As the form reached near ubiquity in the 90’s, its power diminshed. The promise the form held was overcome by child-like meaningless fun. The conversations and relationships that these environments were supposed to foster were filled with mundane chatter. They lacked the intellectual content that seemed to be at the heart of the form. As we saw in the short video on the Tirivanija piece, the most memorable part of the experience was the quality of the food that they had consumed. I highly doubt this was Tirivanija’s intent when he originally held the piece in 1992. Now that the MoMA has acquired the rights to the work it has just become a commodity like every other piece of art. There is nothing subversive or challenging about it. It has become a a playground for the privileged.

Recent examples that reinforce the failure of the potentially subversive form are Carsten Holler’s Experience at the New Museum and Jennifer Rubell’s Incubation at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. Each artist claimed to be manipulating the viewer or consumer’s notion of time and space. Perhaps the artist’s were successful in accomplishing this feat, but to what avail? To discuss how much fun it was to go down a slide in a gallery? How delicious the yogurt was that they eagerly waited to eat?

I doubt that Deleuze would be satisfied with the conversation that filled each gallery space. The most memorable part of the Holler exhibit was the immense line up one had to wait in to get in. Or the endless paperwork that had to be completed to waive the museum’s liability if an accident should have ensued. The timing of the Rubell installation was certainly notable. It was staged during Art Basel Miami Beach. This is approximately a week long period where Miami becomes flooded with the the world’s most affluent collectors. These collectors and their friends were those who partook in Rubell’s breakfast installation. Any other time of year, Miami’s design district is located in rather dismal neighbourhood, nearly Hirschhornian . It would have been interesting if it was held in say, July, when all the privileged collectors and snowbirds had fled. If she had invited the under privileged youth that populate the surrounding area as well as the locals that are shopping at Fendi down the street. Conversations might  not have solely consisted of which hotel one was staying at during the fair or which exclusive party they attended the previous night.

Links to the referenced art
Cartsen Holler
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/449
Jennifer Rubell
http://jenniferrubell.com/index.php?sec=projects&details=47

Rubell’s work as a whole is a great example of the fluffy relational aesthetics that Bishop is attacking. The image on her homepage is a wax reproduction of Prince William with an exact replica of Kate Middleton’s engagement ring attached to his sleeve. Rubell is posing with the figure.  The viewer/participant is encouraged to step on the pedestal and place their finger through the ring. On the walls of the gallery, there are a collection of Rubell’s recurring series of drinking paintings, that dispensed a variety of alcohol associated with the British monarchy. Rubell’s idea was now that every girl could experience an “engagement to prince charming”. If that is not a statement in conformity, I don’t know what is. Combined with the consumption of expensive alcohol in a white cube gallery setting, this is an execution of traditional practices reinforced by a new relational aesthetic form.

Kyle Beechey

The questions I had were whether or not, in our creating concepts in an additive function, even if on an immanent plane (i.e. concepts as a result of experimentation and the use of conjunctions such as “and”), would eventually create a hierarchal structure that was oriented in another way? What is the difference between evolutions of concepts, whether it is vertical or lateral, linear or spatial, as opposed to creating concepts from others and so on by experimenting on an artifice where nothing is relegated to cause and effect or any transcendental Laws of nature? (Visualize the tree metaphor used to describe knowledge production by Deleuze in describing the rhizome. Instead of its verticality being called into question, what if we laid the tree flat?). By creating concepts from others (even in an immanent world) wouldn’t we be able to trace backwards towards the origins of such concepts laid out on this plane? Therefore, exposing a sort of evolution of the concepts created? In other words, a hierarchy laid sideways?

In my nascent understanding of the imagery laid out by Deleuze, this metaphor of the tree (knowledge branching out of an episteme) would imply a hierarchical system within the creation of concepts. This made the additive capacity of the use of the conjunction “and . . . and  . . . and” or “+ . . . + . . . +” with concerns to creating concepts at the edges of the artifice of knowledge, literature, etc. hard to grasp in accordance with my imaginings of how in his view we must move away from any “territorializing”, codifying, or hierarchically systemic identification of the world about. With a more rigorous reading over of Deleuze’s ideas, I was able to resolve my questions from a passage in the introduction of A Thousand Plateaus and their discussion of the rhizome.

