Cultural Politics

Godard in Sarajevo
Media Control in Deleuze and Virilio

Phillip Roberts

Abstract  In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze posits a huge

change in the nature of cinematic time in the postwar years. In
“Postscript on the Societies of Control,” he also claims to identify a
change in power relations and control strategies that takes in a number
of other media transformations. Taken together, these arguments
point toward a broader transformation in the history of thought that is
developed across Deleuze’s work, but also raise a number of problems.
This essay will critique and rearticulate the terms of Deleuze’s media
philosophy in relation to work by Paul Virilio on media and warfare.
This critique is organized around a study of the recent films of Jean-­L uc
Godard, which focus on the recurrence of the images of the mainstream
culture industry and their transformation in wartime Sarajevo. It argues
that Godard’s work is concerned with a cinema of cliché, following
Deleuze’s conceptualization of cliché in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, and
that this raises important political dimensions to Deleuze’s cinema
philosophy and his theorization of media control.
Keywords  Deleuze; Virilio; Godard; cliché; control

I n the early 1980s, Gilles Deleuze published his two-­volume

project on cinema (2005a, 2005b), which claimed to identify
an enormous change in cinema aesthetics in the modern cin-
emas that emerged after the Second World War. Despite the
vast range of conceptual tools used, and the mini-­industry of
academic writing dedicated to explaining them, the basic argu-
ment of these texts is quite simple. Deleuze argues that pre-
war cinemas were largely dominated by “movement-­images,”
while postwar cinemas produced “time-­images.” Deleuze’s
terminology refers to a proposed change in cinema aesthetics.

333
Cultural Politics, Volume 10, Issue 3, © 2014 Duke University Press
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2795717

