The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 54
to Deleuze’s theorisation of the subject. However, there remains a crucial
distinction between the two, as is described by Maria Walsh in a quotation
worth considering in full:
In philosophical terms, the difference between Žižek and Deleuze might
be encapsulated by Robert Sinnerbrink’s formulation of their respective
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positions on difference itself, i.e. between conceptual difference, whereby difference is inscribed within identity, and a conceptual difference, where difference operates on its own terms rather than within a system of representation. The former reduces difference to being constituted in relation
to identity, while the latter allows for the emergence of the new or radically different in itself that exceeds systems of identity. (Walsh 2008)
For Žižek the choice is between deception or rejection, between the self-
delusional adherence to an identity that denies its own difference from
itself and a complete refusal of the symbolic system within which any such
identity finds its terms. For Deleuze, however, the subject can be conceived of outside of these binary terms, but this requires a proper understanding
of difference. Difference should not be understood in relation to identity, as that which disturbs or displaces identity, but as ‘difference in itself, unfolding into further states of self-differing difference’ (Bogue 2010: 120). In other words, for Deleuze, the subject is in a constant state of becoming, of movement and change in time. ‘The subject is not a fixed and transcendentally
controlled entity but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood
(or subjectivity) are challenged in time and by time’ (Pisters 2003: 20). For such a subject, the challenge is not to confront the void at the heart of its self-identity, but to understand the proper nature of time as that which puts all identity into flux so that there is only difference.
To conceive of the subject in such a way also implies a shift in our under-
standing of desire. For Deleuze, desire is a fundamentally positive force,
in contrast to the Lacanian understanding of desire as driven by absence
or need. As we have seen, the Lacanian notion of desire is predicated upon
a divided subject who yearns for an imagined lost wholeness and therefore
desire is intimately connected to lack, desire is an impossible desire. However, Deleuze does not conceptualise desire in relation to a particular object, as desire for some thing which has been lost. ‘Rather, desire is a fundamental wish to live and to preserve life by connecting with and relating to those
things and persons that give us joy, that is, that increase our power to act’
(Pisters 2003: 20). If we reconsider the final scene of Stromboli in relation to this Deleuzian conception of desire and subjectivity, we may be able to
conceive of Karin’s encounter with the overwhelming force of nature in
terms other than those offered by Žižek. As argued above, Žižek can only
conceive of this scene in negative terms, as a moment of withdrawal from
symbolic reality and encounter with the void of subjectivity. Crucial to
this reading is the fact that the narrative does not continue, for this would inevitably see Karin retreating from the abyss and re-entering society in
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some manner. However, in her reading of the scene, Walsh suggests a more
Deleuzian approach which conceives of Karin’s experience in terms of time
and desire: ‘Rather than the abyss, Karin encounters the non-coincidence
of herself with the self she thought she was and this opens up her subjectivity to the pleasures of immanence’ (Walsh 2008). For Walsh, Karin is not
confronted with a void but with a proper understanding of difference, which is a positive force of change. This is not the drawing to a halt of subjectivity and narrative but the opening up to variation, wherein ‘Karin has entered
into new relations of movement, of life, or in Deleuzian terms, of becom-
ing’ (Walsh 2008). The scene is animated by desire, by the positive force of connections which enable Karin to encounter her subjectivity anew. Such
an understanding of subjectivity and desire may enable us to avoid some of
the deadlocks encountered by film theory in attempting a politicised reading of Lacan, which have frequently struggled to go beyond the oppositional
and conceive of a positive politics of the image. We will see this in particular when we consider Deleuze’s challenge to the Oedipal scenarios which have
dominated considerations of gender and sexuality within film studies. For
now, however, let us consider in more detail the differing relations to the image proposed by Lacanian and Deleuzian approaches to film.
