GILLES DELEUZE'S TIME MACHINE

D. N. Rodowick

Duke University Press Durham and London 1997

-iii-

1997 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper +

Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this
book.

"Man Doing Forward Handsprings," by Eadweard Muybridge is reprinted courtesy of the

George Eastman House.

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CONTENTS
Preface ix
PART I
MOVEMENT,1 A Short History of Cinema 3
IMAGE,
SIGN
2 Movement and Image 18
3 Image and Sign 38
4 Time and Memory, Orders and Powers 79
PART II
FORCE, 5 Critique, or Truth in Crisis 121
POWER,
RESISTANCE
6 Series and Fabulation: Minor Cinema 139
7 Thought and Image 170
8 Conclusion: the Memory of Resistance 194
Notes 211
Bibliography 243
Index 249
 -vii-

PREFACE
And this book, if ever written, as it soon will be if I am in a situation to do it, will be one of
the births of time.

-- Charles Sanders Peirce, A Guess at the Riddle

The publication of Gilles Deleuze's two-volume theory of film -- Cinma 1, l'image-

mouvement in 1983 and Cinma 2, l'image-temps in 1985 -- caused something of a sensation
in the French publishing scene. L'image-temps was rumored to have sold out its first printing
on its first day in bookstores. Although both books were quickly translated into English, even
today, over ten years later, Deleuze's study of film has had comparatively little impact on
contemporary anglophone film theory. Certainly, Deleuze is difficult to read, and writing on a
popular art has done little to make his philosophical style any easier to comprehend. Yet this
difficulty has not prevented the flourishing of Deleuze scholarship in the anglophone
theoretical community. Nor have university presses slowed their rate of translation. With the
American publication of Difference and Repetition in 1995, all of Deleuze's major
philosophical works, and indeed almost all of his books, are now available in English.

Curiously, the communities of readers in both philosophy and film studies have treated these
books as anomalies, although for different rea-

-ix-

sons. For both philosophers and film scholars, a good part of Deleuze's books read like French
cinephilic film criticism. Philosophers may suspect there is little of substance here, and film
scholars may feel this is a throwback to a period of film study best left forgotten. From the
perspective of contemporary film study, Deleuze's ideas are not only far afield of the reigning
tenor of anglophone film theory; in some pages, they are also explicitly hostile to it.

The Movement-Image and The Time-Image are books written on the frontier of these two
communities. The publication of these books took readers in both philosophy and film studies
by surprise. Paradoxically, both communities in different ways lack a frame or frames of
reference for judging Deleuze's concepts and arguments. The impact of Deleuze's books on
the philosophical community has been diminished, I believe, by an incomplete knowledge of
film history or depth of understanding of the problems posed by the study of film language
and spectatorship for larger questions of visual culture. While Deleuze himself may be an
"amateur" film theorist, there are few nonspecialists who can match his level of cinematic
erudition. (In using this qualifier, I am thinking of how Alfred Stieglitz and other
Camerawork photographers characterized themselves as "amateurs," refusing the
"professional" norms of photography as impediments to creative and innovative work. For
me, "amateur" has an entirely positive connotation in both philosophy and film studies.
Throughout the two volumes, Deleuze evidences a broad and deep familiarity with the history
of international film theory. On the other hand, his knowledge of film history departs little
from the general histories that have been so profoundly challenged and revised by the new
film history of the past fifteen years. Nonetheless, the range of his film viewing and his
command of the canon of film history is still extraordinary. He is therefore an "amateur" in
the best sense of the term.

By the same token, there are few contexts in contemporary American film studies for either
comprehending or critiquing in depth the tenor of Deleuze's philosophical arguments.
Generally speaking, Deleuze's ideas have had much less impact on anglophone film studies
than on other areas of cultural theory. Deleuze has not often written on the visual arts. And, as
Michael Hardt points out in his introduction to Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in
Philosophy, there is a specific difficulty in reading Deleuze. With each new book, Deleuze
writes as if his reader were familiar with everything he has published before. This is
especially true of the cinema books. Deleuze's style of writing and argumentation is not
inherently difficult to understand. In fact, I argue that the cinema books continue a deep and
complex meditation on time that is one of Deleuze's central contributions to contemporary
philosophy. However, Deleuze takes for granted the

-x-

reader's familiarity with an argument that has unfolded over thirty years through his books on
Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, and Foucault, as well as Difference and Repetition, The
Logic of Sense, and his books cowritten with Flix Guattari. In short, there are few in media
studies who can match (or perhaps who would want to match) the range of his philosophical
erudition. 1

The problem of context is yet more complex for the film studies community. There are two
reasons why the anglophone film community might see Deleuze's film theory as rather
anomalous work. First, since the publication of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, it is
abundantly clear that Deleuze and Guattari have set out to critique and demolish the
Saussurean and Lacanian foundations on which, coincidentally, most contemporary cultural
and film theory has been based. Deleuze and Guattari have developed a philosophical
approach to culture that, while serniotic, psychoanalytic, and anticapitalist, has little else in
common with contemporary anglophone film theory. While Deleuze describes a theory of
cinematic modernism, he is without question hostile to what I have called elsewhere "the
discourse of political modernism." This has produced consternation among reviewers who
have insisted on judging Deleuze's book in the context of contemporary Anglo-American film
theory. In fact, Deleuze unselfconsciously yet fundamentally redistributes the oppositions film
theory has inherited from Tel Quel thought: realism/modernism, illusionism/materialism,
continuity/discontinuity, identification/distance. Rather than trying to incorporate Deleuze in
the extant schemas for understanding the historical development of anglophone film theory, I
believe that The MovementImage and The Time-Image are more productively read as a
challenge to those schemas. (In this respect, I hope Gilles Delauze's Time Machine will be
read as expanding the arguments I initiated in the context of my more sympathetic critiques of
film theory in The Crisis of Political Modernism and The Difficulty of Difference.)

One does not need to accept Deleuze's arguments either partially or completely to enjoy the
freshness of his perspective on some questions that, in anglophone film theory, seem rather
exhausted. Therefore, one reason to read Deleuze is to reinvigorate questions and problems
that have otherwise reached an impasse. Intentionally or unintentionally, Deleuze challenges
contemporary film theory to confront its blind spots and dead ends, as well as to question its
resistances to other philosophical perspectives on image, meaning, and spectatorship. That
much of the recent anglophone work on Deleuze and film is coming from writers who are
approaching film theory from outside the field is symptomatic, then, of a certain inertia in
film studies. And while it is no surprise that interest in Deleuze is great-

-xi-

est in France, one should also account for why scholars in Germany, Japan, and Italy have
confronted Deleuze's concepts more quickly and deeply than those in Britain, the United
States, or Canada.

Few would doubt the influence of French film and cultural theory on the recent history of
anglophone film studies and cultural theory. However, the narrowness of the American and
British perspectives on this history of French film theory and the complexity of French film
culture is not often recognized. This is the second reason why Deleuze's work may seem
anomalous to anglophone readers. The extraordinary work of translation and film theory
accomplished in the 1970s by the British journal Screen has a continuing influence on film
theory today, especially in the United States. However, it is not recognized often enough that
Screen's editorial perspective on French cultural theory of the sixties and seventies was very
particular, and itself already thoroughly filtered by the editorial position of Tel Quel, with its
specific triangulation of literary serniotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian
Marxism. Despite the indubitable value of this perspective, it did produce some rather one-
dimensional readings of both the work of Christian Metz and of the different editorial
manifestations of Cahiers du cinma, which are still perpetuated in many anglophone film
studies classes today. For example, the way in which the work of Metz is opposed to that of
Andr Bazin and Jean Mitry often obscures rather than illuminates what is most interesting in
the debates of the 1960s. All three figures are more productively read in a context that
acknowledges their complex filiations with the history of filmology and, more generally, with
the history of French phenomenology.

When read in the context of the history of French film theory, Deleuze's work on cinema
seems less strange if no less complex. To the extent that Deleuze's books resemble in scope
the "grand" film theories of the 1960s like Jean Mitry's two-volume Esththique et
psychologie du cinma, they do seem a bit anachronistic, even in the French context.
However, despite the brilliance of Christian Metz's accomplishments and the range of his
influence, Metz's work represents only one dimension of French film theory and criticism. For
anyone familiar with the breadth and diversity of French thought on film in the past forty
years -- as represented in journals like Cahiers du cinma, Positif, tudes
cinmatographiques, Cinemaction, Trafic, and many others -- Deleuze's approach seems
mainstream in many respects. And if one looks back over the past twenty years, comparing
Deleuze's work to other important French writers like Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney, and
Jean-Louis Schefer, all of whom, for the most part, remain untranslated in English, Deleuze's
concepts and approach seem even less anomalous. They are very much a part of the
complexity of debate in the

-xii-

current French film theory scene and continuous with a series of questions and problems that
have defined the history of European film theory from filmology through Bazin, Metz,
Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and into the contemporary period. From this perspective,
one sees more clearly how Deleuze's arguments respond to Mitry's interest in Henri Bergson
(though with a fundamentally new twist) and understands better how and why Deleuze takes
up the cause of Pasolini while critiquing Metz, thus reinvigorating earlier debates on film
serniotics from the late 1960s and early 1970s that are still generally misunderstood in the
United States today.

Deleuze contributes an original and innovative perspective on these debates. While I hope
sincerely that this book will be read as a useful introduction to Deleuze's theory of film, thus
clarifying his contributions, this is not my principal objective. Instead, I have chosen to treat
the two books as philosophical works and to try to understand them as a logical development
through cinema of Deleuze's more general concerns. Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is, in the
deepest and most complex ways, a philosophy of time. I have chosen to look at The
Movement-Image and The Time-Image as part and parcel of this philosophical project and,
therefore, to read them as unfolding from Deleuze's major works of the sixties and seventies.

The larger questions raised by these books are for me twofold. On the one hand, why does
Deleuze turn to cinema to address questions of image, movement, and time raised in his
earlier books? (In this respect, the cinema books can be read as a rsum of Deleuze's
philosophical work of the previous twenty-five years, a rethinking on new terrain of the
concepts and questions defined in earlier books.) On the other, Deleuze is quite sensitive to
the ways in which contemporary culture is becoming fundamentally an audiovisual culture.
For him, the semiotic history of film is coincident with a century-long transformation wherein
we have come to represent and understand ourselves socially through spatial and temporal
articulations founded in cinema, if now realized more clearly in the electronic and digital
media. Film theory and history therefore have a key place in both social theory and serniotic
theory, a place that has been slighted in the recent history of philosophy. In many ways,
Deleuze is trying in these two books to acknowledge philosophy's debt to film and film
theory. In reading Deleuze, then, we should also ask: In what ways do The Movement-Image
and The Time-Image help us see the history of film theory in a new light? And, more
importantly, what new concepts provide fresh perspectives on contemporary visual culture?

I believe I could have written another book, one that was thoroughly critical of Deleuze.
There are some aspects of the books that I find indefensible. Deleuze's problematic attitude
toward authorship represents one

-xiii-

of the worst aspects of Parisian cinephilism, and his film analyses are often derivative of other
works. Moreover, the rhetorical shifts in his writing can be unsettling. Throughout the two
books there is a consistent disjunction, often within the same chapter or section, between the
sophistication and subtlety of his philosophical arguments and the thinness of their
demonstration in his analyses of films, which often though not always read like a kind of
romanticized mise-en-scne criticism. A third problem is his implied cultural elitism. In an
era when postmodernism's critique of hierarchies of value predominates, Deleuze's theory of
modernism often evokes a perspective where the last avatars of experimentation and thought
in film are defending cinematic art from the onslaught of a one-dimensional mass culture. 2
Finally, although he is the most sophisticated twentieth century philosopher of difference,
Deleuze seems to have little to offer on the problem of difference in spectatorship. Despite
some powerful pages on cinemas of decolonialization, he has little to say specifically on
questions of sexual, racial, and class difference.
While I would support all of these criticisms in one context, in another I think that many of
Deleuze's attitudes are in fact defensible. The curious thing about Deleuze's treatment of
authorship is that he approaches film authors no differently than philosophical authors. If it is
still possible to treat Bergson, Nietzsche, or Kant in this way, why not Orson Welles, Alain
Resnais, and Marguerite Duras? It all depends on methodology and approach, and Deleuze
takes great pains to demonstrate how philosophical ideas resonate through artistic and
scientific work, and back again to philosophy. 3 Moreover, his philosophical arguments are
not necessarily invalidated by the weaknesses of his film analyses, and sometimes his
readings of films are in fact quite convincing. I hope to demonstrate in the course of this book
that the concepts and ideas Deleuze proposes offer powerful ways of thinking about films in
particular and contemporary visual culture in general. Finally, as I argue in the last chapter of
this book, while Deleuze's theory of modernism does present a theory of value, one should not
judge too quickly its aesthetic and cultural implications. In fact, Deleuze's Nietzschean
approach to art presents a profound critique both of questions of hierarchy and of aesthetic
disinterest -- it is profoundly political in all its dimensions. The same may be said for his
theory of spectatorship. Why not consider the cinema from the point of view of a
"philosophical" spectator? Moreover, if a reflection on a theory of "the subject" is absent here,
perhaps it is because the concepts of identity and subjectivity are being profoundly
interrogated. Indeed, Deleuze's philosophy of difference may provide one of the most
interesting and progressive challenges to the kind of identity politics that has dominated
contemporary cultural studies. Deleuze's arguments may be

-xiv-

philosophically abstract, but I believe they can ultimately be read as innovative and thought-
provoking interventions in contemporary cultural politics.

I should also stress that my own approach to Deleuze is particular and in some ways
eccentric. I have not attempted here a complete overview or systematic account of Deleuze's
theory of film. Many other approaches and criticisms are equally possible, and I sincerely
hope that other scholars will pursue them. Deleuze's work is particularly rich, and in equal
parts fascinating and infuriating; many different paths are possible through these two books.
For my own part, I have chosen to foreground certain concepts and arguments with greater
continuity than they sometimes have in Deleuze's own writing, and it is often not completely
apparent that these arguments are more coincident with my own interests than Deleuze's. In
many instances I try to put Deleuze's concepts in new and original contexts. I should
acknowledge here that rather than explaining Deleuze to you, the reader, my greater interest
has been to understand why I have been so drawn to these books. I have not tried
systematically to be faithful to Deleuze's thought, whatever that may mean, nor have I any
desire to debate what a correct or proper reading of Deleuze would be. In fact, in retrospect I
find some of my arguments to be a bit perverse, though in ways that, coincidentally, are
analogous to Deleuze's own style of reading. Deleuze once remarked that his studies of
individual philosophers have always resulted in the creation of monsters. Reading philosophy
means less understanding or interpreting what the "masters" mean than producing something
new out of an encounter motivated equally by Eros and aggressivity. There is no better reason
to read than to discover an intellectual desire and to create something new from it. In this
respect, I hope the reader will understand that I have tried here to birth my own philosophical
obsessions concerning cinema and time, as well as the emergence of a contemporary
audiovisual culture, out of a reading of Deleuze's. And, having done so, I follow Deleuze
most directly in offering the body of my arguments to the multiple encounters they will now
discover in the hands of readers.

Throughout this book, my main objective is to demonstrate both the originality and
consistency of Deleuze s philosophical concepts in ways that I hope will provoke further work
in contemporary visual studies from these perspectives. The four chapters in part 1 are written
from the position of what Deleuze would call "the formal expression of difference." Working
in the context of the history of philosophy and film theory, in these chapters I map the logic of
Deleuze's theory of images and signs and draw out the consistency of his concepts insofar as
they relate to film. Chapter 1 is conceived as an overture in the composition of this book. My
objective here is to present in the clearest possible way the fundamental concepts and over-

-xv-

all logic developed across Deleuze's two volumes. In so doing, I hope to orient readers,
especially those with little prior knowledge of Deleuze's work, in his philosophical language
and logic as well as the basic architecture of Deleuze's interest in and arguments on film and
film theory. In the next three chapters, I develop, deepen, and complicate these concepts,
enlarging their place in the context of Deleuze's broader philosophical concerns while
introducing my own arguments and perspectives. Chapter 2 examines Deleuze's theory of the
image and its movements with respect to his fascinating reading of Henri Bergson's Matter
and Memory. Chapter 3 is an account of Deleuze's critique of film serniology and his
alternative theory of signs as read through the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. From
Deleuze's perspective, there are, in fact, two "pure semiotics": one for the cinematic
movement-image and one for the cinematic time-image. Chapter 4 presents a formal account
of what Deleuze calls the three direct images of time, with their accompanying powers of
falsification.

The chapters of part 2 consider the time-image as expressing difference in itself. Most
important here is how the time-image's powers of the false initiate a Nietzschean critique of
the will to truth with respect to the cinema of the movement-image as well as our
contemporary audiovisual culture. In the time-image, Deleuze sees an affirmative will to
power with the potential for creating new values and new modes of existence. Here I argue
that Deleuze's approaches to Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza open both The Movement-Image
and The Time-Image to the broader network of philosophical problems addressed in his other
books, including his work with Flix Guattari. More than a philosophical description of the
time-image, part 2 shows what modern cinema shares with critical art and philosophy in
general, and what cinema's concepts affirm with respect to Deleuze's broader political and
philosophical concerns. Chapter 5 examines how the concepts of movement and time are
transformed in the passage from the movement-image to the time-image and introduces the
principal questions raised by Deleuze's Nietzschean aesthetic. Chapter 6 looks at Deleuze's
theory of political cinema as worked through in the concepts of fabulation and time as series.
The philosophical relation between image and thought, as well as how cinema's concepts
affect thinking as a "thought from the outside," are the questions discussed in chapter 7. My
concluding chapter returns to the political critique and theory implied in Deleuze's theory of
cinema. Specifically, I address how Deleuze reads the force of resistance in relation to
Foucault's later theories of power, and how Deleuze and Guattari present the critical and
utopian force of philosophy as a virtuality that may be intuited and thought through in direct
images of time.
 -xvi-

The completion of this book has been marked by many ironies that I have felt deeply. I
learned of Deleuze's death on the very day that I finished and mailed the first draft of this
book. Most of my writing took place across the passing of cherished figures in my life,
including Christian Metz, and, most significantly, my mother, who suffered from an illness
similar to Deleuze's, and who passed away just a month before Deleuze took his own life. In
chapter 7, I comment at length on the relationship between philosophy and death -- a theme
that appears with some consistency in Deleuze's work. In this context, I believe that it is
important to emphasize that Deleuze's treatment of death as a philosophical figure is always in
service to life-the affirmation of life as the creation of the new -- and to resisting those forces
that inhibit in life the appearance of the new, the unforeseen, and the unexpected.

In his homage to Deleuze in Cahiers du cinma, "...une aile de papillon," Jean Narboni relates
a charming anecdote in this respect. Commenting on Deleuze's passion for classification and
invention, Narboni expresses the feeling that the movement and logic of Deleuze's thought
often anticipate an image, sign, or concept in the cinema before the filmmakers get around
actually to inventing them. "I let him in on this one day," writes Narboni, "and he laughed
(25; my translation)."

This wonderful story expresses the drollness of Deleuze's philosophical perspective as well as
its affirmative powers. In the preface to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze himself comments
on the critical and anticipatory power of philosophy. A book of philosophy, he relates, is
comparable both to detective fiction (roman policier) and to science fiction. In the first case,
concepts intervene in local situations in order to resolve them, and the concepts change along
with the problems raised. Every concept, then, suggests its own sphere of influence and
dramas where it exerts itself by means of a certain cruelty. But in the second case, and more
importantly, philosophy has a utopian side that expresses its deepest relationship with time.
This is not a drama of investigation or a policing of or by the concept. Rather, like Samuel
Butler's Erewhon, both nowhere and now here, philosophy points us toward another world, a
world to come that is also this world, or a plane of immanence where "I make, remake, and
unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an
always displaced periphery, which repeats and differenciates them" ( Difference and
Repetition, xxi). Thus philosophy is always untimely in Nietzsche's sense. Philosophy is
neither a philosophy of history, nor of the eternal; it is "lsquo;against this time, in favor, I
hope, of a time to come.rsquo;" And there is no greater strategy of resistance to the mortuary
forces of alienation, reification, and

-xvii-

ressentiment. That Deleuze is a philosopher of time means that he is a philosopher of life: an

inventor of concepts that affirm life and its untimely forces of creation.

I began my work on Deleuze with the help of a Senior Faculty Fellowship from Yale
University in 1990-91. The final revision and editing was accomplished in the fellowship of
the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Generous leave time was also granted
by the University of Rochester. The arguments of my introductory chapter took shape in
discussion with several audiences whose critical acumen was matched only by their
hospitality. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs invited me twice to present my ideas, once at the
University of Kent and once at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, despite their own
reservations about Deleuze. I also profited from critical discussion with audiences at the
University of East Anglia, the University of Iowa, the University of Rochester, the Columbia
University Interdisciplinary Seminar on Film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the
University of Toronto, Duke University, Cornell University, and in Vienna at the Institut
Franaise. Many friends and colleagues took time from their own work to read and comment
on various drafts of this work. Foremost among them are Dana Polan, Reda Bensmala,
Michael Westlake, and Dudley Andrew. Mark Betz provided invaluable editorial help
throughout the process of final revision. I also wish to thank my editor at Duke University
Press, Ken Wissoker, especially for his patience. Other friends, students, and colleagues who
contributed to the composition of this book include Richard Allen, Mark Anderson, Raymond
Bellour, David Bordwell, Donald Crafton, Thomas Elsaesser, Lorenz Engell, Jane Gaines,
Michael Hardt, Amanda Howell, Biodun Iginla, Frank Kessler, Wayne Koestenbaum, Andras
Kovacs, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Tom Levin, Laura U. Marks, Brian Massum, Alain Mnil, Toril
Moi, Marion Picker, Julia Pimsleur, Lauren Rabinovitz, Sally Ross, Shirley Samuels, Kristin
Thompson, N. Frank Ukadike, Geoff Waite, Jennifer Wicke, Janet Wolff, and Nancy Wood,
as well as Tim Murray, Tom Lamarre, Naoki Sakai, and the other members of the Deleuze
study group at Cornell. To all I express my most heartfelt thanks.

-xviii-

PART 1 MOVEMENT, IMAGE, SIGN

-1-

1 A SHORT HISTORY OF CINEMA

1924 . The classic cinema has perfected its geometry of forms, its logic of spatiotemporal
exposition, and its "laws" for the linking of actions through montage. In Sherlock, Jr., Buster
Keaton plays a young projectionist who divides from himself in lap dissolve, entering the
rectangle of the screen as the space of his own dream. The action following is exemplary of
the logic of (paradoxical) sense informing the classical Hollywood cinema in its silent phase.
In this series of shots, Keaton's moving figure provides a stable foreground against a shifting
background of increasingly unlikely and dangerous locations: a garden, a busy street, a cliff
side, a jungle with lions, train tracks in a desert. When Keaton finds himself on a rock by the
ocean, he dives, only to land headfirst in a snowbank. Keaton's movements from one shot to
the next link incommensurable spaces through what modern mathematics terms a "rational"
division. The interval dividing any two spatial sections serves simultaneously as the end of
the first and the beginning of the second. In Keaton's film, every division, no matter how
unlikely and nonsensical, is mastered by this figure of rationality where the identification of
movement with action assures the continuous unfolding of adjacent spaces. The consequence
of this identification is the subordination of time to movement. Time is measured only
dynamically, as a process of action and reaction rebounding across contiguous spaces through
match-cutting.

-3-

This geometry of action and movement expands by levels as well as by linear development.
The moving whole of the film is assured by the continuous linking of one shot to the next, as
well as by the embedding of photograms into the shot, shots into sequences, sequences into
parts, and parts into the moving whole of the film as one great clockwork mechanism. The
dynamics of the classical film function like a Newtonian universe where laws of motion
function independently of time. This subordination of time to movement has philosophical
consequences.

1962 . The modern European cinema, as well as the New American cinema, has displaced the
Newtonian conception of space that characterizes the classical period. Chris Marker's La jete
depicts a not-so-distant future where a prisoner of war is subjected to a series of painful
experiments that enable him to "travel" in time. Whether this passage is actual and physical,
or mental and spiritual, is ambiguous. Movement, drained from the image and divorced from
the representation of action, has relinquished its role as the measure of time. In La jete, the
image of time is no longer reduced to the thread of chronology where present, past, and future
are aligned on a continuum. The painful binding of the subject -- physically stilled no less
than movement is frozen in the image -- liberates him briefly in time, just as the imaging of
time is released from its subordination to movements linked with physical actions 1 Once
chronology is pulverized, time is fragmented like so many facets of a shattered crystal. The
chronological continuum is flayed, shaving past, present, and future into distinct series,
discontinuous and incommensurable. The narrative sections of the film are disconnected
spaces, divided into blocks of time linked in a probabilistic manner: the park, the museum, the
quay at Orly. The spectator's apprehension of what comes next is equivalent to

-4-

a dice throw. Time no longer derives from movement; "aberrant" or eccentric movement
derives from time.

With both action and movement absented from the image, there is now only linking through
"irrational" divisions. According to the mathematical definition, the interval dividing
segmentations of space is now autonomous and irreducible; it no longer forms a part of any
segment as the ending of one and the beginning of another. Image and soundtrack are also
relatively autonomous. While referring to each other, they nonetheless resist being reconciled
into an organic whole. As a result, there is no totalization of space in an organic image of the
whole and no subordination of time to movement. Inside and outside, mind and body, mental
and physical, imaginary and real are no longer decidable qualities. This is another theory of
mind and another logic of sense, defined by a decisive break with the earlier model.

My two examples illustrate how Gilles Deleuze conceives the history of cinematic signs in his
volumes, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. Deleuze himself would demur from
characterizing his books as historical works. Still, I would argue that they are informed by a
historical idea adapted from the German art historian Heinrich Wfflin. In his Principles of
Art History, Wfflin argues for classifications of style based on historical modes of
"imaginative beholding" (vi). 2 The task of the history of aesthetic forms is to understand the
specific set of formal possibilities -- modes of envisioning and representing, of seeing and
saying -- historically available to different cultures in different times.

Equally important for Deleuze is the work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in the
history and philosophy of science. In their book, Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers
characterize the evolution of science and philosophy as one of "open" systems that incessantly
exchange information with their cultural environment and never cease altering that culture as
they themselves change. Strategies of observation, representation, and conceptualization -- of
modeling nature -- are no less historically based than Wfflin's modes of imaginative
beholding. These two references are important. For Deleuze's larger objective is not to
produce another theory of film, but to understand how aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific
modes of understanding converge in producing cultural strategies for imagining and imaging
the world.

Reduced to its simplest form, the question informing Deleuze's cinema books is this: How
does a sustained meditation on film and film theory illuminate the relation between image and
thought? With respect to our recent history, Deleuze argues, the development of cinema
provides a privileged site for comprehending a decisive shift in strategies of signification,
understanding, and belief that is no less true for aesthetic thinking than it is for

-5-

philosophical and scientific thinking. This shift concerns the question of time. For example,
Prigogine and Stengers argue that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the study of
thermodynamic systems, and then probability physics, reintroduces time to science's image of
the physical world. This is an image of irreversible Becoming in contrast with the static and
eternal image of Being depicted by Newton's universal laws of motion. At about the same
time, Henri Bergson produces his image of thought as internal movement and of memory as
complex duration. Among aesthetic practices, Deleuze argues, cinema concretely produces a
corresponding image of thought, a visual and acoustic rendering of thought in relation to time
and movement. At the outset, time is the focus of both of Deleuze's cinema books.

This emphasis on categories of movement and temporality, in relation to visualization or

imaging, is meant as a critique of theories of signification in both contemporary philosophy
and film theory. The history of philosophy is often conceived as a teleological and
progressive refinement of logic in its relation to thought. Thought is considered here to have
an (ideally) unchanging identity to which logical representations can progressively adequate
themselves. Alternatively, for Deleuze, one might say that there is no thinking other than
thinking-through. "Through" what? Images, signs, and concepts. In this respect, Deleuze
follows V. N. Voloinov's argument in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language that
"consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of
signs.... The individual consciousness is nurtured on signs; it derives its growth from them; it
reflects their logic and laws" (11, 13). 3 Deleuze similarly appropriates Bergson to argue that
thought is quintessentially temporal, a product of movement and change. And, rereading
Peirce, Deleuze argues that the image must be considered not as a unified or closed whole, but
rather as an ensemble or set of logical relations that are in a state of continual transformation.
This is why, in my examples from Sherlock, Jr. and La jete, what was "in" the shots was less
important than understanding how they were linked, grouped, and interconnected, and what
these connections implied for a theory of sense. To refer to the movement-image or time-
image, then, is to refer to a fluid ordering of representational elements. This ordering in turn
produces different types of signs, a logic based on division and regrouping.

Such an emphasis clarifies Deleuze's preference for Peirce's semiotic as opposed to a film
semiology derived from Saussure. Metz's notion of the filmic nonc and his theory of
narrative derived from the grande syntagmatique are both criticized by Deleuze for assuming
that meaning is only linguistic meaning and for reducing the image by subtracting its most
visible
 -6-

characteristic: movement. For Deleuze, the image components of cinema comprise instead a
moving "signaletic material which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual
and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written).
Eisenstein compared them first to ideograms, then, more profoundly, to the internal
monologue as proto-language or primitive language system. But even with its verbal
elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying
and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically" ( Time-Image29.). Since Peirce's
theory is a logic and not a linguistics, and since it understands signification as a process,
Deleuze finds it more applicable for understanding the generation and linking of signs in
movement. Where semiology wants to define the cinematic sign by imposing a linguistic
model from the outside, Deleuze applies Peirce's logic to deduce a theory of signs from
material the cinema has itself historically produced.

The idea of the image also serves as a periodizing figure in the two books, marking the
borders of relatively distinct cinematic logics and practices. (In fact, Deleuze defines two
"pure semiotics," one of movement and one of time.) In this manner, Deleuze examines how
mutations in the history of cinematic signification have produced our contemporary
"audiovisual culture." If for Deleuze postwar cinema is different from what preceded it, thus
indicating a gradual yet distinct transition from the regime of the movement-image to that of
the time-image, this difference marks equally a transformation in the nature of signs and
images, and how the cultural image of thought evolves. Deleuze depicts image practices as
social and technological automata where each era thinks itself by producing its particular
image of thought. In turn philosophy can map this image in mental cartographies whose
coordinates are given as "noosigns." This is an implied image of the brain with its internal
wirings, connections, associations, and functionings. In its largest sense, then, the image
describes historically specific cinematic practices as "spiritual automata" or "thought
machines." In this respect, an era's image of thought is "the image thought gives itself of what
it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought" ( Deleuze and
Guattari, What Is Philosophy?37). The cinema is considered here as an "artificial
intelligence," a Cartesian diver, or a machine for the fabrication of concepts. 4 For Deleuze
this is the most compelling gambit of writing a history of "cinematic" philosophy: to take an
era's strategies of thinking-through, represented aesthetically in the nature of its images and
signs, and render them in the form of philosophical concepts. But also for philosophy to
understand how the possibilities of thought are renewed in aesthetic practices.

As a philosopher, Deleuze claims an interest in film because it provides

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a complex moving picture of duration. And what divides the movementimage from the time-
image is their respective spatial rendering of time in this sense. Deleuze rejects the idea that
the film image is always "in" the present, whether with respect to itself or its spectator. The
image is instead a grouping of temporal relations. "The image itself," writes Deleuze, "is the
system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships of time from
which the variable present only flows.... What is specific to the image...is to make perceptible,
to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do
not allow themselves to be reduced to the present" ( Time-Imagexii). These temporal relations
are rarely apparent to quotidian perception; rather, they are rendered as visible and legible in
the images that create signs from them. Because of its constitutive factors of movement and
time, the cinematic image can never be reduced to a simple unity, nor can the relation
between image and thought be reduced to a simple, punctual present.

Nevertheless, the movement-image and the time-image each manage this relation differently:
the former gives us an indirect image of time; the latter, a direct image of time. The gist of
this unusual idea derives from Deleuze's rethinking of "the interval" -- the space or division
between photograms, shots, sequences -- and how the organization of intervals informs the
spatial representation of time in cinema. While he borrows this concept from Dziga Vertov,
Deleuze gives it much wider scope. Understanding how the organization of intervals serves
the spatial imaging of time makes clearer Deleuze's attempts to formalize the logic of
enchainment as a kind of geometry of cinema.

In his "Short History of Photography," Walter Benjamin focuses on how the problem of time
characterized the evolution of early photography. Neither the indexical quality of the
photograph nor its iconic characteristics fascinated him as much as the interval of time
marked by exposure. In the technological transition from an exposure time requiring several
hours to only fractions of a second, Benjamin marked the gradual evaporation of aura from
the image. The idea of aura invoked here is clearly related to Bergson's dure. For Benjamin,
the longer the interval of exposure, the greater the chance that the aura of an environment --
the complex temporal relations woven through its represented figures -- would seep into the
image, etching itself on the photographic plate. More concretely, the temporal value of the
interval determines a qualitative ratio between time and space in the photograph. In the
evolution from slow to fast exposure times, segmentations of time yielded qualitative changes
in space: sensitivity to light, clearer focus, more extensive depth of field, and, significantly,
the fixing of movement. Paradoxically, for Benjamin, as the iconic and spatial characteristics
of pho-

-8-

tography became more accurate by decreasing the interval of exposure, the image lost its
temporal anchoring in the experience of duration, as well as the fascinating ambiguity of its
"aura."

Benjamin's commentary on the long-exposure photograph portrays it as a "primitive" time-

image, a kind of open window on accumulating duration. Alternatively, the reduction of the
time interval in "instantaneous" photography introduced a new possibility for the image: the
representation of movement. Not only the freezing of movement, as in the extraordinary
photographs of the young Jacques-Henri Lartigue; but also its serial decomposition, as in the
motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. The seed of the movement-
image's indirect representation of time is already here. The developing technology has a
specific goal. It equates movement with physical action and dissects movement by dividing it
into rational segments -- here, the action of a man doing forward handstands in twelve
contiguous images. Even in these early motion studies, the management of time is a central
problem for the so-called scientific perception and analysis of movement. Action cannot be
clearly represented without reducing the interval of exposure to a fraction of a second; the
action itself must be carefully "timed" in relation to the relay of cameras to assure that
movement is recorded as successive and contiguous segments. Thus time is subordinated to
movement and represented only indirectly through the agency of movement in two ways. First
it is reduced to a constant (in Muybridge's case, 1/100th of a second), repeated as
equidistantly spaced intervals. Second, it is restricted to a line of action; it flows only through
rationally segmented, contiguous movements. Time serves here as the measure

-9-

of space and movement; it can only be "seen" through the intermediaries of space and
movement.

These two principles were necessary, of course, for the perfection of cinematographic
technology. Yet the cinema added what pioneers such as Marey and Muybridge neither
desired nor imagined: it automated movement by projecting these images at a fixed rate. At
this stage, the cinema of the movement-image becomes, for Deleuze, a spiritual automaton,
producing with its own signifying materials an image of memory and thought extraordinarily
close to what Bergson was describing through the philosophy and psychology of his day. By
extending the subordination of time to movement in a new way, the developing narrative
cinema replicated a logic Bergson described as "an open totality in movement." This figure,
through which Bergson describes the essentially temporal character of thought, is seized by
Deleuze to describe the narrative organization of classical cinema. In Bergson's view, thought
always moves in two directions at once: while it unfolds along a horizontal axis, it also
expands across a vertical axis. The former is an axis of association; it links related images
through principles of similarity and contiguity, contrast and opposition. At the same time,
associated images are distinguished, then grouped conceptually, into ever-growing ensembles
or sets through a process of differentiation and integration. Through integration, related
images are internalized into a conceptual whole whose movement expresses a qualitative
change: the whole is different from the sum of its parts. But this whole in turn enlarges itself
through retotalization in related sets. Across all levels there is both continuous linear
movement by association and volumetric expansion through differentiation and integration.
Deleuze argues that the classical cinema, the cinema of the movement-image, provides a
concrete image of this process. In so doing, it clarifies for philosophy the distinction between
sets and wholes, as well as Bergson's definition of the relation between time, the whole, and
the open. While an ensemble or set organizes diverse elements, it is nonetheless relatively and
artificially closed. There is always a thread that connects a set to another, more extensive one,
and so on ad infinitum. In contrast, the whole belongs to time. It traverses all sets and
prevents them from realizing their tendency toward closure. Therefore, time is defined by
Bergson as the Open: that which changes and never stops changing its nature at each moment.

This account of movement as an open totality closely resembles the theory and practice of
Sergei Eisenstein, as Deleuze himself points out in The Movement-Image. It is also logically
very close to Raymond Bellour's account of the textual organization of classical Hollywood
films. Such resemblances are not surprising, since Deleuze in no way opposes the prac-

-10-

tices of Soviet and Hollywood films, especially in the silent period. He sees them as two
distinct manifestations of the movement-image, different in kind but not in nature. Both, for
example, organize the shot as a moving ensemble rather than as a static figure. Thus Deleuze
writes, "In so far as it relates movement to a whole which changes, [the shot] is the mobile
section of a duration" ( Movement-Image22). As in Eisenstein's conception of the montage-
cell, the shot defines a relatively open and variable space where the process of framing
determines a provisionally and artificially closed set. Framing detaches objects from the pro-
filmic space, grouping actions, gestures, bodies, and decors in a motivated ensemble. At the
same time, the frame opens the shot to the moving whole of the film. The shot already
integrates the action-movement linkage from the photogrammatic level. Through montage
this schema replicates and extends itself by levels, determining the movement or movements
that distribute these elements into larger ensembles. The continuity system of editing
established one set of norms for the linkage of shots through rational divisions. But an
enlarged conception of offscreen space is equally important for Deleuze because it expresses
the essentially open character of sets. Just as the continuous movement of the film strip is
integrated into the shot, the shot into sequences, the sequences into parts, and so forth, every
ensemble is part of another, more extensive one. The interval here is the sign of a
differentiation that is continually retotalized in the image of an organic whole expanding
through rational divisions. In sum, Deleuze writes:

The movement-image has two sides, one in relation to objects whose relative position it
varies, the other in relation to a whole -- of which it expresses an absolute change. The
positions are in space, but the whole that changes is in time. If the movement-image is
assimilated to the shot, we call framing the first facet of the shot turned towards objects, and
montage the other facet turned towards the whole.... [It] is montage itself which constitutes
the whole, and thus gives us the image of time.... Time is necessarily an indirect
representation, because it flows from the montage which links one movement-image to
another. ( Time-Image34-35)

The movement-image provides only an indirect image of time because time is reduced to
intervals defined by movement and the linking of movements through montage. Deleuze
makes no distinction between avantgarde and narrative cinema in this respect. American
silent film, the Soviet montage school, and the French impressionist cinema are all grouped in
the first volume by this principle. Although they produce qualitatively different montage
strategies -- analytical fast and slow motion in Vertov, abstract

-11-

or intellectual movement in Eisenstein, rhythmic and metric variations in Epstein and Dulac --
the idea of montage is in every case founded on managing the number of rational
segmentations of movement per unit of time. In this respect, the avant-garde of the twenties
demonstrates a fascination with movement and space rather than time, and the organization of
time is subordinated to the representation of movement through montage. Both conventional
and avant-garde cinemas were obsessed with this problem, and their theories of perception
and memory derive from it.

The same thing may be said of the noosigns produced by the movementimage. I have already
defined what Deleuze believes them to be: on the one hand, linkage through association; on
the other, an expanding whole expressed through differentiation and integration. The relation
between intervals and the whole here is essentially behaviorist. It is articulated through an
action reaction schema organized by conflicts, oppositions, and resolutions. This
movement of action and reaction derives from an American ideology of will, a belief that the
mastery of environments and opponents is inevitable and infinitely extendable. While
Eisenstein, taking his cue from Engels's Dialectics of Nature, perfects and organizes this
schema in a different way, he does not fundamentally change it with respect to the ideal
image of thought it expresses. 5 Both presuppose an organic model of composition predicated
on the belief that the changing whole of the open totality in movement represents a process of
infinite expansion. The integration of parts into ensembles, and ensembles into wholes,
culminates in a totality where image, world, and spectator are identified through a grand
image of Truth. Deleuze defines this image as an "ideal of knowledge as harmonious totality,
which sustains this classical representation.... Eisenstein, like a cinematographic Hegel,
presented the grand synthesis of this conception: the open spiral with its commensurabilities
and attractions. Eisenstein himself did not hide the cerebral model which drove the whole
synthesis, and which made cinema the cerebral art par excellence, the internal monologue of
the brain-world; 'The form of montage is a restoration of the laws of the process of thought,
which in turn restores moving reality in process of unrolling'" ( Time-Image210-211).

When Deleuze refers to the organic movement-image as "classic" and the time-image as
"modern," this means neither that the latter flows from the former as natural progression, nor
that the modern form necessarily opposes the classic as critique. Instead, this transition
represents a distinct if gradual transformation in the nature of belief and the possibilities of
thought. The organic regime, sustained by the movement-image, proceeds by linking through
rational divisions, projecting a model of Truth in relation to totality. The noosigns of the
movement-image derive from a belief in

-12-

the possibility of action and the stability of Truth. In the aftermath of World War II, especially
in the European cinema, this situation changes, producing a different form of "imaginative
beholding." For example, according to Deleuze, the appearance of neorealism represents a
crisis in the cinema of action and movement. Especially in Rossellini's films, such as
Germania Anno Zero ( 1947), Stromboli ( 1949), or Viaggio in Italia ( 1953), narrative
situations appear where reality is represented as lacunary and dispersive. Linear actions
dissolve into the form of aleatory strolls. Events occur where it is no longer possible to act or
react: situations of pain or beauty that are intolerable or insupportable; occurrences that are
incomprehensible or undecidable. As a result, the action reaction schema of the
movementimage begins to break down, producing a change in nature of both perception and
affect. Since the linking of images is no longer motivated by action, space changes in nature,
becoming a disconnected or emptied space. Acts of seeing and hearing replace the linking of
images through motor actions; pure description replaces referential anchoring. One thinks
immediately of a film like Antonioni's L'Avventura ( 1960), whose ironic title points to spaces
where any decidable action or interpretation has evaporated, leaving characters who wait, who
witness only the passing of time as duration.

What Deleuze calls the nonorganic or crystalline regime of the timeimage thus emerges out of
the social, historical, and cultural context of postwar reconstruction. 6 However, if the modern
cinema offers a direct presentation of time, the emergence of this time-image is not a
necessary consequence of the evolution of the movement-image. For Deleuze, the history of
cinema is in no way a progression toward an ever more perfect representation of time. Rather,
the relation between time and thought is imagined differently in the postwar period -- as
represented in the signs produced by the time-image no less than by changes in the image of
thought in biological sciences and in the image of time introduced by probability physics.
This is why the cinema of Alain Resnais is so significant for Deleuze's project. Resnais
represents for the cinema of the crystalline time-image what Eisenstein represented for the
organic movement-image. From Toute la mmoire du monde ( 1956) to Mon oncle
d'amrique ( 1978), Resnais evinces a constant facination for replicating an image of thought,
but in relation to time rather than movement. The time-image organizes a new geometry of
the interval marked by the concept of "irrational" divisions. This geometry derives from a
heightened sensitivity to the flows of time modeled no less by the calculus of probability
physics than by the time-images of modern cinema. As I explained earlier, "irrational" has a
precise meaning adapted from mathematics: the interval no longer forms part of the image or
sequence as the ending of one or the beginning of the other. Nor can other divisions -- for
example,

-13-

sound in relation to image -- be considered as continuous or extendable one into the other.
The interval becomes an autonomous value; the division it represents is irreducible. Ideally, it
no longer facilitates the passage from one image to another in any decidable way. On this
basis, since the interval functions as an irreducible limit, the flow of images or sequences
bifurcate and develop serially, rather than continuing a line or integrating into a whole. The
time-image produces a serial rather than organic form of composition. Instead of
differentiation and integration, there is only relinking by irrational divisions. This relinking
describes a specific form of grouping the images parcellized by irrational divisions. In
Deleuze's summary:

[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
independent images. Instead of one image after the other, there is one image plus another; and
each shot is deframed in relation to the framing of the following shot.... [The]
cinematographic image becomes a direct presentation of time, according to non-
commensurable relations and irrational divisions.... [This] time-image puts thought into
contact with the unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the
incommensurable. The outside or obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same
time as the interval [ interstice ] or the cut has replaced association. ( Time-Image214, 279)

This difficult passage may be unpacked in reference to a well-known film and one of
Deleuze's principal examples of the cinema of the time-image: Marguerite Duras's India Song
( 1975). The opening shot of the film frames a red sun setting into clouds over a verdant delta.
This is a direct image of time in its simplest manifestation: an autonomous shot describing a
single event as a simple duration. The ensuing shot of the piano in a darkened room is
nowhere motivated by this image. Nor will there be any clear spatial or temporal links in the
cascade of images that follow. The cut defines an unbridgeable interval, and having done so,
each shot becomes an autonomous segment of time. Similarly, instead of linking one to
another, the images divide into series -- the embassy interior with its piano and its mirror that
unsettles the difference between on- and offscreen space, the ruined exterior of the villa, the
tennis court, the park, the river.

The same may be said of the soundtrack. At the beginning we hear the beggar's cries, then the
two "intemporal voices" whose mutual interrogation initiates India Song's uncertain narration.
The sounds themselves divide into distinct series -- the beggar, "les intemporelles," the piano
theme,

-14-

the voices and music of the reception, the cries of the vice-consul -- and it is never certain
whether they occupy the same time or not.
Between and within the relations of image and sound, the interval divides and regroups but
never in a decidable or commensurable way. By the same token, this geometry is not
totalizable as an image of Truth. This does not mean that India Song is randomly organized;
quite the contrary, it is rigorously composed. But unlike the organic movement-image with its
relatively determined and predictable relations, the image of time portrayed here is more
probabilistic. The autonomy of the interval produced by the timeimage renders every shot as
an autonomous shot: a segment of duration where movement is subordinate to time. And
because the interval defines only incommensurable relations, the divisions both between and
within the image and soundtracks split into series whose progression can only be interpreted
in a probabilistic manner. If, as Deleuze asserts, the crystalline regime produces an increased
sensitivity to time, this means that the interval suspends the spectator in a state of uncertainty.
Every interval becomes what probability physics calls a "bifurcation point," where it is
impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change will take. The chronological
time of the movement-image fragments into an image of uncertain becoming.

Aesthetic forms project a sense of order onto an otherwise stochastic universe. In this respect
the regime of the time-image is no less conventional or patterned than that of the movement-
image. However, change in the order of sense implies change in the nature of belief. The
organic regime believes in identity, unity, and totality. It describes a deterministic universe
where events are linked in a chronological continuum: one believes retroactively in a past that
leads inevitably to the present; one has faith in a future that emerges predictably out of the
present.

Alternatively, the regime of the time-image replaces this deterministic universe with a
probabilistic one. In Sherlock, Jr. action leads to repetition, extension, and renewal figured in
the final image of the film. In La jete the end replies to the beginning, but only as an
irreversible sequence leading to the death of the protagonist. Incommensurable and
undecidable relations between shots yield an entropic narrative marked by finitude,
exhaustion, and death, which, nonetheless, leads to the rebirth of history as utopia. The hero
dies, but he transmits from the future an energy source that permits a ruined society to
prolong itself, although with uncertain consequences. I do not use the term "entropy" lightly.
Prigogine and Stengers argue that the image of thought represented by the sciences of chaos
reproduces itself in our information culture. Marked by accelerated temporalities and uncer-

-15-

tain social change, these are images of disorder, instability, and diversity; in short, nonlinear
relationships where small causes initiate massive and unpredictable consequences.
Increasingly, the past is felt as an intangible origin, incommensurable with the present; the
emergence of the future seems unpredictable and undetermined by the present.

The image of time produced in modern cinema blossoms no doubt from a cultural sense of
disorder and unpredictability. But at the same moment, it charges our perception of time with
a receptivity to the multiple, the diverse, and the nonidentical. I would like to conclude this
chapter on this note of encouraging ambiguity. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel prize for
demonstrating that bifurcation points define an equal chance in the evolution of physical
systems: Either the system disintegrates into chaos, or it makes an unforeseen and
unpredictable leap to a new, more complex, and differentiated order. When Deleuze defines
the interval in the time-image as an irrational division and an incommensurable relation, he is
introducing the same dice throw into the relation between image and thought. In this sense he
claims a "power of falsification" for the autonomous interval of the timeimage that derives
from its undecidability. What one sees in the time-image, writes Deleuze, "is the false, or
rather the power of the false. The power of the false is time in person, not because the
contents of time are variable, but because the form of time as becoming questions every
formal model of truth" ( "On the 'Crystalline Regime' "21). 7 Truth here is not opposed to the
false as its opposite or negation; rather, the powers of the false are a measure of truth in its
temporal, and therefore fragile and embattled, forms. Nor is truth an identity waiting to be
recovered. "The idea that truth is not preexistent," writes Deleuze,

something to be discovered, but instead, must be created in every field, is easily seen in the
sciences. Even in physics, all truths presuppose symbolic systems, even if only coordinates.
All truths "falsify" preestablished ideas. To say "the truth is a creation" implies that truth is
produced by a series of processes that shape its substance; literally, a series of falsifications.
In my work with Guattari we are each other's falsifiers, which means that each understands in
his own way what the other proposes. The result is a reflected series with two terms. Nothing
prevents a series of several terms, or a complicated series with bifurcations. The powers of the
false that will produce truth -- those are the intercessors.... ( Negotiations126, 172)

The delimitation of truth is a process -- without predetermined points of departure or ends --

that is creative rather than reflective. This is not a dialectic in the sense of a negation that
produces a higher unity, forging identity

-16-

out of nonidentity in a process of totalization. That is the organic model of truth produced by
the movement-image. Rather, it is a dialogue, an interrogation, always a series of at least two
terms, each of which is able to question, interrogate, or falsify the other in a process that
assures the temporalization of thought. The "intemporal voices" perform this function in India
Song; just as important is the irrational division between and within image and sound
producing both as nontotalizable series. Here the autonomous interval becomes an opening
where unforeseen relations occur.

For Deleuze, the cinema of time produces an image of thought as a nontotalizable process and
a sense of history as unpredictable change. The autonomous interval is not a sign; it does not
define a place for thought to identify itself, even temporarily. Although it characterizes the
noosigns of the time-image as irrational divisions and incommensurable relations, it serves
neither as link nor bridge between image and thought. Rather, the organization of intervals in
the time-image assures that the flux of images and the movements of thought will be disjunct
and discontinuous. Where the movement-image ideally conceives the relation between image
and thought in the forms of identity and totality -- an ever-expanding ontology -- the time-
image imagines the same relation as nonidentity: thought as a deterritorialized and nomadic
becoming, a creative act. Borrowing from Maurice Blanchot, this is what Deleuze calls
"thought from the outside." Thinking, in its attempts to inhabit or encircle the image,
continually encounters a force of time as virtuality, an interval internal to thought, which
divides it from itself and in its relation to the image. Thought becomes agitated and turbulent,
thrown ever closer to its bifurcation points as it is tossed along the incommensurable relations
defined by the time-image. The interval no longer disappears into the seam between
movements and actions. Rather, it becomes a ceaseless opening of time -- a space of
becoming -- where unforeseen and unpredictable events may occur. Deleuze calls this the
"good news" already announced in The Logic of Sense: "meaning is never a principle or
origin; it is produced. It is not something to be discovered, restored, or re-employed -- it is to
be produced by new machineries" (72, 89-90). Such is the time machine of Gilles Deleuze.

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2 MOVEMENT AND IMAGE

Time is invention, or it is nothing at all. -- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

In 1916, Hugo Mnsterberg, neo-Kantian philosopher and pioneer of Gestalt psychology,

proposed that the cinema be defined as an "art of subjectivity." 1 With this claim he
challenged the idea that the purpose of art is imitation. Instead, art should actively and
creatively manipulate or restructure reality according to the laws of thought. Film fascinated
Mnsterberg because for him it reproduced aesthetically the spatial and temporal categories
that govern mental activity itself: perception, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion.
The idea that films can present an image of thought -- the aesthetic externalization of an
otherwise internal and intangible process -- is thus one of the primary, and earliest,
fascinations of philosophy's encounter with film.

A similar fascination informs the image of thought presented in The Movement-Image and
The Time-Image. But just as Deleuze's theory of signs challenges reigning notions of film
semiotics, some of philosophy's most cherished dualisms are demolished in Deleuze's reading
of the philosophy of Henri Bergson in the two cinema books. Otherwise familiar coordinates
on the map of Western philosophy -- distinctions between subject and ob-

-18-

ject, inside and outside, mind and nature, referent and image, realism and constructivism --
shift restlessly on the page. The Cartesian grid plotting the trajectory of philosophical inquiry
since the seventeenth century is of little use here. By the same token, Deleuze's philosophical
career has been devoted to those figures who have most profoundly challenged the French
Cartesian tradition, including Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and especially Bergson.

In particular, Deleuze's path through Bergson must be renavigated, if one is to understand the
originality and limits of Deleuze's approach to cinema, as well as the place of the cinema
books in his philosophical oeuvre. Deleuze's four commentaries on Bergson -- two chapters in
each volume -are the philosophical heart of the cinema books. 2 Deleuze draws extensively on
Bergson's oeuvre, but two works are fundamental: Matter and Memory ( 1896) and Creative
Evolution ( 1907). We should not be surprised to find the cinema addressed directly or
indirectly by Bergson, Deleuze argues: the arc between these two books covers the early
history of cinema, and in this period cinema informs philosophical culture by providing the
image of movement in relation to thought. Paradoxically, however, the final chapter of
Creative Evolution critiques the "cinematographic" model of thought as a mechanistic
illusion. And even if there is, not surprisingly, no mention of cinema in Matter and Memory,
Deleuze considers it to be a work of film theory from first page to last that anticipates
cinema's importance for philosophy. To resolve this paradox, or at least to understand how it
produces the most original aspects of Deleuze's film theory, requires a deeper understanding
of movement, image, and duration as the key concepts of Bergsonism. Along the way,
Deleuze's Bergsonian reading of Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs must also be
addressed.

"[ M]odern science," wrote Bergson, "must be defined pre-eminently by its aspiration to take
time as an independent variable" ( Creative Evolution 336). 3 Bergson believed strongly in
the necessity of a dialogue between philosophy and science. Nonetheless, he was skeptical of
claims to universality and ideologies of progress characterizing modem science's mechanistic
and reductionist attitudes with respect to time. In reducing time to a sequence of instantaneous
states linked by a deterministic law (what Deleuze calls "any-instant-whatevers" [ instants
quelconques ]), Bergson argued that scientific rationality is incapable of understanding
duration. Assessing the limits of scientific reductionism illuminates those qualities Bergson
associated with duration.

After Newton published his universal laws of celestial mechanics in 1687, movements were
considered to be orderly phenomena whose precise consequences and effects could be
calculated using a few differential

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equations. The most important and far-reaching was the statement of the inverse-square law
as a constant of proportionality: F=GMm/r. The idea that universal constants like the value for
gravity could be mathematically described effectively eliminated time and change from
science's image of nature. Once a mathematical constant was established, it held for every
corner of the universe and for all bodies of given masses, earthbound or celestial. Moreover,
its truthfulness was independent of the identity and physical properties of those bodies, the
time and place of measurement, and the presence of an observer. Proportionality dependence
meant that causal chains extended in an unbroken line from the distant past to the foreseeable
future and were spatially extendable in all directions. Essentially, the universe was static and
homogeneous; through mathematical description, it could be disassembled into constituent
parts, from smallest to largest, as well as reassembled. Science became the activity of
isolating basic building blocks, understanding how they combined and recombined into more
complex yet predictable systems. Isolating constituent elements would undoubtedly lead to
further stepping stones in an understanding of nature that, ideally, could and would be one
day complete. The idea of an evolving celestial mechanics was as absurd as considering God
as evolving. The idea of progress was preeminently human progress, assembling the elements
for an ever more complete mathematical description of nature.

This mechanistic and reductionist view of science is peculiarly static. Our understanding of
nature may change constantly, but the constants of nature never change. Progress is defined
by the idea that, if the universe is an unchanging whole, ideally it will be comprehensible in
each and all of its parts. The presence of an observer will not affect this process in any way.
Unpredictable change, the unforeseen appearance of the new, the interactivity of observer and
nature, or change as a heterogeneous continuum are excluded from this ideal of science.
Indeed, contemporary science still largely remains an effort to maintain this image of an
orderly, clockwork universe -- in the face of challenges from the theories of evolution,
quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics and other systems of nonlinear change -as summed
up by Einstein's admonition to Niels Bohr: "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the
world." Bergson responded by claiming, "'Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.' Nature is
change, the continual elaboration of the new, a totality being created in an essentially open
process of development without any preestablished model. 'Life progresses and endures in
time.'" 4

What Bergson called the "cinematographic illusion" is a particular imaging or visualization of

how the reductionist attitude miscomprehends movement and change. In the opening chapter
of The Movement-Image, Deleuze

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explores and redefines Bergson's argument through three theses on movement and time.
These theses involve the relation between movement and instant, the quality of instants
supposed by different philosophies of science, and the relation between movement and
change. Each thesis considers a particular description of time relative to movement. 5

In The Movement-Image, Deleuze's first thesis considers the reductionist error as a formula
where movement equals "immobile sections + abstract time." This is contrasted with the idea
that "real movement concrete duration." Here is a first approach to understanding the dure
in Bergson's sense. Real movement is distinct from the space traversed. The latter is past,
while movement is present as the act of traversing. Unlike space, movement cannot be
segmented or divided into static sections without changing or eliminating its quality as
movement. Therefore, movements are singular, heterogeneous, and mutually irreducible.
Conversely, all spatial segmentations partake of the same homogeneous space. In this manner,
Deleuze reasons that no sequence of immobile sections can reconstitute genuine movement:
"You can only achieve this reconstitution by adding to the positions, or to the instants, the
abstract idea of a succession, of a time which is mechanical, homogeneous, universal and
copied from space, identical for all movements.... On the other hand, however much you
divide and subdivide time, movement will always occur in a concrete duration; thus each
movement will have its own qualitative duration" ( Movement-Image 1). With respect to
movements, duration is singular, qualitative, and unrepeatable. This is the difference between
calculating the formula for the trajectory of falling bodies and the unique event of a meteor
exhausting itself in the earth's atmosphere.

Bergson defines the cinematographic illusion as "immobile sections + abstract time." Indeed
this is an accurate description of the serial organization of images on the film strip: movement
frozen as instantaneous poses, aligned on a linear and irreversible continuum, and automated
at twentyfour frames per second. Writing before 1907 in a scientific context, Bergson
probably had little knowledge of the newly emerging narrative cinema. At the same time, the
scientific uses of cinematography for motion analysis, including the time/motion studies
advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, were well advanced. In this sense, Bergson's
characterization of reified movement and mechanized time as "cinematographic" is perhaps
well deserved.

Alternatively, Deleuze argues that cinema's potential for imaging time and movement was
bound to be misrecognized in the early period since its "essence" -- the shot's capacity for
presenting temporal rather than spatial figures, mobile rather than immobile sections -- is
conquered only through

-21-
the use of montage, moving camera, and mobile point of view. Ignoring the narrative
development of primitive cinema, Bergson misses what cinema implies for his philosophy. 6

Nevertheless, for Bergson the model of "cinematographic" perception is not entirely false; it
is part of quotidian perception, or what he calls "habitual recognition" (reconnaissance). The
apprehension of reality always requires an interior "cinmatographe": a selective sampling
and organization, a series of snapshots preserving only those features relevant for our
immediate needs whose inherent discontinuity is mentally suppressed. Indeed, what an
apprehension of the dure entails is a philosophical intuition of reality that goes beyond
natural or quotidian perception.

Deleuze's more basic defense is ambiguous, however: he forges a curious identity between
movement and image that resonates problematically throughout the cinema books. What the
cinema presents is not photograms or the series of individual frames on the film strip. Rather,
he says, "it is an intermediate image [ l'image moyenne ], to which movement is not appended
or added; the movement on the contrary belongs to the intermediate image as immediate
given" ( Movement-Image2). In other words, what counts for Deleuze is the brute empiricism
of an image in movement, the immediate evidence of our eyes. This is not simply a
phenomenological argument. Because of the mobility of point of view -- an eye distinct from
any weighted body -- the cinema breaks with the conditions for "natural" perception upon
which phenomenology is based. 7

Thus the actual cinematographic apparatus is better than the one turning inside our heads, for,
Deleuze asks, "is not the reproduction of an illusion in a certain sense also its correction?" (
Movement-Image2). This is a curious statement. Deleuze argues that the selective,
discontinuous images of natural perception are corrected cognitively "above" perception by a
mental apparatus that is part of perception itself. Natural perception and cinematographic
perception are therefore qualitatively different because the projector automates movement,
immediately correcting the illusion separate from any human presence. For this reason, the
"cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a
movementimage...a section which is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract movement"
(2). Now it is certainly false to suggest that there is no cognitive correction for movement in
the perception of cinematic images. But it would be equally false to conclude against Deleuze
that cinematic perception and quotidian perception are therefore equivalent. Nevertheless,
Deleuze's reasoning is certainly weak here, and this identification of movement and image
will be further tested in my arguments below.

Deleuze's reading of Bergson's first thesis describes the discovery of the

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movement-image, beyond the conditions of natural perception, as a philosophical innovation

of Matter and Memory. This discovery is contemporaneous with an aesthetic and
technological innovation: the photographic recording and projection of moving images. His
reading of Bergson's second thesis portrays the cinema as the invention of a philosophical
image occupying a key transitional moment in the history of Western thought. Indeed, cinema
represents the appearance of "an organ for perfecting a new reality."

The first thesis states that movement derived from any succession of instants is illusory rather
than authentic. The second thesis explores why this is so according to the quality of instants.
Classical philosophy considered movement the regulated transition between poses or
privileged instants. These poses referred back to Forms or Ideas that were themselves timeless
and immobile. Movement was imagined as deriving from formal transcendental elements, an
ideal synthesis giving order and measure to the dialectic of Forms. The modern conception of
movement as immobile sections + abstract time is quite different. The problem here is to
judge whether the cinema is the perfection of the world's oldest illusion (the Plato-machine of
Jean-Louis Baudry), or the culmination of modern scientific thought, or finally, whether it
augurs a new conception of movement and duration.

In The Movement-Image, the classic cinema occupies a transitional phase between these last
two moments in the history of philosophy. The birth of modern science replaces the
dialectical order of transcendental poses with a mechanical succession of instants: Galileo's
linkage of the time of falling bodies to the extent of space covered; Descartes's calculation of
the movement of a flat curve by linking the position of points moving on a straight line; or
Newton's and Leibniz's invention of differential calculus by examining sections that could be
brought infinitely closer together. Rather than the transcendental poses of ancient philosophy,
these instants are immanent to the movement described as "any-instant-whatevers." For
Deleuze, then, the prehistory of cinema goes back no farther than the perfection of
instantaneous photography and the motion analysis experiments of Muybridge, Marey, and
others. The science informing this technology is fundamentally late modern. Logically, what
the cinema requires is instantaneity (reduction of exposure time), seriality (image size as a
repeatable spatial constant, for example, 35mm), linearity (recording of contiguous
equidistant images on the film strip), and continuity (in the sense of the automation of
movement at a constant rate). Thus the cinema is defined as "the system which reproduces
movement as a function of any-instant-whatever, that is, as a function of equidistant instants,
selected so as to create an impression of continuity" ( Movement-Image5).