Published by Duke University Press

 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
Movement-­images rely on a classical
schema that is character-­driven and ori-
ented toward decisive action and interven-
tion (Rushton 2012: 13 – 26). In contrast,
time-­images present characters who can-
not intervene in situations. Deleuze posits
a crisis in belief in the immediate postwar
years that leads filmmakers to question
the capacities of cinema to respond to a
world that is too powerful, intolerable, or
unjust (Reid 2011; Rushton 2012: 59 – 71).
As a result, the European new waves
in Italy, France, and Germany (and new
waves elsewhere, in Brazil, Japan, and
the Soviet Union, although Deleuze barely
acknowledges these) invent an aesthetic
that relinquishes its position as an accurate
recording apparatus, instead showing a
world that is opaque and hopeless. But in
doing so, the films of this period assumed
powers to depict the postwar world in
another way. By emptying scenes of
action and increasing the length of shots,
the new waves initiated a revolution in
cinematic time, such that the movement-­
centered aesthetic of the classical cinema
is replaced by a modern conception of
time (Martin-­Jones 2006: 19 – 23).
Deleuze’s supposition of a universal
transformation in cinema is not without its
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
problems, but he does present a star-
tling thesis that serves to align changes
in cinema aesthetics with the history of
philosophy, as well as with wider social
changes in the second half of the twen-
tieth century. As David Rodowick shows
(1997, 2001: 170 – 202), Deleuze’s cinema
project also intersects with his wider work,
which broadly shows a transformation
in the history of thought in the twentieth
century. Following the cinema books,
this philosophical project is continued in
Foucault (2006a) and The Fold (2006b) and
aligned with a number of societal transfor-
334
mations in “Postscript on the Societies of
Published by Duke University Press
Control” (1992). This latter essay presents
several quite significant interventions into
the media philosophy developed in the
cinema books, reformulating the terms of
Deleuze’s thinking on virtuality and image
circulation in the context of electronic com-
munications, access-­rights, and extreme
poverty. This essay primarily identifies a
change in strategies of power (from disci-
plinary internment to nonlocated control)
but also introduces a range of causes and
consequences in politics, media technol-
ogy, and social organization.1
I argue that there is a connection
between Deleuze’s formulations of control
and the time-­image and that both concepts
together constitute a new image regime
where concrete formations are superseded
by an immaterial regime of organization.
Both the societies of control and the cine-
mas of the time-­image enter into a regime
of disappearances, where images lose
their material ontological basis, organiza-
tion loses the concentrated application of
physical force, and the world is doubled by
a virtual spectrum of information. The sig-
nificance of this alignment of control and
time-­image is in the resulting redirection of
the cinema books toward politics. The con-
trol article highlights the political dimen-
sions of the cinema books and demands
a reformulation of many of Deleuze’s prior
aesthetic concerns toward political ques-
tions. In the context of control, what con-
cerns the transformation in cinematic time
is not only time itself but also poverty and
powerlessness in the postwar era and the
possibilities of thinking the world anew.
There are already several works that
consider Deleuze’s cinema books signifi-
cant political texts (Jun 2010; Marratti
2008; Pisters 2012) or that address them
from the perspective of minor cinemas
(Marks 2000; Andrew 2000; Yau 2001),
identity politics (Martin-­Jones 2006;
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
Marshall 2001), or gender politics (Butler
2002; Rizzo 2012). Julian Reid’s work in
particular (2010, 2011) analyzes the political
implications of Deleuze’s thesis, focusing
on the concept of the seer and the posited
break between classical and modern
cinema. Reid shows that Deleuze’s
understanding of history and the role of
the Second World War is problematic in
relation to his taxonomical, and supposedly
ahistorical (Deleuze 2005a: xi), study of
cinema. Reid critiques the cinema books’
teleological conception of history (2010)
and proposes a more complex understand-
ing of Deleuze’s crisis and transformation
thesis.
I am inclined to agree that Deleuze’s
posited crisis constitutes one of the most
significant aspects of his cinema politics.
The sections addressing crisis and trans-
formation in the postwar years (2005a:
201 – 15, 2005b: 1 – 23), wartime cinema,
and the betrayal of the movement-­image
(2005b: 159 – 6 0), and minor cinema and
the “people to come” (2005b: 207 – 15) are
most relevant to an analysis of politics in
the cinema books, as these are the points
where Deleuze most explicitly considers
social and political transformations outside
of the cinema. In order to take account of
the full political implications of Deleuze’s
cinema philosophy, it is necessary to
address his conception of transformation
in relation to both cinema and the social
and political fields that intersect with the
medium. Crisis and transformation in the
cinema books has been well analyzed by
a number of critics (Martin-­Jones 2011;
Deamer 2009; Rancière 2006: 107 – 23)
who each, like Reid, encounter problems
concerning the universalism and teleology
of Deleuze’s understanding of cinematic
history. Reid’s “What Did Cinema Do in
‘the War’ Deleuze?” (2010) offers the
only consideration of the role of cinema
Published by Duke University Press
during the Second World War in relation
to Deleuze’s work. Reid’s argument is
convincing but does not go far enough in
its study of the role of warfare and political
transformation in the cinema books.
This essay will develop this perspec-
tive significantly further by developing
Deleuze’s postwar crisis in the context
of further transformations in cinema
and militarism in the second half of the
twentieth century. In particular, I will
explore an evident but neglected link
between Deleuze’s cinema philosophy
and the work of Paul Virilio, who occupies
a crucial position in Deleuze’s thesis on
cinema and warfare but whose work has
been misunderstood by Deleuze. Counter
to Deleuze’s own claims, I will show that
Virilio’s thesis in War and Cinema (1989)
concerns not the crisis of the movement-­
image but of cinema in general.2 It is not
only the movement-­image, as Deleuze
says, that was from the beginning linked
to the organization of war (2005b: 159) but
also the technology of cinema, and this
does not stop with the end of the Sec-
ond World War. In the postwar years and
beyond, cinema and the military continue
to function codependently, with evolutions
in video and digital cinema being driven
by research into military technology and
information warfare. I argue that if we are
to take Virilio’s thesis seriously then we
must rethink the relationship between
cinema and warfare in Deleuze’s work, and
more significantly, between movement-­
Cultural Politics
image and time-­image. The ungrounding
of cinematic thought in the time-­image
is accompanied by a similar ungrounding
in social and political organization. There
has been a revolution in the distribution
of information and images since the end
of the Second World War that demon-
strates an increased virtualization of social
335
relations, such that social formations are
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
increasingly abstracted into distributed
information networks (Galloway 2004:
29 – 5 3). I argue that Deleuze’s conceptual-
ization of the time-­image’s emergence is
insufficient, as it neglects to address the
modern cinema’s own engagement with
the broader abstraction of information and
social relations in the contemporary world.
Deleuze will address this transformation
in social organization in “Postscript on the
Societies of Control,” which will identify
an extensive deterritorialization of political
power but neglect to advance his prior
conclusions concerning cinema and visual
media.
Deleuze’s cinema books have been
developed to take account of more recent
media transformations by Rodowick (2001)
and Patricia Pisters (2012). But it is not suf-
ficient to argue, as these critics do, that we
can simply extend Deleuze’s time-­image
thesis in line with digital cinema and new
media. The short article on control con-
tains only a schematic conceptualization of
a transformation in social organization and
cannot alone express the full complexity
of Deleuze’s understanding of control and
innovation (Galloway 2012); the article
only covers control but, as I will show,
his notions of creation and resistance
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
are essential to understanding Deleuze’s
media politics. I argue that we must read
the cinema books and the control article
together. Cinema 2 offers one of Deleuze’s
most complex accounts of transformation
and innovation but neglects to express the
apparatuses of capture that still operate
through the cinema industry in the age of
the time-­image (Buchanan 2008: 7 – 11).
Similarly, the control article addresses a
deterritorialized control but cannot account
for the possibilities of resistance that the
new regime gives rise to (Galloway 2004:
175 – 206; Bogard 2009: 23 – 29).
336
The interconnectedness of these
Published by Duke University Press
works and the full complexity of Deleuze’s
conceptualization of control and resistance
will be more difficult to express than my
first point concerning the problems with
Deleuze’s time-­image thesis, not least
because Deleuze was dead before the
full extent of the apparatuses of control
was apparent. I argue that we can begin
to grasp this by looking at control and the
time-­image in the context of Jean-­Luc
Godard’s recent work. Godard offers an
excellent case study, since his career
spans the extent of Deleuze’s and Virilio’s
studies of cinema. His career begins in
the immediate postwar years, when his
work remained consistent with Deleuze’s
transformation in modern cinema, before
gradually mutating through the 1970s to
the present. Godard’s work after 1989
touches upon each of the most significant
aspects of Deleuze’s cinema politics (as
noted in Reid’s work — the Second World
War, fascism, and the people to come).3
I will use Godard’s films to expand the
political framework set out by Deleuze in
the cinema books and connect his thinking
on media control to a similar theorization
in Virilio’s work. Godard’s recent films
are remarkable in that they offer a direct
consideration of many of the problems
that inform Deleuze’s cinema project.
Since Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988 – 9 8),
Godard’s career has focused on the means
by which cinema has come to form a sort
of image-­history of the twentieth century,
and he has used his work to map out the
intersection between images, history, and
politics. Godard’s work shows a fixation
with the images of a cannibalistic culture
and, as with Deleuze, he questions the
conditions whereby these culture-­images
might give way to a new image forma-
tion. Serge Daney makes a similar point
in “The Godard Paradox” (2004), arguing
that Godard’s passion for cinema “wants
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
cinema to become something else, it even
longs for the horizon where cinema risks
being absorbed by dint of metamorphosis,
it opens up its focus onto the unknown”
(2004: 68). Daney understands Godard’s
love of cinema as a transformative passion
through which it might be ruptured or done
away with entirely for something new. This
produces a recurring interest across his
work in those images of culture that might
serve to inhibit the transformative potential
of cinema.
To focus on the images of everyday
culture in Godard’s work may seem coun-
terintuitive given his position as one of the
leading exponents of European art cinema,
