vocal cruelties. Consequently when we watch the

`images' of each sequence, rather than merely seeing them in a rational

or cerebral sense, as images through our subjectivity, we actually experi-

ence those images as part of something wider. They participate in a

tapestry of vision and sound which `hystericises' subjectivity. Subjectivity

is subsumed through `intensities, energies'. The eye actually becomes a

polyvalent organ. Therefore, the colours, shapes, tones and lines help to

compose those `images' within the brain in a different way, so that they

don't actually `represent' any form. They exist as `vibratory facticity'. The

brain itself is an active participant and is responsible for the sensation. But

what constitutes the sensation? The very `sensation' happens in the brain

which assembles this amorphous set of colours, shapes, tones and lines.

The brain reacts to movement before form for example. The brain

acknowledges `malleable images' through a `temporal state'. What

22
`comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears'.

In other words `an amorphous mass or a malleable mass' as Deleuze

indicates. This is why Deleuze refers to movement-images as opposed to

images. So a `vibration' occurs at the moment of oscillation of different

colours, tones, lines and sounds. It is premised on difference in intensity

and collision.

So the sequences where we see Leon showering, and also the one

watching the Gene Kelly movie, and returning to his apartment (described

above), `vibrate' with the scene depicting a horrendously cruel attack on

Mathilda's family. This `vibration' is modulated through differential

relations: collision, difference, oscillation of a variety of aesthetic ele-

ments (lines, colours, tone, body movements, music). For example, non-

diegetic violin music is interspersed with the sound of drum rolls, and a

close-up frame as the cops come into view from a long-shot of the

corridor. The first one, front camera angle, backward motion, brings

in one cop, then another; body language is synchronised to the rhythms

of the music. Then a climactic shot of Stansfield (Oldman). His body

movements, angular, erratic, almost insect-like in their febrile energies,

convey a movement-image which disturbs. He swallows a pill, and the

very micro-movements which he performs are in themselves insect-like,

 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 209

animal-like ± a veritable Gregor of Kafkaesque fantasy. He throws back

his head, makes a horrendous crack as he bites the tablet, which he

swallows with an equally alarming noise. Facial expressions, squirms and

menacing eyes penetrate into our consciousness staring back from this

strangely static `moving-image'. What is specifically disturbing are Old-

man's dance-like jerky rhythms of walking. He dances/walks holding out

quivering arms and fingers, evoking the insect again, as he chatters

feverishly, `I love these calm little moments before the storm' with

Beethoven (again, this operates in vibration with the sounds of his voice)

as non-diegetic music. Such static, jerky, angular and animal like gestures

`vibrate', and `resonate', in contradistinction, like Oldman's voice, with

those beautiful modulatory and linear shots of Leon as he showers, his

body movements differently rhythmical, eloquent, refined. Leon emits a

`becoming-girl' which Stansfield could never emulate, appreciate or

evoke. But nonetheless there is something strangely scintillating and

pleasurably dangerous about Stansfield, which is created through the

vibrational and thus contrasting (with Leon) elements of the performance

aesthetics. This `becoming-animal' of Stansfield is later evidenced when

he screams at the `feds' to bring out everyone to find Leon. He turns his

head ever so gently to the left, cranes up his neck and screams, `I said

everyone'. The sound, tone and timbre of his voice are both terrifying

and, simultaneously and paradoxically, scintillatingly pleasurable. That

in-between space of pleasure and danger. Rather than operating as a mere

`character' in a narrative however, Stansfield thus functions in a figural

and haptic way (in the Deleuzian sense) and as a dynamic refrain, in a

musical sense. His insect-like body, voice and movements provide a

vibrational symphony, and an expression of `forced movement' across

other sequences, with those of Leon and Mathilda. But his image is one

which exudes a feeling of `an impulsion to touch' because of his very

rhythmical, dance-like gestures (especially where he quivers his hands and

fingers ± an exquisite performance). As a figural this movement-image

ennervates a disturbing effect across our affective responses which we

carry throughout the rest of the film. In terms of `forced movement' again

it is the sequences which have both Leon and Stansfield, both opposite

and similar, in paradoxical distinction. Near the ending of the film is a

beautiful shot of Leon, slowly and lugubriously moving, in delicate

anticipation of the freedom, exemplified, technically by the vibrant

lighting and uplifting music. Suddenly the camera angle displays a

23
disturbed, Caligarian juxtapositioning of diagonal, and off-centred

position. We discover that this subjective viewpoint comes from Leon.

He has been shot; but the beauty of the camera movement, evincing the
210 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
delicacy and tragedy of Leon's death, simultaneously and ironically show

Stansfield's final victory. A victory only to be annulled in the final

retribution ± an apocalyptic vision of death, through the grenade/body

of Leon. In finality, it is Mathilda who epitomises the vitality and

becoming-girl of the movie, and the final moment sees her strong,

independent, resilient and emancipated: a fragility and vulnerability

colluding and imbricating with an inner strength and joy in `life' and

its vital possibilities.

ENDING OR BEGINNINGS? JUST PROCESS . . .

AN AESTHETICS OF FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

How then, do we begin to discern some sense of significance to this

collusion between philosophy and film theory? The final chapter, speci-

fically, in an exploration of Leon, has, as I have established, shown how

the molar elements of film theory can work alongside newly created ideas

developing from Deleuzian ideas, a molecular paradigm. The earlier

chapters display a more apparent location of sensation, a concern with

the intensities and energies of modulation, force and the beauty of those.

