An unthinkable cinema: Deleuze’s mutant politics of film

The political Deleuze

Before, however, we can turn to these latter claims, it is important to acknowledge the difficulties attendant to any reading of Deleuze which is ‘political’ in the generally accepted sense. Indeed the political efficacy of Deleuze’s thought, in particular of his ‘schizoanalytic’ work alongside Guattari, has been the subject of ample debate, not least because of certain deflationary remarks made by Deleuze and Guattari themselves. ‘…schizoanalysis as such has strictly no political program to propose’, they will write, ‘if it did have one, it would be grotesque and disquieting at the same time’ (2000, 380). This is because the molecular and multivalent operations of their critique are fundamentally opposed to the kind of ‘molar’ organisation required in order for a programmatic or ‘party’ politics to adhere − a claim we might apply to Deleuze’s philosophy more broadly. Yet as numerous commentators have noted (Widder 2012; Tampio 2015; Sibertin-Blanc 2016) political concerns are nevertheless so marbled throughout the Deleuzian corpus, and so consistently dedicated to a clutch of recurrent themes − capitalism, organisation, minority, resistance, control − that we must read such remarks with the sceptical attention they deserve. Indeed, in the same breath (or at least in the following volume) Deleuze and Guattari will also write, in an apparently paradoxical and somewhat grandiose moment, that ‘schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political… for politics precedes being’ (2005, 203).

Many commentators have laid the blame for this apparent incoherence, as well as the sweepingly ‘unphilosophical’ position encapsulated in this latter remark, at the feet of Guattari − who has often been characterised as that ‘bad influence’ drawing Deleuze away from his lucid metaphysical and properly meta-philosophical treatises. Deleuze, so the story goes, having hitherto dedicated himself to studiously a-political readings of the history of philosophy − Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza − is led astray by the unfortunate confluence of Guattari’s institutional analysis and the long shadow of May ’68. Paradigmatic of this ‘anti-Guattari’ reading is Slavoj Žižek, who, with characteristic expeditiousness, will claim that ‘not a single one of Deleuze’s own texts is in any way directly political; Deleuze “in himself” is a highly elitist author, indifferent towards politics’ (2012, 18). Indeed Žižek here adopts a position lamentably taken up by many so-called ‘Deleuzians’ themselves, which serves not only to misrecognise certain ethico-political themes at work in Deleuze’s philosophy long before his encounter with Guattari, but also those solo authored works after their initial collaboration, which continue to advance protracted political lucubrations. Here, we can most certainly locate Deleuze’s two volumes dedicated to cinema, which use that artform to re-pose the question of politics in an entirely new way.

Of course, the idea of a ‘political cinema’ is far from unique to Deleuze, with thinkers from Eisenstein to Bazin, Benjamin to Baudry dedicated to thinking the unique ideological potentialities of the motion picture. Deleuze’s originality, indeed, lies in an eschewal of these authors’ more obviously ‘political’ concerns − ideology, the ‘culture industry’, pedagogy and so on − in favour of a political ontology, which centralises the specific forms of luminous, affective and noetic ‘individuals’ which the cinema is able to produce. ‘…the essence of cinema’, Deleuze will write,‘ − which is not the majority of films − has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning’ (2013, 173), and in this sense, the cinema books plug into a broader political ontology of thought which Deleuze had advanced since at least as early as his 1962 study of Nietzsche.

While we must be wary of reading concepts and critiques as interchangeable across Deleuze’s oeuvre, given the demonstrative differentiation to which they are invariably subjected, we might, in broad strokes, characterise this noetic project thusly: thought is a particular form of intensive individuation, a noetic event which takes place in response to an encounter with that which is ‘unthought’, or unthinkable. As such, thought does not take the form of a habitual recognition (as in Descartes), nor of a unitary representation (à la Kant), rather, thinking is always something unexpected, undetermined and uncontrollable, the creative response to an event which cannot yet be thought, and as such, can only be sensed (Deleuze 1994, 57).

The political consequences of this model are several. First, thought is rigorously material, composed of, and responding to, sensible states of affairs and the actualised events of life. At the same time, thought is set up in opposition to doxa − to habits, lassitude and conservatisms − with which its intensive, creative functioning is fundamentally incompatible. Finally, thought involves a movement into territories which are not yet actualised − which are virtual − in order to draw on the differential genetic structures which enable actualised states to become other than they are. In terms of this participation in virtual structure − in yet-to-be-actualised dimensions of the real − thought therefore has a fundamental solidarity with, and orientation towards, the future, and the creation of new worlds. This is the noetic model present at least as early as Difference and Repetition, and while we may quibble as to its efficacy as politics, it is certainly oriented by political concerns, such as Deleuze himself acknowledges (1994, xx, 137).

