The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory

Cultural Memory in the Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pisters, Patricia.

The matrix of visual culture : working with Deleuze in film theory / Patricia Pisters.

p. cm.—(Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804764551

1. Motion pictures—Philosophy. 2. Deleuze, Gilles—Contributions in film theory. I. Title. II. Series.

PN1995 .P53 2003

791.43’01—dc21

2002015662

Original Printing 2003

Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

Typeset by Alan Noyes in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

Table of Contents

Cultural Memory in the Present

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Universe as Metacinema

2. Material Aspects of Subjectivity

3. Cinema’s Politics of Violence

4. Conceptual Personae and Aesthetic Figures of Becoming-Woman

5. Logic of Sensations in Becoming-Animal

6. (De)Territorializing Forces of the Sound Machine

Conclusion

Appendix A

Appendix B

Filmography

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Cultural Memory in the Present

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank many people for their support: Helen Tartar for her patience and dedication as a publisher; Mieke Bal for her encouragement and support over the last years and for her comments on some chapters; Thomas Elsaesser for his comments on earlier drafts of the chapters; Thomas Poell, another severe but helpful critic; my colleagues and students at the Department of Film and Television Studies of the University of Amsterdam, who have always been most helpful and inspiring; especially Charles Forceville and Janet Taylor for their precise readings of (parts of) the manuscript; my friends for their supporting and enriching friendships; and my parents and sister for their unconditional love. Finally, I thank Gertjan ter Haar for so wonderfully sharing his life with me and our son Rocco for having arrived.

Introduction

The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement images. Here Bergson is startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema.

—Gilles Deleuze¹

The brain is unity. The brain is the screen.... We must understand cinema not as language, but as signaletic material.

—Gilles Deleuze²

The World as Metacinema: Camera Consciousness and the Plane of Immanence

In 1999 Sam Mendes’s film American Beauty won five Oscars. One of the awards went to Kevin Spacey for his performance as Lester Burnham, an American man in his forties who wants to free himself from the constraints of his imprisoning and empty suburban life. In discussions about this film with friends, colleagues, and students, I found that many were irritated by the film’s story of midlife crisis. Granted, Lester’s falling in love with the girlfriend of his daughter Jane, for instance, is not a particularly surprising or original event in the plot; insofar as the story is concerned, I agree with the critics.

Other aspects of this film are interesting, however, for example, the videocentric world view of Ricky, the neighbor boy with a terrorizing military father. Using a video camera, Ricky films everything he sees: his neighbors, a dead bird, a paper bag dancing in the wind—anything that catches his eye. The walls of his bedroom are lined with videotapes, a database of memories and impressions with no (narrative) coherence or logical development. Much like Godard, with his nonlinear presentation of history in and of cinema in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Ricky found a way to liberate the images, the camera, and, as a consequence, his own gaze: His video camera has freed his gaze, released it from the chain of cause and effect. Tragedy and transience, blood and pain and death, they are all still there; the intensely looking neighbor has not transcended his narrow world in any respect. But his gaze has become detached. He has freed himself from his personal life story. In his eyes shines a mystical astonishment about the world.³ Ricky has managed to loosen his gaze from what Deleuze calls the segmental lines of the fixed structures of society and representation. By filming, Ricky has discovered a new mode of individuation, a mode that is nonpersonal and not related to him as a transcendental subject (I see).

