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.
1 comment:
Hey Thoth. I went to the Illiad on Saturday at the TNM and I must say that from where I was sitting on the first balcony I'm not sure that she was really good looking, but what caught my eye was her red gown and matching red pumps.
The way I make sense of Deleuze’s texts are as follows: he refers to the subjectivity of a shot as a subjectivity in spacetime rather than narrative point of view. Each shot has its own psychological time in that it has its own consciousness by virtue of the way it presents (how it feels) time pass. Perhaps this is what Tarkovsky means by time pressure?
The difference between the Movement Image and the Time Image is that in the MI everything (all aspects of reality) appears to share the same objective experience of time. Everything takes place (happens and occupies space) in a homogeneous Newtonian Universe where “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external and by another name is called duration.” Everything and everyone shares a coordinated universal time that goes Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. Events take place within a unvarying, all-pervasive homogeneous time. Imagine a tank full of water with fish swimming in it. Let the water represent spacetime. No matter how you dice it or slice it the slices of water all retain the properties of the water in the tank. Unfortunately, the fish become sashimi but are reconstituted as fish through the magic of montage.
In the TI, the presentation of time in different shots is individually subjective, where individual shots have their own consciousness and their own internal clock. Any image space having its own (time) subjectivity becomes an any-space-whatever that exhibits its own characteristic unspecified, unspecific spacetime distinct from any other any-space-whatever. So the progression of spacetime blocks (shots) takes on a possibly disjointed, indeterminate, illusive, discontinuous, non-homogeneous form that goes Tick, tock, tiiiick, toick, tooooock, tock, tiick… This is somewhat different from what French sociologist Francois Augé intended when speaking of actual locations: an airport has a different time signature than a theatre or a different use or interpretation of spacetime because of its different subjectivities—isn’t the overtly imagistic music of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” or Smetana’s symphonic poems somewhat illustrative of this? Deleuze applies the term with similar effect to the shot. In TI, each shot becomes an any-space-whatever because it has its own spatio-temporal characteristics that are different from all others. The fish tank analogy doesn’t work here because within the tank we would need “pockets” of water with different qualities throughout the tank: denser here, lighter there, green hither and blue thither, etc.
All of a sudden I find myself as the passenger in Kylie Minogue’s video of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” She’s heard the song three million times and she finds my conversation boring; I’m just thrilled to be riding shotgun to KM so my mind is racing with excitement. Her experience of those three minutes will be totally different from mine although we’ve shared the same happening. How do I know that her subjective temporal experience of the drive is completely different from mine? Because of our different ways of describing it or representing it. She would say, “Those were the longest 3 minutes of my life!” and I would say, “3 minutes? I was with her for all of 30 seconds, max!” (perhaps it was vice-versa, I forget) If we wanted shots to show these differences, most likely, they would have different time signatures or time pressures associated with them. Yet containing those divergent subjectivities, there is an overriding one that presents some type of objective reality that represents the duration of the song—and by objective I mean a common Western understanding of time, common anatomical hardware, similar linguistic background, and a common timekeeper that keeps everything and everyone on the same wavelength. If you apply this to the beginning of Tarkovski’s Solaris, the spatio-temporal subjectivity of weeds undulating in a stream, is different from that of a horse running in a field, a man walking through a landscape, two children playing together, or two old-timers speaking about their past. In contrast to this, does the last shot of Antonioni’s The Passenger show variability of spatiotemporal subjectivity within one continuous shot or as a seamless continuity of any-space-whatevers? This is a simplistic approach to the topic but it seems to work within the readings on Deleuze, but it does not bring into play more advanced conceptions and theories of time and their implications such as, who owns the turtle on which the fish tank is sitting on? Regards, Felix
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