Lost in the limit

A remarkable by-product of the excesses of recent academic publishing will itself be one of the fruits of the proliferation of the phenomenon of the 5,000-6,000 word journal article. In an effort to condense their prose into bite-size chunks (including notes and bibliographies) authors cut all manner of material once considered a pre-requisite for peer acceptance. Gone the survey of existing material in the field; vanished the cursory acknowledgement of established contributors, peers and up and coming unpublished PhDs; shortened to a snapshot the once extensive bibliography. In such a stripped down domain (paradoxically located within the hyper-saturation of material), not only is it increasingly difficult to feel one can contribute anything substantial within the word limit, it is also becoming very tempting to hide behind a shrug of the shoulders as if to say, “sorry no space to acknowledge your exemplary scholarship, space is never permitting.”

Conducts of Time #1

Conducts of time are not only behaviours and channels but also gaits of time, postures of time in movement. They may equally inhere in the pas au dela, the step which is also a pas – a not, in Derrida’s Blanchovian formulation. Conducts of time may give rise to systole or diastole, to condensations and saturations, as in running on the spot, and to disseminations. A conduct may produce reifications and consolidations of the most facsistic kind, or it may liberate blocs of becoming. The Block versus the bloc, the distinction which might be found in formulations such as the Abstract Machine in its multivalent functioning in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. The abstract machine as programming inertia on the one hand, and as processual experimental bricolage on the other. Our contemporary technoscientific milieu elicits from its minions – and according to certain accounts we are working whether we like it or acknowledge it or not – responses along both lines in equal measure. Indeed the internet itself displays in its mutations the contending performances of these contrasting and opposed positionings: freedom of expression but only insofar as search engine hierarchies aid in the visibility of that expression, proliferation of glimpses beyond the threshold of copyrighted artefacts but constant reminder of the increasingly flexible border twisting and insinuating itself into every journal article glimpsed via Project Muse, but tantalisingly out of touch to those in universities not subscribing to it. The frustration of the Athens password holder in the university which touches the frontier of Project Muse but can only peer across the digital tract, what Samuel Beckett might call, the “vastitude”, at the disappearing thread of the legible abstract. The web for the university student or staff member is always territorialised. They find the borders everywhere.

In praise of Klinsmann's shirt

The difference between the Germany of Klinsmann and that of Low comes down to one thing: the ability to wear a white shirt. Klinsmann wore his with the confidence in his midriff’s ability to carry off the hip-hugging slacks with skinny belt ensemble. It was a look which, when hands went on hips, as they often did when he ventured into the technical area, accentuated the lithe Delonesque confidence in his corporeal dominance of the frame (he could have done without the white T-shirt underneath however). It was a look which displayed the manager’s awareness of the frame, of enframing. The logical furtherance of his renowned ability to simulate being on the receiving end of a foul as a player. A confidence man, a snake-hipped retro disco ironist, resident in California yet still managing the national team. Like Baudrillard in Las Vegas still running a sub-section of the academic book industry – primers – except he didn’t know it. Both examples of the fatal strategy. Clothing as technology. The current German manager has the same uniform; it’s just that the waistline is a centimetre too high, the sleeves rolled up too far. It has evening wear-style panels.

The window in Truffaut's Jules et Jim

The window pane is a surface which defies inscription or recording: it is a pure medium in that it does nothing other than intervene. Its intervention however solid from a physical point of view (it keeps out and keeps in: it holds) is transparent (usually). If blacked out then it is in some sense no longer a window but a wall. It cannot record or archive the figures reflected in it or which pass in front of it and the gaze of the person stationed at it. It is in some sense erased by reflections upon it. And yet this erasure is paradoxically achieved by embellishing and thickening it, giving it body, even if spectral body.

Any film featuring a medium shot of a window automatically reflects whether intentionally or not on the frame within which it itself falls. A curious thing occurs in Truffaut’s handling of an already interesting window scene in Jules et Jim. They have been looking out at night, then they are filmed from behind, which image is revealed and brought into light by a diagonal wipe which starts with a small square in the top right hand corner and proceeds across the screen in a right to left diagonal axis in order, finally, to fill it with a window scene shot from the interior. It is a remarkable inversion and interpenetration of juxtaposed perspectives and spaces.

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And yet also:

Like any surface capable of being projected upon – and of course windows are surfaces receptive of that most evanescent of modes of inscription involving the technologies of breath and finger combined – the window has in literature enjoyed a rich metaphorical life. Frequently it is summoned within a long tradition of metonymy whereby the writing itself finds itself subject to miniature and emblematic scrutiny. Of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves one commentator asserts that “the window is seen in relation to the awakening of the day, the tabula rasa of the child’s mind, as well as the creation of the novel” (Senn 47).