-23-

As long as this technology was used for the dissection and analysis of motion, it belonged
fundamentally to the modern conception of movement. This is precisely Bergson's point and
the reason why the modern misconception of movement is so eloquently described as a
cinematographic illusion. According to the first thesis, there is little difference between the
ancient and the modern falsifications of movement. "[To] recompose movement with eternal
poses or with immobile sections," writes Deleuze, "comes to the same thing: in both cases,
one misses the movement because one constructs a Whole, one assumes that 'all is given,'
whilst movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable. As soon as a whole is
given to one in the eternal order of forms or poses, or in the set of any-instantwhatevers, then
either time is no more than the image of eternity, or it is the consequence of the set; there is
no longer room for real movement" ( Movement-Image7). With its emphasis on teleology and
totality, modern philosophy followed the lead of science in missing movement by
constructing wholes. But according to Bergson, this should not prevent the imagination of a
new philosophy with a different understanding of the relation of movement to any-instant-
whatever. Indeed, the second thesis on movement suggests that the philosophical intuition of
duration is based on the following idea: "When one relates movement to any-moment-
whatevers, one must be capable of thinking the production of the new, that is, of the
remarkable and the singular, at any one of these moments" (7). Duration is neither linear nor
chronological. Rather, it presumes at each instant an unceasing opening onto an indeterminate
future.
"Time is invention, or it is nothing at all." We are now in a better position to understand this
extraordinary statement. But before we can judge what the cinema might contribute to this
new philosophy, the third thesis from Creative Evolution, which explores the relation between
movement and change, must be investigated.

Bergson's third thesis, according to Deleuze, contrasts an illusion and a reality with respect to
movement. Whereas an instant presents an immobile section of movement, movement itself is
a mobile section of duration. What Deleuze expresses here is not a criterion for dividing false
from true movements. Rather, he is describing a qualitative change in duration as the relation
of parts or sets to wholes. The movement constructed from a succession of immobile sections
is not necessarily a falsification. "Natural" perception relies on discontinuous images just as
the technology of moving images requires the serial organization of frames on the film strip.
Neither by itself, however, allows the intuition of duration as continuous qualitative change.
Just as the method of Bergsonian "intuition" transcends natural perception in its deepening
apprehension of duration, the invention

-24-

of cinematography surpasses motion analysis by presenting the shot as an intermediate image

in movement -- a "mobile section of duration."

In its simplest form, Bergson's third thesis states that what movement expresses is change in
duration or in the whole (tout). The nature of wholes in relation to sets or ensembles is the
principal issue here. A set is by definition closed, if only artificially. Moreover, it is a spatial
section, and as such, intrinsically divisible into parts. In contrast, the whole is open, temporal,
and without parts since it is by definition indivisible without changing in nature -- that is,
from movement to space -- each time it is divided. To say that the set is artificially closed and
that the whole is essentially open is not to oppose the two. Rather, this statement contrasts two
points of view on movement in relation to change or duration. Deleuze writes that a whole is
not a set nor does it have parts:

It is rather that which prevents each set, however big it is, from closing in on itself, that which
forces it to extend itself into a larger set. The whole is therefore like thread which traverses
sets and gives each one the possibility, which is necessarily realised, of communicating with
another, to infinity. Thus the whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even to spirit
rather than to content and to space. Whatever their relationship, one should therefore not
confuse the extension of sets into each other with the opening of the whole which passes into
each one. A closed system is never absolutely closed; but on the one hand it is connected in
space to other systems by a more or less "fine" thread, and on the other hand it is integrated or
reintegrated into a whole which transmits a duration to it along this thread. (
MovementImage16-17)

While the set may be given in itself and in all of its parts, the whole may not, "because it is
the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in
short, to endure [durer].... So that each time we find ourselves confronted with a duration, or
in a duration, we may conclude that there exists somewhere a whole which is changing, and
which is open somewhere" (9).

A set, therefore, may always be understood as a static sectioning of space, but the whole may
only be intuited as continuous transformation. Otherwise, one falsifies its relation to change
and its capacity for producing the new and the unforeseen. This emphasis on wholes rather
than totality is what makes Bergson so attractive to scientists interested in nonlinear change: it
reintroduces time to science's image of the physical world; it describes evolution as continual
creation of the new rather than discovery of what already always is; it conceives development
without reference to

-25-

predetermined goals or outcomes; and finally, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of

phenomena at discrete orders, levels, and distances. Each one of these features comprises an
essential aspect of the dure.

A more concrete example of the relation between sets and wholes is presented in Deleuze's
comments on framing. For Deleuze the shot is described as an ensemble in the sense of a
provisionally closed set. From this point of view the shot is spatial and composed of discrete
parts: it can be decomposed as a series of still images, or divided into the elements that it
gathers within the frame (bodies, actions, gestures, props, scenery, light, and so on). Here the
frame groups, orders, and encloses in a spatial section.

Alternatively, when the image moves there is a qualitative "translation" in space. Being
divisible, space is homogeneous and quantitative; alternatively, movement is understood as
qualitative change. This "intermediate image" becomes durative and does not cease becoming
so. Thus Deleuze concludes that "each time there is a translation of parts in space, there is
also a qualitative change in a whole" ( Movement-Image8). The borders of the frame are
inherently fluid. They not only enclose objects spatially, they also open up the shot on all
sides, dissolving it into a continually changing series of temporal relations. This is what
Eisenstein called the filmic fourth dimension. Through the movement of the image, the
mobile camera, shifts in angle of view, or montage transitions, the "parts" of the image are
caught up in relations that are not immanent to the objects represented. In other words, we do
not apprehend relations in the movement-image as spatial, referring to objects. Instead they
are temporal, continually weaving objects in a net of concrete duration. "By movement in
space," Deleuze writes, "the objects of a set change their respective positions. But through
relations, the whole is transformed or changes qualitatively. We can say of duration itself or
of time, that it is the whole of relations.... [The] point is that the sets are in space, and the
whole, the wholes are in duration, are duration itself, in so far as it does not stop changing"
(10-11).

Representing the shifting whole of the movement-image, these relations can only be
apprehended in and as movement. If movement stops, their quality changes: concrete duration
lapses back into abstract time. In sum, movement must always be considered from two points
of view: "On one hand," Deleuze writes, "that which happens between objects or parts; on the
other hand that which expresses the duration or the whole. The result is that duration, by
changing qualitatively, is divided up in objects, and objects, by gaining depth, by losing their
contours, are united in duration.... Through movement the whole is divided up into objects,
and objects are re-united in the whole, and indeed between the two 'the whole' changes" (
Movement-ImageII).

-26-
The relation between movement and change supposes three levels that are qualitatively
different. Nonetheless all are implied in movement. And to each of these levels there
corresponds a particular kind of image. First are sets or ensembles: spatial sections grouping
distinct objects or parts. These are instantaneous images or immobile sections of movement.
Second is the movement of translation that varies objects and sets by continually modifying
their relative positions and incorporating them into a qualitatively changing whole. Here the
image is considered a mobile section of duration or so many mobile sections crossing and
interrelating otherwise closed sets through montage. And finally, Deleuze asserts that there is
"duration or the whole, a spiritual reality which constantly changes according to its own
relations" ( Movement-ImageII). This is the domain of the time-image, implied by Bergson's
suggestion, "Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is
being inscribed" ( Creative Evolution16). We may refer to an indirect or direct image of time
presented by cinema. What is in question here is an intuition of time implied by an image that
goes beyond movement. Beyond movement means beyond the physical world toward a
mental one, or one that entwines the physical and spiritual worlds in a new way. To
comprehend this difficult idea, our understanding of the "movement-image" and the image of
thought it evokes must be deepened.

...if there is photography. -- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

In his second commentary on Bergson, Deleuze returns to the identification of image with
movement introduced in the earlier chapters. One of Bergson's most curious statements is the
best place to begin. Deleuze rephrases it slightly, but his meaning is commensurate with
Bergson's: "Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the
very interior of things and for all the points of space" ( Movement-Image60). 8 If this is the
case, what, then, is an image?

The identity of movement and image in the first commentary is complemented here with the
identity of matter and light. This equivalence seems less strange on recalling how Einstein's
famous equation rendered matter and energy exchangeable. For Bergson, however, the idea of
an image already "in the very interior of things" represents an attempt to overcome the
dualisms of realism and idealism, object and subject, that have long plagued Western
philosophy.

Since the eighteenth century, the image has been considered a representation of matter: an
internal and secondary rendering or supplement of

-27-

what exists outside of our consciousness. Perception is also tied to knowledge here in a
special way. For both realism and idealism, to see is to know. But for the former, one
represents to oneself what actually is according to the presumed laws of nature; for the latter,
one represents to oneself what is according to the presumed laws of thought. In both cases, the
speculative interest of pure knowledge requires divorcing mind from both matter and time.
Spirit, as it were, exists outside of matter and time. This separation of mind from both matter
and time is the source of the ontotheological emphasis of Western philosophy.

To assert that images are somehow the product of human contemplation is to divorce the
mind from the material world as well as to consider consciousness distinct from that world.
One objective of Bergson's method is to reestablish continuity between consciousness, matter,
and time. In the first chapter of Matter and Memory, Bergson argues that there is no
difference between matter and Image; they are identical. For Bergson, the first sense in which
matter is identified with light is the assertion that matter is already image or a fundamental
appearing. Bergson asks us to dispense with the disputes of philosophers and return to a more
commonsensical view where "the object exists in itself, and...the object is, in itself, pictorial,
as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image.... [M]atter exists just as it is perceived;
and since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image" ( Matter
and Memory10).

Matter is "luminous" in the sense that it is a fundamental appearing. All that can be perceived
or described in it is always there. This is no simple empiricism, however. From the point of
view of human consciousness, this replete state of the Image -- what Deleuze calls the "plane
of immanence" -is virtual to the extent that the body and its needs place limits on what
actually can be apprehended in matter. Bergson begins with the idea that matter and image are
continuous with, yet distinct from, human perception. While Bergson accepts that perception
is subjective -- a human picturing of matter -- this distinction is one of degree, not kind.
Human sight is materially restricted to radiation propagated at wavelengths from 4 x 10--5 to 7
x 10--5 cm; hearing is limited to frequencies of 16 to 20,000 Hz. In both cases the body is, in
Bergson's metaphor, only a telephone exchange acting and reacting to the propagation of
energy, matter, and movement. An image is nothing more than this propagation where the
body serves both as filter and relay. Similarly, one may speak as if there were two "systems"
of images: one that is universal and immanent in matter (the Image as plane of immanence);
and one that is bodily and filtered by physiological limits and human needs (the image in its
more mundane senses).

Bergson calls the former the "present Image." Through its relation to the

-28-

whole of the universe, the present Image constitutes an objective reality, defined by "the
necessity which obliges it [the present Image] to act through every one of its points upon all
the points of all other images, to transmit the whole of what it receives, to oppose to every
action an equal and contrary reaction, to be, in short, merely a road by which pass, in every
direction, the modifications propagated throughout the immensity of the universe" ( Matter
and Memory36). Comprehending Bergson means understanding that all matter is Image, and
that the universe is defined as the whole aggregate of images acting and reacting to one
another on all their surfaces and in all of their parts. In this holistic picture, interiority and
exteriority are only relations among images. It makes no sense in Bergson's view to say that
images are inside or outside of us, and even less to say that they are produced in
consciousness as the internal specular reflection of external perceptions, or that the world is
viewed from behind a solipsistic interior cut off from the objective world.

Body and brain are Images in the sense of their being receptive surfaces acting and reacting to
the propagation of energy and the force of matter. On its most fundamental level, subjectivity
is nothing more than a body's preparation to act or respond in a sensorimotor relation. In this
case the brain, Bergson writes, is nothing more than an instrument of analysis with respect to
movements received and an instrument of selection with respect to movements executed.
Perception, then, must engage another "system" of images, responding, on one level, to
human needs and, on another, to human freedom. It is in this sense that Bergson writes, "I call
matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the
eventual action of one particular image, my body" ( Matter and Memory22).

This argument dispenses with the usual way of distinguishing between subject and object.
There is no object distinguishable from its image, which is to say, the set of actions and
reactions that it incurs or to which it submits. This web of actions and reactions is ultimately
universal. All bodies, regardless of size or distance, are potentially interconnected. From the
standpoint of Bergson's materialism, the laws governing the interior movements of thought --
the flashing of synapses and flows along neural paths -are no different from the laws
governing the movement of physical bodies. If the image is immanent to movement, where is
the sense in saying that the image is in my head instead of in the moving objects I perceive?
What philosophy has called consciousness is a solipsistic illusion. The image is immanent to
the set of movements that rebound between bodies. What I see and the act of seeing are part
of the same network of actions and reactions passing between and through myself and what I
perceive. There is

-29-

no movement that does not produce an image; there is no image separable from an executed
movement. 9

For Bergson and for Deleuze, the basic philosophical problem is not one of subject and object
or inside and outside, but rather, how these two systems of images interact, how they are
woven together in a perceptual and/or epistemological event. This requires three sets of
deductions, each of which corresponds to a specific understanding of what a movement-image
is or could be. The first deduction defines the movement-image in its largest sense as the
plane where matter equals the whole aggregate of images. The second deduction examines
how a perception is derived from this plane as well as how the three varieties of cinematic
movement-images, with their corresponding signs, may be defined through a philosophical
understanding of this movement-image. The third leads to problems of memory and
consciousness with respect to the construction of direct images of time.

The first deduction concerns Bergson's "present Image" as a world of universal variation
where matter is the whole aggregate of images. Deleuze calls this the "plane of immanence"
and describes it as the "exposition of a world where IMAGE = MOVEMENT" ( Movement-
Image58). The plane of immanence might be described as a set. If so, it is an infinite set
containing all matter, and thus all possible images, in the universe. 10

Movement also has a special sense and a special place at this level of description. First of all,
if the plane of immanence is a set, it cannot be considered from the point of view of either the
spatial abstraction of the enclosing frame or the static perspective of an immobile section.
Instead, it must be imagined as an open and changing whole in its most extensive sense. The
plane of immanence is movement itself from the temporal perspective of an ever-changing
whole. As Deleuze explains, it is that facet of movement "which is established between the
parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them
all up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being
absolutely closed.... [It] is a mobile section, a temporal section or perspective. It is a bloc of
space-time, since the time of the movement which is at work within it is part of it every time"
( Movement-Image59).
Movement is usually imagined as actions and reactions on solid bodies, something like the
break of billiard balls pursuing their trajectories on the surface of a pool table. But movement
on the plane of immanence may not be reduced to an initiating force, an elapsed trajectory, or
the exhaustion of energy. And if Deleuze describes the plane of immanence as a kind of flux
where the "movement-image and flowing-matter are strictly the same thing" ( Movernent-
Image59), it is not the picture of lava flows or ocean currents that should grip us. Again,
movement must be considered as a truly

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universal variation where the interactions of the smallest subatomic particles are caught up in
a changing whole with the gravitational effect of one galaxy on another. On the plane of
immanence, a stone is not a solid object, but a mass that vibrates with molecular motion,
absorbing or reflecting light, expanding with heat and contracting with cold. This is why
Deleuze claims that the plane of immanence is made up entirely of Light. On the one hand,
universal variation is considered the propagation of energy and force before the emergence of
geometrically solid bodies; on the other, the present Image is considered immanent to matter
in its movements. The movement considered here is not yet subject to a will or consciousness;
it is not yet that of the stone we skip across the water or on which we stub our toe. It is an
image derived from the movements of molecules, the propagation of radiation, the exchange
of heat, and the pull of gravity. It is an image warmed by the molten core of the earth and
illuminated by the cold light of stars light-years distant.

In sum, the luminosity of matter in movement is not that of the physical and human eye
organized in relation to bodies human or otherwise, but rather that of the propagation of
energy throughout the entire universe. In Deleuze's account there is "a diffusion or
propagation of light on the whole plane of immanence. In the movement-image there are not
yet bodies or rigid lines, but only lines or figures of light. Blocs of space-time are such
figures. They are images in themselves. If they do not appear to anyone, that is to an eye, this
is because light is not yet reflected or stopped, and passing 'on unopposed [is]
never...revealed.' In other words, the eye is in things, in luminous images themselves.
'Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of
things and for all the points of space'" ( Movement-Image60).

This skepticism concerning "photography" is in fact a critique of how Western philosophy

models representation through optical metaphors. Deleuze questions photography's
appropriateness as a model for the essential luminosity of matter for three reasons. First,
photography "drains" movement from objects, unlike cinema, which "extracts" movement, as
it were, from variable relations between objects. Nor would the interaction between the two
systems of movement-images -- on the plane of immanence and with respect to perception --
be describable as the development in consciousness of a latent image residing in matter.
(Later, Deleuze describes this process as "subtractive.") This is the second critique of
considering the image as a photograph. Instead, there is a continuity between matter, eye, and
brain, each of which must be considered images in this special sense, and as caught up in the
flux of images. Each is part of a changing whole; none can be considered the secondary
representation of the others.

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The last issue concerns the status of light in Western philosophy as a metaphor for perception
and consciousness. In this respect, Deleuze contrasts Husserl's argument that "all
consciousness is consciousness of something," with Bergson's statement that "all
consciousness is something." Here Deleuze formulates his second deduction: How is a
perception extracted from this flowing state of matter? 11

Deleuze's Bergsonism rejects phenomenology's modeling of consciousness on natural

perception. Phenomenology models consciousness with respect to "existential co-ordinates
which define an 'anchoring' of the perceiving subject in the world" ( Movement-Image57).
Bergsonism situates consciousness of things in relation to the dure as an open Whole, or as a
state of matter in movement without centers of reference or points of anchorage. The problem
of perception, then, is twofold. The first aspect of perception involves demonstrating how
framing takes place -- the imposition of perspective anchorings and fixed, instantaneous
views. This is neither the development of a latent image nor the illumination of obscure
matter. Rather, it is the creation of a "special image" in relation to the body as a second
system of reference, which itself is open to change and endures in time. Second, if the cinema
creates movement-images on the model of a universal variation where the Image "in" matter
is identical with movement and light, then the quality of movement, where centers not only
emerge but are constantly displaced or dissolved into the flux of matter, must be
reemphasized. In any case, Deleuze writes, we are put in the place of deducing conscious,
natural, and cinematographic perception from this model of universal variation. Nevertheless,
perhaps the cinema enjoys a certain privilege: "just because it lacks a centre of anchorage and
of horizon, the sections which it makes would not prevent it from going back up the path that
natural perception comes down. Instead of going from the acentered state of things to
centered perception, it could go back up towards the acentered state of things, and get closer
to it" (58). This tendency of returning to the acentered flux of matter is perhaps the central
defining quality of cinematic movement-images.

What would impede phenomenology from backtracking toward this "acentred state of
things"? Because it is a subjective philosophy, phenomenology still relates movements to
immobile poses, something like catching movement in an instantaneous flash, thereby
dividing mind from matter. If consciousness is consciousness of something, then it must be
considered an intentionality that projects an illuminating beam of light into the world.
Conversely, if consciousness is already in things, the division between subject and object is
disregarded in the usual sense, for matter has its own "luminescence." It requires no focusing
and illuminating consciousness for its

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intelligibility. This is a rejection of the Western philosophical tradition that identifies spirit
with an interior light that illuminates the world, bringing things out of their "native darkness":
"Phenomenology was still squarely within this ancient tradition: but, instead of making light
an internal light, it simply opened it on to the exterior, rather as if the intentionality of
consciousness was the ray of an electric lamp ('all consciousness is consciousness of
something...'). For Bergson, it is completely the opposite. Things are luminous by themselves
without anything illuminating them: all consciousness is something, it is indistinguishable
from that thing, that is from the image of light" ( Movement-Image60-61).

For Bergson, there are also two forms of consciousness. On the plane of immanence there is
consciousness en droit. This consciousness is virtual. As luminosity, it is diffused across the
entire plane of immanence. However, if a de facto consciousness emerges on the plane of
immanence at a particular point, this is neither the development of an already existing latent
image nor the discovery of an image through the illuminating flash of consciousness.
Consciousness of fact neither develops nor projects light; it stops, reflects, or subtracts as a
darkened screen or an opaque surface. "In short," Deleuze writes, "it is not consciousness
which is light, it is the set of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter.
As for our consciousness of fact, it will merely be the opacity without which light 'is always
propagated without its source ever having been revealed'" ( Movement-Image61). Despite his
hostility to Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre gave the clearest exposition of Bergson's reversal of the
role of light in Western metaphysics. Instead of consciousness being a beam of light
illuminating things, it is a luminosity flooding the subject. There is no illuminated matter, but
rather, a phosphorescence diffused in every direction that becomes actual "only by reflecting
off certain surfaces which serve simultaneously as the screen for other luminous zones" (
Imagination39-40). 12 This is why Deleuze states that the brain is a screen and nothing more.

I have discussed at length the role of movement and light in Deleuze's Bergsonism. But what
of the question of time? Again we must turn to the two perspectives presumed by the two
"systems" of images. On the plane of immanence, movement-images are time itself as a
becoming in space, or the form of time as change. Time is associated here with the
perspective of universal variation, of an ever-changing Whole without horizons, centers, or
points of anchorage. The criterion of a perspective on a Whole that changes inspires the
construction of what Deleuze calls direct images of time as special prehensions of duration or
time as a becoming in space.

However, for the moment we are only concerned with indirect images of time with respect to
a second system of reference: the eye and brain in rela-

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tion to that "special image," which is the body. Bergson insists that an object and its
perception are identical; they are one and the same image. But this situation shifts depending
on the system of reference we use. The object is the image itself in relation to the actions of
all other possible images on it and to which it responds immediately. But perception, Deleuze
writes, relates this image "to another special image which frames it, and which only retains a
partial action from it, and only reacts to it mediately" ( MovementImage63). In other words,
perception is subtractive: "We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a
function of our needs.... In short, things and perceptions of things are prehensions, but things
are total objective prehensions, and perceptions of things are incomplete and prejudiced,
partial, subjective prehensions" (63-64).

Instead of the "subject" of contemporary cultural theory, Deleuze speaks of "special or living
images" and "centres of indetermination." The body is only a contingent center in the
acentered and variable flux of movementimages. If this indeterminate center is to appear, a
gap or interval must be opened in the flow of time as a spatial framing that provides the
perspective of a section, if a mobile section, on movement in its pure state. Thus, movement-
images divide into three categories of images when they are apprehended not in their pure
state, but from this second, contingent system of reference which is the body. For Deleuze,
subjectivity is nothing more that a montage of these three "moments" as they relate to
perception, action, and affection from this singular perspective.
The interval is a temporal figure in that it forestalls movement, producing a gap in time
between an action experienced and the reaction executed in response to it. Whereas on the
plane of immanence images act and react on all their facets and in all of their parts all of the
time, the interval produces an image with only two "sides." One side is a receptive, sensorial
surface that filters stimuli, ignoring external influences irrelevant to the body and isolating
others that become "perceptions" in virtue of their isolation. This isolation in space implies a
delay where the actions undergone are forestalled in anticipation of proper responses.
Consequently, reactions executed on the other side are no longer the simple prolongation of
external movements; in fact, they transform these movements, producing something new. The
interval delays reactions, giving them time to select, organize, and integrate remembered
information, producing a new movement in response. What is "special" about the special
image is that it no longer allows movement to pass through it unopposed or unchanged.
Whatever movement it receives on one side is reorganized and transformed on the other. The
fundaments of consciousness in the human sense are thus constituted by this interval that
suspends actions, producing on one side

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"an instrument of analysis in regard to the movement received" and, on the other, "an
instrument of selection in regard to the movement executed" ( Matter and Memory30).

I will hold until chapter 4 Bergson's explanation of the philosophical nature of this
suspension, which involves the problem of memory and the distinction between pure and
actual perception. For now it is enough to say that, with respect to movement, the interval
produces a provisional cen ter in the acentered universe of movement-images. With respect to
light, it provides a "black screen" or opaque surface reflecting light that otherwise would be
propagated in all directions. In short, perception involves the formation of contingent and
partial picturings of matter, not as snapshots but as samplings of a continuous flow. There is
no essential discontinuity between matter and our subjective prehensions; we neither take
pictures in consciousness nor illuminate an obscure world from behind the window of
consciousness. As Bergson insists,

there is for images merely a difference of degree, and not of kind, between being and being
consciously perceived. The reality of matter consists in the totality of its elements and of their
actions of every kind. Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action upon
bodies: it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally,
for our functions.... Consciousness -- in regard to external perception -- lies in just this choice.
But there is, in this necessary poverty of our conscious perception, something that is positive,
that foretells spirit: it is, in the etymological sense of the word, discernment. ( Matter and
Memory37-38) 13

To insist that the image is already "in" things is to argue that representation is no simple act of
consciousness. For if matter is already image, then "representations" proliferate throughout
the universe in a virtual state, happily ignorant of my body or my potential actions on them.
To initiate this passage from the virtual to the actual in a perceptual act, Bergson says,

it would be necessary not to throw more light on the object, but, on the contrary, to obscure
some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of
being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture
[tableau].... Everything thus happens for us as though we reflected back to surfaces the light
which emanates from them, the light which, had it passed on unopposed, would never have
been revealed. The images which surround us will appear to turn toward our body the side,
emphasized by the light upon it, which interests our body. They will detach

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from themselves that which we have arrested on its way, that which we are capable of
influencing. ( Matter and Memory36-37)

Discernere, to separate or distinguish, is to pass from the virtual to the actual, cutting out
things from matter according to the measure of our needs. It is a rescuing of things from their
dormant state according to par ticular subjective prehensions. In this process Deleuze
distinguishes three basic modalities for deriving actual images, which are in fact three
vicissitudes of the movement-image. From the analysis of pure perception, then, one can
define vicissitudes of the image as organized in relation to actions, qualities, and bodies.
Actions replace movement with a destination or trajectory. Qualities replace movement "with
the idea of a state which persists whilst waiting for another to replace it" ( Movement-Image
59). Bodies replace movement with the idea of a subject who accomplishes this movement, or
an object being moved, or, finally, a vehicle transmitting movement. These are three "material
moments of subjectivity." For Deleuze, subjectivity, as a special image or contingent center,
is nothing but "an assemblage [ agencement ] of three images, a consolidate [ consolid ] of
perception-images, action-images and affection-images" (66).

As a cinematic movement-image, the film shot shares an intermediate status with universal
movement-images. The movement-image is a mobile section of duration. It frames matter and
light as an indeterminate center because of its peculiar tension: "the mobility of its centres and
the variability of its framings always lead it to restore vast acentred and deframed zones. It
then tends to return to the first rgime of the movement-image; universal variation, total,
objective and diffuse perception" ( MovementImage64). But while the parcellizing action of
the frame measures the mobility and indetermination of centers, it also, by its aesthetic nature,
eliminates or subtracts unnecessary information, producing a "unicentered subjective
perception," centering elements in the midst of the pull of a mobile and indeterminate space.
This is what Deleuze calls the perceptionimage. The movement-image tends to restore,
through a variety of strategies, angles that direct movement in relation to a discernible cause,
trajectory, or point of view. Thus all the strategies of mise-en-cadre function as subjective
prehensions, sectioning space from movements to which it inevitably returns. 14

Emerging imperceptibly from the perception-image is the action-image. In the formula that
Deleuze adopts from Bergson, "'Perception is master of space in the exact measure in which
action is master of time'" ( MovementImage65). Perception establishes a provisional center in
a mobile space; action predicates a delay, a temporal interval between an action and a re-

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action. Where perception establishes a center, it also establishes a horizon of action. In this
temporal interval, the subject judges simultaneously the virtual action that things may have on
it and the possible action, reaction, or response that will be appropriate. Opened on one side
by perception and closed on the other by action, the interval is dominated by what Deleuze
calls the "sensory-motor schema." Here perception derives no less from motor centers than
action does from sensory ones. As one passes from perception to action, the "operation under
consideration is no longer elimination, selection or framing, but the incurving of the universe,
which simultaneously causes the virtual action of things on us and our possible action on
things. This is the second material aspect of subjectivity. And, just as perception relates
movement to 'bodies' (nouns), that is to rigid objects which will serve as moving bodies or as
things moved, action relates movement to 'acts' (verbs) which will be the design for an
assumed end or result" (65).

Where the perception-image describes the delineation of bodies, and the action-image acts,
the affection-image relates movement to qualities or lived states. As the third material
moment of subjectivity, the affectionimage defines how the subject perceives or experiences
itself "from the inside." Deleuze says that affection falls within the interval without filling or
completing it: "It surges in the centre of indetermination, that is to say in the subject, between
a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action.... There is inevitably
a part of external movements that we 'absorb,' that we refract, and which does not transform
itself into either objects of perception or acts of the subject; rather they mark the coincidence
of the subject and the object in a pure quality" ( Movement-Image65). Deleuze derives from
the affection-image a physiognomies that, while theorized through Bergson, is quite close to
the theories of Bla Balzs. In the movement of "translation" from received action
(perception) to response (action), marked by the hesitation of the interval and thus a certain
immobility, affection surges as "expression" spatially organized on the face. The face
illuminates "movements of expression...most frequently buried in the rest of the body" (66).
Every film combines these three sorts of images, just as our subjectivity is always a
combination of three moments, although one type may dominate. Deleuze calls the
combination of types "montage." The problem of montage in this enlarged sense of the term
opens onto the question of signs.

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3 IMAGE AND SIGN

Deleuze's book on Francis Bacon, Logique de la sensation, is accompanied by a separate folio
reproducing ninetyseven paintings. Deleuze's film theory presents over six hundred pages of
philosophical analysis of film without reproducing a single frame enlargement or film still.
This omission is strategic and intentional. Frame enlargements present nothing of
cinematographic specificity; the photograph shares little with the cinema. If anything, it
falsifies the essential characteristic of the cinematographic image -movement. Deleuze's film
semiotic is incomprehensible without the imagination of the image as movement. The still
photograph risks more than the written word in this respect. Understanding the special
qualities of images and signs as movement requires, from the first, a philosophical intuition in
Bergson's sense to which no immobile image is adequate. 1

Problems of time and movement have always haunted the textual analysis of film. That
Deleuze puts more faith in the temporality of writing than the immobility of photograms is
justified by Bergson's three theses on movement discussed earlier. First, no sequence of
immobile sections can constitute real movement; they can only present quantitative additions
in space. Second, what movement expresses is qualitative change. Third, movement expresses
change in duration or in the whole; therefore, real movement involves temporal rather than
spatial relations.
 -38-

For Deleuze, this is why the cinema is so interesting for philosophy. The cinema produces
images and signs as movement, that is, as movementimages. No static description can be
adequate to the essential mobility of cinematographic images. That movement is immanent to
the image is a quality that film shares with duration in its two senses: on the one hand, the
universal variation of matter; on the other, movement of thought in time. 2 By the same token,
Deleuze presents not one but two "pure semiotics of film," one for the movement-image and
one for the time-image, one for the indirect and one for the direct presentation of time. In
either case, the main question is the same: How do we grasp an image of thought in and as
movement? For Deleuze, cinema is the one twentiethcentury art form that comes closest to
producing automatically a Bergsonian intuition of movement in this sense.

Deleuze insists that his typology of images and signs is a semiotic rather than a serniology.
This preference for the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce over the linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure involves four arguments; each is fundamental to Peirce's theory of signs. The first
is familiar from chapter I: Signs are not equivalent to language but rather to thought, insofar
as "all thought is in signs." 3 Peirce's theory of signs is a logic, not a linguistics. Recourse to
Peirce thus overturns the centrality of the linguistic model in semiology. Linguistic signs
become only one type among others with no priority or privilege, and like all other types of
images and signs are fundamentally deterritorializing figures. 4 The last three arguments by
Peirce seem very Bergsonian in context. Second is the idea that the thought or signs wherein
we conceive the world share a monistic or substantial identity with it. Peirce's semiotic founds
itself on the Image as b.phisaupsiepsiepsipov or "phanerons," defined as a fundamental
appearing. Peirce argues for a "decriptive science of reality" or a semiotic realism wherein
mind and matter exist on a continuum and have the same substantive identity. Third is the
idea that thinking is neither immaterial nor specular, but behavioral, an "action just as real,
just as historical, just as behavioral as operating a machine"(9). Last and most important is the
idea that thinking is continuous movement, a fundamentally temporal act. This is self-evident
in the idea of unlimited semiosis. A sign acquires meaning only through its interpretation in
another sign and so on ad infinitum. Moreover, rather than the "arborescent" and binary logic
of structuralism and semiology that continually resolves two into one, Peirce proposes triadic
combinations that can produce any multiplicity. For all these reasons, Peirce will hold with no
Cartesian dualisms: "just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body,"
he writes, "we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us." 5

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Deleuze's critique of semiology, in particular the film semiology of Christian Metz, is not
based on a rejection of linguistics, nor is it an argument for the "visual" specificity of film as
opposed to theories of verbal meaning. I believe there is much to be defended in Metz's
arguments, which are often more complex and nuanced than Deleuze portrays them.
Nevertheless, the basic outline of Deleuze's critique is thought-provoking and fundamental for
understanding his own film semiotic. The critique of Metz focuses on two basic themes --
immanence and temporality -- that are central to Deleuze's critique of structuralism in general.
Structuralism ignores the materiality of different materials of expression by reducing them to
a universal "structure," the system of linguistic signs. Moreover, this universal logic is
understood fundamentally as static and unchanging. For Deleuze, Peirce's semiotic restores a
sense of the temporality of signs in relation to thought, as well as their immanence with
respect to the materials of expression that support them.
Deleuze states that cinema is not a language, but a semiotic. The first part of this statement
takes issue with the analysis of filmic signs based on an analogy with verbal language.
Deleuze admires Metzs cautious and complete analysis of the question: "Under what
conditions should cinema be considered a language?" 6 However, he disagrees strongly with
Metz's answer, which circumscribes yet defends the appropriateness of a Saussurrean
approach.

Deleuze targets two arguments in particular. The first concerns the problem of narrative.
Cinema has no langue in the sense of a determinate structure, says Metz. Nonetheless, it is
highly codified owing to its evolution as a narrative form and its adoption of certain novelistic
practices. This is why the early Metz places his bets on a syntagmatic analysis of the image
track: the organization of film into distinct narrative segments, whose linkages and
spatiotemporal characteristics can be analyzed and typed as a relatively distinct set of codes.
The second aspect addresses whether or not the shot can be considered a minimal unit of
meaning whose denotation is subject to linguistic analysis. The cinema, Metz argues, also has
no langue in the sense that the shot cannot be considered an arbitrary sign since there is a
motivated relation between the image and what it signifies and since the shot is not
characterized by double articulation. However, the shot does have a basic unity similar to that
of the nonc or utterance. Thus the verbal equivalent of an image of a gun -- for example, the
opening shot of Fritz Lang 's The Big Heat -- would be the statement "Here is a gun." Unlike
the statement or nonc, however, the image cannot be further divided by a morphemic or
phonemic analysis. 7

For Deleuze, the idea that the history of cinema can be understood as

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the history of its narrational possibilities is undisputed. His difference with Metz lies in how
image and narration are to be defined. When Deleuze writes that cinema is not a language, it
is a semiotic, he is emphasizing the relation of immanence wherein the qualities of cinematic
signs are derived from the image as a mobile material. Analyses of sign and narration in film
must be deduced from this material, from the idea of the Image in its enlarged sense, or else
the essence of cinematic signification is lost. Alternatively, structuralism considers narrative
as a sort of langue or "grammar," an external force analyzable in itself regardless of the
medium in which it is realized. Here narrative functions as a structure of the same,
fundamentally ahistorical and unchanging, that subtends and supports different media while
defining them as narrative.

The suggestion that this structure is linguistic compounds the problem. Deleuze finds that
Metz is caught in a tautology whose origin is the dilemma, posed by Saussure himself, of
deciding whether the study of speech is only a part of semiology, or whether linguistics will
be the founding model for the study of every sign system. Metz argues that filmic
signification is not verbal and operates independently of any fixed langue. Yet in order to
decide in what ways film may or may not be considered a language, he accounts for filmic
signification according to a linguistic model, that of the nonc or statement. In this respect,
any specific and concrete notion of sign and image tends to disappear into Metz's categories
of syntagmatic types. Because Metz's grande syntagmatique must assume that the image is
equivalent in some respects to the nonc, filmic images become noncs because they may
be grouped into syntagmatic categories. Deleuze finds that despite Metz's own cautions, Metz
cannot avoid basing his theory of signification on an analogy with verbal language as a
structure that seems to be both outside and inside the image. Moreover, the codification of
signs is derived here from a universal logic of the same, a "grammar" of narrative, as it were.

For Deleuze, then, semiology presents a reductionist theory of signs. In semiology, both the
filmic image and filmic narration are modeled on "structures" that are external to the
fundamental material of the image, cinematic or otherwise. Alternatively, Deleuze argues for
understanding filmic narration as immanent to filmic images and signs: "Narration is never a
given apparent in images, nor is it the effect of a structure which underlies them; it is a
consequence of images as they themselves appear, as perceptible images in themselves as
they are initially defined for themselves" ( Time Image27, 40). A film semiotic requires a
pragmatic approach where the logic of signs is deduced from images as they appear in and for
themselves. The criterion of immanence means that a semiotic describes

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those properties that cinematic images and signs derive from the Image in its largest sense: as
universal variation, the identity of matter with movement and light.

Semiology is also ill-suited for comprehending the relation between image and time. Time in
relation to movement is elided because the grande syntagmatique immobilizes the image as
fixed, categorical segmentations of space. Time as an open process of creative evolution is
replaced by the search for an underlying langue that reduces images to changing variants of a
changeless and invariant structure. Moreover, this structure itself is immobile and intemporal.
Deleuze believes that the image is badly conceptualized when replaced by the nonc because
its most perceptible and immanent characteristic -- movement -- is drained from it.

Alternatively, a pragmatic and semiotic approach restores the immanence of movement to the
logics of film image, sign, and narration. However, if a semiotic must be derived or deduced
from movement as a kind of primary material, what does "movement" mean here? So far,
there are four variants of the movement-image. First is the plane of immanence or the whole
aggregate of images as a universal regime of acentered variation (the Image). Next comes the
"perception of movement" with the emergence of centers of indetermination, singular bodies
or objects, and the opening of intervals forming contingent, spatial sets. Third is movement in
its most common sense, as an elapsed spatial trajectory. The fourth variation completes the
passage from matter to spirit, intuiting movement, matter, and image in their identity with
time: becoming, change, emergence of the new, creative evolution.

Whereas semiology asserts that there are languages without a langue, Deleuze states that,
from a semiotic perspective, "the language system [langue ] only exists in its reaction to a
language material that it transforms" ( Time Image29). Deleuze calls this the nonable or a
"signaletic material [matire signaltique] which includes all kinds of modulation features,
sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral
and written)...[Even] with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a
language. It is a plastic mass, an asignifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed
linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically, and
pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions" (29). 8

This is nothing less than the movement-image in its basic sense: not an image that moves, but
the identity of matter with movement and image on the plane of immanence. The Image or
images in this sense are anterior to all signification. The most that can be said about them is
that they do not yet signify. However, they are "signaletic," producing signals or
representama, since matter is already "luminous" or a fundamental appearing. In

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whatever form or combination they take-acoustic, graphic, visual-signs must emerge or be

deduced from images.

If the foundation of this semiotic is the forming of movement -images as a signaletic material,
what is the logic of this forming? Deleuze finds intriguing Pasolini's insistence that there is
indeed something like double articulation in the cinema. These articulations are not linguistic,
however. Rather, they are aspects or facets of the movement-image, considered in itself as
"real" movement, in the mobile relation between wholes and sets. On the one hand, there is
division of the whole into objects and bodies and the reintegration of objects into a whole that
passes between them as continuous duration. This is a process Deleuze calls "differentiation."
On the other hand, when movement is organized as intervals in relation to a special image or
center of indetermination, distinct kinds of images and their corresponding signs appear, a
process he calls "specification."

This is the "reaction" that Deleuze refers to when arguing that "the language system only
exists in reaction to a non-language-material that it transforms." The specification of images
and signs occurs in the transition from "matter considered in itself" to the "perception of
matter." Thus, Deleuze's identification of a signaletic material involves Bergson's analysis of
a pure perception, or rather, the emergence of perception between the two systems of
movement-images: total objective prehensions of things, and perceptions of things as partial,
incomplete, and subjective prehensions. The modulation between wholes and sets on the one
hand, and differentiation and specification on the other, defines the two basic articulations of
the movement image.

For Deleuze, the cinema is ideally suited for promoting an intuition of duration because image
and movement are immanent to one another. This is a kind of "realism," though it shares little
with the debates on realism presented in the history of film theory. Most of these debates
describe the power of the photographic image in terms of its analogical representations of
objects. Analogical representations are defined by spatial semblance as well as the indexical
quality of photography, the sense that it preserves an absent referent while certifying its prior
and perhaps continuing existence. Alternatively, Deleuze argues that "the movement image is
not analogical in the sense of resemblance: it does not resemble an object that it would
represent.... The movement image is the object; the thing itself caught in movement as
continuous function. The movement-image is the modulation of the object itself" ( Time-
Image27).

What is the difference, then, between the cinematic movement-image and the movement-
images defined by Bergson in Matter and Memory? For Deleuze there is none. "[M]odulation
is the operation of the Real," he writes,

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"in so far as it constitutes and never stops reconstituting the identity of image and object" (
Time-Image28). Again, the idea of the Real here has nothing to do with the analogical
equivalence of an object and its represented spatial image. This would be an immobile
molding of the object. Rather, when Deleuze defines the shot as a mobile section of duration,
he is closer to Bazin's temporal realism, the idea of a durative identity between the uncut film
shot and the time of perception it presents. Deleuze writes that the "cinema... conveys a relief
in time, a perspective in time: it expresses time itself as perspective or relief" ( Movement-
Image23-24). Bazin argued that photography works like a mold or death mask. But
photography preserves duration as an immobile section, a spatial congealing of the former life
of its object. However, since cinematographic space occurs in time, it preserves the curious
aspect of a continuous modulation of moving space as well as objects that move and whose
positions vary in space. Cinematographic space, therefore, is fundamentally different in nature
than photographic space. "The photographer proceeds," writes Bazin, "via the intermediary of
the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous im-print, a cast...[But] the cinema
realises the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of
its duration as well." 9 While Deleuze criticizes Bazin on some points, in this they agree
completely.

Deleuze's film theory is less a realism, however, than an argument based on the logical
identity of two processes: modulation of wholes and sets in the movement-image; modulation
of frame, shot, and montage in the cinema. These processes are the basis for Deleuze's
definition of the cinematic movement-image as a "mobile section of duration" and for his
description of cinematic images and signs in relation to movement. Movement has yet another
sense in this context, what Deleuze calls "deterritorialization." Because it is deduced from the
plane of immanence, the perception of matter will always contain two sides or facets. In the
universal movement-image, images react on all of their sides and in all of their parts. In the
perception of matter or the emergence of a perception-image, movement becomes bipolar. In
other words, while movement becomes relative to a center of indetermination, it also retains
an absolute quality derived from universal movement-images.

Relative and absolute are two perspectives on movement, inseparable yet quite different in
their relation to images. Relative movement involves relations between the parts of a set,
whereas absolute movement defines change in the state of the whole. Relative movement
involves immobile segmentations of space, which includes changes within and between the
parts of a set -- sectionings of space as lines, planes, or volumes. Absolute movement,

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however, refers to the mobility of a whole that changes as an absolute temporal quality. The
shot always presents this bipolar movement,

in relation to the sets in space where it introduces relative modifications between elements or
sub-sets; in relation to a whole whose absolute change in duration it expresses. This whole is
never content to be elliptical, nor narrative, though it can be. But the shot, of whatever kind,
always has these two aspects: it presents modifications of relative position in a set or some
sets. It expresses absolute changes in a whole or in the whole. The shot in general has one
face turned towards the set, the modifications of whose parts it translates, and another face
turned towards the whole, of which it expresses the -- or at least a-change. Hence the situation
of the shot, which can be defined abstractly as the intermediary between the framing of the set
and the montage of the whole, sometimes tending towards the pole of framing, sometimes
tending towards the pole of montage. The shot is movement considered from this dual point
of view: the translation of the parts of a set which spreads out in space, the change of a whole
which is transformed in duration. ( Movement-Image19-20)
Deterritorialization is another name for the bipolar quality of the image in relation to
movement. Relative movement presents a tendency toward closure and the formation of
spatial sets. Alternatively, absolute movement is temporal, presenting a deterritorialization of
the image: whatever tries to close becomes open; whatever falls into parts or sets will return
to a continuous whole; whatever congeals into space also unravels in time.

In the same way that Bergson presents his three theses on movement as the determination of a
closed system, movement between parts of a system, and the changing whole expressed in
movement, Deleuze presents his deduction of images and signs from three perspectives: the
frame as closed set or system, the shot in relation to the movement it expresses, and montage
as expressing a change in the whole. Each of these perspectives is governed by the reciprocal
relation between relative and absolute movement.

Framing represents enclosure, or rather, a relative, provisional, or artificially closed space.

The act of framing forms sets, and thus the space of the frame is divisible into parts or subsets
according to five variables. Each one of these variables exhibits the two fundamental
perspectives on movement, relative and absolute, or framing of the set and opening of the
whole that changes.

The first variable is informatic, or the degree of how much or how little information is
conveyed by the image. A set can be either relatively saturated or rarefied according to how
much visual information it conveys. A

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thoroughly rarefied image would include a pure black or white frame, as in Kubelka's Arnulf
Rainer ( 1958-60). In narrative cinema, rarefaction usually means the elimination of subsets.
Conversely, saturation implies the multiplication of subsets, often through staging actions on
multiple planes in deep space and in wide-screen formats, or the layering of planes through
superimposition or process shots. Scottie's nightmare in Vertigo( 1958) furnishes some
interesting examples. In shot 8 of this twelve-shot sequence, Scottie is seen walking in
medium close-up against a black background. A red color-field flashes on and off across the
image. Then the black background becomes the cemetery where Carlotta Valdez is buried.
Shot 9 is a subjective tracking shot as Scottie approaches the open grave, which appears as a
yawning black hole in the screen. The set of flashing red fields continues. In the following
shot, Scottie's head appears and disappears alternately over an animation of receding parallel
lines, first in close-up and then gradually expanding to an extreme close-up. The color-fields
now alternate between red, violet, and green. There is a momentary cut to black which
becomes a silhouette of Scottie's body falling toward the red tile roof of the old mission
through a flashing red color-field. Then the field stops, the mission roof disappears, and the
body is seen receding into a white void. The sequence overall is organized by a similar
strategy of taking a minimal compositional set, adding to it within and across shots, then
strategically reducing the amount of information and repeating the process. In any case, the
informatic aspect of the image presents a significant point. The image is not simply visible; its
degrees of organization represent a legible space, a space that is meant to be read as much as
perceived.

When the frame is considered in itself as a spatial limit, it can be defined as either geometric
or dynamic. A geometric frame implies a Euclidean conception of subsets. Here the frame
organizes distinct geometrical shapes where the lines of the image are invariant with respect
to movement. Information is organized spatially as circles, triangles, orthogonals,
parallelepipeds, and other strong compositional shapes. These shapes tend to be rigid rather
than fluid. Conversely, a dynamic conception implies the fluid framelines of an iris in or out,
wipes, as well as other dynarnizations of the frame, to use Eisenstein's terms. These include
compositional lines in movement, whether movement of the frame itself, or relative
movement of lines in the frame. By the same token, compositional geometries can be fluid
and transform into other shapes, as when Carlotta's bouquet dissolves into a more abstract
form which, in turn, explodes in the frame.

Subsets can also be "dividual." In understanding how the frame falls into parts, there is neither
absolute continuity nor distinct division; rather, there is progressive transformation by
degrees. The frame can organize increas-

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ing or decreasing intensities from dark to light, or different gradations of color or black and
white. Other examples might include the extreme plastic transformations that one finds in
animated films. Dividuation produces imprecise sets in the sense that lines or borders are hard
to discern, for example, changes in tonality, or zones defined by gray scales or changes in
color values. Logically, dividuation means a change in qualities whose exact point of
transformation is indiscernible. Any of the fades, dissolves, and animations of "Scottie's
dream" would provide good examples. Dividuation means that movement can render points of
transformation indiscernible -unless, of course, movement is subtracted and the image is
analyzed as a sequence of immobile sections. This is another way of saying that the quality of
movement assures a deterritorialization of the frame, a continual transformation of values
whose gradations are indistinct or only perceived by eliminating movement.

Framing also relates to an optical aspect or angle of view. Simply speaking, this describes an
angle or framing that implies a point of view, providing a given perspective on the
represented image or events. The second shot of Scottie's dream, a strong oblique angle
suggesting an objective view on a "disturbed" space, and the ninth shot, a subjective track
toward the open grave, are two examples. However, we shall see that the poles between
subjective and objective are fluid when, later on, the signs of the perceptionimage are
discussed.

The most complex aspect of framing is what Deleuze calls the out-offield (hors-champ). This
includes articulations of offscreen space as defined by Nol Burch, among others. But
Deleuze's perspective is original, relating back to the relation between relative and absolute
movement.

The out-of-field is not a particular aspect or problem of framing; rather, it defines framing as
mobility in its two aspects or facets. On the one hand, the frame works pictorially, isolates a
set, and congeals the parts of the set into an image. On the other hand, the frame works as a
"mobile mask" that continually extends into new sets. Either the camera isolates or enlarges a
given space, minimizing or maximizing its informatic content, or the frame gives way to a
new shot that replaces it in the form of succession. The former is primarily an act of mobile
framing; the latter an act of montage. Additionally, framing subsumes parts into ever larger
wholes: photograms into shots, shots into sequences, sequences into acts, acts into the whole
of the film. In this respect, framing encompasses the fundamental articulations of the
movement-image: differentiation and specification.
Mobility implies two dimensions of movement that are different in nature. The translation
between these two dimensions gives the essence of movement. A set by definition can be
divided into parts, as small as you

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want, or extended into other sets, either as long in sequence or as large as you want: "when a
set is framed, therefore seen, there is always a larger set, or another set with which the first
forms a larger one, and which can in turn be seen, on condition that it gives rise to a new out-
of-field, etc." ( Movement-Image16). Two important consequences follow. Each time a set is
divided, movement changes in nature: movement at the level of the film strip differs in nature
from that of movement of the camera or that of editing as one shot or sequence replaces
another. Moreover, while the frame in its relative aspect tends to enclose space as sets, these
sets are only artificially and provisionally closed. The frame as limit implies a set that is not
yet seen but that nevertheless appears, implying a new unseen space, and so on.

However, no matter how many times a set expands into ever-larger sets it will never form a
whole, at least in an absolute sense. If this Whole were possible, there would no longer be
movement or change. Thus Deleuze, following Bergson, gives the whole an original
definition: it no longer defines movement as teleology or totality, nor can the whole be
described as a fundamentally spatial figure. Rather, the whole is the Open, or "that which
prevents each set, however big it is, from closing in on itself, and that which forces it to
extend itself into a larger set" ( Movement-Image16).

This idea provides another important distinction. Relative movement is inherently spatial. The
implied out-of-field adds one space to another: the unfolding of space in camera movement;
the succession of shots in editing; or the subsumption of shots or sequences into larger parts.
In any case, movement is defined by physical space as content, a geometry of spatial
segments that can be added, divided, or multiplied as you wish. The out-of-field is by
definition actual and actualizable: it serves continually to produce new spaces. But the Whole
is neither spatial nor actual; it is temporal and virtual. It is the dimension of change itself in
the form of becoming. The absolute aspect of the out-of-field relates to duration as the Open,
which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the spatial and actual. The
movement-image only gives an indirect image of time, because time and change are always
measured as the division or addition of spatial segments. "In one case, the out-of-field
designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of
field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather
to 'insist' or 'subsist,' a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time" (
Movement-Image17). (I will discuss these ideas further in chapter 6.)

Thus the problem of the out-of-field raises again the fundamental issue of Deleuze's two
books: the presentation of time. The cinematic movementimage presents an indirect image of
time as exteriority or extensiveness in space. The cinematic time-image presents a direct
image: anteriority of

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time as creative evolution, the pure form of time as change or Becoming. The universal
movement-image contains both aspects as the foundation from which the two dimensions of
pure semiotic are derived.
Conceptually, framing is more a property of the cinematic movementimage. It articulates
relative movement wherein "a closed system refers in space to a set which is not seen, and
which can in turn be seen, even if this gives rise to a new unseen set, on to infinity" (
Movement-Image17). 10 Alternatively, the time-image organizes what Deleuze calls
"deframings." These express an absolute movement wherein

the closed system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is
no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible.... [There] are always
simultaneously the two aspects of out-of-field: the actualisable relation with other sets, and
the virtual relation with the whole. But in the one case the second relation -- the most
mysterious -- is reached indirectly, on to infinity, through the intermediary and extension of
the first, in the succession of images; in the other case it is reached more directly, in the image
itself, and by limitation and neutralisation of the first. (17-18) 11

In this respect, a pure semiotic in Deleuze's sense will require two books and two
philosophical frames of reference. While Peirce's pragmatism proves adequate to defining the
signs of the cinematic movement-image, as we shall see in the next chapter and throughout
part.2, the time-image requires a critique where Bergson is reread through Nietzsche.

While framing is inherently a force of limitation, the shot in its essence gives movement.
Cutting determines the shot as a set of a particular kind, an interval of movement. But
movement must still be considered from its dual perspectives, spatial and temporal, relative
and absolute: "the translation of the parts of a set which spreads out in space, the change of a
whole which is transformed in duration" ( Movement-Image20).

Because of its special relation to duration as a mobile section, Deleuze defines the shot as a
particular kind of unity or ensemble that includes a multiplicity of passive or active elements.
This is another way of explaining the logic of differentiation wherein the whole continuously
divides into bodies or objects that are simultaneously reunited in duration. There are two
curious consequences to this perspective. First, for Deleuze, the shot is an act that resembles
consciousness, or rather is that act consciousness performs in intuiting duration. Perception
delimits objects in space as so many immobile sections; consciousness reunites them in time
as a continuously unfolding duration. Second, movement has the curious property of being at
once multiple and unitary. It divides into qualitatively differ-

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ent movements, which change in nature each time they are divided, while being resubsumed
into a continuous duration.

As a mobile section of duration, this unity varies constantly according to the multiplicity it
contains. What are the basic variables of this multiplicity within the unity of the shot as
mobile section or temporal perspective? First, camera movement can define variations in
scale, angle, and point of view. Alternatively, continuity cutting constructs unity across shots,
wherein each shot then becomes part of a sequential multiplicity. There is also the use of deep
space wherein independent events are staged on multiple planes of depth: "The unity of the
shot is produced here by the direct liaison between elements caught in the multiplicity of
superimposed planes which can no longer be separated: the relationship between near and
distant parts produces the unity" ( Movement-Image26, 42). Finally, there is the sequence shot
with shallow space. Here, unity refers back to the perfect flatness of the image unrolling
across the correlative multiplicity of successive reframings.

The relation between unity and multiplicity can be made less abstract through an example: the
opening sequence of Touch of Evil ( 1958). The unfolding of this shot yields several
qualitatively different kinds of movement. Yet they are all contained in the unique duration of
the screen time, marked on one end by the opening fade-in and on the other by the cut on the
bomb blast.

How many varieties of movement are there? First, the shot divides and subdivides duration
according to objects in the set -- for example, the bomb, the car, the two couples, the myriad
small actions -- established through a variety of scales: close-up, long shot, extreme long shot,
three-quarter shot, and finally the lovers' kiss in medium shot. Thus the long take establishes
as many frames as one wishes. Second, there is the division of duration into distinct
subdurations, defined here by parallel actions: the placing of the bomb, the movements of the
car carrying Linneker and Zita, Mike and Susan Vargas going for a soda, the movements of
the camera. The relative rates of car, couple, and camera thus establish different rhythms
internal to the sequence. Finally, considered in itself as a given interval of screen time, the
shot reunites objects and sets into a single identical duration, the three minutes and twenty
seconds of the shot defined spatially by four hundred feet of film.

This description of duration seems to be based on a spatial modeling. As an example of the

cinematic movement-image, or what Deleuze will later call the action-image, this is indeed
the case. However, the problem of movement can also be considered from the point of view
of consciousness in time or duration. On the one hand there is a single duration established

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at the level of the shot. It is a long take, perhaps a sequence shot. In this the shot models an
act of consciousness as an agencement machinique or perhaps a "spiritual automaton." 12 On
the other, there is a single duration established by consciousness itself: the act of reading the
film. For Deleuze, however, just as there is a continuous and indiscernible conversion wherein
parts divide into objects in space while being reunited into a whole in time, even while each
part has its own duration in relation to that of the whole, there is no distinction between the
agencement machinique of the shot and the act of consciousness that intuits the philosophical
sense of the shot. This is in no way an identity theory of spectatorship, nor will Deleuze
accept any philosophical dualism. Rather, difference and identity are held, indeed exchanged
continuously, in movement or duration. Therefore, there is a last act that reunites these
qualitatively different movements as a duration immanent to the Whole, that is, in relation to
thought. "The shot," Deleuze writes, "that is to say consciousness, traces a movement which
means that the things between which it arises are continuously reuniting into a whole, and the
whole is continuously dividing between things (the Dividual)" ( Movement-Image20).

Clearly, Deleuze's description of the basic articulations of the cinematic movement-image is

based on their logical identity with Bergson's three levels of movement. Framing relates to the
formation of artificially closed sets. The shot is equivalent to movement established between
the parts of a set, for example, through the linking of shots in sequences or the variation of
parts in mobile framings. There remains, however, the expression of duration or of the whole
that changes, which, in Deleuze's philosophy of film, defines the problem of montage.
Deleuze's definition of montage is broad, as befits an expression of the whole. More than style
of cutting, montage expresses a logic of composition -- a concept or a regulating Idea in the
philosophical sense -- that informs the system of the film both globally and in each of its
parts. Montage indicates a particular organizing principle or agencement of images in the
form of Ideas. As in Eisenstein's idea of organic composition, montage is the expression of
the whole in the parts as it unfolds across the three levels of movement: frame, shot, and
montage. There is thus montage within the frame, across the shot, and in the linking of shots
as the expression of unity in multiplicity throughout the system of the film. Finally, and most
importantly, montage expresses change, therefore giving the form of time whether indirect or
direct. "What amounts to montage, in itself or in something else," writes Deleuze "is the
indirect image of time, of duration. Not a homogeneous time or a spatialised duration like that
which Bergson attacks, but an effective duration and time which flow from the articu-

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lation of the movement-images.... Montage is composition, the assemblage [ agencement ] of

movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time" ( Movement-image29-30).

This is a third sense in which the image is a fundamentally deterritorializing figure for
Deleuze. If the whole were to be given in its totality there would be no change. And since, for
Bergson, time is fundamentally change, there would be no time. Yet everywhere the universe
presents an image of change as evolution, an open-ended process of self-differentiation. Thus
Deleuze, following Bergson, redefines the whole as that which prevents any set -- no matter
how small or large, intensive or extensive -- from being truly closed. This is why time is
anterior to space and why absolute movement gives the form of change as prior to any
expression of spatial form. Understanding duration means conceiving the temporalization of
space as change, rather than the spatialization of time as "movement."

Understanding what Idea is presented by montage means defining what unity informs all of
the parts as a measure of the openness of the whole, or in what way the whole is considered to
be open as the measure of time. Through its organization of images, montage gives the signs
of time. Logically, there are many different ways in which time can be defined as a function
of movement. For example, Deleuze details four different Ideas of montage, or four different
ways of organizing the whole in movement-images in the history of cinema: the organic
montage of American cinema, the dia-lectical montage of Soviet cinema, the quantitative or
extensive montage of French Impressionist cinema, and the intensive montage of German
Expressionist cinema. 13

While there are four montage Ideas, each is a variation on the two fundamental "chronosigns"
of the cinematic movement-image. One presents time as a whole, the arrow of time extending
from an infinitely receding past into an ever-expanding future. The other gives time as a
number or unit of measure, a calculus of time measured as intervals that may be fractioned in
any way one wishes. The latter presents the variability of the present, the former, "the
immensity of past and future." "Time as interval is the accelerated variable present," writes
Deleuze, "and time as whole is the spiral open at both ends, the immensity of past and future.
Infinitely dilated, the present would become the whole itself: infinitely contracted, the whole
would happen in the interval" ( Movement-Image32).

The two chronosigns are related. They meet dialectically at their two extremes because both
present time as units of number -- spatial segments that can be added, divided, multiplied, or
recombined in any way and on any scale. In the same way that Sergei Eisenstein uses the
proportions of the golden section in organic montage to assure the commen-

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surabilty of the whole unfolding in each part of the film, the four Ideas of montage each
present an agencement of compositional space in relation to movement. With respect to the
immensity of the past and future, the whole of time is given in advance as a teleological
unfolding in space. Variability of the present means that time can be divided into sectionings
of space as fine or broad as you wish. The former represents a Western theological rendering
of time, the latter a Newtonian modernist conception.

The shot always expresses the two sides of the movement-image: on one hand, framing
establishes a perspective on objects whose relative positions vary; on the other, montage
expresses a change in the state of the whole. The strategies of montage thus define the various
ways change can be expressed as movement. In other words, montage gives particular images
of time by defining in what ways the whole can be conceived as open. But no matter how this
image of change varies at whatever scale, it can only present an indirect image of time for two
reasons. First, montage in or across movement-images is a logic of juxtaposition, connection,
and linkage. Here time unfolds within movement like the cascading sections of a Jacob's
ladder. The whole is given as addition (n + 1...), and time is reduced to a succession of
presents. No matter where you establish an interval in the movement-image it can only be
calculated as a rational number -- in Eisenstein's example, the organic mean (n = 0.618) --
wherein the beginning of each segment unfolds logically and predictably from the end of the
one that precedes it. 14 Second, this means that the image of the whole, no matter how
infinitely large or infinitesimally small, can always be given. The four Ideas of montage each
present different versions for formulating the whole as changing, both in itself and as it
appears in any part of the movementimage. Each presents different versions of the openness
of the whole. But in every case, the measure of time in relation to the open or the whole is
calculable in advance.

Thus the cinematic movement-image presents its indirect images of time through the forms or
ideas of montage. Each derives from the movement-image the characteristic of openness and
change. But the quality of absolute movement, no matter how varied, always accords with a
number of movement wherein the whole is given in advance. For Deleuze, then, there are two
different forms of montage, one for the movement-image and one for the time-image. While
each produces its own variety of "chronosigns," their relations of time -- how movement
relates to the open -- are quite different.

Just as framing and deframing define two potentialities of the moving image -- one veering
toward an indirect, spatial rendering of time, the other toward a direct image -- the qualities of
unity and multiplicity encompass two kinds of montage articulations. The unity of the shot is
always caught

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between two demands. One is a kind of continuity defined by spatial extensiveness. This
embraces perfectly well the forms of "discontinuity" editing innovated by Eisenstein and
others, and which Eisenstein himself defined as an organicism or organic form. Here unity is
defined by extension and expansion through rational intervals. Spatial continuity in this sense
is always limited to relative movement. It can neither contain nor define the absolute
movement that presents change in the whole. This is what Deleuze calls "normal movement,"
either the regulation of movement in relation to a center around which it turns, or the
perception of movement in relation to a central point of observation. In either case, defining
movement as number, or as quantitative segmentations of space, assures that in the quality of
openness or becoming the whole is given in advance. However, even in the cinematic
movement-image there will always be breaks or ruptures in space, irrational intervals that
open a direct image of time, that demonstrate the whole is not there, even if continuity is
reestablished afterwards. This is what Deleuze calls "aberrant movement" or "false
continuities." Thus the bipolar quality of movement equally assures that the

whole intervenes elsewhere and in another order, as that which prevents sets from closing in
on themselves or on each other -- that which testifies to an opening which is irreducible to
continuities as well as to their ruptures. It appears in the dimension of a duration which
changes and never ceases to change. It appears in false continuities (faux raccords ] as an
essential pole of the cinema...False continuity is neither a connection of continuity, nor a
rupture or a discontinuity in the connection. False continuity is in its own right a dimension of
the Open, which escapes sets and their parts. It realises the other power of the out-of-field....
Far from breaking up the whole, false continuities are the act of the whole, the hallmark that
they impress on sets and their parts, just as true continuities represent the opposite tendency:
that of the parts and the sets to rejoin a whole which escapes them. [ Movement-Image27-28)

Movement always implies the quality of time as change. Even the cinematic movement-image
presents an image of time, if only an indirect one. Thus the unity of the shot can never be
defined by closure or limitation in space. At best the shot can only be provisionally closed
through the limitations of framing, relative movement, and spatial extension through rational
intervals. In the montage forms of the time-image, deframings and irrational intervals thus
present something more fundamental: absolute movement as change in duration or the whole.