But I don't foresee this use of both the molar and the molecular as in any

way a new binary distinction. Rather, the `in-between' space of the molar

and the molecular may be compared, though not identified, with the
24
space of cyborg-becoming, a space which has no boundaries within

boundaries, a place which is not a strictly hybridised space, but a space of

continual motion, movement and becoming. A neo-aesthetics of sensa-

tion, as I have explored, enables this consideration of how film impacts,

how it ennervates and engages as a material capture, as an event, as a

processuality. With such a new vocabulary in film studies, those earlier

concepts of beauty, feeling, movement and sound can take on different

meanings, different equations in our perceptual processes. That new

mind-set of concepts can help us to redefine desire and its relation to

the filmic experience. Vision and sound are not purely experienced

through representation, through the visual and the aural, but through

the materiality of a whole range of `bodies', from a deeper engagement of

body/brain and world, bodies which are human, non-human, technolo-

gised and machinic. What is most creative is that this refreshing con-

ceptualisation of aesthetics takes film studies back into the realm of

cinema as art, and reclaims the aesthetic, but a bio- and neo-aesthetic,

from those ideological, sociological and libidinal restrictions which have

emerged in film theory for too long. Post-structuralism, and its manifes-

tation within a post-feminist pragmatics, has enabled this kaleidoscopic

and multiperspectival approach to language perception, thus enabling a

 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 211

merger with philosophy towards rethinking the `event' of the cinematic,

outside those debates contained within early feminist film theory. Perhaps
in this way we can delight in the dance of the atoms; we can feel, become
and energise through those wonderful cinematic experiences. As Deleuze
indicates, film `spreads an ``experimental night'' and a ``luminous dust''; it
affects the visible, with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a
suspension which contradicts all natural perception. What it produces is
25
the genesis of an ``unknown body''.'
And so, it is a delightful, energised and vital sense of the dynamism in
life that enables these insights into new collusions and collisions across
film and philosophy, new spaces of the interstitial, new engagements with
an aesthetics which becomes a `tiny thousand sexes', and, I hope, the
suggestion that disciplines of knowledge need not be rarefied to the
boundaries of their own volitions. Academia would do well to take note
of the emergence of aparalletic evolution. My own journey, ironically
very non-Deleuzian in its subjective encounter, through those spaces has
been deliciously schizophrenic, and at times brought painfully back, in
more ways than one, to the psychoanalytic. However, that aparalletic
evolution with the beautiful stranger enabled creative volitions which I
know can only evolve further through a `becoming-girl'. I close with these
words from the poet-artist Pessoa,

For a Moment
For a moment
Upon my arm
In a movement
Less of thought than
Of weariness,
You laid your hand
And withdrew it.
Did I feel that
Or didn't I?

I don't know. But

I have, still feel
Some memory,
Steady, solid,
Of you laying
Your hand that had
Felt what it did
Not understand,
But so lightly! . . .
212 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

This is nothing,

But on a road

Such as life is

There is something

Not understood . . .

Do I know if,

When your hand felt

Itself lying

Upon my arm

And a little

Upon my heart,

There was no new

Rhythm in Space?

As you, not

Intending to,

Touched off in me

Without a word

Some mystery,

Sudden, divine

That you did not

Know existed.

Likewise the breeze

In the branches

Without knowing

Muttered something
26
Vague but happy . . .

. . . in a fugitive place, just a `girl' . . . B.

 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty? 213

NOTES
1. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 277.

2. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 276±7.

3. We might also add The Assassin (1993), the American version of Nikita
(1990).

4. See especially Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, chapter on literature, and Deleuze

and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. See also David Musselwhite's

work on Deleuzian readings of Victorian literature, Partings Welded Together:

Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel , and Ian Buchanan
and John Mark (eds), Deleuze and Literature.

5. I would argue that any abstract concept, like a cliche

 , is to some extent premised

on a literal meaning. So that the concept `girl' does in some ways develop out of

characteristics of `girlishness': innocence, naivety, weakness, frailty, ethereality,

fluidity, complexity, etc. All of course are redolent of social and cultural

positioning. An `essential' descriptor of the girl is premised on these stereotypical

characteristics.

6. Aparalletic evolution is a term which Deleuze and Guattari use to explain the

`in-betweenness' of things. They express the concept of `aparalletic evolution' as

the becoming that exists between two contrasting matters: as an example, from

Dialogues, `There are no longer binary machines: question/answer, masculine/

feminine, man/animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is, simply the

outline of a becoming. The wasp and the orchid provide the example. The

orchid seems to form a wasp image, an orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double

capture, since ``what'' each becomes, changes no less than that which ``be-

comes''. The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive organs at the same

time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. One and the same

becoming, a single bloc of becoming, ``aparallel evolution'' of two beings which

have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.' See Deleuze and Parnet,

Dialogues, p. 2.
7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 273.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 261.

9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 269.

10. See paper on cyborg-becoming by Francisco Javier Tirado, `Against Social

Constructionist Cyborgian Territorializations', in Angel J. Gordo-Lopez and

Ian Parker (eds), Cyberpsychology.

11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 272.

12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 272.

13. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 272.

14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 277.

15. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 281.

16. This is not love in the romantic sense, but love as an accommodation of

volatilities and energies which are positive and can be mutually energising;

Mathilda's resonances upon Leon are beautifully positive, vital and energic,

but not romantic in any sense of the word `love'. Indeed, Deleuze indicates that

learning to `love' is nothing to do with being a man or a woman in the molar

sense.

17. Interestingly, Deleuze refers that in order to become truly capable of loving,

`one has to first become the fool'. `To become the real lover, magnetiser, and

catalyser . . . one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter

fool.' (See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 134.) An imbrication

of innocence and profundity?

214 Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
18. Brian Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, p. 746.

19. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision, pp. 62±7.

20. See J. D. Norseen, `Images of the Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet'.

21. Deleuze quoted in Polan, `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in Boundas

and Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, p. 240.
22. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, p. 211.
23. I refer here to `Caligari' from the German movie The Cabinet of Dr

Caligari (1919), which was an important example of German Expressionist

cinema in the 1920s, its characteristics being multiple camera angles which

create a sense of disorientation, angst and an undercurrent of fear, death

and the perverse.

24. See Tirado, `Against Social Constructionist Cyborgian Territorializations', in

Gordo-Lopez and Parker (eds), Cyberpsychology, where he collides notions of

cyborg consciousness, with Deleuzian notions of becoming, a cyborg-becoming,

is a way of describing that unfixed space, not a hybrid place, but a processual

plane of consistency, a becoming.

25. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 201.

26. Pessoa, `For a Moment', in A Centenary Pessoa, p. 45.

Bibliography

Aaron, M. (ed.) (1999), The Body's Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press).

Adams, P., Brown, B., and Cowie, E. (eds) (1984), m/f: a feminist journal, no. 9,

(London).

Allison, D. B. (ed.) (1985), The New Nietzsche (Massachusetts: MIT Press).

Andrew, D. (1978), `The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory', in

Wide Angle, 2.2, pp. 45±6.

Ansell Pearson, K. (1997a), Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer

(London: Routledge).

Ansell Pearson, K. (1997b), Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhu-

man Condition (London: Routledge).

Ansell Pearson, K. (1999), Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze

(London: Routledge).

Bains, P. (1997), `Subjectless Subjectivities', in B. Massumi, `Deleuze, Guattari and the

Philosophy of Expression', in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol. 4,

September, p. 519.

Baron-Cohen, S., and Harrison, J. E. (1997), Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary

Readings (Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell).

Barthes, R. (1972), Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang).

Baudrillard, J. (1983), Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Breitchman (New

York: Semiotext(e)).

Baudrillard, J. (1988), America, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso).

Baudrillard, J. (1990), Seduction, trans. B. Singer (London: Macmillan).

Baudrillard, J. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press).

Beck, U., and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995), The Normal Chaos of Love, trans. M. Ritter

and I. Wiebel (Cambridge: Polity).

Bell, D., and Kennedy, B. M. (eds) (2000), The Cybercultures Reader (London and

New York: Routledge).

Benhabib, S. (1995 [1990]), `Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance', in

L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York:

Routledge).

Bennett, J. (1984), A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Cambridge, London, New York,

Sydney, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press).

Benvenuto, B. and Kennedy, R. (1986), The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduc-

tion (London: Free Association Books).

Bergson, H. (1911), Creative Evolution, trans A. Mitchell (New York: Holt).

216 Bibliography
Bergson, H. (1991), Matter and Memory, trans. N. Margaret Paul and W. Scott

Palmer (New York: Urzone).

Bergstrom, J., and Doane, M. A. (eds) (1989), Camera Obscura: A Journal of

Feminism and Film Theory, nos 20 and 21, September (Baltimore: John Hopkins

University Press).

Bogue, R. (1989), Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge).

Bogue, R. (1996), `Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force', in P. Patton (ed.) (1996),

Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell), pp. 257±70.

Boorman, J., and Donohue, W. (eds) (1974), Projections 3 (London: Faber and Faber

Ltd).

Boundas, C. V., and Olkowski, D. (eds) (1994), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of

Philosophy (London: Routledge).

Braidotti, R. (1994a), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in

Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Colombia University Press).

Braidotti, R. (1994b), `Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or,

Metaphysics and Metabolism', in C. V. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds) (1994),

Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London: Routledge), pp. 157±87.

Braidotti, R. (1996), `An Anti-Oedipal Tribute', in Radical Philosophy, 76, pp. 3±5.

Braidotti, R. (1997), `Meta(l)morphosis', in Theory, Culture and Society, 14:2, pp.

67±80.

Broadhurst, J. (ed.) (1992), Pli: Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious (Cov-

entry: University of Warwick).

Brooks, P. (1977), Freud's Master Plot, vols 55 and 56, pp. 290±1.

Buchanan, I. (1997), `The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, Or, What

Can a Body Do?, Body and Society, 3.3, September, pp. 73±91.

Buchanan, I. (2000), Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-

versity Press).

Buchanan, I., and Colebrook, C. (eds) (2000), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edin-

burgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Buchanan, I., and Marks, J. (eds) (2000), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press).

Burgoyne, R., Flitterman-Lewis, S., and Stam, R. (eds) (1992), New Vocabularies in

Film Semiotics (London and New York: Routledge).

Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New

York: Routledge).

Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London:

Routledge).

Butler, J. (1995a [1991]), `Contingent Foundations', in L. Nicholson (ed.) (1995),

Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge).

Butler, J. (1995b [1993]), `For a Careful Reading', in L. Nicholson (ed.) (1995),

Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge).

Camus, A. (1946 [1942]), The Outsider, trans. Stuart Gilbert with intro. by Cyril

Connolly (Middlesex: Penguin).

Cashmore, E., and Rojek, C. (eds) (1999), Dictionary of Cultural Theorists (London,

New York, Sydney and Auckland: Arnold).

Cassirer, E. (ed.) (1945), Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, trans. James Gutmann

(Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Cioran, E. M. (1992), Anathemas and Admirations, trans. Richard Howard with an

intro. by Tom McGonigle (London: Quartet).

Cixous, H. (1975), `Sorties', in La Jeune Ne  ditions Ge

 e (Paris: Union d'E  ne
 rales, 10/

18).

Cixous, H. (1976), `The Laugh of the Medusa', in Signs, 1, pp. 875±99. Quoted in

Marks and de Courtvron.

 Bibliography 217
Clover, Carol (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws (Princeton: Princeton University

Press).

Colwell, C. (1997), `Deleuze and the Prepersonal', in Philosophy Today, Spring.

Connolly, W. E. (1995), The Ethos of Pluralisation (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press).

Conrad, J. (1973 [1902]), Heart of Darkness (Middlesex: Penguin).

Cornell, D. (1995a), `What is Ethical Feminism?', in L. Nicholson (ed.) (1995),

Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge).

Cornell, D. (1995b), `Rethinking the Time of Feminism?', in L. Nicholson (ed.)

(1995), Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge).

Cowie, E. (1984), `Fantasia', m/f, pp. 70±105.

Crary, J. (1992), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the

Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Press).

Crary, J., and Kwinter, S. (eds) (1992), Incorporations (New York: Zone).

Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (New

York and London: Routledge).