but the images of consumerism have
always been of the greatest significance to
Godard’s work. This paradox is addressed
by Peter Wollen, who argues that Holly-
wood, modernism, and the relationship
between art and culture form three recur-
ring threads that run throughout Godard’s
career (2002: 75 – 78). For Wollen, Godard’s
interests in the images of Hollywood, com-
merce, and art are all interpreted through
a series of modernist strategies that make
his films into “a consumerist version of
Malraux’s ‘imaginary museum,’ a soci-
ety full of posters and postcards of great
paintings, records of great music, shelves
of paperback classics, and people who
can quote instant lines of poetry to each
other” (2002: 77; see also Williams 1999:
310; de Baecque 2004). Godard’s “art” is
a transformative potential, as Daney says,
an opening up of forces to the unknown,
but as with Deleuze’s understanding of
the time-­image, this gives only a potential
rather than, in most cases, an actuality. It
is far more likely that these great artworks
will be reinscribed into an endlessly repro-
ducible consumerist matrix. These images
(of culture, of Hollywood, of art becoming
commerce) define the conditions for the
Published by Duke University Press
organization of the world into a distinct
image formation and determine the
possibilities of thought. Godard’s work is
concerned with a circulating spectrum of
culture-­images, his term for what Deleuze
calls a cliché (2005b: 19). These repeating
cliché-­images form the locus of Godard’s
most significant work and position him in
line with the political concerns of Deleuze’s
cinema project.
To summarize, this essay will develop
two related arguments in relation to
Deleuze’s cinema philosophy. First, in line
with Reid’s work, I argue that his conten-
tion that warfare and the movement-­image
are linked misunderstands Virilio’s thesis.
Following Virilio’s own argument, that the
technology of cinema itself is part of an
extensive military-­media apparatus, will
lead away from the cinema books and
toward the broader transformation of the
control article. Second, I argue that to fully
grasp the political implications of Deleuze’s
thought on cinema and media we need to
address both the cinema books and the
control article as two sides of a fully devel-
oped theorization of media politics. I will
develop these argument through a study
of three of Godard’s recent works, using
Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) to articulate
a tension between images of creativity
and images of stagnation in contemporary
media, Histoire(s) du cinéma to assess the
importance of the Second World War and
subsequent military involvement in media
transformation, and Notre musique (2004)
Cultural Politics
to assess the contemporary state of media
control. The value of this work is threefold.
I will provide a more complex articulation
of Deleuze’s cinema politics than is cur-
rently available, I will question Deleuze’s
relationship with Virilio’s work, and I
will demonstrate the useful continuities
evident in Godard’s recent films. Utilizing
337
Virilio and Godard, this essay will expand
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
Deleuze’s theses on control and media, in
line with continuing transformations in the
contemporary world.
A Thought That Forms / A Form That
Thinks ( Je vous salue, Sarajevo)
Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) is a three-­
minute photomontage in which a pho-
tograph from the Bosnian War is broken
into smaller images and edited to present
segments of the photo, one by one, before
the whole is revealed. In a voice-­over
track, Godard contrasts a sphere of culture
to a sphere of art.4 He says that culture
(“cigarette, T-­shirt, TV, tourism, war”) is
the rule, and art (“Flaubert, Dostoevsky,
Gershwin, Mozart, Cézanne, Vermeer”) is
the exception. Everyone speaks the rule,
but no one speaks the exception. This
binary poses a problem that is specifically
cinematic and concerns the relationship
of the great filmmakers with “cinema
culture.” In Godard’s work, we see a recur-
ring interest in both, for Godard does not
simply make “art cinema,” he questions
what art becomes in the age of culture.
Commercial cinema has always been an
uneasy constant in Godard’s films. There is
a repeating network of culture-­images that
float throughout his work.
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
Deleuze’s cinema books betray a
similar problematic. While they are, for the
most part, concerned with great filmmak-
ers, the shadow of commercial cinema
is ever present. Deleuze asks: “What
becomes of Hitchcock’s suspense, Eisen-
stein’s shock and Gance’s sublimity when
they are taken up by mediocre authors?”
(2005b: 159). Deleuze is often criticized
for being overly elitist in his work on film,
but this question takes on a crucial political
importance in Cinema 2. Like Deleuze,
Godard is not simply contrasting these two
cinemas on qualitative grounds; he consid-
338
ers them specific political forms. Je vous
Published by Duke University Press
salue, Sarajevo asserts that “it is the rule
to want the death of the exception,” and
similarly, when Deleuze says that cinema
is dying (2005b: 159), even when there
is more cinema than ever before, this is
not to express a critical prejudice. Deleuze
says: “There is a still more important rea-
son: the mass art . . . has degenerated into
state propaganda and manipulation, into
a kind of fascism which brought together
Hitler and Hollywood” (2005b: 159). For
Deleuze, as for Godard, this cinematic
break constitutes two different political
image formations. Deleuze’s movement-­
image is a system of organization where
the present is ordered into specific
systems of thought internal to a film itself.
With the time-­image, as Rodowick argues,
cinema shifts from one audiovisual regime
to another and consequently toward a new
image of thought (2001: 170 – 202). No
longer does cinema form closed systems
where a model of truth is imposed on the
spectator, as each system comes to form
a constellation of points in a wider field of
audiovisual culture.
It is on this distinction that Godard
bases his binary. “Culture” is not a
movement-­image, but movement-­image
under the regime of the time-­image.
This is Godard’s problem: not “how does
movement-­image differ from time-­image?”
but “how do these images operate when
the time-­image is the limit of cinema?”
Deleuze asks a similar question: “what
maintains a set in this world without totality
or linkage?” (2005a: 212). By this he means
to ask how movement-­images maintain a
discrete system of thought in an open field
of visual culture. “The answer is simple:
what forms the set are clichés and nothing
else” (2005a: 212; emphasis in original).
These same clichés are visible throughout
Godard’s work — cigarettes and TVs, empty
lovers’ talk, sunglasses and trench coats.
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
Deleuze says: “They are these floating
images, these anonymous clichés, which
circulate in the external world, but which
also penetrate each of us and constitute his
internal world, so that everyone possesses
only psychic clichés by which he thinks and
feels, is thought and is felt, being himself
a cliché among the others in the world
which surrounds him” (2005a: 213). These
are clichés through which, even in an open
system, thought is organized in the same
ways as ever.
So what is art for Godard? And what is
this Sarajevo that he chooses to illustrate
it? For Godard, Sarajevo is neither a place
nor a historical occurrence, but a cinematic
system. This is to say that in Je vous salue,
Sarajevo, as also in Notre musique, Godard
is interested in tracing the images of Sara-
jevo to see what kind of cinematic arrange-
ments they form. In the siege of Sarajevo,
Godard sees the systems of thought
that circulate between the culture-­signs
of Europe become scrambled and indis-
cernible. The images of Sarajevo that fill
Godard’s recent work are given as unread-
able signs that do not organize a consistent
system of thought and do not maintain the
closed-­world sets that Deleuze attributes
to the movement-­image. This is most evi-
dent in Notre musique, which shows the
memories of war written into a man’s face
or a library with Sarajevo’s recent history
inscribed into the walls. These are histories
that are not spoken. They are evoked as a
virtual elsewhere in Godard’s images — the
recent history of Sarajevo as affective
sensation that cannot be spoken but that
hangs over Godard’s work (see also Marks
2000: 71 – 76). There is no depth or detail,
nothing to speak about a people or their
world, but only images. Godard’s problem
is that even those images that lean toward
exception can be reterritorialized into a
system of clichés. The potential of the
Published by Duke University Press
time-­image to order new worlds that take
account of the actually felt poverty and
hunger of existence also contains within
it a potential reterritorialization, in which a
hunger that is felt is reordered as a hunger
that is merely seen or spoken — hunger as
affective sensation remade as a cliché-­
image of the poor.
Hitler and Hollywood
(Histoire(s) du cinéma)
In the opening chapter of Histoire(s) du
cinéma, Godard introduces his project as
an exploration of “history in the plural”
and asserts that this concerns not just the
cinemas that were but also “those that
could be.”5 He argues, through a series of
textual superimpositions, that the classical
cinema apparatuses claim to offer “a world
that matches our desires” but accuses this
cinema of manufacturing sterile images
of glamour or heroism in place of any
productive desire. A series of images inter-
cuts the Hollywood dream factory with
shots of actual factory conditions, a tired
and smoking Charles Chaplin, a dancing
Rita Hayworth, Eisenstein, Lenin’s dead
body, the three stone lions from Battleship
Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925),
Howard Hughes, and Hitler with his eye
pressed to a camera. These are images of
a cinematic dream world beneath which a
hateful underside is present. Through this
montage-­history of 1920s and 1930s cin-
ema, Godard shows a steady movement
whereby these fantasy images become the
Cultural Politics
images of fascism. The images presented
in this sequence relate the entertainment
cinemas in Weimar and Nazi Germany to
the increasing militarization of Europe and
recalls Siegfried Kracauer’s thesis in From
Caligari to Hitler (2004), which discovers
the psychological conditions for the rise of
Nazism prefigured in the German cinema
339
of the 1920s and 1930s.6 Godard attests
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
that cinema will film warfare in newsreels
and dramatic fiction but will say nothing of
importance because it is already complicit
(Williams 1999: 308).7
When read through Deleuze’s writing
on the cinema, it is evident that Godard is
raising two main arguments: the trans-
formative shock of art continues to be
nullified by a network of infinitely repro-
ducible images of culture (which Deleuze
refers to throughout the cinema books
as cliché), and the cinema constitutes a
social-­political apparatus that, at its most
extreme, allies itself with the fascist
regime in Nazi Germany (which Deleuze
touches upon in a few passages on Hitler
and Hollywood [2005b: 159]). These
arguments are connected and of crucial
importance to the political implications of
Deleuze’s cinema philosophy. The second
of these two points Deleuze borrows
from Daney (1983) and Virilio (1989) and
appears in his work in a very simple form.
He says in Cinema 2:
As Serge Daney says, what has brought the
whole cinema of the movement-­image into
question are the “great political mise- ­en- ­scène,
state propaganda turned tableaux vivants, the
first handlings of masses of humans,” and their
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
backdrop, the camps. This was the death-­knell
for the ambitions of “the old cinema”: not, or
not only, the mediocrity and vulgarity of current
production but rather Leni Riefenstahl, who was
not mediocre. And the situation is still worse