Haecceity is the term Deleuze and Guattari borrow from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus to indicate this type of nonpersonal individuation: A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.⁴ Deleuze and Guattari speak of a nonpersonal kind of individuation in terms of molecules, movement, rest, and affects. What is important in American Beauty is that this nonpersonal detachment of the gaze and the susceptibility to haecceities happen through a camera. As Deleuze argues in The Movement-Image, the essence of cinema lies in the mobility of the camera and in emancipation of the viewpoint whereby cinema stops being spatial and has become temporal.⁵ According to Deleuze, who follows Bergson in his cinema books, it is through the camera that we have come to live in a universe that is metacinematic. In it, all kinds of virtual (past and future) images are stored and actual (present) images are constantly generated, and both types mutually influence one another. In this sense, we come to understand our past, present, and future through a new camera consciousness that has entered our perception. In his book Cinematic Political Thought, Michael Shapiro argues that experiencing events critically in the present is made possible not by the exercise of a faculty of judgement that can integrate the domains controlled by disparate cognitive functions, but by a cinematographic apparatus. ⁶ To understand contemporary culture and its pasts and futures, it is therefore necessary to develop a camera consciousness that makes it easy to jump between layers of time as well as between the actual and the virtual. Deleuze’s cinema books and some of the concepts he developed together with Guattari offer useful tools for such a new critical consciousness. The first aim of this book, therefore, is to investigate this new type of metacinematic consciousness and its nonpersonal forms of individuation with the help of Deleuze’s cinema books and the concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari.

According to Bergson and Deleuze, all images are situated on a plane of immanence where past, present, and future coexist and can be ordered in various ways, including linearly. Images are there; they do not represent some other-worldliness but constantly shape the world and its subjects. With this conception of images, Deleuze developed a film theory that is quite different from traditional film theory, which always sees images as representations of other (transcendental) worlds. One of the questions posed within traditional film theory that loses its usefulness when one works with Deleuze is the question concerning the difference between real and unreal (dream, fiction, memories). As Deleuze has argued, the distinction between virtual and actual offers a more adequate way to think in images. Virtual and actual are not opposed to each other; both are real, but only the actual is in the (physical) present. In the most recent French edition of Dialogues, Deleuze states in an added text called L’actuel et le virtuel that every actual image is surrounded by a mist of virtual images: A perception is like a particle: an actual perception wraps itself in a mist of virtual images that distribute themselves in mobile circuits that move further away and grow larger, that construct and deconstruct themselves.⁷ Virtual images react to actual images, and actual images belong to the virtual. As Deleuze puts it in The Time-Image:

In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object, which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is coalescence between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.⁸

Madonna’s video clip Don’t Tell Me is a perfect illustration of Deleuze’s point about the coalescence between the virtual and the actual. In this clip, the images of dancing and rodeo-riding cowboys come to life not on a postcard but on a billboard in the desert, and these images in turn give a virtual quality to the actual images of Madonna in front of a screen showing a desert road. The actual and virtual images start to exchange their specific qualities, in this clip especially through repetition of the movements and gestures of Madonna and the dancing cowboys. The clip is as simple as it is strong, and its strength lies precisely in this play between the virtual and the actual, which thus become interchangeable, like the many facets of a diamond. According to Deleuze, the actual is defined by the present that passes, the virtual by the past that is preserved. A constant process of crystallization is taking place between the two. Both the actual and the virtual are contained on what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. The plane of immanence contains not just filmic images but all images relating to a life. New camera consciousness is fundamentally related to a life that is nonpersonal and nonsubjective and yet highly specific and individuated, always part of a concrete assemblage.

In traditional film theory, the cinematographic apparatus (perhaps as an old form of camera consciousness) conceives the image as a representation that can function as a (distorted or illusionary) mirror for identity construction and subjectivity. As has been proved by the last fifty years of film theory, representations can profoundly affect identity formation by providing positive or negative role models. Feminism and (post)colonial discourses have shown, often with the help of psychoanalysis, the ways in which representations can have negative consequences for certain groups in society. It seems clear that a different conception of (cinematographic) images and camera consciousness would also have consequences for identity and subjectivity. To discover the ways in which a Deleuzian approach to visual culture differs from a traditional view of images as representations, I start with a comparison between a traditional theoretic approach to film and a Deleuzian way of seeing things.