Deleuze brings in the concept of memory (which I believe is influenced by Henri Bergson) and states that there is a division between the long term and the short term. He proposes that the short term allows us to forget previously invented concepts and move on to create the next. In this system, the genealogical aspect of concepts – an evolution of sorts as a result of the additive use of the conjunction “and” (which in my view leads one to think that there has to be something to originally add to therefore the metaphor of the tree)  – lives in the long term memory which is not the active and/or creative aspect of our cognition. Removed from our conscious perception of concepts, this would allow for the creation of concepts to not be placed in a hierarchical ontic system.

“Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. ‘The axon and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns.’ The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an “untimely” way, not instantaneously.” (Deleuze and Guittari, 15-16)

Our class discussion of Hume brought this home even further. The questioning of causality I think marked a break from actually knowing and believing. Before belief constituted knowing. Reason. Specifically, the belief that we could know things “in and of themselves” (which Kant rapidly tried to debunk) that served as the precedent to the creation of the whole world – God as Supreme Cause. But with Hume, we only have belief and imagination, which shows that we connect phenomena/events via inference and habit (which of course in empiricism means that we have to always check these happenings against observation). I feel that this image of thought makes human beings at heart, in the state of nature, inventive. Socially, scientifically, etc.

Foucault’s aims in his analysis of the discursive relations of power that exist within society to expose a genealogy through an archaeological technology to discover the episteme from which social institutions and their “power relations” act within the problem of subjectivity. To in essence unearth certain epistemic discontinuities in the history of concepts that we take for granted. In short, to discuss identity, with regards to institutions, knowledge, concepts, personhood, etc.  Deleuze, in contrast, wants to create a map as opposed to an archaeological site. To show the relationships between agents and not a family tree. Along with Bergson (In his Matter and Memory), the inventive capacity of our cognition, our action in thinking, lies within our ability to forget – our short term memory – which in turn forces us to invent. Deleuze seeks to be a cartographer, seeking the relationality between agents in his rhizome, his terrain of immanence. In this topography, we turn the social systems we believe we are subject to on their head (instead of working top down, in our plane of immanence, through the subsequent mapping of it, forces us to work from the bottom.  From within the purview of science, philosophy, literature, and art and to their edges). This is a move to push the image of thought, the subject, and art to its farthest limits and to concern ourselves with what is outside their demarcated boundaries. To dig around in the darkness and create new concepts along the margins.

- Victor Peterson

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. , 2004. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism And Schizophrenia. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Here, in full, are the notorious final two paragraphs to Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966):

“One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”

It is for such lines as these that Foucault came to be described – indeed, came to be attacked – as anti-humanist. This term is accurate as long as we don’t confuse anti-humanist with anti-human. Foucault is not a misanthrope. He is critiquing here the humanist subject, and the anthropomorphism that is implied in humanism. He is critiquing the idea that man is the necessary end or telos to evolution (as though the goal of life were … mankind). His argument here is simple: the term “modern man” is entirely accurate to the extent that it refers to a historical category, a historical formation – the result of a specific series of discourses and discursive practices. And it is precisely because of this – precisely because it is a historical emergence – that it is possible, at the same time, to envisage a future without this particular form, without this particular mode of being. Again, what this means is not necessarily a world without humans but rather a world without the “human” in the sense that the term is used today. This, by the way, is also what Nietzsche means by the over-man.

Not surprisingly, when Deleuze was interviewed in the mid-eighties, at the time of the release of his monograph on Foucault, it was the question of his colleague’s anti-humanism that was repeatedly brought up and which Deleuze explains or defends. As he says in the interview entitled “Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open,” Foucault questions the extent to which man, as a conceptual category, can be understood as an opening –  a line of flight – and to what extent as an obstacle or obstruction, “a way of imprisoning life” (91). Understanding man as a historical entity also allows us to think about the “play of forces” in each historical epoch and how these forces work with, and against, “man” in order to create a composite form, e.g., man in relation to the infinite; man in relation to labor and language; man in relation to new kinds of materials and discourses. “In all Foucault’s work” – Deleuze says – “there is a certain relation between forms and forces that’s influenced my work and was basic to his conception of politics, and of epistemology and aesthetics too” (89). It is because the relation between forms and forces is not eternally fixed, he adds, that we are able “to follow some restless line still further,” pushing things forward, breaking things open, breaking words open. And this, Deleuze argues, is what Foucault did. This is why the development of his thought takes him from his initial interest in knowledge and power to an increased focus on what Deleuze calls subjectivation: the process of becoming a subject. At the end of his life, Foucault wanted to move beyond the enclosures that he himself had brilliantly diagrammed and follow another path, a leap into the unknown – a leap into the void. This is why we can’t interchangeably use the terms subject and subjectivation. The latter must be understood in intensive terms (not extensive ones), like “an electric or magnetic field” (91). And this is how Deleuze wants us to remember Foucault as well. Not as a self-enclosed substance but as “a gesture,” “a laugh,” “a volcanic chain” far from equilibrium.