if we accept Virilio’s thesis: there has been no
diversion or alienation in an art of the masses
initially founded by the movement-­image; on
the contrary the movement-­image was from
the beginning linked to the organization of war,
state propaganda, ordinary fascism, historically
and essentially. (2005b: 159)
This position is explored by Virilio in War
34 0
and Cinema, where he explains that
Published by Duke University Press
cinema has played an important part in the
development of the technology of warfare
in the twentieth century.8 As the limits of
war expanded from localized battlefields
to total warfare in the early twentieth
century, cinema and other image-­making
technologies assumed a vital strategic role.
Commanders could no longer understand
and manipulate troops’ movements, since
battlefields stretched beyond the field of
vision and included multiple fronts and
millions of troops. Cinematic technologies
assumed strategic importance as means of
communicating the organization of warfare
to its participants. Virilio explains: “To
grasp the objective truth of a great battle,
the camera eye (of Napoleon or Griffith)
could not have been that of the general or
director. Rather, a monitor would have had
to have recorded and analyzed a number
of facts and events incomparably greater
than what the human eye and brain can
perceive at a given place and time, and
then to have inscribed the processed data
onto the battlefield itself” (1989: 59). The
cinema became part of a military-­industrial
complex, replacing a commanding figure
with an apparatus of images and data and
multiple strategic and decision-­making
functions.
Military cinema constructs a readable
world from discrete shots and recordings
of military maneuvers and (through its
own cartographic functions and in support
of more traditional mapping techniques)
battlefield geography and landscapes.
Furthermore, in the middle of the twen-
tieth century, both cinema and warfare
engaged in a double encroachment of the
social itself so that both assumed a total
capture of life. Virilio explores the use of
cinema as the mechanism of this new kind
of warfare in Nazi Germany (1989: 52 – 6 0),
noting that from the onset of total warfare,
“war now spread not just territorially, but
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
to the whole of reality, with neither limits
nor purpose” (1989: 57). In order for every
aspect of reality to be captured by the Nazi
war machine, it was necessary for cinema
to assume a function that is extensive with
the entire life of the nation, no longer oper-
ating within the confines of studios and
theaters but as a network of images that
stretches across the social and attaches
itself to a political machine founded on a
vast array of spectacular devices.9
Kracauer explores the operations of
Nazi wartime propaganda in “Propaganda
and the Nazi War Film” (2004: 271 – 307).
Alongside a study of Triumph of the Will
(Triumph des Willens, 1934) and two
feature-­length campaign films, Kracauer
details the production and circulation of
weekly newsreels, highlighting the speed
and organization of a distribution network
that was to assume a strategic role in the
circulation of Nazi discourse.10 Kracauer
explains: “In 1940, Goebbels said that
films must address people of all strata. Fol-
lowing his instructions, the Nazis managed
to impose their propaganda films upon
the entire German population, with the
result that within Germany proper no one
could possibly escape them” (2004: 277).
The newsreel became one mechanism
through which the entirety of social reality
was colonized by fragments of images and
sounds (Welch 2001: 163 – 72). The cinema
apparatus became a universal spectacle
for staging a world that confirms the preju-
dices of the state.
Thus in Deleuze’s work, the attitude
toward what he calls “mediocre cinema”
(2005b: 159) poses a specific political
problem. For these are not simply bad
films, they are “disgraceful works” (2005b:
159) — disgraceful for political rather than
aesthetic reasons. Here is a situation
where all the image-­making technolo-
gies of the cinema apparatus have been
Published by Duke University Press
assembled to produce a closed mythic
world that is anathema to Deleuze’s under-
standing of the potentialities of cinema. It
is the organization of the movement-­image
cinema as a regressive media apparatus
that Deleuze will set against his study of
the time- ­image.
Paul Virilio and the Media Apparatus
Deleuze’s analysis of the innovations
of modern cinema addresses only part
of the problem. The other side of the
time-­image is the continuing life of the
movement-­image and some of its most
regressive qualities into the postwar years
and beyond (Rushton 2012: 119 – 3 8).
The time-­image does not overcome the
regressive structures of the movement-­
image, as these return in a number of
film cycles and military-­media networks.
Deleuze does not address the recurrence
of the movement-­image in the postwar
years. Much more significantly, he also
ignores the greater significance of Virilio’s
thesis, which does not conclude with the
fall of the Third Reich. Virilio argues that
cinema and warfare continue to develop
in tandem and that neither the end of the
Second World War nor the development
of the time-­image will be sufficient to stop
this.11 Furthermore, Virilio indicates that
Deleuze’s movement/time break is more
complex than is implied in the cinema
books, as many of the properties of the
time-­image (virtuality, ungroundedness,
falsity, automatism) also characterize the
Cultural Politics
military-­industrial control apparatuses in
the latter half of the twentieth century. It
is not so simple as to say that the crisis
of the movement-­image is resolved by a
better regime of images, but rather that
the time-­image opens a different set of
potentials that, as Deleuze also suggests
of control (1992: 4), produce both new
341
weapons and new modes of capture. This
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
is evident when the time-­image is consid-
ered in the context of Virilio’s work.
The concluding chapter of War and
Cinema (1989: 68 – 8 9) divides Virilio’s
thesis on the interrelation of cinematic
technologies and military techniques into
three main parts, focusing on, respec-
tively, the First World War, the Second
World War, and the Cold War (which
includes military actions in Vietnam, the
Malvinas, Lebanon, and elsewhere). In
the first section (1989: 68 – 74), Virilio
explains how the development of aerial
photography responded to the needs for
accurate reconnaissance and visualization
of a terrain in perpetual variation, due to
an artillery bombardment that destroyed
landmarks and reduced the theater of
operations to a gradually evolving network
of temporary positions, tunnels, trenches,
supply lines, and railway networks (1989:
70). Repeated aerial photography replaces
the defunct ordinance survey maps that
conceive of battlefields and supply routes
as relatively stable geographies, changing
only at long intervals; a military apparatus
of observation is required to document and
navigate a new kind of warfare in constant
flux. Warfare had to contend with the
dissolution of static territories and develop
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
an effective apparatus for making sense of
the rapidly changing landscape of battle.
Virilio develops this further in his account
of the Second World War (1989: 74 – 81),
where he adds a crucial temporal dimen-
sion. With the blitzkrieg assaults of the
German army, warfare became motorized
(1989: 74). The rapidity of battle required
a new set of technologies that could
document an accelerated warfare taking
place thousands of miles apart on multiple
fronts. The cinema apparatus was utilized
as a means of documenting the changing
state of the war in Europe, for both strate-
342
gic and propagandistic purposes. Warfare
Published by Duke University Press
had expanded to include the entirety of a
society that was in a state of total war and
that was also constantly being fed by the
rapid circulation of images and discourses
encompassing the full extent of the world.
This is where Virilio’s work intersects with
that of Deleuze and Kracauer.
But Virilio goes further still and, in
a third section (1989: 81 – 8 9), begins to
outline the subsequent development of
military-­cinematic technologies in the post-
war years, through the Vietnam War, and
up until Israel’s war in Lebanon in the early
1980s. Whereas Deleuze’s position on the
propaganda machine in wartime Germany
is that it marks the culmination and failure
of the movement-­image, Virilio takes this
apparatus as a single stage in a longer
evolution that both predates and outlasts
the Second World War. Deleuze says that
the movement-­image (and not the cin-
ema) was from the beginning linked to the
organization of war (2004b: 159). This is a
slight but significant misreading of Virilio’s
argument that leaves space in Deleuze’s
work for a more progressive modern
cinema that can overcome such “fascism
of production” (2005b: 159). Virilio is
more inclusive and means to connect the
technological capabilities of cinema itself
with the military-­industrial complex. Virilio
is unconcerned with particular cycles or
films, but he sees the development of war-
fare in the basic mechanisms of cinema
production. This has important implications
with respect to Deleuze’s work, as Virilio’s
subsequent writing and his focus on the
deterritorialization of warfare will intersect
with Deleuze’s work on the time-­image
more closely than is suggested in the few
references made to Virilio in Cinema 2.
In the postwar era, the military-­cinema
apparatus expands to include new image-­
processing and data-­processing technolo-
gies. With the increasing speed and range
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
of weapons systems, human perception
is unable to provide a reliable picture of a
theater of operations and must make use
of an increasingly sophisticated appara-
tus of image-­collection and information-­
collection devices to relay a complex set
of actions and terrains into a network of
readable maps, charts, and commands.
Virilio explains how a process that began
with the mapping of battlefields many
decades earlier culminates in the cockpit
of the fighter pilot, whose every perception
of the world is filtered through a system of
information-­and image-­processing devices
and organized into a digital display that
interprets the world at hyperspeed and
over vast distances (1989: 84). The extent
of the world has become, for military pur-
poses, a network of images and informa-
tion provided by planetary-­wide satellite
systems and data processors. Virilio calls
this “a final image of the world, a world
in the throes of dematerialization and
eventual total disintegration” (1989: 73;
emphasis in original) — that is, a deterrito-
rialized image of a world dissolving into a
network of data-­processing technologies,
no longer even an image at all, but rather,
as Conley (2011) would suggest, a virtual
cartography of potential images, variously
actualized and rendered visible by different
visualization technologies.
Scott McQuire outlines this aspect
of Virilio’s thesis in “Virilio’s Media as
Philosophy,” arguing that Virilio’s most
significant conclusion in War and Cinema
“was less his analysis of the growing role
of photography and film in military obser-
vation, but his connection of this process
to the general informationalization of
warfare” (2011: 103; emphasis in original).
This is important because it testifies to
the expansion of cinema production into a
more generalized network of information
and images that stretches beyond the
Published by Duke University Press
confines of the movie theater and into
every realm of life. As McQuire suggests,
Virilio’s argument addresses a “gradual
conversion of warfare to a problem of
data management” (2011: 104; emphasis
in original). The primary problem of the
modern military becomes, as Virilio himself
contends, “a problem of ubiquitousness, of
handling simultaneous data in a global but
unstable environment” (1989: 71). Much