This vacillation is the essence of movement, or of the movement-image,

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which constantly turns spatial perspectives into temporal perspectives like the twisting of a
Mbius strip. For Deleuze, the cinema takes us into the heart of things, in their movement or
as defined by their movements: "By producing in this way a mobile section of movements, the
shot is not content to express the duration of a whole which changes, but constantly puts
bodies, parts, aspects, dimensions, distances and the respective positions of the bodies which
make up a set in the image into variation. The one comes about through the other. It is
because pure movement varies the elements of the set by dividing them up into fractions with
different denominators -- because it decomposes and recomposes the set -- that it also relates
to a fundamentally open whole, whose essence is constantly to 'become' or to change, to
endure; and vice versa" ( Movement-Image23).

Each of the forms of montage discussed by Deleuze presents a different expression of a whole
that changes. Montage expresses the form of change, giving us an image of time whether
indirect or direct. How is it, though, that the movement-image can produce signs, or that the
cinematic movement-image can derive its signs from movement? What semiotic mechanisms
account for the appearance of signs in and as movement?
In Deleuze's reading of Peirce, semiotics conceives signs not as fundamentally linguistic
entities, but on the basis of images and their combinations. Understanding what this means for
Deleuze requires a return to the precise and original sense he gives to the idea of the image in
relation to movement and matter as read through Bergson. Semiotics begins on a specific
plane of immanence where the Image is a fundamental appearing in a process of continual
change. However, since semiotic inquiry is a human enterprise, a deduction of the
fundamental types of images must begin with the "perception of matter" rather than matter
itself; that is, with the appearance of a center of indetermination with respect to the acentered
variation of the plane of immanence.

Until now, I have only examined how images are constructed through the logic of
differentiation, that is, through the relation of wholes and sets in variations of frame, shot, and
montage. The remainder of Deleuze's theory of signs concerns the logic of specification: how
various types of signs can be deduced from intervals of movement that vary with respect to a
center of indetermination. This deduction follows what Peirce called the three fundamental
categories of consciousness, or firstness, secondness, and thirdness. 15

According to Peirce, firstness is a conception of being or of existing independently of any

other thing (quality), secondness is the concept of being relative to some other thing
(relation), and thirdness is the concept of me-

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diation wherein the first and the second are brought into relation with one another (synthesis
or mediation.).

Firstness is both quality and possibility. Peirce refers to firstness as "feeling," something akin
to "raw feels" in Richard Rorty's sense of the term. 16 A feeling may be immediately
conscious, but it cannot be consciousness because it is an immediate, pure perception.
Because it is instantaneous, it is only possible rather than actual. Consciousness requires time
to experience effect, action, or relation, as well as to interpret. But feeling is simple quality.
As such it is pure possibility (of actions, relations, or interpretations to come) rather than
consciousness. Firstness is the mode of being-in-itself. As a quality of the image, it refers to
the experience of "red" rather than taking color as the effect of something else (secondness: I
find I am bleeding from a paper cut) or as a conventional symbol (thirdness: red as the color
of violence, patriotism, or danger).

Secondness is the category of existence, fact, or singularity. A quality without secondness is

indeterminate. Thus secondness always includes firstness as that which has been determined
or brought into existence as a thing. Following Duns Scotus, Peirce also claims secondness as
the category of "haecceity," or the here and now. Secondness is consciousness of effort and
resistance, action and reaction, of things that exist in immediately affecting our senses as well
as themselves producing physical effects.

Thirdness is the category of thought as relation with respect to a future action. While thirdness
defines, it neither represents nor indicates. Rather, thirdness is the category of mediation par
excellence. Thirdness refers to itself by comparing one thing to another, establishing in that
comparison a synthetic "law" in the sense of a predicative concept.
Thirdness also demonstrates that the ordering of the three categories is cardinal as well as
ordinal: firstness is included in secondness, both are included in thirdness. For Peirce there are
three modes of the image (firstness, secondness, and thirdness) and three aspects of the sign
(representamen, object, and interpretant), which in turn produce nine sign elements and ten
corresponding types of signs. 17 Although it is rarely noted, Peirce's categories also suggest
the embedding of three forms of temporality: firstness exists as pure immediacy, secondness
as a present that endures, and thirdness as the prediction or predication of future actions. For
Peirce, like Bergson, consciousness as image or in relation to the image is neither intemporal
nor can it exist as in a single, homogeneous time.

The problem from the point of view of Deleuze's Bergsonism, however, is that Peirce presents
the three categories axiomatically, rather than deducing the three types of image from the
enonable or the movement-image as a primary signaletic material. I discussed in the previous
chapter how

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the movement-image divides into three special images when related to a center of
indetermination: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image. The
perception-image, however, poses a special problem for Deleuze's reading of Peirce. Bergson
asserts that there is no substantive difference between perception and matter considered as
movements. This is the distinction between perception and the perception of matter which is,
in fact, the origin of the bipolar quality of movement as either absolute or relative. On the
plane of immanence, perception and image are identical insofar as every image reacts on all
others on all their sides and in all of their parts.

The perception of matter is something else. Here the image relates to an interval of movement
as to a center of indetermination. Within one image an interval is opened as a movement
received on one side and as a movement executed on the other. This is no longer the simple
expression of movement, which would be a perception identical to change or duration, but an
act of discernment that produces the "special image" of a sensorimotor situation. In this case,
images appear as intervals of movement that vary only in relation to this one image. This is no
longer pure perception, but rather a perception-image. What it expresses is no longer simply
movement, but the relation between absolute movement and the interval as movement in
relation to a center of indetermination. Therefore, Deleuze writes, "If the movement-image is
already perception, the perception-image will be perception of perception, and perception will
have two poles, depending on whether it is identified with movement or with its interval
(variation of all the images in their relations with each another, or variation of all the images
in relation to one of them)" ( Time-Image31).

Deriving the perception-image in this way has several consequences. Because of the
fundamental openness of the whole, this perception is always constituted as an interval
opened on one side as movement received and closed on the other as a movement executed. I
have already noted how the image is produced as a deterritorializing figure owing to its
bipolar quality. Perception cannot constitute a "first" image without being extended
necessarily into the other types of image. "The perception-image," says Deleuze, "will
therefore be like a degree zero in the deduction which is carried out as a function of the
movement-image: there will be a 'zeroness' before Peirce's firstness" ( Time-Image31-32).
Similarly, the other types of cinematic movement-images are defined as sensorimotor wholes
where perception extends spatially in the following way: What begins as perception may be
executed as an action (secondness); what cannot be converted into action occupies the interval
as affection (firstness); what reconstitutes the whole of movement with respect to all aspects
of the interval is relation (thirdness). According to Deleuze, then, there will finally be four
fundamental types

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of perceptible, visible images corresponding roughly to Peirce's categories: from the

perception-image there derives the affection-image as quality or firstness, the action-image as
secondness, and the relation-image as thirdness. While thirdness constitutes a limit for the
movement-image, as we shall see below, it does not do so for the time-image. 18

Unlike Peirce, Deleuze believes that a taxonomy of images and signs is potentially limitless.
And even though Deleuze borrows terminology directly from Peirce, he provides original and
sometimes perplexing definitions of those terms. I leave to others a complete accounting and
critique of Deleuze's taxonomy of cinematic signs. Understanding the originality and interest
of Deleuze's film semiotic requires only that his logic of deduction, which is as rigorous and
precise as his individual definitions are wild, be understood.

What Deleuze calls an image or a sign can vary to a dizzying degree, and Deleuze's definition
of the sign clearly differs from Peirce's in many respects. This has less to do with the relative
precision of Deleuze's definitions than with a centuries-long Western preference for
understanding images and signs as static bodies and immobile categories. Semiosis is
fundamentally mobile in several senses, including the sign's relation to the movements of
thought. Following Peirce, Deleuze defines the sign as "an image which stands for another
image (its object), through the relation of a third image which constitutes' its interpretant,' this
in turn being a sign, and so on to infinity" ( Time-Image30). The function of the sign in
relation to the image is cognitive and additive, but not in the sense that the sign makes its
object known. Rather, the sign presupposes knowledge of the object in another sign,
continually elaborating and adding new elements of knowledge to it as a function of the
interpretant. Semiosis is expansive rather than reductionist.

For Deleuze, then, both images and signs are best conceived as mobile sets or ensembles. The
range or extensiveness of a set can vary widely. A group of shots or framings can constitute a
set no less than a single frame or shot. Sometimes Deleuze even takes an entire film as
expressing a type of sign, as when he characterizes Joris Ivens's Rain [ 1929] as a "qualisign."
When Deleuze begins distinguishing between types of images and their corresponding signs,
what is at stake is less immobile forms than the particular logic of movement or movements
that specify different kinds of sets. Therefore, a sign is only a type of image, and the potential
complexity of any given cinematic movement-image is astounding. The set defining this
image may combine the levels of frame, shot, or montage.

The image is also a deterritorializing figure owing to the tension between relative and
absolute movement, which prevents any set from being

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closed. The quality of framing may be defined at any time by as many as five variables, while
each image may be articulated in relation to firstness, secondness, and thirdness. These
definitions are fundamentally mobile, following out the general logic of differentiation
(division of the whole into objects; reintegration of objects into a continuous duration) and
specification Imovement organized as intervals or sets varying in relation to a center of
indetermination).

With this in mind, the basic categories of images can be recomprised. First of all there are
movement-images in the sense of universal variation or a mobile section of a whole that
changes. When these movement-images are related to a center of indetermination they divide,
according to the kind of determination, into perception-images, affection-images, action-
images, and relation-images. The plane of movement-images provides a genuine temporal
perspective, a sense of duration as a universal becoming. Thus Deleuze argues that "the centre
of indetermination, which can avail itself of a special situation on the plane of movement-
images, can itself have a special relationship with the whole, duration or time" ( Movement-
Image 69). This is the justification for asserting that there can be direct images of time that
would be entirely different from cinematic movement-images. However, the logic of
specification, which requires a priori the formation of an interval of movement as a spatial set,
more clearly articulates indirect images of time. Specification, then, is largely a logic of
montage in its enlarged sense: either a comparison of movement-images, the combination of
the three varieties, or the multiple articulations of frame, shot, and montage.

Deleuze's definition of signs, which is more Bergsonian than Peircean, follows a similar logic.
A sign, Deleuze argues, "is a particular image that refers to a type of image, whether from the
point of view of its bipolar composition, or from the point of view of its genesis" ( Time-
Image32). Because each sign type is an extension of the perception-image, within the
fundamental categories there will always be individual signs that correspond to absolute
movement on one hand and relative movement on the other. Each category of image also
presupposes a "genetic" sign indicating a trajectory or point of passage through which each
image derives from the other as either perception, affection, action, or relation. Therefore, a
limited taxonomy of the signs of the cinematic movement-image produces, for each category
of images, at least two signs of composition and one sign of genesis.

Deleuze's discussion of the perception-image (the zeroness or ground on which all the others
are based) exemplifies this particular logic of deduction. According to Deleuze, the genetic
sign of the perception-image is the engramme (sometimes "gramme" or "photogramme").
This sign originates in

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what Bergson calls the perception of matter: the construction of an interval between two
movements opens an empty place that anticipates the subject insofar as it appropriates a
perception to itself.

The engramme is exemplified by Dziga Vertov's discussions of the kinoeye as an objective

perception that "'couples together any point whatsoever of the universe in any temporal order
whatsoever'"( Movement-Image 80). 19 In Deleuze's reading, Vertov's theory of montage
intervals constructs cinematic movement-images on the system of universal variation. The
condition of possibility of the kino-eye is a beyond of human perception that, because of the
grounding of the eye in the body, always presents the interval as a privileged image in respect
to which all other images vary. Here the engramme appears as montage, a machine
construction of images, which is objective in Bergson s sense of the term:
from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the
point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the pure vision of a non-human eye, of
an eye which would be in things.... What montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry
perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space
itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions
and reactions extend. This is the definition of objectivity, "to see without boundaries or
distances."... The materialist Vertov realises the materialist programme of the first chapter of
Matter and Memory through the cinema, the in-itself of the image.... [The kino-eye] is the eye
of matter, the eye in matter, not subject to time, which has "conquered" time, which reaches
the "negative of time," and which knows no other whole than the material universe and its
extension.... (81)

As the genetic element of perception, the engramme is a primary sign or basic articulation of
cinematographic enunciation. As such, it forges a special relation between relative and
absolute movement from this "objective" point of view. In the human perception of matter,
the interval is a delay between an action and a reaction that measures the unforeseeability of
the reaction. In the Vertovian theory of montage, however, the interval no longer simply
marks the distance between two consecutive images. Rather, on the one hand it correlates two
or more images whose distances are incommensurable from the standpoint of human
perception; on the other, it figures variation as the power of the whole, matter reacting on all
its facets and in all of its parts, regardless of distance. Both a framing and an open whole
incommensurate with the human eye, the engramme offers "the genetic element of all possible
perception, that is, the point which changes,

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and which makes perception change, the differential of perception itself" ( Movement-
Image83).

Deleuze understands the engramme as a "gaseous" state of perception. Here the universal
variation of matter acts and reacts with a kind of Brownian motion. Alternatively, the two
signs of composition for the perception-image, the dicisign and the reume, function as a
"solid" and a "liquid" state of perception.

The dicisign is the more complex sign of the two. Peirce identified the didicisign with the
example of propositions in general. Deleuze, however, sees a special case in the cinematic
movement-image: "The dicisign refers to a perception of perception, and usually appears in
cinema when the camera 'sees' a character who is seeing; it implies a firm frame, and so
constitutes a kind of solid state of perception" ( Time-Image32). Rather than a proposition per
se, for Deleuze the dicisign presents a "free indirect proposition," on the model of Pasolini's
important discussions of the free indirect subjective in cinema.

While the goal of the engramme is to construct an objective, machinic perception, Deleuze
wonders if an objective perception is really possible in narrative cinema. He finds that
narrative cinema constanxtly passes from subjective to objective and back again according to
what Jean Mitry called a "generalised semi-subjective image." 20 Deleuze turns to Bakhtin for
a more precise formulation of this idea. Bakhtin identified free indirect discourse as a special
case of literary enunciation. Free indirect discourse is syncretic. It appears at first glance as an
indirect, though objective, narration marked by the author's time and person. However, the
utterance is also permeated with subjective features, syntactic and semantic markers that can
only be associated with the represented character. 21 This is not a simple combination of two
self-identical subjects of enunciation, one objective and the other subjective. Instead, the
suppleness of the free indirect style indicates a process of splitting or "differentiation of two
correlative subjects in a system which is itself heterogeneous" ( Movement-Image73). Deleuze
sees the composition of a free indirect style as a fundamental cinematic and philosophical act.
Here the free indirect style represents nothing less than the operation of the Cogito as Bergson
defines it in Mind-Energy: the division or differentiation of the subject in thought and art.
Deleuze writes:

[A]n empirical subject cannot be born into the world without simultaneously being reflected
in a transcendental subject which thinks it and in which it thinks itself. And the Cogito of art:
there is no subject which acts without another which watches it act, and which grasps it as
acted, itself assuming the freedom of which it deprives the former.

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"Thus two different egos [ moi ], one of which, conscious of its freedom, sets itself up as
independent spectator of a scene which the other would play in a mechanical fashion. But this
dividing-in-two never goes to the limit. It is rather an oscillation of the person between two
points of view on himself, a hither-and-thither of the spirit...." (73-4) 22

Free indirect discourse is not simply a property of cinematic movementimages. If this were
the case, the dicisign would not describe a special compositional sign or utterance. One can
obviously define objective and subjective images in the cinema. For Deleuze, however,
Pasolini's "cinema of poetry" presents a style of composition where the camera enacts this
Cogito as a form of cinematic self-consciousness. Thus a character is presented whose
subjectivity strongly colors the mise-en-scne through spatial motivation, optical point of
view, or other spatial markers. But this character is simultaneously framed by the camera,
which strongly marks its enunciative presence in the scene. The free indirect style composes a
kind of double framing:

the camera does not simply give us the vision of the character and of his world; it imposes
another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected. This subdivision is what
Pasolini calls a "free indirect subjective"...: it is a case of going beyond the subjective and the
objective towards a pure Form which sets itself up as an autonomous vision of the content.
We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images; we are caught in a correlation
between a perception-image and a cameraconsciousness which transforms it.... In short, the
perception-image finds its status, as free indirect subjective, from the moment that it reflects
its content in a camera-consciousness which has become autonomous ("cinema of poetry"). (
Movement-Image74)

For Deleuze the dicisign is equivalent to a free indirect proposition. It composes a

"perception" in the frame of another perception that is solid, geometric, and physical.
Alternatively, the reume is a perception that traverses or overflows the frame. Deleuze refers
to it as a "liquid" or flowing perception. Each of the three signs of the perception-image --
engramme, dicisign, and reume -- refer to a particular way of articulating the relation between
subjective and objective perceptions. The engramme tends toward objectivity in Bergson's
sense of the term. Cinematic movement-images are constructed on the basis of that set of
movements where perception originates in the identification of matter with Image. Both the
dicisign and the reume presuppose the copresence of the two poles: objective and subjective,
absolute and relative movement. However, the dicisign is composed from

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a desire to contain and transcend the movement between the two poles in an aesthetic self-
consciousness. As innovated in the French Impressionist and German Expressionist cinema,
the reume reflects a nonthetic or nave consciousness, a belief that the rhythms defined by
camera movement and editing could produce a subjective perception identical with nature. As
a figure of the cinematic movement-image, the reume was constructed in the belief that the
more the "centre is itself put into movement, the more it will tend towards an acentred system
where the images vary in relation to one another and tend to become like the reciprocal
actions and vibrations of a pure matter. What can be more subjective than a delirium, a dream,
a hallucination? But what can be closer to a materiality made up of luminous wave and
molecular interaction?" ( Movement-Image76-77).

Rather than reflecting the perception image in a formal self-consciousness, the reume is
constructed out of the mobility of framing itself: the molar congealing of perception as
geometric space becomes molecular and diffuse, undermining the solidity of the frame. The
desire here, according to Deleuze, is to construct a flowing perception equivalent to the flow
of matter. The French Impressionists pushed this tension between absolute and relative
movement to extremes. But to the extent that the engramme, dicisign, and reume were defined
by the distinction between absolute and relative movement, no matter how far they pushed,
the limits of the cinematic movement-image they could not provide the basis for constructing
a direct image of time.

Whereas the perception-image and its signs provide the perceptible ground for cinematic
movement-images, the affection-image and its signs express relations between movement and
affect comparable to Peirce's category of firstness. Remember that for Peirce, firstness is the
category of possibility, of a power or quality expressed as sensation or feeling. The genesis of
affection-images is found in what Deleuze terms the qualisign or potisign. The qualisign is
affect expressed in "any-space-whatever," that is, as a space that does not yet appear as a real
setting or is abstracted from the spatial and temporal determinations of a real setting. Deleuze
defines only one sign of composition, the icon. Nevertheless, the icon expresses in itself the
bipolar quality of movement, either quality or power as affect expressed in the image without
being actualized there.

To understand how something can be expressed without being actualized, Deleuze compares
the category of secondness to that of firstness. Secondness expresses relation in the form of
duality: comparison, contrast, or opposition; action and reaction; excitation and response;
effort and resistance; and so on. Moreover, secondness always refers to entities that are actual,
that have come into existence or have been individuated. Through

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secondness, power-qualities become forces acting in particular states of things ("real settings"
as determined spatial and temporal coordinates and actual geographic or historical milieux)
and through particular agents or protagonists, whether individual or collective. This is the
realm of the action-image, which always presupposes the affection-image as its emotional
content. 23
Therefore, powers-qualities can be signified in one of two ways: either through secondness as
actualized in a state of things, or for themselves directly in the image. If expressed in relation
to secondness, Deleuze calls them "real connections"; if expressed as firstness, he calls them
"virtual conjunctions" ( Movement-Image102-3). In the former the affect is excess. What
cannot be fully expressed by an action or conflict is experienced as a visceral response,
according to the dynamics of action and reaction in the sensorimotor whole. In the latter the
affect is abject in the sense of an objectless emotion or feeling. In both cases affect produces a
movement whose trajectory cannot be precisely plotted.

The genesis of the affection-image as qualisign (quality) or potisign (potentiality or

possibility) is located in the construction of any-space-whatevers (espaces quelconques). An
any-space-whatever is a space that is not yet situational. Sometimes it is an emptied space,
sometimes a space whose parts are not yet linked in a given trajectory of movement. Any-
space-whatevers are figures of indetermination, but this does not render them abstract
universals. Indeed, we shall see that the time-image has its own special relations with these
"disconnected spaces," independent of the affection-image. 24

With respect to the movement-image, however, any-space-whatevers are less disconnected

than they are indefinite. The idea of any-space-whatevers expresses the quality of
deterritorialization and indeterminacy specific to the affection-image. The engramme
presupposes a system of montage where a multiplicity of fragmentary spaces appears to be
mutually connected and interdependent regardless of distance. As qualisign, an any-space-
whatever is a spatial fragment or fragments whose identity and meaning remain part of an
indeterminate multiplicity that nonetheless expresses a quality or power. This indetermination
is defined by two criteria. When the spatial and temporal coordinates of the image are
indeterminate, no angle or movement defines the image as a necessary part of a given action
or setting. The "metric" relations of the image are also indefinite, meaning the absence of
compositional cues of scale, volume, or depth that would specify the image as having a
particular identity or as belonging to an actually existing milieu. In short, the space of the
qualisign or the potisign is virtual. "It is a perfectly singular space," writes Deleuze, "which
has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection
of its own

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parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual
conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the
heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities
which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determination" ( Movement-
Image109).

Deleuze borrows his example of the qualisign and potisign from Bla Balzs's discussion of
two films by Joris Ivens, Rain ( 1929) and The Bridge ( 1928). Balzs's analysis is worth
quoting at length:

The rain we see in the Ivens film is not one particular rain which fell somewhere, some time.
These visual impressions are not bound into unity by any conception of time and space. With
subtle sensitivity he has captured, not what rain really is, but what it looks like when a soft
spring rain drips off leaves, the surface of a pond gets goose-flesh from the rain, a solitary
raindrop hesitatingly gropes its way down a windowpane, or the wet pavement reflects the life
of a city. We get a hundred visual impressions, but never the things themselves; nor do these
interest us in such films. All we want to see are the individual, intimate, surprising optical
effects. Not the things but these their pictures constitute our experience and we do not think of
any objects outside the impression. There are in fact no concrete objects behind such pictures,
which are images, not reproductions.

Even when Ivens shows a bridge and tells us that it is the great railway bridge at Rotterdam,
the huge iron structure dissolves into an immaterial picture of a hundred angles. The mere fact
that one can see this one Rotterdam bridge on such a multitude of pictures almost robs it of its
reality. It seems not a utilitarian bit of engineering but a series of strange optical effects,
visual variations on a theme, and one can scarcely believe that a goods train could possibly
pass over it. Every setup has a different physiognomy, a different character, but none of them
have anything whatever to do with either the purpose of the bridge or its architectural
qualities. 25

These multiplicities of fragmentary or partial views mean that the different images "can be
fitted together in an infinite number of ways and, because they are not oriented in relation to
each other, constitute the set of singularities which are combined in the any-space-whatever" (
Movement-Image III). This multiplicity must be indefinite. Otherwise, the affect would be lost
by attributing a specific aim or narrative trajectory to the images: this is the rainstorm that
flooded Amsterdam in 1929; two thousand freight cars pass over the Rotterdam bridge each
year. Neither a definite place, historical origin, nor narrative exposition, all of which would
render the

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images as a determined and homogeneous multiplicity, limit the connotative richness of these
films. The images are singular, but in a special way that exemplifies Balzs's sense of
experience. Peirce located firstness in the value of magenta, the smell of a rose, and the
locomotive whistle, meaning not the memory of an actual impression or the present
consciousness of those sensations, but their quality in and for themselves before being raised
to the level of secondness in the form of a definite connotation for magenta, a memory
associated with the smell of the rose, an attempt to locate spatially the origin of the whistle.
The peculiarly abstract quality of any-space-whatevers returns us not to objects or things
themselves, but to specific visual impressions. Rain is a qualisign whose affects are wetness,
rippling, reflection, a hundred associations without specific reference to the concept of rain or
rain specific to a time and place. The Bridge is a potisign expressing metallic construction as
dynamism, pure power, the potential of rail transportation itself.

Balzs returned repeatedly to the idea of physiognomy as expressing the emotional or

affective power of cinematographic images. In both A Thousand Plateaus and The Movement-
Image, Deleuze presents a similar idea in the concept of "faciality" (visagit). 26 This the key
to understanding the icon as the sign of bipolar composition of affection-images. The icon is
affect expressed by a face or a "facial equivalent." It is closely linked to what Balzs called
physiognomic expression, and Deleuze, like Balzs, Epstein and others, closely associates
faciality with the use of close-ups. Within the cinematic movement-image, magnification is
one of the primary strategies of abstraction or deterritorialization used to produce any-space-
whatevers. What the icon presents is two modes for expressing or composing affects with
respect to any-space-whatevers.
The bipolar composition of affection-images produces as signs either icons of feature or icons
of outline. Each expresses a particular set of movements relative to the abstracting quality of
the close-up. Deleuze's discussion of faciality is very different from Balzs's physiognomy of
images in this respect. Neither Balzs nor Deleuze necessarily nor literally identifies their
respective concepts with the human face. For Balzs, for example, if cinematic landscapes
display a physiognomy, this is the result of a projection of the subjective into the objective, a
humanizing of nature through a specific set of artistic procedures. Unlike Balzs, however,
Deleuze takes the face as a model displaying two different but interrelated series of
sensorimotor movements. Bergson characterized the face as that facet of the body that has
sacrificed most of its motricity to serve as a support for the organs of reception. With respect
to the face, what the body loses in movements of extension in space, it gains in expressive
movements of a particular kind.

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The face can serve as a reflecting unity, responding to or expressing an emotional state.
However, the unity of these states can also be comprehended as a multiplicity, an intensive
series of micromovements building toward a threshold of expressiveness. The icon describes
the close-up or a set of close-ups according to these two basic compositional figures. As a
reflecting unity, the icon produces a "faceifying" outline where all the represented features are
grouped into a single image expressive of a quality. As intensive multiplicity, the icon carries
out a series of movements that tend toward a limit or cross a threshold. In this respect the icon
is expressive of a power that passes from one quality to another.

No doubt an actor can produce these affects in close-up. But Deleuze has a rather different
idea in mind, represented by Eisenstein's style of expressionism. The Odessa steps sequence
from Battleship Potemkin ( 1925) provides numerous examples of intensive series. Perhaps
the simplest example occurs in the transition from the greeting of the ship to the attack by the
Cossacks. The title "Suddenly" is the transition point between two qualitative series. On one
side, the revolutionary joy expressed by various classes of people; on the other, the tragic
result of reactionary oppression. The series of images that follows is much more complex.
Nevertheless, the Odessa steps sequence is marked throughout by nodal series of close-ups-
either of faces or fragments of bodies or objects -- marking the passage from one qualitative
state to the other: joy, panic, pleading for mercy, violent oppression, and finally, revolutionary
recompense as the Potemkin fires on the Odessa opera house. One might also trace here, as
Eisenstein himself does, the transition from quality to power: from the affects evoked
dramatically by faces to the forces evoked symbolically by the rising of the stone lions. 27 In
sum, the serial aspect, writes Deleuze, "is best embodied by several simultaneous or
successive faces, although a single face can suffice if it puts its different organs or features
into series. Here the intensive series discloses its function, which it to pass from one quality to
another, to emerge on to a new quality. To produce a new quality, to carry out a qualitative
leap, this is what Eisenstein claims for the close-up: from the priest-man of God to the priest-
exploiter of peasants; from the anger of the sailors to the revolutionary explosion; from the
stone to the scream, as in the three postures of the marble lions ('and the stones have roared')"
( Movement-Image89).

Neither the literal expressiveness of the human face nor the magnifying quality of the close-
up should be strictly identified with the affection-image or its signs. Rather, the icon identifies
the face with the close-up only on the basis of logically identical sets of movements. Though
the affection-image is certainly bound up with the face in close-up as expressive of affect, this
is not a necessary condition for the composition of icons. More important is

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the quality of abstraction or deterritorialization that permits the expression of these particular
movements: intensive series or reflecting unity.

If one could say there is a nucleus to the regime of cinematic movementimages, the center
around which all else turns, it would be the actionimage. Raised to the level of secondness,
any-space-whatevers become situational: space becomes mise-en-scne, a site with symbolic
import, the dramatic locus of action or conflict. Here the imprint serves as the genetic sign of
the action-image, as the internal link between a situation and an action. Deleuze argues that
within the forms of organization of the action-image, "[q]ualities and powers are no longer
displayed in any-space-whatevers...but are actualised directly in determinate, geographical,
historical and social space-times. Affects and impulses now only appear as embodied in
behaviour, in the form of emotions or passions which order and disorder it" ( Movement-
Image141). As sign, the imprint indicates the raising of qualities or powers to secondness
where movements, and the images and signs corresponding to them, are two in themselves.
Space is now determined or actualized in milieux or situations; affects are realized in
embodied modes of behavior.

Deleuze's account of the action-image corresponds closely to descriptions of the classical

Hollywood cinema familiar from the work of Andr Bazin, Nol Burch, Raymond Bellour,
Stephen Heath, David Bordwell, and others. Indeed, Deleuze credits the apparent
"universality" of the cinematic movement-image in this form to America's historical
dominance of international cinema markets. Here movement appears as an organized set of
actions segmented in space and time. The most typical example is what Bazin termed analytic
montage: actions motivate and completely fill space; spaces are linked in time through chains
of action and reaction as well as logical relations of cause and effect.

With respect to its signs of composition, the action-image also divides into large and small
forms. The large form includes the synsign and the binomial; the small form includes the
index as its sign of composition. The difference between the two forms is measured by how
situations are transformed in relation to actions.

Within the action-image, qualities and powers are determined as forces acting in a given
milieu or mise-en-scne. Action properly speaking is motivated by a protagonist, whose
actions and reactions are constituted as physical movements in a struggle with the milieu. The
milieu and its forces construct a situation that englobes the protagonist, defining the challenge
to which he or she must respond. And characters do respond, and in so doing transform the
milieu and their relationship to it, as well as their relationship to the other characters, thus
creating a new, modified, or restored

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situation. Secondness reigns at multiple levels of the set or ensemble. The milieu is
individuated as a determined space-time with a determining situation; the protagonist,
individual or collective, is individuated as actant, locus of the required action. Situation and
action emerge as two terms that are necessarily concomitant and antagonistic. The action in
itself is conflict-- with the milieu, with others, with itself. "Finally," argues Deleuze, "the new
situation which emerges from the action forms a couple with the initial situation. This is the
set [ensemble] of the action-image, or at least its first form. It constitutes the organic
representation, which seems to be endowed with breath or respiration. For it expands towards
the milieu and contracts from the action. More precisely, it expands or contracts on either
side, according to the states of the situation and the demands of the action" ( Movement-
Image142).

The large form of the action-image is therefore produced by the formula SAS': from situation
to a modified situation transformed by an action. These are not states that the action-image
links together. They are interrelated movements that Deleuze describes as two inverse spirals
organizing the spatial and temporal trajectories of the action-image. One spiral contracts,
focalizing the action as its relational center; the other dilates out from the action, opening onto
a new situation. These movements in fact produce two signs of composition. The synsign
refers to the organic quality of situations. It comprises a set "of qualities and powers as
actualised in a state of things, thus constituting a real milieu around a centre, a situation in
relation to a subject" ( Movement-Image218). The binomial is functional and relates primarily
to actions. As the name suggests, it refers to the conflict or duel that relates two antagonistic
forces, particularly when an agent acts in anticipation of, or as a function of, the presumed
movement of an antagonist.

The small form presents a variation on this formula as ASA'; its primary sign of composition
is the index. The index designates "the link of an action (or of an effect of an action) to a
situation which is not given, but merely inferred, or which remains equivocal and reversible" (
Movement-Image218). Whereas the large form unfolds completely through the regulated
progressions and retroactions, contractions and expansions linking situations and actions, the
small form advances elliptically. An action only partially discloses a situation, and, moving
from action to action, the situation only gradually, if ever, becomes clearly and fully
developed. Rather than a chain of actions linked by organic spirals, there is a chain of
situations strung together by ellipses. The partiality of what the action discloses derives either
from the withholding of information (indices of lack) or by rendering ambiguous the
connections between actions and situations (indices of equivocity). A number of films noirs
like The Big Sleep ( 1946) conform to

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this model, but Deleuze associates it especially with the episodic nature of comedy, especially
burlesque. In any case, here the actionimage "moves from an action, a mode of behavior, or a
'habitus,' to a partially disclosed situation. It is a reversed sensorymotor schema. A
representation like this is no longer global but local. It is no longer spiral but elliptical. It is no
longer structural but episodic [ vnementielle ]. It is no longer ethical, but comedic (we say
'comedic,' because this representation gives rise to comedy, although it is not necessarily
comic, and may be dramatic)" (160, 220).

If there is a psychology to the large form of the action-image, it is essentially behaviorist. As

such, the action-image presents the equilibrium profile of the regime of cinematic movement-
images according to two criteria. It is both a perfectly constituted organic representation and a
sensorimotor whole. The translation of movements as perception is entirely consumed by the
conversion of affection into action. Within the schema SAS', what Deleuze calls the great
organic representation, "the situation must permeate the character deeply and continuously,
and...the character who is thus permeated must burst into action, at discontinuous intervals....
Indeed, what must appear on the outside is what happens inside the character, at the
intersection of the situation which permeates and the action which is to detonate" ( Movement-
Image155, 158).

That there is a "small form" of the action-image by nature episodic with disconnected
situations and weak sensorimotor links -suggests that it is possible to go "beyond" the action-
image. This beyond can be thought of both as the necessary completion of the regime of
cinematic movementimages and as the displacement of that regime by the appearance of
something new: direct images of time.

Completing the regime of movement-images means following out the logic of Peirce's
categories toward a thirdness of the image, or what Deleuze calls "mental relations." The idea
of relation has a special sense in this respect. The action-image always "relates" in twos:
action and situation, conflict, opposition, duality. Deleuze argues, however, that this must not
be confused with logical relations as the expression of a law or meaning. Actions may have
significations, but this is not their end. Any potential meaning must be inferred in a third act,
which is interpretation. Actions may also imply laws as their condition of possibility, but they
must never be confused with the expression of those laws. For laws are abstract and general,
while actions are concrete and singular. One would never confuse a steering wheel or a car's
acceleration with the mathematical expression used to calculate the radius of the former or the
trajectory of the latter. Thirdness is an act that completes the movement of thought that begins
with the apprehension of a quality (firstness), comes into being with the im-

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plication of a connection or cause (secondness), and is finally completed in a hypothesis

(thirdness). The latter expresses the relation that binds the three terms together while
remaining external to them. Therefore, rather than actions, thirdness implies a mental act that
necessarily contains a symbolic element of law. Instead of perceptions, thirdness gives
interpretations. And instead of affections, thirdness promotes intellectual intuitions in the
form of logical conjunctions.

Following philosophical convention, Deleuze distinguishes between natural and abstract

relations. Natural relations imply the formation of a series of images as a chain of derivations.
The image unleashes a chain of associations, each of which motivates the one that follows
through some apparent element held in common. Small similarities yield a series of
differences. An abstract relation brings two images together according to a commonality that
is inferred rather than apparent. Homology rather than similarity is the case here. Where
natural relations form a series, abstract relations constitute a whole, ensemble, or set among
the three terms.

These distinctions are the basis for Deleuze's derivation of the signs of relation of the mental
image. The genetic sign of the mental image is the symbol; its signs of composition are the
mark and the demark."In accordance with the natural relation," writes Deleuze, "a term refers
back to other terms in a customary series such that each can be 'interpreted' by the others:
these are marks; but it is always possible for one of these terms to leap outside the web and
suddenly appear in conditions which take it out of its series, or set it in contradiction with it,
which we will refer to as the demark" ( Movement-Image203). The mark implies a series
motivated by habitual expectations, while the demark shocks or arouses suspicion. For
example, in Hitchcock's Notorious ( 1946) the suspicious bottle of wine appears not as a prop
motivated by the action, but as an element in a hermeneutic series. With respect to the
ordinary relations in which it is embedded -the series dinner-connoisseur-wine-cellar-the
bottle functions as a mark. But when the bottle evokes anxious surprise by one of the German
dinner guests, it becomes a demark. The bottle becomes strange, as it were, opening a new
chain requiring interpretation and inference: cellar-uraniumespionage-betrayal. With respect
to the hermeneutic acts they imply, the mark composes a set that tends to close around a
customary interpretation, while the demark prevents the set from closing by opening a new
series.

As Deleuze describes it, the mark clearly belongs in some sense to the action-image, if only
because it functions by transforming a series of actions into a series of questions or signs
requiring interpretation. Alternatively, Deleuze claims that demarks and symbols "constitute
the two great signs of the mental image. Demarks are clashes of natural relations (series), and

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symbols are nodes of abstract relations (set)"( Movement-Image204). While marks and
demarks compose the movements of the set of mental images, the symbol defines the set itself
as abstract relation. As such it functions as the genetic sign of mental images. The much-
noted figure of voyeurism in Rear Window ( 1954) is a clear example of a symbol in this
sense. Here voyeurism functions as an abstract idea that nonetheless threads together the
images of watching or spectating in the film. It is the figure of unity that underlies their
multiplicity, binding them into a set of homologous figures. Rear Window has become a
canonical metacommentary on spectatorship in the cinema because this abstract relation
governs organically the unfolding of each sequence, both with respect to itself and to the
whole of the film, so much so that the film could be said to presuppose a theory of
spectatorship.

This helps clarify what a mental image is as the expression of thirdness through cinematic
movement-images. As Deleuze describes it, a mental image is not an internalized
psychological representation; it is a concrete cinematic movement-image, the last of the
series. The mental image "takes as objects of thought, objects which have their own existence
outside thought, just as the objects of perception have their own existence outside perception.
It is an image which takes as its object, relations, symbolic acts, intellectual feelings.... It will
necessarily have a new, direct, relationship with thought, a relationship which is completely
distinct from that of the other images" ( Movement-Image198). The action-image forms a set
wherein perceptions, affections, and actions relate organically in a sensorimotor whole. This
is why, in one sense, the action-image already completes the deduction of cinematic
movement-images. By the same token, the mental image opposes rather than continues the
weave of actions, perceptions, and affections. Or rather, it delimits or frames the whole of
their relations, reflecting them in another set as a "figure of thought." The mental image is not
simply added to the other three; it frames and transforms them, reflecting the whole of their
relations as an object of interpretation or intellection.

Rear Window could not have been taken so widely as a commentary on spectatorship if
Hitchcock had not transformed so completely his protagonist, in the first shot of the film
reducing the man of action (the globetrotting photojournalist) to a passive optical situation.
Here the protagonist is no longer the vehicle of an action. The camera reserves all agency for
itself. In a single movement it connects the series wheelchair-framed photo of accident-
window frame in multiple reframings that reflect the whole of the set in a single idea. Action
has been subsumed by the image instead of being carried out through it; the protagonist has
been immbolized as a double of the spectators, reproducing their condition in the image.

A film like Rear Window occupies a curious position in Deleuze's argu-

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ments. It certainly belongs to the regime of cinematic movement-images, yet its status there is
uncertain. On the one hand it completes the unfolding of movement-images by reflecting
them in an organic whole wherein contemplation of their totality is possible: within the frame
of mental images the picture is complete, as it were. But the ability to picture this organic
totality also casts doubt on its validity. Here, Deleuze writes,"one consequence appears
inevitable: the mental image would then be less a bringing to completion of the action-image,
and of the other images, than a renewed questioning of their nature and status. Moreover, the
whole of the movement-image would be put into question by the rupture of the sensorymotor
links in a particular character"( Movement-Image205, 276-77). In one and the same gesture,
Hitchcock becomes the avatar of a certain classicism as well as the herald of a crisis in the
action-image.

This crisis of the action-image is not yet a direct image of time. However, it does establish the
preconditions for that image. This crisis is nothing new. Indeed it is part of the very
constitution of action-images. An important point Deleuze does not make clear, though it is
implied throughout the volume on The Movement-Image, is that there is an inherent tension
between the formation of the cinematic movement-image and the movement-image
considered in itself as Image of universal variation. The logical beauty of the organic
composition of cinematic movement-images, which obsessed Eisenstein throughout his life,
resided in the image of an open totality in movement. But whereas the action-and relation-
images imply that totality is possible -- indeed that movement can be stopped or constrained
by a universal image -- the movement-image in itself shows otherwise. For movement in the
physical sense cannot elide or subsume the force of time as change.

The whole history of cinematic movement-images is marked by this paradoxical position: the
desire to build an image of organic totality out of a force that assures the openness of the
whole, or the inability of any set to close except in a partial way. While montage binds the
relations of the set in a given image of the whole, it also establishes the intervals wherein the
set always remains open as potential deframings. For Deleuze, the cinema is marked from the
beginning by a tension wherein the open surges to undermine the whole and the Whole is
defined by the open. The simple durations of early cinema, the dynamic and mathematical
sublime of German Expressionism and French Impressionism, the emergence of any-space-
whatevers in the affection-image, and the episodic nature of the small form of the action-
image: all are harbingers of time, as it were, signs of openness within an emerging desire for
totality.

From this perspective, the time-image appears neither suddenly nor as a

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decisive break with the cinematic movement-image. Alternatively, a number of postwar

cinemas -- Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the New American cinema, and the
New German cinema -- break with the cinematic movement-image and open the path toward
direct images of time. As a philosopher of signs, Deleuze insists on two pure semiotics; but as
a "historian" of signs he often does not distinguish clearly between the two regimes.
Nevertheless, Deleuze lays out a number of coordinates for mapping the conditions of
emergence for the new cinema and the second semiotic.

The crisis of the action-image involves the weakening and eventual disintegration of the
sensorimotor schema as the basis for composing cinematic movement-images. The
sensorimotor schema limits movement to a physical trajectory or transformation in space,
giving a restricted sense to the image and to the narrative logic deriving from it. Affections
must be translated into spatial images constitutive of a mise-en-scne. These in turn create the
possibility of situations requiring series of actions and reactions, conflicts and resolutions.
The whole of the sensorimotor schema unfolds as organic composition where
commensurability is the rule: on the one hand, movement between the parts of the whole; on
the other, montage within which the web of actions and reactions is woven. Each requires
connection through rational intervals. In every case the image has precise spatial and temporal
coordinates, which map predictably its extensions into other images. The motivation and the
vehicle of change is a certain motricity.

Both the qualisigns of any-space-whatevers and the episodic structure of the action-image's
small form prefigure another image of change. The quality of deterritorialization peculiar to
any-space-whatevers is particularly important. With respect to the possibility or possibilities
they express, any-space-whatevers may compose either real connections or virtual
conjunctions. The former relate to the sensorimotor schema as the space of emergence of a
milieu or situation to come. The qualisign is indefinite yet nonetheless is caught up in a
trajectory that soon clarifies it. The sensorimotor schema determines the spatial and temporal
coordinates of the image by composing a line of action through rational intervals and organic
construction. Within the action-image, any-space-whatevers are always being transformed as
situations requiring action. In short, real connections mean that possibilities become
actualities.

If the sensorimotor schema breaks down, however, a new set of potentialities opens in the
image. First, the intervals of montage become irrational rather than rational. No longer caught
up in a spatial and temporal series defined by the arc of actions and reactions, effects and
causes, the image becomes an "amorphousset" or "deconnected" space ( Movement-
Image120).

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In the absence of a predetermined trajectory, the image may develop in one series as much as
another, but only as a "delinked" and nontotalizable block of space-time. In its singularity, the
deconnected space is most truly defined as any-space-whatever. It is indeterminate rather than
indefinite, a virtual conjunction, a set of contingent possibilities. When the image is no longer
used up in the accomplishment of an action or conflict, it becomes an "emptied" space in
which both the function and the potential signification of the image change. The image
becomes a space for reading: seeing and hearing as decipherment rather than following an
action; a legible image or lectosign to be read, rather than an action-image to be absorbed or
reacted to.
These are what Deleuze calls opsigns and sonsigns, or pure optical and acoustical images. The
existence and definition of opsigns are a precondition for a cinema of the timeimage. As such,
they motivate the second pure semiotic. Deleuze offers both a historical and a philosophical
justification for the erosion of the sensorimotor schema and the emergence of opsigns. His
historical account is thought-provoking, if somewhat sketchy and general. The most
compelling challenges to a cinema defined by the actionimage and the sensorimotor schema
occur in four waves: in the cinema of Yasushiro Ozu (especially the postwar films); in the
emergence of Italian neorealism in the late 1940s; in the French New Wave of the 1950s; and
New German cinema of the 1960s. Especially for European cinema, modern film style is
rooted in the experience of societies devastated during the Second World War and slowly
reconstructed (both physically and psychologically) afterwards. Images of wasted and
emptied spaces surged into everyday life. One need only think of the cityscape of Berlin in
Germania Anno Zero with its vacant lots, rubble-strewn streets, and demolished buildings. No
wonder, then, that these images would emerge as the milieu of neorealism.

But more important for Deleuze are the narrative logics deriving from these emptied and
deconnected images where "the characters were found less and less in sensorimotor
'motivating' situations, but rather in a state of strolling, rambling or wandering aimlessly
which defined pure optical and sound situations. The action-image then tended to shatter,
whilst the determinate locations were blurred, letting any-space-whatevers rise up where the
modern affects of fear, detachment, but also freshness, extreme speed and interminable
waiting were developing " ( Movement-Image120-21, 169). One can also trace the emergence
of a kind of "postmodern" mentality -the faltering belief in totality, either from the point of
view of the grand "organic" ideologies (universal democracy or socialism), or from a belief in
the image as anything other than a partial and contingent description of reality.

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This declining belief in totalizing or organic ideologies and global situations throws into
question the narrative foundations and logic of the actionimage. Indeed, the aimless
wanderings of modern cinema's protagonists is itself a deterritorializing figure: the
disappearance of a line of action and the emergence of a labyrinthine path of loosely
connected situations. In this context, the large form (SAS') loses its viability and power to
convince. Lacking the motivation of grand ideologies or globalizing situations, narratives
were unable to focus on a decisive action. Instead, "action or plot were only to be a
component in a dispersive set, in an open totality" ( MovementImage205). By the same token,
"the structure ASA was subject to an analogous critique. In the same way as there was no
predetermined story, there was no preformed action whose consequences on a situation could
be foreseen" (206, 277). Rather than describing events that had already happened, the cinema
"necessarily devoted itself to reaching the event in the course of happening" (206). Rather
than an elliptical narrative holding out the promise of gaps filled and ambiguities resolved at
its conclusion, the small form further unravels into a truly episodic structure. "We hardly
believe any longer," Deleuze argues,"that a global situation can give rise to an action which is
capable of modifying it -- no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to
disclose itself, even partially. The most 'healthy' illusions fall. The first things to be
compromised everywhere are the linkages of situation-action, action-reaction, excitation-
response, in short, the sensory-motor links which produced an action-image. Realism, despite
all its violence -- or rather with all its violence which remains sensory-motor -is oblivious to
this new state of things where the synsigns disperse and the indices becomes confused. We
need new signs" (206-7).
These new signs are opsigns and sonsigns. As the action-image began to unravel, the
preconditions for opsigns became apparent in five criteria. First, the sets defining the image
became dispersive rather than global and organic. This entailed the weakening and
uncoupling of the parts of the set. Second, the organization of the narrative is guided
predominantly by chance rather than by a motivating action. Third, the protagonists no longer
act; rather, they wander and observe. An errant and labyrinthine path replaces the unfolding
sensorimotor action or situation. The modern voyage "happens in any-space-whatever --
marshalling yard, disused warehouse, the undifferentiated fabric of the city -- in opposition to
action which most often unfolded in the qualified space-time of the old realism" ( Movement-
Image 208). Fourth, without the context of a global ideology and a belief in real connections,
the action-image is replaced by clichs. The double sense of the French use of the term should
be maintained: both tired images and snapshots or random impressions. Deleuze calls them
"floating images...

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which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each one of us and constitute
our internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichs by which they think and
feel, are thought and felt, being themselves a clich among the others in the world which
surrounds them. Physical, optical and auditory clichs mutually feed on each other. In order
for people to be able to bear themselves and the world, misery has to reach the inside of
consciousness and the inside has to be like the outside" (209, 281). Lastly, with respect to a
situation of declining meaning and belief, the idea of totality reappears as the sense of an
inscrutable, global plot in which the characters are embedded, though often in ironic ( Bicycle
Thief) and parodic ( Alphaville) as much as paranoiac ( The Trial) forms.

Deleuze defines these five criteria as an envelope or a "necessary external condition" for the
appearance of a modern cinema without yet constituting a direct image of time. This is the
basis for comparing the late classicism of Hitchcock with the innovations of the French New
Wave, for example. From Deleuze's point of view, both are concerned with the construction
of mental images or figures of thought. For example, Godard seems to ask, "if images have
become clichs, internally as well as externally, how can an Image be extracted from all these
clichs, 'just an image,' an autonomous mental image?" ( Movement-Image214). Perhaps the
definition of thinking changes, both with respect to the image and movement? Rather than
completing or extending the cinema of the movementimage by introducing the possibility of
pure optical situations, Hitchcock demonstrated for the French New Wave that it was possible
"to cut perception off from its motor extension, action, from the thread which joined it to a
situation, affection from adherence or belonging to characters. The new image would
therefore not be a bringing to completion of the cinema, but a mutation of it.... The mental
image had not to be content with weaving a set of relations, but had to form a new substance.
It had to become truly thought and thinking, even if it had to become 'difficult' in order to do
this" (215). To put it more simply: for Deleuze, to withdraw perception from action means
putting it into contact with thought. This idea will be the foundation for his definition of direct
images of time.

For Peirce, thirdness remained a limit to the possible categories of logic. Relation does appear
to be the logical endgame for the development of cinematic movement-images. Here the
mental image produces a frame that expresses the whole of relations. It delimits the possible
transformations of the movement-image by determining all the possible permutations
reflected by changes in the whole. Another perspective on the composition of images is
possible, however, one that restores movement to the whole in an entirely different way. The
second dimension of a pure semiotic occurs

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when sign and image reverse their relations. Here signs no longer derive from the image as
movement. Rather, opsigns produce an image whose material they specify and whose forms
they constitute from sign to sign. The logic of differentiation and specification characteristic
of the movementimage constructs an image of the whole based on exteriority and
extensiveness in space. This is expressed in an idea of montage that links one movement-
image to another through a logic of organic composition, thus drawing an indirect image of
time as a trajectory in space. When the sensorimotor schema breaks down, the interval of
movement achieves another value. Rather than extensiveness in space, opsigns relate to an
interiority where the definition of movement changes: on the one hand, the movements of
thought in time; on the other, the anteriority of time to the forms of change, a perspective on
time linking "the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changeable, one single and
identical time as the unchanging form of that which changes.... This is the very special
extension of the opsign: to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and
acoustical" ( Time-Image17-18, 28-29). The founding question of the second semiotic, then, is
how to distinguish movement in time from movement in space. Peirce can no longer serve as
our guide here. Instead, Deleuze extends his reading of Bergson through Leibniz and
Nietzsche.

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4 TIME AND MEMORY, ORDERS AND POWERS

...cinema is the sole experience where time is given to me as a perception. -- Jean-Louis
Schefer, L'homme ordinaire du cinma

The movement-image provides one way of apprehending or understanding duration as an

image or a spatialization of time. If indeed, as Bergson says, perception is the master of space
in the measure to which action is the master of time, what happens when actions no longer
"master" time in the image, that is, when duration is no longer measured by the translation of
movements into actions? What does movement become, and what kinds of images are
formed?

According to Deleuze, the appearance of Italian neorealism set the conditions for the
appearance of direct images of time in the cinema. The basic qualities of these images were
recognized by Andr Bazin. Bazin's aesthetic of realism was based on a particular vision of
everyday life: undeciphered, ambiguous, and elliptical events portrayed in their unique
duration, as well as deliberately weak connections between events. For Deleuze, however, the
time-image needs to get beyond the "real" no less than beyond movement. The image must
turn from exteriority or extensiveness in space toward a genesis in mental relations or time.
This is the basis of the second pure film semiotic. "If all the movement-images, perceptions,
actions and affects

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underwent such an upheaval," Deleuze writes, "was this not first of all because a new element
burst on to the scene which was to prevent perception being extended into action in order to
put it in contact with thought, and, gradually, was to subordinate the image to the demands of
new signs which would take it beyond movement?" ( Time-ImageI).

This new element was a crisis of the action-image that propelled the cinematic movement-
image toward its logical conclusion. At this point, according to Deleuze, going beyond
movement required a "triple reversal." First, the image had to free itself from the sensorimotor
schema by transcending the action-image and becoming a pure optical and sound image.
Second, it also had "to open up to powerful and direct revelations, those of the time-image, of
the readable image and the thinking image. It is in this way that opsigns and sonsigns refer
back to 'chronosigns,' 'lectosigns' and 'noosigns' " ( Time-Image23). Finally, the quality of
movement had to be redefined. Movement is not absent from the pure optical image defined
by irrational intervals. Neither does the movement-image disappear entirely. Rather,
movement is no longer limited by the representation of actions as a succession of spatial
segments in a sensorimotor image. Whereas the cinematic movement-image was ultimately
based on the image of a whole as extensiveness in space, an ever-expanding organic totality,
the time-image derives from an intuition of the Whole, of universal becoming, change or
creative evolution.

A new montage form emerges in the cinema of the time-image. Montage is based here on
irrational intervals that "de-link" images, as well as the relation between images and sounds,
which are no longer limited by an image of the whole or by Peirce's three categories. In this
context, any-spacewhatevers become deconnected, autonomous images defining three new
powers. The task of the second pure semiotic, then, is to define these powers with respect to
the concrete images composed in the modern cinema. Despite all its complexities and
digressions, the volume on The Time-Image largely concerns only three kinds of signs:
lectosigns, chronosigns, and noosigns. These three kinds of signs relate back to philosophical
problems of description, narration, and thought.

The lectosign constructs a new form of description -- a "crystalline" description or crystalline

images, as opposed to the organic images of the first semiotic. The image is no longer used up
in its analogical and spatial rendering of an object: "the sound as well as visual elements of
the image enter into internal relations which means that the whole image has to be 'read,' no
less than seen.... [It] is the 'literalness' of the perceptible world which constitutes it like a
book" ( Time-Image22). Deleuze derives the term "lectosign" from the Stoic rendering of the
word lekton, indicating what is

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expressed in a proposition independently of its relationship to an object. 1 This is not a pure

cinema in the sense of a nonreferential or nonobjective image. Rather, the criterion of
referentiality is "subordinated to the internal elements and relations which tend to replace the
object and to delete it where it does appear, continually displacing it.... The cinema is going to
become an analytic of the image, implying a new conception of cutting, a whole 'pedagogy'
which will operate in different ways" (22). It is not reference that disappears as much as a
description based on the discernibility of the real and the imaginary, original and copy.

When a pure optical image or sound displaces an image based on motor action, the distinction
between objective and subjective also loses relevance in favor of a principle of
indeterminability or indiscernibility. A sensorimotor description requires the independence of
its referent or object as a means of deciding between an objective or subjective, real or
imaginary perspective. Deleuze contrasts this situation to Robbe-Grillet's theory and practice
of "neo-realist" description in his novels and films. Here, Deleuze argues, "we no longer
know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are
confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which
to ask.... [S]ince it replaces its own object, ...[neo-realist description] erases or destroys its
reality which passes into the imaginary, but on the other hand it powerfully brings out all the
reality which the imaginary or the mental create through speech and vision" ( Time-Image7).

Chronosigns derive from pure optical and acoustic images. When sensorimotor situations
disappear, the quality of movement in relation to time changes. To the extent that time is no
longer the measure of movement as indirect image, movement becomes a perspective on time,
thus inaugurating new forms of montage and narration.

Chronosigns express the transcendental form of time. The empirical or chronological view of
time measures past and future as self-similar moments that precede or follow the present in a
line of succession. Time is understood as an indirect image -- as spatial segmentations of a
continuum that are themselves immobile. In its empirical form, time is given either as
calculated intervals of movement or as a whole expanding through differentiation and
integration toward an image of sublime totality. But closer attention to the present shows that
there is real movement, a movement of becoming which is the pure form of time as change.
Here there is no present distinguishable from a present-becoming-past, on the one hand, and
the present-becoming-future on the other. Rather than a chronological and successive addition
of spatial moments, time continually divides into a present that is passing, a past that is
preserved, and an indeterminate future 2

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Deleuze calls this the most fundamental operation of time: "since the past is constituted not
after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment
as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same
thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched
towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time has to split at the same time as it
sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the
present pass on, while the other preserves all the past" ( Time-Image81).

The direct presentation of time is fundamentally paradoxical. Because time passes, and cannot
do otherwise, the present will coexist with the past that it will be, and the past will be
indiscernible from the present it has been. This yields three chronosigns divided into two
fundamental types. The first two direct images involve the order of time. Described by
Deleuze as "points of present" and "layers or sheets of the past," they are topographical
expressions of relations internal to time' passing. In the former, time as external succession is
displaced by quantic jumps across points where the present has fractured into a present of the
present, a present of the past, and a present of the future which are nonetheless simultaneous.
In the latter, succession is displaced by topological transformations of layers of the past that
coexist even though their order is discontinuous and nonchronological. "We are no longer in
an indiscernible distinction between the real and the imaginary...," Deleuze writes, "but in
undecidable alternatives between sheets of past, or 'inexplicable' differences between points
of present, which now concern the direct time-image. What is in play is no longer the real and
the imaginary, but the true and the false. And just as the real and the imaginary become
indiscernible in certain very specific conditions of the image, the true and the false now
become undecidable or inextricable: the impossible proceeds from the possible, and the past is
not necessarily true" ( Time-Image274-75).

The third chronosign, which constitutes a second fundamental type, organizes time as series.
In the empirical succession of time, the present is a fault line that separates what comes before
from what comes after. A series emerges from becoming as the most immanent quality of
time. In Deleuze's definition, "[a] series is a sequence of images, which tend in themselves in
the direction of a limit, which orients and inspires the first sequence (the

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before), and gives way to another sequence organized as series which tends in turn towards
another limit (the after). The before and the after are then no longer successive determinations
of the course of time, but the two sides of the power, or the passage of the power to a higher
power. The direct time-image here does not appear in an order of coexistences or
simultaneities, but in a becoming as potentialization, as series of powers" ( TimeImage275). 3

In series, we witness change or metamorphosis across a sequence of images as the

transformation of states, qualities, concepts, or identities. This is why Deleuze calls the third
direct image of time a "genesign." Here the distinction between the true and the false is again
transformed. The genesign presents a power of the false that questions the notion of the true.
But this is not an overcoming of the false as illusion or deception. Rather, it is an affirmation
of the force of time as becoming, a force that continually renews the possibilities for change
and the appearance of the new. According to Deleuze, "Genesigns present several figures in
this sense. Sometimes..., they are characters forming series as so many degrees of a 'will to
power' through which the world becomes a fable. Sometimes it is a character himself crossing
a limit, and becoming another, in an act of story-telling which connects him to a people past
or to come" ( Time-Image275). These images are especially powerful in postcolonial cinemas
as well as other work based on the creation or emergence of identities otherwise occluded in
contemporary media. Through a form of enunciation that Deleuze calls fabulation, series
express a becoming-other appropriate to the invention of a people who are "not yet" but who
may find a means of collective enunciation as a line of variation in the dominant cinematic
discourse. This is a minor cinema analogous to the concept of a minor literature created by
Deleuze and Guattari in their short book on Kafka. (I will extend and deepen this argument in
chapter 6.)

Finally, movement is also redefined as that which subordinates the description of space to the
functions of thought. The noosigns of the timeimage are no longer founded only in the
articulations and modulation features of a signaletic material. In the second pure semiotic,
description and narration are grounded in forms of thought as a consciousness in and of time.
This is a certain Kantianism of the cinema, the foundation of thinking in the form of time, or a
Critique of Pure Reason in images. As opposed to the movement-image, "a camera-
consciousness...would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make,
but by the mental connections it is able to enter into. And it becomes questioning, responding,
objecting, provoking, theorematizing, hypothesizing, experimenting, in accordance with the
open list of logical conjunctions ('or,' 'therefore,' 'if,'

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'because,' 'actually,' 'although'...), or in accordance with the functions of thought in a cinma-
vrit, which, as Rouch says, means rather truth of cinema [ vrit du cinma]" ( Time-
Image23).

The idea of consciousness invoked here does not represent a subject who thinks as the origin
of a "movement." This would suggest a Cartesian dualism -- a self-actualizing brain in a
body-machine -- that Deleuze strictly opposes. Our brain does not reflect the world to us in a
specular image, for, in the Bergsonian sense, the brain is an image no less than the world.
Rather, what film helps us to understand is how we think in and through time in a situation
where time passes in us and divides us from ourselves. The Cartesian idea of the subject
disappears in this context along with its particular notions of agency. Instead, thought
becomes machinic. The time-image constructs noosigns organized as cartographies of
thought, mappings or visualizations of the movements of thought in and as time. The "cause"
of thought is a power rather than an agency. And what direct images of time express are
nothing other than the powers of thought, an idea Deleuze adopts from Spinoza. It is not I
who think, as self-present agency, but rather the "machinic arrangement" I make with the
spiritual automaton that thinks in me. In another context, Deleuze writes that "when [
Spinoza] shows that our ideas are causes one of another, he deduces from this that all have as
cause our power of knowing or thinking. It is above all the term 'spiritual automaton' that
testifies to this unity. The soul is a kind of spiritual automaton, which is to say: In thinking we
obey only the laws of thought, laws that determine both the form and the content of true ideas,
and that make us produce ideas in sequence according to their own causes and through our
own power, so that in knowing our power of understanding we know through their causes all
the things that fall within this power" ( Expressionism140). 4 In The TimeImage Deleuze
suggests that these powers are subject to broad historical shifts that can be mapped in the
images and narratives cinema presents to us. Whereas the movement-image wants to force us
to think through the administration of shock (early Eisenstein), the time-image wants to
augment our powers of thought through assisting our knowledge of these powers.

Therefore, these three new signs also imply a new set of qualities or powers. As I argued in
chapter I, the problem of differentiating a direct from an indirect image of time is motivated
largely by the question of how an image models the movements of thought. The indirect
image of time restricts itself to the sensorimotor schema. Movements are represented as
actions prolonging themselves in space as reactions, thus generating chains of narrative cause
and effect in the form of linear succession. Ultimately, the sensorimotor schema implies a
world apprehensible in an image of Truth as totality and identity. The movements of thought
are exhausted in

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the dialectical image of an ever-expanding organic spiral and in the belief of a world mastered
by action. In contrast, the direct image of time presents situations where the problem of time
puts the notion of truth into crisis. Rather than organic expansiveness, its powers are the
"powers of the false."

Immediate clarifications are wanting. What Deleuze suggests by "powers of the false" is not a
question of pluralism, of tolerating equally possible yet incomplete and contradictory
perspectives on the true. Nor is it a question of a nihilism where truth is impossible and all is
illusion or fiction. Nor is truth "historical" in the sense that each era has its own truth that
replaces the one preceding it and that will in turn be displaced by the one that supplants it.
Rather, the condition of truth has changed in what Deleuze calls the "crystalline regime."

The crystalline regime does not "falsify" the image of thought rendered by the organic image.
Instead, the problem of time changes the relation between true and false. In the organic
regime, the form of truth requires the false as its opposite or negation in order to master the
negative under the form of unity and identity. There is movement here, but only as an
ahistorical image of the True that may broaden and deepen but never change. This is thought
imaged as an ever-expanding organic spiral, organized by passing from one rational link to
another in chronological time. Organic narration also refers to a system of judgment. In the
course of an investigation, a trial, or a conflict, we presume that one party will ultimately --
finally and teleologically -- represent the side of the right and the true. And along with
protagonists, witnesses, and jurors, we are put in the position not only of judging what is true
or false, but also of knowing that we will finally be right.