S I-G

References

Deleuze, Gilles. “Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open.” In Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1989.

In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as “prince of philosophers.” Spinoza, they write, “is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere […] He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence” (48). Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is the consequence of his rejection of the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a transcendent creator; a supernatural being who is cause of a world distinct from himself, created out of nothing and through an act of free will. Spinoza argues that God is not prior to or outside the world – transcendent to creation – but wholly immanent within it. God is “an extended substance composed of an infinity of attributes that is purely immanent throughout nature” (Smith 18). Divinity is fully expressed in the world and without reserve. This leads Spinoza to his scandalous formulation “God, or Nature” (Deus sive natura), which both divinizes nature and naturalizes divinity (and explains descriptions of Spinoza as both pantheist and atheist).

By rejecting the notion of God as transcendent cause, Spinoza also undermines the link between God and moral absolutes or laws. Moral judgments have no corollary in the natural world and therefore cannot be attributed to God, since what cannot be said to belong to nature cannot be said to belong to God. Moral judgments must be understood as “human creations made for our convenience and utility.” Morality as “the product of social agreement” can only be deemed legitimate or illegitimate in terms of its beneficial or harmful effects on the society that agrees to live under its rules and regulations (Smith 2003, 52 and 126). For Spinoza, there is no “imaginary supernatural realm” and no external authority to which we can refer or reference in order to determine morality, and if there is no God who pre-exists the world, then there can be no source that can be said to stand outside or beyond the world to approve or condemn it. Life cannot be explained by what transcends life.

Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence thus requires a new kind of ethics, addressed to the here and now, immersed in the sensible world, without recourse to absolute or divine authority. Spinoza goes further. He rejects the anthropomorphic fallacy that conceives God in the image of man, albeit raised to the power of infinity. “People attribute to God features borrowed from human consciousness […] and, in order, to provide for God’s essence, they merely raise those features to infinity, or say that God possess them in an infinitely perfect form” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 63). What Spinoza makes clear is the extent to which this notion of God functions as a mirror image of the attributes man perceives or idealizes in himself: man as an intending agent, who supposedly creates, like God, through a spontaneous act of free will; man as outside, or transcendent to, nature.

Here, Spinoza’s critique can be directed not only against the philosophy of transcendence found in Plato and in Christian theology, but the modern variant found in Descartes. Thus, in opposition to the latter’s dualist ontology, Spinoza asserts the conjugation of mind and body. Both mind and body are modes of substance (i.e., God or nature). Spinoza: “Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension” (qt. in Montag 42). Spinoza renders problematic the notion that that body is controlled by “the will of the mind and the exercise of thought” (Spinoza qt. in ibid. 38). Spinoza doesn’t simply reject Descartes’s dualist thought, but challenges the hierarchy that subordinates the body to the mind, which subordinates the power to be affected to the power to think, which separates the power to be affected from the power to think. Spinoza’s immanent philosophy does not allow us to set apart “mind from body, thought from action,” or man from nature: each coincides with the other (ibid. xvii). Just as God is expressed in world – as world – so too is the artist, for example, expressed in their work. There is not an individual who acts but an act that individuates. And this individuation is ongoing.

S I-G

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. London and New York: Verso, 1999.

Smith, Daniel. “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought.” In Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida. London and New York: Continuum, 2003.