Deleuze, G. (1981), Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (Paris: Editions de la

Diffe
 rence): vol. 1 contains Deleuze's text; vol. II contains reproductions of Bacon's

paintings.

Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B.

Habberjam (London: Athlone and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press);

(1983), Cine
 ma 1: L'Image-mouvement (Paris: Editions de Minuit).

Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta

(London: Athlone); (1985), Cine

 ma 2: L'Image-temps (Paris: Editions de Minuit).

Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with Charles Stivale (New

York: Colombia University Press).

Deleuze, G. (1991), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York:

Urzone).

Deleuze, G. (1994a), Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit).

Deleuze, G. (1994b), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (London: Athlone).

Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, 1972±1990, trans. M. Joughin (New York:

Colombia University Press).

Deleuze, G. (1997), `Immanence: A Life', in Theory, Culture and Society, 14:2.

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (London: Athlone); (1972) Capitalisme

et Schizophre
 nie tome 1: l'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Editions de Minuit).

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana

Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-

phrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone); (1980), Capitalisme et Schizo-

phrenie tome 2: Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit).

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchill and H.

Tomlinson (London: Verso); (1991), Qu'est ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les

Editions de Minuit).

Deleuze, G., and Parnet, C. (1987), Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habber-

jam (London: Athlone).

Diprose, R. (1994), The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Differ-

ence (London and New York: Routledge).

Doane, M. A., Mellencamp, P., and Williams, L. (eds) (1984), Revision: Essays in

Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles: University Publications of America).

Doel, M. (1999), Post-structuralist Geographies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press).
218 Bibliography
Eisenstein, S. M. (1943), The Film Sense (London: Faber and Faber).

Ferguson, R. (1991), Henry Miller (London: Hutchinson).

Forster, E. M. (1910), Howard's End (London: Edward Arnold).

Fox Keller, E. (1983), A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara

McClintock (New York: W. H. Freeman).

Fraser, N. (1995a), `False Antitheses', in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminist Contentions

(London: Routledge).

Fraser, N. (1995b), `Pragmatism, Feminism and the Linguistic Turn', in L. Nicholson

(ed.), Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge).

Fraser, N. (1997), `Feminism, Foucault and Deleuze', in Theory, Culture and Society,

14:2, pp. 23±7.

Freud, S. (1957 [1922]), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works

of Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other

Works, 1920±1922, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth).

Friedberg, A. (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Post-Modern Condition

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).

Friedberg, A. (1994), `Cinema and the Postmodern Condition', in L. Williams (ed.)

(1994), Viewing Positions (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press).

Gardner, W. H. (1953), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Middlesex: Penguin).

Gatens, M. (1996a), Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and

New York: Routledge).

Gatens, M. (1996b), `Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power', in P.

Patton (ed.) (1996), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Massa-

chusetts: Blackwell), pp. 162±88.

Giraud, P. (1975 [1971]), Semiology, trans. George Gross (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul).

Gledhill, C., and Williams, L. (2000), Re-inventing Film Studies (London and New

York: Arnold).

Goethe, J. W. von (1945), `Theory of Colours', in E. Cassirer (ed.) (1945),

Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, trans. James Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton

University Press).

Goodchild, P. (1996), Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire

(London: Sage).

Gordo-Lopez A. J., and Parker, I. (eds) (1999), Cyberpsychology (London: Macmil-

lan).

Griggers, C. (1997), Becoming-Woman: Theory Out of Bounds (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press).

Griggers, C. (2000), `Goodbye America (The Bride is Walking . . .)', in I. Buchanan

and C. Colebrook (eds) (2000), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edin-

burgh University Press).

Grosz, E. (1990), Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London and New York:

Routledge).

Grosz, E. (1994a), Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press).

Grosz, E. (1994b), `A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics', in C.

Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds) (1994), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of

Philosophy (London: Routledge), pp. 187±213.

Grosz, E. (1995), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies

(London: Routledge).

Grosz, E., and Probyn, E. (1995), Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

(London and New York: Routledge).

Guattari, F. (1984), Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary

Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

 Bibliography 219
 cologies (Paris: Galile
Guattari, F. (1989), Les Trois E Â e).

Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J.

Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications); (1992), Chaosmose (Paris: Editions Galile

 e).

Gunning. T. (1989), `An Aesthetics of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredulous

Spectator', in Art and Text, 34, pp. 31±45.

Haar, M. (1985), `Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language', in D. Allison (ed.) (1985),

The New Nietzsche (MIT Press).

Hansen, M. (1993), `Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public

Sphere', in Screen, 34: 3, Autumn, pp. 197±210.

Haraway, D. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

(London: Free Association).

Haraway, D. (2000 [1991]), `A Cyborg Manifesto; Science, Technology and Socialist

Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', in B. Kennedy and D. Bell (eds) (2000),

The Cybercultures Reader (London: Routledge).

Hardt, M. (1993), Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press).

Hegel, G. W. F. (1975), Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox

(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Horner, A. and Keane, A. (eds) (2000), Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality and

Corporeality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press).

Houlgate, S. (1986), Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press).

Hughes, J. (1997), Lines of Flight: Reading Deleuze with Hardy, Gissing, Conrad,

Woolf (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press).

Irigaray, L. (1974), Speculum de L'autre femme (Paris: Minuit).

Irigaray, L. (1976), `Women's Exile', interview in Ideology and Consciousness (May

1977), pp. 62±76.

Irigaray, L. (1980), `When the Goods Get Together', in E. Marks and Isabelle de

Courtivron (eds) (1980), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester).

Irigaray, L. (1985), This Sex Which is Not One, trans. C. Porter with R. Burke

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University).

Irigaray, L. (1986), Amante Marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris: Minuit).

James, H. (1963), `The Figure in the Carpet', in The Complete Tales of Henry James

(London: Rupert Hart-Davies).

Jardine, A. (1984), `Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and his (br)others', in Substance, 44/

45, pp. 46±60.

Jardine, A. (1985), Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press).

Kafka, F. (1961 [1916]), Metamorphosis, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Middlesex:

Penguin).