In Chapter 1, The Universe as Metacinema, I look specifically at the implications of these two approaches by opening a dialogue between Slavoj Zižek and Deleuze through the work of Alfred Hitchcock: How does Hitchcock’s universe look if we consider his world either as a representation of impossible desire or as a network of relations between virtual and actual images? I end this first chapter by discussing the film Strange Days, a film that has much in common with Hitchock’s Vertigo. It presents a universe as metacinema in a Deleuzian sense and illustrates that Hitchcock’s premonition seems to have come true: a camera consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into.⁹

Throughout this book, I return regularly to a comparison between a traditional psychoanalytic approach and a Deleuzian approach to the image. The aim is always to understand what these different approaches enable us to see and feel.

In Chapter 2, Material Aspects of Subjectivity, I discuss the horror genre and the monstrosities of the flesh, explicit images that have become more frequent and important during the last few decades. Psychoanalysis has demonstrated how these images are connected to the horror and fascination of abject femininity. In this way, images of the monstrous flesh always indicate a border that is necessary for the establishment of identity (borders between human and nonhuman, between life and death, between man and woman). In a Deleuzian approach, these images do not have one fixed meaning, but they always need to be reconsidered and related to their specific assemblages. Thus, they can construct different aspects of subjectivity that are materialized in the image. I return to this point of assemblages later in this Introduction when I propose one way of working with Deleuze in film theory.

Sound and music are other aspects of contemporary image culture that have gained greater importance. Again, it is possible to look at sound and music as representations, as an acoustic mirror of sexual difference, in the way that, for instance, a psychoanalytic approach to the sound track proposes. In a Deleuzian conception of music, sound and music do not constitute an acoustic mirror; rather, they provide the means to free oneself from self (mirror) images: music deterritorializes the subject in becoming-music. Nevertheless, music also can have strong territorializing powers. All these points concerning music and identity are elaborated in the last chapter.

Before we move on to the second aim of this book, it might be useful to recall briefly what Deleuze said about representational thinking, to clarify why we might want to change our basic image of thought and perhaps to try to establish why representation has been, and still very often is, such an attractive way of thinking. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze discusses the dominant image of thought, which is defined by thinking in terms of representations. Representation is characterized by four aspects: identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance:

Such is the world of representation in general. We said above that representation was defined by certain elements: identity with regard to concepts, opposition with regard to determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, resemblance with regard to objects.... The I think is the most general principle of representation—in other words, the source of these elements and of the unity of all these faculties: I conceive, I judge, I imagine/I remember and I perceive—as though these were the four branches of the Caught. On precisely these branches, difference is crucified. They form quadripartite fetters under which only that which is identical, similar, analogous or opposed can be considered different: difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude.¹⁰

According to Deleuze, the dominant image of thought is a restrictive one, one that does not allow thinking to occur unless there is something with which we can compare. It does not allow us to think of real difference, the way things differ from themselves, because there is always a principium comparationis at work (that is, one is either good or bad, young or old, man or woman). Deleuze proposes a much more open and multiple way of thinking, which he and Guattari later call rhizomatics, the type of grassroots thinking that does not acknowledge hierarchies, beginnings and endings, or segmental and oppositional divisions.¹¹ This rhizomatic thinking is also pertinent with respect to cinema, but I return to that point in a moment. What is important for now is to notice that this rhizomatic way of thinking implies a type of thinking in assemblages, where heterogeneous aspects come together. It also implies thinking in terms that differ from those to which we are accustomed, for instance, territorialization and deterritorialization, speed and slowness, and affect.