As some of you already know, Nietzsche is considered an influence not only on “post-structural” philosophers, like Foucault and Deleuze, but also on the movement that came to be known as existentialism that precedes post-structuralism by a couple of decades. (The most recognized face of existentialism at the time was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre.) Deleuze, for his part, would argue that existentialism does not live up to the challenge of Nietzsche’s thought, since it presumes a transcendent subject with a power to choose this or that action. In other words, existentialism remains a philosophy of transcendence. Indeed both existentialism and phenomenology can be understood as the latest developments in a legacy that begins when Descartes utters the formula cogito ergo sum. As Todd May notes, in his explication of Deleuze’s philosophy, “It is not simply a question of how we human beings might go about creating our lives, of what we might decide to make ourselves into” (“How One Might Live” 23). This is Sartre’s question. It is still insufficient or inadequate because it prioritizes being over becoming, identity over difference. It presupposes that there is an identity, a self, who chooses their existence. Deleuze rejects the emphasis placed in Sartre on agency, on self, and, more importantly, the emphasis placed on the human. “Deleuze,” May writes, “tries to pry us away from humanism by focusing on a difference that need not be human difference and a one that need not be a person.” Humanism is to understood here as a form of anthropomorphism. Humanism commits the “error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject” (ibid. 24). Humanism places man at the center of the universe, since man is its principle or exclusive concern. Deleuze places his emphasis on life; on the becoming of the entities that populate our world. These entities are not pre-determined; nor is their future known once and for all. To stop at the human would be to presume that the goal of life were the creation of man. (Which, of course, is what Christian theology says.) It would be a mistake to argue (and some have done so) that this “anti-humanism” is an expression of contempt for mankind. How could this be so since mankind is part of world? At the same time, we cannot fall into the trap of thinking too highly of ourselves. Since everything is becoming – everything is in process – so too is man. Man is becoming, in and with the world. This, Deleuze will claim, is what Nietzsche means when he coins the term übermensch (the “over-man” or “super-man”). We are in the process of overcoming ourselves, and there is no certainty that our evolution will not take us elsewhere, even beyond man. At least, man as it is known today.

As Deleuze says to his interviewer, in “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” the goal of contemporary philosophy is to attempt to rethink the questions of existence without the constraints of either God or Man – which is to say, without the constraints of transcendent being. And the value of Nietzsche is that he “was trying to uncover something that was neither God nor Human…” which he called Dionysos or the over-man (139).

***

What does it mean though to say that there is no identity or self who chooses this or that existence? And how might this be squared, for example, with the thought-experiment known as the Eternal Return? (Does not the Eternal Return seem to presuppose choice?) This is where Nietzsche gets tricky. Consider here his concept of Will-to-Power, which he views as the “noblest” of values. Will-to-Power is misunderstood if we imagine an individual who exerts his or her will on another entity or thing. For Nietzsche, there is no separation between a will and what is willed. They are one and the same. There is no pre-constituted subject who wills this or that act. No, the act (what is willed) and the subject (who wills) are constituted at the same time. (The error of separating out one from the other is precisely what we find in Descartes: Descartes assumes that a thought, the act of thinking, requires a subject who performs this action. Nietzsche would deny this hierarchy or priority: the subject doesn’t precede thought but is constituted in the act of thinking.) Put more simply, we can say that the subject is immanent to its expression. The challenge then is not to fall back on a notion of substance or install an agency at the origin of an activity or an expression of Will-to-Power. The use of terms like “object” or “thing” or “entity” is an example of how language misleads us into seeing solids (autonomous, pre-constituted beings) when there are only fluidities, only relations. The artist’s relation to their artwork is a good demonstration of this: the challenge from a Nietzschean perspective is not to be misled into seeing the artwork as an expression of the artist’s will. There is not an entity we call an “artist” who decides to will a painting into existence. Rather, the activity of painting itself is the expression of a will to power that produces both the painting and painter at the same time: the painter as such emerges through the activity of painting, and not once and for all, not through the painting of this or that painting, but over the course of years or decades and in conjunction with a body of work. What then is the difference between an artist and an oeuvre? There is none in terms of Will-to-Power: they are an expression of the same force, the same will. The artist accumulates an oeuvre and, in the process, a self.

S I-G

References

Deleuze, Gilles. “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext, 2004.

May, Todd. “How Might One Live?” In Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

We already traced, in class, the way Plato’s philosophy of transcendent Ideas and Forms is transformed and extended in Christian theology. In both cases the sensible, sensual world is considered inferior, is considered secondary, to another world that exists beyond or above it. Life – life in this world – is what we are taught to distrust or devalue in the name of something else, something that transcends the immanent world. In the seventeenth century another type of transcendent philosophy will emerge, and it is this one that has perhaps had the most influence on contemporary Western thought. This new brand of transcendent philosophy finds its origins in the works of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes’ goal – in attempting to outline a new methodology for philosophy – was to remove all external (i.e., transcendent) sources of knowledge from the realm of truth and reason. Thus he claims, for example, that he will refrain from making assertions such as “man is a rational animal” since this statement presumes prior knowledge of “man” and “animal” (not to mention what it means to be “rational”). He also casts doubts on the objective world, since he says we can be mistaken at times in believing we are seeing external objects when in fact all that is occurring is that we are having a dream or a hallucination (or being led astray by a mischievous demon). After this exercise of removal, the casting aside of philosophical presumptions, there is only one thing – according to Descartes – that he can be certain of: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). The only thing he can be certain of is that he has had these thoughts and that this “having” is an affirmation of his existence as a conscious being. Note that what is foregrounded here is not thinking itself but the I who thinks; the I who has a thought; the I who recognizes the first certainty in the utterance “I think.” The assumption here is that “thinking” only occurs because there is an entity to whom this action belongs, an entity to whom we can attribute thought.