Kant, I. (1929), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:

Macmillan).

Kant, I. (1982), Critique of Judgement, trans. J. Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon

Press).

Kaplan, E. (ed.) (1980), Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Institute).

Kaplan, E. (ed.) (1990), Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Routledge).

Kennedy, B. M. (1999), `Post-feminist Futures in Film Noir', in M. Aaron (ed.)

(1999), The Body's Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

Klossowski, P. (1997), Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Kristeva, J. (1974), `La femme ce n'est jamais c

Ë a', in Tel Quel, 59, pp. 19±24.

Kristeva, J. (1984), Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Walter (New York:

Columbia University Press).

220 Bibliography
Kristeva, J. (1986a), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,

ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell).

Kristeva, J. (1986b), Powers of Horror, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Colombia

University Press).

Kristeva, J. (1980), `Woman Can Never be Defined', in E. Marks and Isabelle de

Courtivron (eds) (1980), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester).

Lacan, J. (1977a), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock).

Lacan, J. (1977b), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London:

Hogarth Press).

Lecercle, J. J. (1985), Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense,

Desire (La Salle: Open Court).

Lechte, J. (1990), Julia Kristeva, (London and New York: Routledge).

Levinson, J. (1998), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press).

Lichtenberg-Ettinger, B. (1992), `Matrix and Metamorphosis', in Differences, A

Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4:3, p. 176.

Lingis, A. (1994), Foreign Bodies (London: Routledge).

Lucie-Smith, E. (1996), Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century (London: Lawrence

King).

Lyotard, J. F. (1971), Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck).

Lyotard, J. F. (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G.

Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: University of Manchester).

McMahon, M. (1997), `Beauty: Machinic Repetition in the Age of Art', in B.

Massumi (ed.) (1997), Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

McWilliam, E., and Taylor, P. (eds) (1996), Pedagogy, Technology and the Body

(New York, Washington, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Berne, and Baltimore DC: Peter

Lang).

Marks, E. and Courtivron, Isabelle de (eds) (1980), New French Feminisms (Brighton:

Harvester).

Massumi, B. (1992), A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations

from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Massumi, B. (1996), `The Autonomy of Affect', in P. Patton (ed.) (1996), Deleuze: A

Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell), pp. 217±40.

Massumi, B. (1997), `Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression', in

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, vol. 4, September.

Mayne, J. (1993), Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge).

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Lon-

don: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Metz, C. (1971, 1972), Essais sur la signification au cine

 ma, vols I and II (Paris:

Klincksieck).

Metz, C. (1974a), Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford

University Press).

Metz, C. (1974b), Language and Cinema (The Hague: Mouton).

Metz, C. (1975), `The Imaginary Signifier', in Screen, 16(2) Summer.

Metz, C. (1982), The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press).

Miller, H. (1965), Sexus (New York: Grove Press).

Modleski, T. (1991), Feminism Without Women, Culture and Criticism in a `Post-

feminist' Age (New York and London: Routledge).

Moi, T. (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen).

Mouffe, C. (ed.) (1996), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York:

Routledge).

Mullarkey, J. (1997), `Deleuze and Materialism: One or Several Matters?' in Ian

 Bibliography 221
Buchanan (ed), A Deleuzian Century: Special Issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly,

96.3 (Summer), pp. 439±63.

Mulvey, L. (1989), Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan).

Musselwhite, D. (1987), Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the

Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London and New York: Methuen).

Nicholson, L. (ed.) (1990), Feminism/Postmodernism (London: Routledge, Chapman

and Hall).

Nicholson, L. (ed.) (1995), Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge).

Nietzsche, F. (1954a), Werke I (Munchen: Carl Hanser Verlag).

Nietzsche, F. (1954b), Werke II: Die Fro

È hliche Wissenschaft (Munchen: Carl Hanser

Verlag).

Nietzsche, F. (1954c), Werke III (Munchen: Carl Hanser Verlag).

Nietzsche, F. (1968), The Will to Power, trans. T. Kaufman (New York: Vintage).

Nietzsche, F. (1969), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New

York: Vintage Books).

Nietzsche, F. (1982), Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans.

R. J. Hollingdale, with intro. by M. Tanner (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press).

Nietzsche, F. (1998), Twilight of the Idols, trans. with intro. and notes by Duncan

Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Norseen, J. (1996), `Images of the Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet', in American

Computer Scientists' Association.

O'Connell, S. (1997), `Aesthetics: A Place I've Never Seen', in Canadian Review of

Comparative Literature, September, p. 486.

Ondaatje, M. (1993), The English Patient (London: Picador).

Patton, P. (1994), `Anti-Platonism and Art', in C. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds)

(1994), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London and New York:

Routledge), pp. 141±57.

Patton, P. (ed.) (1996), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, Mas-

sachusetts: Blackwell).

Penley, C. (1989), The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Penrose, R. (1997), The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press).

Pessoa, F. (1995), A Centenary Pessoa, ed. by E. Lisboa and L. C. Taylor, trans.

poetry by K. Bosky, prose by B. McGuirk, M. Lisboa and R. Zenith, intro. by O.

Paz (Manchester: Carcanet).

Polan, D. (1994), `Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation', in C. Boundas and D.

Olkowski (eds) (1994), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London and

New York: Routledge), pp. 229±55.

Pollock, G. (1988), Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art

(London: Routledge).

Powell, A. (2001), Transformations: Altered States in Film (London: Flicks Books).

Prigogine, I. (1989), `The Philosophy of Instability', in Futures, no. 396, p. 400.

Rodowick, D. N. (1991), The Difficulty of Difference (London and New York:

Routledge).

Rodowick, D. N. (1997), Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (London: Duke University

Press).

Root-Bernstein, R. (1997), `Art, Imagination and the Scientist', in American Scientist,

85, pp. 6±9.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, M. C. (1994), `The Cinema, Reader of Gilles Deleuze', in C.

Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds) (1994), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of

Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 255±61.