On meeting and collaborating with Guattari, of course, who had already long been engaged in an activism far more ‘actualised’ than that of Deleuze, ¹ the latter eschews his meta-philosophical approach to themes of doxa, conservatism and reactionary modes of life, in favour of an explicit vocabulary of micro-politics, molecular revolution and revolutionary desiring production, themes which I will leave to one side here. Suffice it to say that Deleuze and Guattari’s project to identify the processes of axiomatized individuation which constitute capitalism is the most explicitly political moment in Deleuze’s career. It is far, however, from the last, and in turning his attention, after the laborious completion of A Thousand Plateaus, to a study of ‘aesthetics’ across painting and cinema, Deleuze carries over ethico-political concerns already present, yet thoroughly enriched by Guattari’s provocations.

Thus, in Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, the latter’s canvasses constitute the site of a diagrammatic ‘battle’ against cliché, as against figuration and representation in their ‘Royal’ modalities (2003, 86–98). In the cinema books, meanwhile, Deleuze’s noetic philosophy is forcefully returned, drawing upon a long critical tradition − from the Soviet School to contemporary French criticism in the Cahiers du Cinéma − dedicated to the proposition that the fluid and dynamic interaction of images on the cinema screen might enter into catalytic relations with a spectator whose mentation is constructed in a complementary fashion.

But Deleuze’s intervention is at once more idiosyncratic and far more contemporary than this. For the ‘pre-war’ model of a political cinema, such as might ‘shock’ the spectator into action, evokes a stable or coherent ‘people’ which might serve as the subjects for such ideological demystifications. By the 1980s, however, a multiplicity of factors − the break-up of traditional labour movements in the developed West, the consolidation of totalitarianism in the Soviet sphere, a generalised ‘incredulity towards metanarratives,’ to use the Lyotardian parlance − problematise this traditionally political model. It is to this clutch of issues that Deleuze will turn, advancing, across the latter stages of Cinema II, a protracted discussion of how such a ‘people’ might be thought in the post-war world.

Belief in the World

Deleuze’s starting point, in pursuing a political cinema apt to this post-war condition, is perhaps an unexpected one. ‘Restoring our belief in the world − this is the power of modern cinema…’ he will write, ‘whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world’ (2013, 177). This is certainly one of Deleuze’s most unexpected claims, and its context and implications require careful excavation. Importantly, this is not a belief in any pre-ordained or pre-distributed world, such as would replicate the ‘belief’ of religious orthodoxy. Rather, drawing on the unique confluence of Nietzsche, Marx and Spinoza which informs his politics, this is a revolutionary belief in the world’s immanent and infinite capacity to become other than it is − a fact with which the indexical ontology of cinema is intimately connected, as we shall see.

The idea that we no longer ‘believe’ in the world is perhaps a familiar one. A universe of contemporary conditions − from mood-deadening pharmacological interventions to stubborn, obstructive inaction in repose to climate change − seems to attest to a generalised scepticism about the ‘world’ as a figure with which we might meaningfully interact. This is undoubtedly the consequence of what Mark Fisher has described as ‘capitalist realism’, an episteme encapsulated in that apparently irrevocable sentiment, attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, ‘that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (2009, 2). And it is most certainly towards this same confluence that Deleuze addresses himself, writing, ‘the modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as though they only half concerned us’ (2013, 177). In place of a ‘world’ in which we might participate, he explains, ‘it is the world which looks to us like a bad film’ (2013, 177).

Deleuze will once more approach this problem on the noetic register. This lack of belief follows from the demise of a regulatory neural structure he will dub, following Henri Bergson, the ‘sensory-motor schema’ (2013, x); a milieu-responsive network of nervous affects which ensures that incoming sense data and outgoing motor action are meaningfully coordinated. This schema − for Deleuze, as for Bergson − selectively ‘frames’ reality, legislating over incoming sense data in terms of its utility for potential action. And while it is therefore practically useful, this schema is also fundamentally conservative − constituting a predetermined space of possible actions, in a model which sees both action and movement ‘obey laws which are based on the distribution of centres of forces in space’ (2013, 133). The sensory-motor schema, in other words, far from a ‘natural’ orientation of the nervous-system, replicates habitual and culturally determined ways of seeing and of acting − a fact which renders its workings eminently political.