like Deleuze’s conceptualization of control,
warfare becomes an exercise in the man-
agement and interpretation of information.
The “informationalization of warfare” will
expand further still in the age of control.
As McQuire explains, “by the 1990s this
is not simply a matter of the military’s
growing use of sophisticated weapons
systems incorporating real time surveil-
lance, but the growing strategic need to
manage the data flows of civilian media”
(2011: 104). Virilio announces a planetary
warfare that encroaches on every aspect
of the world in the electronic media age,
utilizing the cinema apparatus and multiple
other image-­making and data-­processing
technologies to organize and administer a
worldwide information network (see Cubitt
2011: 75 – 76). From the perspective of Viril-
io’s work, Deleuze simply cannot conclude
his remarks on the fascist cinema appara-
tus at the end of the war and the inception
of the time-­image. The militarization of
the cinema will only accelerate after the
Second World War and eventually absorb
a series of computer technologies that will
Cultural Politics
result in the deterritorialization of the world
into a global network of information flows
and digital images.
This is the significance of “Postscript
on the Societies of Control.” Whereas
the cinema project books briefly address
Virilio’s thesis, Deleuze’s eventual confron-
tation with the information society shows
343
a more direct appraisal of the intersection
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
between Virilio’s work and his own, and
more importantly, it theorizes the deterri-
torialization of images in general and not
simply of the time-­image. Virilio notes his
own influence on Deleuze’s conceptualiza-
tion of the control society in an interview
with John Armitage, in which he claims to
have introduced Deleuze to the concept of
control (Armitage and Virilio 2011: 30; see
also Virilio 2000b: 66).12 Deleuze himself
notes the importance of Virilio’s work in
the control article, praising him for his anal-
ysis of the ultrarapid forms of free-­floating
control (1992: 4). In a most interesting
note, Deleuze even provides an overview
of Virilio’s work in Cinema 2:
Paul Virilio shows how the system of war mobi-
lizes perception as much as arms and actions:
thus photo and cinema pass through war, and
are coupled together with arms (for example,
the machine gun). There will increasingly be a
mise- ­en- ­scène of the battlefield, to which the
enemy replies, not now by camouflage, but by
a counter-­mise- ­en- ­scène (simulations, trickery,
or giant illuminations of the air defence). But it
is the whole of civil life which passes into the
mode of the mise- ­en- ­scène, in the fascist sys-
tem: “real power is henceforth shared between
the logistics of arms and that of images and
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
sounds”; and, to the very end, Goebbels dreamt
of going beyond Hollywood, which was the
modern cinema-­city in contrast to the ancient
theatre-­city. Cinema in turn goes beyond itself
towards the electronic image, civil as well as
military in a military-­industrial complex. (2005b:
300n16)
Given such a concise summary of Virilio’s
thesis in War and Cinema, it is surprising
that we find so little consideration of the
implications of Virilio’s work on Deleuze’s
cinema philosophy. There is evident
continuity between the two thinkers, and
34 4
this will eventually lead to the remarkable
Published by Duke University Press
outline of information systems in the con-
trol essay.
Godard and Cliché (Notre musique)
Through Godard’s work it is possible to
connect these two thinkers in a more
systematic fashion. I argue that the con-
trol essay contributes a crucial missing
element to Deleuze’s work on cinema
and visual culture, as it takes account
of a global deterritorialization occurring
alongside the rapid development of
data-­processing and digital technologies.
Control transforms the organization of
the social so that the concentrated appli-
cation of force and the segmentation or
incarceration of people is supplanted by
“security” — a risk management con-
cerned with the administration of the
future (Bogard 2009: 26 – 27; Savat 2009:
48 – 51; Rose 2004: 235 – 4 0; Beck 1992).
In the control society, order is maintained
by the organization of the virtual, so that
a multitude of potential orderings are
reduced to a manageable limit (see Gal-
loway 2004: 52 – 5 3). Following Virilio, we
can say that cinema is directly involved in
this process.
In the final part of this essay, I will
explore the mechanisms of control and
the possibilities for thinking otherwise
that emerge with this new regime. I have
addressed the continuities that this aspect
of Deleuze’s thought has with Virilio’s writ-
ings on cinema and the media, arguing that
the brief evocation of the fascist cinema
apparatus in wartime Germany should be
developed to encompass a more extensive
regime of images that arises later in the
control essay and in Virilio’s work. Through
Godard, I intend to connect this network
of arguments with the conceptualization of
cliché in the cinema books, which consti-
tutes a more obviously political dimension
of Deleuze’s cinema work and will allow
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
me to identify the surreptitious appearance
of control in these earlier books.
I suggested earlier that Godard’s work
raises two significant arguments with
respect to Deleuze’s cinema project, the
first of these concerning cinema’s coloniza-
tion by the fascist war machine during the
Second World War. Tracing this argument
through Virilio’s work, I have shown that
the cinema-­military apparatus expands in
the latter half of the century to form an
extensive media apparatus. Godard’s sec-
ond argument contends that this apparatus
is involved in the production of a network
of infinitely reproducible images of culture
that, as he argues in Je vois salue, Sara-
jevo, negates the transformative potential
of art. In Godard’s understanding, the
images of culture are parasitic and reduce
“the art of living” to a ready-­made percep-
tion of the world. We can understand this
position through Deleuze’s conceptualiza-
tion of cliché. The significance of cliché in
Godard’s work is revealed in his articula-
tion of a circuit of cultural images through-
out his career and, more significantly, in
his transformation of such images and
objects. Godard’s work will help to express
the political force of the time-­image in the
age of control, which can offer the means
for a transformation in the possibilities of
thought in cinema.13
Deleuze conceptualizes cinematic
cliché in the final chapter of Cinema 1
(2005a: 212 – 15). Clichés are sound and
visual slogans, the iconography of an era or
moment shown through photos, record-
ings, television, symbols, and consumer
objects that map out a little angle on the
world without saying anything about it. In
Cinema 2, Deleuze develops this through
Henri Bergson’s work. Deleuze says:
“Now this is what a cliché is. A cliché
is a sensory-­motor image of the thing.
As Bergson says, we do not perceive
Published by Duke University Press
the thing or the image in its entirety, we
always perceive less of it, we perceive
only what we are interested in perceiv-
ing, or rather what it is in our interest to
perceive, by virtue of economic interests,
ideological beliefs and psychological
demands. We therefore normally perceive
only clichés” (2005b: 19). Understood in
this way, a cliché is an image that reveals
only part of its object. A cliché is an event
or an object that is filmed and presented in
a familiar way, such that it will elicit a famil-
iar response from the spectator. This may
include the formal rules that the classical
cinema had established, as well as those
images that will recur again and again and
require each time the same response,
such as the leading lady’s scream, the
after-­sex cigarette, or the ticking clock.
These are images that are intended to
elicit a motor response from the audience
and rarely have anything new to say about
a situation. The viewer will perceive a
familiar and isolated segment of the image,
which may be the twitch that indicates
that a character is “psychotic” or the
tattered clothes that indicate a character is
homeless, but never the actual experience
of mental illness or the hunger or cold of
living in the streets, and absolutely never
the social or political conditions that might
give rise to either situation. In each case,
an audience perceives only what the film
requires it to perceive, determined, as
Deleuze suggests, by virtue of economic
interest, ideological beliefs, and psycholog-
Cultural Politics
ical demands (2005b: 19).
The question of how to tear an image
from cliché is a problem that is present
across Godard’s career. Deleuze says:
“We will find in Godard formulas which
express the problem: if images have
become clichés, internally as well as
externally, how can an image be extracted
345
from all these clichés, ‘just an image,’ an
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
autonomous mental image? An image
must emerge from the set of clichés. . . .
with what politics and what conse-
quences? What is an image which would
not be a cliché? Where does the cliché
end and the image begin?” (2005a: 219;
emphasis and ellipsis in original).
Godard’s films show a continual
engagement with the role of the cliché-­
image in the political conception of his
films (MacCabe 1980). Notre musique will
prove useful in this regard, as it offers a
closer consideration of the significance
of the Bosnian conflict for Godard’s
understanding of culture and cliché. Notre
musique returns to Sarajevo and further
questions the role of warfare and milita-
rism in transforming the visualization of life
in Europe. Through a short study of this
film, I will explore the cinematic transfor-
mation of cliché in Godard’s recent work
and his strategies for reinventing the con-
ditions of thought in relation to Sarajevo as
cinematic event.
As Deleuze’s account (2005b: 173 – 81)
of Godard’s work from the 1960s and
1970s shows, Godard has consistently uti-
lized the clichés of consumerism in order
to shatter the self-­evident unity of the
world (see also MacCabe 1980). But by
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
Je vous salue, Sarajevo, Godard had more
or less departed from his earlier use of
consumer aesthetics and developed small-­
scale strategies for critiquing the func-
tioning of art and culture. Je vous salue,
Sarajevo is a meditation on the interrelation
between culture and violence. Signifi-
cantly, it does not feature any examples
of culture-images, but rather an image of
a soldier kicking a civilian. This image may
have been typical of its historical moment,
but it is hardly useful for developing a the-
sis on culture more generally. Similarly, the
Sarajevo of Notre musique only occasion-
346
ally depicts commercial images (adverts on
Published by Duke University Press
the side of trams, billboards, soft drinks).
The largest extent of the film, and all of its
most significant sequences and images,
focuses on a regime of images apart from
cliché. Notre musique depicts the transfor-
mation of the images of culture in a limit
situation.
As Deleuze notes, cliché can serve
to inhibit the possibilities of the world
by reducing thought to its most limited,
habitual components. Godard had already
expressed this in a large extent of his
work, as Deleuze recognizes, but his
Sarajevo films reveal the potential extent of
the control apparatus. If control can utilize
cliché as one technique toward the reduc-
tion of creativity (toward sameness and
thus more efficient control) as part of the
normal functioning of contemporary life,
then in the limit situation of actual warfare,
this can easily escalate toward genocidal
tendencies and the active eradication of
alternative ways of living. Notre musique
has two main focuses: the destruction of
histories and the images, discourses, and
objects that sustain them (in the library or
Mostar bridge scenes) and the continuing
life of the peoples associated with these