At first, this may seem confusing or chaotic compared with the clear and binary logic of the dominant image of thought. At the same time, we encounter the strength and power of the dominant image of thought: it provides stable and recognizable forms that can give the idea of security and stability, for instance, in an identity. As Dorothea Olkowski explains in Gilles Deleuze: The Ruins of Representation, Representations are produced by a certain organization of elements in the assemblage—any collection of molecular or quasi molecular elements. The production of representations is a second-level articulation that establishes functional, compact, and stable forms (objects) that simultaneously actualize in molar compounds or substances. The resultant stable, functional structure is the type that represents differences as different only in relation to identity.¹²

Leaving the safe territory of representation therefore entails the adventure of multiplicities and new thoughts, affects, and percepts. It also entails leaving behind the model of the eye, which traditionally has been the most important model for perceiving, conceiving, imagining, and judging representation and difference (I see, I think, I imagine, I judge, all through the noble sense of sight, which presupposes an I that transcends experience) for a model of the brain. In Deleuze’s immanent conception of images, the brain itself functions like a screen. It is here that we make assemblages and rhizomatic connections. The brain is the screen, says Deleuze. If there is a domain that can assess changes in film, aesthetically or otherwise, it would be the biology of the brain:

It’s not to psychoanalysis or linguistics but to the biology of the brain that we should look for principles, because it doesn’t have the drawback, like the two other disciplines, of applying ready-made concepts. We can consider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what circuits, what kind of circuit, the movement-image or time-image trace out, or invent, because circuits aren’t there to begin with.¹³

Moreover, each circuit of movement-image or time-image enters into a rhizomatic assemblage of cinematographic and noncinematographic aspects. This leads me to my second aim in this book.

Working with Deleuze: A Book for Use

Although Deleuze’s cinema books of the 1980s were rapidly translated into English, they did not find their way into film theory until the turn of the century. David Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine helped to establish both the philosophic and the film theoretic value of Deleuze’s cinema books. He convincingly demonstrates that Deleuze’s cinema books continue a deep and complex meditation on time that is one of Deleuze’s central contributions to contemporary philosophy.¹⁴ Whereas Rodowick looks at the connections between Deleuze’s cinema books and his other philosophic works, such as his books on Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Gregory Flaxman in The Brain is the Screen collected a number of interesting metacritical reflections on the implications of The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, considering, for instance, a Deleuzian geology and ontology of the image or looking at the emergence of cine-thinking.¹⁵ In his Film Theory: An Introduction, Robert Stam is first to include Deleuze in the official canon of film theory. He concludes his passage on Deleuze by expressing doubt about the practical relevance of Deleuze’s cinema books: While one can acknowledge the brilliance of Deleuze’s analyses, and while one can dialogue with Deleuze, try to philosophize like Deleuze, or do with other philosophers something analogous to what Deleuze does with Bergson, it seems somewhat more problematic to ‘apply’ Deleuze, to simply ‘translate’ analysis into a Deleuzian language.¹⁶

Although both Rodowick’s book and Flaxman’s collection present some concrete analyses of specific films, the emphasis in these books is indeed on a metadiscursive level.¹⁷ Moreover, the analyses presented in these books concentrate on minor cinema, films that have the characteristics of, for example, the modern political film as described by Deleuze in The Time-Image.¹⁸ This led me to reflect on the possible relevance of Deleuze’s work for more popular and commercial cinema. Inspired and challenged by the aforementioned studies, my second aim in this book is therefore to find some answers to a pragmatic question: How can we work with Deleuze in analyzing specific expressions of contemporary popular media culture? Clearly, in his cinema books, Deleuze confined himself strictly to the masterpieces of cinema history. In presenting my encounters with Deleuze’s cinematographic and noncinematographic concepts in contemporary cinema and popular culture, however, I do not strictly follow all of Deleuze’s approach. In this respect, I concur with Ian Buchanan, whose ambition in his Deleuzism: A Metacommentary is to "suggest the possibility of an other reading of Deleuze that would enable his work to be systematically applied.¹⁹ As Buchanan admits, this might imply some anti-Deleuzism, which nevertheless should be taken in the spirit of Deleuze, who rejected all forms of slavishness in favor of (liberating) creativity."²⁰

Through Deleuzian concepts, I hope to establish unexpected encounters between avant-garde film, political cinema, and more commercial media expressions. Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) toolbox of concepts serve here as virtual guides, accompanying me on my expedition to unknown territories. The experimental and explorative character of this (re)search may not always be in line with more traditional academic practices. I do not attempt to persuade the reader that Deleuze’s ideas are truer than, for instance, psychoanalytic concepts or that my reading of Deleuze is the right interpretation. I simply try to demonstrate how some of his ideas can work: What new thoughts become possible? What new emotions can I feel? What new sensations and perceptions can be opened in the body?²¹ Therefore, my hope is that the open-ended nature of this work will create a book for use that contributes to the growing field of Deleuzism in cultural analysis.