For Deleuze indeed, this schema is reproduced in and by the ‘classical’ or ‘action-images’ of most commercial cinema, in which characters propel forward narrative arcs through sensible interactions with milieux. This model sees all events in diegetic space rendered ‘meaningful’ by the trajectories of narrative, which subordinates all manner of alternate and aberrant movements to its own hegemonic and central structure. But it is just this schema which has become impossible in the post-war world. The catastrophes of the 20^th century, Deleuze will claim, have thoroughly confounded it at both the individual and collective levels, causing it to shatter and to collapse − a fact he will find reflected in the listless wanderings and vague trajectories of Italian neorealism and the films of the various post-war New Waves. As Deleuze explains

The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations that we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These are ‘any-spaces-whatever’ [espaces quelconques], deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers (2013, x).

The themes here are again familiar − echoing the interventions of Lyotard and Adorno. There is simply no action commensurate with a horror as vast as Auschwitz, or indeed a banality as irrevocable as the autogenetic unfurling of post-war suburbia. The contemporary world is simply too big, too autonomous, its political subjects – importantly − too diffuse and atomised, for any meaningful motricity, much less political action to adhere. In Deleuze’s words, ‘the link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief’ (2013, 177).

Deleuze’s claim, here, is not that political action ceases in the 20^th century. Rather, as we shall see, his argument is at once more difficult and precise: sensory-motor action has come to appear impossible in the post-war world − it is ‘unthinkable’ − and it is this very impossibility which must serve as the condition for new styles of thinking and of acting to emerge. Indeed, the political becomings which increasingly interest Deleuze after his encounter with Guattari, and which we might broadly describe as ‘minor’ − the struggles of decolonisation, of women, students, prisoners, the ‘mad’ − are those which crystalise at just this juncture, as dominant modes of collective political action fragment into a multiplicity of disparate and disjunctively related resistances.

For Deleuze, this new political reality is expressed in what he will describe as the ‘time images’ of the post-war cinema. In the sumptuous and difficult films of neorealism and the New Waves − from Resnais to Varda, Antonioni to Tarkovsky − the ordering movement of sensory-motor narrative subsides, allowing a multiple and multivalent temporality to saturate the screen. Thus, in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, an initial ‘mystery’ − the disappearance of a young woman during a pleasure cruise on the Mediterranean − is strangely and abruptly forgotten by both characters and director, submerged in an ocean of confused and apparently disconnected images. In Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, meanwhile, protagonists float through scenes of urban decay, unable to act ‘meaningfully’ because adrift on the plural rhythms of a vast and indifferent city.

These are films which express situations so complex, powers so profound, that the sensory-motor schema can no longer bring its powers of recognition to bear. And in keeping with Deleuze’s broader political ontology of thought, this incapacity, this ‘unthinkable’ state of affairs, is that which causes thought to be reborn. Importantly however, this new thought − the condition likewise for new styles of acting − is indifferent to the certainties engendered by the sensory-motor schema. Rather than images about which we can be ‘sure’, the post-war cinema produces images which serve as the object of a tentative and nascent perceptual belief.

The fundamental role of belief in the functioning of thought is a theme we can trace as far back as Deleuze’s first monograph, his 1953 study of Hume. Hume, Deleuze explains, ‘laicized belief’ (1991, ix), removing, through his artful elaboration and ultimate transcendence of scepticism, the epistemological fetish for a means by which subjectivity might ‘hook on’ to the given, in favour of a pragmatics according to which the subject is composed of a series of habitually practiced ‘beliefs’ about its world − that there are objects, that they are subject to causation, that there is an experiencing ‘I’ and so forth. By Difference and Repetition, belief is associated with the third synthesis of time, and the Nietzschean eternal return, which Deleuze will describe as ‘a belief of the future, a belief in the future’ (1994, 90), a creative belief in the world’s capacity for change.

In Cinema II, Deleuze returns to this theme, arguing that the constitutive role played by belief in the context of thought is brought to particular intensity with the case of cinema, which, in terms of its inherently ‘illusory’ reality, constitutes an artform uniquely implicated with belief. While in theatre, for instance, the fact of our embodied ‘presence’ before the events means that we can be perceptually ‘sure’ of what we see, the cinematographic illusion − in its consistent deployment of experientially impossible space-times, its constant comingling of dream, flashback and hallucination − offers up no such certainty, drawing out a particularly intense form of perceptual belief. ‘It is clear from the outset that cinema had a special relationship with belief’, Deleuze explains, going further, indeed, to claim that, ‘there is a Catholic quality to cinema’ (2013, 176).