threatened histories (in the transition
sequences that show working trams,
cafés, markets, and mosques interspersed
with damaged buildings from the war). As
Godard says in Je vous salue, Sarajevo,
the aftermath of the Yugoslav war demon-
strates the continuing “art of the living,”
which persists even when threatened with
its own destruction.
Notre musique begins by establishing
Sarajevo in the context of a century of war-
fare. The first section of the film presents a
montage of war footage (real and fictional)
from throughout the twentieth century,
concluding with a few frames from the
Bosnian War. Other than these few
images, after which the second section of
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
the film begins, Notre musique does not
depict the war at all but focuses on the
visible traces of conflict around the city. As
Burlin Barr argues in “Shot and Counter-­
shot,” these traces remain as visual
markers of a breakdown in discourse and
the erasure of diversity due to state and
military violence (2010: 66). This is most
evident in the National Library and Mostar
bridge sequences, which show traces of
wartime violence and reveal the extent of
genocidal military strategies, which, in sev-
eral instances during the Yugoslav wars,
had directed violence toward identified
peoples, as well as their histories and the
multiple world-­making systems that under-
pinned them. As Virilio shows in Strategy
of Deception (2000c), this is a tendency
of contemporary militarism more gener-
ally and concerns a conversion toward a
warfare of information and disinformation.
Warfare had increasingly tended toward
information management in the latter half
of the twentieth century, as Virilio’s earlier
work had shown (1989 and 2002), but the
Yugoslav wars would modify this tendency
to a state of general disinformation prop-
agated by all participants, as evidenced
in the Serbian shelling of the Bosnian
National Library and Sarajevo Oriental
Institute, aimed at eradicating deposito-
ries of historical information (Barr 2010:
80; Perlez 1996), and in the NATO bomb-
ing of Belgrade’s television studios (see
Virilio 2000c: 22 – 24), aimed at destroying
general information transmission. In each
case, the information and world-­building
capacities of enemy groups (rival mili-
tary combatants in the case of NATO, or
Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats in the case of
Serbian and VRS [Army of the Serb Repub-
lic] forces) are rendered unintelligible. This
is one of the reasons for Godard’s refusal
to show the Bosnian War directly and why
he will concern himself with uncovering
Published by Duke University Press
its lingering traces and recollections in
postwar Sarajevo. The national narratives
that had sustained a people are scrambled,
as disinformation becomes a weapon to
destroy an enemy’s organizational capaci-
ties and historical cohesion.
Godard’s response to these dis-
courses of disinformation and eradication
is a cinematic analysis of visibility. This
is seen most clearly in the recurring
appearance of three Native Americans
throughout the film. As Barr notes, these
figures introduce an element of radical
alterity (2010: 81) into the film’s discourse
on cultural and ethnic erasure. That is, the
Native Americans are markers of another
genocide (both culturally and actually),
and Godard introduces them to Sarajevo
in order to raise the specter of other
peoples’ denied visibility. As Barr argues,
“the native Americans are attempting to
fight off systematic erasure and to gain a
voice in the very site of another episode
of genocide” (2010: 80). Their appearance
at the library and bridge is significant as
both are sites of the attempted reclaiming
of a scattered historical archive. However,
in each scene, the right to visibility of this
other threatened people is denied, as they
are ignored or essentialized. The latter
encounter is particularly significant, as
it again raises the problem of the cliché
aesthetic that Notre musique had for-
mally departed from.14 The Mostar bridge
sequence sees a young journalist visiting
the bridge as it undergoes restoration, but
Cultural Politics
she misunderstands the significance of its
reconstruction. Rather, as Barr notes, she
understands the bridge through a ready-­
made formula and uses it to verify her
own preconceived ideas (2010: 78).15 This
is especially evident as she photographs
the three Native Americans by the side of
the road, who are magically transformed
347
in a subsequent image (meant to reflect
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
the journalist’s perception) that shows the
three figures in traditional costume (they
had been dressed in modern clothes)
directly in front of the bridge (which had
not been in the background when the pic-
ture was taken). As Barr argues, this shot
highlights the difference between material
reality and the ideals of the journalist, cast-
ing the Native Americans “according to her
preconceptions and not by their ongoing
efforts at self-­definition” (2010: 79). They
become cliché-­images of a people denied
autonomy over their own visualization. In
the context of such denial, Godard’s inves-
tigation of Sarajevo’s monuments of con-
flict takes on an increased importance. It
is here, in these marked but silent spaces,
that the inscriptions of a people and the
violence that had threatened them are to
be found and not, as Godard had earlier
noted, in the culture-images of a homo­
geneous postwar normality. Both of these
distinct sets of images will determine what
makes up a world — that is, what kind of
Sarajevo is visualized — but they each pre-
suppose a quite distinct visibility.
The question to be asked is exactly
what kind of visibility this is and whether
the repeated visualization of a particular
kind of world might eliminate another that
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
remains possible (insomuch as the images
to make it visible exist in a virtual state) but
is not actualized. Deleuze’s project calls
for a cinema that can make visible a new
world of complex changes, unseen powers
and forces, and new and creative thoughts.
This is the kind of cinema that Godard has
invented and that Deleuze expects of the
time- ­image.
Control
The control essay changes Deleuze’s cin-
ema books in two significant ways. It allows
us to account for the political terms of
34 8
these earlier books by more closely aligning
Published by Duke University Press
Deleuze’s thoughts on the cinematic image
with media politics and addresses the rise
in information technology and mass com-
munications, opening the cinema books
onto a broader field of images and visual
culture (Pisters 2011, 2012).
Virilio traces similar ground in “Indirect
Light” (2000a), which details how video
technology can make visible or “light up” a
space or event (2000a: 64, see also 2000b:
58 – 61).16 An indirect lighting through video
recording no longer reveals a localized city
space (as had the limited and direct lighting
of the street lamp) but instead a distributed
image of the world as what Virilio calls
“ideography” (2000a: 59) — a presentation
of places and milieu through the recording
and circulation of vision technologies. For
Virilio, the vision technologies of an indirect
lighting are ways of capturing and circulat-
ing (of making visible) a given ordering of
the world — a particular angle on the world
that is illuminated by a network of image
technologies.
Virilio gives the 1989 Tiananmen
Square demonstrations as an example
(2000a: 65 – 67). What the demonstrators
wanted, according to Virilio, was that the
occupation of the square be made visible
on screens around the world. After the
massacre of the students by the military,
Chinese television began to broadcast
recorded material of what Virilio calls “cer-
tain excesses against isolated vehicles and
soldiers” (2000a: 67) — violence committed
by demonstrators captured on police sur-
veillance cameras — but always withholding
footage of both the peaceful occupation
of the square and the subsequent mili-
tary violence. Thus there is a selection of
images that is supposed to determine a
current political reality — an instant cho-
sen to speak for an event and a place and
time. Virilio says that there is a decision to
obscure the immediate event and that the
 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
key element in this concealment is not just
a censorship that prevents the disclosure
of certain events but the replaying of
recorded material so as to substitute one
image of the world for another — the indi-
rect light of recorded footage for the living
light of events (2000a: 67).
Virilio details a process of substitution
where the circulation of a media event
destroys the traces of an event in real
space (eventually, of course, a different
set of images will come to visualize the
Tiananmen Square demonstrations). In
Deleuze’s work, this substitution is not all
that is at stake. As Conley’s work (2007,
1991) on the cartographic and hieroglyphic
tendencies of cinema shows, the territorial
functions that coincide with these media
events have long been provided by older
forms of cartographic and image-­forming
media (maps, literature, diagrams, tapes-
tries, etc.). These virtual events are sig-
nificant not because they replace a “real”
event but because they are always in com-
petition with other conflicting formations
and can have crucial political importance in
how the actual world is thought.
We have seen through Godard’s
work how the scrambling or eradication of
information networks in the Bosnian War
had a serious impact on possible forms of
political visibility. Reid shows how break-
downs in the images and discourses that
had previously sustained a people are no
longer possible in the modern era (2011:
220 – 24), and Virilio further extends this
fragmentation following the increasing
dominance of military and civilian media
systems (2000c: 22 – 26). Virilio contends
that the monitoring and manipulation of
civilian data-­flows becomes a military
concern. Images and information are
means through which individuals can
visualize a world — through which they can
understand their own position in a social
Published by Duke University Press
field and constitute themselves as part of
an autonomous (or imagined) people or
social group. These abstract collectivities
and variable ties to different groups can be
managed for military or police purposes,
where information transmissions can be
manipulated to constitute an identifiable
enemy group or dissolve a shared expe-
rience. As Virilio argues, this shows the
transmutation of social control toward a
more general problem of data manage-
ment. In Strategy of Deception, he also
shows how the interruption of informa-
tion-­and image-­transmission systems can
also be a viable military strategy (2000c:
22 – 25), such that a geopolitical territory
loses autonomy at the level of its media
systems (and not only, as was already the
case across the Balkans, on the ground).
With the advent of the control society,
as Lazzarato explains (2006: 178 – 8 0), the
disciplinary world gives way to a multi-
plicity of other formations in a distributed
universe of images and information. The
disciplinary form does not disappear but
is integrated into the functioning of the
control system as a reterritorialization that
operates to reduce these infinite possible
worlds, not to a single “correct” world,
as before, but to a manageable limit. The
cliché form is one system of media control
that exists at an everyday level but that can
easily give way to more aggressive control
strategies in particular political (or military)
circumstances. Deleuze’s partial invoca-
tion of Virilio’s work goes some way to
Cultural Politics
addressing this but does not take account
of the full implications of his thesis, which
show a military-­media network becoming
increasingly powerful in the latter half of
the twentieth century. The full extent of
the cinema books’ political project can
only be understood through control, which
extends the conceptual eradication (at the
349
level of virtual potential) already evident
 Cultural Politics

