This post is about chemistry, registry, the buzz, immediacy and sharping (you have to watch me, sometimes I go too far with neologisms!), that occur within our experiences and memories...
How much does this discussion divert all of you and me from the work that we have been doing so far, or from the readings and interrogations in which we will participate very soon? Not very far. Eventually, anyway. So have no fear.
Let us start by analyzing what Deleuze means in this segment from his Cinema 2: The Movement Image:
But increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are , in which we move, live and change. [...] In the novel, it is Proust who says that time is not internal to us, but that we are internal to time, which divides itself in two, which loses itself and discovers itself in itself, which makes the present pass and the past be preserved.(Cinema 2, 82)
Deleuze is, at this point, determined to make clear, to himself, and to us, what time is, and what the passage of time means, as it occurs about us, around us, and, in potentia, in us. If it occurs in us, it is as a virtual state. This does not mean that we don't see the bowl of pickles that we remember seeing someone eating pickles, that rainy day in September. However, those items will retain an element of trace in the memory. It might be a memory that is common to all of us, and might actually retain a sense of real commitment to the sensation of experience. However, because it is just a detail, and because that detail is not involved in flowing of time's passage, it is virtual, not actual. The actual involves a complex flow of events involving common subjects who experience the same events.
In a film, if I draw from Deleuze correctly, the actual will only reside if the events are objective. I understand the affection image is, as Deleuze states here, the virtual.
The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, 'the affection of self by self' as the definition of time.
(Cinema 2, 82-3)
The subjective "image" (in all its virtuality) is both raw material for other kinds of images, as well as a frightening blind spot, that is, and is not, a part of us - read one of Deleuze's last sentences in this section, which makes it very clear:
Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual.
(Cinema 2, 82-3)
Do Deleuze's action-images find their equivalence in actual-images? For now, I would say yes. Many definitions in Deleuze's writings are fluid, so a provisional equivalence is all that we can manage. As one or two of you have mentioned earlier, the import that Deleuze's writing brings, is different every time. Deleuze's definitions of actual and virtual are particularly hazy in this regard.
After having dispensed with that aside, let us continue. I find what is most interesting about this discussion of time and subjectivity is the very complex questions that intersubjectivity bring up. How can one individual, one person-image, or one group of people, with its or their integral experience, develop a common framework when only one of our placings of time is truly common to all. How can we all see the same face in one memory. How could the Spartans have all seen that famous face that launched a thousand ships? (I am being disingenuous and simplistic, of course, since obviously it was word of mouth and powerful leaders that literally launched these ships.) Be it word of mouth, vision, sight, or smell, how do we all experience the same thing? The very notion that this is possible (and the very dupe of it, since it involves a common, social and self-deception should make one angry)!
These are complex questions. Perhaps I live on a different, er, layer, than all of you, or perhaps not. It is a good and pleasant thing to live on the same layer of time, of memory (those are two different things, obviously, although, to a certain extent, Deleuze obfuscates these things). How, and at what point does "everyone's" (and that everyone is obviously very provisional) times merge?
I have always seen part of my pathetic role in existence is to try to scratch away the illusion, so that we don't always have to rely on an illusion that, when taken for granted, becomes a crutch or a dead thing. When it becomes a crutch, how does one deal with a disease like Alzheimer's, for instance? How much does awareness of such things change us? Is anyone up for doing a Deleuzian analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949)? Of whose subjectivity are we part. Which Willy Loman? Is it possible to reach one particular branch of time, break it off, and make that branch real, if you will? These are highly speculative ideas, but, hopefully, thought-provoking, as well as being fruitful for your own inquiries.