At face value, this latter claim may seem strange indeed, however it not without precedent. Erwin Panofsky, writing in 1934, had claimed that film, ‘called into being by a co-operative effort in which all contributions have the same degree of permanence, is the nearest modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral’ (1995, 30). In Fonction du Cinéma, meanwhile, the art historian, medical doctor and critic Élie Faure had written that cinema is, ‘today, the most “Catholic”, means of expression that the evolution of ideas and techniques has put at the disposal of man, if we want to return to this word its original, human sense’ (1954, 4). ² And indeed the basis of these claims is persuasive. Cinema, like Catholicism, deploys a set of universalist tropes which have demonstrated an impressive capacity for translation into different semiotic situations globally. Catholicism itself is distinctly cinematic, deploying a grand mise-en-scène of Apostles, villains and heroes, spread across audacious and exotic sets − while cinema, with its great deco temples occupying pride of place on street corners and in the weekly routine (a Saturday night mass to replace that of Sunday morning) constitutes in turn, in Deleuze’s words, a ‘cult which takes over the circuit of the cathedrals’ (2013, 176).

But there is more than collaborative effort, universalising semiotics and the question of a certain perceptual ‘faith’ in common between church and cinema. Essential, for Deleuze, is the fact that cinema constitutes an art of the masses − in the dual sense of the word − such as imbues it with a simultaneously spiritual and political power. As Deleuze explains

…from the outset, Christianity and revolution, the Christian faith and the revolutionary faith, were the two poles which attracted the art of the masses… hence it developed either in the direction of a transformation of the world by man, or in the discovery of an internal and higher world than man himself…(2013, 176)

Cinema, indeed, constitutes an art at the apex of this latter pole, its confluence with revolutionary faith finding ultimate expression in the figure of Eisenstein, for whom, in the early years of the Bolshevik experiment, a largely illiterate Russian public might be awakened to their revolutionary consciousness by the dialectical collisions of the celluloid image. Alongside his fervent belief in the revolutionary promise of the cinematic form, Eisenstein will also describe cinema as ‘one of the most characteristic reflections of man’s spiritual activity’ (1977, 193), and indeed a strangely secular spirituality crystallises across 20^th century cinema, commensurate with its luminous distance from the ‘everyday’.

Tarkovsky’s sprawling films, for instance, constitute a self-professed attempt to generate a ‘new spirituality’ (Skakov 2012, 213), uniquely conditioned by the material circumstances of presenting religious content in the context of strict Soviet censorship. Andrei Rublev’s (1961) vistas of medieval Russia, in which we move from molecular treatments of cracked or spattered paint, drops of water or of flittering ashes, up to vast tableaux of extras engaged in battle or industry − often within the same shot − constitute a cinematic cosmology which oscillates between patterns observable in both the vast and the minute. Stalker’s (1979) saturated mise en scène, in which religious iconography, syringes, weapons, coins and clocks form a montage of interlocking symbols submerged beneath a ‘film’ of tepid water, gives us a worn-out collection of worldly matters, later sublimated by the messianic emergence in full-colour of the telepathic little girl, riding atop the Stalker’s shoulders. Such films constitute a high-water mark in the production of a cinematic spirituality, one in which our ‘link’ with the world, in all of its tenuousness and complexity, is made manifest.

There can be little doubt that the specific vocabulary of a spiritual/revolutionary tendency toward ‘belief in the world’ in Deleuze’s work on cinema emerges from the influence of both Eisenstein and Élie Faure. But a third and more thoroughly philosophical axis, formed by Deleuze’s Nietzschean and Spinozist commitments, determines the unique specificities of this belief. For in order for it to have a revolutionary function, this cannot be belief in the ‘link’ with a given world, in which all values are already distributed – such as in the orthodoxies of organised religion. Indeed, it is via recourse to Deleuze’s profound – and often perverse – Spinozism that we might grasp exactly how the notion of belief might be purified of its doxic residues, opening the way for a style of thought synonymous with the revolutionary production of the new.

A cinematic Spinozism

When Spinoza provides his famous definition VI, writing ‘by reality and perfection I understand the same thing’ (IId6), we may rightly question the efficacy of his philosophy from any political (much less revolutionary) point of view. If reality and perfection are absolutely equivalent, then according to what orientation would we strive to change anything, to act at all? However, as Antonio Negri has noted (1991, 4), the history of philosophy has in effect afforded us ‘two Spinozas’, one who is broadly rationalist and materialist, who ‘expresses the highest and most extensive development of the cultural history of its time’, and the other, who ‘accomplishes a dislocation and projection of the ideas of crisis and revolution’. This tension, Negri will claim, is such that ‘the first is the author of the capitalist order, the second is perhaps the author of a future constitution’ (1991, 4). Spinoza, in other words, presents us with an anomaly which resists subsumption within our (already ideological) history of ideas, an ‘absolute exception’ (1991, 5), irreducible to any systemisation with which me might approach it.