Indeed, Deleuze’s cinema books may seem to be perfect self-contained essays that preclude any room for new experiments; but this impression is incorrect. The books are full of concepts that can be employed as practical tools in the analysis of all kinds of media expressions. Moreover, one of the most challenging aspects of applying Deleuze is to highlight the relation of the cinema books to concepts that he developed elsewhere, mostly together with Guattari. In this way, it is possible to avoid making a strict formal and aesthetic analysis of either cinematographic concepts or of purely content matters related to the stories of the films. The concept of assemblages is important in this respect.

In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the concept of machinic assemblages. They are greatly indebted to Hjemslev when they discuss possible ways of conducting analyses of assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari do not consider Hjemslev a linguist but rather as the Danish Spinozist geologist:

Hjemslev was able to weave a net out of the notions matter, content, and expression, form and substance. These were the strata, said Hjemslev. Now this net has the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since there was a form of content no less than a form of expression ... the first articulation concerns content, the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression.²²

Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is no single Hjemslevian model for analysis because the relation between content and expression can take various forms. Nevertheless, they draw some general conclusions on the nature of assemblages:

On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to each other; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations. On a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorial sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.²³

I develop this tetravalence of assemblages as one possible model for conducting a Deleuzian analysis of cinema by looking at both the specific cinematographic forms of content and expression of specific images and the territorializing and deterritorializing forces that traverse these images. After the metalevel in Vertigo and Strange Days in The Universe as Metacinema of Chapter 1, I introduce an analytic model of assemblages in Chapter 2, Material Aspects of Subjectivity. Here I concentrate on material and temporal aspects of subjectivity that thus can be established by different types of cinema, ranging from European art cinema to Hollywood film and African cinema. In Chapter 3, Cinemas Politics of Violence, I look at more collective enunciations of political cinema. Violence, fabulating the power of film, and schizophrenic strategies are discussed with reference to assemblages of a variety of films: Marguerite Duras’s Nathalie Granger to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and David Fincher’s Fight Club.²⁴ In Chapters 4 and 5, I take a different approach and apply the model of the assemblage more loosely. In Chapter 4, Conceptual Personae and Aesthetic Figures of Becoming-Woman, I look at the figure of Alice in Wonderland and treat her as a conceptual persona and aesthetic figure that demonstrate in what ways becoming-woman can be a critical, albeit often paradoxic, strategy in cinema and in life. This chapter ends with a discussion of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark and the cinematographic and deterritorializing strategies in this film that make it so that becoming-woman here opens up to a becoming-music. In Chapter 5, Logic of Sensations in Becoming-Animal, I discuss the way in which becoming-animal in cinema is closely related to a logic of sensations and finds its form of expression in affection-images. As indicated earlier, Chapter 6, (De)Territorializing Forces of the Sound Machine, finally looks at aspects of becoming-music by comparing a traditional approach to sound and music in cinema with a Deleuzian way of establishing the powers of music. Here I argue that it is perhaps possible that, precisely through the depersonalizing force of music, a people of a new kind might come into existence.

All chapters present rhizomatic networks of thoughts, sensations, affects, movements, and rest—all fundamentally related to the plane of immanence of images of life. We have come to live in a matrix of visual culture—although not necessarily in the manner presented to us by Larry and Andy Wachowski’s film The Matrix. To show how the matrix of media culture might be related to the plane of immanence that is so dear to Deleuze, I conclude this Introduction by looking at the way this matrix is presented in The Matrix.