Alternatively, there is a power of the false where thought moves not as an expanding spatial
image but in time or as temporality, a becoming rather than a being. To think a direct relation
between truth and the form of time means finding a third path, alternative to organic
description on the one hand, and to the eternal and unchanging on the other. In the organic
regime, truth can only be found, discovered, or described. But there is a "falsifying" narration,
Nietzschean in inspiration, which does away with the opposition of true and false and instead
creates truth positively. The primary question for Deleuze is how thought can be kept moving,
not toward a predetermined end, but toward the new and unforeseen in terms of what Bergson
calls the Open or "creative evolution." Thus the organic and crystalline regimes are
qualitatively different with respect to how they answer the question "What is thinking?" For
the former it is the discovery of concepts through negation, repetition, and identity toward
ever more self-identical Being; for the latter it is the creation of concepts through difference
and nonidentity in a continually open Becoming.

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What the direct image of time presents, then, are "metamorphoses of the false which replace
the form of the true" ( Time-Image134). These metamorphoses are presented as paradoxical
figures of sense. In this manner, the crystalline regime differentiates itself from the organic
regime, point for point, with respect to four problems: description, distinguishing between the
real and the imaginary, narration, and the question of judgment or truth. The problem of
description involves how the distinction between real and the imaginary becomes
indiscernible. Narration entails how the ordering of time presents differences in the present
that are inexplicable and alternative versions of the past whose truth or falsity is undecidable.
Finally, the problem of judgment, of deciding the necessity or contingency of possible or
probable interpretations, is transformed through an analysis of incompossible worlds. In this
manner, Deleuze presents four powers of the false, though there could certainly be more. In
the direct image of time, the past is not necessarily true and the impossible follows the
possible. Beyond the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, falsifying narration poses
inexplicable differences to the present and alternatives to the past whose truth or falsity are
undecidable.

...just as we perceive things where they are present, in space, we remember where they have
passed, in time....
-- Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image

The powers of the false derive from a general principle of incommensurabilty between time
and space in the dimensional sense. The movementimage asks that we consider time as
another spatial dimension. The direct time-image, however, is not movement in the spatial
sense, and in fact may ask us to redefine philosophically what movement is. I will take up this
question in the next chapter. Until then, the relation between time and perception must be
considered more deeply.

Deleuze's principal thesis in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image is that cinema has a
special relation to duration. Its derivation of images from movement presents blocs of space-
time as "a mobile section of a Whole which changes, that is, of a duration or of a 'universal
becoming' " ( Movement-Image68). What is important to these books is the perspective that
cinema gives on time. The movement-image is in fact a time-image, but an indirect one. It
subordinates the whole to montage of a particular type based on sensorimotor situations. The
cinematic movement-image fragments space and links shots in the representation of organized
actions. It also organizes space across centers that combine perception, affection, and action-
images in a system that presents time indirectly as "normal"

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movement. Alternatively, Deleuze suggests, "the centre of indetermination, which can avail
itself of a special situation on the plane of movementimages, can itself have a special
relationship with the whole, duration or time. Perhaps here there is the possibility of a direct
time-image: for example, what Bergson calls the 'memory-image,' or other types of
timeimage, but which would be in any event very different from movementimages?" (69). By
turning to the complex forms of memory defined by Bergsonism, we can better understand
what is implied by a direct image of time, above all with respect to perception and
description. This is the subject of Deleuze's third and fourth commentaries on Bergson in The
Time-Image.

As I argued in chapter 2, for both Bergson and Deleuze the distinction between matter and the
perception of matter in relation to image is a difference in degree, not kind. What, then, of the
relation between perception and memory in relation to the image? Perception only exists
where movements are reflected, stopped, or otherwise arrested by a subject capable of
responding to them. Movements in the universal sense (the propagation of light or energy) are
transformed into movements in the physical sense; the formation of an image prepares for a
response executed as a motor action. Thus perception, as defined in the preceding pages, is an
interval opened on one side as sensation and closed on the other as action. What falls in
between is affection, or what has not been transformed as either an image or action and
therefore persists as a quality or state. Thus the interval is described as a center of
indetermination because the range of events occurring across its two sides is complex.
"Indetermination" has a specific sense here: it is the range of responses available for selection
as the appropriate response or action with respect to an analyzed stimulus or perception.

This definition fits any living entity, no matter how simple or complex. How, then, can the
problem of conscious perception, and beyond that, consciousness itself, be defined?
Everything relies on how we conceive the "range of indetermination left to the choice of the
living being in its conduct with regard to things" ( Bergson, Matter and Memory31).
As a center of indetermination, the interval is defined as the location of a process bringing
ever more numerous and distant points in space into relation with ever more complex motor
responses. Bergson calls this "pure perception." Pure perception in no way implies the
necessity of representation, consciousness, or memory. All forms of plant and animal life
accomplish as much. For Bergson, this is all there is to an immediate perception, which is
why Deleuze treats phenomenology with some skepticism. Bergson develops the concept of
pure perception as a heuristic abstraction, in contrast to idealist philosophers who treat
immediate perception as an interiorized subjective vision differing from memory only by its
greater intensity. Ideal-

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ism fails to understand that memory is something truly different in nature from perception in
the form of motor or neurological responses.

Bergson understands the relations between movement and matter as continuous in space.
There can be no physical division of body and mind considered from the point of view of
movement. Memory, on the other hand, requires the interval as a dislocation in time. In the
direct image of time, the interval no longer functions as continuity in space, but as a series of
dislocations in time. These dislocations involve relations between present and past that are
nonlinear and nonchronological. Contrary to perception, then, memory might be defined as a
process bringing ever more complex and numerous points in time into relation with an image
drawn from perception on the one hand, and from memory itself on the other. Direct images
of time provide audiovisual mappings of this process.

Obviously, both time and memory have a complexity that belies the analysis of pure
perception. Perception, Bergson argues, always occupies a given duration and requires an
effort of memory. The specific temporal qualities of the interval as a center of indetermination
thus take on a renewed importance. Consciousness is not identical to perception. In fact,
consciousness only appears with memory and in relation to how memory occupies duration.
The physiological limits of perception filter movements, distilling our image of things.
Recollection complicates this process. Our subjective prehension of things, then, takes place
as a "contraction of the real" through the agency of memory in its two forms: one where
layers of recollections surround a kernel of immediate perception; the other which condenses
disparate historical moments into a single point. Later, Deleuze derives two direct images of
time from this proposition: layers or folds of the past (anappes de pass) and peaks or points
of present (pointes de present).

Clearly, the notion of time developed in Deleuze's books is not chronological time. Rather,
memory with respect to duration is the central problem of Bergsonism. This does not mean,
however, that consciousness is restricted to our "inner" duration, a misconception that ignores
the complex continuities between matter and memory. Rather, the scope of indetermination
with respect to the spacing and duration of the interval becomes a qualitative measure in
which "[o]ur representation of things would...arise from the fact that they are thrown back and
reflected by our freedom" ( Berg son , Matter and Memory37). The value of indetermination
must widen now as the freedom to think and to choose. To determine the course of one's life
separate from the habitual or instinctual struggle for survival is indeed the key metaphysical
value in Bergson's philosophy. The English title of Les donnes immediates de la conscience
says it all: Time and Free Will.
The time-image is an image of memory. Or rather, for Deleuze it is pure

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memory-image in Bergson's sense. The question is how to understand the vicissitudes of the
time-image with respect to Bergson's analysis of the fundamental forms of memory. Like pure
perception, "pure" memory (souvenir pur) is a heuristic abstraction. Consequently, in many of
Deleuze's examples the border between the movement-image and the time-image is fluid or
indistinct. One gets the sense that, for Deleuze, the cinema of the movementimage has been
fully realized while that of the time-image is emergent. Comparatively speaking, there are few
"pure" examples of films where direct images of time predominate. Mixed or hybrid examples
are more common. Thus, in examining "memory-images" in film through Bergson's
discussion of the fundamental forms of memory, Deleuze follows Bergson's method of
moving from the simple to the complex. There is no single place where Deleuze defines
outright what constitutes a direct image of time. Instead, the direct image of time gradually
begins to distinguish itself through a series of concepts: from opsigns and sonsigns, to
recollection-images, to image-crystals.

Following Bergson, Deleuze posits two forms of recollection (reconnaissance): automatic or

habitual recollection and attentive recollection. The former is associated with sensorimotor
activities and the pragmatic consequences of movements. Habitual recollection dominates our
quotidian negotiations with the world: I recognize my friend and move forward to shake her
hand; I am hungry so I go shopping at the grocery store. Habitual recollection yields ends-
directed movement cued by perception. Stimulus and response, action and reaction are
organized as horizontal movements in space. Alternatively, attentive recognition takes place
as "inner" movement or the movements of thought in time. Perception withdraws from the
outer world. Instead of relating a sequence of objects on the same level of experience (I am
hungry-I make a grocery list-I drive my car-I enter the store), a given object passes through or
relates different planes or levels of recollected experience. In the first case, a sensorimotor
image initiates and completes a chain of actions; in the second, an optical/acoustic image
initiates a process: the attempt to make a more or less replete mental description by moving to
and fro through strata of memory.

From the movement-image to the time-image, the cinema also tends to create two sorts of
descriptions -- two ways of constituting objects of thought through images -- which in turn
correspond to two manners of thinking-through. The movement-image is organic. It creates
narrative images linked to actions and the extension of actions in ends-directed chains.
Organic descriptions presume the independence of their objects; that is, pro-filmic space is
assumed to stand for a reality that preexists its description by the camera.

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The time-image tends toward inorganic or "crystalline" images. Alain Robbe-Grillet's

attempts at "pure" description in his novels and films are one important predecessor. Here the
optical/sound image does not represent a thing. Instead, pure description loosens the anchor of
designation that attaches images to things. Crystalline description is provisional and
contingent. It replaces the object, continually "erasing" it and creating it anew, giving way to
other equally adequate descriptions, which may modify or contradict the ones preceding it.
Rather than an organic adequation of image by the object, it "is now the description itself
which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object" ( Time-Image126).
Crystalline or inorganic images presuppose a special relationship between perception and
memory. The "pure" optical image does not extend into actions or movements but rather
relates to "recollection-images" (images-souvenir) that it recalls. For each actual description
(physical and object-related), there corresponds a virtual memory-image (mental and
subjective) recollected from chains of associations and memories of past experiences. Each
time a virtual image is called up in relation to an actual description, the object depicted is de-
formed and created anew, widening and deepening the mental picture it inspires. In Matter
and Memory, Bergson describes this process through the schema shown here.

The smallest circuit -- OA -- refers to the initiating perception of the object and the first
memory associated with it. Afterwards, writes Bergson, "the progress of attention results in
creating anew not only the object perceived, but also the ever widening systems with which it
may be bound up; so that in the measure in which the circles B', C', D' represent a higher
expansion of memory, their reflection attains in B', C', D' deeper strata of reality" ( Matter
and Memory105). The pure optical/sound image constitutes a cinematic description in an
analogous way. Rather than extending or linking actions and movements, it forms an
expansive circuit with a virtual image.

The model of attentive recollection is on the path to the direct image of time. But
optical/sound images may not yet be time-images. The movement-image presents its own
figurations of memory and imagination: flash-

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backs, dream sequences, and all the varieties of mental subjectivity. And there are many films
that mix the two forms, passing subtly from organic to crystalline images or combining them
in various ways. The best criterion examines how the imaginary is mobilized with respect to
the real: as contrast and opposition or as chiasmus and reversibility? In the organic regime,
the measure of the real is continuity. Descriptions are assumed to be haptic or continuous with
the objects they represent. The linking of spaces is ruled not only by continuity editing, but
also in the larger sense of "rational" segmentations that connect images in causal chains as
well as integrating them into larger organic wholes. Obviously, the cinema of the
movementimage includes a great variety of figures of the imaginary. But in every case the
imaginary is presented as a deviation from the real, the better to restore belief in it.

Flashbacks present an interesting test case. As a recollection-image, the flashback detours

time the better to restore a linear causality. One plunges from the end to the beginning to
restore understanding of the sequence of events through which destiny brought us to this
point. The recollectionimage, then, is not the proper subjective correlate for the direct image
of time because actual and the virtual are contrasted and discernible. It "actualizes virtuality"
by plumbing strata of pure memory, seeking out an image from the past through which to
represent itself. In this manner, the recollection-image is discernible from the actual image
inspiring it. It is itself an actual image, or rather, an image in the process of an actualization
inspired by and completing a search initiated by the originating image. The flashback
describes a circle of memory restored -- an originary actual image dives into the past to
restore the sequence of images that led ineluctably to it.
When it succeeds, attentive recognition links up recollection-images drawn from memory.
This linkage tends to restore sensorimotor connections as well as the teleological orientation
of habitual recollection. In the activity of recollection, the passage between the actual and the
virtual bridges the interval thus connecting the initiating optical image with either a
recollection-image that could fill it up with meaning or a motor action that could exhaust it.
Thus the flashback, even if it signifies memory, still belongs to the regime of the movement-
image. The same may be said for dream sequences and other forms representing distortion,
discontinuity, or extreme subjectivity. These deviations may weaken the sensorimotor schema
or widen its scope. But as long as they are patterned on the model of deviation and return,
prolongation of actions and reactions, and actualization of memory-images, these forms
remain with the regime of movement-images. 5

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What interests Deleuze is the logical nature of this "reflection" of perception in memory
suggested by the smallest circuit in Bergson's schema. By definition, the two images at OA
are different in nature: where perception occurs in space, memory occurs in time. In a
practical instance of attentive recollection, one could perhaps be considered as simply
reflecting the other. In this case perception searches out memory as a mirror image that gives
it identity and renders it meaningful. But Deleuze argues that this ultimately ignores the
temporality of the process where, in fact, the two images " 'run after each other,' refer to each
other, reflect each other, without it being possible to say which is first, and tend ultimately to
become confused by slipping into the same point of indiscernibility" ( Time-Image46).

Indiscernibility is the key to understanding what Deleuze means by a crystalline image. For
Deleuze, the time-image is crystalline because it is multifaceted. Like an image produced in a
mirror, it always has two poles: actual and virtual. However, like the salon in India Song, it is
often difficult to decide what is an "actual" image and what is a "reflection." What
indiscernibility makes visible is the ceaseless fracturing or splitting of nonchronological time.
In this manner, facets of the time-image crystallize around four axes -- actual and virtual, real
and imaginary, limpid and opaque, seed and milieu -- organized as figures of indiscernibilty.

Indiscernibility relates primarily to description. Discernment in Bergson's sense implies a

movement between the virtual and the actual, the world of memory and the objective world.
At the level of descriptions, the actual refers to the states of things -- the physical and the real
-- as described in space through perception. The virtual is subjective, that is, mental and
imaginary, sought out in time through memory. Indiscernibility thus refers to an image where
it is impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary even when the two
poles remain distinct.

This point of indiscernibility is not fantasy; it concretely relates to objects and their potential
intelligibility. But unlike either attentive or habitual recollection, it is impossible to decide
where and when this process begins or concludes. Physical object or mental description? The
two become confused in a process that both deepens our understanding of objects or events
and widens our access to circuits of remembered experience in a mutual interpenetration of
memory and matter. "How can we say that it is the same object...," writes Deleuze, "which
passes through different circuits, because each time description has obliterated the object, at
the same time as the mental image has created a different one? Each circuit obliterates and
creates an object. But it is precisely in this 'double movement of creation and erasure' that
successive planes and independent circuits, cancelling each other out, contradicting each
other, joining up with each other, fork-

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ing, will simultaneously constitute the layers of one and the same physical reality, and the
levels of one and the same mental reality, memory or spirit" ( Time-Image46).

Opaque and limpid is the expression of the indiscernibility of actual and virtual. The process
wherein a virtual, originating image becomes actual is a process of increasing clarity, of
coming into focus. But in the course of time, the actual image fades, becomes obscure as it
lapses into a virtual image. The two lines of development are always crossing one another.

Citizen Kane provides a convenient example. In the opening sequence of the film, after the
camera penetrates the interior of Kane's bedchamber, there is a series of four shots where
snow seems to fall in the image. Kane's hand lets fall the ornament; in extreme close-up Kane
speaks his final word. Only indiscernibility describes the logical status of these images. They
are neither fantasy nor purely objective; in fact, they are mixed. We are given a series of
objective shots -- an extreme close-up of the ornament with an optical zoom back to a close-
up; Kane's lips; a high-angle shot of his hand releasing the glass ball; the ornament breaking
at the bottom of the steps -- all overlaid with falling snow as, perhaps, a sign of Kane's mental
subjectivity.

This image is paradoxical rather than simply ambiguous. It vacillates like a figure-ground
illusion, and it is unclear how it should be read. From one perspective the narration implied by
this image is objective and actual, from another mental and virtual. The movement from
virtual to actual clarifies the image, making it limpid. The signifiers of memory or virtuality
(snow, the ornament) crystallize around the moment of Kane'ss death and last word --
"Rosebud." But at the same time, the actual dissolves into the virtual. The moment this word
is spoken it becomes opaque and mysterious; its meaning disappears among the layers of
memory superimposed in the image.

Whereas opacity and limpidity define a scale of intelligibility in the image, seed and milieu
define genetic elements wherein narratives are created out of the indiscernibility of the actual
and the virtual. Seeds are virtual elements that generate actual diegetic environments. The
snow that clouds the scene of Kane's death is the germinating element of the first flashback:
Kane's childhood in Colorado and his separation from his mother. The shattered ornament
unleashing this "snow" both reconsiders (from the point of view of the story) and prefigures
(from the point of view of the plot) Kane's destruction of Susan's room in the last flashback.
In these examples, time is neither circular nor chronological. Rather, it splits across the image,
implying a past perfectly conserved (the complete story of the film as a virtual or pure past) as
well as, in the actual screen duration of the image, a present that passes.

Similarly, the shot of the "hall of mirrors" condenses in a single image a

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principle of undecidability that organizes the overall composition of Citizen Kane. Within the
logic of the film, Kane appears as an actual image in the present only as a dying shadow and
as a fragment, speaking the word "Rosebud" and then expiring. From this moment on "Kane"
and "Rosebud" become virtual spaces in the investigation of the reporter. The various actual
images of Kane are called up out of the memories, the voyages into the past, of the various
narrators. But this process is yet more complicated. Bernstein's image of Kane becomes
virtual for Leland, whose actual image of Kane becomes virtual for Susan, until so many
virtual images proliferate that "all together they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at
the same time as the character is no more than one virtuality among others" ( Time-Image70).
Each flashback actualizes another layer of memory that intersects with Kane's life, and each
corresponding image of Kane erases the former image in creating a new one. "Rosebud" will
never explain the narrative of Kane's life. The sled consumed by fire in the closing images of
the film is the sign of the impossibility of a stable identity or a totalizing life-narrative. It is
called up out of the virtual space of memory only to disappear immediately, unrecognized by
any character. It confirms no recollection; rather it undermines any hope of a full or exact
recollection.

The image-crystal is organized by relations of indiscernibility -- between the actual and

virtual, physical and mental, or real and imaginary -- in the images it summons forth. This
"confusion" of the real and the imaginary is neither a subjective illusion, Deleuze argues, nor
a simple case of mistaken reading. In the image-crystal, the real and the imaginary are always
distinct. The problem is deciding, at any given moment, which is which.

[I]ndiscernibility constitutes an objective illusion; it does not suppress the distinction between
the two sides, but makes it unattributable, each side taking the other's role in a relation which
we must describe as reciprocal presupposition, or reversibility. In fact, there is no virtual
which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the
same relation.... The indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the
past, of the actual and the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or the mind, it is the
objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double....

The actual image and its virtual image thus constitute the smallest internal circuit, ultimately a
peak or point, but a physical point which has distinct elements (a bit like the epicurean atom).
Distinct, but indiscernible, such are the actual and the virtual which are in continual exchange.
( Time-Image69-70)

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In my example from Citizen Kane, the parts of the images remained distinct even if they
continually exchanged their identity (actual-virtual), qualities (real-imaginary, opacity-
limpidity), and functions (seed-milieu). Thus indiscernibility does not mean confusion, nor
does it imply chronological time. The crystalline image is not actual then virtual, first limpid
then opaque, or vice versa. There is a genuine chiasmus between them, a superimposition
where one fades out as the other fades in, one dilates and the other contracts, without our
being able to ascertain which is first and which is second, which is cause and which is effect.
In the indirect image of time, the spatial image of time is measured chronologically by
rationally linked physical actions. In the direct image of time, movement refers to this
"objective illusion" called indiscernibility where we gravitate between distinct yet
incommensurable representations of space and time. "What we see in the crystal," writes
Deleuze,

is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor its indirect
representation as interval or as whole; it is its direct presentation, its constitutive dividing in
two into a present which is passing and a past which is preserved, the strict contemporaneity
of the present with the past that it will be, of the past with the present that it has been. It is
time itself which arises in the crystal, and which is constantly recommending its dividing in
two without completing it, since the indiscernible exchange is always renewed and
reproduced. The direct time-image or the transcendental form of time is what we see in the
crystal.... ( Time-Image274)

...the direct time-image always gives us access to that Proustian dimension where people and
things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space. --
Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image

The inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, or the actual and the virtual,
yields another paradox: being unable to choose between equally possible yet mutually
contradicting narrative explanations. In other words, direct images of time present contingent
narrations.

Take for example the opening of Hiroshima mon amour ( 1959). There are two voices-off
(He: "You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing." She: "I saw everything. Everything."), and
two "times" of the image, the abstracted images of the lover's bodies, intertwined but never
able to merge, and the "documentary" images of Hiroshima, linked without distinct
chronology. While the woman's voice seems to cue the documentary images,

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there is no concrete evidence that these images represent her point of view or her memory.
Without a chronology or "rational" links to situate them, the voices, the bodies, and the
images of Hiroshima are part of an uncertain present. Whether the voices belong to the
bodies, or the documentary images belong to a memory, or all three belong together in a
distinct diegetic present is undecidable. These are three series of events presenting distinct
"points" of present that may not be reconcilable in the same world. Sure criteria for judging
what is subjective and objective, present or past, perception or memory are strategically
absent. The French actress may well have seen nothing in Hiroshima; the Japanese architect
may really know nothing about what happened during the German Occupation in Nevers.

This is what Deleuze calls a "falsifying narration." Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras give
no reason for doubting either the historical veracity of the nuclear violence visited on
Hiroshima, or the narrative veracity of the actress's account of the death of her German lover
at Nevers. There are nothing but "true" stories in this film. Moreover, the true is understood to
be "historical." Yet what is known is no longer anchored in a sure link between present and
past, perception and memory. The opening of Hiroshima mon amour presents a desire to
understand the past across mutually contradicting positions that seem nonetheless to be true.
However, these positions are only contradictory if they are assumed to be necessary rather
than contingent. Indeed, the central question of the film seems to be: how is a historical
world, where the experience of violence is the guarantor of events passed, to be reconciled
with a present where history can only be represented as contingent? For if the relation
between past and present was continuous and determined, we could not imagine having acted
differently in the past, or preventing a repetition of past violence in the future. Thus the
powers of the false insist that truth is historical. But in saying so, our relation to the past must
be clarified. Falsifying narration does not mean that history is no longer true or cannot be
known. Rather, it asks how the will to truth is transformed in a world built out of contingent
propositions.

The problem of contingent propositions is closely associated with the seventeenth-century

German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Contingent propositions pose an interesting
dilemma since they fall between statements that can be shown as necessarily true and those
that are evidently self-contradictory. The best-known examples of contingent propositions are
statements about history, "Caesar crossed the Rubicon" being one classical example.
Similarly, Deleuze characterizes Leibniz's position on contingency as an argument that the
past may be true without being necessarily true. According to Deleuze, this is Leibniz's
solution to the paradox of "contingent futures." This paradox assumes, of course, that the
future is

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indeterminate or contingent. Here the interval dividing past from present assumes another
value, for without this assumption the possibility of exercising free will is lost. In the present
we must choose between equally possible alternatives. But when this present becomes past,
we must choose between incongruous truths.

The classical example is the following: I predict that a naval battle may take place tomorrow.
But when tomorrow comes I am confronted with a series of apparent contradictions. If the
battle takes place it is no longer possible that it may not happen. If I say in hindsight that the
battle must have necessarily occurred, and that the past is determinate with respect to the
present, I have renounced the possibility of free will. Alternatively, I could argue that the
impossible proceeded from the possible: the battle may not have occurred, yet it did. Now if
the battle does not take place, my conditional judgment in the past that it may is untrue; the
battle did not occur when I supposed it might. Once again I could assert that the impossible
proceded from the possible, or I could argue that my prediction in the past was true without
being necessarily true.

In working through the paradox of "contingent futures," Leibniz wants to preserve equally the
universal power of an omniscient God for whom time is irrelevant, and the freedom of choice
for individuals whose actions will nonetheless produce determinate consequences in the
historical fate of their world. Leibniz's solution is to assert that the battle may and may not
take place, but in different worlds. Both worlds are equally possible and consistent within
themselves. And being different worlds they do not contradict one another. They are, Leibniz
argues, not "compossible" with one another.

The most daring argument for this idea occurs in the concluding paragraphs of the Theodicy.
A dreaming Theodorus is brought by Pallas to the hall of the fates. Here a record is kept "not
only of that which happens but also all of that which is possible." Leibniz depicts this hall as
an encyclopedic theater -- or, one wants to say, a cinema -- where contingent lives are
witnessed "as in a stage presentation." In this palace, where all that may be is written and
visualized, Pallas relates that

one may know...what would happen if any particular possibility should attain unto existence.
And whenever the conditions are not determinate enough, there will be as many such worlds
differing from one another as one shall wish, which will answer differently the same question,
in as many ways as possible. You learnt geometry in your youth, like all well-instructed
Greeks. You know therefore that when the conditions of a required point do not sufficiently
determine it, and

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there is an infinite number of them, they all fall into what the geometricians call a locus, and
this locus at least (which is often a line) will be determinate. Thus you can picture to yourself
an ordered succession of worlds, which shall contain each and every one the case that is in
question, and shall vary its circumstances and its consequences. But if you put a case that
differs from the actual world only in one single definite thing and in its results, a certain one
of those determinate worlds will answer you. These worlds are all here, that is, in ideas. 6

Deleuze's Bergsonism is perfectly consistent with Leibniz's arguments concerning the

contingent and the possible. One need only reframe the problem of possible and
incompossible worlds with the problem of memory and the indiscernibility of perception and
memory, present and past.

Leibniz's palace is depicted in the Theodicy as a crystal pyramid. It also describes two direct
perspectives on time, one grounded in the present, the other in the past. The base of the
pyramid expands to infinity because there are an endless number of possible worlds. At the
apex of the pyramid is the best and true world atop an ascending hierarchy of perfection
wherein one passes from the possible to the actual. Now what is interesting in this pyramid is
the simultaneity of all possible worlds. Rather than a single chronological time, in the present
"destiny" splits into an uncountable number of determined yet incompossible trajectories. The
passing present at the extreme tip of the pyramid contains all of human history -- not only in
terms of what actually happened, but what could have happened. Yet each level of the
pyramid contains a different trajectory, a different history, organized as so many
incompossible strata of the past, with their own relations of succession and chronology.

Leibniz proposes incompossible worlds to evade a contradiction between the determinate

infinite power of God and the undetermined freedom of humanity. Deleuze, however, wants
to retain the force of the incompossible as a sign of the Open, thus asserting that
incompossibles can belong to the same world. Fiction provides one domain for considering, in
Borges's beautiful phrase, this "garden of forking paths" that is the pure form of time.
"[N]othing prevents us from affirming that incompossibles belong to the same world,"
Deleuze argues, "that incompossible worlds belong to the same universe: 'Fang, for example,
has a secret; a stranger calls at his door...Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang,
they can both escape, they can both die, and so forth...you arrive at this house, but in one of
the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend...' This is Borges's reply to
Leibniz: the straight line as force of time, as labyrinth of time, is also the line which forks and
keeps on forking, passing

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through incompossible presents, returning to not-necessarily true pasts" ( Time-Image131). 7

For Deleuze, Leibniz must be reread through Bergson. This paradoxical situation appears as a
power only to the extent that the interval between perception and memory, present and past is
understood as a "center" of indetermination. The apex of Leibniz's crystal pyramid contains
the most perfect world, our own, while its base extends out to infinity containing yet more
imperfect worlds as one descends. Obviously, the figure of Jupiter/God contains within
himself all contingencies of all possible worlds as a spatial and intemporal figure, concluding
in the summit of the pyramid as a finite point. Only humanity lives within the temporal and
the contingent. When Deleuze pits Borges against Leibniz, however, the pyramid is
overturned and transformed as Bergson's second schema, the model of the inverse cone.

Remember that for Bergson, the past cannot be identified with a recollection-image. Rather, it
is a virtual archive wherein we leap to link memory with an image that could represent it. The
base still recedes indefinitely into the past and contains all of the past, but the apex is
continually splitting toward an indeterminate future and a past conserved in itself. Pure
memory in Bergson's sense consists of these layers or regions in their state of virtual
existence. Bergson argues that our entire past is preserved as a nonchronological coexistence
in time. There is no "natural" chronology or continuity to the past as remembered. Rather, the
entirety of the past rests in a state of virtual and simultaneous coexistence that expands as
time passes. Therefore, the point S defines the present only as the totality of the past
condensed into a single, moving point. Each of the circles of the cone define so many regions,
strata, or sheets of the past. The movement of recollection first consists in a leap into the past
in general, then in a search through the different regions or layers where we believe a memory
is hidden.

The model of the inverse cone thus illustrates three different temporal

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perspectives. Each of these regions coexist from the point of view of the actual present from
which a given search is begun. However, each of the layers may also be considered
successive from the point of view of how they are marked in time by the former presents
outlining each of their borders. Therefore, what is the past in relation to present? Three
equally valid yet incongruous answers can be given: the present may be defined as a point (S)
representing the most extreme condensation of the past; the past in general can be defined as
the preexistence of all of the past from the point of view of the passing present; and finally,
the past may be layered into various coexistent sheets (A-B, A'-B', and so on), each one
bounded by the former present that marks it. Therefore, the relation between present and past
can be contemporaneous, opposed, or layered as contiguous strata in any combination. These
are the paradoxes defining nonchronological time. 8 Together or in combination, they subtend
the different narrational schemes of the cinema of the time-image.

One narrational schema for the direct image of time involves discontinuous leaps through
sheets of the past. These leaps are not chronological, nor are they unifiable from the point of
view of a narrator who could synthetically authenticate their veracity or sequencing. Rather,
undecidable alternatives between sheets or layers of the past are constructed. Whereas in
Citizen Kane, a point in the present determined the launching pad for a leap to a layer of the
past, in the work of Alain Resnais these centers disappear. In films like L'anne dernire
Marienbad ( 1961) or Je t'aime, je t'aime ( 1968) there are only discontinuous leaps between
points in the present or layers of the past. Each develops a stage in the powers of the false
where coexistent points in the present or sheets of the past formulate alternatives
incompossible with one another.
Another direct image of time is oriented with respect to the present considered in itself rather
than in relation to the past. This is what Deleuze calls "accents" or "de-actualized" points of
present (pointes de prsent). The French word pointe can indicate a peak, a geometric point as
in Leibniz' locus, an orientation point or point of view, or the peak amplitude of a waveform.
"De-actualized" means that a represented event must no longer be confused with the space
serving as its location nor be considered a present that passes. Just as the past may be
considered simultaneously all of the past in general, as distinct layers of regions, or as
contracted entirely into the moving point of a present passing, the present fragments into a
present of the future, a present of the present, and a present of the past. 9

Both direct images of time associate a nonsubjective memory with nonchronological time. In
Marienbad or Hiroshima, memory is nonsubjective because no one character authenticates or
verifies the historical truth of

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a memory. Similarly, the spectator is not in the position of juror, adjudicating the veracity or
probability of one character' narration with respect to another. There is no "truth" to uncover.
Instead there is a set of transformations where narrations continually falsify one another in
series that may just as easily contradict as corroborate one another. There is no point -fixed,
intemporal, ahistorical -- outside these series that enables us to make a subsumptive judgment
that transcends and unifies them in a position of truth. Instead, we follow transformations in
time as becomings in space, something like the mappings of phase space that are the
mathematical origins of chaos theory.

Last Year at Marienbad could be discussed from the point of view of both direct images of
time. For the moment, however, I want to clarify what Deleuze means by a direct image of
time opening on the present.

Can the present stand for the whole of time? Yes, Deleuze responds, as long as an idea of time
as succession from past to present to future is renounced. Then the time of a single event can
be grasped as the splitting of the present into contingent lines: present of the present, present
of the past, and present of the future. There is an implied past in Marienbad: one year ago
when it was so cold that the ponds froze; that point where A asks X to wait one year before
she leaves her "husband," M. But in the logic of its composition, the film asserts that this past
cannot be shown and, therefore, that its temporal displacements cannot be considered
flashbacks. Instead, these ellipses are so many conditional descriptions of the past from the
point of view of the present. Each responds to narrational statements in ways that are as much
oblique as direct. And each ellipsis undermines those statements as much as it corroborates
them by branching toward implied yet incongruous pasts and futures. The film is not really
about the past, nor even a consistent memory of the past. Rather, these striking ellipses signify
conditional or contingent descriptions where possible pasts and futures are negotiated as
variations in the present.

"Last year," then, marks the extreme limit of the present of the past. The present of the future
is implied in the series of possible endings: Will X and A leave together? Does M shoot A?
Does X die falling off the broken balustrade? Yet these events could also mark off the present
of the present that is the film itself. Deleuze describes this narration as a kind of
Augustinianism where "the three implicated presents are constantly revived, contradicted,
obliterated, substituted, re-created, fork and return.... [N]arration will consist of the
distribution of different presents to different characters, so that each forms a combination that
is plausible and possible in itself, but where all of them together are 'incompossible' " ( Time-
Image101). We know that the two narrations and two series in memory offered by A and X
are

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shared since they refer to the same givens, affirmed by one and denied by the other. However,
Deleuze argues, X circulates in a present of the past where A serves as an aspect or attractor,
while A moves in regions where X is marginal.

This attribution of different presents to the different characters, however, obscures both the
interest of Deleuze's ideas and the logical clarity of the film. For it assumes a reading where X
and A are the origins of distinct layers of memory that could overlap or diverge, support or
contradict one another. This tends to restore a diegetic quality that is consistently undermined
in the film, and an emphasis on subjectivity in a narration that is thoroughly
"desubjectivized." 10 In Marienbad, the present forks into divergent and conditional paths not
because there are discrepancies between two "memories" but because the characters
themselves are attributes in a logic of memory presented by the film's overall compositional
strategy. Any reading that treats the characters as agents of a memory that could be judged
true or false should be renounced.

In this respect, the "present" is not designated as a diegetic space where events take place in
succession. Rather, it is already "in time" as an unfolding narration, at once acoustic and
"literary": "Once again -- I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls,
these galleries, in this structure -- of another century...." This voice-off fades in and out over
the credits, and continues in this way over the initial tracking shots. Like the composition of
the images, these statements are thickly descriptive. In describing actions, they imply a
repetitive present, caught up in a feedback loop returning to, as well as discontinuously
repeating and varying, certain "attractors": the balustrade and the statues, A' bedroom, the
garden.

At first one might think that the images follow the voice and that the camera movements
should be attributed to a subjective presence moving through the diegetic space of the film.
But this is not necessarily the case. Sometimes the descriptions of the voice coincide with that
of the camera, sometimes they do not. The camera movements are too long, too smooth, the
angles too oblique, to suggest convincingly a subjective traveling shot. Moreover, the voice
fades in and out, creating sound perspectives that seem to depart from the image and return to
it, or that the camera might lose and then find again. In other words, sound and image are
synchronized yet autonomous. In fact, throughout the film, while the spoken rcit does seem
to drive the image, in fact the image refuses to "cooperate" with the sound in any consistent
way.

Similarly, while Giorgio Albertazzi's voice opens the film, it is not the character X who
narrates. Rather the narration "speaks through" characters and events. The same discourse that
opens the film is passed into the

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text of the play in the second sequence. The voice-off becomes sound-off -or was this always
the case? In fact, the film plays continuously against the desire to attribute a unique subjective
origin to the voice. Even when diegetic speech is unambiguously attributed to a character, the
obvious postsynchronization makes the characters seem like ventriloquists' dummies; this is
what I mean by a nonsubjective narration. Falsifying narration has a specific function in this
film. The interval between sound and image is indeterminate, that is, contingent or
conditional. We may seek to unify sound and image in a single narration -- a single character
or consistent diegetic space -- but we will be disappointed every time. Each one forks and
forks again into durations that are consistent within themselves yet often discontinuous with
one another.

The effect of this indeterminacy is that X and A appear to move in times that are alternately
commensurable and incommensurable. This is signified by a form of repetition based on
dividing up the duration of single events. Privileged sites include the encounters in the garden,
in the bedroom, and on the staircase. This division begins with the interval between the sound
and image tracks, and each subsequent fork becomes a way of establishing another
conditional path with respect to the same initial givens presented by the rcit. The image track
splits into moving or static shots: static shots divide into scenes with high- or low-key
lighting; low-key scenes divide into shots that may alternate between stillness and movement
in the represented figures. The spoken space branches between voice-off and "diegetic"
speech, speech and silence, with speech branching into on- and offscreen. 11 This variation
often produces false cues in the image -- distant shots where our attributions of speech to
certain characters turn out to be misguided, indeed, where attributions seem to be
indiscernible. The overall effect is a rhizomatic movement or permutations of ever-branching,
incongruous spaces rather than linear development by contrast and opposition.

Now, if it is given that there is a narration in the film, who or what narrates? Deleuze wants to
say that it is time en direct, though even he will admit that this is not precisely the case. Time
in itself, as ratio essendi, cannot be known. Alternatively, time as ratio cognoscendi, in its
form of being known, can be apprehended. The movement-image presents one form: time
measured as rational intervals, or the linking of physical actions in space in the form of
continuity and succession. But space has a different function in Marienbad and time a
different form of being known. The camera moves more than the characters, and the
displacements of the image are as much temporal as spatial. As spectators, we are only
confused or disappointed to the extent that we cannot or will not adapt to this new logic.

Understanding how time's form of being known has shifted, then, is

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largely a question of understanding how its relation to narrative space has changed. Rather
than producing an image of movement accomplished as space traversed, the logic of irrational
intervals gives an image of time passing as aberrant or "false" movements in the form of
juxtaposing discontinuous durations. In its simplest form, certain kinds of sequence-shots give
in their longeurs an image of duration as time passing in the form of waiting. (Recall the
opening of India Song cited in chapter 1.) But the examples of Marienbad are considerably
more complex. The voice-off functions as one duration that is "synchronized" with the image-
track yet functionally autonomous. In addition, the emphatic use of postsynchronization may
bring image and sound very close together in the film, but there will always be an
unbridgeable interval between them. This fundamental discontinuity divides them into two
separate times, two separate presents that "relate" to one another but that can never be
combined into a homogeneous diegetic space or a unique duration. Instead, they produce
variable and discontinuous distributions of narrative space that keep forking, varying, and
repeating without resolving in any single explanation.

In this manner, irrational intervals are productive of a spatial complexity whose discontinuity
is the measure of time passing in the form of fragmented and incompossible presents. Each of
these presents has its own duration that may be both consistent yet incompossible with the
ones surrounding it. Time operates as a force where the form of the True is replaced by the
conditional and the contingent. In Marienbad, the most easily cited examples occur where the
continuity of the spoken text of the film contrasts with the fragmentation of shots into
discontinuous presents.

A relatively simple example occurs in the sequence of seven shots where X poses his first
version of the encounter in A's bedroom. This sequence interweaves three locations: the hotel
interior, the exterior on the balustrade overlooking la grande alle, and A's bedroom.

1. First, a slow track left finds X dressed in black tie

among a group of people debating the story of one
year ago when the ponds froze.

2. The second shot frames X in medium close-up to

the left of an ornamental mirror. As he glances off
right, A appears framed in the mirror, dressed in a
black evening gown and necklace.

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3. After X relates what he has heard, a matched angle

shot finds A in a soft-focus medium close-up.

4. A and X then appear on the balcony overlooking

la grande alle, A in the foreground left with her

back to the camera, X facing her in the right middle

ground. She interrupts his story by saying "What do

you want from me, then? You know it's impossible."

5. At this point, there is a cut to A, still dressed in

black, in a soft-focus medium close-up that repeats

exactly the framing of the third shot. Although it

is not yet unambiguous, the location has shifted to

A's bed chamber as X shifts the subject of his story:
"One night, I went up to your bedroom . . ."
 6. The sixth shot finds A in the bedroom in long

shot. The composition is lit in deep focus with high-

key lighting. She stands, still in black, slightly left

of center frame, where a dressing table with a large

mirror predominates. In this "imaginary" space, she
addresses X--"Leave me alone, I beg of you . . ."

7. --continuing with the next cut,". . . leave me

alone." This last shot frames X and A in a two-shot

back in the hotel with the ornamental mirror be-

tween them. The camera is placed to the right, more

or less over A's shoulder. But now she is dressed in
white and A is wearing a dark suit and tie. He con-
tinues as if he has not heard her response: "It was
almost summer. Yes, you're right. Ice would be out
of the question."

The camera then follows behind X and A in a medium traveling shot they walk down the
hallway toward the concert salon. They pause and look off right. A pan right follows A as M
arrives from the right side of the frame.

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He says, "Are you going to the concert?" She responds, "I'll meet you later for dinner." Then
there is a pan left and track as she rejoins X.

At this point a voice-off begins and continues until X and A exit left into the concert salon:
"This entire story is now already past. It is accomplished. In a few more seconds it will freeze
forever in its marble past, like these statues, these gardens carved from stone, this hotel itself
with its rooms hereafter empty...."

In describing the bedroom, I put "imaginary" in quotes because there is no basis for judging
whether any of the three locations are more real or imaginary than the others. Nor can it be
said with certainty whether the bedroom is X' fantasy projected "around" A' body or an
"authentic" memory of the past inspired by it. With the disappearance of sensorimotor
connections -- that is, the enchaining of shots by cause and effect measured by the linking of
contiguous actions -- there is no longer a sure measure of the True. There are only repetitive
transformations of the false producing, at the level of description, an indiscerniblity of real
and imaginary. This indiscernibility in turn creates series of equally probable yet contingent
explanations or responses, each equally possible yet all incompossible with one another.

The shifts in time across this relatively simple series of shots are also striking. Diegetic
speech is interlocutory, following a logic of cause and effect in continuity. As the shots
change over speech, however, it is as if the characters respond to one another from a different
present than the one in which they were addressed, the presents themselves implying so many
possible worlds. In shot 4, does A respond to X from the world in which she was addressed?
At the beginning of shot 7, does she continue her plea in the same world in which she began
it? Even within shots, the slight discrepancies are remarkable. At the beginning of shot 7, X
seems to agree with an opinion of A' heard in one possible world, but it is not the one we were
shown. Similarly, M and A address one another in the same shot as if they were speaking
from different worlds. The effect here is a series of images juxtaposing incompossible worlds
that the soundtrack links only in an apparent rather than an actually meaningful way. The final
shift in narration from diegetic speech to the voice-off accomplishes yet another
displacement. "Toute cette histoire est dj maintenant passe." In this phrase the uncanny
Augustinianism of Marienbad asserts itself. The voice-off marks itself as a present of the
future wherein every contingent narrative path has now already terminated itself as the present
of the past. The path presented by the current image thus marks itself as the present of the
present. In turn, the past in itself folds back beyond the purview of the film's narration as

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that which is accomplished, immobile, still, unrepresentable.

In comparing this sequence to the one cited from Sherlock, Jr. in chapter 1, it is evident that
sound -- the spoken rcit -- rather than action preserves a sense of apparent continuity across
otherwise discontinuous images. But the voice is not "in" the images. And in its autonomy the
voice also emphasizes the difference between images. In other words, the continuity of the
rcit -- as either a duration in itself (voice-off) or as the logical connection of snatches of
diegetic speech -- is an index of temporal variation in the images. The chain of images thus
presents incompossible versions of the same present wherein the rcit is repeated. Does the
sequence above begin and end in different "presents"? In shot 7, does X respond correctly
("Yes, you're right") to a present we neither hear nor see wherein A in fact corrects him,
responding to the initial strand of the conversation? In the bedroom, does A respond to X
from a different time and space than the one he "imagines"? In this manner, the
incompossibility of different temporal worlds is implied by the incommensurability of the
presents occupied by different characters.

Therefore, when Deleuze says that Marienbad presents an inexplicable narration, this means
that no single explanation can adjudicate between the competing versions of statements and
descriptions, and indeed several different explanations are possible within themselves yet
contradictory with respect to one another. On this basis the different presents remain distinct
as durations consistent within themselves yet incompossible with one another. This logic
provides an image of time passing not as chronological succession, but as the splitting of the
present into an indeterminate future and a nonchronological past. In this manner, Deleuze
finds in Last Year at Marienbad, and in related films of the time-image, a modeling of time
wherein the divagating paths of the memory-image organize narrative chains that are neither
straight lines nor circles that complete themselves: "its repetitions are not accumulations, its
manifestations refuse to be aligned, or to reconstitute a destiny, but constantly split up any
state of equilibrium and each time impose a new 'meander,' a new break in causality, which
itself forks from the previous one, in a collection of non-linear relations" ( Time-Image49).
The voice appears as an act of memory whose will is to link past and present in a convincing
representation. While this voice is focused on X, it is not ultimately attributable to him.
Memory is invoked as an uncanny force represented less as subjective interiority than as a
"world" in which the characters move. In Resnais, then, Deleuze finds a "rare marriage" of
cinema and philosophy. Not that Resnais applies philosophical concepts to the cinema, or that
his characters discuss philosophy.

-107-

The characters do not remember nor do they act in a diegesis; rather, they are functions in a
memory machine. The logic of memory itself is the model here. The originality of Resnais's
cinema is its visualization of mental functions or processes of thought, not symbolically or
allegorically, but in the logic of temporal and spatial articulations in the narration.

L'anne dernire Marienbad fragments chronological succession into points in the present
whose transitions are inexplicable. Je t'aime, je t'aime presents discontinuous leaps across
layers of the past. The narrative premise of the film is simple. After recovering from an
unsuccessful suicide attempt, a writer, Claude Ridder, is asked to serve as a guinea pig for an
experiment in time travel. The apparatus, referred to in the script as the Sphere, looks like a
soft sculpture of the brain conceived by Claus Oldenburg. Ridder will be sent to one minute in
his past one year ago. Mice have made many successful trips, or, at least, have disappeared
from the machine for one minute; but there is no guarantee that they have actually traveled in
time. The scientists stand witness to the displacement of a physical body, but they need a
speaking consciousness to verify displacement in time, the when of the body's disappearance.

The experiment goes wrong, however. The scientists have a reductionist view of time. They
comprehend movement from the present to the past as displacement along a continuous line.
At four o'clock, Ridder will live for one minute at 5 September 1966 instead of 1967, and then
return for the four minutes "decompression" required to anchor him in the present. Ridder
indeed arrives at this moment -- snorkeling at a beach in the Midi with his companion of
seven years, Catrine. (Later, we discover that Catrine dies several months later; depression
after her death is the implied reason for Ridder's attempt on his own life.) But this minute
does not endure in the form of continuous succession. A series of simple actions -- Ridder
entering the water, snorkeling, surfacing, returning to Catrine -- are instead fragmented and
repeated both in and out of sequence. While this moment will return several times, in the
course of the next hour Ridder will be bumped, randomly it seems, to and fro across moments
experienced in the last sixteen years of his life. The scientists find it impossible to anchor him
in the present.

The scientists have conceived time as a quantity measurable by segmentations of space

ordered in succession. Unable to distinguish between mice and men, they have not thought
through what consciousness means in and as time. Instead, Ridder experiences time as
duration. Memory appears as a "force" of time, as a movement of the past that, ineluctably
divided from the present, keeps splitting and multiplying into unpredictable trajectories. There
are a number of patterns that appear in repeated viewings of the

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film. Certain events serve as "attractors" or points of repeated returning: the beach on the
Midi (9/5/66, eight repetitions); meeting Catrine (9/6/59, four shots); Catrine's death in
Glasgow (/67, six shots); Ridder's confession to his friend, Wiana Lust (3/4/67, six shots);
and several other minor sequences. With only a few exceptions, all of the fragments "in the
past" are presented as single shots of relatively short duration. Even when a number of shots
are devoted to historically specific events, Catrine's death, for example, each of the shots will
be scattered across the film, often out of chronological sequence. While discontinuities in
temporal sequence are extreme, the transitions between shots are often marked by graphic
matches, obscure metonymies, surreal poetic juxtapositions, and, rarely though significantly,
even chronological succession -- for example, awakening from dreams. 12

Like the movements of memory, the passage between shots occurs as associative leaps in time
rather than as the chronological succession of actions in space. In this respect, the film
contrasts two perspectives on time, one that is quantitative, physical, and "scientific," the
other that is qualitative, psychological, and experiential. What happens outside the Sphere
from the point of view of the observers, and from within on the part of the subject, present
distinct narrational temporalities.

The scientists' perspective dominates the expository section of the film. The secret
observation of Ridder in the hospital, the trip to the laboratory in Crespel, and the scientists'
preparation of Ridder all occur chronologically. Even so, there are emphatic ellipses between
sequences (the exposition covers almost a month of story time) and strong discontinuities
between shots. The few axial cuts, for example, barely anchor us across extreme changes in
scale. Matched action cuts are rare; contiguous actions are not portrayed as continuous
movements.

When the experiment begins, three distinct temporal spaces are marked off in the film.
Outside the Sphere, the scientists' perspective marks time experienced as succession in the
present. Each return to the laboratory marks an elapse of chronological time as the scientists
wait and worry. This is roughly equivalent to the screen duration of Ridder's discontinuous
displacements back and forth across sixteen years of his past. Within the Sphere, Ridder
disappears from and returns to the present. But just as there is no communication between the
inside and outside of the Sphere, there are also no "rational" links that permit Ridder to
connect his present to his past and to the present of others in the form of succession. Third,
Ridder experiences his past in the form of de-chronologized irrational intervals. The effect of
this nonlinear editing is striking. For even though the shots of Ridder's returns to the Sphere
and the scientists' attendance out-

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side the Sphere clearly mark the persistence of a chronologically oriented present, they seem
overwhelmed by the force of the larger patterns of nonchronological editing. Their temporal
sequence seems uncertain outside of our general sense of their measure of an elapsed screen
time.

The temporal patterning of the editing is exemplified by fifteen shots that occur rather late in
the film.

This group is marked by clear symmetries. Lasting just over three minutes, the elapsed time
of the shots is roughly equal to the chronological time measured by the scientists. Clearly
bookended by the passage from the laboratory to the Sphere and back again, the shots move
succinctly across the three temporal perspectives established by the film: the chronological
time of the scientists, Ridder's fragmented present in the Sphere, and his discontinuous leaps
in the past.
This brief series also exemplifies a number of stylistic features that Deleuze associates with
direct images of time. Ridder is the perfect protagonist for a collapsed sensorimotor situation.
A seer rather than a doer, his neurotic passivity is less important to the film that his capacity
for observing time's passing, a function underscored by encasing him up to the neck in the
Sphere. More importantly, the premise of the film permits Resnais to dispense with most of
the features of continuity editing, and therefore the logic that groups shots in patterns
motivated by sensorimotor situations defined by rational links and chronological time. The
logic of continuity editing presumes that the passage from one shot to the next is motivated by
a spatial contiguity that follows a line of action as well as a linear chain of causes and effects.
This is what Deleuze calls normal movement. But here the logic of space gives way to one of
time and aberrant movement. No longer do space and time unfold relative to the movement of
bodies or centered by the passing from one action to the next. Instead, time is given for itself
in displacements of space organized by irrational intervals and false continuities. Lacking the
motivation of sensorimotor situations, shots present unlinked and disconnected spaces, all
with their own integral durations. Moreover, the grouping of these delinked spaces takes the
form of heterogeneous series rather than a continuously unfolding chronology or succession.

This accounts for the forms of undecidability or inexplicability peculiar to this film's
narration. The attributions of time and place outlined in the description above are a product of
the script, not of the film as presented to the spectator. This more exact designation of time,
however, deepens rather than resolves the film's paradoxical quality. Rather than
reestablishing a chronology not apparent to the spectator, these attributions reinforce the
temporal vertigo established by the film. For example, in this series of

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Crespel (5 September 1967, 17.08) 1.Laboraatory. High angle, long shot, straight on: the
scientists attempt to immobilize Ridder within the Sphere.

2.Sphere interior. A high-angle, three-quarter shot finds Ridder cocooned up to the neck
by the material of the Sphere. Plage du Nord(1 September 1960, 13.00)

3. Ridder, lying on the sand, raises himselg up on his elbows, beginning from the same
position and fram-ing as the previous shot in the Sphere. Plage du Midi (5 September 1966,
16.00)

4. Ridder and Catrine in bathing suits on the beach. Water laps at their feet.. Crespel

5.Sphere interior (17.09). The franubg if shot 2 is repeated."Il faut que je retrouve cette
minute...": Ridder attempts to anchor homself on year in the past, on the jplage du Midi at
16.00. His speech communicates retroactively ehat he has been trying to do in thought in the
previous three shots, as he tries to summon yhe scene throught a verbal description: "I'm in
the water. The weather is beautiful. Not too hot. Catrine is there on the beach. The water is
warm. I'm swimming underwater. I see the bottom..." Plage du Midi (7 September 1966,
12.00)

6. A miss by two days as Ridder stands on the beach, alone in the rain.

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 Brussels(23 October 1962, daytime) 7. Ridder is dreaming: a man is talking on the phone
in a booth filled with water.

8. Ridder awakens in a Brussels post office as the man emerges, quite dry, from a phone
booth behind him. Brussels, Ridder's apartment (6 March 1967,05.00)

9. Ridder is dreaming. Ridder entertains a stranger, Nicole (the women in the bathtub),
and the Glasgow inspector general who apologizes in perfect French for his inability to
speaak French. There is a cut as the inspector asks'"O est Catrine?"

10.Glasgow hotel room [ 4 January 1967, 18.00]. Catrine is sleeping. The back of
Rigger's head in silhouette dominates the foreground of the frame. A pan right frames a gas
radiaator whose flaames gradually die out. There is sound-off associated with Ridder's
snorkeling underwater on the Midi.

11. Ridder awakens with a start, shouting, "Caatrine!." Brussels, Ridder and Catrine's
apartment (26 Octob ber 1959, 10.00)

12. Ridder and Catrine during happier days, lying together in bed. Catrine offers to write
an encyclopedia of all the excuses Ridder can use for being late for work.

Plage du Midi (5 September 1966, 15.59) 13. Ridder finds the searched-for point in time,
emerging backwards from the water, his snorkeling

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Crespel (5 September 1967 17.12.47) 14.Sphere interior. Ridder despairs, still cocooned
by the Sphere. Four minutes of "lab time" have elapsed.

15.Laboratory. Three-quarter group shot, straighton. The scientists worry over their
equipment. The chief remarks, "In any case, he's returning more and more often."A scientist
replies,"Thirty second intervals between the last two trips. It's never been so brief..."

fifteen shots, the only obvious chronological links occur in the transitions from the lab to the
Sphere and back again, and in Ridder's transitions from dreaming to awakening. But even
here the ambiguities are profound. Shots 9 through 11 present an interesting case. In shot 9
Ridder is dreaming and in shot 11 he wakes. In between is a shot that the script clearly
identifies as "historical"; the script also associates shots 9 and 11 as part of the same temporal
sequence. But in the context of the film itself the placement of shot 10 raises interesting
questions. Shot 10 presents the ambiguity of whether Ridder passively witnessed the flame
going out and did nothing, or whether he turned it off himself. Moreover, does Ridder wake
from the image in shot 9 or shot 10? Is shot 10 really an objective event, or is it an imagined
event? Or is shot 11 truly a de-connected image wherein Ridder awakens from a dream we do
not see? One might argue that the script resolves these seemingly inexplicable questions. But
the apparent objectivity of shot 10 is also undermined by a division between sound and image.
The image may date from 4 January 1967, but the sound dates from Ridder's underwater
excursion on 5 September 1966. A split in temporal perspective occurs within the image.
What time and place does Ridder occupy, and therefore what temporal perspective organizes
our relation to this image? There is no synthetic perspective or point of view that can decide
this question for us, since time seems to fragment or split, for the spectator no less than
Ridder, each time we seek out a link between two or more images.

These images unfold through displacements in memory rather than chronological linking;
space is organized through a logic of false continuity, presenting time as aberrant movement.
There is a graphic match between shots 2 and 3. Ridder prostrate in the Sphere finds a place
in time where he can raise his prone body from the sand. But the search in time for a beach in
the south instead finds an earlier one in the north. Ridder's attempt to focus

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on water and beau temps in shot 5 yields rain in shot 6, a dream in shot 7, and an acoustic
image in shot 10 before the desired scene appears and disappears in shot 13. Here aberrant
movements are ordered by a logic of memory in relation to duration. But memory does not
mean an associative search directed by consciousness. Rather, the nonchronological splitting
of time also presents a division between self-consciousness and duration in the film's
narration. The film does present duration as a force of memory, but this is a nonsubjective and
nonchronological force.

Thus there are definitive demarcations between present and past in the film, as well as
distinctions between two kinds of present, all of which imply a nonlinear force of time that
continually undermines chronological succession. This is a powerful, direct image of time,
which Deleuze clearly associates with Bergson's analysis of memory, or at least with the idea
that what a direct image of time presents is movements in or of memory rather than physical
traversals of space. This means clarifying exactly what conception of memory and time is at
stake.

The most common critique of Bergson is that he reduces time to a subjective experience of
interiority. Regardless of whether or not this critique is just, we might ask: To what extent are
Ridder's displacements in time subjective? For example, do the different temporal spaces in
the film -- that of the laboratory outside the Sphere and the subjects ( Ridder and his
companion, the white mouse) within it -- mark off distinct levels of narration? Most of the
views of the lab are long shots from a slightly high angle. Moreover, the scientists have no
way of seeing or hearing inside the Sphere. They can only register when Ridder disappears
and for how long. They are subjects of an unrestricted narration no less than Ridder himself
and are given no privilege with respect to hierarchies of knowledge presented by the film. In
fact, this unrestricted narration serves to question the scientists' claims to objectivity and
knowledge by emphasizing their helplessness.

Alternatively, Ridder's experience of the past is not "subjective" in the usual sense of the
word. There are cues suggesting depth of narration. Each of the discontinuous fragments of
the past are marked by spatial association; we can see only those events where Ridder himself
has been, and camera movements are organized to that end. But we do not inhabit Ridder's
mental subjectivity. There is little "depth" suggested by markers of subjectivity in these
images. Even in the fragments marked as Ridder's dreams, the camera remains relatively
objective, playing on an indiscernibility between what is "mental" and what is objective, and
thus collapsing a sure distinction between what is imaginary and what is real. Our view is
always from the outside.

Thus an unrestricted narration dominates in the film, passing from one

 -114-

temporal space to another. Alternatively, restrictions in the range of narration isolate three
temporal perspectives: Ridder's nonchronological past, his fragile present, and the present of
the scientists as the successive chronology of elapsed time. In so doing, Resnais remaps how
objective and subjective is thought in relation to present and past.

The time machine, even the idea of time travel, is a MacGuffin in this film. Like all fictions of
time travel, Je t'aime, je t'aime assumes that we are "in" time. But at question here is how
time is presented and how we are assumed to "inhabit" it. What concepts does it suppose in
relation to history and memory? What does it mean for us to endure in time? Unlike George
Pal's version of The Time Machine ( 1960), this is not a question of movement back and forth
on a line of time, of accelerating space forward and backward in a fourth dimension. Instead,
Je t'aime, je t'aime presents three paradoxes of time concerning what it is and how we "move"
in it.

The first paradox states that the past in general should be considered nonsubjective memory.
It is true that the images of Ridder's past organize a restricted narration. Each fragment is
marked by spatial association; the spectator can follow in time only where Ridder has been.
The spectator even sees Ridder's dreams and follows Ridder from dreaming to waking. But
none of these shots are composed as optically or mentally subjective. All of the images of the
past have a curious distance and objectivity to them. Without the external aid of the script, a
first-time viewer will find most of the dream sequences entirely indiscernible from the
discontinuous series in which they are imbedded.

The impression overall, then, is of an objective, if discontinuous, flux of time. In this, Je

t'aime, je t'aime can be contrasted with La jete. In the latter, it is ambiguous whether the
protagonist travels physically or only mentally in time. Moreover, he travels in the past in
general rather than in his own past. Alternatively, Ridder disappears from the present to
appear when, where, and how he was. He travels in his own past, but it is less his memory --
as a mentally subjective space -- than his history that is explored. While the protagonist of La
jete does seem to travel by "subjective" means, Ridder's displacements are entirely objective.
The three temporal spaces organize shifts in levels of unrestricted narration rather than from
objective to subjective spaces. These shifts imply the overlapping of three heterogeneous and
completely autonomous durations: that of the scientists where chronological time elapses;
Ridder's past, discontinuous yet objective and inalterable, organized as distinct if
noncontiguous layers; and Ridder's present, which has become disconnected from his past and
his immediate future. La jete appears to be a mental voyage in a generalized past, the
departure from and return to chronological time by an individual. Ridder's is

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an objective displacement restricted to his own past that is embedded in distinctively different
durations signified by shifts in an unrestricted narration. The past is depicted as memory, but
as a nonsubjective memory.

The second paradox is common to time-travel narratives. It might be called the "two-body"
problem. Time-travel films generally prohibit the encounter of a past and present self and
insist that there can be only a single consciousness in time. (Violation of this rule can have
gruesome consequences, as shown in Timecop [ 1994 ].) Most films treat this problem by
sending protagonists out of their own duration, that is, before their birth or after their death. In
The Terminator, for example, Kyle Reese is displaced to a time where he has not yet been
born in order to father the future. La jete has a more interesting spin. Given a choice, the
protagonist travels ineluctably to a point in the past where, as a child, he witnesses the murder
of his adult body. The comparison is interesting. There is a general supposition that the past is
"objective" in the sense that, for example, one could travel in a past where one existed as a
child. But time-travel narratives tend to find uncanny this doubling of personhood. (The Back
to the Future series plays this to great comic effect.) Conventionally, consciousness of a dual
existence in the past is "illegal." In La jete it measures the destiny in time of the protagonist.
The film begins with his childhood witnessing of an assassination on the quay at Orly; it ends
with the realization that it is his adult self that is murdered. The recent remake 12 Monkeys (
1995) reworks but in no way challenges this idea.

In these films, characters move in a past that, although permeated with their personal and
historical "destiny," is nevertheless not restricted by their memory of events. In the past they
remain conscious of their displacement in time. Wherever they are in time is nevertheless a
consciousness of the present. In narratives where time is organized as destiny, this leap into
the past is nothing more nor less than a chronological extension of the protagonists' present,
that is, their present destiny. It seems plausible that their memory is preserved, since a voyage
"into the past" is merely a prolongation of their present. In addition, their leap into the
historical past is, from the point of view of their own personhood, linear and chronological,
simply the unfolding of their personal destiny. One might say, then, that history is subjective
here in the sense that it is depicted as the playing out of personal destiny.

Je t'aime, je t'aime uses the device of time travel for different philosophical ends while
preserving the "law" of a single consciousness in time. Rather than preserving consciousness
and doubling the body, Ridder's consciousness of time is split while his body is preserved. In
the past, Ridder exists as he was; there is no doubling of his existence in time nor his con-

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sciousness of time. The result is that the past is preserved in itself instead of being portrayed
as an extension of the present. The film maintains an ineluctable division between past and
present, while simultaneously dividing Ridder's consciousness of time. Only in the present
does he have self-consciousness of the passing present, the division of present and past, as
well as the nonchronological persistence of layers of the past. The past preserved in itself is
experienced as an "unconscious" that is nonetheless "objective." As visualized by the film,
time passes from dreaming to waking states without a perceptible shift just as easily as it
unfolds nonchronologically across layers of the past.