Cathrin Senn, Framed Views and Dual Worlds: The Motif of the Window as a Narrative Device and Structural Metaphor in Prose Fiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001)

D comme Deleuze, Dionysius, dissonance and (sober) dissolution

A short text from 2005 after another viewing of L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze’s career in philosophy took frequent detours through domains of enquiry which if not exactly alien to the discipline, then were decidedly peripheral to its principal concerns, whether those concerns are defined in traditional terms or in Deleuze and Guattari’s own terms as the invention of concepts. Never one to subscribe to the sense of philosophy as higher/first philosophy, Deleuze not only sought out a maverick line of philosophers from Spinoza to Nietzsche – thinkers in one way or another of immanence – but also sought out concepts or problems in thinkers to whom his own thought is in profound disagreement. The most famous case of this is Kant, who despite being the primary philosopher of the tribunal (a process which Deleuze holds in disdain). However it is in his devotion to certain problems and concepts in Kant that lies one of the clues as to the role played in the development of his thought by the non-philosophers to whom he so frequently turned. When, in his series of interviews with Claire Parnet for the Franco-German television station Arte broadcast in 1995, Deleuze came to consider the letter K (…comme Kant); he dwells on two central moments which define for him the immensity of Kant’s achievement, in spite of the conservative and reactive effects of the tribunal of reason. These are the Kantian reversal whereby instead of time being subservient to movement, movement depends upon time, and the idea of a discordant accord between the faculties (as in the experience of the sublime).

Our clue is in the passion evinced by Deleuze for these concepts, and for the questions they pose. The task of philosophy confronted by a system such as that of Kant becomes less a tribunal to judge the overall system as a totality, than to evaluate immanently the capacity of the concepts to create thought, or to engender new concepts responding to new problems. Eschewing therefore the transcendent position which would judge in a reactive manner the work of a philosopher (Russell on Leibniz for example), the Deleuzean approach to the history of philosophy adopts a more active and affirmative approach. In this way the philosophy of Kant can find itself reconfigured in the form of four poetic formulas. This manoeuvre is a prime example of the principle governing most of Deleuze’s work in the history of philosophy, that is “giving…a little of the joy they…”( ). The case of this particular use of Kant provides another clue as to the detours into non-philosophy in Deleuze’s career. In celebrating the Kantian reversal and its correlative discordant accord, Deleuze also makes this problem and this concept resonate in new confrontations (an example itself of philosophy as the production of discordant accords). However the confrontations are not with antagonists in a dialectical argument or dispute; rather they are encounters with non-philosophers and with the material they can bring to the Kantian dinner party.

Deleuze makes much of the fact that philosophy entails a certain sobriety, a certain asceticism, often coupled with hardship or persecution. It is perhaps Kant who most comprehensively deserves the label of sobriety, this despite his addictions – a combination brilliantly brought out in Thomas de Quincey’s book on the philosopher and which is superbly evoked by Philippe Collin’s film based on the de Quincey volume. If philosophical activity – the generation of concepts – is essentially a sober endeavour, then it will be necessary to look outside philosophy for a little joy, a little inebriation, a little passion. Even the Kantian dinner party seemed a reluctant host to just a little bit of dissolute[1]. This joy can appear when philosophy touches upon its own limit, as when Leibniz takes his philosophy close to the shores of Dionysius, but pulls back. Equally it might arise when the creation of concepts is allied – acrobatically – to the creation of percepts and affects. This is the case of Nietzsche with his cast of dwarves, giants and walkers. Nietzsche is the primary example of a philosopher taking his concepts to their limit; of a philosopher whose concepts exist in a discordant accord with their own non-philosophical components. When Nietzsche writes of ‘lightness’ he has created a concept-percept with one foot in the philosophical and the other in literature. Here then is the second clue: in order to be philosophical one must simultaneously be non-philosophical. In the interview with Parnet, under the category ‘P…comme professeur’ Deleuze recalls with fondness the distinctive nature of the public attending his cours at Vincennes. Marked by the variety of their occupations, by the diversity of their ethnic origins, and by the disparity of their relations to the philosophical as such, the cours was for Deleuze a key landscape for producing encounters between philosophy and non-philosophy, an environment wherein it was possible to pursue what he calls a ‘double lecture’ - the professional and competent on one level and the impassioned amateur on another.
[1] For an example of a virulently anti-Kantian embrace of the dissolute in philosophy see Land 1992.
An excerpt from Les derniers jours d'emmanuel Kant is can be seen at
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://a171.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/124/s_d381b2feaa4ec80222cf434529bb176a.jpg&imgrefurl=http://la.myspace.com/index.cfm%3Ffuseaction%3Dvids.individual%26videoid%3D17441060&h=114&w=90&sz=3&hl=en&start=10&um=1&tbnid=UDfaTFZq8EMtUM:&tbnh=87&tbnw=69&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dderniers%2Bjours%2Bd%2527emmanuel%2Bkant%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26rls%3DDMUK,DMUK:2006-41,DMUK:en%26sa%3DG