The Matrix of Visual Culture

There is probably no other contemporary film that better serves as a kind of Rorschach test for contemporary theory than The Matrix (1999). The main character in The Matrix is a computer hacker, Neo, who discovers that the world he lives in is actually a matrix constructed by a giant computer that feeds on human energy. He is offered a trip into the real world that lies underneath the matrix and, together with a few other rebels, starts a war against the imprisonment by the illusory world of the matrix. In the film, there is an explicit reference to Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and many debates on postmodernism have centered on this science fiction fantasy. Žižek tells us that his psychoanalysis-oriented friends are convinced that the authors have read Lacan; the Frankfurter School partisans see in The Matrix the extrapolated embodiment of an alienating cultural industry; and New Agers recognize how our world is just a mirage generated by a global mind embodied in the World Wide Web.²⁵ Others have called the film A High-Tech Plato. The Matrix does indeed have some similarities to Plato’s cave, in which people are imprisoned until they are released, whereupon they can see the real world. In contrast to Plato’s allegory, however, the real world in The Matrix is not a bright light and ideal world but a dark and desolate place. In fact, The Matrix could very well be compared to Jean-Louis Baudry’s formulation of the apparatus theory of cinema, which he develops in analogy to Plato’s cave and the Freudian unconscious.²⁶ The Matrix seems to be a paradigmatic film for contemporary audiovisual culture and theory and a blueprint for future cinematography.

Given the gradual but undeniable acknowledgment of the relevance of Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) philosophic work to contemporary culture, it may be somewhat disappointing that this work does not seem to pass the Rorschach test of The Matrix. Although one could translate The Matrix in terms of action-images according to the classification of Deleuze’s cinema books, and perhaps even make an argument for The Matrix‘s bodies without organs, the hypermodern world of this film does not correspond to the conceptual universe of Deleuze and Guattari. Basically, this has to do with the fact that The Matrix presents to us two worlds, one virtual and one real, however complexly and perversely they are interwoven.²⁷ In this way, The Matrix presents a techno-transcendental image of the world; but Deleuze’s philosophy is one of immanence where the virtual is perfectly real, although not always actual. In one of his last texts, Immanence: A Life, Deleuze emphasizes this aspect as the heart of his philosophy: "Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, not to something; it does not depend on an object and does not belong to a subject. In Spinoza immanence is not immanence to substance, but substances and modes are in immanence.... Pure immanence is a life, and nothing else.... A life contains only virtuals."²⁸

Deleuze distinguishes between the trunscendental field, for instance, a subject, an object, consciousness, which is defined by a plane of immanence, and the transcendent, which is taken as universal, such as a subject (I) or an object in general to which immanence is attributed. The transcendental field is a consequence of immanence, a life, and hence is situated within the same world of images but on a different field. Ian Buchanan explains this point further and calls this form of immanent transcendentalism transcendental empiricism:

Now, instead of being a Universal, a core I think to be sought in all things by transcendental reduction, contemplation is universal, an immanent it thinks as the basis of all matter, organic or inorganic. This it that thinks Deleuze and Guattari call a microbrain: Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things. Yet insofar as this process can be thought philosophy must produce its concepts, at which point it becomes a transcendental term once again. However, it is now of a completely different kind: it is transcendental to immanence, it is a purposefully wrought survey of a vast process, but is not in itself a direct product of that process. This, in an ultra-shorthand way, is what transcendental empiricism actually means.²⁹

Because the fundamental idea of two worlds in The Matrix presents such a clear transcendental fantasy of the world, I do not think this film corresponds to the immanent or transcendental empiricist philosophy of Deleuze. I have nevertheless discussed this film because it has invited so many theoretic discussions and at the same time proves that the traditional transcendental model of the cinematographic apparatus is still vigorously alive. This is why I keep coming back to this model throughout the book. I also hope to present on the following pages some transcendental empiricist experiments with images and sounds that prove that working with Deleuze’s toolbox of concepts, planes, and assemblages reveals some interesting aspects of our life and our subjectivities in the matrix of visual culture that is defined by immanence and a new nonpersonal but nevertheless individuating camera consciousness.