Thus Je t'aime, je t'aime preserves the law of a single consciousness of time by challenging
definitions of both time and consciousness. There is a single consciousness, but it is split
topographically. If Ridder suffers from his experience, it is not from a dual existence in time
but from an excessive consciousness in time. Ridder is brought face-to-face with a view of
time that we all must suppress in order to maintain our quotidian existence. Each brief interval
of the past preserves a bit of time as succession, the simple, homogeneous present perception
that Bergson calls our "attention to life." But returning to the Sphere, Ridder must face the
topographical splitting of time, a self-consciousness of time passing alongside the coexistence
of the present with the nonchronological preservation of all the past.
The third paradox addresses the Leibnizian problem of contingent futures and determined
pasts. What does "movement" in time mean? In Je t'aime, je t'aime the past is determined and
inalterable -- time passes as the inexorable and nonchronological movements of memory.
Conversely, the present opens onto a contingent future. Only in the present are we free to
make choices and exert our will.

Again, this contrasts with other time-travel narratives. Kyle Reese remains an action hero
when he travels to the past. The protagonist of La jete moves "mentally" in the past, mostly
only as a witness. Both, however, can act there with a self-consciousness derived from the
future. Displaced into the past, Ridder exists there as he was. In the past, he can in no way
witness himself self-consciously from the point of view of an older personhood. Nor can he
act in the past in any way since he lacks self-consciousness from the point of view of his
"future." How, then, do we know that a displacement in time has occurred? Because of
Ridder's retroactive realization in the Sphere of why he saw a white mouse on the beach, his
companion in time, on 24 September 1962 at four o'clock.

What are the consequences of this specific visualization of time? Despite their being very
different films, both La jete and The Terminator present an image of time as a fixed and
inalterable line that extends from the past

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through the present into the future. 13 Here time is presented as a "space," or a fourth
dimension in which one moves back and forth as freely as one wants while preserving one's
will and one's consciousness of time. This idea of time as a continuous, extended, and
homogeneous space is supported by the idea that "history" will not be altered in the two films.
Kyle Reese returns to the past to preserve the future and fulfill his narrative destiny. In La
jete, the choice has always already been made by the future to help the past since the future
exists, and the protagonist will always return to his destiny on the quay at Orly.

In each case, consciousness in itself remains indivisible. For Ridder, however, there is a single
consciousness in time. But since time itself is split, there is a qualitatively different
consciousness for the present and the past. A homunculus or ghost in the machine, a
consciousness within the "brain" of the machine, Ridder comes to understand the division
between the past and the present, but he is no longer able to link them nor extend them to a
future. He is no longer a subject who can act in time. Rather he is moved in time, split
between the present that passes in the Sphere and the fragmented and discontinuous layers of
his past life. There is memory in the film: in the present Ridder recalls that he has been
displaced in time, which is all the difference between him and the mouse who experiences the
present as it is, no matter "where" it is. But this displacement is itself objective, and all the
more so since self-consciousness in past time is absent from it.

Thus, the image of time travel in Je t'aime je t'aime illustrates precisely one of the principal
arguments in The Time-Image. "[T]he only subjectivity is time," Deleuze writes, "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" (82). That we are in time is the highest paradox: like Ariadne's
thread, this thesis winds its way through Deleuze's long and varied philosophical career. And,
according to Deleuze, Resnais's is the most philosophical cinema. What, then, is the relation
between film and philosophy? Complicating and deepening this question is the task of the
next four chapters.

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PART II FORCE, POWER, RESISTANCE

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5 CRITIQUE, OR TRUTH IN CRISIS

The will to truth requires a critique -- let us thus define our own task -- the value of truth must
for once be experimentally called into question.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

In part I of this book, I focused on giving a formal sense of what direct images of time are. In
the second part, I want to pursue the question of what direct images of time do. Are they
simply compelling analogues for the concepts and ideas of Deleuze's philosophy of time? Do
they "represent" thought in some sense?

One important consequence of the passage from an indirect image of time as spatial
succession to a direct image is the displacement of a quantitative view of time by a qualitative
one where time is given as a force. In this respect, the relation between time and movement
must be reconsidered. More than any other philosopher before Bergson, Kant transformed
how time is conceived in relation to movement. Prior to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,
philosophy subordinated time to movement. The image of time was inseparable from the
moving hands of a clock: the designation of points, successively replacing one another on a
spatial continuum that was ultimately circular and closed. But in the first Critique, Kant
pulled "time out of joint,"

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lifting it off its hinges with movement. Whereas philosophy once considered time the spatial
image of movement, now movement had to be rethought in relation to time. 1 What the time-
image presents directly is not time in itself; rather, time presents itself as a force. One sense of
force here is that which subordinates or disrupts movement as spatial succession. If time is
given as a perception in modern cinema, as Jean-Louis Schefer claims, this is an image of
time's displacements of space that result in aberrant movements or false continuities. The
alignment of space and time in empirical succession is dislodged, permitting an intuition of
time's transcendental forms.

In that the direct time-image is a sign, however, it does not represent, much less represent
thought. Rather, it provokes thought or "forces" us to think. When Deleuze writes of an image
of thought, this image is not the projection of some predetermined interiority, the workings of
an ephemeral mind that finds itself abstracted in external matter. Rather, time appears as a
force that provokes thought by disjoining it from its image or "truthful" self-representation.
"The conditions of a true critique and a true creation," Deleuze argues, "are the same: the
destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of
thinking in thought itself" ( Difference and Repetition139). Here three figures rival Bergson in
importance for the cinema books: Kant, Nietzsche, and Spinoza. Each philosopher presents a
different approach to the question of how time puts truth into crisis and so provokes thought.

Critique in the Kantian sense, which asks how a thing is known, is a central question for both
cinema books. From a Kantian perspective, the important distinction is between time in its
essence and in its forms of being known. With Nietzsche the critique implied by the direct
time-image takes a different form. Important here is the critique of value and how the powers
of the false are related to a will to power and the eternal return. Following Spinoza, Deleuze
asks how the time-image affects our power to think? Three questions, then, inform a
qualitative account of philosophy's encounter with the time-image: What are time's forms of
being known? How do the powers of the false replace the form of the True? How does the
time-image affect our power to think?

In the Republic, Socrates explains that contradictory perceptions found the experiences that
provoke thought. Plato, it must be said, is ambivalent about this idea. The Platonic theory of
the image is complex, distinguising between model and copy (the immaterial Idea and its
physical embodiment) but also between the eikon or good copy and bad copies in the form of
phantasmata or simulacra. As Ronald Bogue points out, Plato's concern is to distinquish
between true and the false copies, those which have an inner resemblance to the ideal as
opposed to an external or illusory sem-

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blance. But it is not good or bad representation that interests Deleuze, nor is this a question of
Baudrillard's simulacra -- postmodernity defined as the proliferation of images without
models. "What Plato fears in illusory simulacra, claims Deleuze, are entities with no fixed
identity, contradictory or disguised entities in which the dimension of an unlimited and
illogical becoming is revealed" (Bogue 56). These are paradoxical objects, capable of
expressing difference in itself, that provoke thought to its proper activity: an unthought in
thought that resists or even challenges those forces that freeze or curtail thought in the form of
universal consensus or "common sense." In order to think, or better, to understand our powers
of thought, we need simulacra as figures of uncommon sense. 2

Understanding time's forms of being known is the descriptive project of the second pure
semiotic -- the definition of chronosigns and the forms of falsifying narration. Our
understanding of what chronosigns do, and what time means as a "medium" of cinematic
expression, must still be deepened. In what ways does time appear as a simulacral force?
What are the transcendental forms of time? What does movement become when it is
subordinated to time, that is, when empirical succession in space is displaced by
dechronologized moments? Four possible responses to these questions include duration, an
act of memory, the passing present, and, finally, what Deleuze has called the passive
syntheses of time.

For Bergson the transcendental form of time is the dure, whose reality is an indivisible,
ceaseless, and ever-changing flow. Obviously, cinema -- with its beginnings, endings, and
exact repetition in each projection -- ultimately falls short of a complete mapping of duration.
Still, Bergson does grant art the ability to provoke an image directing perception to an
intuition that only philosophy can ultimately deepen. 3 Even indirect images of time retain
something of duration, and thus provide an important intuition of time in their own way.
Remember that, in its primary form, time flows as the universal variation, or constant
universal change, that Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. Despite the varieties of
framings, centers, continuities, and commensurabilities elaborated in the history of
movement-images -- all of which have the property of subordinating time to space -- more
than any other art form, cinema still retains the quality of continually eroding these spatial
centers and horizons in an ideal return to the dizzying regime of universal variation. In this
manner, Deleuze's volume The Movement-Image presents movement as a primary force: the
image of change as universal variation that subtends every cinematic image. Even a simple,
static shot may retain this image of time as a simple duration. Thus, the movementimage may
give a perception of change and duration in their original mobility. But in order to apprehend
a direct image of time, the image must

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be released from sensorimotor situations and freed from the elaboration of wholes.

Here Deleuze's appropriation of Bergson's intermediate or mediating image (image moyenne)

as the basis for defining the cinematic movementimage must be reconsidered. For Bergson,
the image moyenne is a figure of thought. The image facilitates contact between matter and
mind since it shares equally in the materiality of things while retaining the immateriality of
thought. It is, writes Bergson in "Philosophical Intuition,""an image which is almost matter in
that it still allows itself to be seen, and almost mind in that it no longer allows itself to be
touched" ( Creative Mind118). No doubt Deleuze sees in Bergson's definition an exact
description of the cinematographic image.

This idea implies another important theme of Bergsonism: We perceive in space, but we think
in time. The difference between an indirect and direct image of time can also be distinguished
on this basis. The vicissitudes of the movement-image follow out the diverse encounters of
perception and matter, giving an image of change as variation in space. The basic figure here -
time's form of being known -- is the open totality in movement. But when perception
withdraws from matter, another dimension of the image opens up. Movement becomes a
standard of comparison rather than a primary force, and succession gives way to new forms of
linking and transforming images -- false continuities and aberrant movements. Perhaps
universal variation can underwrite a direct image of time, but only if this absolute movement
ceases to be relativized and localized according to the measure of the sensorimotor schema,
with its centers of motion and rational links.

A second possible solution is that movement becomes an act of memory. Bergson says as
much in the third chapter of Matter and Memory: "Whenever we are trying to recover a
recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis
by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past
in general, then, in a certain region of the past -- a work of adjustment, something like the
focusing of a camera" (133-34). As I discussed earlier, one might think of the time-image as
equivalent to a memory-image. Rather than time's being measured by action and physical
movement in space, it becomes a "mental" movement represented by the activity of
recollection. The cinema of the time-image would then become a cinema of subjectivity and
consciousness. It would be a cinema "about" voyages into memory, dream, and fantasy rather
than explorations of the physical world. This is precisely how most modern European cinema
is discussed.
There is some justification for this position in Bergson to the extent that he stresses the
continuities linking perception, the memory-image, and

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pure memory in any act of recollection. 4 Deleuze, however, is quite clear that in the cinema
recollection-images (mnemnosigns) and dream-images (onirosigns) are the products of
sensorimotor situations

whose interval they are content to fill, even though lengthening and distending it;
[recollection-images] seize a former present in the past and thus respect the empirical
progression of time, even though they introduce local regressions in it (the flashback as
psychological memory).... [D]ream-images, rather affect the whole: they project the sensory-
motor situation to infinity, sometimes by ensuring the constant metamorphosis of the
situation, sometimes by replacing the action of the characters with a movement of world. But
we do not, in this way, leave behind an indirect representation, even though we come close, in
certain exceptional cases, to doors of time that already belong to modern cinema.... Time-
Image273)

The virtual image as pure memory refers neither to consciousness nor to a psychological state.
Indeed, if Alain Resnais succeeds in representing time as nonsubjective memory, then the
subjective can no longer be defined as separate from or in contrast to the objective. Rather, as
Deleuze writes, "it exists outside of consciousness, in time, and we should have no more
difficulty in admitting the virtual insistence of pure recollections [ souvenirs purs ] in time
than we do for the actual existence of non-perceived objects in space" (80).

At this point, however, Deleuze's discussion of the actual and virtual must again be redefined
and deepened. Beyond the voyages of memory or dream there is a more fundamental
"movement" of time presented by its direct image. Movement in this sense is neither a
passage in space nor a drama of memory, but rather how we conceptualize the passing of time
and orientate the present in relation to past and future. In chronological time, the present has a
curious existence. It is simply a point moving continuously on a line where the present
burrows into the future, leaving the past behind in its wake. The present is the constantly
moving division of the future into the past. But if we look directly at the actually given
"present" considered as an interval of time, time appears as a paradoxical image. The linearity
of time begins to break up. How are we to grasp the present and distinguish it absolutely from
the past it has already become and the future it is too rapidly overtaking? The point is, we
cannot. Following St. Augustine, we see passing time shatter into an event composed
simultaneously of a present of the future, a present of the present, and a present of the past,
each of which is distinct and incommensurable.

Thus the third sense in which time moves is through its passing. This

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passage is neither linear nor chronological because time is continuously forking, splitting off
in one direction toward an undetermined future while disappearing into another, the absolute
past. This is how Bergson responds in Mind-Energy to the question How is memory formed? 5
We can only have an image of time passing if, while an image is formed in perception, it is
simultaneously preserved in the past as the image it once was. While these are two "sides" of
the same memory-image, they nonetheless differ in nature: present-actual-spatial-perception
as opposed to past-virtualtemporal-memory. This is why Deleuze argues that what the image-
crystal ultimately presents is "the most fundamental operation of time..., the 'vanishing limit
between the immediate past which is already no longer and the immediate future which is not
yet...[a] mobile mirror which endlessly reflects perception into recollection' " ( Time-
Image81). At each moment, time divides into present and past -- a present that passes and a
past that is preserved. And as each moment divides it also doubles: the past coexists with the
present that it once was; the past is preserved in itself as a nonchronological time, a virtual
archive of the past in general. This is why memory will never be correctly represented by the
"cinematographic illusion" -- a linear succession of still images. The actual is always a
present, but a present that changes. At one and the same time the image is present and past,
still present and already passing.

This is the deepest paradox of time that the time-image presents. The "smallest possible
circuit" -- the OA of Bergson's first diagram -- forms an incommensurable division between
perception and memory, the actual and the virtual. Virtuality means that the past coexists with
the present it once was. The present is an actual image; its contemporaneous past disappears
in time as its virtual image. Bergson characterizes this phenomenon as a continuous
duplication of the present into perception on one hand and recollection on the other: "Our
actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual
existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and
virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other.... Whoever becomes conscious
of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and memory... will compare himself
to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself play" (
Mind-Energy135-38). The virtual image as "pure" recollection differs in nature from any
mental image that may actualize it.

We are closer to understanding what time is in relation to cinematic expression. Cinematic

movement-images emerge from the regime of universal variation where "matter=image." In
this manner, they give rise to signs that are so many extensions and variations of the relation
between perception

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and matter. Alternatively, time-images emerge from what Deleuze calls, in Difference and
Repetition, the three passive syntheses of time. What I have referred to as the passing present,
Deleuze defines as the founding (fondation) of time by the contraction of moments into three
incommensurable points: a passing present, a conservation of the past, and an indeterminate
protention of the future. The second synthesis presents the foundation (fondement) of time as
virtuality, the preservation of all of the past as nonchronological strata. The third synthesis,
which is undoubtedly the most difficult, is the common denominator linking Deleuze's
interest in Bergson, Kant, and Nietzsche. This involves not a subjective voyage in memory,
but rather, understanding the "pure form of time" or the "unfounding" (ffondement) of
nonchronological time as constitutive of subjectivity itself, presented, on the one hand, by
Kant's critique of pure reason and, on the other, by Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return. 6

These are among the most difficult pages of Deleuze's argument. Deleuze notes that the
history of philosophy often reduces Bergson's thought on duration to the idea of a subjective
interiority. For Bergson, however, the dure does not refer to psychological introspection but
to a continuous and complex intercalation of perception and memory that mocks every
dualism of mind and body or mind and nature. As I asked in my reading of Je t'aime, je
t'aime: Since there is no sense in dividing inside and outside, subject and object, how can
"time" be characterized either as something experienced psychologically "inside" or as an
external medium in which we are moving? In its deepest sense, Deleuze argues, Bergson's
meditations on time 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.... Subjectivity is
never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, 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 definition of time. ( Time-Image82-83)

Deleuze's arguments are made less obscure by returning to his account of Kant's
transcendental philosophy. Bergson suggests that the direct apprehension of the splitting of
time into present and past, as the duplication of the past into perception by memory, would be
experienced as a kind of spiritual automatism. The form of address suggested by the direct
image of time

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presumes a philosophical subject that is, precisely, the transcendental position of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason. This subject thinks in the form of division, but it is neither that of
Cartesian dualism nor that of psychoanalysis per se. The latter two represent spatial divisions.
Kant restores time's relation to thought, and in so doing finds a new way of thinking through
the constitutive divisions of subjectivity. Thus transcendental philosophy is not, as a more
commonplace view would have it, a way of restoring a "transcendent" identity and unity to
the subject by overcoming the antimony between the senses and reason. Rather, Kant
discovers a way of defining the subject through his "unhinging" of time from movement.

The originality of Deleuze's reading of Kant is important for understanding all that is implied
in a direct image of time. Deleuze's position is laid out succinctly in his preface to the English
translation of Kant's Critical Philosophy. Here, the "spiritual automatism" remarked upon by
Bergson is reconsidered under Rimbaud's formula "I is an other." 7

How the I becomes other, or how time is defined by "the affection of self by self," is the
difficulty confronted here. The clearest way of explaining the link between Kant and Bergson
is to say that both refuse to think the form of time as a chronological and linear succession in
space. When Deleuze argues that Kant unhinges time from movement, the definition of
"movement" is radically transformed. Movement can no longer be imagined as physical
movement in space; it must be reconsidered as the form of change through time. This is what
"movement" finally means in the volume on The Time-Image. The direct image of time
presents the inventiveness of time: the possibility of the appearance of the new and
unforeseen, a possibility renewed at each moment of time.

The questions of how and in what ways thought is determinable with respect to the forms of
time must now be reconsidered. Kant's solution, according to Deleuze, is to define time as the
immutable Form of everything that changes and moves. All that moves or changes is in time,
but time itself neither changes nor moves. This does not mean that time is eternity. If so, we
would be caught in the tautology of defining time by time. Rather it is "the form of that which
is not eternal, the immutable form of change and movement" ( Kant's Critical Philosophy
viii). Time is change: the fact that the universe never stops moving, changing, and evolving. 8

Therefore, there are two perspectives on time, one that passively witnesses change without
finality, the other that understands, through a transcendental synthesis, that what does not
change is change itself. In this manner, the form of time presumes a division of the subject
into a passive Ego (Moi) that is in time and constantly changing, and an I (Je) that actively
carries out a synthesis of time by continually dividing up the present, past,

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and future. When Deleuze asserts that "I am separated from myself by the form of time," he is
arguing that the ego cannot constitute itself as a unique and active subject. Rather, it is a
"passive ego which represents to itself only the activity of its own thought; that is to say, the I,
as an Other which affects it" ( Kant's Critical Philosophy ix).

In Deleuze's reading of Kant, the form of time modulates continually between the synthetic
act of the I and the ego to which this act is attributed. The continual splitting of time that
doubles perception with memory also constitutes a fundamental division of the subject.

Thus time moves into the subject, in order to distinguish the Ego from the I in it. It is the form
under which the I affects the ego, that is, the way in which the mind affects itself. It is in this
sense that time as immutable form, which could no longer be defined as simple succession,
appeared as the form of interiority (inner sense), whilst space, which could no longer be
defined by coexistence, appeared for its part as the form of exteriority. "Form of interiority"
means not only that time is internal to us, but that our interiority constantly divides us from
ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no
end. A giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time. ( Kant's Critical Philosophy ix)

This is how Kant overturns Descartes's cogito. Instead of thinking in the form of identity
where I=I, Kant presents an I fractured (je fl) by the division of time. Descartes
disingenuously conceals this division, as does most Western philosophy. While the cogito
must assume it is present to itself in thought, what it predicates, the object of its thinking,
must nevertheless always be divided from it by the form of time. This is why time cannot be
known as in itself. Once intuited it divides, branches, and slips away. 9 In Ronald Bogue's
account, just as "the spatium is the groundless depth from which issues the dimensional space
of the extensio, so the pure and empty form of time is the groundless form of time from which
issues the foundation of time (the virtual past), the founding of time (the living present) and
the empirical time of common sense" (66). Here the certainty of the cogito becomes a kind of
quantum uncertainty. I contemplate thought, but within my self-reflection thought changes
and keeps on changing; its movements are nonlocalizable. Is my thought in the ego or the I? It
is, rather, in the division that constitutes them both in the impersonal form of time. 10

This division in the subject has profound epistemological consequences represented by what
Deleuze calls the "powers of the false" (les puissances du faux). The time-image's strategies
of falsifying narration -- whose qualities include inexplicability, undecidability, and
incompossibility -- are one
 -129-

way of addressing this concept. While this idea is Nietzschean in inspiration, one way to think
of it is as a "power" in Kant's sense. Kant considered judgment as a power (Kraft), the ability
to do work or to prepare the way for a synthesis, rather than as a mental "faculty" or capability
(Vermgen). If the direct image of time is figured in the form of temporal paradox, the True
can no longer be thought under the forms of the changeless, the selfidentical, or the self-same.
What used to be called the "laws" of thought (the principles of identity, of contradiction, and
of the excluded middle) are effectively overthrown. Kant shrank away from the consequences
of his discovery in making judgment teleological. Nietzsche, alternatively, seized the
opportunity. If the forms of truth are temporal, then we are freed from the reactive or passive
position of "discovering" a preexisting truth. Instead, we are active and creative, inventing our
world as we move through it. What Deleuze finds so attractive in the paradoxes of time is
simultaneously Kantian and critical, and Nietzschean and inventive. What is most true and
most immutable is that thought in relation to time is always changing. If we are willing to see
truth in its historical and embattled forms, we are in the position of actively willing it. Time is
invention or it is nothing at all.

The Kantian aspects of Deleuze's analysis relate to time's forms of being known in relation to
an image. Most importantly, this includes the problem of description in the crystalline image
and the orders of time, represented by points of present and strata of the past, with their
corresponding forms of narration. But just as Nietzsche faults Kant for excluding values from
philosophical critique, Deleuze uses the concept of the powers of the false to shift from the
largely descriptive project of the second pure semiotic to a qualitative analysis of how the
cinematic time-image answers a specifically philosophical question: What is thinking? But
perhaps this question is posed badly, or rather, we may not yet be in a position to pose it
properly. Deleuze echos Nietzsche's dissatisfaction with Kant's presentation of philosophical
questions in the transcendental form of "What is?" The problem of defining cinema's noosigns
does begin with a transcendental critique: What is thought in relation to the cinematic image?
or, What image of thought is presented in the movement-image, as well as the time-image?
But the powers of the false are better understood by reasserting the question of values in the
Nietzschean sense. This involves not the question of thinking, but the relation between
thought and the form of the True. The best questions to pursue here are: What will to truth
informs organic narration? Who wants the truth and why, and how does their perspective
inform a film's narration no less than its reading? Alternatively, what powers are unleashed by
a critique of values?

In the volume on The Time-Image, the Nietzchean critique of value is an

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exploration of the relation between time and thinking. This is not necessarily "thought," which
implies an accomplished event. Rather, thinking is posed as an act, an event in the form of
becoming -- in short, as movement. Understanding what "critique" means clarifies Deleuze's
project in the film books in important ways. The ideas of "criticism" and "interpretation"
practiced in Deleuze's readings of films should be understood only within the context of his
particular approach to Nietzsche. Only in this respect is it possible to understand, in Deleuze's
view, how films are philosophical and what philosophy contributes to an understanding of
film.
As Deleuze explains in Nietzsche and Philosophy, the critique of value encompasses two
inseparable activities: interpretation and evaluation. "To interpret," Deleuze writes, "is to
determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power
which gives value to a thing" (54). The analysis of force is in fact the province of a certain
semiology. The idea of force should be understood neither as originating cause nor as agency
in the sense of self-conscious will. Rather, it refers to an event, or more precisely, a set of
relationships organizing events, phenomena, or propositions, as well as their genesis. For
example, the genetic element of the sign-types deduced in the first semiotic all follow from
the movementimage defined as a force whose qualities derive from the plane of immanence or
the regime of universal variation (relative and absolute movement, etc.). The primary question
of interpretation in this sense is not What does it mean? but rather What makes meaning?
What relations or forces organize this phenomenon and account for its emergence and
individuation? Philosophy, in Deleuze's account, is a "symptomology or semeiology" whose
task is to evaluate how a sign finds meaning in an existing force and how signs are organized
in the play of forces dramatized within them. 11

Deleuze's account of pure optical and sound images (opsigns and sonsigns) and the ordering
of time (chronosigns) are interpretations in this sense. Just as the force giving sense to
cinematic movement-images refers back to the qualities of movement derived from the plane
of immanence, what gives sense to time-images is the force of time as a primordial act of
memory, a present that passes (into perception and memory), the pure form of time as the
(un)founding of subjectivity, and, finally, the force of time as change or pure becoming. Each
one of these forms of time is dramatized as a force or play of forces in Bergson's schemata
except for the last, the force of time as change or becoming. Now, to evaluate the qualities of
direct time-images means comprehending which will to power gives value to them. Bergson's
idea of creative evolution is one way of describing the force of time as change; Deleuze's
account of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is a better way of interpreting the force of time in
the cinema books. And from the idea of

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the eternal return we can better comprehend the powers of the false as the will to power of
time-images.

In retrospect, Deleuze's view of Kant is very Nietzschean. So much so that the definition of
time given in the English preface to the Kant book ("the form of that which is not eternal, the
immutable form of change and movement") could be given equally well as a definition of the
eternal return. Eternal recurrence should not be confused with a mechanistic and cyclical time.
Nor is it the return of the same. It is, rather, the highest affirmation of difference, not the
return of being and the self-same, but that of becoming and difference. Eternal recurrence is a
pure becoming whose value is affirmed by reconsidering the philosophical conundrum of how
the present passes. Deleuze argues that being and becoming should be considered neither as
distinct nor opposed categories. Instead, we should ask:

What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming?
Returning is the being of that which becomes [Revenir, l'tre de ce qui devient ]. "That
everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being --
high point of the meditation" [ Will to Power617]. This problem for the meditation must be
formulated in yet another way; how can the past be constituted in time? How can the present
pass? The passing moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come -- at
the same time as being present. If the present did not pass of its own accord, if it had to wait
for a new present in order to become past, the past in general would never be constituted in
time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait, the moment must be
simultaneously present and past, present and yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass
for the sake of other moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. (
Nietzsche and Philosophy48)

This argument should be familiar. It is Deleuze's most replete account of the third schema of
time where the present forks into an indeterminate future and falls back into the past. But how
does this descriptive image of time serve as the foundation of the eternal return? There is no
principle of identity, concept, or being that is not also affirmed in becoming. Thus the present
cannot persist in itself without also losing its ontological character as a state of the now. This
state includes both the diversity of time as a multiplicity of points (present of present, of past,
and of future) as well as the synthesis of time wherein the present grounds its relation to the
past and future. Without affirming the becoming of being, neither this multiplicity in relation
to unity or diversity in identity nor their indiscernibility can be accounted for. This is why the
eternal return must not be interpreted

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as the return of the one or the return of the same. "It is not being that returns," Deleuze argues,

but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and
of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the
one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal
return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of
returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a
synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction,
a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double
affirmation. ( Nietzsche and Philosophy48) 12

A direct imaging of nonchronological time may provide a fundamental philosophical

intuition. Just as there is no present that does not differ from itself as moments of past and
future, while simultaneously carrying out a synthesis that allows the present to pass and the
future to emerge, there is no identity -- as concept, body, event, or consciousness of self --
that is not affirmed in the principle of becoming as the return of difference. Here, then, is the
fundamental quality of the direct image of time: "That the present moment is not a moment of
being or of present 'in the strict sense,' that it is the passing moment, forces us to think of
becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have started, and cannot finish,
becoming" (48)

The more quotidian connotations of the word "force" may give a misleading idea of the will
to power. Thinking is a matter of affirmation, not determination. Indeed, what the direct
image of time shows is the incommensurability of thought and determination in relation to
identity or being. Force is not coercion. Rather, the quality of incommensurability
demonstrates that we cannot think otherwise than in the streams of time or in the form of
nonidentity. An image could only determine thought under the form of identity. What
Deleuze searches to define here is not a forcing of thought, but a way of affirming in time the
force or relations of forces that put thought in movement or make thought an act. We must
evaluate what power or powers affect thought through time's qualities of recurrence,
differentiation, and becoming. In short, we must evaluate which will to power appears in the
powers of the false. 13

Understanding the powers that are affirmed in the powers of the false requires comprehending
what constitutes the "will to truth." Who wants the truth and what do they will in wanting it?

There is a Nietzchean aesthetic in Deleuze, but it does not derive from Nietzsche's early
"aesthetic" writings composed under the influence of

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Schopenhauer. Deleuze's Nietzscheanism derives, rather, from the critique of truth that
unfolds across the mature writings -- The Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and
The Will to Power. To understand how the false becomes a power, or expresses a will to
power in the direct timeimage, means understanding what the desire for truth wills. For the
world to be true, or to be subject to a truthful description, it would have to be static and
unchanging. Both Nietzsche and Bergson oppose this mechanistic world to a world of
continual change composed of a multiplicity of forces and of a constant becoming where
relations of identity are unstable and in flux. In this respect, Deleuze argues that "the 'true
world' does not exist, and, if it did, would be inaccessible, impossible to describe, and, if it
could be described, would be useless, superfluous" ( Time-Image137). 14 If a replete
description of this world were possible, life itself would disappear into static, lifeless signs.
How then can "life" be restored to philosophy, or how can philosophy be made responsive to
the forces of life?

The organic narration of the movement-image subscribes entirely to this mechanistic picture
of the world. What fascinates Deleuze most, of course, is how the specter of absolute
movement continually reappears as a force organizing the genesis and composition of the
signs of the movement-image. But despite their diversity, each one of these signs is organized
by a will to power that is negative and limiting. In the signs of the movement-image, the
quality of absolute movement always returns to relativistic centers even while it erodes those
centers. I have already discussed what constitutes this "truthful" description: identity (an
image that stands as a complete description of a preexisting reality); reduction (the image of
the whole informs each of the parts as well as their relation to one another); continuity
(movements unfolding in sensorimotor situations linked by rational intervals); and circularity
(the end must reply to the beginning as the answer to the question or the completion of the
virtual by the actual). 15

Evaluating these principles means understanding which will to power values them, and from
what perspective such an image demands to be read. Deleuze calls this perspective the system
of judgment. Judgment demands one who wants the truth, both as protagonist and spectator,
and thus one who wants to judge the world from a transcendent perspective. The will to
power of organic narration seeks to confirm itself in an image of Truth as the selfsame, or
repetition as resolution rather than differentiation.

There is really only one scenario dramatized in organic narration, that of judgment, and one
protagonist, the "man of truth." In this respect, judgment always poses itself as "the moral
origin of the notion of truth" ( Time-Image 137). The noosigns of the movement-image
always come back to a dogmatic image of truth. Organic narration and its accompanying
signs dramatize
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the mode of existence of the truth-seeker who is a Platonist at heart. The seeker-of-truth's
strongest desire is not to be fooled. This is a negative will, which views the world as an
inherently deceptive and illusory appearance. The truth-seeker poses a supersensible and ideal
world, a true and a good world, that bestows order on life from a transcendent perspective.
This is a moral rather than an epistemological perspective, because the goodness of
knowledge is opposed to the falsity of life. Philosophy is ascetic and nihilistic in this image of
thought. The truth-seeker wants to "correct" life by making it conform to an atemporal,
systematic, and transcendent image of thought and, in so doing, to annihilate life in an ideal
image.

Alternatively, the powers of the false describe the will to power of affirmative thought, or
what Deleuze characterizes in Nietzsche as a "will to falsehood" ( Nietzsche and
Philosophy184). This will is "artistic" rather than aesthetic; it is an active and creative will. It
does not realize itself in the accomplished image of art, but rather in that being of becoming
that is the creative act; it is intrinsically temporal. In Bogue's account, "A thought informed by
such a will would not oppose knowledge to life, would not confine life within the narrow
bounds of rational knowledge and then measure knowledge by the reduced standard of a
reactive life. Rather, in such a thought life would become 'the active force of thought' and
thought would become'the affirmative power of life...Thinking would then mean discovering,
inventing, new possibilities of life' " (19). 16

Thus there are two dimensions to affirmative thought: one a semiology that deciphers the
symptoms of negativity, the other an artistic will creating new images of thought and
inventing new forms to express them. The symptomology of the system of judgment is now
easy to understand. First, judgment requires the opposition of true and false, the better to
project an image of a true and good world that transcends the falsity of life. By the same
token, judgment targets error as its antagonist. Here, error is presented as a force foreign to
thought that seeks to divert it from its true and natural course. Finally, judgment requires
method, that is, a transcendent system that protects thought from error by isolating it from
life. Each one of these ideas presents a property of organic narration: opposition of true and
false, error as the antagonist of judgment, narrative as a transcendent whole consistent with
itself and opposed to the open-endedness of life.

Under what conditions, and with respect to what forces, does thought become active and
creative, rather than reactive and nihilistic, especially in film and other modes of artistic
expression? In Deleuze's view, filmmakers and artists can be philosophers just as
philosophers must become artists. Both are involved in the creation of images that empower
thought, though one works in spatial and temporal articulations, the other in the formula-

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tion of concepts. 17 The quarrel between the Platonist will to truth and the Nietzschean powers
of the false hinges on the problem of time. For the Platonist, the world must be judged by a
timeless and transcendent image. Indeed, one of the functions of art is to construct an image
of this timeless and transcendent world as a place for thought to harbor itself against the forms
of change. Cinema fascinates Deleuze because it is anti-Platonic in its essence. The
automatism of the movement-image produces images giving the form of change as
movement, even if change is given as the rational and continuous unfolding of space. The
automatism of the time-image produces images whose aberrant movements unveil the force of
time as change. 18 Thus, the will to falsehood acknowledges a fundamental "truth": We can
only think through the forms of change, becoming, and differentiation. What and how we
know will never be confirmed in the return of being to its origin in a transcendent image, but
only by affirming the being of becoming. The cinema of time assists us in this thought not by
opposing the true to the false. In the same way that the real and imaginary become
indiscernible in a "crystalline description," the relation between the forms of the True and the
powers of the false is rewritten in the qualities of inexplicability, undecidability, and
incompossibility. "To say that 'truth is a creation,' " writes Deleuze, "implies that truth is
produced by a series of processes that shape its substance; literally, a series of falsifications....
[All truths] falsify preestablished ideas -- a reflected series with two terms, or a series of
several terms, or a complicated series with bifurcations" ( Negotiations126, 172). What we
perceive in the direct image of time is aberrant movement and false continuities. This does not
mean that time is somehow seen in its essence. Rather, time is apprehended as a force that
disrupts repetition as the return of the same, no less than it interrupts the elaboration of
movement as a continuous unfolding of space. In this manner, Deleuze writes:

Falsifying narration...shatters the system of judgement because the power of the false (not
error or doubt) affects the investigator and the witness as much as the person presumed
guilty.... The point is that the elements themselves are constantly changing with the relations
of time into which they enter, and the terms of their connections. Narration is constantly being
completely modified, in each of its episodes, not according to subjective variations, but as a
consequence of disconnected places and de-chronologized moments. There is a fundamental
reason for this new situation: contrary to the form of the true which is unifying and tends to
the identification of a character (his discovery or simply his coherence), the power of the false
cannot be separated from

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an irreducible multiplicity. 'I is another' [ Je est un autre ] has replaced Ego=Ego. ( Time-
Image133)

The force of time puts truth into crisis, then, because in these images it is no longer possible
to think a direct relation between truth and the form of time. Similarly, it helps us understand
how "the power of the false is also the most general principle that determines all the
relationships in the direct time-image" (131). The difficulty of conceiving of a direct relation
between truth and the form of time obliges us to differentiate the true from the existent or the
eternal. The orders of time that constitute falsifying narrations thus imply values as much as
forms. The power of the false supersedes the form of the true by posing the simultaneity of
incompossible presents and the coexistence of not-necessarily-true pasts: the past is not
necessarily true; the impossible derives from the possible.

Nietzsche's will to power "substitutes the power of the false for the form of the true, and
resolves the crisis of truth...in favour of the false and its artistic, creative power" ( Time-
Image131). In Deleuze's definition, art requires this affirmative will to power -- a will to
falsehood that raises the false to its highest powers. The system of judgment seeks out the
truth in the lie, but in so doing disparages the world as deception and opposes it with a
dogmatic image of thought to which the world must conform. Here the ideas of method, the
disinterestedness of art, the attainment of the true in the image of the identical and selfsame,
all return in the aesthetic ideal of Western philosophy. The system of judgment recoils from
becoming and the eternal return. It poses change and differentiation as deception, thus
retreating to an ascetic ideal. What the truth-seeker sees as deception, Nietzsche asks that we
affirm as the highest and most active powers of life. Rather than the work of the negative,
which systematically passes judgment on the false in order to overcome it, Nietzsche asks that
the false itself be understood as a power, and that this power of the false "be selected,
redoubled or repeated and thus elevated to a higher power. The power of the false must be
taken as far as a will to deceive, an artistic will which alone is capable of competing with the
ascetic ideal and successfully opposing it" ( Genealogy of Morals III, 25; cited in Nietzsche
and Philosophy103, 117). Indiscernability, inexplicability, undecidability, and
incompossibility all represent values associated with this power. Chronosigns and falsifying
narration augment our powers of life by affirming change and by creating images of thought
that put us in direct contact with change and becoming as fundamental forces. They redefine
appearance as reality repeated, not in the form of the same, but as recurrence and
differentiation. Appearance, then, would no longer mean

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"the negation of the real in this world but this kind of selection, correction, redoubling and
affirmation. Then truth perhaps takes on a new sense. Truth is appearance. Truth means
bringing of power into effect, raising to the highest power. In Nietzsche, 'we the artists' = 'we
the seekers after knowledge or truth' = 'we the inventors of new possibilities of life' " [103),
The will to power realized in art -- and here specifically in the cinema of the timeimage -- is
the power of the false. Nietzsche values artistic will (and not the aesthetic) because his
philosophical program is best realized there. Thus, there is a quality of the will to power
"through which willing is adequate to the whole of life, a higher power of the false, a quality
through which the whole of life and its particularity is affirmed and has become active" (185).

The ethical principle affirmed in Nietzsche, and the qualities affirmed in the direct image of
time, have nothing to do with the creation of new values, at least in the banal sense of new
metaphysical principles to think with and live by. "To create new values," says Zarathustra,
"even the lion is incapable of that: but to create itself freedom for new creation -- that the lion
can do." 19 Here Deleuze rewrites Bergson's ontological principle -- whereby the temporal
disjunction between perception and memory informs our freedom to think and to choose -- as
Nietzsche's affirmation in the eternal return of the power of difference in repetition. This is
the power of creating the freedom for new creation. The values associated with the powers of
the false (indiscernability, inexplicability, undecidability, incompossibility) are not new
principles for thinking, but rather the measure of that which has not yet become thought. This
is not a new way of thinking, nor is it another method or system where thought becomes
trapped in the form of identity or tautological circles. Rather, the appearance of the new is
affirmed in the potentials of thought expressed in the following intuition: "we are not yet
thinking..."

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6 SERIES AND FABULATION: MINOR

CINEMA
Speech soars into the air at the same time that one sees the earth sink more and more into
itself.... And if the voice speaks to us of corpses, of a whole line of corpses that have just been
lain beneath the earth, then at this moment, the least stirring of the wind across this deserted
land, across this empty space you have beneath your eyes, the smallest hollow in this earth, all
of this takes on meaning.

-- Gilles Deleuze, "Avoir une ide en cinma" (my translation)

Deleuze's Nietzschean criticism asks: How can life be restored to philosophy? or, How can
philosophy be made responsive to the forces of life? Constrained by sensorimotor situations
and organic narration, cinema excels in projecting self-contained possible worlds -- either
replete diegetic descriptions or subjective dreams and fantasies, and often a mix of both.
These are transcendent worlds that demand to be judged in opposition to life. Alternatively,
the time-image lets us believe again in "life." This is neither a romantic nor a vague
metaphysical concept. Life refers to how the qualities of change expressed by Nietzsche's
doctrine of eternal recurrence inform the construction and reading of direct time-images.
There are two principal issues to examine here: the construction of time as series; fabulation
as the serial form of narration.

That life is change rather than "lifeless signs" also informs Deleuze's con-

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ception of subjectivity and thought. Rimbaud's poetic statement, "I is an other," expresses a
fundamental idea in Deleuze's philosophy of difference. That Deleuze has no theory of "the
subject" is very true. Nothing is more alien to Deleuze's thought than the form of identity
where Ego=Ego. Because the impersonal form of time divides us from ourselves,
constructions of subjectivity are always changing. There is no singular or self-identical
subject because we think, exist, and live in time; subjectivity is becoming, change,
deterritorialization, repetition becoming difference, the singular becoming multiple.
Reactionary thought wants to bolster the ego against the forces of change, to anchor it in a
true, good, and changeless world; it exhausts life by freezing identity. The powers of the false
evaluate and enhance the potentiality for change, differentiation, and creative evolution.
Creation and reaction are both forces that express a will to power, but the former is capable of
transforming itself, of becoming other and raising itself to a higher power, while the latter is
reified and inertial. 1 Certainly, philosophy has the important task of evaluating these two
states of life: interpreting what is immanent in them as concepts, critiquing symptoms of
reaction or negativity, affirming what new powers of change may be emerging. In its own
realm of activity, art too serves active and creative forces by giving material form to change
as "sensible aggregates" or "blocks of sensation." 2 For Deleuze, cinema ranks among the
most significant arts because it gives material form to varieties of movement, time, and
change that philosophy may, in its turn, formulate as concepts and interpret as values.

Both the cinematic movement-image and the time-image have important roles to play in this
respect. But in the historical shift from the former to the latter, the status of the whole is
completely transformed and a new set of values emerges. In classical cinema, the whole is the
open or, more precisely, an open totality in movement that merges with an indirect
presentation of time. With the direct presentation of time, however, the whole is the outside
(dehors): the linear unfolding of organic narration gives way to a serial organization of
images and sounds.
This is without doubt the most complex and elusive idea in The TimeImage. Deleuze adopts
his presentation of "the outside" from Maurice Blanchot. 3 But throughout the second half of
The Time-Image, this concept varies subtly depending on context. It has as many definitions
as time itself, including "life" as universal variation (where matter=image) and change (as
creative evolution). The most fundamental force of the outside undoubtedly derives from
time's passive syntheses, including the impersonal form of time that divides the ego from the I
and difference in itself expressed as eternal recurrence. It is perhaps even the body's
relationship to time as exhaustion, waiting, and mortality. Spatially, this shift in the definition
of

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the whole produces two broad genres of time-images: a cinema of the body and a cinema of
the brain. By definition, however, time is that which is incommensurate with space; it cannot
be given either in perception or in an image of thought. It is the virtual or the unthought that
haunts both the body and the brain in the cinema of the time-image. The whole as outside -a
pure virtuality that opens between images, between image and sound, and between image and
perception -- is the force that produces a serial image of time, an image of becoming rather
than being -- becoming other in thought and becoming other in identity.

Of the three chronosigns, the construction of time as series (sometimes called the genesign) is
also the least clearly defined in the cinema books, throughout which are scattered discussions
of series. The difficulty of the concept also does not lend itself well to a formal description
through close analysis. Moreover, the organization of time as series is barely comprehensible
without understanding Deleuze's version of eternal recurrence. In this respect, Deleuze takes
for granted the reader's knowledge of his book on Nietzsche, as well as the only recently
translated Difference and Repetition.

The few direct discussions of political cinema are also mostly contained in these pages. Few
have noted that most of Deleuze's examples of "serial" cinema come from "hybrid" and
postcolonial filmmakers, including Pierre Perrault, Glauber Rocha, Ousmane Sembene, the
Los Angeles school of African American filmmakers, and many others. 4 In fact, what is at
stake here is a minor cinema similar to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of minor literature.
Despite its philosophical interest, however, the critique expressed in the falsifying narrations
of the two other direct time-images is not necessarily political. Time as series expresses a
different will to power than the other two direct images of time. While the philosophical
expression of time by the series is certainly important, for Deleuze it has a political force as
well, characterized by Carmelo Bene's rather startling comment that "the people are missing"
( Time-Image 320 n41). For Bene, a popular theater does not "represent" the people; rather it
anticipates a people who may not yet exist and whom the theater must help bring into
existence. 5 Thinking again of the example of Je t'aime, je t'aime, we might ask: How can the
passive ego of Claude Ridder be transformed as a political will? Must time only be
understood as a force escaped through death? Or can time be defined as an affirmative force
wherein new potentialities of subjectivity emerge? That "the people are missing" means they
require an enabling image that can summon them into existence as identity becoming other.
Time as series is the expression of how the "not yet" existence of thought summons the "not
yet" existence of a people. Not-yet-become and a bringing into existence express the
temporality of series as a transformation of states or qualities into

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something new -- the apprehension of a virtual or future event as a force in the present
emerging from the past.

Series express states of change in the present. There is no present as a state of the Now that is
not itself haunted by time's passing. The idea that the film image gives a perpetual present is
misleading. Because time and movement are fundamental in film, the present must coexist
with the past as a virtual image irreducible to a former present, and with a future whose
potentiality is distinct from a present to come. In other words, time cannot be thought as
simple, empirical succession. The present is not a necessary consequence of the past any more
than the future can be determined by the currents of the present. "It is characteristic of
cinema," Deleuze says, "to seize this past and this future that coexist with the present image.
To film what is before and what is after.... Perhaps it is necessary to make what is before and
after the film pass inside it in order to get out of the chain of presents" ( Time-Image37-38).
All three direct images break the empirical flow of time as chronological succession. But
where sheets and points refer to orders of time as coexistence or simultaneity, series of time
are best able to express virtuality as a force of becoming realized in the present, a potentiality
being urged into a becoming.

The vagueness of this formulation disappears when we examine how the changing status of
the whole transforms the function of the interval as that which occurs between images and
sets. The most concrete way of comprehending this change in the whole is to look again at
how the time-image transforms the nature of the "out-of-field" or offscreen space.

The indirect presentation of time always refers to movements in space. These movements can
be relative or absolute. Relative movement links images of the same order through association
and substitution. This is the most traditional definition of offscreen space, as found in Nol
Burch's Theory of Film Practice, for example. A sound or glance offscreen, a movement
toward one of the six sides of the frame, or the mobility of the camera, suggests a virtual
space that will be actualized in the image or shot to follow. Absolute movement expresses a
changing whole where the linking of shots is internalized as a unified image, and images in
turn are externalized in an ever-expanding global picture. In either case, organicism is the rule
-- movement is spatial and ruled by the linking of rational intervals; the whole is the open. 6
To say that the whole is the open, then, means two things. On the one hand, movement or
duration can only be expressed indirectly as space. On the other, the movement-image longs
to encompass and subsume the world as image and to make life conform to the "laws" of the
open totality: differentiation and integration as well as organic movement through rational
links. More directly put, the open totality in movement

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aspires to the creation of an ideal world, one that overcomes and transcends life and against
which life must be judged. The cinematic movement-image asserts its own powers of thought
here, but these powers are Hegelian in their logic and Platonist in their values. These powers
demand belief in teleology, totality, identity, and repetition as a return of the same; in short,
they harbor the subject in an ideal world impermeable to change.

To say that the whole is the outside implies a different organization of images. In its primary
definition, this outside is the force of time which, incommensurable with space, changes the
function of the interval. There is no longer a rational interval assuring continuity in space and
succession in time. Rather, the force of time produces a serialism organized by irrational
intervals that produce a dissociation rather than an association of images. The interval is no
longer filled by a sensorimotor situation; it neither marks the trajectory between an action and
a reaction nor bridges two sets through continuity links. Instead, the interval collapses and so
becomes "irrational": not a link bridging images, but an interstice between them, an
unbridgeable gap whose recurrences give movement as displacements in space marked by
false continuity.

In like manner, differentiation changes meaning: "given one potential, another one has to be
chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established
between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new" ( Time-Image179-
80). Through this serialism, the time-image leaves behind a cinma of identity and totality in
order to create new values, new subjectivities, and new powers of thought. Rather than the
continuous association of images, false continuity introduces a serialism representative of a
change in the whole:

Film ceases to be "images in a chain...an uninterrupted chain of images each one the slave of
the next," and whose slave we are (Ici et ailleurs). It is the method of BETWEEN, "between
two images," which dispels [ conjure ] all cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, "this
and then that," which dispels [ conjure ] all the cinema of Being=is. Between two actions,
between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two
acoustic images, between the acoustic and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the
frontier, visible.... The whole undergoes a mutation, because it has ceased to be the One-
Being, in order to become the constitutive "and" of things, the constitutive between-two of
images. The whole thus merges with what Blanchot calls the force of "dispersal of the
Outside," or "the vertigo of spacing": that void which the image must cross over [ franchir ] in
order to carry on, which is no longer part of the image as a sensory-motor

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bridge, but is rather the radical calling into question of the image.... False continuity, then,
takes on a new meaning, at the same time as it becomes the law. (180, 235)

Montage changes meaning in the passage from the movement to the timeimage. When the
whole is formed by an indirect representation of time, discontinuity is only the deviation from
a norm whose noosigns include rational connections and commensurable relations. But when
the interval is opened by time as a force of the outside, space gives way to a series of
irrational points and nonchronological relationships. Framing, which assured the unfolding of
continuous images in space according to the chronological succession of presents, gives way
to a series of deframings where time interrupts space as aberrant movements. The spectator is
no longer included in the image as part of this expanding whole; there is no ideal or
transcendent perspective from which the image must be judged in opposition to life. "It is in
this sense," writes Deleuze, "that, already in Welles, then in Resnais, and also in Godard,
montage takes on a new sense, determining relations in the direct time-imagee.... We have
seen that the power of thought gave way, then, to an unthought in thought, to an irrational
proper to thought, a point of outside beyond the outside world, but capable of restoring our
belief in the world. The question is no longer: does the cinema give us the illusion of the
world? But: how does cinema restore our belief in the world?" ( Time-Image181-82).

The irrational interval gives rise to a set of new values, based not on totality and identity
which stop thought, but on simulacra whose incommensurabilities make thought move -- the
indiscernible, the inexplicable, the undecidable, and the incompossible. Dispersed by time,
belief returns from an ideal world -- the transcendent, timeless good and true world -- to the
world in which we live, in time and changing. Here the present changes value. It becomes an
opening where principles of identity and transcendence give way to a virtuality, the possible
emergence of new subjectivities and new forms of thought. The interval no longer serves as
the frontier between the before and after, separating them into successive moments that are
distinct and identical to themselves. Instead there is a passage of one into the other: the past
becomes present as the present passes; the future emerges in the present as a new potentiality
recognized in the present's relation to the past.

Deleuze's reading of Pasolini's use of the free indirect style is one example of this logic. In the
series, however, the free indirect style yields to a transformation of sound/image relations that
is peculiar to the time-image. The irrational interval, which creates aberrant movement in
series of discon-

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tinuous images, also passes between the image and soundtrack, separating them into two
heautonomous images. "Heautonomous" means that image and sound are distinct and
incommensurable yet complementary. Deleuze adapts this curious concept from the
introduction to Kant's Third Critique. When an irrational interval passes between them, sound
and image become incommensurate; each follows its own compositional logic. Instead of
being a component of visual space, sound space becomes autonomous, thus transforming the
out-of-field. In so doing, sound becomes a "pure speech-act." In most narrative cinema, sound
is a component of the image. In other words, sound space is an extension of visual space as
part of the expanding whole. But when sensorimotor situations collapse, sound is freed from
its dependence on images; it is no longer woven into the linking of actions and reactions.
When an irrational interval divides sound from image, speech turns inward. It becomes an
autonomous acoustic-image, defined in and for itself, while referring only to itself and the
sounds it frames. This in turn affects the visual images whose own seriality as discontinuous
any-spacewhatevers is enhanced. In this situation, "the visual image ceases to extend beyond
its own frame, in order to enter into a specific relation with the sound image which is itself
framed (the interstice between the two framings replaces the out-of-field); the voice-off must
also disappear, because there is no more out-of-field to inhabit, but two heautonomous images
to be confronted, that of voices and that of views, each in itself, each for itself and in its
frame" ( Time-Image278). More simply put, offscreen space disappears in the time-image. In
this manner, the screen also becomes a self-contained frame. Rather than the reversing fields
that characterize the deictic features of classical editing, there is an incommensurable relation
between the space of the screen and the space of the auditorium.

When the acoustic is no longer an extension of the visual, the acoustic and the visual become
two distinct layers of a "stratigraphic" space. In the most extreme instances -- late Duras or
Straub/ Huillet, for example -- the visual image never reproduces what the voice utters, and
the soundtrack never describes what the image shows. However, even if the two domains are
incommensurable, they are not without relation. There is in fact a complementarity between
sound and image based on their strategic dissociation.

Claude Lanzmann's Shoah ( 1985) presents many suggestive examples of this

"incommensurable complementarity" between sound and image. The great philosophical
problem that Lanzmann confronts is the impossibility of representing the past. The "shoah"
also indicates the slow annihilation of memory and history by the passing of time, which
compounds the worldhistorical violence of the destruction of 6 million souls. Take the
opening sequence of the film: Buried within the Polish countryside is evidence of the

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existence of the Chelmno death camp. As the scrolling text relates, 400,000 were gassed here,
and only two survived. The camera can frame this landscape for us, but it cannot recount the
story that is sunk in the earth and lost to the historical past. Nor is the text alone adequate for
recounting this history. The same may be said for the visual presence of Simon Srebnik, one
of the two survivors. His memory, which bears witness to the past effaced in the landscape, is
equally invisible, that is, opaque to the camera. The question, then, is how to construct a
historical image where the virtuality of history and memory can be restored from Srebnik's
body and the present countryside of Chelmno? 7 How can the present and past be made to
communicate?

Lanzmann resists the annihilation of history by time by forging something new out of the
impossibility of this communication. The past is outside of both image and sound,
unreachable by either. The image of the Polish landscape is the signifier of a present
perception where the past is buried. This is a division where the visual, in its attachment to the
present, is that which holds history from sight. Srebnik's voice is equally the signifier of a
present perception; however, its relation to the past has the form of memory as a buried
interiority.

How can history be made to speak in the land, and how can an image be restored from
memory? Though related to the construction of a free indirect style, this is a more difficult
problem. One cannot place image and voice in a commensurate space by traveling back in
time, thus erasing the division between past and present. However, Lanzmann does make the
division "speak" by returning memory ( Srebnik) to the historical situation from which it (he)
has been exiled. Srebnik's songs return here as pure speechacts, as well as acts of resistance to
the erosion of history by time.

An equally powerful example is the first testimony of Filip Mller, a survivor of the five
liquidations of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. This sequence, which lasts about five and a
half minutes, begins with a slow zoom back from the black execution wall in the courtyard of
block II at Auschwitz I. A subtitle identifies the place. Light snow drifts down in the image as
we hear Lanzmann ask in German in voice-off: "Filip, on that Sunday in May when you first
entered the crematorium, how old were you?" Mller begins his narration: "It was a Sunday in
May. We were locked in a cell in block II..." There is a retroactive shock in recognizing that
despite the disjunction between voice and image, memory and perception, there is nonetheless
a historical link in the present -- this is block II in Auschwitz and this is, perhaps, an early
spring snow falling. The image of the execution wall is a contemporary image, of course. Yet
a subtle though no less forceful free indirect relation begins to weave back and forth between
image and

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sound, Lanzmann's narration and Mller's testimony, present and past, perception and
memory. Lanzmann's question solicits Mller's story, and at the same time the camera "goes
back" spatially in the present to the place where Mller's voice goes back in time.
Mller's testimony is constructed as a pure speech-act. The place from the past he describes
linguistically through an act of memory can never appear again as a contemporary image. Yet
the place where he was and survived -the crematorium at Auschwitz -- persists in space just as
his memory persists in time. As Mller continues, each action he describes is reenacted by the
camera. Lanzmann's voice, which solicited the testimony, now passes into a visual act of
historical imagination that follows the actions Mller describes. As Mller relates that "we
marched along a street in the camp," the camera follows the path he describes. The camera is
handheld and the sequence continues without a cut for several minutes. There is a mimetic
relation here between camera and voice. But this is neither an attempt to identify with
Mller's former place nor to construct a subjective perspective for the spectator to occupy.
The camera accompanies the voice in a free indirect relation, passing through a gate, coming
in sight of a building three hundred meters away, seeing a door, passing through a corridor,
and entering the crematorium; dogs bark distantly in the background throughout. In this
manner, the camera follows the visual traces in the present that coincide with the linguistic
traces Mller follows in memory, while acknowledging that the two can never be fully
present to one another. Just as Lanzmann and Mller communicate even though neither is
speaking his own language, image and sound forge a historical relation across their division.
Whereas the two sides -- image and voice, present and past, perception and memory -- can
never be fully commensurate, out of their disjunction the authenticity of the historical
testimony survives and is confirmed. However, as Mller continues the camera cannot show
what weighs most heavily in his testimony: the Jewish workers, hundreds of corpses,
suitcases and bundles, and the blue-violet crystals. There is a dimension of the film that goes
beyond both image and sound yet is forged in their incommensurate yet complementary
relation. The past cannot be represented. Yet out of the pure speech-act there arises an act of
historical imagination commensurate with memory in virtue of the fact that image and
memory can never occupy the same place. We cannot see Mller's memory, nor can we live
what he survived. To want to do so would be abominable. However, out of the temporal
division of image from sound, present from past, and perception from memory, there arises a
powerful historical relation. The pure speech-act of Mller's testimony finds itself
corroborated detail for detail in the visual traces that remain at Auschwitz. And the millions of
lives lost to

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the past are nonetheless redeemed in the act of historical imagination that arises from the
autonomy of speech in relation to image.

There is a catastrophe more profound than the disappearance of visible evidence: not
forgetting the past, but forgetting the relation between present and past, which relinquishes
hope for the future. In Shoah, Lanzmann discovers cinematic strategies for turning the
absences of history and memory into virtualities that speak through the incommensurability of
past and present in the relation between image and sound. This is not history en direct.
Rather, the juxtaposition of text, image, and sound, each autonomous with respect to the
other, overcomes the division between past and present, image and sound, by making
incommensurability the measure of the authenticity of testimony. Srebnik's song and verbal
testimony make the history of the Chelmno landscape legible; what was opaque or occluded
in the image becomes "visible," and what is buried comes to light. Similarly, the soundtrack
gains in authenticity through its proximity to the landscape. However, this is not an image that
"shows," equating visibility with knowledge and self-evidence; it is an image that must be
read. The virtual becomes actual not as a visible or acoustic image on the screen. That
relation, which completes the historical image, is restored only in an act of reading. This is a
virtual-actual circuit that is only established by appealing to the spectator's activity as
historical memory.

Thus the goal of stratigraphic space is to construct "lectosigns": images that must be read
rather than simply heard or seen. Here image and sound are each constructed as a pure
exteriority; neither is an extension of the other, just as the screen no longer extends into the
auditorium. We are outside the image, just as sound and image are external to one another.
Yet this externality puts us in contact with an unreachable interiority represented by the
incommensurability of past and present, memory and perception, where memory becomes
legible even if it is imperceptible, just as the force of the past becomes apparent in the present
without being actually seen. Stratigraphic space asks to be read as an event where history is
both virtual and real. By its persistence in the present, the landscape gives visible testimony to
what cannot be represented in the voice. In turn, the voice excavates a past entombed in the
landscape and hidden from sight. And between the two there is a

contact independent of distance, between an outside where the speechact rises, and an inside
where the event is buried in the ground: a complementarity of the sound image, the speech-act
as creative storytelling [ fabulation ], and the visual image, stratigraphic or archaeological
burying. And the irrational cut between the two, which forms the

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non-totalizable relation.... This is perpetual relinkage. Speech reaches its own limit which
separates it from the visual; but the visual reaches its own limit which separates it from sound.
So each one reaching its own limit which separates it from the other thus discovers the
common limit which connects them to each other in the incommensurable relation of an
irrational cut, recto and verso, the outside and the inside. ( Time-Image279, 364)

This pure speech-act has its own power of the false that organizes narration as fabulation.
Deleuze uses the term lgender to characterize this act. In French this verb means equally to
make up stories, mythmaking, but also to comment on or to caption an image. Fabulation
requires speech as a separate and (he)autonomous discursive register that unfolds relative to
the image in a stratigraphic space without being a component of the visible. Without their
accompanying speech-acts, the Polish farmland of Shoah, or the Italian quarries of Fortini
Cani ( 1977) that Deleuze discusses, are empty landscapes. With them the land gains
historical depth, legible if no longer perceptible. "[In] the ambiguous landscapes themselves,"
Deleuze writes,

there is produced a whole "coalescence" of the perceived with the remembered, the imagined,
the known. Not in the sense that it used to be said: to perceive is to know, is to imagine, is to
recall, but in the sense that reading is a function of the eye, a perception of perception, a
perception which does not grasp perception without also grasping its reverse, imagination,
memory, or knowledge. In short, what we call reading of the visual image is the stratigraphic
condition, the reversal of the image, the corresponding act of perception which constantly
converts the empty into full, recto into verso [ l'endroit en envers ]. To read is to relink
instead of link; it is to turn and turn round, instead of to follow on the visible side [ l'endroit ]:
a new Analytic of the image. ( Time-Image245, 319) 8
This is an audiovisual image requiring an "archaeological" reading. The relation between
sound and image requires a mental rotation of visible surfaces or an excavation of pictured
landscapes in an act of historical imagination. Image and sound have become separate
powers. And if there is a passage from one to the other in the form of a free indirect relation,
this is because the irrational interval has a disjunctive rather than a conjunctive value -the
very definition of the series. There is "a 'dissociation' of the two powers which strengthens
each of them, in a 'division of labour between presentational image and representational
voice.'...The ethereal speech-act creates the event, but always placed crosswise over tectonic
visual layers: there

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are two trajectories crossing each other. It creates the event, but in a space empty of events.
What defines modern cinema is a 'to-ing and fro-ing between speech and image,'which has to
invent their new relationship" (247.) 9

Time as series, then, organizes a space that is more deciphered or read than perceived. The
absence of rational connections -- between images as well as between image and sound --
transforms the orientation of reading in an act that is both virtual and real. Perception no
longer authenticates an identity between image (visual or acoustic) and referent. The recorded
world disappears into the past, becoming an outside, a world unreachable by the present
image. The edges of the frame are no longer extendable; rather, they divide the image into
series -- a visible frame as opsign or any-spacewhatever and an acoustic frame as pure speech-
act, each incommensurable with the other. Relations are no longer given by the images. The
spectator is no longer included in an expanding totality constructed by the narration, and thus
must provide the relation himself or herself. Whatever is withdrawn into the interval the
spectator must make up for in an effort of memory and imagination. By the same token, once
causation is disrupted by the irrational interval an infinite variety of relations becomes
possible. The discontinuous succession of images and sounds is indeterminate. No longer
included in the narration, the relation between film and spectator is indeterminate as well. In
principle, there are as many readings as there are spectators willing to read.