A vestige of authentic Euro-vision

The French Eurovision entry this year was a thing of rare heterotopic complexity. Combining all of the best elements of the Gibb brothers' hairstyles circa 1977, Sebastien Tellier was propelled on stage in a golf cart and backed by identically bearded singers of indeterminate gender; the song as performed on stage featured an inflated transparent ball - which may have represented the planet - as an accessory to its sub-Pulp (but higher-pitched) evocation of a purported divinity inherent in a loved creature and/or transcendent being (or possibly an immanent being raised to the power of the transcendent). The vaguely 'yeh-yeh' backing vocals of a machinic monotony and precision ceased for the singer to go on one knee, in a gesture reminiscent of Johnny Logan, completely pause for a second, and to deliver the line concerning divinity once more. Including the line 'this is a token line in French' or something along those lines (in French) the song delivered a nice reminder of the lost linguistic exoticism of the Eurovision Song Contest and replied to the furore caused by the decision of FR3's voting public to select a song performed in English. Luckily youtube preserves the performance, even if I still can't identify the globe. Apparently the semi-final version was even better.

Montrage obligatoire: A Twentieth-century portrait

A short text from 1995 written having seen the film screened at La Pagode in Paris one afternoon in the company of many older than JLG's generation.


Godard, not unlike Deleuze, has always thought that "cinema is an instrument of thought". But with Godard, as with Deleuze, cinema will never simply be at the service of thought. Instead it will produce an image of thought. For both Godard and Deleuze, thought/cinema is a "battlefield". That battlefield, however, is not one where is played out a dialectic resulting in the triumphant progress of reason. The words spoken by Samuel Fuller in Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) accord with Deleuze's interest in what he calls the "dust" of battle: "a film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death". The latter are categories through which the film passes. For Deleuze, by providing his films with so many "reflexive types" (or conceptual personae) Godard keeps cinema on the battlefield as EVENT and not as essence, perpetrating molecularising stratagems as opposed to molarising strategies. The result is not, therefore, the proud line anchoring the plane to the transcendent, but, rather, the
broken line, a zig-zag line, which brings together the author, his characters and the world, and that which passes between them. Thus modern cinema develops new relations with thought from three points of view: the obliteration of the whole or of a totalisation of images, in favour of an outside which is inserted between them; the erasure of the internal monologue as whole of the film, in favour of a free indirect discourse and vision; the erasure of the unity of man and world, in favour of a break which now leaves us with only a belief in this world. (Cinema II, p. 188).

The film JLG/JLG (1995) sets us on the trail not of one, but of many Godards. Doubling and folding around the inflection of the bar between JLG and JLG the film unfolds as a self-portraiture (and the processual quality of portraiture as opposed to portrait is important) without subject. The elision of the subject by means of an avowed portrayal of the subject named in the film's title (named and unnamed) sees emerge the heterotopic zone of inflection marked in the bar.

Since Eisenstein and Vertov the primacy or not of montage has been a central question for theories of cinema. With Godard, however, montage becomes montrage. Of utilisation of the plan fixe in Godard, Deleuze asserts: it "effectively carries the static shot of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsist are tiny varieties of speed between movements in composition". No longer is it a question of the ontological piety of Being, of the copula IS. In Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-1998) Godard himself frequently appears in partial silhouette at an editing table, figured in the atopic, smooth and threshold state - the smooth space - of the space between, the intermezzine space of AND. "Vous-êtes là, là!", the voiceover at the beginning of Soigne ta droite (1987) intones, as an aerial shot points earthwards (the film's subtitle is "A place on earth"), at which point a camera jolt reminds the viewer that they are precisely in this "there" (là), this shifting there, the atopia of which is ciphered in the techne of cinema, now become an irrationality incapable of being made subservient to a rational goal. Godard subjects Heidegger's being-in-the-world to a neo-baroque loosening: being-for-the-world: you are here, AND here, AND here, multiplied across the film of cinema. Your subjectivity is a genre, as one says of Hollywood musical comedy that it is a genre.