In Descartes, we no longer have a transcendence of the Idea or Form (as in Plato) or the transcendence of Being (as in Christianity) but the transcendence of a thinking subject. Now it is the I, as an expression of consciousness, which is privileged in relation to experience. This leads Descartes to assert a dualist ontology, claiming a fundamental distinction between mind and body. It takes little guesswork to figure out which of the two attributes – mind and body – will be placed on the side of transcendence and which will be placed on the side of immanence. It takes little guesswork too to figure out which of the two substances is considered superior, is giving priority over the other. Mind is superior, is transcendent, precisely because it is “immaterial”, precisely because it is not-body. If this form of transcendence continues to be dominant in contemporary society (even as we become more secular, and more suspicious of the notion of universal truths and moral absolutes), it is because it conforms to our common-sense perception of the world; each of us perceives the world as though we are at its center, with the freedom to remove ourselves from the world when we feel the necessity to reflect, to cogitate, and so on. We feel as though we are transcendent to the world, no more so than when we are thinking.

Needless to say, this mode of transcendence is no more acceptable to Deleuze than the other two we considered. There is, for Deleuze, no “mind” or “consciousness” or “self” or “I”, or whatever you want to call it, which exists outside of life (or outside of time). There is only mind or consciousness or self or I, or whatever you want to call it, that exists within life, that exists on an immanent plane along with all the other entities that make up the world, all the other entities that make up our world – the only one we have.

S I-G

My first impression is the diversity of his works such as small drawings, video installation, large-scale participation project, etc. Although this diversity makes me a little bit confused, eventually it shows how much he is active and open to possibilities as artist and environments. My favorite work is Rehearsal 1 that red beetle car goes up and down a steep hill based on jazz music (rehearsal recording) played in the car. When music stops, he also stops car in the middle of hill. With emphasis on progress in art, Alÿs creates certain qualities by simple repetitive activities – going up and down. The running time is about 25 min (I think…) and this one long take provides many chances to observe specific areas where broken cars are on the middle of red clay hill and sometimes white car slowly pass by. What interest to me is the fact that my interests are shifted while viewing this work from movements of red car to electric cables that creates several section in the air. If this work is shorter, then I cannot have that experience. Also, I did not read a description of work before viewing, but without specific information about music and concept, I experienced various elements in this work.

Few other works such as Paradox of Praxis (above image) somewhat resonates with Deleuze’s thoughts on the process of making art. But Tornado that provides very tactile experience seems to be very separate from other selections in terms of concept.

-Inhan

Through abstract machine system, the standard of face have been constructed, which is starting from Jesus Christ and now existing as White Man (typical European). This face facializes not only the face but also the entire body and spread everywhere. In this sense, the face is not a universal: “It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself”. This is the first function of system, which is to produce concrete individualized faces such as father and son or worker and boss. The second function of it is to judge or make a choice whether produced faces are good or not, and on the basis of choice, binary relations between first, second, third choices, etc. are established. Shortly, the face itself has a history.

The question is how to dismantle this faciality produced by abstract system. Here, deterritorialization is necessary: how to break the white wall of signifier and get out of the black hole of subjectivity. Both authors clearly claim that this deterritorialization of faciality only will happen in white wall and black whole system. In other words, knowing my face becomes the highest priority, which is actually the only way. More practically, dismantling face needs to happen in real life. According to Deleuze, it does not happen in art because art is only tool for “all of positive deterritorializations…toward to the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless”.

In the end of this chapter, both authors curiously mention about a probe-head that is another type of face born from abstract machine. This probe-head is “a living block” that dismantles faciality and opens “a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of possible”. Personally, I cannot understand exactly this probe-head. Is this a kind of few possibilities that can be generated from abstract system by coincidence (in terms of historical sense)? Considering conventional ways of filmmaking, we can make some connections between abstract machine and the close-up/face in cinema. Through habitual editing techniques, the close-up/face only serves for the arc of narrative. But in cinema, there are some great filmmakers who critically examine what the close-up and face are such as Dreyer, Bresson and Costa. And also, I can add Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours. In fact, it is not difficult to find current filmmakers who explore different possibilities…(images at the bottom is from In Vanda’s Room).