We may well argue, indeed, that this ‘anomalous’ status is the common thread linking Spinoza to Deleuze, particularly given criticisms of Spinoza’s ‘political’ utility often closely resemble those levelled at Deleuze. Paradigmatic are those of Alain Badiou, who accuses Deleuze of an unconscious status quo monism, writing, for instance, that

[Deleuze] came to tolerate the fact that most of his concepts were sucked up… by the doxa of the body, desire, affect, networks, the multitude, nomadism and enjoyment into which a whole contemporary ‘politics’ sinks, as if into a poor man’s Spinozism (2009, 35).

Leaving aside the complexities of the Badiou-Deleuze schism, it is important to say that Badiou has here misread Deleuze in the terms of this ‘first Spinoza’, rather than the second, for whom we may well say that reality is perfection insomuch as reality is difference and change. Reality, thus conceived, requires of us a style of thought which is fundamentally open to novelty and emergence, in a model according to which thinking itself might become revolutionary praxis. To explicate this complex axis of Deleuze’s political philosophy, however, we must briefly explicate Spinoza.

Spinoza famously argues throughout the Ethics that there is a single immanent substance, which is God or nature (Ip14). As such, everything exists and acts in such a way as is necessary in accordance with God’s nature, and does so without an external end or purpose. This rejection of any transcendent conception of divinity thus problematises the very possibility of normative ‘natural law’ as it had hitherto been imposed by both state and church. As Spinoza writes, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

We conclude therefore that God is described as a legislator or a prince, and as just, merciful etc., only because of the limited understanding of the common people and their lack of knowledge, and that in reality God acts and governs all things from the necessity of his own nature and perfection alone, and his decrees and volitions are eternal truths and always involve necessity (2007, 64).

The implications of this philosophical manoeuvre are vast. Not only does Spinoza call into question the very premise of state and religious power – that legislative proscriptions over and above human behaviours can be derived from scripture – he opens the space for a radical self-determination of individuals, given that their natures and actions must invariably be seen as modular expressions of divine will.

Far, therefore, from creating a kind of imbricated homogeneity from which we can no longer derive difference or multiplicity, Deleuze reads this ‘univocal’ premise (alongside that of Duns Scotus) as a condition for thinking genuine difference or singularity. As he explains, in Difference and Repetition

…the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same… the essence of univocal being is to include individuating differences, while these differences do not have the same essence and do not change the essence of being… (1994, 36)

And while Deleuze will claim that Spinoza – in positing the modes as dependent on substance (and not vice versa) does not ultimately succeed in thinking difference without identity ³ – Deleuze’s commitment to radical immanence sees substance and its plural modalities understood as fundamentally inextricable.

Importantly, this plurivocal metaphysics is therefore – for Deleuze as for Spinoza – simultaneously the condition for an ethics. The architecture of this Spinozist-Deleuzian ethics is complex, and involves a highly specific lexicon, which constraints of space do not allow me to treat fully here. ⁴ Suffice it to say that from these metaphysical terms, Spinoza advances a definition of freedom according to which singular ‘bodies’ (understood in the broadest possible sense) are free insomuch as they express divine substance to the full extent and in the full exercise of their unique (modal) powers. The essence of singular beings must be properly understood to accord with their own capacities to self-determine and individuate – to affect and be affected – expressing their singularity in ways which extend capacities for action and resist external repressions. This is therefore an ethics dedicated to the multi-lateral increase of potentialities, and such as must become a politics, given that such singularities exist simultaneously. Or as Negri explains

The singularity is free. Freedom is the form of the singular being. There is an identity between the singular being and its practical nature. Necessity is not contradictory with freedom but only a sign of the ontological absoluteness of freedom (1991, 83).

In other words, Spinoza’s metaphysical premise – that reality, as God, is perfection – becomes an ethical premise – that difference and multiplicity is to be affirmed as the expression of this perfection, in a move consonant with Spinoza’s advocacy for religious tolerance and individual liberty. At the same time, this ethics has political implications, given that the ideal political state is one which would afford the conditions for the broadest possible diversity and difference of individuation(s).