222 Bibliography
Rosset, C. (1993), Joyful Cruelty: Towards a Philosophy of the Real, trans. and ed. by

D. F. Bell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

Ruyer, R. (1952), Neo-finalisme (Paris: PUF).

Sandoval, C. (2000), `New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the

Oppressed', in B. M. Kennedy and D. Bell (eds) (2000), The Cybercultures Reader

(London: Routledge).

Saussure, F. (1974), Course in General Linguistics (London: Fontana).

Schact, R. (ed.) (1993), Nietzsche: Selections (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall).

Shaviro, S. (1993), The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press).

Shiach, M. (1991), He
 le
Á ne Cixous (London: Routledge).

Silverman, K. (1996), The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge).

Smith, D. (1996), `Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality',

in P. Patton (ed.) (1996), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Blackwell), pp. 29±57.

Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985), Disorderly Conduct (Oxford: Open University Press).

Sobchack, V. (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Sobchack, V. (1994), `Phenomenology and the Film Experience', in L. Williams (ed.)

(1994), Viewing Positions (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press),

pp. 36±59.

Stam, R., Burgoyne, R., and Flitterman-Lewis, S. (eds) (1992), New Vocabularies in

Film Semiotics, Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond (London and New

York: Routledge).

Stern, D. (1985), The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A Review from Psycho-

analysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books).

Stone, R., Allucquere (2000 [1992]), `Will the Real Body Please Stand Up', in B. M.

Kennedy and D. Bell (eds) (2000), The Cybercultures Reader (London: Routledge).

Studlar, G. (1988), In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the

Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press).

Tirado, F. J. (1999), `Against Social Constructionist Cyborgian Territorializations', in

A. J. Gordo-Lopez and I. Parker (eds) (1999), Cyberpsychology (London: Mac-

millan).

Tuer, D. (1987), `Pleasures in the Dark: Sexual Difference and Erotic Deviance in an

Articulation of Female Desire', in Cineaction, 10.

Valadier, P. (1985), `Dionysus versus the Crucified', in D. B. Allison (ed.) (1985), The

New Nietzsche (Massachusetts: MIT Press).

Virilio, P. (1994), The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Wartenberg, T. E., and Freedland, C. A. (eds) (1995), Philosophy and Film (London

and New York: Routledge).

Williams, L. (ed.) (1994), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press).

Wilson, E. O. (1998), Consilience (London: Little, Brown and Company).

Woolf, V. (1925), Modern Fiction: The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press).

Woolf, V. (1925±30), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press).

Woolf, V. (1928), Orlando: A Biography (London: Hogarth Press).

Woolf, V. (1943), The Waves (London: Hogarth Press).

Woolf, V. (1992 [1925]), Mrs Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Yeats, W. B. (1977 [1933]), `The Second Coming', in The Collected Poems of W. B.

Yeats (London: Macmillan).

Zeki, S. (1999), Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).
Filmography

Age of Innocence (1993) Martin Scorsese

The Assassin (1993) J. Badham

Basic Instinct (1992) Paul Verhoeven

Battleship Potemkin (1925) Sergei Eisenstein

Bladerunner (1982) Ridley Scott

Blue Steel (1990) Kathryn Bigelow

Blue Velvet (1986) David Lynch

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) Robert Weine

Crash (1996) David Cronenberg

End of Days (1999) Peter Hyams

The English Patient (1996) Anthony Minghella

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) John Schlesinger

Howard's End (1992) James Ivory

Leon (1994) Luc Besson

Metropolis (1926) Fritz Lang

Near Dark (1987) Kathryn Bigelow

Nikita (1990) Luc Besson

October (1928) Sergei Eisenstein

Orlando (1992) Sally Potter

224 Filmography
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Stephan Elliott

Raging Bull (1980) Martin Scorsese

Romeo is Bleeding (1993) Peter Medak

The Sheltering Sky (1990) Bernardo Bertolucci

Sliver (1993) Phillip Noyce

Strange Days (1995) Kathryn Bigelow

Strictly Ballroom (1992) Baz Luhrmann

Strike (1925) Sergei Eisenstein

Twelve Monkeys (1995) Terry Gilliam

Videodrome (1982) David Cronenberg

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996) Baz Luhrmann

The Winter Guest (1997) Alan Rickman

Index

`abstract machines', 67±70, 186 `becoming-woman', 14±15, 17,

aesthetics, definition of, 12±13 28±9, 77, 91±7, 103±5, 127,

see also `materialist aesthetic'; 130, 136, 140±2, 149, 160,

`neo-aesthetic'; sensation, 165, 169, 191±2n, 193±5,

aesthetics of 197±8

`affect', concept of, 81±2, 93±4, 97, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 209

99±100, 114±15, 169 Bell, Clive, 30

definitions of, 47±8, 101±2, Bene, Carmelo, 169

108 Benhabib, Seyla, 18±19, 22

Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, Benjamin, Walter, 60

1993), 138, 170 Bergson, Henri, 4, 47, 81, 116,

anti-feminism, in film, 9, 182, 183± 118±19, 178n

5, 190±1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and (Freud), 73±7
Guattari), 77±8 Binoche, Juliette, 153

`aparalletic evolution', 24, 36n, 68, Bjo

È rk, 205
115, 211, 213n Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982),
Apollonian vs. Dionysian art, 85 9, 15, 133, 134, 138, 187

Aristotle, 30 Blanchot, Maurice, 137

Artaud, Antonin, 103, 169 Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986),

98

Bacon, Francis, 110±11, 113±14, `body'