The values or affirmative will to power represented by the series should now be clearer. All of
the direct images of time represent deviations in the ordering of time as empirical succession.
However, modeled on eternal recurrence, series represent the impossibility of pure repetition
or the return of the same. 10 Repetition always enacts difference, a change of state, transition,
or appearance of the new. With genesigns, an empirical sequence of images is transformed by
a becoming. This becoming is represented by the irrational interval that, since it no longer
bridges two images, now exists as a force encouraging a change of state. Something like a
pure present passes into the interval; the images falling on either side represent what comes
before and after. More than a montage principle, the irrational interval also expresses an
affirmative will to power. The genesign is also a power of the false and is intimately linked to
the critique of the will to truth. If the present endures as a state of change, time cannot be
reconciled with identity or being in the form of the selfsame. The formula of Ego=Ego has
been replaced with I is an other. "[The] false ceases to be a simple appearance or even a lie,"
writes Deleuze, "in order to achieve that power of becoming which constitutes series or
degrees, which crosses limits, carries out metamorphoses, and develops along its whole path
an act of legend, of story-

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telling. Beyond the true or the false, becoming as power of the false" ( TimeImage275). This
is not a direct relation, but rather a free indirect one. The utterable invokes what cannot be
seen; the visible evokes what cannot be said. In Deleuze's own account:

What constitutes the audio-visual image is a disjunction, a dissociation of the visual and the
sound, each heautonomous, but at the same time an incommensurable or "irrational" relation
which connects them to each other, without forming a whole, without offering the least
whole. It is a resistance stemming from the collapse of the sensory motor schema, and which
separates the visual image and the sound image, but puts them all the more into a non-
totalizable relation.... What has now become direct is a time-image for itself, with its two
dissymmetric, non-totalizable sides, fatal when they touch, that of an outside more distant
than any exterior, and that of an inside deeper than any interior, here where a musical speech
rises and is torn away, there where the visible is covered over or buried. (256, 261)

For Deleuze, this performative act has an expressly political dimension. The pure speech-act
is the basis for "fabulation" wherein the serial form of narration becomes a political cinema.
Here the powers of the false created by the direct time-image require not only an overcoming
of the model of the true, but also a new conceptualization of the subject as a "realizing
fabrication" creative of an event: the constitution of a people.

Bodies in flight do not leave the world behind. If the circumstances are right, they take the
world with them -- into the future.

-- Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Series express an affirmative will to power as a force where time puts truth in crisis. The
forms of identity no less than the model of the true are affected here. One kind of becoming is
the force of time as change; another is becoming-other, the pure form of time as the
(un)founding of subjectivity whose formula is "I is an other." This is why there is no theory of
"the" subject in Deleuze. To become-other is not to identify or to identify with and so to
become-the-same-as. Rather, as Zarathustra exclaims, it is "to create itself the freedom for
new creation," to affirm the ever-recurring possibility for change.

That series require an act of historical imagination is crucial for understanding the
innovativeness of modern political cinema. However, this act is not singular. In the series,
identity itself -- no less than the politics of identity considered as self-consciousness or the
selfsame -- is falsified.

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Becoming-other is a serial process, and modern political cinema critiques identity because
becoming-other is expressed as a collective will. The direct time-image can serve an explicit
political function. To create the freedom for new creation means establishing through
cinematic discourse the potentiality for the enunciation of a collective will. Understanding the
basic conditions for this collective enunciation as a cinematic discourse of minorities is the
key to understanding the modern political cinema.

The cinematic movement-image undoubtedly has its own political cinemas and its own image
of the collective: the great films of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and others in the first ten
years of the Soviet revolution; the social documentaries of Joris Ivens and many others; the
populism of King Vidor or Frank Capra; and even the Nazi films of Leni Reifenstahl. But the
function of political cinema also changes in the shift to the timeimage. Classical cinema is for
the most part social democratic, regardless of its nation of origin or its political ideology. Its
goal is to represent the masses or "the people." They may be oppressed or in the process of
liberation, alienated or awakened, but representation is nonetheless their right. That they are
representable as a collective image, and that their political self-consciousness is also
renderable in images, are givens.

Classical cinema testifies to the existence of "the masses," and this is its true political subject.
The classical formation of this subject shows all the hallmarks of organic narration. In each
case, the people are imaged as an organic collective, unified by a single ideology (whether
American democratic populism or Soviet socialism). The part is also substitutable for the
whole, such that the individual stands as a metonymy for the entire collective (Capra's John
Doe no less than Pudovkin's Mother). Finally, the image of the collective is given organically
as a great teleological unfolding. The people are figured as a homogeneous force waking to its
collective power. Walter Benjamin saw this historical image in both the films and in the
popular political movements of the 1930s when he wrote in his "Theses on the Philosophy of
History" that, "Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it
was moving with the current" ( Illuminations260). 11 Classical cinema participated in its own
way in representing the teleological becoming of the people as identical with the ineluctable
unfolding of history.

The belief in a preexisting collective identity, which unifies a people and is the basis of their
unflexed power, was the great progressive ideal smashed historically by the rise of National
Socialism, the violent repressions of Stalinism, the history of colonialism, and the continuing
failure of American democracy to integrate and enfranchise fully its minority peoples and
immigrants. Thus, the belief that the masses are the true subject of repre-

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sentation is among the many philosophical ideals that come to grief in classical cinema.
According to Deleuze, the paradox of both Soviet and American cinemas was an empirical
belief that the people were already there, "real before being actual, ideal without being
abstract" ( Time-Image216). In its staging of a model of the true, political cinema in the
classical period was based on the assumption that this ideal collectivity actually existed
outside of its construction in images, and that it conformed or could conform to the ideals
those images presented. In the postwar period, the crisis that historical materialism had to
overcome was the brutal truth that "the people" do not exist.

Or not yet. One of the great values of modern political cinema is its potential for restoring this
belief in a way entirely different from that of the classical period. While a collective subject is
undesirable as a teleological end, it is nonetheless still desirable as a political goal. The
problem is to affirm a people in their collective becoming, to define their potential or their
affirmative will to power. This means acknowledging first that a group is actual before it
becomes real, that is, before it finds the means to express itself collectively. Second, this
becoming must not be understood as an ideal image of unity that already exists and must only
be awakened into self-consciousness. Rather, it is a concept, both virtual and real, on the basis
of which a people can invent themselves. This is a historical image that invents a future by
creatively transforming occluded elements of the past. "In short," Deleuze argues, "if there
were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not
yet...the people are missing" ( Time-Image216).

This phrase expresses an affirmative force that inaugurates a cinematographic discourse of

minorities. Deleuze envisions political cinema as a "minor cinema" in the same way that he
and Guattari have taken up the problem of "minor literatures" from the writings of Franz
Kafka. 12 To be a minority in this sense is not necessarily to be a demographic minority. (The
day is rapidly coming when Caucasians will be a demographic minority in California and
other states; yet they remain, for the time being, an economic, political, and cultural majority
defining the dominant culture.) A minority discourse must affirm its becoming in images by
struggling to define itself through the forces of domination and exclusion that occlude it. The
defining characteristic of a minority is in fact philosophical: to becomeother as an affirmative
will to power.

Alternatively, a minority discourse cannot not be based on an identity politics. By addressing

a (minority) people already assumed to exist, identity politics falls prey to a schema of
reversal that reifies or essentializes the subaltern subject no less than that of the cultural
hegemony it is try-

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ing to combat. 13 Ideally, a minority discourse is collective without unifying. The people are
never one but several or multiple, not molar but molecular. Rather than being based on a
unified or unifying discourse, minor cinema must produce collective utterances (noncs
collectifs) whose paradoxical property is to address a people who do not yet exist and, in so
doing, urge them toward becoming.

Here the formula of "I becomes other" widens its import. This "not yet" of a subject or a
people describes a virtuality, or a potentialization of forces, that is not unlike Ernst Bloch's
concept of utopia as Vor-Schein or anticipatory illumination. 14 Utopia is not an unrealizable
ideal here. It too is virtual and real as material forces that urge, perhaps unsuccessfully or
successfully, an immanent becoming. Series of time express this immanence in relation to
bodies as well as thought. The cinema of the body is not a picturing of the literal body.
Rather, its goal is to give expression to forces of becoming that are immanent in bodies, as
well as the body's receptivity to external forces through which it can transform itself. Deleuze
follows Spinoza in defining the body not as a static mass (this would be equivalent to
reasserting the model of identity), but as a potentiality defined by relations and forces or the
power to affect and be affected.

In this respect, the cinema of the body begins to respond to Spinoza's observation that we
barely know what a body can do. Within the actionimage, for example, the body serves as a
locus. It organizes forces in chains of action and reaction, conflict and resolution, that unfold
spatially as lines of movement communicated by bodies. When organized by series, the body
becomes an undecidable figure, hesitating between the virtuality of the past and the
indeterminacy of the future. Rather than a locus of unfolding actions, the body becomes a
read surface where disparate temporal perspectives overlap and conflict without being
resolvable in a sensorimotor situation. In this manner, the undecidability of the body serves as
an obstacle that does not, "as in the action-image, allow itself to be determined in relation to
goals and means which would unify the set, but is dispersed in 'a plurality of ways of being
present in the world,' of belonging to sets, all incompatible and yet coexistent" ( Time
Image203). 15 Therefore, becomingother is an affirmative will to power expressing the body's
own potential for "creative evolution," that is, its power to be affected by and to affect, to
metamorphose, to ally itself with the affirmative powers of life.

The cinema of the body has many aspects. But in every case, series organize becoming-other
as an affirmative will to power presented by a direct image of time. In this respect, perhaps
the cinema is best suited to the task of presenting what Deleuze and Guattari call "bodies
without organs." Bodies without organs can be conceptualized as "bundles of virtual af-

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fects." 16 This is not a question of identification. When I becomes other, neither is less subject
to this virtuality. In either case identity is a set of affects, the forces that a body can affect or
which affect it. Whether in the theatrical sense of masquerades, in the descriptive sense of
mimesis, or in the psychoanalytic sense, identification presumes analogy. One becomes "like"
another in a process that requires a model and a copy. Identification requires a desire or will
to become-the-same-as rather than the differential becoming of a line of flight. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that all identity is simulation, in fact, that persons are simulacra. To the extent
that social ideologies are coded as abstract models of identity, behavior, and acts, we are all
"bad" copies since no one can fully embody this ideal. The question here is: Which is your
will to power? To become-the-same-as or to become-other? The former requires an
opposition between a true and false identity where we are always found lacking and resentful
before the "true" or truthful self. The latter overcomes identity by engaging the powers of the
false. "The difference between becoming-other and becoming-the-same," write Deleuze and
Guattari, "is not the difference between a false copy and a true copy. It is a difference in
degree of falsity (artifice). Becoming-other is a simulation that overthrows the model once
and for all, so that it can no longer be said to be a copy in even approximate terms. It is a
declaration of bad will toward sameness, in a full deployment of the powers of the FALSE"
(cited in Massumi 181 n12). Rather than identity, becoming-other is driven by a tension
between power and evasion. Power articulates itself as a socially mandated force that limits
the body's range of dynamic affects; becoming-other emerges from a countervailing desire to
evade those limits, to find lines of flight wherein new potentialities for desire and identity can
be expressed. This process is a double movement from both the side of I and the other.

Becoming-other is not an isolated act; it is thoroughly political and collective. The process is
so prone to failure, co-optation, repression, or simply falling back on becoming-the-same, that
forceful strategies are needed. To establish a successful line of flight means not only
recognizing a power that must be evaded, but knowing its forces and potentialities well
enough to formulate strategies of evasion and creation. Moreover, regardless of how much it
is divided or oppressed, a collectivity will always embody potential affects and actions whose
range is greater than that of an individual body. Becoming-other emerges from a group or
people who have become so critically sensitive to an intolerable situation that they can
together develop strategies as countervailing forces. Becoming-other is therefore a minority
process. Not the exchange of one identity for another, nor the recognition of a repressed but
articulable being. Rather, out of the recognition of forces that limit, constrain, or separate a
molecular collective, there emerges the

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virtual or an Idea as concept through which they may affirm their mutual will to power. Out
of the molecularity of individuals there arises the Idea of a people who are "not yet" but
perhaps are in a process of actualization.

This Idea represents a bodily thought necessary for establishing a line of flight. It defines
"imagination" as the augmentation of the body's degrees of freedom. Freedom is not defined
here in an absolute or metaphysical sense. Rather, it is a pragmatics of what a body can do,
that is, the parameters of its potentialities or virtual characteristics. These characteristics are
defined by Ideas whose milieu is language. Language is a "communicating" environment, not
only in the transmission of ideas, but also in the French sense of "opening onto." Language is
what links one molecular individual to another in a network of forces that can be recognized
collectively. This is less a unifying or homogenizing force than a "free indirect" passing back
and forth between the individual and the collective, the subjective and the objective, by
indiscernible degrees and through minute and subtle transformations. Language is the milieu
of double-becoming, a point of intercession that affects the addresser no less than the
addressee, who becomes an addresser in turn. The task of the minority author is to create a
patois or creolization of the dominant language, a foreign language within language, as a
strategy of becoming or a line of flight. Collective enunciation only takes place through a
minority language where I becomes other and others can begin to become in recognition of a
collectively elaborated I. Therefore, a minority discourse must create strategies for mapping
becoming without immobilizing it. This process is "as fragile as it is infectious," explains
Brian Massumi. "Becoming must keep on becoming, in an indefinite movement of invention
opening wider and wider zones of autonomy populated by more and more singularities....
Successful becoming-other concerns the entire body politic, precipitating a
hyperdifferentiation that exponentially multiplies the potential bodily states and possible
identities it envelops. Becoming bears on a population, even when it is initiated by a single
body. even one body alone is collective in its condition of emergence as well as in its future
tendency" (101, 102).

The basis for collective enunciation, then, is not to represent the people. Rather, an idea or
image must be constructed through which a people can affirm their becoming as a collective
will to power. Deleuze calls this process fabulation, which is translated throughout The Time-
Image as "storytelling function." 17 Fabulation is a complex concept defining minor cinema as
well as its forms of collective enunciation. At first glance the concept is quite simple:
fabulation is telling stories (rcits). However, there is an ambiguity in the French, so close to
our own "recitation" or "to recite," that is important.

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Freely translating from the Petit Robert, a rcit is an oral or written relating of real or
imaginary acts ["Relation orale ou crite [de faits vrais ou imaginaires ]"). There are three
important qualities embedded in this definition. First, storytelling is performative in the
philosophical as well as the theatrical sense. Rather than a tale told it implies a process, an act
of telling inseparable from the time of enunciation. That the form of the story may be oral or
written -- and in the cinema is related acoustically as well as visually -- is also important.
Finally, the rcit is neither precisely a document nor a fiction, but a form of enunciation that
gravitates between these poles in a free indirect relation. In French it may refer equally to an
expos, story, narration, or report as much as a tale, fable, or legend. It may also be a
historical chronicle. Even in the stolid Petit Robert, the list of examples unravels in a giddy
hybrid of documentary and fictional characteristics: "Rcit d'aventures merveilleuses...; Rcit
historique...; Rcit vridique, fidle, dtaill, circonstanci; mensonger, infidle." This
performative oscillation between the oral and the written, the true and the false, is at the heart
of the "story-telling function" (fonction de fabulation), which is distinct from either
description or narration and in fact goes beyond both. In each case this oscillation is governed
by the free indirect relation characteristic of series. Similarly, the cinematographic rcit lends
itself to a stratigraphic construction that relates the acoustic and the visual, the false and the
true, in ways that are both complementary and incommensurable.

These qualities also inform the deictic features characteristic of fabulation. Within the
cinematic movement-image, subject-object relations are governed by sensorimotor situations.
The relation between subject and object must remain distinct and commensurable so that the
narrative model of the true can reaffirm itself in a transcendent perspective.

Take the example of documentary or ethnographic cinema. In conventional documentary, the

perspectives of observer and subject are divided and opposed in a hierarchical fashion that is
all too familiar in fiction films. As a narrative of "truth," the documentary plays out patterns
of conflict and resolution, especially with respect to point of view, that are entirely
characteristic of the movement-image. In each case the model of identity is preserved. The
observed is literally "subjected" or judged from a transcendent perspective while the observer,
as reporter or ethnologist, reserves for himself or herself all the authority of an unrestricted
narration. While challenging fiction, conventional documentaries nonetheless retain the
polarities of narration -- subjective and objective -- to maintain the forms of identity. The
formula of Ego=Ego is not yet replaced by I is an other. 18

Alternatively, the rcit presents narrative situations where the adequation of subject to object
breaks down along with the model of the true.

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Deleuze's discussion of dicisigns in relation to Pasolini's free indirect subjective is one

example. Pasolini's syncretic style -- which freely confuses the boundaries between an
objective, indirect camera narration with a subjective, direct character narration -- thus heralds
another power of the false. The two poles of narration are not mixed only to be separated later
in favor of the veracity of one according to the ideal of the true. Rather, the means of the
camera work identify so closely with the material situation of the character that the
"objective" point of view of the camera is transformed by the characters' internal and external
situations without being identified completely with their literal perspective. Each falsifies the
other, so that neither can be taken for a transcendent perspective where Ego=Ego, or the
model of identity that adequates subject and object.

The political force of fabulation is clearest in historical situations where a people struggle to
find a collective means through which to define themselves. Postcolonial cinemas in the
1960s and 1970s, both narrative and documentary, provide provocative examples. The
historical situation of developing nations only recently freed from colonial domination gives
added meaning to the formula "the people are missing."

For postcolonial filmmakers, it is evident that the model of fiction includes a preestablished
"historical truth" -- the point of view imposed by the colonizers. This is clearly and tragically
the case of documentary cinema in sub-Saharan Africa before the period of liberation. From
approximately 1939 to 1960, the history of African cinema is fundamentally a history of
technological and cultural domination by the British and Belgian colonizers. Both groups
censored Western films on the assumption that these images were too powerful and dangerous
for "primitive" mentalities. The European administrators who created Britain's Colonial Film
Unit and Belgium's Film and Photo Bureau constructed African peoples as "backward," not
only in the images and narratives presented by their films, but also in restricting African
technicians to the most elementary positions in the production process. In both their images
and their modes of address, the so-called educational films produced by these units presumed
a "truthful" or "scientific" presentation of the African, which was in fact a construction of the
colonial imaginary. Frantz Fanon saw clearly the end result: "the Negro" is an invention of the
white colonizer.

Postcolonial African writers and filmmakers have given disturbing testimony to how the
history of this domination alienated them from the image of black skin. Kwame Nkrumah,
Frantz Fanon, Haile Gerima, and indeed many others have commented ironically on the
cheers of African audiences at Tarzan's defeat of "the Negroes" or the cowboys' defeat of "the
Indians." 19 The hurtful effect of this reification of the black image was twofold. On

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the one hand, it alienated Africans from the image of black skin, leaving no place with which
to identify save with the idealized image of their oppressors. On the other, it homogenized the
diversity and complexity of African cultures. The white construction of "the Negro" imposed
a false unity that justified colonial dominance no less powerfully than the imposition of
political borders on otherwise very different cultures and ethnic groups. In every case,
Africans were dislodged from their nations, languages, and cultures, in fact, disenfranchised
as a people, as the effect of technological and ideological domination by the colonial powers.

The historical situation of the former French colonies in Africa demonstrates well how a
minority culture confronts a double colonialization whose effects are both individual and
social. First, there is linguistic colonialization as the imposition of francophonie and French
culture on distinct ethnic and linguistic groups. To the extent that francophonie is
internalized, African peoples are alienated from their own cultures and territorialized by a
language wherein they can only be dominated. Divided from their own culture, colonized
peoples also become alienated within their own languages and from their own myths. The
images and narratives that formerly unified each group as a people are now displaced by the
spurious unity of francophonie and the colonial construction of "the Negro." 20

These divisions also alienate the private from the public, or the inside of the subject from the
outside of collective life. The double colonialization of minorities intertwines two types of
seriality as two sides that can no longer communicate since they are alienated from each
other. One is the question of the I, of individual and private life as a singularity defined by the
alienation of one body and its forms of interiority. In this sense, the individual becomes a
minority of one who experiences the division and alienation of the entire collective from the
inside. Alternatively, there is a question from the outside, which defines public existence as
an exteriority defined by the atomized collective oppressed and divided by the history of
colonialism.

The problem is how to make these two series -- the private and the public, the inside and the
outside, the individual and the collective -- meet in an image wherein fragmented singularities
can forge a collective enunciation. A collective memory as legend or strategic mythmaking
must be invented for the individual as well as the community. As narration or fabulation, this
is neither a psychological memory where the individual recalls a repressed history, nor simply
a historical memory as the representation of the occluded story of a people. Rather, it entails a
serialism that transforms the individual at the same time as the collective. This double-
becoming intertwines two discursive series in a free indirect relation: communication between
the world and the I in a fragmented world, and communication of

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the world and the I in a fragmented I, which must find common points of articulation. In this
form of narration, both the representer and the represented, the individual and the collective,
are caught up in an indiscernible or undecidable relation where each stands in for the other as
intercessor, each becomes other in a "mutual image" similar to that of other forms of time-
image. In this respect, a simple return to the old culture suppressed by the colonizers is
obviously an insufficient strategy. Rather, the artist must contribute to the invention of new
minority discourse.

Kafka was well aware of the paradoxical position of the artist within a minority culture.
Intellectuals and artists are alienated from the community by virtue of their "education" -- the
internalization of the dominant culture and language. But defined by the dominant culture as a
minority, they are also subject to the seriality that atomizes the people and alienates them
from their collective identity. In their individual alienation, intellectuals are nonetheless
identified with the minority condition and are capable of articulating it. As a Czech Jew,
Kafka expressed this as "the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in
German, the impossibility of writing otherwise" ( Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 16). West
African filmmakers have experienced a similar dilemma, since the struggle to define a
national voice is both impeded and aided by francophonie, which, paradoxically, is often the
sole cultural basis for national unity. This marginality, a double alienation or seriality to the
second degree, means that the artist is in "a situation of producing utterances which are
already collective, which are like the seeds of the people to come, and whose political impact
is immediate and inescapable. The author can be marginalized or separate from the more or
less illiterate community as much as you like; this condition puts him all the more in a
position to express potential forces and, in his very solitude, to be a true collective agent, a
collective leaven, a catalyst" ( Time-Image221-22). The task of a minority artist, then, is to
serve as an intercessor: to create or invent a minority discourse as the basis for a collective
enunciation. The postcolonial filmmaker must not only disarm the harmful fictions of
colonialization -- the African as non-volu, and so on -but also contribute to the invention of
a people by creating new forms of subjectivity and collective enunciation apposite to a
postcolonial and posttribal idea of nationhood.

To achieve this goal, fabulation does not oppose fiction; it wants to free fiction from the
model of the true. There is a fiction of the real which is the Platonic world, and a fiction of the
truth which is always that of the colonizer. But there is another kind of fiction which is that of
the "people," a popular memory whose stories transform the world as legend. Here again
"legend" must be taken in its double sense, as mythmaking but also as

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commentary. African cinema is an apposite example, since it is so rich in oral traditions and
in the diverse ways that filmmakers seek to displace dialogically a Western visual narrative
tradition with an oral one, creating a hybrid form where orality invades and transforms the
visual, and where the visual then transforms the oral as a medium of social cohesion. In
African cinema, the oral tradition is recovered as a "usable" past that the narrative image
draws upon to invent a future -- the creation of a people as a national becoming.

To transform the dualities of subject and object, true and false, visible and utterable,
fabulation requires a "double becoming," which can be conceptualized in a variety of ways.
Becoming refers to a temporalization of the image in series, where the present is never pure
but is rather the site of a constant crossing of the past and future. This requires a
transformation of both language and point of view. A minority discourse is not the recovery
of a lost or repressed tongue, but the creation of a new language through the creolization of
the language of the colonizer. This minority position within language, so despised by the
colonizer, is not only an elegant and poetic subversion, but also a linguistic territory wherein
the minority can assert itself collectively by creatively appropriating the language attempting
to dominate it. Forging a collective speech-act requires a deterritorialization of language: the
creation within the dominant language of a foreign language within language, or a linguistic
mutation capable of expressing the impossibility of living under domination. 21

The subject of this collective enunciation is not one but several. There must also be a new
relation between filmmaker and subject, a new ethnography, as it were, where the task of both
is to become-other. For the postcolonial filmmaker, this means reestablishing contact with her
or his people by rediscovering and giving new form to their collective culture, lost and
repressed under colonialism and always at risk of being lost again. This situation is especially
poignant for the exile, who must create the fiction of a people not only as an image of
potential liberation but also as a way of maintaining contact with a history and a culture that
may never be regained. For a First World figure like Jean Rouch, this double becoming is a
strategy for fleeing the colonial tradition and mentality through an identification that critiques
the concept of the colonial other, and returns to undermine the fiction of identity that forms
the basis of dominator and dominated. In either case, the task is to raise this creative process
to a serialism capable of formulating a collective identity in time. "This is no longer Birth of a
Nation," writes Deleuze, "but constitution or reconstitution of a people, where the film-maker
and his characters become others together and the one through the other, a collectivity which
gradually wins from

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place to place, from person to person, from intercessor to intercessor.... 'I is an other' is the
formation of a story which simulates, of a simulation of a story or of a story of simulation
which deposes the form of the truthful story [ rcit ]" ( Time-Image153.).

Fabulation requires intercessors to formulate strategies for breaking down subject-object

relations and making them indiscernible. Becoming-other is the task of the intercessor, but the
filmmaker must intercede for the subject, just as the subject must intercede for the filmmaker.
Both must inaugurate a serialism with the power to enact or bring into being a community.
The presence of intercessors is a necessary condition for a minority discourse and a minimum
requirement for collective enunciation. And if an intercessor cannot be found by the
filmmaker, one must be fabricated. The construction of intercessors is more an enunciative
function than a documentary or ethnographic strategy. Like the series, collective enunciation
requires at least two narrators. Postcolonial filmmakers cannot escape the dominant discourse
(cinematic or otherwise) without the intervention of an intercessor. If they produce a singular
narration, they risk remaining trapped in the discourse of the intellectual and of the reigning
dominant discourse. Instead, the filmmaker must establish a free indirect relation with a
minority intercessor. This means constructing a narration between two points of enunciation
where author and subject continually exchange roles so that their relative positions become
indistinct or undecidable. In this way the narration passes between them as "a reflected series
with two terms," each of which falsifies the other. In this encounter, the intellectual's
discourse is deterritorialized in one direction, and the minority subject's in another. Both
become-other in the creation of a new minority relation. 22

Ousmane Sembene has creatively confronted this problem throughout his career as a
filmmaker. Borom Sarret, a short film from 1963, provides many examples of fabulation as a
narrative strategy for minor cinema. The style of Borom Sarret is clearly influenced by the
documentary aspects of Italian neorealism, though with many original twists. In fact,
Sembene appropriates the documentary approach characteristic of colonial African cinema
and turns it to his own ends.

Sembene's early films are clearly influenced by neorealism's mixing of documentary and
fictional styles through the use of nonprofessional actors, location shooting, and episodic
narrative structures. A short film made with very limited resources, Borom Sarret presents a
day in the life of a Dakar cart driver, moving from morning until evening through brief
vignettes of Senegal's working poor. The film also adapts from neorealism the use of
postsynchronized sound. While the images retain a documentary quality,

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sound does not. In fact, sound is used with great originality, turning an aesthetic liability into
an asset. 23

Throughout Borom Sarret, no attempt is made to preserve the illusion of either "naturalistic"
sounds or a sound space strictly synchronized to the image. The distinctiveness of sound with
respect to image, as well as various sounds with respect to one another, is emphasized
throughout. One effect of this strategy is a layering of acoustic space within a fairly simple
mix: voice, effects, and music are organized as distinct blocks. This layering also produces a
complex stratification of narrative registers: the voice that shifts in a free indirect style
between inner speech and dialogue; the stories related in two songs on the music track, one
diegetic and sung by the griot or praise singer during the lunchtime episode, and one
nondiegetic that plays under several episodes before and after midday; and of course the
perspectives staged by the camera. These different narrative registers also split the narrative
address of the film: the French of the cart driver accessible both to Senegalese and Europeans,
the Wolof songs accessible only to that linguistic group, and then the visual address of the
film itself.

All of the voices are closely miked, retaining a uniform proximity independent of camera
distance. This adds to the nonnaturalistic feel of sound and the separation of sound from
image. The cart driver's narration only rarely departs from his free indirect narration into
direct speech. Moreover, the direct speech of both the cart driver and his interlocutors (his
wife, the beggar, the bricklayer, the expecting husband, the mourning husband, the man
moving to the Plateau, and the policeman) all have the quality of appearing "in quotes." This
quality is enhanced by similarities in the male voices -- many of which, I believe, were
spoken by Sembene -- while magnifying the division of voices from bodies. Throughout the
film one has the sense that the narration comes from "outside" the image in a storytelling
space, complexly ordered by acoustic relations. The narration, then, is less the "inner voice"
of the cart driver than a storyteller's voice, related by Sembene himself and coming from
outside the image, in another time and place. The entire soundtrack gives the impression of a
rcit, an act of storytelling relating to the image but separable from it. Sembene is the
storyteller, of course, and like all storytellers lends his voice to the principal characters.
However, in placing his voice in relation to the lyric tales related in the two songs, he
multiplies the commentaries on the image and situates himself, in a complex way, with
respect to the traditions of African fabulation.

Sembene's free indirect style also conveys strongly the odd pastness characteristic of the rcit.
The unfolding of image and sound narrations are complementary yet disjunct; both seem to
take place in the "present" of

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screen duration. But Sembene's original handling of postsynchronization. casts doubt on

whether the present of the soundtrack and that of the image are commensurable. On one hand,
the grammatical and performative styles of the narration, as well as the free indirect relation
between sound and image, invoke here, as well as in oral tales, a force of the past still present
in the tale and its moral. In Borom Sarret, however, Sembene pushes this quality in a more
complex and political direction. The distinct separation of sound and image reinforces a
temporal division in the film. The uncertain synchronization of sound and image contributes
to the sense of a vague, uncertain, and undulating relation between present and past, and
indeed often renders ironic any simple appeal to the past.

This is especially apparent in the lunchtime episode. The cart driver, having stopped to rest
and eat a bit of kola nut, is approached by a griot. Here voice, song, and image are
complementary in the sense that they obviously refer to the same narrative space. Yet very
few cues serve to "naturalize" the relation between these spaces. For example, despite the
presence of a Wolof lute (probably a khalam) on the soundtrack, the griot appears to sing
unaccompanied by any instrument, nor is there any attempt to make his lips seem
synchronized with the singing. The narration represents less what the cart driver thinks or
how he might respond than Sembene's indirect relating of what a cart driver might think in a
similar situation. The tone of the script is quite literary, but in a way that serves the
innovativeness of Sembene's early cinematic style. The relation between voice, song, and
image is complementary yet incommensurable; their uncertain synchronization constructs
sound and image as separate, though related, diegetic spaces. In disconnecting the utterable
from the visual, the oral narration from the visual presentation, Sembene comments explicitly
on how the force of the past affects the present in undesirable as well as desirable ways. The
inventiveness of this relation allows Sembene to preserve the African tradition of oral
narration in a fundamentally new and contemporary context. These spaces remain separate,
yet never cease to comment on one another in informative ways. This form of enunciation
strongly privileges the voice as the source of narration, but entirely without the authority of a
conventional, Western documentary or narrative style. Nor does it present a voice-over in the
usual sense. The voice is neither single nor abstract. Rather, it circulates through the film,
becoming embodied in concrete ways in different characters and voices.
At the same time, Sembene has a complex and contradictory attitude to African traditions. I
have no doubt that the griot represents a respected tradition of storytelling and historical
narration. Yet at the same time, the

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precolonial African past is represented implicitly as a false path toward a postcolonial future.
The song praising the nobility of the cart driver's Wolof ancestors is in equal parts true and
false. "The New Life may have reduced me to slavery," relates the narrator, "but I'm still a
noble." At the same moment, the cart driver hands over his day's earnings to the griot, who
has gathered a considerable crowd. The appeal of the historical past that momentarily restores
the cart driver's pride also impoverishes him. Later in the film, when he is arrested for
bringing his cart into "the Plateau," Dakar's European quarter, the cart driver's medal for war
service goes unrecognized by the policeman, who grinds it underfoot. Traditional drums play
under this scene, again invoking a historical pride that goes unrecognized in the present by a
Wolof "brother." The film also exhibits a similar ambivalence toward the historical force of
Islam.

The cartdriver and the griot, and in fact each of the pairings of the cartdriver with one of his
customers, presents a power of the false as an attempt to break the repetition of the past in the
present and to expose the limits of an identity that resists change because of a nostalgia for the
past and a refusal to recognize the emerging, collective voice of the Senegalese people. Each
character of the film acts out of his or her own interest. And in this manner, the episodic
structure of the film traces out the serialization of the Senegalese as a people who are actual
before becoming real. But while the people are still missing, the passage of the free indirect
style from voice to voice and of the image from episode to episode demonstrates how they are
all connected, in equally serial fashion, to a collective situation. The cart driver's journey
unites as well as divides. But for Sembene the way to the future does not go through the past,
and one must show that the people are missing as a precondition for their becoming. While
preserving a respect for history, it is also necessary to break the circular relation wherein an
idealized identification with the precolonial past preserves the forces of alienation and
subjugation in the neocolonial present.

Sembene turns to cinema to draw on traditional African history and storytelling in ways that
respect yet critically transform them. His ambiguous identification with the social role of the
griot thus represents a desire to transform the role of the African intellectual as intercessor.
Toward the end of Borom Sarret, the cart driver laments, "Who can you trust? Who? It's the
same in every country. They know how to read, but they only lie." The neocolonial educated
and professional classes of the Senegalese have relinquished their responsibility for
representing Dakar's working poor. The explicit political motivation for Sembene's use of the
free indirect style, then, is to redeem the African intellectual, not by "representing the people,"
but

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by using the free indirect style to effect a double becoming: to give voice to Senegal's
working poor and in turn to transform the voice of the intellectual.

This is not a politics of identity or identification. In Sembene's films the function of the
storyteller is preserved in the voice, but not in the simple form of identity. Sembene himself
relates the tale and plays many of the speaking characters. He acts as their intercessors, in
Deleuze's sense of the term, and they in turn intercede for him. Both act as a power of the
false for the other. Narratively, Sembene relinquishes the Western omniscient voice while
maintaining an indirect and fluid authorial presence. The "author" has a quality of anonymity
behind the voice analogous to the cart driver's anonymity -- a job without a name -- that
establishes contact between two commensurate forms of alienation. This is a powerful
example of the construction of intercessors and their narrative function. The character of the
cart driver is divided between the performing body of Ly Abdoulaye and the cart driver's
voice performed by Sembene. A circuit is established here between the organic intellectual
and the worker, but not in the usual sense of identification. Sembene absents himself to give
voice to the body of the cart driver who, in turn, inflects the voice of the intellectual. Each is
brought out of their position to become-other.

In narrating through the cart driver's body, Sembene creates a Wolof creolization of French
both in the quality of spoken language and in the narrative style of the film. A free indirect
relation circulates among the film's different narrative registers, unleashing a serial force that
splits identity. In the complex divisions between sound and image, positions of identity are
multiplied in ways that yield, from character to character, the image of a collective they
themselves cannot yet recognize, although the audience might. Voice and image no longer
serve the documentary function of modeling the true. Rather, the relation between image and
sound, subject and object, is distinct and incommensurable, yet it nonetheless keeps sliding
one between the other, oscillating in a free indirect relation. As a result, the model of the true
cannot hold; identity cannot be "found" in either image or voice, or narrator and characters,
but only in an image of incomplete becoming. This is yet another form of an irrational
relation where bodies and voices can never link up in a stable unity. Each is always
differentiating and becoming-other out of this incommensurablity. Neither image nor voice
can adequately represent the claims of postcolonial African identity. Yet, in their
differentiation, the individual divides in a serial relation and so becomes collective. I becomes
an other, private becomes public.

As it runs from episode to episode and character to character, serial construction acts as a
force of the outside. Sembene's free indirect style does

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not put us in the place of the cart driver. Rather, in every case the spectator is forced outside,
to take a view more comprehensive than that of either the narrator or the characters in a way
that relinks all the disconnected relations they are unable to fathom. This is also partly the
effect of the irrational division between sound and image. In Borom Sarret, acoustical space is
a storytelling space, ordered by the time of telling; the image track is an auditional space, one
version of the imagined story, ordered by the time of "listening." But unlike traditional
storytelling, there is no room for the direct participation of the spectators. Instead, spectators
are asked to participate indirectly. At the end of the film, the cart driver returns home with
neither money nor cart. His wife leaves the compound, assuring him that they will eat tonight.
This conclusion is usually read as the deepening of an ironic situation: because the cart driver
failed to provide for his family, his wife must now prostitute herself. But perhaps another
perspective is possible. The audience is asked to move outside the film, as it were, to leave the
film, like the cart driver's wife, and thus to create or invent our place out of an
incommensurable relation and an impossible situation. We are not asked to consider the
impossibility of historical change, but to imagine the forms of change we have not yet
considered and to act on them collectively.

The cart driver is constructed to embody a power of the false, as so many false paths for the
postcolonial African articulated as much by the disjunction between sound and image as by
the represented narrative situations. Sembene has created an intercessor who brings him out of
himself in an identification with the Wolof working poor. At the same time, the narration
springs loose from the body of the actor playing the cart driver, who becomes-other in
Sembene's narrative voice, as do all the other actors. Stylistically, the film is a creative patois
no less than the dialogue that Sembene writes and performs. This power of the false performs
simultaneously the impossibility of the Wolof intellectual expressing his or her situation in
French and the impossibility of Wolof culture reasserting itself through a simple regression to
a history uncontaminated by colonialism. Instead, Sembene creates a minor style as a hybrid,
neither French nor African, but something more appropriate to the historical situation of
postcolonialism. At the end of the film, it is up to the figure of the woman to seek out the
unthought, the undefined possibility of a new beginning. Through Sembene, the narrative
voice divides, becomes-other and other again, to figure, as postcolonial storyteller, the means
of collective enunciation.

In conclusion, the concept of becoming-other exemplifies best the relation of the body to
thought as presented in minor cinema. The relationship of body to thought is a complex one
that is analogous to that of space to time. The body is intimately linked to the materiality of
perception; it an-

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chors perception in space and grounds the horizons and perspectives from which space is
apprehended. However, if time is anterior to space, this does not mean that mind is divided
from body. One aspect of Deleuze's critique of Cartesianism is expressed in the following
terms: "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....
The attitude of the body relates thought to time as to that outside which is infinitely further
than the outside world" ( Time-Image189).

Body and mind are not divided, but they do differ in their relationship to time. The body is a
spatial sign of time that passes. It is never in the present because time passes: the body
registers and accumulates its past experiences; it anticipates the future either reactively as
repetition of the same, or affirmatively as the anticipation of new potentialities and
transformative forces. Therefore, the body does not think, but neither is it separate from
thought. Rather, "to think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its
postures" ( Time-Image189). Series are the expressions of forces through which the body
transforms itself and through which I becomes other. Unlike the action-image, where the body
is always identical to the space through which it moves -- acting, reacting, grounding
perspectives in a hodological space organized by sensorimotor situations -the series takes up
the body in an image where disparate spaces overlap without resolving into a totality or a
whole. Instead, the series presents "a pre-hodological space, like a fluctuatio animi which
does not point to an indecision of the spirit, but to an undecidability of the body" (203). The
cinematic body is more malleable than our physical bodies, of course, and more easily
expresses the series of performances, masquerades, postures, and rituals, all the powers of the
false through which the I becomes other. Still, the body is capable of transformation and the
cinema is instrumental not only in showing this as a possibility, but also in expressing these
powers as a will. Becoming-other in thought is the prelude to becoming other.

Unlike the performing arts, cinema cannot give us the presence of a body. This in fact is one
of its great powers. As Christian Metz has argued, the cinema is constituted not by presence
but by a double absence: it absents bodies in space (the past presence of the body before the
camera) as well as images in time, a passing of time we are forever running after in
perception. This is one definition of the imaginary upon which Deleuze and Metz might have
agreed. But while the passing of time affects Metz's theory, like Bazin's, with a certain
melancholy, Deleuze affirms a "revitalizing inspira-

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tion which means that cinema thus coincides with its own essence, at least with one of its
essences.... The problem is not that of a presence of bodies, but that of a belief which is
capable of restoring the world and the body to us on the basis of what signifies their absence"
( Time-Image201-2.). What "signifies their absence," of course, is time, the passing of time in
the irrational interval as a disymmetrical splitting between space and time, perception and
thought. The direct image of time is that of a pure virtuality, which "affects the visible with a
fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural
perception. What it produces in this way is the genesis of an 'unknown body' which we have
in the back of our heads, like the unthought in thought, the birth of the visible which is still
hidden from view" (201). This unthought is the force of the other which the body wills to
become; it is equally the Idea behind that will, the problem the body brings to thought, and
the unfolding of a series of differences which, retroactively, philosophy can express as
concepts and their linkages. This latter is a spiritual automaton, an "eidetics of the spirit,"
which yields a cinema of the brain.

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7 THOUGHT AND IMAGE

Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking -- not even yet, although the state of
the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.... Most thoughtprovoking in our
thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

-- Martin Heidegger, "What Calls for Thinking?"

Among the more darkly comic passages in The Time-Image, there is a brief meditation on the
relation between philosophy and death. This is undoubtedly the musing of a mature
philosopher, and it is striking now, in retrospect, that What Is Philosophy? begins with a
similar meditation. In The Time-Image, Deleuze relates a story by the Qubecoise writer
Pauline Harvey. Harvey writes that in spite of her lack of understanding of philosophy, she
loves philosophers because they give the impression of having passed through death and
returned to life, fatigued and cautious, and with a great sensitivity to the cold. Harvey finds
this impression amusing because of its double error-to have died and returned-but Deleuze
asserts instead a double truth. It is indeed characteristic of philosophers, he suggests, to
believe they have passed through death, but with a twist: "the philosopher is someone who
believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full
consciousness [ en toute raison ]. The phi-

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losopher has returned from the dead and goes back there. This has been the living formulation
of philosophy since Plato" ( Time-Image209).

This stark image presents the critical force of philosophy. Death has many faces here. It is the
black depression or inner death faced by Kierkegaard, as well as the inevitability of physical
death as a limit to existence. And there are many forms of outer or social mortality as well:
Marx's struggle to define and combat the alienation of labor; Adorno's vision of the reification
of culture, as the logic of commodities proliferates dialectically under late capitalism; and
Heidegger's fears for the fate of thinking in an increasingly technocratic society of control.
This is a melancholic view of philosophy. The philosopher surveys lands that few can picture
and even fewer wish to understand. And he or she brings along an image or map -- keys for
navigating, understanding, and surviving the terrains in which those deadened by capitalism
must still live. But few wish to hear the message; more often than not, it is hard to understand
and harder to accept. Moreover, most people are caught up in the perpetual present of their
daily survival, and for them the philosopher is always untimely. He or she returns from the
present of the future carrying along the heavy baggage of the past. Few find time to mourn the
philosopher's absence or celebrate his or her return. Thus death marks the horizons of thought
and existence. It is the philosopher's task to traverse these horizons and return with new
possibilities for life.

These are dark times for philosophy. But there is a joyful song as well -dithyrambs sung to the
rhythm of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. Philosophy's critical force includes both
interpretation and evaluation in the Nietzschean sense. Through critique, philosophy must
affirm both life and thought, enhancing their powers and potentialities in the face of alienation
and reification. Life here is what opposes repetition without difference, affirming life as
change and the being of becoming. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari refuse
wholly to accept the endgame that associates the nearness of death with a questioning of
philosophy's identity and tasks. For philosophy is invention or it is nothing at all, and in fact it
must be defined as a continuing process of creating new concepts. Eternal recurrence, the fact
of returning for that which differs, assures the open-endedness of time and the ever-renewed
possibility for creative life. Just as the I is divided by the form of time and so becomes other,
multiplying the possibilities of subjectivity and collective life, Deleuze argues that "thought
has no other reason to function than its own birth, always the repetition of its own birth, secret
and profound.... [The] image thus has as object the functioning of thought, and...the
functioning of thought is also the real subject which brings us back to images" ( Time-
Image165).

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Deleuze and Guattari have a straightforward answer to the question What is philosophy?
Philosophy is the art of inventing concepts -- though invention, no doubt, requires intense
labor, deep meditation, and a profound if joyful struggle. The question remains, however, why
the functioning of thought should be the "real subject" that brings us back to images. Why is
the relation between image and thought of such consequence for philosophy? And in turn,
why should cinema, a practice of images and signs, be of such interest for philosophy that
Deleuze will conclude The Time-Image by writing that "there is always a time, midday-
midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves, 'What is cinema?' but 'What is
philosophy?'" ( TimeImage280).

I argued at the beginning of this book that eras are defined philosophically by their images of
thought. This is a continuous though understated theme in the two cinema books. The fate of
the concept-and therefore the fate of philosophy -- is linked to that of the image and the
history of its transformations as regimes of signs. Equally powerful is the transformation of
philosophy by this history. One of Deleuze's assumptions is that film theory is indeed part of
philosophy. Consequently, film theory is not about, nor is it a reflection on, cinema; rather, it
is about the concepts created in the history of cinematic images. This is why Deleuze reads
the history of cinema as if it were a history of philosophy, and why defining cinema's
concepts is fundamental for understanding both the historical emergence of our contemporary
audiovisual culture and the fate of thinking within this culture's image of thought.

Our culture has become a predominantly audiovisual culture. This is one of the most
powerful, if implicit, themes of Deleuze's cinema books, as well as his book on Foucault. 1
The emergence of an audiovisual culture is concomitant with the history of cinema and the
history of film theory. However, in Deleuze's view the concept is not faring well in the
audiovisual era, especially as this culture becomes more televisual and as society becomes
one of control marked by the flows of information. This is one of the frequent complaints in
What Is Philosophy? It is bad enough that the human sciences -- sociology, psychoanalysis,
and linguistics -- have posed themselves as rivals to philosophy for the claims of thinking. But
now even the disciplines of mass communications -- marketing, design, advertising, and
information technologies -- lay claim to the title of concepteurs as the creators of "events."
The idea of critique in the philosophical sense has been replaced by marketing. "The only
events," write Deleuze and Guattari, "are trade fairs [ expositions ], and the only concepts are
products that can be sold" ( What Is Philosophy?10, 15). But the two philosophers are not
ones to withdraw from a challenge. "Certainly, it is painful to learn that

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Concept indicates a society of information services and engineering. But the more philosophy
comes up against shameless and inane rivals and encounters them at its very core, the more it
feels driven to fulfill the task of creating concepts that are aerolites rather than commercial
products. It gets the giggles, which wipe away its tears. So, the question of philosophy is the
singular point where concept and creation are related to each other" (II).

Outside of his love of cinema, which clearly runs deep, it is easy to see why for Deleuze the
fate of philosophy under late capitalism is tied to the fate of cinema. The avatars of the time-
image are not realizing cinema's essence in a historical teleology. Rather they are pitched in a
battle for the fate of what image and concept will become in an audiovisual culture. Deleuze's
philosophy of cinema is ultimately not an aesthetic, despite his avid cinephilism, his appeals
to grands auteurs, and his implicit hierarchies of value. Examples of the direct time-image are
as rare as genuine philosophical concepts. Both are engaged in the struggle against
information and the presumed reification of thought in an information society.

If the site of critical struggle is the fate of the concept, then what is at stake in the concept
itself, in its relation to thought, and with respect to the plane or planes of immanence in which
our contemporary image of thought emerges? The concept is certainly without informational
value. 2 As a philosophical reality, the nature of the concept is not linguistic, nor is it
reducible to a symbolic logic. Nor can the concept be considered as a pregiven knowledge or
representation that mental faculties discover, formulate, and pass judgment on. Art and
philosophy do share a common activity: creation. Philosophy creates concepts just as art
creates percepts and affects. Both emerge from a similar plane of immanence where "the
concept is not given, it is created; it is to be created. It is not formed but posits itself in itself-it
is a self-positing. Creation and self-positing mutually imply each other because what is truly
created, from the living being to the work of art, thereby enjoys a self-positing of itself, or an
autopoetic characteristic by which it is recognized" ( What Is Philosophy?II).

The history of cinema provides concrete examples for thinking through the autonomy of
movement in the creation of concepts. Thus, cinema's two regimes are marked on the one
hand by the automatization of movement in the image and on the other by the
autotemporalization of the image. Each regime forms spatial and temporal articulations whose
logic posits concepts that, from a philosophical perspective, can be articulated as spiritual
automata, mental cartographies, and noosigns. Neither cinema nor cinastes need have any
interest in recognizing and formulating their spatial and temporal creations as concepts. Yet
philosophy, which sees in cinema a properly philosophical consideration of time, may define
on its own ter-

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rain as concepts the way images and signs are thought through in cinema. Within its own
territory, and in its encounters with neighboring activities such as art and science, philosophy
has "the more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the
conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments" ( What Is Philosophy?12).

Cinema's conditions of creation in this respect are simultaneously automatic and eidetic. That
cinema is a technological apparatus -- a machine organizing the space and time of meaning in
the image for the spectatoris a commonplace of contemporary film theory. With the idea of
automates spirituels, however, Deleuze is pursuing different philosophical quarry. Spinoza
formulated this idea by defining the task of philosophy as giving knowledge of our powers of
thought, as opposed to providing knowledge of things. The task of the philosophical idea is
not to make something known, but rather to make known our powers of thought. Spiritual
automata are autopoetic because ideas are causes, one for the other. Ideas are a mode of
thought. They have no cause save in the attributes of thought that unfold as spiritual automata
according to certain laws. To be sure, these automata are neither Aristotle's laws, nor should
they be confused with Descartes's mind. The spiritual automaton is in no way equivalent to a
psychological consciousness, nor can it be construed in the forms of identity-such is the basis
for Spinoza's critique of Descartes. The object of philosophy is not "the subject," but rather
the powers of thought. Ideas have a logical form separate from consciousness and a material
content separate from their representamen: "In thinking we obey only the laws of thought,
laws that determine both the form and content of true ideas, and that make us produce ideas in
sequence according to their own causes and through our own power, so that in knowing our
power of understanding we know through their causes all the things that fall with this power"
( Deleuze, Expressionism140). 3 The concept of a cinematic Idca -- for example, the indirect
and direct image of time-suggests that automata may be described philosophically as mental
cartographies. To be a cartographer of thought for either the movement or time-image means
tracing out their distinct planes of immanence, their concepts relating movement and time to
thought, and the noosigns each gives rise to as particular raccordements of concepts and
signs. Only in this way will we understand what new powers of thought arise with the
movement-image and time-image as well as how they are distinct.

The spiritual automaton is machinic thought, but this means that the cinema is less a
technology than a thn or poesis. Many have commented on photography's and film's
qualities as an image produced automatically and, it is assumed, objectively without the
intervention of the human hand. Deleuze is unique in defining the automation of movement as
primary to

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the image. However, as I explained in chapter's, the definition of "movement" changes from
the classic to the modern conception, and, along with it, the powers of thought change as a
function of the concepts relating image and movement.

In many ways Peirce is the avatar of the classical conception. Here the spiritual automaton
characterizes "the human mind as a sign developing according to the logical rules of
inference." 4 Hitchcock's mental images represent the cinematographic apogee of this
conception, where one image follows the next according to a strictly defined causality and
necessary relations. The ineluctable quality of the logical unfolding of inference in the thriller
is perfectly commensurate with the automovement of the image -the regular unwinding of
space is an automation of time represented indirectly as the continuous, linear, chronological,
and irreversible succession of identical intervals in space. Alternatively, the
autotemporalization of the image opens a new regime of images and signs and thus requires a
new set of concepts. While the technological basis of cinema's "machinic" qualities are
undoubtedly important, philosophically they are not fundamental for discussing the cinema as
a spiritual automaton. Apparatus theory, with its identification or determination of the subject
by technology, has been haunted by its Hegelian origins, from Vertov to Baudry. Deleuze
sides more with Heidegger, as we shall see. Nonetheless, the emergence of the timeimage
demonstrates how a fundamentally new tchn and a new set of concepts can be invented out
of the same "technology." The spiritual automaton is not an apparatus (appareil) but a
dispositif, albeit a philosophical dispositif rather than a psychological or psychoanalytic one.
Conceptual innovation is more important here than technological innovation.

Dleuze's books divide into two volumes because movement-images and time-images differ
with respect to the image of thought they presuppose. Each gives rise to an abstract machine
characterized by its own concepts, as well as its own images and signs. The automation of
movement in the image produces a psychological automaton; the autotemporalization of the
image produces spiritual automata. To oppose the two as self-identical forms, one negating
the other, or to describe them as distinct "grammars" of cinema, would be equally misleading.
Rather, as definable regimes of images and signs, the cinematic movement-image and the
time-image posit two distinct planes of immanence. Earlier I discussed the plane of
immanence, after Deleuze's reading of Bergson, as universal variation or an asubjective plane
of movement where matter=image. The plane of immanence of the time-image could be
described as the "movements" of time in eternal recurrence or as the passive syntheses of
time. In What Is Philosophy? the plane of immanence is defined more abstractly as the image
of thought

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where concepts are produced regardless of their contours or the problems they suppose.

The relation between concepts and planes of immanence is important. "The plane of
immanence," write Deleuze and Guattari, "is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather
the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of
thought, to find one's bearings in thought" ( What Is Philosophy?37). An image of thought is
not a method of thinking (though every method concerns, nonetheless, the formulation of
concepts and presupposes an image of thought). Nor does it suggest a scientific account of the
brain's functioning or a theory of cognition. Nor, finally, is it an image in the sense of a
cultural representation of the forms, means, and ends of thinking in a historically specific
moment. Each of these perspectives relinquishes the immanence of thought with respect to the
image. Instead, philosophy lays claim to defining an image of thought as separate from either
science or art. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari argue that "the image of thought implies a
strict division between fact and right: what pertains to thought as such must be distinguished
from contingent features of the brain or historical opinions.... The image of thought retains
only what thought can claim by right. Thought demands 'only' movement that can be carried
to infinity. What thought claims by right, what it selects, is infinite movement or the
movement of the infinite. It is this that constitutes the image of thought" (37).

This idea of an infinite movement suggests, of course, the universal variation or absolute
movement of the movement-image. Deleuze in fact presents this argument in the conclusion
of The Time-Image. Cinema's images and signs -- whether "kinostructures" or
"chronogeneses" -- derive from the semiotic material of the primary movement-image. This
enonable or utterable of cinema is a signaletic material: "it consists of movements and
thought-processes (pre-linguistic images), and points of view on these movements and
processes (pre-signifying signs). It constitutes a whole 'psychomechanics,' the spiritual
automaton, the utterable of a language system [ langue ] which has its own logic" ( Time-
Image262). But in order to claim for philosophy what is its activity by right, the philosopher
must invoke the more fundamental "movement" of the impersonal form of time and eternal
recurrence. The relation between concepts and their plane of immanence is complementary
and incommensurable, divided by the pure form of time, which assures the creativity of
concepts.

Philosophy's activity by right is suggested by the dual meaning in French of plan as both map
and plane in the dimensional sense. The plane of immanence sets the horizon of thinking and
the consistency of concepts, but it does not restrict the creation of concepts, which is limitless.
Philosophy

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is both a constructivism and a cartography. The philosopher invents concepts as well as maps
their horizons, relations, and planes of consistency. In this respect, the image of thought is an
abstract machine, and the spiritual automaton is a machinic arrangement or concrete
assemblage of concepts. 5 The spiritual automaton expresses the singularity of a given image
of thought. Images and automata both posit a machinic thought:

Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the
abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts. Concepts are events, but
the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events: not the
relative horizon that functions as a limit..., but the absolute horizon, independent of any
observer, which makes the event as concept independent of a visible state of affairs in which
it is brought about. Concepts pave, occupy, or populate the plane bit by bit, whereas the plane
itself is the indivisible milieu in which concepts are distributed without breaking up its
continuity or integrity.... It is the plane that secures conceptual linkages with ever increasing
connections, and it is concepts that secure the populating of the plane on an always renewed
and variable curve. ( What Is Philosophy?36-37)

This abstract machine or image has a relation with the Whole more commensurate with the
time-image than the movement-image. Throughout the volume on The Time-Image, Deleuze
poses an intimate relation between image and thought expressed as mental cartographies,
noosigns, and spiritual automata. However, only the movement-image pretends that thought
can be presented directly in or by the image. Alternatively, time always divides thought from
the signs that express or represent it. Through the force of the eternal return, time affirms a
specific power, or rather "impower" of thought: "we are not yet thinking."

This is why the time-image is fundamentally important for Deleuze. It also helps explain the
relative rarity of time-images in contrast to movement-images, which, nonetheless, have their
own relation with the Whole and their own plane of consistency and image of thought. The
plane of consistency of the cinematic movement-image is the open totality in movement that
gives rise to the model of the True as totalization. Two coordinates map this classical image:
images are linked or extended according to principles of association and contiguity, and
associated images are integrated into a conceptual whole and differentiated into more
extensive sets. From plane to coordinates, a mental cartography is drawn out. The plane of
consistency is the surface of the map; noosigns are the coordinates that orient the movements
of thought.

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The number of images and signs that may be invented by the avatars of the movement-image,
as well as the concepts that inform the logic of this inventiveness, are potentially infinite. Yet
the movement-image's plane of consistency -- and thus what defines its Idea, or the
immanence of thought in the image -- is organized fundamentally only by two kinds of
noosigns. Noosigns are defined by the logic of intervals and the relation between intervals and
wholes. One noosign defines the linking of images by rational intervals into sequences
forming an extendable world; the other assures "the integration of the sequences into a whole
(self-awareness as internal representation), but also the differentiation of the whole into
extended sequences (belief in the external world)" ( Time-Image277). Thus the potential
infinity of movement-images is governed by a horizon of thought where the
commensurability of the interval and the whole represent time indirectly as succession in
space. The commensurability of interval and whole also presents the identity of image and
concept in the movement-image as its particular expression of how thought is immanent in the
image. Deleuze calls the logic of rational links the law of the image, since it governs the
sequencing of images through principles of contiguity or similitude. Integration and
differentiation are the law of the concept, since together they define the relations of the whole.
Movement expresses change in the whole as the integration of images into extendable sets;
differentiation expresses the division of the whole into sets whose movement passes between
sequences and their extensions. Therefore, in the classical image we pass "naturally" from
image to concept and back again; thought is commensurate with the dialectical expansion of
the whole.
This is how thought moves in the movement-image. But in the transition to the time-image-no
matter how gradual, rare, or indistinct -- the definition of movement changes, as does the
relation between image and thought. The plane of consistency of the time-image is best
characterized by seriality: the irrational interval assures the incommensurability of interval
and whole. Succession gives way to series because the interval is a dissociative force; it
"strings" images together only as disconnected spaces. The rational interval is a spatial
conjunction since it belongs simultaneously to the end of one set and the beginning of the set
that follows. But the irrational interval is autonomous and irreducible. It is not spatial, nor
does it form part of an image. Rather, it presents the force that unhinges images and sounds
into disconnected series, which can no longer form a whole. The Idea of a direct image of
time is a paradoxical construction. What the irrational interval gives is a nonspatial perception
-- not space but force, the force of time as change interrupting repetition with difference and
parceling succession into series. 6

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In the classical image, the movements of thought, no less than physical movements, are
defined by relative transformations in space. Moreover, relations between space and time are
governed by the commensurability of intervals and the whole. In contrast, the plane of
consistency of the timeimage is marked by the "reign of incommensurables," and in this
manner the movements of thought, and the mental cartographies that trace them, are
fundamentally transformed. Time asserts its autonomy in the interval with several
consequences. Images, and images and sounds, are no longer conjoined by rational intervals,
but rather "relinked on to irrational cuts [r-enchanent sur coupures irrationelles ]" ( Time-
Image277). Not that one image succeeds or is added to another. This montage construction
might better be characterized as "differential," since sequences are formed not through linear
succession in space and chronological succession in time but through the incommensurability
of space and time reasserted in every irrational interval. The "will to falsehood" of the direct
time-image draws all of its powers from this quality of incommensurability: indiscernability
of the real and the imaginary in the image; inexplicability of narrative events; undecidability
of relative perspectives on the same event, both in the present and in the relation of present
and past; and, finally, the incompossibility of narrative worlds, which proliferate as
incongruous presents and not-necessarily-true pasts.

By the same token, the movements of thought are no longer represented "in" the movement of
images, through either the commensurability of intervals and wholes or the open totality in
movement. There is neither integration of sequences into a whole, which promotes the
representation of thought as an internal self-representation (memory, dream, fantasy), nor
differentiation of the whole into a diegesis or believable world. Rather, the whole is the
"outside." There is movement in the image, of course, which is given as an actual perception
in space. But the differential relations "between" images and sounds are furrowed by a pure
virtuality: the force of time. Time is always outside the image. It recedes from the image
toward an absolute horizon, since it is incommensurable with space. Thought, too, "moves"
only in incommensurable relations that recede toward an interiority deeper than the I can
reach. For this reason, Deleuze writes,

There are no longer grounds for talking about a real or possible extension capable of
constituting an external world: we have ceased to believe in it, and the image is cut off from
the external world. But the internalization or integration in a whole as consciousness of self
has no less disappeared.... This is why thought, as power which has not always existed, is
born from an outside more distant than any external

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world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an unthinkable or
unthought, deeper than any internal world.... [There] is no longer any movement of
internalization or externalization, integration or differentiation, but a confrontation of outside
and an inside independent of distance, this thought outside itself and this un-thought within
thought. ( Time-Image277-78, 363)

This power born from an outside more distant than any world is becoming, or virtuality as the
force of time as change. This unthought, deeper than any interiority, is becoming-other or
virtuality that constitutes the subject in the divisions of time. Simultaneously, outside and
inside start to change places like the twisting of a Mbius strip and never cease doing so. As
Foucault phrases it in The Order of Things, here I become what I do not think, in order for my
thought to become what I am not. Thus thought eludes both subject and object in the
following sense: You may contemplate the world outside, but there will always be a horizon
farther than your thought can reach. You can reflect within yourself, yet there will always be
an interiority beyond the reach of your thought. These are two incomparably distant infinities
which meet, nevertheless, in an absolute horizon. Because the irrational interval no longer
forms part of any sequence or of any whole, it posits for itself an autonomous outside and
gives itself its own interiority.

Is thought becoming or becoming-other? Is it a thought outside itself engendered by the

division of the I from the ego, or an unthought within thought as pure virtuality? In fact, these
are the two sides of differentiation-distinct and asymmetrical, yet in a constant relation of
complementarity and chiasmus. The two noosigns of the direct time-image express what
Deleuze calls the "complex notion of different/ciation." 7 On the one hand, there is
differenciation as "aesthetic actualization" determined by the specification of relation and the
composition of singularities. Here the irrational interval founds "chronogenesis" as different
relations among "nonlinked (but always relinked) images" ( Time-Image278). On the other,
there is differen t iation as the Idea or the exposition of the virtual as a second noosign, "the
absolute contact between non-totalizable, asymmetrical outside and inside" (278).

The outside as pure virtuality forms an absolute horizon in relation to thought, and the time-
image has no other reason than to confront our thinking with this horizon. In this manner, the
contact between inside and outside in the irrational interval resembles the complementary yet
incommensurable relation between concept and plane of immanence. In What Is Philosophy?
Deleuze and Guattari explain this relation through the dis-

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tinction between a relative and an absolute horizon. 8 A relative horizon is terrestrial and
human-centered, it is grounded in a stable, geometric perspective that assures the continuity
of vision. But an absolute horizon is independent of any observer or terrestrial perspective.
The distinction between these two perspectives divides events into those that are seen and
unseen, communicable and incommunicable. But what is unobserved or incommunicable is
nonetheless an event, a potentiality, or an event to come. Thus the absolute horizon appears as
an infinite reserve of events, and the plane of immanence includes as yet unrealized powers of
thought or the unthought in thought. This is not a sublime, which augments our powers of
thought through a totality that expands in contemplation of the infinite. Rather, the absolute
horizon confronts the relative as an "outside" -- what is yet outside vision, outside
communication, not yet thought. It confronts the observer with the "impowers" of thought --
we are not yet thinking.