The Cinematic Image
Patricia Pisters begins The Matrix of Visual Culture, her exploration of working with Deleuze in film theory, by contrasting Deleuze’s take on
Hitchcock with the more prevalent Lacanian readings of his films. A num-
ber of analyses have focused on the operation of the cinematic gaze within
Hitchcock’s work, including Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytical urtext
‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’. For Mulvey, Hitchcock utilises
the dynamics of identification and looking to force the audience into shar-
ing the morally ambiguous position of his male protagonists, who seek to
assert the power of their gaze over an objectified female (Mulvey 2004:
841–2). The gaze functions to shore up the protagonist’s subjectivity,
constituting a subject-object relation between self and environment and
thereby securing a transcendental identity as that which makes sense of
the world. According to Mulvey’s theory of spectatorship, by identifying
with this gaze the film viewer guarantees his (but not her) own position
of mastery in relation to the object world. However, drawing again on
Žižek, Pisters suggests that within Hitchcock’s films, this powerful gaze
is increasingly haunted ‘by the stain of the Real’ (Žižek 2003: 19). Giving an example of the birds in The Birds (Hitchcock 1963), she suggests that Untitled-2 353
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something disturbing enters the image, affecting both the protagonist and
the spectator’s relationships of control:
It is precisely the Real that stains the Symbolic and therefore threatens
not only the subjects on the screen but also the spectator’s sense of secu-
rity: his or her position of safe distance, bridged by the eye, is suddenly threatened by something out of control. (Pisters 2003: 19)
Once again, as with Žižek’s description of Karin in Stromboli, we encounter a subject who seeks coherence and control but who suffers breakdown in the
face of the Real. This explains why Hitchcock’s protagonists, such as Scottie in Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958), must work so hard to ward off the Real, which constantly threatens the mastery conferred upon them by the Symbolic
order.
It is through an analysis of Vertigo that we can clearly understand what is at stake in the distinction between the Lacanian and Deleuzian approach to
the cinematic image. In Lacanian terms, Scottie, the protagonist of the film, seeks to affirm his own masculine identity through control of the feminine
and by denying the Real of female subjectivity and desire. As the film pro-
gresses, Scottie’s gaze becomes explicitly sadistic and identification for the spectator increasingly problematic. In attempting to remake another woman,
Judy, into his lost love-object Madeleine (whilst not realising that they are the same woman), Scottie clings to a logic of identity which is unwilling
to accept difference regardless of the consequences for others. However,
the spectator’s knowledge of Judy’s true identity enables us to see Scottie’s actions for what they are, a desperate attempt to maintain a coherent identity in the face of the devastating impact of time. Scottie is transfixed by the process of representation, literally the process of substituting an image for that which is no longer present. He desires the presence of something which cannot be present. Within the Lacanian models of spectatorship which we
have been discussing, his relationship to the female love-object is analogous to that between the image and the spectator, whose desire is directed towards a filmic world which is present yet not present. Time, when considered
within this logic of representation, is therefore equated with loss, with the substitution of an original state of presence for an inferior imaged copy.
However, it is through a considered understanding of the operation of
time that Deleuze offers an alternative approach to the film. What happens, Pisters asks, ‘when we consider the image not as a representation but as
an expression of mental relations?’ (Pisters 2003: 34). Deleuze discusses
Hitchcock’s cinema as a set of relations which the spectator enters into,
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rather than as a representational object which engenders desire. ‘That is,
[Hitchcock] makes relation itself the object of an image, which is not merely added to the … images, but frames and transforms them’ (Deleuze 2005a:
207). The set of relations which Vertigo gives rise to includes those between the past and present; between Scottie, Judy and Madeleine; and between
the spectator and the film. As Pisters argues, ‘the spectator is a third term, sometimes consciously addressed by the camera, sometimes presented with
a point of view of one of the protagonists, but clearly part of the network of relations, more than just by identification’ (Pisters 2003: 37). Thus, rather than desiring an original object which is lost in time or problematically identifying with a controlling gaze, the spectator is constantly entering into new relations with the film’s images in time. The disjunction between absence
and presence which informs the representational logic of the Lacanian
approach is replaced here by a metaphysics of presence which positions the
viewing subject and image in a positive set of relations upon a single plane of immanence.
The crucial point to be made here is that, for Deleuze, images are not
impoverished substitutions for objects. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri
Bergson, he insists that the image exists ‘in-itself ’ as matter: ‘not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of image and movement’ (Deleuze 2005a: 61). As Deleuze states in The Time-Image: the movement-image is not analogical in the sense of resemblance: it does
not resemble an object that it would represent … the movement-image is
the object; the thing itself caught in movement as continuous function.
The movement-image is the modulation of the object itself. (Deleuze
2005b: 26)
This difficult concept underlies the entirety of Deleuze’s approach to cin-
ema and distinguishes his ideas from the representational approaches to the image that have dominated film theory. What Deleuze is attempting, after
Bergson, is to collapse the distinction between movement, which occurs in
the object world, and images, which are internalised representations. If the Lacanian model of the subject positions it in a transcendental relationship with the object world, a place from which it can aggregate its impressions, for Bergson and Deleuze the relationship between matter and mind is continuous and, furthermore, both must be understood as images:
Comprehending Bergson means understanding that all matter is Image,
and that the Universe is defined as the whole aggregate of images acting
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and reacting to one another on all their surfaces and in all of their parts …
Body and brain are Images in the sense of their being receptive surfaces
acting and reacting to the propagation of energy and the force of matter.