136, 145 in cinematic experience, 25±6,

Bains, Paul, 90, 91 33, 36n, 57±8, 103±4

Bassett, Angela, 185 definitions of, 14, 16, 20, 69,

Baudelaire, Charles, 60 96

Baudrillard, Jean, 183 in psychoanalysis, 42, 44, 48±9

beauty, impact of, 30±2, 50, 116, `without organs', 58, 97±102,

143±4, 157, 171±2, 200±1 137, 162, 164±5, 197

`becoming', concept of, 81, 87±8, Bosch, Hieronymus, 169

108, 115 Braidotti, Rosi, 19±20, 93, 95

`becoming-girl', 157, 160, 191± brain, structure of, 166±7, 183±4,

2n, 193±5, 196±200, 204±5, 207

206±7, 209±10, 211 Bray, Linda, 94

226 Index
Brecht, Bertolt, 128 death

The Burial of Ornans (Courbet), instinct, 74, 77±8, 82

131 significance in film, 129±31,

Butler, Judith, 22 133, 134, 154

definitions of terms used, 10±15,

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari 18±23

(Robert Wiene, 1919), 209, Deleuze, Gilles

213n artistry of, 2

camera obscura, 52±3, 62±3n on `becoming-woman', 91±7

Cartesian philosophy, 4, 18, 20, on cinema, 1, 25, 100, 103±5,

53, 72, 90, 101, 185 118, 136±7, 138, 161±2, 167,

Ce
 zanne, Paul, 89, 112, 166 200±1, 210±11

Chaosmosis (Guattari), 17, 35n, on desire, 78±82

84±5, 182 elusiveness of, 1±2

Chekhov, Anton, 191 on girlhood, 196±200, 212±13n

Chomsky, Noam, 68 heterodoxy of, 1±3

Cinema 1: The Movement-Image influence of, 2

(Deleuze), 1, 25, 91, 136±7 on maps, 147±8

Cinema 2: The Time-Image neologism, use of, 27

(Deleuze), 1, 25, 91, 100, on painting, 110±12

103±4, 161±2, 167, 200±1, philosophy of, 24±7, 33, 47, 49,

210±11 56, 61, 161±2, 163±4

cinematic history, 52±3 on pleasure, 74±8

Cioran, Emil, 132, 163 and postfeminism, 24±5

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), sensation, theory of, 108±14

202 on thought, 67±72

Cixous, He
 le
Á ne, 20 works see individual titles

colour, impact of, 115±17, 169, Descartes, Rene

 , 53

177±8, 186 see also Cartesian philosophy

Colwell, C., 89, 165 desire, significance of, 26±7, 29,

Conrad, Joseph, 2 34, 41±2, 44±5, 50, 59,

Courbet, Gustave, 131 61±2, 72±3, 78±82, 132±3,

Crary, Jonathan, 51±5, 56, 60, 61, 199

70, 78 Des'ree, 175

Crisp, Quentin, 129 deterritorialisation, 1, 6

Cronenberg, David, 191 di Caprio, Leonardo, 168

`cruelty', definition of, 105±6n Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet), 1,

cyberfeminism, 20, 62n 36n, 70±1, 163

Diderot, Denis, 53

Dafoe, Willem, 158 Difference and Repetition

dance (Deleuze), 74±5

images of, 137, 156, 174, 175±6, Duchamps, Marcel, 89

185, 188±90 Duns Scotus, 197

as metaphor, 71 Dworkin, Andrea, 12

Danes, Claire, 168

Darwinism, 11 Eisenstein, Sergei, 34±5n

Day-Lewis, Daniel, 138 End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999),

de Biraine, Maine, 54 182, 191n
 Index 227
The English Patient (Anthony Gatens, Moira, 20

Minghella, 1996), 15, 131, Gledhill, Christine, 51

140, 147±62, 167, 175, 183, Godard, Jean-Luc, 34±5n

196 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 54

Epstein, Jacob, 118 Griggers, Camilla, 52, 94±5, 96±7

 tranger (Camus), 24, 135
L'E Grosz, Elizabeth, 40, 47, 99

Guattari, Fe
 lix, 3, 17, 26, 33,

Far from the Madding Crowd 35n, 70, 84±5, 89, 90, 91±2,

(John Schlesinger, 1967), 172 96, 97±8, 102, 182, 189,

Fechner, George, 54 196±8

feminism Gunning, Tom, 59, 60, 63n

definition of, 18±19

and film theory, 3±4, 9±10, 13± `haecceity', 30, 61, 76, 85, 90,

14, 28, 42, 48, 50±1, 61, 95, 122n, 127, 136, 150, 165,

125, 191n 167, 181±2, 186, 194, 196±7,

in French thinking, 19, 20, 26, 206±7

35n, 45 Hansen, Miriam, 51, 59±60

and politics, 11±12, 19±20, 94± `hapticity', 117, 122n, 203±4

5, 96±7 Haraway, Donna, 20, 36n

problems of, 92±3 Harvey, P. J., 185, 188

see also anti-feminism; Hegel, Friedrich, 19, 47, 88, 117,

postfeminism 185

Fiennes, Ralph, 148, 183 Herodotus, 155±6

`figurals', 110±11, 129±30, 136±7, Houlgate, Stephen, 87

145, 155±6 Howards End (E. M. Forster), 176

`The Figure in the Carpet' (Henry

James), 6n ideas, generation and nature of,

film 69±72

aesthetic impact of, 4±6, 27±8, immanence, processes of, 80±1, 87,

58±9 97, 99, 163, 180±1, 196±7

as art, 33±4, 83 Irigaray, Luce, 20, 62n, 96

experiential nature of, 16, 26,

46, 55±7, 60, 102, 186, 194 James, Henry, 6n

film theory Jardine, Alice, 93

aesthetics of, 79±80 Joan of Arc, 198

modern developments in, 51±61

Firth, Colin, 155 Kafka, Franz, 209

forced movement, aspect of Kandinsky, Wassily, 2, 166

sensation, 113±14, 142, 209 Kant, Immanuel, 37n

Foucault, Michel, 2, 20, 53, 56 Kelly, Gene, 204, 206, 208

Francis Bacon: Logique de la King, Rodney, killing of, 182, 185

Sensation (Deleuze), 1, 82, Klee, Paul, 2

110±11, 166 Klossowski, Pierre, 78

Freudian theory, 26, 39±41, 43±5,

73±7, 79, 127, 139, 168±9 Lacan, Jacques, 26, 39±40, 41±4,

Friedberg, Anne, 51±2, 60, 61 46±7, 79

Fry, Roger, 30, 34n language, theories of, 41±2, 69±70,

future, visions of, 182 86±7

228 Index
Leon (Luc Besson, 1994), 9, 15, `neo-aesthetic', 4±6, 13, 15±16,

162, 191±2n, 193±212 31±2, 33±4, 38, 49, 59, 61±2,

Leone, Sergio, 171 165, 168±9

Lewis, Juliette, 185 of sensation, 115, 178, 210±11

Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Bracha, 52, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 36n, 85±8,