1

The Universe as Metacinema

Ernie, do you realize what we are doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment we play this note and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way. And someday we won’t even have to make a movie—there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we’ll just press different buttons and they’ll go oooh and aaah and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?

—Hitchcock on the set of North by Northwest¹

Hitchcock’s fantasy about directly entering people’s brains seemed futuristic and absurd in the 1950s when he expressed these words to his scriptwriter, Ernest Lehman. A few decades later, however, scientific and cinematographic technology has improved to such an extent that Hitchcock’s joke no longer seems so far-fetched. In Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983) and Katherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days (1995), direct recording and playing of brain waves are presented as being possible. Of course, these films belong to the genre of science fiction, and the actual possibilities of such techniques are not as refined as they are portrayed. I am not, however, interested in the exact state of affairs that might be represented in these films. Rather, I am challenged by the implications for the relationship between human beings (subjects), images, and the world—and for the underlying image of thought that Hitchcock’s words express, both in respect to his own work and in respect to developments in contemporary cinema and contemporary audiovisual culture. What if we do not consider Hitchcock’s words as merely a never-to-be-fulfilled fantasy of having effects on people without representations, bypassing the eyes of the spectators and reaching them directly via the brain, as the psychoanalytic model of thought does? What if we consider Hitchcock a visionary who anticipates contemporary scientific and cinematographic preoccupations, as would a rhizomatic model of thinking, according to which the brain is literally the screen? Would Hitchcock’s fantasy then not be a Bergsonian statement about the immanence of body, brain, and images? As Deleuze argues in The Movement-Image, Bergson was startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema.² After all, Hitchcock’s wish seems to entail a revolutionary conception of images that are not representations of something else but that exist in themselves. In The Time-Image, Deleuze attributes to Hitchcock explicitly anticipatory insights about the nature of images in contemporary society. When he discusses developments of the image (cinematographic or real), he argues, Hitchock’s premonition will come true: a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into.³

If, however, Hitchcock is not only a visionary and the first of the modern filmmakers, but is indeed also the ultimate classic director who completes the classic action images, his fantasy would be a symptomatic fantasy after all.⁴ In any case, his work is a rich source for tracking some of the assumptions of the different images of thought that are presupposed by a classic psychoanalytic and a rhizomatic view of the subject, the world, and cinema.

To bring to the surface some of these presuppositions and implications, I first give a comparative reading of Hitchcock’s universe, concentrating on the concept of the subject that is defined by desire. Then I focus on the status of cinema and the cinematographic apparatus by looking at Rear Window and especially two other metafilms: Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Strange Days. Although Strange Days has much in common with Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), it more often has been compared with Peeping Tom. Both Peeping Tom and Strange Days deal with the (darker) implications of our cinematographic voyeurism. Nevertheless, I argue that by comparing Strange Days with Peeping Tom, one misses some essential differences between the two films, especially the way in which a new kind of camera consciousness has entered our perception, our experience of the world, and ourselves. I therefore return to Hitchcock, especially Vertigo, to explore the ambiguous status of this film: at once a classic picture of an obsessive love affair (a movement-image) and a modern film about the confusing experience of time and virtuality (a time-image) that anticipates Strange Days. Contemporary cinema, for which Strange Days is paradigmatic, demonstrates that both Bergson’s futuristic insights and Hitchcock’s premonition have indeed come true: we now live in a metacinematic universe that calls for an immanent conception of audiovisuality and in which a new camera consciousness has entered our perception. In this chapter, I explore various implications and effects of the universe as metacinema and the new camera consciousness by considering Peeping Tom, Strange Days, and Hitchcock’s universe as philosophic pamphlets.

Hitchcock’s Universe: Žižek and Deleuze

Representations of Guilty Subjects or a Logic of Relations

I begin this exploration by looking again