Perhaps these arguments can be made less abstract by deepening our understanding of the
historical transition from the movement-image to the time-image as the displacement of one
spiritual automaton by another.

From the beginnings of cinema as an industrial art, and certainly from the beginnings of film
theory, the automation of movement was recognized as the fundamental quality of classic
cinema. This automovement is unique in making movement an immediate given of the image.
Cinema is wholly unlike the other arts, either spatial or temporal, in that movement is no
longer mediated directly by a performing body as in dance, theater, or music, nor
reconstituted mentally from its abstract rendering in a figurative medium like painting or
photography. The automation of movement has philosophical consequences as well. In
classical philosophy the spiritual automaton defines our powers of thought as the movement
of inference -- the logical possibility of formally deducing thoughts from each other. But this
too was, in its essence, a mental reconstitution of movement from its abstraction in symbolic
logic.

In Deleuze's view, classical film theory characterizes the force and the originality of the
movement-image as a "psychological automaton." Film sets up in the spectator what Jean
Epstein called a "subjectivit automatique" ( crits2, 63) correlative to the mechanical
qualities of the camera and projector, with their automation of movement in the image. In a
1934 essay, "Introduction la mystique du cinma," Elie Faure describes this as a "material
automatism" produced in the moving image that gradually imposes itself on our "intellectual
automatism." "Thus there appears, in a blinding light," Faure writes, "the subordination of the
human soul to the tools which it creates, and vice versa. It turns out that there is a constant
reversibility between technical and affective nature" ( Fonction du cinma56). 9

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Left-wing theorists from Eisenstein to Benjamin described this self-given movement as the
experience of shock. The montage of movement-images reproduces within spectators a
movement of mental images we are incapable of resisting and which take us outside of our
ourselves. Eisenstein's theory of montage in the 1920s best describes the ideals and
pretentions of the movement-image in this respect. At the most fundamental level, cinematic
movement, whose essence is montage, produces a shock in thought communicated directly,
physiologically and mentally, to the spectator. Thought is conceived here not as a power or a
potential, but rather as a material force, "as if the cinema were telling us: with me, with the
movement-image, you can't escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you" ( Time-
Image156). From the 1920s through the 1940s, Eisenstein's position evolved from the more
Pavlovian theory of shock to one in which the movement-image pushes the spectator outside
himself or herself in an ecstatic movement of Hegelian alienation and self-transcendence
influenced by Engels's Dialectics of Nature. This is the theory of organicism and pathos that,
after the theories of shock and inner speech, was Eisenstein's third elaboration of a cinematic
dialectical materialism.
Eisenstein's philosophy of cinema exemplifies three assumptions concerning the relationship
between cinema and thought produced throughout the history of the movement-image: First,
the automaton produces a relationship with the whole that throws thought into a higher
awareness; second, the psychomechanics of the movement-image shapes thought in the
subconscious unfolding of images as a prelinguistic inner speech; third the organic unfolding
of movement creates a scnsorimotor unity between world and "man," nature and thought.
Together these principles define what Deleuze calls the "dialectical automaton." Eisenstein
brought this conception to its highest form. Here there is no need for a distinction between a
cinema of the body and a cinema of the brain. From the beginning, Eisenstein's goal was to
construct an image that would affect body and brain equally in a dialectic that would raise
them to a higher unity. From the cinema of attraction to nonindifferent nature, Eisenstein
sought an image of shock or of ecstatic intensity that would move the spectator from percept
to concept, or from image to thought. This passage from image to thought takes place, in
Eisenstein's view, through the body. Conflictual montage affects the body by strategically
bombarding it with sensations, moving the spectator from the cinema of "I see and hear" to
the cinema of "I feel and think." Thus, Deleuze argues, "If Eisenstein is a dialectician, it is
because he conceives of the violence of the shock in the form of opposition and the thought of
the whole in the form of opposition overcome, of the transformation of opposites: 'From the
shock of two factors a concept is born.'...

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[In] this way he dialecticizes the most general given of the movementimage; he thinks that
any other conception weakens the shock and leaves thought optional. The cinematographic
image must have a shock effect on thought, and force thought to think itself as much as
thinking the whole" ( Time-Image158). 10 As I have noted before, this is a Hegelian cinema of
the sublime. What Eisenstein desired was an image of the whole that affects the mind through
the body, raising it to a higher consciousness. The ideal of the cinema of shock, as well as the
later cinema of ecstasy, is that it forces us to think, and to think the whole in an organic image
of an expanding totality in movement.

The first stage of Eisenstein's dialectical automaton marks a transition from percept to
concept, which forces the spectator through shock to a higher awareness of the whole. At the
same time, the "highest form of consciousness in the work of art has as correlate the deepest
form of the subconscious," or, in other words, the organic form of the movement-image
informs, and is informed by, the most sensory and primitive forms of thought ( Time-
Image159). This is the thesis of Eisenstein's famous 1935 address to the congress of Soviet
cinema workers, "Film Form: New Problems." The second stage passes back from a concept
of the whole to affect: "we no longer go from the movement-image to the clear thinking of the
whole that it expresses; we go from a thinking of the whole which is presupposed and obscure
to the agitated, mixed-up images which express it" (159). In this respect, film language
becomes the dialectical motor striking an identity between, on the one hand, the universal
variation of movement-images as a prelinguistic signaletic material and, on the other, inner
speech as the primitive language of thought. 11

Finally, in true Hegelian fashion there is a third stage to Eisenstein's dialectical automaton.
Not only does this automaton move us from image to concept and concept to affect, it also
forges an identity between concept and image. This is why Eisenstein concurs with Engels
that nature is "not indifferent." The same dialectical process informs equally the image of
movement and change in nature, inner speech as the primitive language of thought, and
montage as the principle for constructing an open totality in movement. Deleuze calls this
identity an "action-thought" that forges a sensorimotor unity between humanity and the world,
or between humanity and nature. Eisenstein located this global unity in the concept of
montage as a principle for organizing images. Balzs defined it as a physiognomy in images,
where humanity and nature show their common face. For Bazin, an emphasis on unbroken
duration founds a temporal realism that unifies humanity and nature in a common act of
perception. Each one of these cases requires the teleological orientation apposite to the
organic will to truth.

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This is an image of Truth as globalizing or totalizing apperception, linking humanity and the
world as commensurable points in a sensorimotor whole, that is, in an indirect image of time.

Eisenstein's dialectical automaton exemplifies the "classical" image of thought. The idea of an
open totality in movement traces a cartography where thought unfolds across two axes. First,
images are extended or linked by opposition through principles of continuity and
resemblance, contrast and association. This is one specific noosign of the movement-image.
In the classical schema, these principles are further ordered by a linear causality; they are also
generalizable as conventions. Within this context, Deleuze defines logical sets as legal lwithin
the parameters of a codifiable space) or illegal. Throughout this schema, the rational interval
is the guarantee of continuity and commensurability, both in the extension of the referent into
an image and in the linking of one image to another in causal chains.

While associated images are linked horizontally, they also expand vertically through a
dialectic of integration and differentiation. The linked images together form an image or
concept of the whole (integration), which is extended in turn as part of a set of a higher order
(differentiation). This is a second noosign of the indirect image of time. The
commensurability of parts and wholes is assured through a dialectical movement between
internalization of parts as an image of the whole and externalization of this image as part of a
larger set. This organic image thus constructs a model of the True as an open and moving
totality unfolding horizontally and expanding vertically. In this manner, the impossible ideal
of the movement-image resembles Borges's story of the cartographer who dreamed of making
a map commensurable with the world in all its dimensions. And we believe in this world not
only because of its internal consistency or representational power, but also because we are
included as part of the image of the whole.

An open totality expanding through differentiation and integration, commensurable relations

between intervals and the whole: this is the abstract machine of the movement-image. In this
context, an abstract machine is defined either through the dominance of a singular concept
(for example, the four principle montage Ideas of the movement-image) or through
diagrammatic expression. The best example here is Eisenstein's promotion of the golden mean
as a model of organic composition, a formula that informs equally parts, wholes, and the
relations between them.

By 1935, however, the psychological automaton of the movement image, as described by

Epstein, Faure, and Eisenstein, was beginning to be treated with increasing political
skepticism. While the collective nature of cinema produced great aspirations for its role in
promoting universal socialism, it proved equally effective as propaganda and as a global
commodity, reveal-
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ing a duality at the heart of cinema's psychomechanics. As a philosophy machine, the spiritual
automaton marks, on the one hand, "the highest exercise of thought," a self-producing
autonomy where thought thinks and thinks itself. This is Jean-Louis Schefer's version of the
cinematic dispositif as "a giant in the back or our heads, Cartesian diver, dummy or machine,
mechanical man without birth who brings the world into suspense" ( TimeImage263). On the
other hand, the movement-image found itself equally capable of producing a psychological
automaton as a subject dispossessed of its own thought who only obeys an internal vision,
obsession, or drive. This is one of the principal arguments of Siegfried Kracauer's From
Caligari to Hitler. Earlier, Walter Benjamin expressed well this duality of the movement-
image as a conflict between the politicization of aesthetics in Soviet films of the 1920s and
the aestheticization of politics in the Nuremberg rallies, captured so powerfully on film by
Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will ( 1935). 12 Therefore, in order to liberate the spiritual
automaton, the bond between movement and image had to be abandoned, thus unleashing
occulted powers and creating new concepts.

Deleuze describes the displacement of the movement-image by the timeimage as "an original
will to art" that transforms the intelligible material of cinema itself. This transformation
requires not only a second semiotic to describe the new regime of images and signs, but also a
new image of thought which presupposes "a direct experience of time, anterior to all motivity
of bodies" ( Time-Image267). Despite its variation and complexity, modern cinema founds an
audiovisual regime characterized by three factors whose assumptions differ from Eisenstein's
dialectical automaton. Thus the direct image of time requires "the obliteration of a whole or of
a totalization 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 the world, in favour of a break which now leaves us with
only a belief in this world" (187-88.). These three principles define the relationship between
cinema and thought in the direct time-image.

To say that time has its direct image does not necessarily mean that time is a form that can be
represented. What best characterizes chronosigns is the appearance of time as a nonlinear and
nonchronological force whose relation to the whole is entirely different from that of the
movement-image. The movement-image is defined by an organic will to truth, or a
fundamental philosophical belief in the representability of the whole. In this manner, the
movement-image operates as an abstract machine whose noosigns include linkage by
association and expansion by differentiation and integration.

Alternatively, the obliteration of the whole or of a totality expressible

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by images is the most fundamental concept for the direct image of time. The others follow
from it. Here the irrational interval restores the absolute aspect of the out-of-field as the
"outside" inserted between images. In the movement-image, offscreen space is an implied
presence, a cue for the next consecutive space toward which the sequence is evolving in a
linear, causal, and chronological fashion. When irrational connections predominate, offsereen
space no longer refers to the evolution of a closed set -- shot, sequence, or film system -- but
rather to the Whole, that is, "duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no
longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible. Deframings [dcadrages] which
are not 'pragmatically' justified refer to precisely this second aspect as their raison d'tre....
[T]he out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to
exist, but rather to 'insist' or 'subsist,' a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space
and time" ( Movement-Image 17). The irrational interval stands as a token for the force of
time. In the movement-image, offsereen space signals actualizable relations with other sets.
Deframing, however, presumes a virtual relation with the Whole that is the regime of the
time-image. The two strategies often intermix, and indeed both present images of time. But in
the movement-image, time "is reached indirectly, on to infinity, through...the succession of
images; in the other case it is reached more directly, in the image itself, and by limitation and
neutralisation of the first" (18).

The direct image of time appears as a force that disrupts chronological space defined by
exteriority, extension, and continuity links. The formal equivalent for this direct image is
montage patterns defined by irrational intervals. Here sensorimotor situations have
disappeared in favor of visualizations of the force of time that are, generally speaking,
modeled on the passive syntheses of time: distinct yet incommensurable points of present;
preservation of memory as nonchronological strata; and the pure form of time as change, or
the Nietzschean conception of time as the eternal return. In this respect, eternal recurrence is
to the force of change and differentiation in the time-image as absolute movement or
universal variation is to the forms of change presented by the movement-image.

So there is not one correlative in time for chronosigns, but at least three. By the same token,
the narrative cinema of the time-image also has its machinic qualities whose logic is defined
by relinking on irrational divisions rather than by association, and by strategies of serial
composition with noncommensurable relations between parts and wholes rather than by
volumetric expansion through differentiation and integration. These are the noosigns of the
time-image.

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This obliteration or neutralization of the whole is also represented by the disjunction or

"heautonomy" of the acoustic and the visual, exemplified in the films of Marguerite Duras,
Straub and Huillet, and Hans Jrgen Syberberg. This disjunction can take several forms in the
construction of stratigraphic space. On the one hand there is the objective dissociation
between what is seen and what is said; on the other, the subjective dissociation between voice
and body. On this basis, one could argue that there is also a psychological automaton for the
time-image, but it is not defined by a thought of which the subject is dispossessed and which
could be returned to it. The irrational disjunction of stratigraphic space means a whole cannot
be restored to the image, nor can an idea of self-identity be restored in the image of a unique
identity to which voice and body both belong. Syberberg pushes these strategies to their
extremes: for example, the puppets of Our Hitler ( 1977) present human voices through
inanimate bodies; in Parsifal ( 1981), body and voice are foreign to one another despite the
apparent synchronization of image and sound. Sometimes there is a woman's body for a man's
voice or two bodies compete for the same voice. This is a psychological automaton only in
the sense of the image of a divided psyche that speaks or moves according to a force that does
not belong to it. Nonetheless, the automaton is not psychological in the sense that there could
be a "nonmachinic" subject that could return to itself, or find itself again, in the absence of the
force that divides it. Force is equal here to the series of time as an affirmative will to power
that transforms identity -- I becomes an other and never stops becoming.
The visual and acoustic complexity of Syberberg's films are no less formidable than their
length. Deleuze reads this complexity as forming a world where nature has been replaced by
information. In Our Hitler, not only does Syberberg present the spectator with a dossier on the
cultural afterlife of Hitler whose vastness and density is incomprehensible, but in dividing the
visible and the utterable there are no causal relations with which to link this information in a
coherent historical image. Syberberg presents a "non-totalizable complexity" which is "non-
representable by a single individual" ( Time-Image269). There is no whole that can be
restored, nor an individual who can restore sense to the whole as narrator or interpretant. As
Deleuze relates, Syberberg's enemy is the cultural image of Hitler. This is neither Hitler the
individual, who is long gone, nor the totality that could put these images in a causal relation
and so produce a coherent historical "truth." The power of Syberberg's film is a power of the
false. Hitler cannot be defeated by explaining the falsity of the image, nor by replacing
corrupting with truthful information, for "no information, whatever it might be, is

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sufficient to defeat Hitler" (269). The irrational division between body and voice, the visible
and the utterable, is dedicated not to the transmission of information, but to its overcoming.

More important than communication is the force of becoming, or the intuition of the outside
as a nonspatial perception of what has not yet become thought or become other. And if there
is "an original will to art" in the time-image, it is based neither on communicating with nor
informing the spectator. Rather, the time-image puts us in contact with what is closest to us
and yet most distant -- thought that is still outside of us, and so remains intransmissible.
Cinema's survival in the postmodern era, suggests Deleuze, is thus defined by its internal
struggle with competing technologies of communication and information, both televisual and
computational, which vie with it to define our contemporary audiovisual regime. 13 This is
undoubtedly the expression of a late modern, rather than postmodern, aesthetic, which is
characterized by the weariness of critical philosophy before a global capitalism and a near
total society of information. Deleuze is not unlike Adorno in his nostalgia for a modern art
that in its very difficulty -- its "non-totalizable complexity non-representable by an
individual" -- could combat the global banalization of information with its very
inexpressibility. When Deleuze states that "cinema is dying from its quantitative mediocrity,"
or complains of a "generalized shortcoming in authors and viewers," he is undoubtedly
expressing a cultural elitism and snobbery that is distasteful in the current climate of cultural
studies' redemption of the popular. More serious is his citation of Paul Virilio's idea that the
technology of the movement-image has been intimately and historically linked to the logistics
of warfare, propaganda, and ordinary fascism ( Time-Image 164-65). 14 But, as in the case of
Adorno, I believe there are deeper philosophical principles that not only provide new ways of
understanding and appreciating the difficulties of "modern" cinema but also open up new
debates of interest for cultural studies. If there is no self-identical subject who can speak for
the image or interpret it as whole, if the complexity of the image itself can be neither reduced
nor represented as a whole that can be contained in memory, then what does the time-image
represent or communicate? Only time, the impersonal form of time that divides the ego from
the I and disjoins all forms of identity, in the subject or in the image, as a force of becoming.
This is the ineluctable return of that which differs -difference in itself that returns from
beyond any absolute horizon or from deeper than any interiority. This is why Syberberg
insists that no infor mation, whatever its content or amount, is sufficient to defeat Hitler, and
Lanzmann portrays history and memory as incommensurable dimensions. To the extent that
they invoke the model of the True, neither history, com-
 -188-

munication, nor information can represent the political force of the direct image of time. Time
incommensurable with space is unrepresentable. Unrepresentable, that is, as an actual image.
For it still retains the force of the virtual, pure virtuality as a people or a thought who are not
yet.

Deleuze contrasts the writings of Antonin Artaud on the cinema with those of Eisenstein in
this respect. More fundamental, however, is Maurice Blanchot's reading of Artaud in Le livre
venir and its links with Jean Louis Schefer 's L'homme ordinaire du cinma. The link
between Artaud, Blanchot, and Schefer in Deleuze is a Heideggerianism that describes "the
essence" of cinema, although it is found in very few films. This is the expression of the
highest power of thought -- which is, in fact, a powerlessness or impouvoir in relation to
thought -- in a confrontation in the image with an outside that posits "we are not yet thinking."

The key here is Heidegger's work "What Is Called Thinking?" Deleuze comments several
times on Heidegger's remark that the fact that humanity is capable of thinking does not mean
that we in fact think, or are now thinking. If anything, we are thinking less and less and are
encouraged to do so as we absorb more and more information. What we need is something to
put thought in movement, or to define movement in relation to thought as an automovement
or spiritual automaton that "forces" us to think. For Deleuze, this is the essence of cinema as
defined by the time-image-an impower of thought expressed by the direct image of time, the
very model of a simulacrum.

What interests Deleuze about Artaud is the opposite of what fascinates him about Eisenstein.
Eisenstein is cinema's Hegel, and so believes spectators can be willed to change and to think
by catching them up in grand dialectical synthesis, uniting filmmaker and spectator in the
identity of image and concept. From image to thought there is a shock produced under the
sign of a concept -- montage -- and this concept in turn gives rise to a cinematic image of
thought as the basis of film language: the flow of images as an internal monologue equivalent
to the movement of prelinguistic thought. Like his Impressionist and Surrealist
contemporaries, Artaud is fascinated by the idea of cinema as spiritual automaton --
mechanized vision and automated thought-though he soon despairs of ever realizing his idea.
Both Eisenstein and the Surrealists are on the wrong track. The idea is not to compare cinema
to, or to model montage on, mental states or interior selfrepresentations like dreaming,
hallucination, or psychosis. This is to strike an analogy between cinema and thought where
neither is well served. For Artaud, the spiritual automaton discovered through cinema is no
longer either an inferential machine where thoughts are deduced one from the other, or a
physical force that renders thought identical with the concept

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of montage or inner speech. What cinema contributes to the history of thought is a

powerlessness -- in fact, a dispossession of thought in relation to the image -- that is
equivalent to the division of the subject by the pure form of time. The idea of movement is
again subtly transformed here. Dispossession becomes a primary force rather than an effect,
separate from a totality that would judge it as a simple lack. " 'What comes first" writes
Blanchot, "is not the fullness of being, but the crack and the fissure' " ( "Le livre"59; cited in
Time-Image310 n 22). Cinema's harshest enemies have always disparaged this force in the
image. Nonetheless, this is a power in the philosophical sense, where cinema confronts with
us with the "highest problem." Cinema's most profound task is to unveil "this difficulty of
being, this powerlessness at the heart of thought" ( Time-Image166). This is not precisely a
power of thought in Spinoza's sense, but rather an "impower," and "thought," writes Deleuze,
"has never had any other problem" (166). 15

Artaud's idea, in Blanchot's reading, is that cinema must rejoin the brain's innermost reality.
But this reality is not dialectical nor is it a whole, as Eisenstein's believes, but rather a crack, a
fissure, or a splitting. The cinema does not have the power to make us think the whole.
Instead, it is a "dissociative force" producing a "figure of nothingness" or a "hole in
appearances." Eisenstein links image to thought through the concept of an open totality in
movement and in the figure of inner speech. But Artaud's dissociative force is an unlinking of
images, of images in relation to sound, of bodies in relation to voice, and of thought in
relation to image. "In short," Deleuze writes, "it is the totality of cinema-thought relations that
Artaud overturns: on the one hand, there is no longer a whole thinkable through montage, on
the other hand there is no longer an internal monologue utterable through the image.... [If] it is
true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it..., it can only think one thing, the
fact that we are not yet thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself,
thought which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed. A being of thought which is always
to come" ( Time-Image167). This dissociative force is "a little time in the pure state," the
impersonal form of time splitting the present in disymmetrical jets between the past and
future, whose primary noosign is the irrational interval. Neither space nor the perception of
space can show us this force in the image. Instead, we encounter a time anterior to space: an
emptiness, a pure virtuality rendered by the incommensurability of perception in space and
thought in time. This is the highest power of the false that cinema can express. Blanchot
articulates most clearly a Heideggerianism that, from Artaud to Schefer, expresses the
spiritual automaton of the time-image. What forces us to think is the impower of thought, an
emptiness, the nonpresence of a whole that could be thought. "What Blan-

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chot diagnoses everywhere in literature," writes Deleuze, "is particularly clear in cinema: on
the one hand the presence of an unthinkable in thought, which would be both its source and
barrier; on the other hand the presence to infinity of another thinker in the thinker, who
shatters every monologue of a thinking self " (168). 16

The essential concern of the direct time-image is a thought that is "not yet." In this respect, we
cannot say that thought is either the object or subject of the time-image. The relation between
image and thought is one of neither representation nor visibility. Aberrant movement neither
links nor represents. Rather, it "carries out a suspension of the world or affects the visible with
a disturbance, which, far from making thought visible, as Eisenstein wanted, [is] on the
contrary directed to what does not let itself be thought in thought, and equally to what does
not let itself be seen in vision. ...[It] is the suspension of the world, rather than movement,
which gives the visible to thought, not as its object, but as an act which is constantly arising
and being revealed in thought" ( Time-Image168, 169). This is fundamentally a melancholic
situation. Rather than making thought visible, as in Eisenstein's utopian wish, visibility is
perforated by the incoherence and inchoate quality of thought. According to Schefer, this is
the experience of the "ordinary man" in cinema, rather than the ordinary fascism, whether
dormant or rampant, of the movement-image. When a sensorimotor whole is no longer
apprehendable, either in the cinema or in the world, paralysis grips the "ordinary man," as if
confronted with something intolerable in the world or unthinkable in thought. Between these
two confrontations, thought is dispossessed of itself and the world. 17 Because the system of
representation no longer holds, we cannot say that thought confronts the intolerable in the
name of a better or truer world we have already imagined. "On the contrary," writes Deleuze,
"it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The
intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality" (169-
70).

This is Deleuze at his most melancholic, but also his most lighthearted and joyful. For
Deleuze recognizes the situation as comic and, as such, must be treated with the laughter of
Zarathustra. And once our laughter has died down, it is possible to envision "the subtle way
out." With the spiritual automaton of the time-image, the dispossession of thought
paradoxically enhances vision: through the automaton, one sees better and farther than one
reacts, that is, thinks. The subtle way out, then, is not to believe in a different world. This
could only be a transcendent or Platonic world which restores the system of judgment and, in
its impossibility to achieve on this earth, only produces a psychology of ressentiment. To
believe in a transcendent world is to believe in an ignoble utopia. But this does not mean

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that we relinquish either belief or a utopian aspiration. The subtle way out is to believe, "not
in a different world, but in a link between humanity and the world, in love or life, to believe in
this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot be but thought:
'something possible, otherwise I will suffocate.' It is this belief that makes the unthought the
specific power of thought, through the absurd, by virtue of the absurd" ( Time-Image170,
221).

Belief thus engenders an ethics of time. For Deleuze, what characterizes our modernity is that
the link has been broken between humanity and the world, such that we no longer believe in
it: "It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film" ( Time-
image171). Nietzsche is the turning point in philosophy for replacing the model of knowledge
with belief. For if our link with the world is broken, and we can no longer react to it,
"[henceforth], this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be
restored within a faith.... Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal
schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world" (172). 18 This means restoring neither
a totality nor a sensorimotor link, but a belief capable of affirming life and its powers. To put
one's faith in the impossibility or powerlessness of thought is not a flaw or disability; it is a
part of thinking, or the spiritual automaton that lives within thought. We should find our way
through it without feeling we have to restore a totality or judge our thinking in relation to a
totality. The subtle way out, then, is to "make use of this powerlessness to believe in life, and
to discover the identity of thought and life" (170). This identity of thought and life is neither
analogy nor identification. Rather it is the virtuality of time that produces all the powers of the
false -- indiscerniblity, inexplicability, undecidability, incompossibility -- where "thought, in
cinema, is brought face to face with its own impossibility, and yet draws from this a higher
power of birth" (168). Belief is no longer belief in a transcendent world, or in a transformed
world, but a belief in this world and its powers of transformation. It is believing in the body,
in its relation to thought, and in the potential of body and thought to affirm their powers of
change and their receptivity to transformation. The transformation of belief as will to power is
an affirmation of time and its powers of becoming and of faith in a life that can be
transformed by an active and creative will. This is the power to become-other in thought, and
then, to become-other.
This unthought in thought is a thinking from the outside that defines for Deleuze the utopian
aspiration of philosophy as an act of resistance. What philosophy resists in this respect is the
globalization and banalization of information as a power that affirms the dominance of late
capitalism both in

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the forms of the audiovisual and in the architecture of everyday life. To pose the question of
resistance is to ask: What is or can be outside this power? How is the "outside" to be
understood? What is the relation between power and resistance? I will continue my discussion
of these questions in the next and final chapter.

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8 CONCLUSION: THE MEMORY OF

RESISTANCE
What must I be, I who think and who am my thought, in order to be what I do not think, in
order for my thought to be what I am not?... [How] can it be that being, which could so easily
be characterized by the fact that "it has thoughts" and is possibly alone in having them, has an
ineradicable and fundamental relation to the unthought?

-- Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The Movement-Image and The Time-Image recapitulate a number of important ideas and
arguments that are worked through more completely in A Thousand Plateaus, Foucault, and
What Is Philosophy? and anticipate Deleuze's extraordinary book on Leibniz, The Fold.
Philosophically, the two cinema books also represent a retrospective look. Deleuze's
meditation on cinema recomprises many of the ideas and arguments in Difference and
Repetition, for example, concerning the importance of Bergson, Kant, and Nietzsche for
Deleuze's philosophy of difference. The first volume is a fascinating extension of Deleuze's
Bergsonism as a theory of image and movement, while the second volume testifies to the
importance of a Nietzschean perspective throughout the two books. From the first volume to
the second, Deleuze works through the vicissitudes of movement as concept: from the
chronological succession of spatial intervals, to absolute movement as

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universal variation (physis as flux, multiplicity of forces, and universal becoming), then to the
force of time as change or eternal recurrence. Finally, The Time-Image presents a Nietzschean
meditation on thought as experimentation, where truth is to be created rather than discovered.

The original will to art that Deleuze identifies in the time-image is simulacral. The time-
image and, through its own will to power, the movementimage are paradoxical entities that
throw thought off balance. They are "unreasonable" images since, unlike reason or the
dogmatic image of thought, they do not adhere to a logic of representation, identity, or the
return of the Same. But this is only half of the encounter. For once thrown off-balance, or
confronted with the simulacral unthought-in-thought, we need to become philosophers. In the
name of the time-image, Deleuze asks us the spectators to pursue a philosophical activity
where "thought must 'explicate' or unfold the world of difference 'implicated' within the
paradoxical element, at once inventing a perspectival truth and exploring the virtual domain
of difference through an experimentation of the real" (Bogue 154).

In the previous chapter, I discussed the questions what calls for thinking in relation to the
movement-image and time-image, and what power is expressed in the time-image when it
awakens the idea that "we are not yet thinking." This power is a thought from the outside.
Where Nietzsche conceptualizes movement as eternal recurrence, Bergson posits infinite
movement as a world where matter=image. These are two ways of beginning to think through
the "outside." I began chapter 6 by discussing how the outside can address several problems.
With respect to the cinema books, however, the outside refers to two distinct planes of
immanence: either universal variation or virtuality as the force of time as change. I want to
conclude by deepening my discussion of the powers of the outside, or virtuality as an absolute
memory, the memory of resistance.

Logically, the outside is posited through any two incommensurable terms that come into
contact independent of space. This is the logic of the irrational interval which, as I have
shown, is not a spatial figure since it does not belong to any set nor can it be incorporated as
part of a whole. By contrast, in the movement-image the outside is the referent: a space with
which the image has both iconic and indexical relations and against which it measures itself.
The value of the interval is measured by a spatial commensurability where the whole is the
open-a web unfolding horizontally through relations of contiguity and continuity and
vertically through relations of differentiation followed by integration. Here the world is
constituted as image, since the image can expand to encompass any world with all the
subjects and objects in it. However, the time-image does not represent in this sense. It neither
presents an imaginary world complete unto itself in which we

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are asked to believe, nor does it give us a transcendent perspective from which the world
should be judged as false or true, lacking or full. The outside is not space or the actual, but
rather the virtual, which acts "from the outside" -- on another plane or in another dimension --
as force or differentiation. Rational connections present spatial intervals, namely, the indirect
image of time as a succession of sets or segmentations of space. But irrational intervals are
not spatial, nor are they images in the usual sense. They open onto what is outside of space
yet immanent to it: the anteriority of time to space, or virtuality, becoming, the fact of
returning for that which differs. Virtuality, or difference in itself as force, defines time as the
Outside. This force opens a line of variation in any image, sign, idea, or concept that attempts
to express it. Only on this basis can the cinema found, in Deleuze's terms, "a theory of thought
without image." 1

The outside must not be confused with exteriority. Otherwise, the powers unleashed by the
irrational interval and the series of time cannot be understood. Exteriority always concerns
form and the relations between forms. It is spatial and territorial. Two forms identical to
themselves but different from each other are external to each other. However, the outside
concerns fundamentally force and relations of forces. From Deleuze's Nietzschean
perspective, force is primarily in relation with other forces. This implies an irreducible outside
through which a force acts or upon which it is acted by another force. As Deleuze explains in
his book on Foucault, the becoming of forces must not be confused with the history of forms
because they operate in another dimension: "an outside which is farther away than any
external world and even any form of exteriority, which henceforth becomes infintely [sic ]
closer" ( Foucault86). Forces operate at a site and in a dimension other than that of forms-not
the space of extensiveness, the actual, and perception, but the dimension of the Outside, the
virtual, which is not so much a "space" as a becoming or emergence. This is why the relation
between history and memory is incommensurable. Forces of the outside are not a historical
transformation, a succession of composed events. Rather they are "composing" forces reacting
with other forces from the outside. Becoming, emergence, and change involve composing
forces and not composed forms.

In this respect, The Time-Image suggests a political philosophy as well as a logic and an
aesthetic. Evaluating the political consequences of the timeimage requires understanding that
force is not equivalent to power. Rather, the great lesson from Foucault is that a historical
meditation on force helps us consider the relation between power and resistance as thought
from the outside, or the unthought-in-thought of new ways of thinking and new modes of
existence. Simulacra, including direct images of time, have no other function. Thought from
the outside, this unthought in thought, is

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always thought of resistance. If, as Foucault implies, the last word of power is that "resistance
comes first" ( Foucault95), this is not because resistance blocks power or slows it by friction.
Rather, that which resists is mobile, diffuse, nomadic, and deterritorializing. Fueled by its
sensitivity to the virtual, that which comes from the outside is a power in Spinoza's sense --
the capacity of a body or thought to affect and to be affected by change.

Power in this sense has a special relation to the audiovisuality of contemporary culture, that
is, how our culture is defined by its particular stratifications of the space of visibility with that
of utterability 2 . Deleuze asks that we consider the two sides of power as understood by
Foucault: on the one hand, that which oppresses and occludes, but on the other, that which
can be affected and which in turn affects change. The division of the subject by time in Kant's
schema exemplifies a fundamental dualism -- the difference between a force that acts and one
that is acted upon -- which Deleuze maps onto other domains, including those of the visible
and the utterable in their relation to knowledge, power, and subject formation. This division in
two between the affecting and affected is productive of a multiplicity that can never be
represented in a whole or a single form because it is divided from itself by the form of time.
This is why the series of time is always a rhizome and never a line, a set of mutations and
never a dialectical unity, the incommunicable and never an act of communication or
information. The complex notion of different/ciation means that whatever is divided by time
cannot resolve into a unity. Rather it mutates, multiplies, and differentiates itself. 3 Time is
invention or it is nothing at all...

The audiovisuality of modern cinema has a special relation to power and resistance as
expressed in contemporary culture. As Deleuze explains in the book on Foucault, power
neither sees nor speaks. It is neither form nor force; rather, it maps or diagrams. Power
organizes the horizons of seeing and the limits of saying. The visible and the utterable, in fact
the whole audiovisual regime, are caught up in relations of power that they suppose and
render actual as diagrams or abstract machines. Power does not repress, it produces. And what
it produces are spiritual automata or images of thought that are expressed in art and cinema no
less than philosophy. The variable combinations of the visual and the utterable constitute a
historically formed stratigraphic space where power is immanent in relations of forces that are
nonformal and nonstratified. Power is "diagrammatic" but it is not formal. The diagram or
abstract machine of a given era is suprasensible. Like the relation of the plane of immanence
to concepts, it should not be confused with audiovisual formations. Rather, it is the historical
a priori that audiovisual formations suppose.

Here the logic of the outside takes a peculiar yet fundamental turn. Im-

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manent to every historical formation are relations of forces as its "outside." Relations of
forces are mobile and diffuse. They express an absolute or infinite movement. These
movements are not external to the stratifications of audiovisual space; they are the outside,
more distant than any externality that could be represented, deeper than any interiority that
could be thought. Forces are a continuous becoming, a becoming of forces or the virtual that
doubles history as the actual succession of events. If mental cartographies map relations of
forces as an image of thought, this map is neither a place nor a set of coordinates in space, but
rather a "nonspace" or site of mutations. Power is not formal. Yet one might say it
"formalizes": it composes, limits, stratifies, and territorializes. But force is nonformal. And
while it is immanent to relations of power and constructions of audiovisual space, it is equally
outside them, in time, as the "opening of a future, with which nothing ends since nothing has
become, but everything transforms" Foucault89, 95). Power and resistance are therefore
coupled in a complementary yet incommensurable relation. Power anchors itself in relations
of forces to the extent that it must territorialize or map them in an abstract machine; but
resistance is necessarily in a direct relationship with the outside, the fluidity and multiplicity
of future-oriented forces from which power has tried to stabilize itself.

What is thinking, then, in relation to power? Thinking or thought is defined not by what we
know but by the virtual or what is unthought. To think, Deleuze argues, is not to interpret or
to reflect, but to experiment and to create. Thought is always in contact with the new, the
emergent, what is in the midst of making itself, and thus supposes a distinction between
knowledge and thought. Knowledge is defined by formed relations -the construction of an
audiovisual space as what is actually possible to see and to say in a given historical era. Power
is the relation of forces expressed as a diagram or abstract machine. And, finally, there is "the
outside," virtuality or an absolute relation that is in fact a nonrelation: the unthought in
thought. Foucault's description of a microphysics of power has particular significance here.
That singular point where life is the most intense, where its energies are most concentrated, is
the struggle with power or the marshaling of forces to evade the snares of power. Power and
resistance present two sides of force as a reciprocal inside and outside. Power cannot operate,
cannot form an abstract machine, without calling on points of resistance, which are in fact
primary. And power cannot target life without simultaneously revealing a life that resists
power by sustaining a force of the outside that never ceases to shake and overturn abstract
machines, awakening what is unthought in them.

Another way of understanding the force of the outside and its relation to

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the unthought is through the distinction between a theorem and a problem. The theorem
follows an axiomatic logic that "develops internal relationships from principle to
consequences" ( Time-Image174). This is a selfcontained, deductive logic-world not unlike
the automata of action-images (mental relations). Alternatively, the problem confronts
thought as an obstacle or outside. This outside should not be confused with either the
exteriority of the physical world or the interiority of a mental one, at least in the context of the
direct time-image. The movement-image has its own spiritual automata founded on a
dialectical relation between the outside and the inside. Here the outside is the physical world
as external "real" which measures the accuracy of cinematic description and governs the logic
of the image as the unfolding of sensorimotor situations. The inside for its part marks the
interiority of thought as a projection in images. In this way, the language of cinema in the
movement-image is organized as internal monologue or is regulated by the mental or
linguistic "laws" of metaphor and metonymy, association and contiguity. Between the two
there is a dialectical expansiveness wherein world, image, and concept achieve the unity of
creator and spectator in an organic image.

A problem often informs or motivates a theorem as the question to which it longs to respond,
but this is not a dialectical relation. A theorem may incorporate a problem whose resistance to
a deductive whole it attempts to master. A problem may slip into a theorem, setting its
deductive unfolding onto unforeseen roads. However, the two will never meet in a dialectical
unity. Rather than deriving from an axiom, the problematic deduction arises because '"I am
haunted by a question to which I cannot reply'" ( TimeImage175). This is a very different
image of thought, Nietzsche an in inspiration, in that it tears belief from faith in order to
restore it to thought. For far from restoring knowledge to thought, or providing thought the
internal consistency and certainty it longs for, "the problematic deduction puts the unthought
within thought, because it does away with all interiority by hollowing it out with an outside,
an irreducible exergue [ envers ], which devours its substance. Thought finds itself carried
away by a'conviction' [ croyance ], outside any interiority of a mode of knowledge" (175,
228). The problem contains its own principle of uncertainty. Rather than resolving itself in a
method or model of knowledge, or freezing itself in a proof, thought is pitched into
movement, without finality or resolution, by an unanswered question. 4

All simulacra are problematic in this sense. But to call the time-image "problematic" is also to
identify it with a Nietzchean existential ethics. I have noted how the key metaphysical value
of Bergsonism involves the relation between consciousness and the freedom to choose.
Deleuze argues as

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well that the formulation of a problem is inseparable from choice. Indeed, one of film's
highest aspirations is "the identity of thought with choice as determination of the
indeterminable.... [This] is a cinema of modes of existence, of confrontation of these modes,
and of their relation to an outside on which both the world and the ego depend" ( Time-
Image177). In this respect, Deleuze writes:

Choice no longer concerns a particular term, but the mode of existence of the one who
chooses.... In short, choice covered as great an area as thought, because it went from non-
choice to choice, and was itself formed between choosing and not choosing. Kierkegaard
drew all the consequences of this: choice being posed between choice and non-choice (and all
their variants) sends us back to an absolute relation with the outside, beyond the inward
psychological consciousness, but equally beyond the relative external world, and finds that it
alone is capable of restoring the world and the ego to us.... [It] is not simply a question of a
film-content: it is cinema-form...which is capable of revealing to us this higher determination
of thought, choice, this point deeper than any link with the world. (177-78)

The time-image asks us to believe again in the world in which we live, in time and changing,
and to believe again in the inventiveness of time where it is possible to think and to choose
other modes of existence. This is the utopian aspect of the time-image, which also transforms
memory in relation to time. Memory is no longer habitual or attentive as a faculty for
recollecting or for regathering images from the past. In positing the coexistence of
nonchronological layers and incommensurable points, the orders of time figure memory as a
membrane joining two sides, a recto and verso divided by the pure and empty form of time.
Here, sheets of past emanate from a pure virtuality (an unreachable interiority where the I
divides from the ego), while the actual or perception recedes from us as an absolute horizon
(an outside yet to come -- an indeterminate future or a world, people, or thought who are not
yet).

Spiritual automata are thus the expression of a power. And this is why Deleuze and Guattari
write that "it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and
not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so
as once again to give birth to new modes of existence.... It may be that believing in this world,
in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be
discovered on our plane of immanence today" What Is Philosophy?74-75). That thinker
within me that is the unthought of my thought is also a power of transformation, indeed the
power to trans-

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form life by revealing new lines of variation in our current ways of thinking and modes of
existence.

How are we to become what we do not yet think, in order to think what we have not yet
become? To believe again in life is to believe again in the transformative powers of life. And
what is life if not this capacity of resistance in a will to power that acknowledges change and
becoming as forces, or the force of time as change? Nietzsche's bermensch is not a better or
superior "man," but what must be overcome in us in order for humanity to change. Resistance
should be understood, then, as an awakening of forces of life that are more active, more
affirmative, richer in possibilities than the life we now have.

For Foucault, the stakes of a bio-power mean that life must be liberated in us because it is in
us that life is imprisoned and unresponsive to becoming-other. Our contemporary struggle for
new modes of existence is defined against two forms of subjectivation. One is an
individuation obliged by power whose command is "you will be One." The other consists of
marking the individual, once and for all, with a known and recognizable identity: you will be
white or black, masculine or feminine, straight or gay, colonizer or colonized, and so on.
Alternatively, resistance means the struggle for new modes of existence. It is therefore a battle
for difference, variation, and metamorphosis and the creation of new modes of existence.
However, we could neither invent nor choose new modes of existence if the force of time as
eternal recurrence, becoming or change, did not undermine identity with difference.
Differentiation maintains an opening to the future from which we derive our powers to affect
life and to be affected by it. The goal of the direct time-image and other forms of art, whether
successful or not, is to awaken these powers in us. To become-other, we need an image to
wake the other in us as what yet remains unthought.

That difference returns and so unfolds identity, Deleuze argues, is presented throughout
Foucault's work by the theme of the double. The double is not a projected interior but rather
an interiorization of the outside; not a redoubling of the One, but rather of the Other, as a
folding of the unthought within the subject. The double is simulacral. If the spiritual
automaton awakens the unthought thinker in us, this is not a reproduction of the same but a
repetition of the Different. "It is not the emanation of an 'I,' " Deleuze explains, "but
something that places in immanence an always other or a Non-self. It is never the other who is
a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives me as the double of the other: I do not
encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me" ( Foucault98).

The other in me is the unthought within thought or the spiritual automaton that lives in me.
This redoubling constitutes an absolute memory, a

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memory of the outside that should not be confused with an archival or commemorative
memory. This absolute memory is the "real name" of the affection of self by self. Time is the
form through which the mind (l'esprit) affects itself, while space is the form through which
the mind is affected by something else. Time as subjectivation, division of the temporal I
from the spatial self, is Memory in this absolute sense: a splitting of time where Memory
"doubles the present and the outside and is one with forgetting, since it is endlessly forgotten
and reconstituted.... Time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside and, as
such, forces every present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory:
forgetting is the impossibility of return, and memory is the necessity of renewal" (
Foucault107-8).

Therefore, to think is not to recall or reconsider the past, but rather to invent the future. The
time-image is like Ernst Bloch's concept of Vor-Schein or anticipatory illumination. It is
anterior to or ahead of history. It does not represent either the real or the imaginary; it is the
harbinger of a new reality which must yet be invented. What calls for thinking, then, has the
most complex and profound relationship to time. According to Deleuze: "To think the past
against the present, to resist the present, not for a return but 'in favor, I hope, of a time to
come' (Nietzsche): this means making the past active and present to the outside, in order,
finally, for something new to happen, and for thinking always to happen in thought [ pour qu'
arrive enfin quelque chose de nouveau, pour que penser, toujours, arrive la pense ].
Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the
present), and to be able, finally, to 'think otherwise' (the future)" ( Foucault119, 127).

Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition that the only aesthetic problem of concern to
philosophy is the relation of art to everyday life. Because our contemporary everyday life is
immersed in an audiovisual and information culture, cinema's ways of working through the
relations of image and concept have become particularly significant to our strategies for
seeing and saying. This is not because cinema is the most popular art. Television and video
games now have arguably a far greater economic and "aesthetic" impact. However, cinema's
history of images and signs is nonetheless both the progenitor of audiovisual culture and
perhaps the source of its unfounding as a simulacral art. To think otherwise, from the outside,
or to find the subtle way out, means thinking through the history of the audiovisual. To this
end, art must not appeal to a transcendent world but to the world here and now in which we
live. Art must extract from the habitual repetition of the everyday "a little time in a pure
state," an event or virtuality in the passing present, deeper than any interior, farther than any
exterior. Like every

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art form, the original will to art of the time-image consists of extracting difference from
repetition by reversing copies into simulacra. Art neither represents nor imitates, because it
repeats: "it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy,
but art is simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra)" (Difference and Repetition 293). 5
Everyday life is characterized by repetition as return of the same, primarily in the
standardized production of commodities and the proliferation of information. Art is not
opposed to this mechanical, stereotyped, and habitual repetition. Instead, it embraces it, or
rather, incorporates it the better to expose its limits and to extract what is differential and
virtual within it. The task of a work of art, then, is to open a line of flight that passes from the
actual to the virtual by interrupting repetition with difference. And gradually, repetition is
transformed from the return of the same to creation from difference: first the habitual series
(repetition without difference) and chronological series (repetition as succession of instants in
space); but then the fragmentation of the present, the displacements of nonchronological
memory, and the fact of returning for that which differs.

Simulacra do not represent. Thought cannot confirm itself in an initiating image there. Rather,
it forces us to think, if we are able, through the construction of Events. 6 We can calculate and
rationalize the passing of time as the succession of so many segments in space. This is a
passing of the virtual into the actual, where thought recognizes itself in its own image. But the
"event" is what happens between -- an entre-temps between segments that disjoins thought
from itself. Time can only appear for itself in the fissures opened by irrational intervals. In the
cinema, events and their corresponding powers emerge only when the force of time returns as
difference, unhinging the chronological unfolding of space with seriality, interrupting
repetition by relinking series on irrational intervals. In this manner the force attached to
thinking is neither the exercise of an innate faculty nor the acquisition of a knowledge
preconstituted in an external world. Should we then characterize the outside as an aleatory
force? The formation of series shows this is not precisely the case. In this respect, what the
irrational interval determines in direct images of time is analogous to the logic of Markov
chains, a sequence of partial relinkings where what comes after is partially determined by
what comes before. The outside is a line of variation determined not by continuous and
chronological succession, but rather in a relinking on irrational intervals that mixes contingent
and dependent forces. Thinking here is organized in new figures: an extraction and relinking
of singularities; organization of singularities into series. What is common to singularities is
that they all come from the outside: "singularities of power,

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caught in relations of forces; singularities of resistance, which prepare mutations; and even
savage. singularities which rest suspended outside, without entering into relations or letting
themselves be integrated (only here does the 'savage' take its meaning, not as an experience,
but as what has not yet entered experience)" (Foucault 117, 125). In other words, where time
is rendered incommensurable with space, the virtual opens a vast territory of potentialities in
every present that passes. It is as if Leibniz's crystal pyramid drove a wedge between each
passing present. In the interval opened by this wedge, virtuality unfolds as a vast reserve of
future acts, each of which is equally possible in itself, yet incompossible with all the others.
Thus the event "is pure immanence of what is not actualized or of what remains indifferent to
actualization, since its reality does not depend upon it. The event is immaterial, incorporeal,
unlivable: pure reserve.... It is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event
that is a meanwhile [un entre-temps ]: the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but neither is it
part of time-it belongs to becoming" ( What Is Philosophy?157-58). Events are immanent to
every moment of time's passing yet remain both outside and in between the passage of time.
Simulacra are better understood as heterocosmic forces rather than utopian worlds. Between
each measure of time there is an infinite movement, so many possible worlds and immanent
modes of existence, that we must recover from time's passing.

The noosigns of the time-image are time's concepts in this respect. Time's direct image is not
time in itself, but rather the force of virtuality and becoming, or what remains both outside of,
yet in reserve and immanent to, our contemporary modes of existence. The irrational interval
does not signify or represent; it resists. And it restores a belief in the virtual as a site where
choice has yet to be determined, a reservoir of unthought yet immanent possibilities and
modes of existence. In this respect, the utopian aspect of philosophy and art is the
perpetuation of a memory of resistance. This is a resistance to habitual repetition -- a time that
is calculated, rationalized, and reified. But it is also resistance to all forms of commerce or
exchange, whether in the form of communication or that of commodities.

The memory of resistance is not a historical memory even though the history of capitalism
and that of philosophy and art are conjoined in complex ways. If this were not the case,
neither art nor philosophy could hold in reserve nor express the immanence of the memory of
resistance. Capitalism no doubt has produced its own "image of thought." 7 Indeed, Deleuze
and Guattari's complaint is that, in the information era, thought has been reduced to commerce
with the concept as its commodity and conversa-

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tion or common sense its form of exchange. By the same token, philosophy does not have
exclusive right to the forces of deterritorialization. Capital produces its own diabolical forces,
what Deleuze and Guattari call its relative deterritorializations, in the forms of imperialism
and multinationalism. These and other forces uproot individuals from their land and alienate
them from their work and from their thought. Deterritorialization can also mean the transfer
of wealth out of the earth and the labor of individuals and into the hands of capital without
respect for borders. Capital has its own concepts and forms of immanence. Marx's great
analysis and critique has not lost its force in this respect; it still testifies to the necessity of a
critical encounter between philosophy and capitalism.

Therefore, the audiovisual and information era has its own philosophy of communication,
consensus, and universal values, but this is not a philosophy of resistance. It is capitalism's
own philosophy or image of thought where it seeks to recognize itself and to affirm its
powers. The special task of the simulacral arts and a philosophy of resistance is to interpret
and evaluate, as well as to invent alternative ways of thinking and modes of existence
immanent in, yet alternative to, late capitalism and liberal democracies. This is why it is
necessary to argue that philosophy creates concepts rather than "reflecting on" or
"communicating" notions. What is lacking is neither communication nor information; rather,
we suffer from too much of both. We lack for neither truth nor knowledge. What we lack is
creation and the will to experiment. "We lack resistance to the present," write Deleuze and
Guattari."The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people
who do not yet exist.... Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth
and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation" ( What Is Philosophy?108).

Memory and history are like the incommensurability of time and space, or the virtual and the
actual. History in the sense of commemoration, an affirmative and institutional history, cannot
express becoming. Commemorative history is always the history of the victors, as Walter
Benjamin so forcefully argued, and a power that inhibits the becoming of subjected peoples. 8
Whatever the forces and resources of history might be, it works to preserve the values, will to
power, and modes of existence of the victors and to inhibit and derail any immanent mode of
existence that runs counter to or challenges its powers.

Alternatively, memory is not what is recalled; it is rather that which returns. This is what
Deleuze calls an absolute memory, deeper perhaps than Bergson's pure memory, as difference
in itself or eternal recurrence as the force of returning for that which differs. The relation of
history and

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memory is equivalent to that of power and resistance. The memory of resistance is not a
"human memory," though its forces can be marshaled for all kinds of mobilizing narratives:
alternative histories, or popular memory and countermemory in the Foucauldian sense. This
memory is absolute because it is the barrier thought comes up against -- forcing thought to
call upon an absolute or infinite movement, the force of time as change, and to recognize the
immanence or becomings that resist capitalism and restore life to modes of existence
deadened by capitalism.

This becoming, this absolute memory of resistance that founds all acts of resistance, is
minoritarian. As I have argued, the principal quality of the minor voice -- in art or philosophy
-- is that of double-becoming. The philosopher and the author can neither represent the people
nor speak for or in place of the people. Their power is that of an anterior time, or time as
anteriority. They speak "before" as the expression of a becoming or the immanence of an
alternate mode of existence. The quality of becoming establishes a zone of exchange between
the minor author and the people. The author/philosopher can only anticipate a new mode of
existence if the people's becoming is immanent to his or her thought, just as his or her
thinking is internal to the people's becoming. "The artist or philosopher is quite incapable of
creating a people," write Deleuze and Guattari, "each can only summon it with all its strength.
A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more
with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of
unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in
common -- their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the
present" ( What Is Philosophy?110).

Abstract though it may be, philosophy has a place in the resistance to capitalism, and not just
by opposing the force of its deterritorializations. For Deleuze and Guattari, the critical and
utopian force of philosophy resembles Adorno's negative dialectic in some respects. Rather
than simply objecting to the relative deterritorializations of capital, philosophy pursues its
lures and contradictions toward an absolute horizon: it makes capitalism "pass over the plane
of immanence as movement of the infinite and suppresses it as internal limit, turns it back
against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people. But in this way it arrives at the
nonpropositional form of the concept in which communication, exchange, consensus, and
opinion vanish entirely" [ What Is Philosophy?99). The nonpropositional form of the concept
is not silence, but what readies itself to speak. It is not speechlessness, but an absolute
resistance to what is, in favor of what must come and has not yet been thought. The idea of
utopia conjoins philosophy

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with its historical epoch, that of late capitalism, as resistance and critique, rather than
consensus and collusion.

Philosophy is the caretaker of utopia for a given epoch, forging its concepts and sustaining its
forces. It sustains the qualities of infinite movement and so achieves a political and critical
force. In this way the concept of utopia forms its own time-image. The time-image of utopia
is given by Samuel Butler's concept of "Erewhon": both nowhere and now here. 9 Deleuze and
Guattari note that etymologically utopia "stands for absolute deterritorialization but always at
the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with
the forces stifled by this milieu" ( What Is Philosophy?100). There are risks in the concept of
utopia. There are affirmative, transcendent, and authoritarian utopias as much as or more than
utopias of contestation, immanence, and liberation. The direct time-image, however, is one
expression, like revolution, of a utopia of immanence. Utopia is not dream or fantasy here, the
unrealized and unrealizable hope that consoles. "On the contrary," Deleuze and Guattari
argue, "it is to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute
survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the
struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed.
The word utopia therefore designates that conjunction of philosophy, or of the concept, with
the present milieu -- political philosophy" (100).

Does this mean that the cinema of the time-image is a revolutionary and political cinema? Not
necessarily, and if so, only in limited cases. As acts or events, neither art nor philosophy is
inherently political in the sense of an organized force capable itself of transforming social
relations. However, in their anteriority or virtuality they can call forth or solicit political acts
and events, and this may be the best definition of utopia. Philosophy's relation to infinite
movement is not that of a contemplation of the eternal, nor is it a reflection on the longues
dures of history. As Nietzsche argued, philosophy interprets and evaluates. In this respect,
the philosopher is the physician of culture whose tasks are the diagnosis of becomings in
every passing present and the invention of new and unforeseen modes of existence.

To present a direct image of time as the force of change: this is the highest point of thought
where cinema and philosophy converge. The utopian force of cinema, like any simulacral art,
is that of Nietzsche's untimely meditation: "Acting counter to the past, and therefore on the
present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future -- but the future is not a historical future, not
even a utopian history, it is the infinite Now, the Nun that Plato already distinguished from
every present: the Intensive or Untimely, not an instant

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but a becoming" ( What Is Philosophy?112). This becoming is "outside" history and thus
distinguishes a creative force that only philosophy or art can express. Perhaps utopia is not the
best concept in this respect, because it is not outside history but opposed to it. Thus it is a
historical concept, an ideal or motive force housed within history. Alternatively, write
Deleuze and Guattari,

becoming is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but it is not of it. In
itself it has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu.... [To] create is to resist: pure
becomings, pure events on a plane of immanence. What History grasps of the event is its
effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its
specific consistency, in its self-positing as concept, escapes History.... To think is to
experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about -- the
new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding
than it is. What is in the process of coming about is no more what ends than what begins.
History is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make
possible the experimentation of something that escapes history. Without history
experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not
historical. It is philosophical. (110-11)

Foucault expresses a similar idea in his distinction between the "actual" and the present. From
a Bergsonian perspective, one might be tempted to see the actual as the completion of the
virtual. Foucault's actuality, however, is the constant becoming of virtuality. The actual and
the present are two sides of the passing present, and between these two sides the untimeliness
of the passing present as the Now of becoming is what actuality portends. The present is what
we are, and therefore what we are already ceasing to be. But Foucault's "actual" is not what
we are now, but rather, what we are now becoming: "what we are in the process of becoming
-- that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other.... It is not that the actual is the utopian
prefiguration of a future that is still part of our history. Rather, it is the now of our becoming"
(112).

The creation of concepts and the powers of fabulation proper to cinema do not recall, they call
forth. They summon or solicit the relations of forces or will to power that express the
immanence of new modes of existence. As avatars of becoming, art and philosophy have a
special relation to the virtual. They do not actualize a virtual event; they incorporate or
embody it. They do not represent or communicate, do not recall, commemorate, or celebrate
the past. Rather the task of art is to confide

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to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed
suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle.
Will this all be in vain because suffering is eternal and revolutions do not survive their
victory? But the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations,
clinches, and openings it gave to men and women at the moment of its making and that
composes in itself a monument that is always in the process of becoming, like those tumuli to
which each new traveler adds a stone. The victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in
the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the
revolution's fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal. ( What Is
Philosophy?176-77)

Like every simulacrum, the cinema of the time-image and the philosophy of resistance share
an arduous task: "beyond all the codes of past, present, and future, to transmit something that
does not and will not allow itself to be codified. To transmit it to a new body, to invent a body
that can receive it and spill it forth; a body that would be our own, the earth's, or even
something written" ( Deleuze, "Nomad Thought"142). From the cinema of the body to the
cinema of the brain, the time-image forges a special relation to both subjectivity and thought.
Organized by irrational intervals, the time-image continually interrupts the virtual-actual
circuit. This accounts, perhaps, for both the difficulty, the boredom, and the
miscomprehensions inspired by modern cinema. But these difficulties must also be
understood as missed opportunities. Our relation to the image is neither determined nor
dialectical. With the circuit interrupted, we lose a present perception wherein we can harbor
ourselves in the calm waters of attentive recollection. Breaking the circuit is also interrupting
the force of repetition we call habit. It is in this sense that virtuality acts as a force from the
outside. Deleuze and Guattari call this the supreme act of philosophy: "not so much to think
THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it
in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-
internal inside -- that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought" ( What Is
Philosophy?59-60).

This is not the sublime. Rather, it is the pure and impersonal form of time that divides us from
ourselves in identity and in thought. What is personal and human is what we continually
actualize in our bodies and brains to cement our identity and render it impervious to
movement and change. What Deleuze sees in the time-image is the opportunity to confront
these constraints with an inhuman potential that is outside us as the pure form of time. Yet it
is also the interiority where we live and think. This is neither

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an identity nor a thought to which we aspire. It is confronting the virtual as an Other we have
not yet become that pitches us into becoming, and as an Idea that in escaping us demonstrates
that we are not yet thinking-an encounter without finality.

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NOTES
Preface
1. For those unfamiliar with Deleuze's philosophy, yet committed to reading seriously his
work on film theory, I can provide some advice for approaching The Movement-Image
and The Time-Image. Before beginning a systematic reading of the two books, one
should try to understand the broad outline of Deleuze's argument. One way to begin is to
look at the prefatory material in both books and then to continue by reading chapter 2 and
sections 2 and 3 of chapter 10 in The Time-Image. It is also useful first to read Deleuze's
occasional pieces on cinema as collected in the anthology Negotiations. These essays and
interviews provide a basic understanding of his theory of movement, image, and time
that otherwise only becomes apparent when one is deep into the second volume. For this
reason, I also believe that for audiences unfamiliar with Deleuze's work, it is preferable
to read The Time-Image first. Reading Negotiations in its entirety provides a schematic
though sound background for the philosophical project of the cinema books. Deleuze's
Foucault as well as Dialogues, his book cowritten with Claire Parnet, also provide
valuable contextual material.
2. In this way Deleuze's books are a curious anachronism. In that they present an
extraordinary account of cinematic modernism, they describe a period that I believe has
already been exhausted. Indeed, what is most interesting in the volume on the time-image
is the intimation of an era that is already emerging as yet another mutation in the regime
of signs: the silicon era, sometimes called

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by Deleuze "societies of control." What is ultimately most interesting for me is Deleuze's

innovation of a vocabulary for describing this emergent mutation in the order of signs.
See, for example, "Mediators", "Doubts on the Imaginary," and "Societies of Control,"
all in Negotiations, as well as the book on Foucault.
3. On the relations between art, science, and philosophy, see "Mediators" in Negotiations
and part 2 of What Is Philosophy?

1 A Short History of Cinema

1. The seven shots presented here represent the protagonist's first successful voyage in time.
Each image begins and ends with a slow fade to black. The sequence as a whole is
accompanied by the following narration: "On the tenth day, images began to ooze, like
confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children.
Real birds. Real cats. Real graves...." For a fascinating analysis of La jete in a Deleuzian
context, see Rda Bensmaa's essay, "Du photogramme au pictogramme".
2. Wfflin uses the terms "anschaulichen Vorstellens" or "Vorstelleungsformen." See, for
example, his preface to the 7th edition of the Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5.
Deleuze refers frequently to Wfflin throughout the two volumes.
3. I take no position on whether Voloinov is a pseudonym for Mikhail Bakhtin. Deleuze,
however, treats them as one and the same. One of the most important aspects of the
volume The Movement-Image is Deleuze's reading of Bakhtin's ideas concerning "free
indirect discourse." See The Movement-Image, especially pp. 72-76.
4. Deleuze is following arguments proposed by Jean-Louis Schefer in his L'homme
ordinaire du cinma. Also see What Is Philosophy?, especially chap. 2. I will return to
these arguments and deepen them in chapter 7 of this book.
5. Deleuze is referring here to Eisenstein's theory of composition according to the "golden"
section. See Eisenstein's Nonindifferent Nature, especially pp. 10-37. Also see The
Movement-Image32-40 and The Time-Image210-13.
6. Deleuze adapts his notion of organic and crystalline regimes from the German art
historian Wilhelm Worringer. Worringer contrasts the organic and the crystalline as
compositional strategies. Each is an a priori will to form that expresses a culture's
relation to the world. Organic forms express a harmonious unity where humanity feels at
one with the world. Here representations are based on natural forms and are sustained by
the belief that natural laws support and lend them truth. Alternatively, the crystalline
represents a will to abstraction. When a culture feels that it is in conflict with the world,
that events are chaotic and hostile, it tends to produce pure geometric forms as an attempt
to pattern and transcend this chaos. See Worringer's important study Abstraction and
Empathy. Also see Form in Gothic.
7. For an alternative translation see Negotiations62-67. I will deepen these arguments in
chapter 5 of this book.

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2 Movement and Image

1. In his Film: A Psychological Study, Mnsterberg writes on the "esthetic feeling of
cinema in the following terms: "The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been
freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own
consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the
ease of musical tones. No wonder that temples for the new goddess are built in every
little hamlet" (95).
2. Deleuze's interest in Bergson has been well-known since the publication of Bergsonism
in 1966. For a critical overview of Deleuze's interest in Bergson, see Michael Hardt's
Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, 1-25 .
3. For some interesting comments on how Bergson's critique of science anticipates the
changing conception of time in studies of complexity and nonlinear change, see Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers's Order out of Chaos . Prigogine and Stengers see an
equally fascinating anticipation of nonlinear dynamics in the metaphysical speculations
of Charles Sanders Peirce. For the arguments that follow, I am also indebted to accounts
in John D. Barrow's The World within the World as well as John Briggs and David F.
Peat's The Turbulent Mirror.
4. Creative Evolution 361 and 54, as cited in Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of
Chaos92.
5. The four theses on movement presented by Bergson in the fourth chapter of Matter and
Memory clarify Deleuze's arguments in the first chapter of The Movement-Image: (1)
every movement, inasmuch as it is a passage from rest to rest, is absolutely indivisible;
(2) there are real movements; (3) any division of matter into independent bodies with
absolutely determined outlines is a subjective and artificial division; (4) real movement is
the transference of a state rather than a thing.