Phillip Roberts

in cliché into a more powerful conceptual- 5. See Williams 1999 for an explanation of Godard’s
ization of media control and demonstrates treatment of history in Histoire(s) du cinéma.
the full significance of the time-­image’s 6. Kracauer provides an idiosyncratic (and not
strategies of innovation. entirely accurate) study of prewar German
cinema. For a better historical account of this
period, see Eisner 1973. For information on
Acknowledgments
wartime cinema and the role of the Nazis in
An early version of this paper was presented at
cinema production, see Tegel 2007.
the “Remembering the Event” conference held at
7. The role of warfare (and the Holocaust) in
Cardiff University in April 2011. I am thankful to the
Histoire(s) du cinéma is examined in Saxton
participants at the event for their helpful questions
2004. Saxton explores the relationship between
and comments. I am also grateful to Julian Reid for
Godard’s position on the Holocaust and that
providing me with a copy of one of his articles.
given by Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), which
appears briefly in the first chapter of Histoire(s)
Notes but is absent from the rest of the film. Saxton
1. This short introduction necessarily simplifies
argues that there is a fundamental disagreement
some quite complex arguments. For more
between the two filmmakers on the relationship
extensive overviews of his work on cinema, see
between the Holocaust and the cinematographic
Bogue 2003 and Rodowick 1997. For excellent
image, with Godard criticizing Lanzmann for his
accounts of his work on control, see Lazzarato
failure to confront the Holocaust directly and
2006 and Newman 2009.
thus “sacralizing” the nondiscourse that remains,
2. Patricia Pisters (2013: 271 – 9 8) and Verena
due to the failure of images of suffering to
Andermatt Conley (2009) both address Virilio
escape the camps (2004: 369). For Godard, the
in relation to Deleuze’s thought on media
failure of cinema was its refusal to do justice to
and technology, but neither note Deleuze’s
the real horror of the war.
misreading of War and Cinema or properly
8. I focus mostly on the position developed by Virilio
account for the evident connections between
in War and Cinema concerning the interrelation
Virilio and Deleuze’s work on cinema and the
of military and cinematic technologies. For an
control society (Pisters will instead align Virilio’s
overview of Virilio’s thought more generally, see
thought with Jean Baudrillard’s thesis on
Armitage 2000a and 2011. For a summary of
simulation [2013: 274 – 78]).
Virilio’s writings on cinema, media technology,
3. Reid also notes the significance of Godard’s work
and media theory, see Freidberg 2004 and
for Deleuze’s posited transformation in cinematic
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014

Armitage 2012.
thought, suggesting that Godard might offer a
9. David Welch outlines film policy in Nazi Germany in
way of thinking about the interrelation of cinema
Propaganda and the German Cinema (2001: 33 – 39).
and war, taking into account both the controls
10. The two campaign films studied by Kracauer are
and the counterstate struggles inherent to the
Baptism of Fire (Feuertaufe, 1940) and Victory in
cinema (2010). Reid’s suggestion is provocative,
the West (Sieg im Westen, 1941). See Kracauer
but he provides only a hint as to what Godard
2004: 275 – 307; Welch 2001: 172 – 8 3.
might offer and no further analysis of his work.
11. To be fair to Deleuze, the implications of Virilio’s
4. I focus on Godard’s thesis concerning art and
work were not entirely clear at the time of Cinema
culture, but there is also an interesting prayer-­
2 ’s publication. At the time of writing, Deleuze
like aspect to this work that it shares with
had read Speed and Politics (2006), War and
Godard’s earlier Je vous salue, Marie (1985),
Cinema (1989), and probably also The Aesthetics
and that I am unable to explore here. For a
of Disappearance (1992). He did not have access
study of the theological component of Godard’s
to The Vision Machine (1994), Polar Inertia (1999),
post-­1980s work, particularly in relation to Je
or Desert Screen (2002), through which Virilio
vous salue, Marie and Deleuze’s own theological
will further explore deterritorialization and the
350

undercurrent, see Sterritt 2010.

militarization of perception.