Deleuze adopts this model in various places across his oeuvre, given its fertility for thinking a politics adequate to his metaphysical commitments to both multiplicity and immanence. For our purposes, what’s important is that it is therefore belief in a very specific world which Deleuze advocates, indeed an open plurality of worlds, ushered in when we take seriously a (Spinozist) natural philosophy of necessity. Belief in the world must be understood as belief in the world’s capacity to be multiple, to elaborate itself by becoming other than it is, a belief which is therefore thoroughly fertile with the possibilities of a revolutionary politics. From an ethico-political perspective, this approach may still seem vague or abstract, especially once removed from the political circumstances of Spinoza’s own milieu. ⁵ However, Kathrin Thiele rightly notes the radical pragmatism inherent to Deleuze’s deployment of Spinozism, when she writes

First we have to adequately understand the rigorous philosophical demand for an immanence immanent only to itself that is so fundamental to Deleuze’s thought. His strong commitment to immanence and nothing but immanence already turns every ontological endeavour into a practical one, and that is into an endeavour driven by an ethico-political impetus (2010, 31).

In this sense, a Deleuzian injunction toward belief must only ever be understood in terms of a pragmatics, a sense that in the very act of believing in a certain kind of world, we commence the task of bringing it into being (or, more properly, becoming).

Thus, the ‘link’ between humanity and the world, properly understood, constitutes a belief in the world’s capacity to change, to become an open plurality of worlds and not to calcify in any preordained manner, according to any transcendent principle. And it is this link, argues Deleuze, which has become untenable in the modern world. Evacuated of the potentiality for political action, traditionally understood as a function of the sensory-motor schema, the pure ‘optical’ and ‘sound’ situations of the time-image (which is to say situations which are no longer ‘sensory-motor’, but rather unthought and as such, can only be sensed) precipitate a kind of thinking which must take the reconstruction of such a belief as its essential mission. As Deleuze explains

The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith… Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link… restoring our belief in the world – this is the power of modern cinema… whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world (2013, 177).

The prescience of this contention, in the context of capitalist realism and anthropogenic climate change – which present themselves at entwined inevitabilities – is profound. It has become all but an impossibility to imagine the emergence of a world, or of worlds, that exceed the logic(s) of the present one, a fact that Deleuze not unconvincingly traces to the crisis of modernity in the jaws of the Second World War. But in believing that there exists a link between humans and the world they are destroying, and furthermore that this world is plurivocal, radically undetermined and redolent with differential potentialities, we might commence the task of changing it.

Minority cinema

But who are these believers, given that this shattering and disillusionment is so profound? How might we identify the agents which would enact such a belief, given that the concept of ‘humanity’ itself is so thoroughly problematized by the catastrophes of the 20^th century, the impending disasters of the 21^st? Deleuze’s answer to these questions will draw on the theme of ‘minoritarian’ enunciation, such as he had developed in his work with Guattari, in both A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka: Towards a minor literature. And central once again is the ‘unthinkable’, which this time takes the form of an absence, articulated in an incessant refrain across his work alone and with Guattari: ‘the people are missing’ (2013, 223). Indeed, as ‘minor’ literatures and cinema attest, the people also must be thought anew.

Classical Soviet and American cinema, claims Deleuze, deployed a concrete or stable notion of ‘the people’ as socius or body-politic. The status or ideal organisation of this ‘people’ could be the source of (often bloody) contest, but their appearance as a priori principle for political thought and aesthetic representation was unquestioned. We must think here of some paradigmatic examples: the crowds in Eisenstein, which surge and seethe as though a single organism, dividing into particulate units before reconverging into a whole. In Hollywood, the musicals of Berkeley, in which showgirls swirl and organise into elaborate geometric shapes, perfectly coalescing the ideal tenets of the American socius – democratic interchangeability and Fordist mass-production. And later, this tendency evolves, in Hollywood, into that of the Western, and that other Ford, to distribute a ‘people’ constituted by ragged, self-sufficient individuals, through films which ‘testify’ to the hardships of their existence (2013, 223).

The same conditions, however, which led to the collapse of the sensory-motor schema, have problematised this hitherto stable (if contestable) premise, causing ‘the people’, as they had hitherto existed, to disappear. As Deleuze explains

In American and Soviet cinema, the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract. Hence the idea that cinema, as art of the masses, could be the supreme revolutionary or democratic art, which makes the masses a true subject. But a great many factors were to compromise this belief: the rise of Hitler, which gave cinema as its object not the masses become subject but the masses subjected; Stalinism, which replaced the unanimism of peoples with the tyrannical unity of a party; the break up of the American people, who could no longer believe themselves to be either the melting-pot of peoples past or the seed of a people to come (it was the neo-Western that first demonstrated this break-up). In short, if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet… the people are missing (2013, 223).