The first thesis critiques Zeno's paradox as an artificial decomposition that reduces
movement to differential segmentations of space. All mathematical and geometric
descriptions of movement are inadequate insofar as movement is reduced to space in the
form of a trajectory plotted against a succession of points or sections. Nonetheless, there
exist real movements -- continuous, singular, and indivisible -- apprehensible as a change
in state or quality. Our segmentation of matter into distinct bodies, Bergson argues, is an
artificial though necessary act responding to our needs, the perceptual search for and
identification of whatever is required to maintain life. Intuition as a philosophical
method, however, requires restoring a sense of reality as a "moving continuity" in which
everything changes and yet remains. This is duration in Bergson's sense. Deleuze argues,
in fact, that cinematography performs this intuition for us in its identification of
movement with image. This is not only the reconstitution of movement from a series of
immobile images, but also the mobility of the camera, point of view, and montage. What
is important in the cinematographic image is not the presentation of objects (the realist
argument), but rather, the weaving of objects into an open whole that never ceases to
 shift and change qualitatively.

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6. Bergson notes in the last chapter of Creative Evolution that his ideas concerning the
"cinematographic illusion" were developed during his 1902-3 course on the idea of time
at the Collge de France. Whatever commercial films he may be referring to would thus
fall within the period of "primitive cinema." The one example he mentions -- a parade of
soldiers -- indicates actualities of the Lumire type.

I might also add that Deleuze's historical understanding of primitive cinema is terribly
remiss. By his own criteria one can see elements of the "time-image" emerging through
the early period, especially, I think, in kinesthetic films. There is much in Nol Burch's
and Tom Gunning's work that would confirm this impression. Following a classical film
theory paradigm, Deleuze overstresses the importance of montage in this respect. Thus
Deleuze's unfamiliarity with the stylistic variety and complexity of early cinema causes
him to miss its implications for his own theory. I would like to thank Lauren Rabinovitz
for confirming this impression. A number of these issues as raised by Burch, Gunning,
and others are addressed in Thomas Elsaesser's anthology Early Cinema: Space, Frame,
Narrative.
7. Compare this statement with Bergson's observation in Creative Evolution that "What is
real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view [instantan] of a
transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous
images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not differ from
each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning of a single mean
image [ image moyenne ], or as the deformation of this image in different directons. And
to this mean we really allude when we speak of the essence of a thing, or of the thing
itself" ( Creative Evolution302). Also see Bergson's The Creative Mind, 118 et passim. I
resume my discussion of the intermediate image as a philosophical concept in chapter 5.
8. The passage in question appears on page 38 in Bergson, Matter and Memory.
9. Citing Bergson, Deleuze writes:

"The truth is that the movements of matter are very clear, regarded as images, and that
there is no need to look in movement for anything more than what we see in it." An atom
is an image that extends to the point to which its actions and reactions extend. 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 on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could
images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?

...The infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane of immanence. The image
exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden
behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement.
The identity of the image and movement leads us to conclude immediately that the
movement-image and matter are identical. "You may say that my body is matter or that it
is an image." The
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movement-image and flowing-matter are strictly the same thing. ( MovementImage58-59)

The image is not a signifier representing movement here nor vice versa. The image is
immanent in movement: what we see is intrinsically what we get. Neither Bergson nor
Deleuze will hold with solipsistic arguments concerning the subjectitivity or illusoriness
of individual perception. This is why the psychology of Matter and Movement is
inseparable from the metaphysics of Creative Evolution. Both are important sources for
Deleuze's transcendental empiricism.
10 Like many of his philosophical ideas, Deleuze's definition of "the plane of immanence"
shifts in subtle and interesting ways in different books. For example, it is interesting to
compare the account of the plane of immanence in The Movement-Image to the chapter
in What Is Philosophy? devoted to this notion. I will take up this question once again in
part II, especially chapter 7.
11 Both Husserl and Bergson are credited with attempting to overcome a historical crisis in
psychology represented by the dead-end duality of subject and object. Paradoxically,
both phenomenology and Bergsonism condemned the cinema as an ambiguous ally with
respect to the problem of perception and consciousness. Phenomenology sees the cinema
as an ambiguous ally because it suppresses the anchoring of the subject and the "natural"
horizon of the world in two ways. First, through the ability to reproduce any object from
any scale or angle, the cinema implies a world without centers or horizons. Then, through
the norms of framing and editing "it substitutes an implicit knowledge and a second
intentionality for the conditions of natural perception" ( Movement-Image57). That is, it
recenters perception and reorganizes horizons according to an artificial, aesthetic logic
unrelated to that of natural perception. However, while the cinema is condemned for
departing from the conditions of natural perception, it is also celebrated as a new way of
" 'drawing close to' the perceived and the perceiver, the world and perception" (
Movement-Image57).
12 Deleuze cites this passage in full in footnote 18 of chapter 4 in The MovementImage.
13 Compare with the following passage, also from Matter and Memory:

We are too much inclined to regard the living body as a world within a world, the
nervous system as a separate being, of which the function is, first, to elaborate
perceptions, and, then, to create movements. The truth is that my nervous system,
interposed between the objects which affect my body and those which I can influence, is
a mere conductor, transmitting, sending back or inhibiting movement. This conductor is
composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the
center, and from the center to the periphery. As many threads as pass from the periphery
to the center, so many points of space are there able to make an appeal to my will and to
put, so to speak, an elementary question to my motor activity. Every such question is
what is termed a perception. Thus perception is diminished by one of

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its elements each time one of the threads termed sensory is cut because some part of the
external object then becomes unable to appeal to activity; and it is also diminished
 whenever a stable habit has been formed, because this time the ready-made response
renders the questions unnecessary. What disappears in either case is the apparent
reflection of the stimulus upon itself, the return of the light on the image whence it
comes; or rather that dissociation, that discernment, whereby the perception is
disengaged from the image. We may therefore say that while the detail of perception is
molded exactly upon that of the nerves termed sensory, perception as a whole has its true
and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement. ( Matter and Memory44-
45)
14 Taking a hint from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stephen Heath's essay on Narrative Space
adopts a similar perspective on the construction of "perception-images" from the mobility
of filmic space. The camera and projector lens impose centered perspectives from which
all the variables of mise-en-cadre derive their sense by adding or subtracting significant
elements in the image. But the factor of movement, in the image and of the camera,
always erodes the centers that the frame attempts to restore. For Heath, the process of
converting space into narrative presumes an ongoing struggle to derive a centered
perception from the acentered mobility of movement. See also Film and the New
Psychology in Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense48-59.

3 Image and Sign

1 Originally, I had intended to include frame enlargements in this chapter illustrating my
analyses of several films, including Vertigo, Touch of Evil, and Battleship Potemkin.
However, as my understanding of Deleuze's arguments deepened, I became more and
more convinced by his arguments concerning movement and his implied argument that
the film still (one wants to say "the film stilled") lends little to our understanding of
images and signs in the cinema. In fact, an excessive reliance on using frame
enlargements in a print medium in the name of "cinematic specificity" would be, for
Deleuze, entirely oxymoronic. Therefore, and especially in this chapter, illustration
through frame enlargements did not seem justified. However, in other chapters I have
provided illustrations in those cases where I felt they would clarify other aspects of my
arguments or analyses without unduly mischaracterizing the important relations between
image and movement.
2 This argument relies, of course, on the acceptance of Deleuze's bracketing of the
intermediate image for analysis. A more skeptical view would continue to take seriously
Bergson's critique of the "cinematographic illusion." It is hard to say that movement is
truly immanent to the film image when, on the one hand, it is artificially produced below
the image by the automated passage of still images, and, on the other, it is corrected
cognitively "above" the image by mental processes that are still not thoroughly
understood. Nevertheless, the ways in which

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Deleuze poses the problem of movement in relation to cinema and to the history of film
theory are still very rich in concepts.
3 "Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," Peirce on Signs49.
4 Deleuze suggests, nonetheless, that there may be some linguistic bias in Peirce. See p. 31
of The Time-Image.
5 "Some Consequence of four Incapacities," Peirce on Signs 71 n.4.
6 Deleuze's critique of Metz unfolds on pp. 25-30 in chapter 2 of The Time-Image. His
account of Metz is a very partial one. He refers mostly to the first volume of Metz's
collected writings, especially the 1964 essay Le cinma: langue ou langage? translated in
Film Language, 31-91, although other work is mentioned in footnotes. The best
statement and defense of Metz's own position would be his magisterial Language and
Cinema.
7 For an alternative view see Umberto Eco, especially the essays Articulations of the
Cinematic Code" and "On the Contribution of Film to Semiotics. Eco's general position
in this period is summarized in A Theory of Semiotics.
8 I cannot fully elaborate here what might constitute a Deleuzean "semiotic," especially
with respect to his recasting of the notion of enunciation. Important sources, however,
include his book Foucault and "plateaus" 3 through 5 of A Thousand Plateaus. On the
distinction between "signalization" and sign, see Difference and Repetition20. See also
my essay Reading the Figural.
9 What is Cinema?96; cited in Movement-Image24.
10 This is the basis of Deleuze's fascinating account of the mathematic and dynamic sublime
in the European avant-gardes of the 1920s. There is an important point to be made here,
however. Deleuze sometimes resorts to a rhetoric of the sublime when writing on the
crisis of the movement-image and the emergence of the time-image in postwar cinema.
Nonetheless, following Kant, he gives a precise definition of the cinematic sublime. In
each case, movement is referred to as a numerical measure and montage is organized as
organic composition. In other words, we remain within the regime of the movement-
image. The cinematic sublime does not necessarily anticipate a break with the
movementimage. It represents, rather, the idealist attempt either to overcome or to extend
its limits. See, for example, Movement-Image41-55.
11 Deleuze adopts the term "deframing" from Pascal Bonitzer. See his essay Dcadrage in
Cahiers du cinma.
12 I will define and discuss Deleuze's arguments concerning spiritual automata in chapter 7.
13 See especially chapter 3 of The Movement-Image.
14 Rational numbers can always be defined as a ratio of integers, for example , 2/3, 3/4.
They can always be formulated in either a finite decimal form ( = 0.5; = 0.25) or as
an infinitely recurring decimal set (1/3 = 0.3333333, and so on). Therefore, rational
numbers always express forms of change that are calculable and predictable in advance.
Alternatively, an irrational number cannot be expressed as a ratio: its decimal expression
contains an infinite number of terms without a repeating

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pattern, and the ordering of digits is random. Calculating frequencies according to

irrational numbers is an important mathematical feature of complex systems and the
singular though patterned images of change and self-differentiation that these systems
present. This distinction between rational and irrational numbers also corresponds closely
 to Deleuze's definitions of "normal" and "aberrant" movements in indirect and direct
images of time.
15 Throughout his career, Peirce argued that the three categories were the fundamental basis
for his semiotic. His categories are also designed as a rather blistering critique of Hegel,
an enterprise to which Deleuze would be very sympathetic. See in particular Peirce's
essays "One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories," Peirce on Signs180-85; and "A
Guess at the Riddle," Peirce on Signs186-201. One of the best overviews of Peirce's
thought in this regard is Grard Deledalle's commentary on pp. 202-51 of the French
translation of Peirce's writings, crits sur le signe. Deleuze is particularly indebted to
Deledalle's work.
16 See his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 77-103 passim.
17 By 1906, Peirce ultimately deduced ten trichotomies and sixty-six classes of signs.
Peirce's typology remains the subject of some debate among his interpreters. For a brief
overview, see Ecrits sur le signe242-45.
18 There are also intermediate or transitional stages that correspond inexactly to Peirce's
degenerative and accretive sign variants. Each marks gradations of passage between the
fundamental types of image whose borders are often permeable and indistinct. Since the
perception-image is by its nature extensive, each image is perceptible and requires no
intermediary with respect to the other kinds of images. For Deleuze, however, between
affection and action there will be an "impulse-image," and between action and relation
there will be a "reflectionimage."
19 This is a paraphrase by Deleuze from Vertov's From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye in Kino-
Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov88.
20 See sththique et psychologie du cinma, II, 72-78. The best discussion of Mitry's
arguments in English is Christian Metz's "Current Problems of Film Theory."
21 In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V. N. Voloinov offers the following
example from Puhkin's Bronze Horseman: "What were the thoughts he pondered then?
That he was poor; that he perforce must labor to achieve respect, security; that God just
might have granted him more brains and money. That goodness knows, there are those
idle lucky dogs with little brains, those loungers, for whom life is just a lark! That he had
been in service in all two years; his thoughts remarked as well that the weather wasn't
calming down; that the river kept on rising; that the bridges over the Neva were all most
likely up and that he would be two days or three cut off from his Paraa. Thus went his
pondering" [italics added] (133). Also see Pasolini's essays collected in Heretical
Empiricism, especially Comments on Free Indirect Discourse and The 'Cinema of
Poetry.' . In chapter 6, I discuss further the concept of free indirect discourse in cinema.

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22 The interior citation is translated from the chapter entitled "Le souvenir du prsent et la
fausse reconnaissance" in Bergson's L'energie spirituelle, reprinted in Bergson's Oeuvres
920. The standard English translation can be found on p. 138 of Mind-Energy. Also see
my account of Deleuze's reading of Kant's "affection of self by self" in chapter 5.
23 Neither the affection-image nor the action-image are subordinate to one another. But
 secondness does provide a context for understanding firstness as the expression of
qualities or powers in themselves. Following Peirce, Deleuze characterizes firstness as

an immediate and instantaneous consciousness, such as is implied by every real

consciousness which is itself never immediate nor instantaneous. It is not a sensation, a
feeling, an idea, but the quality of a possible sensation, feeling or idea. Firstness is thus
the category of the Possible: it gives a proper consistency to the possible, it expresses the
possible without actualising it, whilst making it a complete mode. Now, this is exactly
what the affection-image is: it is quality or power, it is potentiality considered for itself as
expressed. The corresponding sign is therefore expression, not actualisation.... The affect
is impersonal and is distinct from every individuated state of things: it is none the less
singular, and can enter into singular combinations or conjunctions with other affects. The
affect is indivisible and without parts; but the singular combinations that it forms with
other affects form in turn an indivisible quality, which will only be divided by changing
qualitatively (the "dividual"). The affect is independent of all determinate space-time; but
it is none the less created in a history which produces it as the expressed and the
expression of a space or a time, of an epoch or a milieu (this is why the affect is the
"new" and new affects are ceaselessly created, notably by the work of art). ( Movement-
Image98-99)
24 Also see, in this respect, Rda Bensmaa's essay "L' 'espace queconque' comme
'personnage conceptuel.'"
25 "Formalism of the Avant-Garde [ 1949 ]" in Theory of the Film 176. I have cited the
English translation, which differs somewhat from the passage appearing on pp. 110-11 of
The Movement-Image. Deleuze's translators have simply rendered the French translation
of Balzs into English ( Le cinma: nature et volution d'un art nouveau [ Paris: Payot,
1979 ]) rather than using the Dover text or returning to the original German. I have also
restored some passages, including the mention of physiognomy, which Deleuze omits. In
a phrase that resonates strongly with Deleuze, Balzs calls this sort of image "ein rein
optisches Erlebnis," a pure optical experience or event. See the discussion of the
"absolute film" in Der Geist des Films, collected in the second volume of Balzs's
Schriften zum Film125-26.
26 See in particular "Year Zero: Faciality"; in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand
Plateaus167-91. I find Massumi's choice in translating visagit as "faciality" preferable
to Tomlinson and Habberjam's "faceicity."
27 I am thinking in particular of Eisenstein's own fascinating analysis of Battleship
Potemkin in the first chapter of Non-indifferent Nature3-37.

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4 Time and Memory, Orders and Powers

1 A succinct discussion of this concept, especially in relation to Deleuze's arguments in
The Logic of Sense, can be found in Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari71-73. Lekta
are "expressibles" with paradoxical properties. Both things and words, they convey
simultaneously the qualities of "physical appearances, logical attributes, and concepts
capable of expression"(71).
2 Deleuze refers to this diagram as Bergson's third schema. Unlike the other diagrams that
 Deleuze discusses, it does not come from Matter and Memory. Rather, Deleuze
extrapolates from arguments Bergson presents in "How Is Memory Formed?" in Mind-
Energy; see especially p. 130. The ideas Deleuze presents here are among the most
powerful common threads in his major philosophical works. They inform particularly his
rereading of the eternal return in Nietzsche and Philosophy and his presentation of the
three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. I continue my discussion of these
ideas in the next chapter.
3 This particular notion of becoming is worked out more fully in A Thousand Plateaus. See
especially plateau 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming
Imperceptible." I will return to these arguments in chapter 6.
4 Here Deleuze is discussing Spinoza's Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding.
Rda Bensmaa has written a superb and thought-provoking account of the importance of
Deleuze' work on Spinoza for film theory. See his "Les transformateurs -- Deleuze ou le
cinma comme automate spirituel". On machinic arrangements, see Bogue, Deleuze and
Guttari130-35.
5 In a similar manner, Deleuze represents late Hitchcock as pushing the envelope of the
movement-image to its breaking point without breaking with it. See, in this respect,
Deleuze's comments on mental relations in Hitchcock in The Movement-Image197-205.
Here almost all of the criteria for constructing opsigns are set up without the true
construction of direct images of time. Consequently, a complete account of the second
pure semiotic as it is presented in The Time-Image necessarily includes sign types that
are not, strictly speaking, direct images of time. A complete outline might look like the
following (see Time-Image270-79):
Opsigns break with the sensorimotor situation in such a way that what is seen can no
longer be extended into an action.
-- Mnemosigns or recollection-images fall "within the framework of the sensory-
motor situation, whose interval they are content to fill, even though lengthening and
distending it; they seize a former present in the past and thus respect the empirical
progression of time, even though they introduce local regressions into it (the
flashback as psychological memory)" ( Time-Image273).
-- Onirosigns or dream-images affect the whole: "they project the sensorymotor
situation to infinity, sometimes by ensuring the constant metamorphosis of the
situation, sometimes by replacing the action of characters with a movement of the
[dream] world" ( Time-Image273). Nonetheless there is also

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a departure and return, from actual to virtual to actual, that respects the empirical
flow of time.
Hyalosigns or image-crystals present a direct image of time through a pure
description; the actual image is indiscernible from its own virtual image.
Chronosigns where time is no longer subordinate to movement:
-- Order of time
-- facies, sheet or aspect: coexistence and topological transformation of layers of
the past
-- point or accent: quantic leaps between a present of the present, past, and
future
 -- Times as series
-- genesign, or the direct time-image as becoming or potentialization of powers,
rather than coexistences or simultaneities
Noosigns of time-image go beyond themselves toward something that can only be
thought rather than perceived. These noosigns include:
-- "the irrational cut between non-linked (but always relinked) images, and...
-- the absolute contact between non-totalizable, asymmetrical outside and
inside" ( Time-Image278)
Lectosigns construct a stratigraphic space, which must be read as well as seen, from
the irrational and nontotalizable disjunction between sound and image.
6 "Essays on the Justice of God and the Freedom of Man in the Origin of Evil" in
Theodicy, 370-71. The life in question, of course, is that of Sextus. In one world Sextus
swears to obey God, cultivates a garden in a city resembling Corinth, finds a treasure
there, and dies an esteemed man. In another world, he swears again to obey Jupiter,
marries the daughter of the king of Thrace, and ascends to the throne. There are as many
possibilities as there are worlds. But in the most perfect world, which is our historical
reality, Sextus scorns the gods, brings chaos to Rome, violates the wife of his friend, and
with his father is driven from the city. As the result of this evil, however, Rome is freed
and becomes a model for human history.

Deleuze's discussion of Leibniz in The Time-Image, especially in relation to Bergson, is

repeated and extended in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. See especially chapter 5,
Incompossibiity, Individuality, Liberty59-75. Sources for Deleuze's arguments include P.
M. Schuhl's Le dominateur et les possibles and Jules Vuillemin's Ncessit ou
contingence.
7 The interior citation is from Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths" in Labyrinths. In
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze associates this force of time with Nietzsche's doctrine
of eternal recurrence as well as Leibniz's arguments concerning compossible and
incompossible worlds. These strands come together in a longer citation from Borges's
works, including "The Babylon Lottery" and "Garden of Forking Paths," in chapter 2,
Repetition for Itself:

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if the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos,
would it not be desirable for chance to intervene at all stages of the lottery and not
merely in the drawing? Is it not ridiculous for chance to dictate the death of someone,
while the circumstances of his death -- its silent reserve or publicity, the time limit of one
hour or one century -- should remain immune to hazard? . . . The ignorant suppose that
an infinite number of drawings require an infinite amount of time; in reality, it is quite
enough that time be infinitely subdivisible.... In all fiction, when a man is faced with
alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui
Pn, he chooses -- simultaneously -- all of them. He thus creates various futures, various
times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times.
This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel. Fang, let us say, has a secret. A
stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill him. Naturally there are
various possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can
be saved, both can die and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pn's work, all the possible solutions
 occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations. ( Difference and
Repetition116)

I give a deeper analysis of the force of time and eternal recurrence in the next chapter.
8 For a fuller discussion of the paradoxes of time suggested by Bergson's assertion of a
"pure past," see Difference and Repetition81-84.
9 Deleuze compares this mode of narration to an event transmitted "in a same time," that is,
at the speed of light, to three planets at variable distances. Each planet has its own
present discontinuous with that of its distant neighbors. As the event is transmitted, the
third planet "would not yet have received it, the second would already have received it,
the first would be receiving it, in three simultaneous presents bound into the same
universe. This would be a sidereal time, a system of relativity, where the characters
would be not so much human as planetary, and the accents not so much subjective as
astronomical, in a plurality of worlds constituting the universe. This would be a pluralist
cosmology, where there are not only different worlds . . . , but where one and the same
event is played out in these different worlds, in incompatible versions" ( Time-
Image102).
10 I hesitate to write "objective" here since there is nothing objective about the narration of
Marienbad. Indeed, the criteria of subjective or objective narration would only hold, in
Deleuze's own account, for the cinema of the movement -image. Contingent narration
aims neither at a teleological ending in a final truth nor in a linking by predication,
attaching subjects to objects. Instead there is a radical questioning of the subject-object
problematic as a privileged metaphysical schema. This reading is also symptomatic of a
curious contradiction that threads its way throughout the cinema books. Deleuze's
philosophy, which is radically antihumanist, is constantly restoring a privileged
subjective agency to characters as narrative agents and directors as creative auteurs.
Thus, centers of subjectivity keep reappearing in those passages of the books devoted to
film

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criticism, while the philosophical arguments keep developing the most powerful aspects
of Deleuze's critique of the subject-object problem in Western metaphysics.
11. The organization of the music track is also quite important. There is no diegetic music in
the film, although there are often suggested sound sources. The film alternates between
music and silence, and the music alternates between the atonal organ score and romantic
orchestral music.
12. The exceptions involve dream sequences or awakening from dreams. In fact, the only
match cuts in the film occur in two dream sequences. One, the dream of Nicole, the
woman in the bathtub, occurs after a brief camera movement as an over-the-shoulder shot
of Ridder in his office looking, followed by a matched eye-line shot of a naked woman in
a tub that sits atop a colleague's desk, then returning to the initial shot. The other,
wherein Ridder, sleeping with an unknown woman in a hotel room, is awakened by a
workman, contains the only matched action cut in the film.

There are other curious editing patterns worth noting. The point of arrival -the beach in
 the Midi, 9/5/66 -- is, I believe, the only event whose shots repeat rather than being
simply disordered chronologically. This is why I distinguish between shots and
"repetitions" in the comments above. What Resnais usually presents are "events"
fragmented into anywhere from two to six shots, which are then presented out of order.
Whereas the duration of these events or "attractors" is fragmented, because of this very
temporal discontinuity each fragment or shot has its own integral duration marked off by
irrational intervals. In effect, many of the 150 or so shots comprising the past can be
considered sequence-shots, even if they are of very short duration. This would include
the intercalation of Ridder's present in the Sphere, and that of the waiting scientists -- the
effect being to further fragment the line of time into the discontinuous past, Ridder's
fragile present, and the present in the lab as successive, elapsed time.

For those interested in further sorting out the temporal peculiarities of Resnais's film, a
superb transcription and sequence breakdown has been published in l'Avant-Scne du
Cinma 91 ( 1969). Also see James Monaco's Alain Resnais 121-44.
13 Terminator 2 attempts to critique or rewrite the first film in this regard. In his sequel,
James Cameron seems to have converted to a more Leibnizian view of time where, rather
than being predetermined, choices in the present produce different futures. By extension,
then, the present becomes less a point on a line than a crossroads where the possible
worlds of future and past intersect. The Back to the Future series plays out the same
gambit with comic effect, though in a somewhat confusing and unconvincing way, since
the conclusion of the films and the series is so heavily determined by the Oedipal destiny
of the hero.

Although still within the narrative regime of the movement-image, some of the more
philosophically interesting narrative explorations of time have appeared in episodes of
Star Trek: The Next Generation. In "Cause and Effect," the Enterprise is caught in a time
loop which continually results in the explosion of

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the ship until a way can be found to send a coded memory to the past point of origin.
"Timescape" explores relative discontinuities in duration by posing a region of space
where time flows in currents at radically different rates. Most interesting of all is
"Parallels," the most Leibnizian of the episodes, where Worf finds himself making
unpredictable quantum leaps through different possible universes, each with a different
account of Worf's history and the fate of the Enterprise.
5 Critique, or Truth in Crisis
1 I am referring here to Deleuze's extraordinary preface to the English translation of Kant's
Critical Philosophy, vii-xiv. Deleuze makes a similar argument in Difference and
Repetition: "The joint, cardo, is what ensures the subordination of time to those properly
cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements which it measures (time,
number of the movement, for the soul as much as for the world). By contrast, time out of
joint means demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated from
its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up its content, its
relation to movement overturned; in short, time presenting itself as an empty and pure
form. Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things
unfolding within it (following the overly simple circular figure). It ceases to be cardinal
 and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time" (88).

Bergson acknowledges this filiation with Kant. In his lecture "The Perception of
Change," he notes that Kant represents a distinct break with the Platonic tradition
because he "believed that our senses and consciousness are in fact exerted in a real Time,
that is, in a Time which changes continuously, in a duration which endures" ( Creative
Mind141).
2 In this respect, Deleuze writes,

Philosophy is revealed not by good sense but by paradox. Paradox is the pathos or the
passion of philosophy. There are several kinds of paradox, all of which are opposed to
the complementary forms of orthodoxy -- namely, good sense and common sense.
Subjectively, paradox breaks up the common exercise of the faculties and places each
before its own limit, before its incomparable: thought before the unthinkable which it
alone is nevertheless capable of thinking; memory before the forgotten which is also its
immemorial; sensibility before the imperceptible which is indistinguishable from its
intensive.... At the same time, however, paradox communicates to the broken faculties
that relation which is far from good sense, aligning them along a volcanic line which
allows one to ignite the other, leaping from one limit to the next. Objectively, paradox
displays the element which cannot be totalised within a common element, along with the
difference which cannot be equalised or cancelled at the direction of a good sense. It is
correct to say that the only refutation of paradoxes lies in good sense and common sense
themselves, but on condition that they are already allowed everything: the role of judge

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as well as that of party to the case, the absolute along with the partial truth. ( Difference
and Repetition227-28)

Although he does not discuss them as such, Deleuze clearly considers direct images of
time as simulacra in precisely this sense: paradoxical figures expressing difference in
itself. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier is especially attentive to this aspect of Deleuze's
film theory, noting in particular how Deleuze's arguments in The Time-Image relate to his
Logic of Sense. See her essay "The Cinema, Reader of Gilles Deleuze." On simulacra as
expressing difference in itself, see Difference and Repetition, especially pp. 69, 201-2,
293-94, and 299300.
3 In his lecture, "Introduction to Metaphysics," Bergson writes:

No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images, taken from
quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to
direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on.
By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from
usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be
driven out immediately by its rivals. By seeing that in spite of their differences in aspect
they all demand of our mind the same kind of attention and, as it were, the same degree
of tension, one will gradually accustom the consciousness to a particular and definitely
determined disposition, precisely the one it will have to adopt in order to appear unveiled
to itself. But even then the consciousness must acquiesce in this effort; for we shall have
 shown it nothing. We shall simply have placed it in the attitude it must take to produce
the desired effort and, by itself, to arrive at the intuition. ( Creative Mind166)
4 In point of fact, the "movements" of thought described by Bergson in Matter and
Memory are much more complex. A good example is the "second" schema of memory or
Bergson's inverse cone (reproduced on p. 99). Bergson invokes this schema to illustrate
his description of how a "general idea" can emerge as a complex oscillation between
perception and memory. Moreover, the movement Bergson describes both enlarges and
complicates his account of how a center of indetermination opens in memory. Writes
Bergson:

The essence of the general idea . . . is to be unceasingly going backwards and forwards
between the plane of action and that of pure memory. Let us refer once more to the
diagram we traced above. At S is the present perception which I have of my body, that is
to say, of a certain sensori-motor equilibrium. Over the surface of the base AB are
spread, we may say, my recollections in their totality. Within the cone so determined, the
general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and the base AB. In S, it would
take the clearly defined form of a bodily attitude or of an uttered word; at AB, it would
wear the aspect, no less defined, of the thousand individual images into which its fragile
unity would break up. . . . [The] truth is that the general idea escapes us as soon as we try
to fix it at either of the two extremities. It consists in the

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double current which goes from the one to the other -- always ready either to crystallize
into uttered words or to evaporate into memories.

This amounts to saying that between the sensori-motor mechanisms figured by the point
S and the totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room . . . for a thousand
repetitions of our psychical life, figured by as many sections of A'B', A"B", etc., of the
same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that we detach ourselves
from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams; we tend to concentrate
ourselves in S in the measure that we attach ourselves more firmly to the present reality,
responding by motor reactions to sensory stimulation. In point of fact, the normal self
never stays in either of these extreme positions; it moves between them, adopts in turn
the positions corresponding to the intermediate sections, or, in other words, gives to its
representations just enough image and just enough idea for them to be able to lend useful
aid to the present action. ( Matter and Memory161-63)
5 See in particular the section entitled "How Is Memory Formed?," in Mind-Energy 127-
29.

In discussing these ideas, Deleuze reconstructs a third schema, which illustrates

Bergson's ideas concerning the splitting of the present into the past and future
(reproduced on p. 82).

Taken together, these figures represent for Deleuze three possible schematizations of
how time "moves": as act of memory, as the present that passes, and, subsequently, as a
division of the subject by the forms of time. (Recall also how duration is characterized as
continuous qualitative change.) Each of these three schemata, in fact, should be
 considered from the point of view of how the "differentials" of time are constitutive of
subjectivity: as acts of memory continually passing between the actual and virtual; as the
continuous duplication of present into perception and memory; and as the form of
interiority dividing the ego from the I. Each of these divisions might be considered as a
form of "indetermination" wherein thought constitutes itself in time.
6 I have already presented one version of these syntheses of time in my comparison of
Leibniz and Bergson in the previous chapter. I would also like to express here my
indebtedness to Ronald Bogue's superb overview of Deleuze's arguments concerning
time in Difference and Repetition. See his Deleuze and Guattari, especially pp. 65-66
and 151. See also Difference and Repetition79-84 passim.
7 This formula -- "I is an other" -- is also the key formulation for Deleuze's discussion of
the powers of the false and the falsifying narration presented by direct images of time.
See Deleuze's discussion in Time-Image133-37 and his extension of the concept in his
discussion of cinma verit and the cinemas of decolonialization in Time-Image147-55. I
will deepen these arguments in the next chapter.
8 Without doubt, this reading of Kant is deeply informed by Deleuze's unique combination
of Bergson and Nietzsche. Bergson's own relation to Kant was more critical. See, for
example, Creative Mind139-42. Deleuze, I think, was closer to Bergson's own position
when Kant's Critical Philosophy was first published in 1963. The English-language
preface ( 1984) thus represents an interesting retro-

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spective account of Deleuze's changing relationship to Kant as a product of the cinema

books. Also, Deleuze does not often acknowledge that his reading of Kant is also
influenced by Heidegger's. See, for example, Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics.
9 If we could witness time's passing in itself, we would be in the position of Claude Ridder,
whose agony is directly related to his position as witness to the unending division of
time. In the machine, he experiences a passing present he can neither escape nor hold; in
the past, sequence-shots of short duration pose a passing present of which Ridder has no
retroactive consciousness. Once he is placed in the machine, Ridder paradoxically lives
in the Kantian division of time without being able to bridge it in a transcendental
position. Displaced in time, Ridder exists as Kantian ego -- in time and constantly
changing (will he fall in love with Catrine, is he in love with Catrine, does he love
Catrine no longer?), as well as a synthetic "I" who witnesses the division of time without
be able to bridge it.
10 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that Descartes's cogito assumes two logical
values defined as the determination ("I think") of an undetermined existence ("I am
because in order to think I must exist"). Kant ripostes: While determination obviously
implies something undetermined, Descartes fails to explain how or why being should be
determinable by the act of thinking. Therefore, Kant's critique of Descartes involves the
exposition of a third logical value: Time is the form through which undetermined
existence is determinable by the "I think." "The consequences of this," writes Deleuze,
"are extreme":
 my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a
phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a
result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the "I think" cannot be understood as
the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive
self which experiences its own thought-its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can
say I -- being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. Here begins a long and
inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. The activity of thought
applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself
rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it
like an Other within itself. To "I think" and "I am" must be added the self -- that is, the
passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and
the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is "add"
entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing the difference and
interiorising it within being and thought. It is as though the I were fractured from one end
to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate
of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a
passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I
constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican
Revolution. ( Difference and Repetition86)

Also see the "Analytic of Concepts" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, especially

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the note to ?25 (169). See also Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of Kant's critique of
Descartes in What Is Philosophy?29-32.
11 For a more complete analysis of Deleuze's arguments, see Ronald Bogue's superb
account in Deleuze and Guattari, especially 16-19.
12 Deleuze links Kant's "Copernican revolution" to Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal
recurrence throughout Difference and Repetition; see in particular 40-42.
13 Deleuze's book Proust and Signs makes a similar argument but with different emphases.
Ronald Bogue notes well the correspondences here with Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche:

Proustian truths are the products, not of method, but of constraint and chance, the
fortuitous encounter with a sign that forces the subject to think. Such truths are necessary
and particular, not arbitrary and abstract, those of a singular encounter in which the
subject is, as it were, "elected," chosen and compelled to the explication of a specific
essence. And that which forces thought to think is the sign. The only true thought is
interpretation, and the only true creation is the act of thinking. "To think is always to
interpret -- to explicate, to develop, to decipher, to translate a sign. Translating,
deciphering, developing are the form of pure creation" [ Proust and Signs162, 119 ].
Proustian interpretation and creation parallel Nietzschean interpretation and evaluation
(evaluation being described at times by Deleuze as the creative imposition of form), just
as the force of the sign that compels the subject to think parallels the active will to power
that seizes thought. (Bogue 45)
14 Compare this statement with the following passage from Nietzsche and Philosophy:
 The world is neither true nor real but living. And the living world is will to power, will to
falsehood [ volont du faux ], which is actualised in many different powers. To actualise
the will to falsehood under any power whatever, to actualise the will to power under any
quality whatever, is always to evaluate. To live is to evaluate. There is no truth of the
world as it is thought, no reality of the sensible world, all is evaluation, even and above
all the sensible and the real. "The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception, to
becoming and change (to objectified deception) here counts as more profound, primeval,
'metaphysical,' than the will to truth, to reality, to mere appearance: -- the last is itself
merely a form of the will to illusion" (VP IV 8/WT 853 III p. 453-"here" refers to BT). (
Nietzsche and Philosophy184)

The German quote from The Will to Power reads as follows: "Der Wille zum Schein, zur
Illusion, zur Tuschung, zum Werden und Wechseln (zur objektivirten Tuschung) gibt
hier als tiefer, ursprnglicher, 'metaphysischer' als der Wille zur Wahrheit, zur
Wirklichkeit, zum Schein: -- lezterer ist selbst blo eine Form des Willens zur Illusion" (
Der Wille zur Macht, 100-101).
15 Compare, for example, these elements of truthful description with the four illusions of
representation discussed in the concluding chapter of Difference and Repetition262.
16 The interior citation is from Nietzsche and Philosophy101, in Bogue's own

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translation. I have slightly modified Bogue's translation. Compare, for example,

Nietzsche et la philosophie 115.
17 The most complete account of this argument is worked through in part 2 of Deleuze and
Guattari's What Is Philosophy?
18 For example, Deleuze writes:

what contrasts with the ideal of truth is not movement: movement remains perfectly
consistent with the true while it presents invariants, point of gravity of the moving body,
privileged points through which it passes and point of fixity in relation to which it moves.
This is why the movement-image, in its very essence, is answerable to the effect of truth
which it invokes while movement preserves its centres. And this is what we have been
trying to say from the beginning of this study: a cinematographic mutation occurs when
aberrations of movement take on their independence; that is, when the moving bodies
and movements lose their invariants. There then occurs a reversal where movement
ceases to demand the true and where time ceases to be subordinate to movement: both at
once. Movement which is fundamentally decentred becomes false movement, and time
which is fundamentally liberated becomes power of the false which is now brought into
effect in false movement.... ( Time-Image142-43)
19 "Of the Three Metamorphoses", cited in Nietzsche and Philosophy185; emphasis added.

6 Series and Fabulation: Minor Cinema

1 The power of the false, Deleuze argues, is that will which knows
 how to transform itself, to metamorphose itself according to the forces it encounters, and
which forms a constantly larger force with them, always increasing the power to live,
always opening new "possibilities."...There is will to power on both sides, but the latter is
nothing more than will-todominate in the exhausted becoming of life, while the former is
artistic will, or "virtue which gives," the creation of new possibilities, in the outpouring
becoming.... [Only] the good allows itself to be exhausted by life rather than exhausting
it, always putting itself at the service of what is reborn from life, what metamorphoses
and creates. Out of becoming it makes a Being, so protean, instead of despatching it into
non-being, from the height of a uniform and fixed being. There are two states of life
which are in opposition at the heart of immanent becoming, and not one instance which
would claim to be superior to becoming, whether in order to judge life, or to appropriate
it, and in any event to exhaust it. ( Time-Image141-42)
2 On the relation between art and philosophy, see "Mediators" in Negotiations 121-26 and
chapter 7 of What Is Philosophy?
3 For Deleuze, the most important texts treating the theme of the outside are Blanchot's
L'entretien infini, especially the chapter entitled "Parler, ce n'est pas voir," and Foucault's
essay on Blanchot, "The Thought from the Outside." The

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latter has been translated by Brian Massumi in "Foucault and Blanchot",

Foucault/Blanchot. This theme introduces a Heideggerian motif in Deleuze's arguments
that I will discuss in the next chapter.
4 One exception is Laura Marks's "Deterritorialized Filmmaking: A Deleuzian Politics of
Hybrid Cinema". Marks has an interesting discussion of the insufficiency of various
terms describing this kind of filmmaking: "hybrid," "multicultural," "exile,"
"posteolonial," or "third cinema." Also see her book, The Skin of the Film: Experimental
Film and Intercultural Experience, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
5 Franz Kafka and Paul Klee, Deleuze suggests, were among the first twentiethcentury
artists to state this theme explicitly: "The first said that minor literatures, 'in the small
nations,' ought to supplement a 'national consciousness which is often inert and always in
process of disintegration,' and fulfill collective tasks in the absence of a people; the
second said that painting, to bring together all the parts of its 'great work,' needed a 'final
force,' the people who were still missing" ( Time-Image217). See Kafka's Diaries ( 25
December 1911) and "letter to Max Brod" ( "Letters", June 1921), and Klee's On Modern
Art, 55.
6 In Deleuze's explanation,

This first relation is that of a given set with a larger set which extends or encompasses it,
but which is of the same nature. Sometimes, in contrast, the out-of-field shows a power
of a different kind, exceeding any space or set: it is connected in this case to the Whole
which is expressed in sets, to the change which is expressed in movement, to the duration
which is expressed in space, to the living concept which is expressed in the image, to the
spirit which is expressed in matter.... These two relations of the out-of-field, the
actualizable relation with other sets, the virtual relation with the whole, are inversely
 proportional; but both of them are alike strictly inseparable from the visual image.... (
Time-Image236).
7 On the construction of historical images, see my essay "The Last Things Before the Last:
Kracauer and History," and my "Seminar with Claude Lanzmann."
8 Also see Deleuze's lecture, "Avoir une ide en cinma" in Jean-Marie Straub, Danile
Huillet. The entire lecture is available on video as Qu'est-ce que l'acte de cration?

Yet another difference between the movement-image and the time-image suggested by
Deleuze's concepts of lectosigns and stratigraphic space is that they imply different
relations of reading. The relation between time and reading in the movement-image is
quite well accounted for in the formalist model. (See in particular David Bordwell's
Narration and the Fiction Film and Making Meaning.) The cinema of the time-image
presents a different situation. In this respect Deleuze presents a model of reading that is
quite different from the formalist one. For the latter, reading means the restoration of a
chronological story time from the disordered elements of the plot. This is a model of
reading based on chronological time. Indeed, what Deleuze calls reading is nothing more
nor less than the Bergsonian theory of duration and memory and how it is rendered
differ-

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ently in the movement-image and time-image. Remember how Bergson insists on the
virtuality of pure memory. A memory-image, then, is the actualization of memory in
relation to a present perception, a fluctuating link or bridge between a present perception
and past memory. Nevertheless, pure memory, where the past is preserved in itself, is
quite different from the memory-image that serves temporarily to represent it. When we
leap into the past to recover a "memory," several possibilities can occur. First, we can
discover the point we were looking for and represent it to ourselves as a memory-image.
This is something like the formalist theory where the past (actual past moments of the
plot and implied past moments of the story) are reordered mentally as a coherent and
chronological story. Here thinking or reading is defined as a process where we
"naturally" desire to order perceptions in a continuous, consecutive, and chronological
fashion. Alternatively, Deleuze follows Bergson in asserting that this process fails more
often than it succeeds. We have all the more to learn from these "failures," which after all
are only lacking from the point of view of a philsophical prejudice. It is just as common
that we are unable to link up a layer or layers of the past with a present perception.

There is a last possibility, however. Perhaps thinking is difference in time: a differential,

discontinuous, and nonchronological process. One task for the work of art, as well as the
work of philosophy, then, is to construct cartographies of time and memory, to map out
the multiple and discontinuous relations between regions of the past and the passing
present from a point of view on, rather than in, their division. When we read, Deleuze
argues, we make specific machinic arrangements:

we constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse continuity or

communication between several sheets [ nappes ], and weaves a network of non-
localizable relations between them. In this way we extract non-chronological time. We
draw out a sheet which, across all the rest, catches and extends the trajectory of points,
 the evolution of regions. This is evidently a task which runs the risk of failure: sometimes
we only produce an incoherent dust made out of juxtaposed borrowings; sometimes we
only form generalities which retain mere resemblances. All this is the territory of false
recollections with which we trick ourselves or try to trick others.... But it is possible for
the work of art to succeed in inventing these paradoxical hypnotic and hallucinatory
sheets whose property is to be at once a past and always to come.

[T]hought, the brain, is the set of non-localizable relations between all these sheets, the
continuity which rolls them up and unrolls them like so many lobes, preventing them
from halting and becoming fixed in a death position. ...In cinema, Resnais says,
something ought to happen "around the image, behind the image and even inside the
image." This is what happens when the image becomes time-image. The world has
become memory, brain.... The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate
and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future, the inside and the
outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent of any fixed point.... The

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image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and
time. ( Time-Image123, 125)

This position of reading assumes a particular orientation toward history and the future.
The formalist model of reading is restricted by the modern conception of movement. All
possible fragmentations of plot can be reordered into a chronological and continuous
sense, and it is our "natural" inclination to desire this mental state of things. There is a
will to chronology in this perspective that requires the predictable succession of the
present out of the past and into the future, that is also commensurate with the organic will
to truth. By the same token, despite its useful and thought-provoking calls to history, the
formalist model of narration and reading is curiously ahistorical. Styles of narration and
schemata of reading can only be described as static and synchronic sets, though these sets
may supersede one another as historical models.
9 Internal citations refer to Nol Burch's reading of Ozu's The Only Son ( 1936). See his To
the Distant Observer175-79.
10 The doctrine of eternal recurrence assures difference its own concept on this basis. For
example, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explains,

That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a
principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a
Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own
concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general
already understood as identical. Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal
return. Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a
world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and
dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does
not bring back "the same," but returning constitutes the only Same of that which
becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the
only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical
which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. ( Difference and
 Repetition41)
11 In the preceding section, Benjamin notes how, regardless of protests to the contrary, the
ideology of the politicians that accommodated Hitler was, in fact, the double of National
Socialism. "Our consideration proceeds from the insight," wrote Benjamin, "that the
politicians' stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their 'mass basis,' and, finally,
their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the
same thing" ( Illuminations260).
12 See in particular What Is a Minor Literature? in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature16-27.
13 "If the people are missing, if there is no longer consciousness, evolution or revolution, it
is the scheme of reversal which itself becomes impossible," Deleuze writes.

There will no longer be conquest of power by a proletariat, or by a united or unified

people. The best third world film-makers could believe in this for a

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time.... But in this respect these authors still participated in the classical conception, so
slow, imperceptible and difficult to site clearly. The death-knell for becoming conscious
was indeed becoming conscious that there were no people, but always several peoples, an
infinity of peoples, who remained to be united, or who should not be united, in order for
the problem to change. It is in this way that third world cinema is a cinema of minorities,
because the people exist only in the condition of minority, which is why they are
missing.... By acknowledging the impasse of fusions or unifications which did not re-
create a tyrannical unity, and did not turn back against the people, modern political
cinema was constituted on this fragmentation, this break-up. ( TimeImage219-20, 286)
14 On Bloch's concept of utopia and the translation of Vor-Schein as anticipatory
illumination, see Jack Zipes's introduction to The Utopian Function of Art and Literature,
especially xxxii-xxxvii.
15 The interior citation is from Gilbert Simondon's L'individu et so gense
physicobiologique233-34.
16 Brian Massumi presents a provocative account of these concepts to which I am indebted.
See his User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia33.
17 Fabulation is another concept adapted from Bergson. See, for example, The Two Sources
of Morality and Religion, especially chapter 2.
18 Deleuze continues:

fiction was...abandoned in favour of the real, whilst retaining a model of truth which
presupposed fiction and was a consequence of it. What Nietzsche had shown, that the
ideal of the true was the most profound fiction, at the heart of the real, had not yet been
discovered by the cinema. The veracity of the story continued to be grounded in fiction.
When the ideal or model of the true was applied to the real, it began to change many
things, since the camera was being directed to a pre-existing real, but, in another sense,
nothing had changed in the conditions of the story: the objective and the subjective were
displaced, not transformed; identities were defined in a different way, but remained
 defined; the story remained truthful, really-truthful instead of fictionally-truthful. But the
veracity of the story had not stopped being a fiction. ( Time-Image149-50)
19 For a theoretical overview of this problem, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's superb
account in the concluding chapter of Unthinking Eurocentrism.
20 Ngg wa Thiong'o comments movingly on this experience in his essay, "The Language
of African Literature": "Colonial alienation takes two interlinked forms: an active (or
passive) distancing of oneself from the reality around; and an active (or passive)
identification with that which is most external to one's environment. It starts with a
deliberate disassociation of the language of conceptualisation, of thinking, of formal
education, of mental development, from the language of daily interaction in the home
and in the community. It is like separating the mind from the body so that they are
occupying two unrelated linguistic spheres in the same person. On a larger social scale it
is like producing

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a society of bodiless heads and headless bodies" ( Decolonising the Mind28). I would
like to thank Sean Cubit for bringing my attention to this passage.
21 Deleuze writes concisely and elegantly on the deterritorialization of language in minor
literature in his short essay "He Stuttered", published in Boundas and Olkowski's
collection Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy23-29.
22 The series, then, may be understood generally as a combinatoire of three strategies: First,
the character or subject is constructed as a site of oscillation between the real and the
fictional. As an intercessor, the character is chosen as the site of popular memory and for
a capacity for fabulation. Second, the filmmaker must organize this fabulation in a direct
time-image wherein the before and the after intersect in a state of passage or
transformation: "the camera is constantly reaching a before or an after in the characters
which constitute the real, at the very point where story-telling is set in motion" ( Time-
Image154). Third, "the becoming of the film-maker and of his character already belongs
to a people, to a community, to a minority whose expression they practise and set free
(free, indirect discourse).... What has to be filmed is the frontier, on condition that this is
equally crossed by the film-maker in one direction and by the real character in the
opposite direction: time is necessary here; a certain time is necessary which constitutes
an integral part of the film" (153-54). This frontier can only be apprehended in flight, that
is, in the specific deterritorializations it inspires. This structure of enunciation is
comparable to the semiotic situation of the image-crystal -- not a truthful description, but
a power of the false where "truth is produced by a series of processes that shape its
substance; literally, a series of falsifications" ( Negotiations126, 172). Quoting
Qubecois filmmaker Pierre Perrault, Deleuze relates that, in the series, "We must catch
someone in the process of 'making up legends,' 'in the act of making up legends.' Then,
between two or more speakers, a discourse of the minority can develop. Here we find
again the function of Bergsonian fabulation.... All peoples constitute themselves in that
way. So against the pre-established fictions, which always refer back to the colonizer's
discourse, the minority's discourse is opposed, which happens through intercessors" (
Negotiations125-26, 171).
23 Sembene's innovations in the use of sound and narrative voice have similar and equally
 powerful functions in La Noire de... ( 1966). For a contrasting though very interesting
view, see Roy Armes's discussions of Sembene's early films in "Malkmus and Armes",
Arab and African Filmmaking.

7 Thought and Image

1 For further arguments on defining contemporary culture as an audiovisual culture, see
my essays "Reading the Figural" and Audiovisual Culture and Interdisciplinary
Knowledge.
2 In fact, the question of time posits an inverse ratio between the movements of thought
and the communication of information. See, for example, Deleuze's "Avoir une ide en
cinma" in Jean-Marie Straub, Danile Huillet.

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3 I am indebted to Rda Bensmaa for a number of these arguments. See his essay, "Les
transformateurs -- Deleuze ou le cinma comme automate spirituel". Other imporant
discussions of Deleuze's reading of Spinoza can be found in Michael Hardt's Gilles
Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Brian Mas sumi 's User's Guide to Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, and Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari.
4 "Consequences of the Four Incapacities," Peirce on Signs, 313.
5 Abstract machines tend to be "territorializing," in that they function as generalities that
regulate the appearance of all their individual instances. Machinic arrangements are more
often deterritorializing and are expressed as individual instances. The concepts of
abstract machines and machinic arrangements have, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari,
evolved with considerable complexity and nuance. I am thinking especially here of the
diagrammatics of power that Deleuze outlines in his book on Foucault, a position that I
believe is more apposite to the cinema books. For different developments of these
concepts, see especially the summary in A Thousand Plateaus (510-13) and in the last
two chapters of Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues. It is also important to keep in mind that
the movement-image is characterized by its own powerful deterritorializations in the
relation between relative and absolute movement.
6 The philosophical consequences of simulacra are raised here again. While the movement
of thought is charged by a sentiendum or the sensible, this is not an object of recognition
but rather a paradoxical or contradictory perception. "Do not count upon thought to
ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks," writes Deleuze. "Rather, count upon the
contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the
absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of a true
critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which
presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself" ( Difference
and Repetition139). This encounter is with neither a recognizable object nor a
representable memory. Rather, it is "the dissimilar in the pure form of time which
constitutes the immemorial of a transcendent memory. Finally, it is an I fractured by this
form of time which finds itself constrained to think that which can only be thought; not
the Same, but that transcendent 'aleatory point,' always Other by nature, in which all the
essences are enveloped like so many differentials of thought, and which signifies the
highest power of thought only by virtue of also designating the unthinkable or the
inability to think at the empirical level"(144).
7 These ideas are presented by Deleuze at the end of chapter 4, Ideas and the Synthesis of
Difference, in Difference and Repetition, 214-21 passim.
8 See especially The Plane of Immanence33-37.
9 Both references are cited from The Time-Image, 308, n. 1.
10 The interior citation is from The Milk Separator and the Holy Grail in Nonindifferent
Nature38-59. Rda Bensmaa has a similar reading of Eisenstein's dialectical automaton.
See his essay Les transformateurs -- Deleuze ou le cinma comme automate spirituel. On
the dialectical nature of Eisenstein's thought

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in general, see Jacques Aumont's Montage Eisenstein and David Bordwell's The Cinema
of Eisenstein.
11 Here, according to Deleuze,

The whole is no longer the logos which unifies the parts, but the drunkeness, the pathos
which bathes them and spreads out in them. From this point of view images constitute a
malleable mass, a descriptive material loaded with visual and sound features of
expression, synchronized or not, zig-zags of forms, elements of action, gestures and
profiles, syntactic sequences. This is a primitive language or thought, or rather an
internal monologue, a drunken monologue, working through figures, metonymics,
synecdoches, metaphors, inversions, attractions....

The complete circuit thus includes the sensory shock which raises us from the images to
conscious thought, then the thinking in figures which takes us back to the images and
gives us an affective shock again. Making the two coexist, joining the highest degree of
consciousness to the deepest level of the unconscious: this is the dialectical automaton.
The whole is constantly open (the spiral), but so that it can internalize the sequence of
images, as well as becoming externalised in this sequence. The whole forms a
knowledge, in the Hegelian fashion, which brings together the image and the concept as
two movements each of which goes towards the other. ( Time-Image159, 161)
12 See Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in
Illuminations243-44.
13 The irrational interval has another power: it is not easily convertible to capital and thus
cannot enter the circuit of equivalence sustained by the logic of commodities. The
rationalization of space in the movement-image is commensurate with a general principle
of the age of industrialization: the rationalization of time and the mechanization of space.
In the movement-image, time is literally money: the passage of frames through the
camera also measures a constant expense -- on average in 1996, $250/frame or
$6000/sec. In an earlier time, Marcel L'Herbier wrote, "space and time becoming more
and more expensive in the modern world, art had to make itself international industrial
art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time as 'imaginary warrants of capital'" (
Time-Image 78). (The interior citation is from Le cinmatographe et l'espace, chronique
financire in Marcel l'Herbier, ed. Nol Burch, 97-104.) The movement-image
developed its own strategies for resisting this equivalence, above all in montage
 strategies for expressing the sublime. The irrational interval that founds the direct image
of time plays a different hand. The rationalization of space, and the expression of time as
space, renders the image susceptible to conversion as money, making it a "warrant of
capital." But the irrational interval, at its foundation, renders time incommensurate with
space. There is a dissymmetrical relation between space and time, perception and
memory, which is a pure virtuality -- the fact of returning for that which differs. In the
time-image, just as a sign cannot be exchanged for a referent, nor an actual perception for
a virtual memory, we find the irrational interval "endlessly relaunching exchange which

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is dissymmetrical, unequal and without equivalence, trading image for money, trading
time for images, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a
spinning top on its side" ( Time-Image78, 105). The direct image of time, then, also
presents a struggle between the image and capital to see who will be exhausted first.
14 Virilio's main statement of this idea is War and Cinema: Logistics of Perception.
Overcoming the ordinary fascist in us is, of course, one of the great problems posed by
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, as Foucault points out in his interesting preface to
the English translation.
15 This is yet another argument that Deleuze adapts from Difference and Repetition. For
example, Deleuze writes:

Artaud said that the problem (for him) was not to orientate his thought, or to perfect the
expression of what he thought, or to acquire application and method or to perfect his
poems, but simply to manage to think something. For him, this was the only conceivable
"work": it presupposes an impulse, a compulsion to think which passes through all sorts
of bifurcations, spreading from the nerves and being communicated to the soul in order
to arrive at thought. Henceforth, thought is also forced to think its central collapse, its
fracture, its own natural "powerlessness" which is indistinguishable from the greatest
power -- in other words, from those unformulated forces, the cogitanda, as though from
so many thefts or trespasses in thought. Artaud pursues in all this the terrible revelation
of a thought without image, and the conquest of a new principle which does not allow
itself to be represented. He knows that difficulty as such, along with its cortege of
problems and questions, is not a de facto state of affairs but a de jure structure of
thought; that there is an acephalism in thought just as there is an amnesia in memory, an
aphasia in language and an agnosia in sensibility. He knows that thinking is not innate,
but must be engendered in thought. He knows that the problem is not to direct or
methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and in nature, but to bring into
being that which does not yet exist (there is no other work, all the rest is arbitrary, mere
decoration). To think is to create -- there is no other creation-but to create is first of all to
engender "thinking" in thought. ( Difference and Repetition147)
16 "The imperatives and questions with which we are infused do not emanate from the I: it
is not even there to hear them," Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition.

The imperatives are those of being, while every question is ontological and distributes
"that which is" among problems. Ontology is the dice throw, the chaosmos from which
the cosmos emerges. If the imperatives of Being have a relation with the I, it is with the
 fractured I in which, every time, they displace and reconstitute the fracture according to
the order of time. Imperatives do indeed form the cogitanda of pure thought, the
differentials of thought, at once that which cannot be thought and that which must be
thought and can be thought only from the point of view of the transcendent exercise.
Questions

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are these pure thoughts of the cogitanda. Imperatives in the form of questions thus
signify our greatest powerlessness, but also that point of which Maurice Blanchot speaks
endlessly: that blind, acephalic, aphasic and aleatory original point which designates "the
impossibility of thinking that is thought," that point at which "powerlessness" is
transmuted into power, that point which develops in the work in the form of a problem.
Far from referring back to the Cogito as a proposition of consciousness, imperatives are
addressed to the fractured I as though to the unconscious of thought. For the I has the
rights of an unconscious without which it would not think, and in particular would not
think the pure cogitanda. Contrary to what is stated by the banal propositions of
consciousness, thought thinks only on the basis of an unconscious, and thinks that
unconscious in the transcendent exercise. Consequently, far from being the properties or
attributes of a thinking substance, the Ideas which derive from imperatives enter and
leave only by that fracture in the I, which means that another always thinks in me,
another who must also be thought. Theft is primary in thought. Of course powerlessness
can remain powerlessness, but it alone can also be raised to the highest power. This is
precisely what Nietzsche meant by will to power: that imperative transmutation which
takes powerlessness itself as an object (be cowardly, lazy or obedient if you wish! on
condition that...) -- that dice throw capable of affirming the whole of chance, those
questions with which we are infused during torrid or glacial hours, those imperatives
which dedicate us to the problems they launch. (199-200)
17 This confrontation in time and its symbolizations -- described beautifully on pp. 88-90 of
Difference and Repetition in a reading of Hamlet -- returns us to the empty form of time
that "signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of
the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to
pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the
shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the
unequal in itself. In this manner, the I which is fractured according to the order of time
and the Self which is divided according to the temporal series correspond and find a
common descendant in the man without name, without family, without qualities, without
self or I, the 'plebian' guardian of a secret, the already-Overman whose scattered
members gather around the sublime image" (89-90).
18 Eternal recurrence founds this comedic belief in Deleuze's Nietzschean ethics:

How could faith not be its own habit and its own reminiscence, and how could the
repetition it takes for its object-a repetition which, paradoxically, takes place once and
for all -- not be comical? Beneath it rumbles another, Nietzschean, repetition: that of
eternal return. Here, a different and more mortuary betrothal between the dead God and
the dissolved self forms the true condition by default and the true metamorphosis of the
agent, both of which disappear in the unconditioned character of the product. Eternal
return is not a faith, but the truth of faith: it has isolated the double or the simulacrum, it
 has liberated the comic in order to make this an element of the superhuman. That

-238-

is why-again as Klossowski says -- it is not a doctrine but the simulacrum of every

doctrine (the highest irony), it is not a belief but the parody of every belief (the highest
humour): a belief and a doctrine eternally yet to come. We have too often been invited to
judge the atheist from the viewpoint of the belief or the faith that we suppose still drives
him-in short, from the viewpoint of grace; not to be tempted by the inverse operation --
to judge the believer by the violent atheist by which he is inhabited, the Antichrist
eternally given "once and for all" within grace. ( Difference and Repetition95-96)

8 Conclusion: The Memory of Resistance

1 The problem of thinking thus returns us to Kant's critique of Descartes. For only the
empty form of time, furrowing between the I and the self, can explain the engendering of
thought. "The subject of the Cartesian Cogito," Deleuze argues,

does not think: it only has the possibility of thinking, and remains stupid at the heart of
that possibility. It lacks the form of the determinable: not a specificity, not a specific
form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the pure and empty form
of time. It is the empty form of time which introduces and constitutes Difference in
thought, on the basis of which it thinks, in the form of the difference between the
indeterminate and the determination. It is this form of time which distributes throughout
itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive self produced by a groundlessness that
it contemplates. It is this which engenders thought within thought, for thought thinks
only by means of difference, around this point of ungrounding. It is difference or the
form of the determinable which causes thought to function-in other words, the entire
machine of determination and the indeterminate. The theory of thought is like painting: it
needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of
a theory of thought without image. ( Difference and Repetition276)
2 I write as if the audiovisual were only a media space (cinematic, televisual, or
informatic). However, Deleuze argues that stratigraphic constructions of the visible and
the utterable inform in different ways every historical formation as variable relations
between knowledge, power, and subjectivation. This is the larger argument of his book
on Foucault. Also see my essay "Reading the Figural."
3 And this is also why the force of the outside is nothing other than the force of eternal
recurrence, which produces simulacra in whatever is divided from itself by the pure and
empty form of time. "What is this content which is affected or 'modified' by the eternal
return?" Deleuze asks.

We have tried to show that it is a question of simulacra, and simulacra alone. The power
of simulacra is such that they essentially implicate at once the object = x in the
unconscious, the word = x in language, and the action = x in history. Simulacra are those
systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is
essential is that we find in these systems no

-239-
 prior identity, no internal resemblance. It is all a matter of difference in the series, and of
differences of difference in the communication between series. What is displaced and
disguised in the series cannot and must not be identified, but exists and acts as the
differenciator of difference. ( Difference and Repetition299-300)
4 The problem in this sense is expressive of a will to power that pitches the individual into
a Dionysian world or state of intensity. Thus Deleuze argues that

the individual in intensity finds its psychic image neither in the organisation of the self
nor in the determination of species of the I, but rather in the fractured I and the dissolved
self, and in the correlation of the fractured I with the dissolved self. This correlation
seems clear, like that of the thinker and the thought, or that of the clear-confused thinker
with distinct-obscure Ideas (the Dionysian thinker). It is Ideas which lead us from the
fractured I to the dissolved Self. As we have seen, what swarms around the edges of the
fracture are Ideas in the form of problems-in other words, in the form of multiplicities
made up of differential relations and variations of relations, distinctive points and
transformations of points. ( Difference and Repetition259)
5 Deleuze continues this thought in a striking passage:

The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated
reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to
extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of
repetition.... [Art] aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications which make
up the real essence of this civilisation, in order that Difference may at last be expressed
with a force of anger which is itself repetitive and capable of introducing the strangest
selection, even if this is only a contraction here and there -- in other words, a freedom for
the end of the world. Each art has its interrelated techniques or repetitions, the critical
and revolutionary power of which may attain the highest degree and lead us from the sad
repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and then to the ultimate
repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out. ( Difference and Repetition293)
6 The Logic of Sense, of course, presents Deleuze's deepest meditation on the nature of
events. Also see "What Is an Event?" in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. On
cinematic "events" see Tom Conley's essay L'evnement-cinma.
7 In an implicit jab, I believe, at Richard Rorty, Deleuze and Guattari describe this as an
image that capitalizes philosophy "as an agreeable commerce of the mind, which, with
the concept, would have its own commodity, or rather its exchange value -- which, from
the point of view of a lively, disinterested sociability of Western democratic
conversation, is able to generate a consensus of opinion and provide communication with
an ethic, as art would provide it with an aesthetic" ( What Is Philosophy?99).
8 In section 7 of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin argues that
historicism always produces empathy with the victors. This is why "There is no
document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of bar-

-240-

barism. And just as a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner
in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefor
 dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history
against the grain" ( Illuminations258-59).
9 Samuel Butler has an equally significant place in Difference and Repetition. See, for
example, Deleuze's preface xx-xxi.

-241-

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