Form, emergence, space in To the One of Fictive Music

To the One of Fictive Music explores the philosophical question of the emergence into form, and traces the movement from fluid hyle to wrought object. It situates this movement in the context of another allied philosophical debate, namely that which pertains to the ontological status of a work of art. By virtue of the self-reflexive gestures pervading the language of the poem, and when placed in the context of Stevens’ other work, the question of the ontological status of the poem itself is never far from the centre of the poem’s concerns.

In a striking opening which resonates with a variety of philosophical interventions, including Aristotle, and Irigaray’s reading of Physics 4, Stevens poses his initial problematic in terms of the matricial status of the maternal body, and by extension (indeed performing the extension mentioned by Irigaray) the body of woman. The pregnant body of the opening stanza comes to term in the second. With birth there is a coterminous emergence of music. This however is not just any music, but a specific type of music wrought out of our imperfections. The emerged being retains a foothold in the fluidity of the maternal matrix (“the wind and sea/yet leaves us in them”) for as long as earth has not yet ‘become’s intwined and intermingled with the emerged body. The intermingling would be an instance of a Dasein-like reciprocity, an example perhaps of the dwelling described in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, where ‘homelessness’ “is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling” (363). For Dasein pervades space,as Hillis Miller observes (246).

The music is said to ‘give motion’: it sets something to work; it inaugurates and undertakes. This ignition or spark of music orchestrates a passive stalled foetal being half-way into life but already dragging its heels in inert matter. The poem captures this moment, which would be close to what Bernard Cache calls inflection (as in his discussion of Leibniz on mind-matter) in a synaesthetic turn whereby the animating music is the most kindred (the most related?) to the matter in question, as underlined by the fact that the gown – the formed, finished garment – of the first stanza, is itself being animated and created anew (“the weaving that you wear”) at the end of the second stanza.

The men of the third stanza are said to be reluctant to err, to stray or wander: they stick to the related, the kindred, the alike; they adhere moreover to the very structure of relation. The relation in question is to the matricial body, the hyle (which phenomenology would subject to inventory and the laws of property). But the relation is manifest in a determination to rest, to remain, not to move – an instance of what Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire calls fascination. The stasis finds expression in a holding on to the refrain which celebrates the same “clearest blooms” of the maternal matrix. Music is considered first, and is said to be superlative only when the “retention” and restraint just discussed are operative. The second, and allied, consideration is that of a vigil. The property linked to the first is intensity, the second apprehension. Music can be more of less intense whereas the vigil can apprehend more or less. Music can also “proclaim” and vaunt in a kind of spontaneous response to the kindred, the nearest, the most related (autopoeisis). By contrast the vigil can “see” and “name”. Music thus speaks while the vigil sees, but also imposes. The vigil is privileged. This statement finds itself ‘proven’ in the example of “your name”. But the name is also an image, thus indicating that the two functions of the vigil are of a piece; perhaps to name is to see. Once more synaesthaesia takes hold as name and image meld with “arrant spices” – the sonorous, the visual and the olfactory. The sun is light, illumination, that which is required to have something be “most clear”, that which is a prerequisiste for the vision of the “clearest bloom”. Thus stanza 3 reveals that it is on the boughs, bushes and scented vines that one finds these blooms: the structure of relation, the most near, the most proximate, the most belonging, the most attached, property and properties.

This structure of return, of retention, this restraint that compels men to listen only to that which is closest is however subject to qualification and dismantling in the final stanza. Here the attachment to likeness is thought to be problematic. In place of repetition that confirms the matrix and holds only to the minimal quotient of emergence, that is into form, after as swift an issuing forth as possible, the fourth stanza speaks of stretching out the process. It is a little like the concept of enfance as described by Lyotard. The come to rest too soon is to become already a gross effigy; it is to be frozen in Platonic torpor. Rather, the action advocated by the fourth stanza suggests a neoplatonic solution (close to Plotinus in particular) to the question of fallen bodies. In a sense the fallen body in the Plotinian conception has lost closeness to the divine (see Irigaray, ‘Mere de glace’); it has spurned, in Stevens’ terms, “imagination”.