64n, 174 163

lines, 70±1 Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990), 186,

`liquidity' of image/perception, 193, 195

119±20, 187, 203±4 Norseen, John D., 178, 203

Locke, John, 53 nouvelle vague, 34±5n

love, presentations in film, 132±5,

137±9, 145, 151±2, 156, 164± Oedipal myths and theories, 39±

5, 199±200, 213n 41, 44±5, 77±8, 79, 81, 82

Lynch, David, 98±9, 144 O'Keefe, Georgia, 2

Lyotard, Jean-Franc
Ë ois, 110, 121n Oldman, Gary, 195, 199, 202,

208±9

McClintock, Barbara, 31±2 Orlando (film, Sally Potter, 1992),

`machinic' constructions, 23, 24, 15, 125±45, 150, 152, 156,

36n, 68±70, 194, 195 159, 167, 183, 196

McKinnon, Catherine, 11±12 Orlando (novel, Virginia Woolf), 125

Madonna, 206 Othello (Shakespeare), 129, 139
maps, literal and figurative

significance of, 147±9, 150 Pessoa, Fernando, 27, 32, 82, 211±

Marxist theory, 16, 34n, 185 12

Massive Attack, 186 Plato and Platonist theory, 19, 24,

Massumi, Brian, 116, 172 109

`materialist aesthetic', 29, 34, 49, pleasure, 29, 34, 49±50, 72±8

165 Polan, Dana, 111, 112, 166

Matter and Memory (Bergson), Pollock, Jackson, 2, 111, 189

118±19 post-structuralism, 1, 20, 30, 35n,

Mazelle, Kim, 174 51, 97, 210±11

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 55, 56, postfeminism, 1, 3, 5±6, 51

112 definitions of, 21±3, 32

Metz, Christian, 125, 133 and Deleuzian ideas, 24±5, 27

`micro-politics', 17, 85, 195 and film theory, 28±9, 69, 193,

definitions of, 10±11, 23 210±11

millennial themes, 181, 185 pragmatics, 11±12, 23, 51, 69

Miller, Henry, 146n psychoanalytic film theory, 38±50,

Mondrian, Piet, 2, 111, 131, 166 72

Monroe, Marilyn, 206

Moore, George, 30, 34n Radiohead, 172

movement, impact of, 116±20, Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese,

134±5, 136±7, 171±2 1980), 189

see also forced movement Reno, Jean, 198

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 172 resonance, aspect of sensation,

Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), 113, 177, 187, 204

114 `rhizome', image of, 69±70, 147±8,

Mulvey, Laura, 43±4, 51 183, 185, 194

 Index 229
Rodin, Auguste, 2, 138 transcendence of, 82±3, 84, 88±

Rodowick, David, 33 91, 100±1, 103, 108±9, 186,

romanticism, 2, 145 207

Romeo and Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, Swinton, Tilda, 126, 138

1996), 15, 113, 117, 162,

163±78, 183, 186, 196 Theory of Colours (Goethe), 54

Romeo is Bleeding (Peter Medak, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and
1993), 9, 188, 191n Guattari), 1, 88, 92, 137, 162,

Ruyer, Raymond, 90±1, 102 193, 196±8, 202

`Three Syntheses of Beyond the

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 41 Pleasure Principle' (Deleuze),
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 85 74±5, 104

Scorsese, Martin, 170, 189 Tiananmen Square, 11

Scott Thomas, Kristin, 148 Tricky, 186

`The Second Coming' (Yeats), 180± triptychal structures, 72, 110, 113±

1, 187 14, 121n, 145, 158

sensation Tristan und Isolde (Wagner),

`aesthetics of', defined, 53, 68 172

categories of, 113±14 Trost (writer), 198

impact of, 14±15, 29±32, 76±8, Truffaut, Franc

Ë ois, 34±5n

108±14, 152, 157±61, 171±2, Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam,

186, 199, 207 1995), 182

types of effect on, 114±20

sexuality Vertov, Dziga, 119±20

in aesthetic response, 45±9 vibration, aspect of sensation, 113,

in critical theory, 41±5, 62n, 76± 187, 204, 205, 207±10

8, 193 violence in film, impact of, 180,

in film, 132±3, 158±60, 167, 182, 183±4, 199

171, 188, 202

The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo `wasp and the orchid', image of, 2,

Bertolucci, 1990), 131 36n, 115, 148, 213n

Smith, Daniel, 109 Wayne, John, 206

Sobchack, Vivian, 51, 55±9, 60, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and

61, 78, 98, 112 Guattari), 1, 2, 67, 70, 84,

Somerville, Jimmy, 128 90±1, 108, 112, 113±14, 114±

Spinoza, Baruch, 4, 81, 96, 101, 136 15, 135±6

Stamp, Terence, 172 Williams, Linda, 51, 61

Stern, Daniel, 90, 106n Wilson, Edward, 84, 105n

Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, The Winter Guest (Alan Rickman,

1995), 15, 117, 162, 180±91, 1997), 133

196, 199 Woolf, Virginia, 114, 125, 145

Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, Wuornos, Aileen, 94

1992), 170

structuralism, 18, 20, 97, 149 Yeats, W. B., 180±1, 187

style, 114±15

subjectivity, 23±4, 31±3, 35n, 46 Zane, Billy, 126, 145

definition of, 19±20 Zeki, Semir, 162n, 166±7, 178