The cinema according to Gilles Deleuze and the politics of experience

One of the things I most love about the cinema of Neorealism (beginning with Visconti's Osessione) and the Nouvelle Vague is a sense of freedom that consists largely just in the movement of characters and camera through spaces, which are usually outdoors, and so in part geographic (a movement between different rooms in a house is still too close to the stage and changes of scene within it), and most often urban. Bicycle Thieves is more about the city of Rome than the two main protagonists. Truffaut and Godard take this theme up in their first features, and it characterizes Godard's cinema from "Breathless" to "Weekend."  Examples that are repetitions of this include the punk romance trilogy of Leos Carax ("Boy Meets Girl," "Bad Blood," and "Lovers on the Bridge") and the recent "Alaska" by Italian director Claudio Cupellini.

I think Deleuze says something like this and it suggests to me how Paola Maratti in her book on them might be right that the Cinema volumes give us a new political philosophy. The art of the movement through situations and settings arranged (mise-en-scène) through time as registering what might be best called not the art of moving pictures, a term that ambiguously designates film as an art form that exists as a library of images on the one hand, and the singular work as itself multiple on the other, but the image as multiplicity and movement.  This is related to the art of the novel, with its use of language, which in the modernist period could be seen to be in its essence not a medium for the presentation of characters and stories but one that is centrally about discourse(s), including that of the "author," and their uses.  Film is able to do this with images, though photography's intrinsic immediacy and realism may render this implicit most of the time.  Yet, both novel and narrative film embed dialogue, plot, and revelation of character within the broader and more fundamental depiction of ways of seeing, or registering the articulation of things through words in reading.  It is a truism that any thinking about the essence of an art form or genre will be Greenbergian, theorizing the ways in which the art can be used to theorize itself, or place itself in question. In this way Greenbergianism is a formalist Heideggerianism: if our way of Being is a question for us, so must be the artist's, and our, understanding of the artwork.  Thus, it places a form of life in question though its mediation by a form of art that does so.  Shakespeare did this with theater: All of his most interesting tragic and comic problematizations are of individuals in moral and political circumstances that reveal their character and the tenuousness of its tenability, and do so by using the theatricality of the actor's representation of himself in the guise of a mask or persona, and thus ultimately, if not placing in question the theatrical paradigm of social life, at least revealing in a family of ways what it involves.  Classical theater from Aeschylus to Racine and beyond gives us a model of politics (as it did Greece in its short-lived invention of democracy).  The arts of the novel and cinema shift politics from interpersonal conflict and confrontation, and its interiorization in self-confrontation and self-representation through staging, as in Shakespeare and Racine, to a thematization or focus and thus problematization of a form of life through a thematizing of the form of the readable or sayable and the visible.  This is precisely why cinema and psychoanalysis, born in the same year, 1995, in Paris and Vienna, are contemporaries.  For of course we know now that psychoanalysis is not about learning to repair relationships, nor is it about introjections and projections, which would both suppose the stronger inner/outer divide that theater requires because the character's support is an actor whose performance of a role renders him necessarily identical to and different from the persona he takes on and plays.  This is particularly clear in Shakespeare, who in many ways is Freud's precursor and model, his central myth having far more to do with "Hamlet" than "Oedipus the King," since Shakespeare is the great theorist of how theater stages this relationship as an unsolvable problem.  The idea of a responsible self who stands behind the world of his experience, and which is Descartes's legacy to all of modern philosophy until Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is bound up with this and is theatrical.  And so too the worry that Descartes was only the first of a long line of artists and thinkers to concern himself with, that of the possible unreality of the apparent world, including our knowledge of or (following Cavell's reading of Shakespeare) ability to acknowledge and recognize, other people.  This is the anxiety in "Life is a Dream," "The Matrix," Hilary Putnam's "brain in a vat," or the anxieties about autisms and sociopaths (and of course, the sociopath is just a Machiavellian without empathy or morals, for we moderns are all Machiavellians, as has been broadly recognized).  Morality as a problem that can be posed as a possibility that might be denied and that involves something like recognition of the existence of the Other and his claim on me, or the problem of God's existence as an epistemological one: these are problems akin to that of theater in a way.  This is very different from taking as given a form of life, recognizing that in the modern world it is rendered problematic along with everything else, but questioning not its reality or unreality, possibility or impossibility, in the bivalent fashion of what is now the thinking of digital machines (except that they cannot call themselves into question because they cannot reflect or represent what they are doing, and so in a way operate a language that is not a discourse because it has no true subjective enunciation: there is no Shakespearean computer), and then interrogating or experimenting with that form, rather than instead holding up to it the mirror of itself, which is a paradigm that much European art cinema followed (and that Fassbinder, for instance, lets run out to the end of its line in "Despair," which shows the failure of this model of recognition, which is Hermann Hermann's problem to begin with).  In contrast, psychoanalysis is not a moralism but a mode of thinking.  In this it leaves behind the theatrical models of self and society (though Freud's own model of the unconscious as a hidden place is as theatrical as Marx's of base and superstructure, and it may be constitutive of such theatrical models to take literally their metaphors), which were originally based on forms of legal tribunals just as the narrativall logic of moral judgment that traditional dramatic narratives (if not epic) share with tribunals is clearly based on a logic of commercial exchange.