The Downpour of the gaze in Tsai

The Downpour of the Gaze:
Contingency, Chance and Contiguity in Tsai’s The Hole

The generative centre of the film is a plague/epidemic which has afflicted the city. Official dictates heard over the radio on the soundtrack urge the public to evacuate. Those who remain do so in flagrant defiance both of logic and the law. It is this liminal state that Tsai locates his narrative: a spatio-temporal co-ordinate /locus from which whereon/in normativity is in abeyance.

This is of course a frequent recourse in cinema: war, plague, cataclysm...these ruptures in normative civil management offer the filmmaker an opportunity to explore a limit situation wherein the organisation of the social body breaks down and begins to spawn mutating and transformative alliances and ruptures.

In Deleuze’s concept of naturalism it is often the building which offers a link with nature - a primordial undifferentiated continuum measurable only in intensities. Tsai’s film clearly belongs to this tradition with its dual onslaught of rain and pestilence. The rain establishes a relentless and univocal backdrop, a continuum. The hole which appears between the two floors of the apartment block enables, ultimately, the downward gaze and voyeurism of the man.

Within the gaping space of the evacuated city - the man steadfastly continues to open his stall in the abandoned market - is opened up also, however, a ludic possibility. Via the widening hole the man and woman play out a strange and mute courtship (any reading of the film which insists on viewing the hole in a predominantly sexually symbolic register as orifice to be penetrated is missing much). As the downpour persists and as all continues to precipitate (notably the bags of rubbish which plummet to the ground throughout the film), the film offers its own ruptures in that continuity in the form of the song and dance sequences in the elevator and along the walkways of the building (the entire film is dedicated to the Hong Kong chanteuse Grace Chang). The economy and the traffic human and otherwise of the film takes place within these thoroughfares, only one of which is the hole.

Tsai’s film seems to acknowledge, with Jean-François Lyotard, that in the contemporary megalopolis there is “only transit, transfer, translation and difference. It is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the shepherd’s hut, it is in passing that we dwell” [The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991) 198]. The film can be located within this economy of ‘passage’.

Losing touch with the image

A rejected abstract for a conference paper.

On serait tenté de dire que la pensée est toujours locataire: toujours en un lieue, toujours dans le lieu et l’avoir-lieu, mais jamais comme propriétaire, ayant sa propriété dans le transport et dans le déménagement. (Jean-Luc Nancy)

According to the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy thought rents a place but never owns it. Its property and its properties inhere in transport, in moving from place to place. In an era characterised by fluidity of boundaries, in an era identified by pre-set obsolescence, by new velocities demanding a new ethology (in Virilio’s terms, a dromology), the era of dislocation is in full flow. The discipline of film studies is subject to a particular trauma in this context. As books such as Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film suggest, on the one hand its specificity as understood in a certain historical context is, in the eyes of some, already in the past, while for others that specificity is feast moveable through new supports and channels of viewing. In the first case what remains for writing and teaching in the area of film studies is a thanatographic enterprise, in the second a potentially problematic neutrality. What if the object of scrutiny – cinema -, the exemplar intended to stand in for the vanishing discipline (of Film Studies underpinned by ‘Theory’) were obstinately to remain lost in its out of joint “conducts of time” (Alliez), were itself intermittent (to use a Rancièrean formulation), or interstitial (to use a more Deleuzean vocabulary)? This paper attempts to sketch an answer to these questions by returning to an idea put forward by Raymond Bellour some twenty years ago but explored afresh in the light of key films in the intervening period where the ‘touch’ of video (and other media) and film takes place. It will be suggested that this ‘touch’ represents a challenge to the teaching of film studies as well as suggesting the exigency of film theory in the face of cognitivist and other declarations of abandonment. The argument will draw, inter alia, on examples from Rivette, Egoyan, Godard, Sissako and Gordon and Parreno.

The moustache of Jean Ferrat

I think I picked up my cassette version at a French motorway service station en route to Tuscany via Geneva in 2002. It is the destiny of the cassette to remain in the car, resilient in the face of all manner of maltreatment. It is a magnificently defiant analogue.

Jean Ferrat’s moustache on the cover of the Master série collection (vol. 1) seems about to take flight from his upper lip. The mouth of which the latter forms precisely 50% of the surface is arranged in an expression of earnest and inquisitive gazing skyward as if at a satellite or a bizarre conflagration at the zenith. There is s truly remarkable replication by his left eyebrow of the fold of his eyelid which both curl in mimicry of the moustache’s corresponding extremity. The head of hair frames the face, a central spiral protrudes from the centre of the forehead with superabundance. The wrinkles at the extremity of the eyes curl upward. Cheekbones prod out of the flesh. It is a complex face worthy of 'Au printemps de quoi revais-tu?'