Published by Duke University Press

 Cultural Politics
Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio
12. Virilio states: “The only person to have had
any interest in my work in this area was Gilles
Deleuze, who, in his book Foucault, demonstrated
that he understood the geographical dimension
of ‘control societies.’ It was my work that
inspired Deleuze in this area, given that we had
meetings where I introduced him to the concept
of ‘control societies’” (2011: 30).
13. Deleuze expresses a similar argument in relation
to Godard’s invention of “cinematic thinking” in
“On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought” (2004:
141).
14. Godard generally avoids the standard shot/
reverse-­shot form and often refuses to focus
on protagonists and action, locating important
dialogue off-­screen or isolating seemingly
unimportant details. See Barr 2010: 67 – 71.
15. Her ideals have already been established in
an earlier scene. The journalist explains that
she came to Sarajevo (from Israel) in order to
see “a place where reconciliation is possible”
and to take part in “a dialogue that no one can
have, not even in their heart.” Her aims bear no
resemblance to the actual situation of postwar
Sarajevo and her findings only serve to reinforce
her own expectations.
16. “Indirect Light” is available in translation in both
Virilio 1999 and Armitage 2000b.
References
Andrew, Dudley. 2000. “The Roots of the Nomadic:
Gilles Delleuze and the Cinema of West
Africa.” In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory
Flaxman, 215 – 4 9. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Armitage, John. 2000a. “Paul Virilio: An
Introduction.” In Paul Virilio: From Modernism to
Hypermodernism and Beyond, edited by John
Armitage, 1 – 23. London: Sage.
Armitage, John. 2000b. Paul Virilio: From Modernism to
Hypermodernism and Beyond. London: Sage.
Armitage, John. 2011. “Paul Virilio: A Critical
Overview.” In Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in
Virilio Studies, edited by John Armitage, 1 – 28.
Cambridge: Polity.
Armitage, John. 2012. Virilio and the Media.
Cambridge: Polity.
Published by Duke University Press
Armitage, John, and Paul Virilio. 2011. “The Third War:
Cities, Conflict, and Contemporary Art: Interview
With Paul Virilio.” Translated by Patrice Riemens.
In Armitage 2011: 29 – 4 5.
Barr, Burlin. 2010. “Shot and Counter-­shot: Presence,
Obscurity, and the Breakdown of Discourse
in Notre Musique.” Journal of French and
Francophone Philosophy 18 (2): 65 – 85.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New
Modernity. Newbury Park: Sage.
Bogard, William. 2009. “Deleuze and Machines: A Politics
of Technology?” In Deleuze and New Technology,
edited by Mark Poster and David Savat, 15 – 31.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Cinema. New York:
Routledge.
Butler, Alison. 2002. Women’s Cinema: The Contested
Screen. London: Wallflower.
Buchanan, Ian. 2008. “Five Theses of Actually Existing
Schizoanalysis of Cinema.” In Deleuze and the
Schizoanalysis of Cinema, edited by Ian Buchanan
and Patricia MacCormack, 1 – 14. London:
Continuum.
Conley, Tom. 1991. Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in
Classical Cinema. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Conley, Tom. 2007. Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Conley, Tom. 2011. “Deleuze and the Filmic Diagram.”
Deleuze Studies 5 (2): 163 – 76.
Conley, Verena Andermatt. 2009. “Of Rhizomes,
Smooth Space, War Machines, and New Media.”
In Deleuze and New Technology, edited by Mark
Poster and David Savat, 32 – 4 4. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Cubitt, Sean. 2011. “Vector Politics and the Aesthetics
of Disappearance.” In Armitage 2011: 68 – 91.
Daney, Serge. 1983. La rampe: Cahier critique,
1970 – 1982. Paris: Gallimard.
Cultural Politics
Daney, Serge. 2004. “The Godard Paradox.” Translated
by Valerie Orpen. In For Ever Godard, edited by
Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael
Witt, 68 – 71. London: Black Dog.
Deamer, David. 2009. “Cinema, Chronos / Cronos:
Becoming an Accomplice to the Impasse of
History.” In Deleuze and History, edited by Jeffrey
Bell and Claire Colebrook, 161 – 87. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
351
 Cultural Politics
Phillip Roberts
de Baecque, Antoine. 2004. “Godard in the Museum.”
In For Ever Godard, edited by Michael Temple,
James S. Williams, and Michael Witt, 118 – 25.
London: Black Dog.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of
Control.” Translated by Martin Joughin. October,
no. 59: 3 – 7.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “On Nietzsche and the Image
of Thought.” Translated by Michael Taormina.
In Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953 – 1974),
35 – 42. New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, Gilles. 2005a. Cinema 1: The Movement-­
Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbera Habberjam. New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2005b. Cinema 2: The Time-­Image.
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta.
New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006a. Foucault. Translated by Seán
Hand. New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006b. The Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. New York:
Continuum.
Eisner, Lotte H. 1973. The Haunted Screen:
Expressionism in the German Cinema and the
Influence of Max Reinhardt. Translated by Roger
Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Freidberg, Anne. 2004. “Virilio’s Screen: The Work
of Metaphor in the Age of Technological
Convergence.” Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2):
183 – 9 3.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. Protocol: How Control
Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA:
Cultural Politics   •  10:3 November 2014
MIT Press.
Galloway, Alexander R. 2012. “Computers and the
Superfold.” Deleuze Studies 6 (4): 513 – 28.
Jun, Nathan. 2010. “Toward an Anarchist Film Theory:
Reflections on the Politics of Cinema.” Anarchist
Developments in Cultural Studies 2010 (1): 139 – 61.
Kracauer, Siegfried. 2004. From Caligari to Hitler:
A Psychological History of the German Film.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2006. “The Concepts of Life and
Living in the Societies of Control.” Translated by
Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki. In Deleuze
and the Social, edited by Martin Fuglsang and
Bent Meier Sørensen, 171 – 9 0. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
MacCabe, Colin. 1980. Godard: Images, Sounds,
352
Politics. London: Macmillan.
Published by Duke University Press
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural
Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Marrati, Paola. 2008. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and
Philosophy. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Marshall, Bill. 2001. Quebec National Cinema. London:
McGill-­Queens University Press.
Martin-­Jones, David. 2006. Deleuze, Cinema, and
National Identity: Narrative Time in National
Contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Martin-­Jones, David. 2011. Deleuze and World
Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
McQuire, Scott. 2011. “Virilio’s Media as Philosophy.”
In Armitage 2011: 92 – 114.
Newman, Saul. 2009. “Politics in the Age of Control.”
In Deleuze and New Technology, edited by Mark
Poster and David Savat, 104 – 2 2. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Perlez, Jane. 1996. “Sarajevo Journal: A Lovely Library
in Ruins, but with a Will to Live.” New York
Times, August 12, www.nytimes.com/1996/08
/12/world/a-­lovely-­library-­in-­ruins-­but-­with-­a
-­will-­to-­live.html.
Pisters, Patricia. 2011. “Flashforward: The Future Is
Now.” Deleuze Studies 5 (supplement): 98 – 115.
Pisters, Patricia. 2012. The Neuro-­Image: A Deleuzian
Film-­Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Film Fables. Translated by
Emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg.
Reid, Julian. 2010. “What Did Cinema Do in ‘the War,’
Deleuze?” Theory and Event 13 (3), muse.jhu.edu
/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.3.reid.html.
Reid, Julian. 2011. “A People of Seers: The Political
Aesthetics of Postwar Cinema Revisited.”
Cultural Politics 7 (2): 219 – 3 8.
Rizzo, Teresa. 2012. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist
Introduction. London: Bloomsbury.
Rodowick, D. N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rodowick, D. N. 2001. Reading the Figural; or,
Philosophy after the New Media. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 2004. Powers of Freedom: Reframing
Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rushton, Richard. 2012. Cinema after Deleuze. London:
Continuum.
 Cultural Politics

Medi a Control in Deleuze and V ir ilio

Savat, David. 2009. “Deleuze’s Objectile: From
Discipline to Modulation.” In Deleuze and New
Technology, edited by Mark Poster and David
Savat, 45 – 62. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Saxton, Libby. 2004. “Anamnesis and Bearing Witness:
Godard/Lanzmann.”In For Ever Godard, edited by
Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael
Witt, 364 – 79. London: Black Dog.
Sterritt, David. 2010. “Schizoanalzing Souls: Godard,
Deleuze, and the Mystical Line of Flight.” Journal
of French and Francophone Philosophy 18 (2): 9 – 27.
Tegel, Susan. 2007. Nazis and the Cinema. London:
Hambledon Continuum.
Virilio, Paul. 1989. War and Cinema: The Logistics
of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller.
London: Verso.
Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance.
Translated by Philip Beitchman. Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e).
Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. Translated by
Julie Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1999. Polar Inertia. Translated by Patrick
Camiller. London: Sage.
Virilio, Paul. 2000a. “Indirect Light: Extracted from
Polar Inertia.” Translated by Patrick Camiller. In
Armitage 2000: 57 – 70.
Virilio, Paul. 2000b. The Information Bomb. Translated
by Chris Turner. London: Verso.
Virilio, Paul. 2000c. Strategy of Deception. Translated
by Chris Turner. London: Verso.
Virilio, Paul. 2002. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of
Light. Translated by Michael Degener. London:
Continuum.
Virilio, Paul. 2006. Speed and Politics: An Essay on
Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Welch, David. 2001. Propaganda and the German
Cinema 1933 – 1945. London: Tauris.
Wollen, Peter. 2002. Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film.
London: Verso.
Yau, Ka-­Fai. 2001. “Cinema 3: Towards a ‘Minor Hong
Kong Cinema.’” Cultural Studies 15 (3 – 4): 543 – 63.
Filmography
Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin). Dual
format DVD. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. 1925;
USSR: Goskino / Mosfilm. Distributed by BFI,
2012.
Feuertaufe (Baptism of Fire). DVD. Directed by Hans
Bertram. 1940; Germany: Tobis Filmkunst /
Reichsluftfarhtministerium. Distributed by IHF,
2003.
Histoire(s) du cinéma. DVD. Directed by Jean-­Luc
Godard. 1988 – 9 8; France / Switzerland:
Gaumont / Canal Plus. Distributed by Artificial
Eye, 2008.
Je vous salue, Marie. DVD. Directed by Jean-­Luc
Godard. 1985; France / Switzerland: Sara Films /
Pégase Films / Gaumont. Distributed by Umbrella
Entertainment, 2006.
Je vous salue, Sarajevo. DVD. Directed by Jean-­
Luc Godard. 1993; Switzerland: Périphéria.
Distributed by ECM Cinema, 2006.
Notre musique. DVD. Directed by Jean-­Luc Godard.
2004; Switzerland / France: Avventura Films /
Périphéria. Distributed by Optimum, 2005.
Shoah. DVD. Directed by Claude Lanzmann. 1985;
France: Historia / Les Filmes Adelph. Distributed
by Eureka, 2007.
Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West). Film.
Directed by Fritz Brunsch, Werner Kortwich,
Svend Nolan, and Edmund Smith, 1941;
Germany: Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
Wehrpropaganda / UFA.
Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will). Film.
Directed by Leni Reifenstahl. 1934; Germany:
NSDAP-­Reichsleitung.
Cultural Politics

Williams, James S. 1999. “The Signs amongst Us:

Jean-­Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma.” Screen
40 (3): 306 – 15.

Phillip Roberts is a researcher for the University of York and the National Media Museum,
Bradford. He is editor of the Early Popular Visual Culture special issue “Social Control and Early
Visual Culture” (2014) and coeditor of Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture (2011). He is currently
researching media transformation in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the magic lantern
353

and other image-­making devices.

Published by Duke University Press