Of course this absence, so keenly and so suddenly felt in the late 20^th century West, has been the condition of ‘third world’ and ‘minority’ cinema since its inception. Here, the people are already missing, insofar as minority identities (paradigmatically post-colonial subjects) have never been permitted to properly appear within hegemonic orders of visibility. That not only individual subjectivity but collective identity are thoroughly problematised by the violence of colonisation is a fact Deleuze will claim is expressed by a number of filmmakers from non-Western contexts (Lino Brocka, Pierre Perrault, Glauber Rocha, Yılmaz Güney, Youssef Chahine, Ousmane Sembene). ⁶

Indeed it is to such ‘minoritarian’ enunciations that Deleuze will turn. Reflecting on the impasse encountered by Kafka, who found himself facing the entwined impossibilities of choosing not to write or of writing in the coloniser’s language (2013, 224), Deleuze identifies a third way, open to ‘minority’ auteurs

Kafka pointed to another path, a narrow path between the two dangers: precisely because ‘great talents’ or superior individualities are rare in minor literatures, the author is not in a condition to produce individual utterances which would be like invented stories; but also, because the people are missing, the author is in a situation of producing utterances which are already collective, which are like the seeds of the people to come, and whose political impact is immediate and inescapable (2013, 228).

In this context, Deleuze appoints cinema the grand task of preparing the way for a ‘people to come’. Claiming that ‘art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people’ (2013, 224).

The notion of a ‘people to come’ such as are immediately identity-less, obscure (and obscured) by current power relations and regimes of visibility, but who might emerge in a revolutionary becoming whereby the ‘subjected’ become ‘subjects’, offers up a compelling model of how a ‘revolutionary consciousness’ might be understood in terms beyond the inevitabilities of dialectical materialism. In taking up majoritarian forms (cinema), and using them to produce images such as might reflect the situation of minor identities, art therefore emerges as a powerful machinery for producing collective identities and movements from ‘outside’. Such identities, movements and consciousness do not pre-exist this process − before which they are, indeed, ‘unthinkable’ − rather, they are called into becoming through this very action.

Again, this model is far from utopian or hopelessly abstract. The Afrofuturistic experiments in the ‘defacement’ of public property by early wildstyle graffiti artists like Rammellzee have changed the face of every major metropolis on Earth. Simultaneous investigations into synthesised music and sampling in New York’s b-boy underground replicated early African American experiments with electrified instruments to ensure that the world continues to dance to minoritarian music. From the Mississippi Delta to the Harlem Renaissance, isolated and localised expressions of ‘black’ identity have worked to call forth a people from the catastrophic ‘social death’ attendant to the middle passage. That these minor literatures have been incorporated so completely into majoritarian discourse (and markets) is dual evidence both of the profundity of capitalist ‘apparatuses of capture’ and of these praxes’ profound dynamism and power in the formation of subject groups. But how might minoritarian becomings elude this ‘capture’? What forces and functions could instigate this initially opaque undertaking? It is in Deleuze’s account of an encounter with the ‘intolerable’, that I will conclude, washing us up once more on the shores of the ‘unthinkable’, or ‘outside’.

The intolerable

Deleuze’s discussion of the ‘intolerable’ situations which might provoke a people into becoming begins with one of his most profound theoretical axes, the noetic philosophy which he develops with reference to Antonin Artaud. As far back as Difference and Repetition, Artaud’s meditation on the gruesome impossibility of thought, of any thought, propelled Deleuze towards a critique of habitual, anthropocentric and dogmatic ways of thinking. Deleuze resumes this theme, with a new, political colouring in the latter part of Cinema II, writing

Artaud never understood powerlessness to think as a simple inferiority which would strike us in relation to thought. It is a part of thought, so that we should make our way of thinking from it, without claiming to be restoring an all-powerful thought. We should rather make use of this powerlessness to believe in life, and to discover the identity of thought and life… (2013, 175)

This ‘identity’ of thought and life indicates what is at stake in Deleuze’s noetic philosophy. Thought, conceived as radically immanent to the plane(s) on which it is situated – alongside matter, human and inhuman forces, a qualitatively evolving chaosmos of actual-virtual relations – is no mere reflection on an already distributed real. Properly understood, as a ‘thought from outside’, thinking creates the new, bringing forth previously unimaginable forms of life.

This conception, which drives Deleuze to the ‘thought without an image’ sketched in Difference and Repetition, becomes, in Cinema II, the remit of a politics sculpted by the apparent hopelessness of the 20^th century. If it is no longer possible to imagine a ‘world’, or indeed a ‘people’, which elude capture by the axioms of capital, then this very impossibility must become the condition for our belief, and as such for our becomings. As Deleuze explains, ‘it is as if modern political cinema were no longer constituted on the basis of a possibility of evolution or revolution, like the classical cinema, but on impossibilities, in the style of Kafka: the intolerable’ (2013, 226).