I take it this kind claim about the shift from the theatrical to the novelistic and cinematic to be roughly also Jacques Rancière's argument about the shift from representational to "aesthetic" models of art after roughly the French Revolution, the "aesthetic regime" being one that understands politics as legislation and distribution of an order of the sensible and perceptual. Whether or not Walter Benjamin was right to say that experience begins in the late modern world to become impossible, and there are signs that a new shift has been under way, perhaps in part because the inner/outer distinction that the novel and classical music, and practices of reading and listening associated with them, instituted, and that has been questioned since Husserl (and arguably placed in question by Frege's linguistic turn at the origin of contemporary English-Language philosophy), is disappearing.  This means that the public/private distinction is weakened also, if not abolished, which is surely impossible since language is shared but bodies are separate (as Giuliana remarks in “Red Desert”).  That this distinction might disappear, and thus both interiority and politics as dependent on something like a public sphere or civil society (that is distinct from the family, as Hegel argued, a distinction feminism at one point sought eagerly to abolish), may be thought as heralding some kind of totalitarianism.  Though in placing this in question, it should be noted that the term was first used affirmatively by Marxists on the basis of Hegel, and Hegelianism is surely the philosophy of the optimism of reconciliation of all such differences.  I suspect that these distinctions are simply being reconfigured.  There will always be a said and unsaid, a visible and invisible, and some intertwining of and relationship to them, as Heidegger argued concerning "world" (the representable) and "earth" (its grounding in the unrepresentable and necessarily latency or implicitness of the materiality of both social life and artistic media whose formal possibilities rest on the uses of certain tools).  Perhaps every revolution or paradigm-shift in modes of artistic presentation amount to a reconfiguration of this relationship and with it modes of presentation of the real and the interesting, the categories which in our time perhaps have replaced the beautiful and the sublime.

The art of moving images, then, gave us a new way of understanding space and time that allows fragmentation and mobility in ways that are impossible in theater.  The literary genre that film continues is not the theater but the novel.  It shifts experience away from agency and responsibility, a moral idea that derives from legal tribunals, onto consideration of the plastic forms with which it is rendered.  As responsibility fades from view, the plasticity of the forms of social life and experience is foregrounded.  We begin to be able to discuss the discourses within which all possibilities of meaning and truth were thought to be held captive.  Making those discourses reflect upon themselves is a baroque and theatrical gesture that in one sense never achieved much more than the problematic prise de conscience of those performing it.  This is how social critique is transformed in a society where theatrical public life has become impossible. But the participatory democracy of the self-managing community of workers is now a ghost that will surely not be resuscitated, as it was captive to a logic of necessity; that is, to an economy.   There is no logic by which a social criticism formed by this kind of aesthetic experience needs to be an affair for scholars and other elites alone.