-Inhan

What is striking to me about this is the similarity between the Novella and the short film form. To begin with the differences though, the Novella is a legitimate and respected form for writers to produce work, in that it approaches the story in a different way–one which takes on a different narrator, audience, and approach to the story. The short film has the capacity to do the same, yet the short itself is not so much a respected art form as it is a calling card for aspiring filmmakers. Presumably for mostly financial reasons, the short film is an abandoned form for filmmakers who use budgets to produce feature length productions.

Regardless, what is interesting about both Novella and short film is the tendency to have a reveal or twist ending of the knowledge previously unknown. Along with the calling card of young filmmakers comes a productions success at pulling off such a reveal. That is not to say that this typical approach can not be interesting or well done. I think the best shorts still do this, probably precisely for the reasons that Deleuze identifies the success of the Novella.

In addition though, I think there are feature length films that borrow this format of the Novella. Though seemingly not suited for an entire 90min production, an audience can be surprised by an excellent screenplay in this style. I would point to the Linklater film of ten years ago, TAPE. The feature length film (albeit on the shorter side) engages the past and memory, but does so in a way that the real action involves the relevance of the unknown in the present. It is an excellently written film that perfectly balances suspense and dramatic irony. It stands as a premiere example of Novella on screen and a great film. Check it out!

-Colin Nusbaum

For those who may not remember, I wrote my final paper on Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (a 90 minute single shot) as a crystal image. I suggest anyone with an interest in Deleuzian film theory check this film out. It’s fascinating and although it certainly deserves your full attention and more than 360p, here’s a YouTube link (!) to the whole thing, which, coincidentally, is what I will discuss!

When I realized the film was up on YouTube, my friend joked that the fact that Russian Ark is now divided into 10 segments on the internet actually creates 10 functional edits and that I should probably make mention of this somewhere in my paper. Quoting him, “something along the lines of ‘it says there are no edits but I saw like 10!’”. I thought this was hilarious because 1. this is a really funny joke and 2. he actually made a really good point without even intending to. In fact, he was totally right.  Never one to let an opportunity for wordplay to pass me by, I acknowledged the legitimacy of his claim and suggested a new working title for my paper: “Russian MalArky: It says there are no edits but I saw like 10!?”. Just to clarify, that is not, in fact, the title nor topic of my paper.

All joking aside, the point I’m trying to make is one that Sam has brought up a couple times throughout the semester—there is a very real, very affective difference between viewing a film in the (relatively) distraction-free confines of the cinema and screening it off of Netflix, let alone YouTube, on your tiny laptop in your bed. This shift in medium has the power to remove part of the affective response you might otherwise experience were you to sit down for two solid hours and watch it in a dark cinema– a place where you can honor a film by giving it your undivided attention. This shift also has the power to add new affections as your attention is undoubtedly fragmented by the regular distractions you sustain in your home environment.

This discussion is all the more relevant to Russian Ark as its auteur’s intention was surely never to have it massacred into 10 sections replete with pop-up ads. To make matters worse, when one clip ends, you are offered a variety of related and unrelated clips to watch next. If you’re lucky, one of those might be the continuation to the clip you just finished. This inevitably ruptures the rhythmic and affective momentum Sokurov worked so hard to create. What I find unfortunate and what I can only imagine is either heartbreaking or enraging for Sokurov is that in arbitrarily cutting (and disrupting) the flow of Russian Ark, a film constructed out of its filmmaker’s revelry towards the long take, part of its essence is lost.

As the practice of screening films on computers becomes evermore popular, I can’t help but consider the fact that the internet is indeed democratizing and provides artists with a new audience who would otherwise never view their work. On the other hand, if this work is being viewed in a format in which it was never intended, one that severly degrades its aesthetic quality and essentially alters the auteur’s intention, is more being lost than gained? Or is watching a film on the internet not as pure as screening it in a cinema, but better than never seeing it at all? I think I subscribe to the latter– only due to my own awareness that watching a film in this format will elicit a different affective response than if I were to watch it on the big screen. Either way, this is something for everyone to rack their brains with over the summer holidays.

And now, contradicting most of what I’ve just written, in celebration of the end of the semester, I will  watch a film off of Netflix on the tiny laptop in my bed.

Have a great summer everyone.

- Aïcha