(Rodowick 1997: 29)
Thus, the image is already ‘in’ the thing, quite apart from any ‘body’ which might perceive it, and the subject is constantly evolving difference, existing in a network of relations within a single plane of existence, or in Deleuze’s term, plane of immanence.
Deleuze’s interest in cinema stems from its ability to put the image into
movement. If the fundamental truth of objects is that they are constantly in process, constantly changing and moving, then the art form which permits
movement in time necessarily has a privileged relationship to reality. Again, what is crucial to establish is that cinema does not represent an external
reality, its movement-images themselves constitute a reality with which the viewing subject interacts. When we encounter a cinematic image we enter
into a relationship of process upon the plane of immanence. Conceiving of
the image in this way enables us to open up our understanding of cinema to
include the notion of affect. As Barbara Kennedy argues, Lacanian theories
of film spectatorship, which are usually limited to a discussion of visual
representation and which describe the relationship between spectator and
image in terms of lack, do not adequately capture our experience of film:
We can feel intense and ecstatic resonances in an array of dimensions of
experience, specifically through dance, colour, tactility, movement and
the rhythmical. Why then should the iconic formations such as cinema be
explained through psychical constructions of desire, locked into binarist
language … or through the purely visual and scopic? (Kennedy 2001: 46)
By constantly referring the image back towards a lost object or lost plenitude psychoanalysis does not acknowledge ‘the processuality of film in duration’, the bodily experience of film in time.
Cine-semiotics
Deleuze’s approach to the image relates to his more general understanding
of thought itself. As D. N. Rodowick argues, ‘for Deleuze, one might say
that there is no thinking other than thinking-through. “Through” what?
Images, signs and concepts’ (Rodowick 1997: 6). Just as images are not
held to be representations but the thing in-itself, Deleuze critiques the
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traditional model of thought within philosophy which conceives of thought
as an abstract system of ideas rather than a material encounter. For Deleuze this ‘crush[es] thought under an image which is that of the Same and
Similar in representation, but profoundly betrays what it means to think
and alienates the two powers of difference and repetition (Deleuze 1994:
167). Thought, for Deleuze, is inherently temporal and creative rather than something which refers constantly back to preconceived ideas. Similarly,
the image ‘must be considered not as a unified or closed whole, but rather
as a set of logical relations that are in a state of continual transformation’
(Rodowick 1997: 6). It is for this reason that he critiques Christian Metz’s grande syntagmatique, which sought to develop a taxonomy of the cinematic image, despite undertaking a similar project in his own Cinema books.
In Metz’s attempt to develop a semiology of the cinema, the focus is on
the basic units of meaning-making which combine within narrative cinema.
However, the problem for Deleuze is that Metz does not give primacy to the
movement-image in itself, but only considers it in relation to its narrative qualities. In other words, he abstracts the narrative component from the
moving-image and thereby loses its essential quality, which is movement.
For Deleuze, narrative is a secondary consequence of the images rather
than the structuring principle of cinema and he critiques the semiologi-
cal approaches which apply a linguistic model to film, thereby abstracting
linguistic utterances from cinema’s material form. Metz’s structuralism
‘considers narrative as a sort of langue or “grammar”, an external force
analyzable in itself regardless of the medium in which it is realised. Here narrative functions as a structure of the same, fundamentally ahistorical
and unchanging’ (Rodowick 1997: 41). Thus Metz’s approach repeats the
very model of thought which Deleuze argues against. Instead he insists
that cinema be considered as a ‘plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically … It is a condition anterior by right to what it conditions’ (Deleuze 2005b: 28). Although it may give rise to narrative, cinema is firstly a moving-image and any attempt to think the medium must address this material primacy.
Deleuze contrasts Metz’s linguistic analogies with his own semiotic
approach to the medium, which focuses on the various categories of images
which may be encountered within cinema as they relate to the subject. As
Joe Hughes argues, unlike the grande syntagmatique, Deleuze’s semiotic of the cinema is not intended to be an abstracted list of the signs which collectively constitute cinema but rather ‘refer[s] back to a Bergsonian theory of the subject’ (Hughes 2008: 15). To return to Bergson’s insistence that
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