Deleuze once more evokes the neorealists in approaching this cinema of the intolerable – De Sica’s Umberto D and its scenes of quotidian squalor, Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and its vistas of rubble – in short, as we have seen, we have arrived at a cinema which confronts a power so profound, a situation of such despair, that the sensory-motor schema can no longer bring its powers of recognition to bear. Deleuze illustrates this ‘overwhelmed’ cinematic perception with an example from Umberto D, which, in muted tones and with a cast of non-actors, tells the story of the titular character, an old man desperately trying to maintain his rented room. In one scene, we see

…the young maid going into the kitchen in the morning, making a series of mechanical, weary gestures, cleaning a bit, driving the ants away from a water fountain, picking up the coffee grinder, stretching out her foot to close the door with her toe. And her eyes meet the pregnant woman’s belly, and it is as though all the misery in the world were going to be born. This is how, in an ordinary or everyday situation, in the course of a series of gestures, which are insignificant but all the more obedient to simple sensory-motor schemata, what has suddenly been brought about is a pure optical situation to which the little maid has no response or reaction. The eyes, the belly, that is what an encounter is… Of course, encounters can take very different forms… but they follow the same formula (2013, 2).

Robbed, by concrete socio-political circumstances, of the possibility for coherent sensory-motor response, both characters in, and viewers of, neorealist cinema thus come to grasp new and hitherto obscured aspects of the real. Faced with the raw optical and sonic data afforded by the screen-image, we perceive the mechanics of a pure ‘encounter’ in terms prior to any predetermined social inscription.

And these new encounters, indeed, are capable of engendering visual revelations and dispositions of thought which shatter socio-politically determined conventions of perception derived from the sensory-motor schema. In one example to which Deleuze frequently returns – Rossellini’s Europe ‘51 (1952) – Irene (Ingrid Bergman), the wife of a wealthy industrialist, will be driven by the suicide of her son to a new regime of ‘pure’ perception, in which hitherto subterranean relations structuring the real are suddenly made manifest. Roaming the slums of post-war Rome, entering the factories upon which her affluence is built, Irene sees the factory workers and in an apparent ‘hallucination’ believes she is seeing convicts. As Deleuze explains

…if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character, because it no longer has to be ‘justified’ for better or for worse… The factory creature gets up, and we can no longer say ‘Well, people have to work…’ I thought I was seeing convicts: the factory is a prison, school is a prison, literally, not metaphorically... (2013, 21)

As such, the shattering of the sensory-motor schema produces a concrete political affectivity, revealing the ‘intolerable’ conditions of capitalistic, fascistic and otherwise repressive social arrangements within which it has functioned.

And it is this ‘intolerable’ which, in keeping with the noetic philosophy we have already discussed, forces us into the activity of forging new, creative and anti-fascistic lines of flight, be they in philosophy, art, or indeed political praxis. As David Lapoujade explains

Everything begins, each time, with a ‘vision’ of something intolerable, unjust, or shocking. Such events affect not only individuals; sometimes an entire social field ‘sees’ something intolerable and rises up. We do not live in a world where all political action is impossible, we live in a world where the impossible is the condition of every action, of every new creation of possibilities (2014, 275).

In other words, this is not a mere ‘revelation’ of a political reality which was hitherto obscured. The production of affects in such an image must be understood in the immanent, metaphysical terms of Henri Bergson − not as mimetic double or derived representation, but as an individuation of forces with its own affective powers. Once situated at the level of the intensive variation and becoming of matter, or, to transpose things into terms more hospitable to politics – an individual or social ‘body’ – the ‘intolerable’ and ‘impossible’ affects extended by a given cinematic image, call forth responses in the ‘images’ to which they relate (minds, social bodies, collective identities). Or, as Lapoujade continues

The perceptual or affective shock is inseparable from the powers it awakens in each of us… perceptions communicate directly with the plane of intensive matters of which we are composed. A redistribution of powers is effected that makes perception an event. At that point, but only at that point, we stop thinking in terms of the future and rather in terms of becoming. A becoming is first of all this: powers that rise up and pull us toward something non-personal and, in this way, ‘political’ (2014, 275).

If this vocabulary of ‘political becomings’, sounds hopelessly abstracted from the bloody struggles of the real, we might turn, in closing, to a concrete example.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) – co-directed with Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian filmmaker – provides a compelling example of the capacity of film to extend multilateral affects – in both its subjects and its spectators – which might produce qualitative changes in individual and collective bodies. Focussing on the aftermath of the 1965-66 massacre of between 500,000 and two to three million Indonesian ‘communists’ (though this designation became a short-hand for anyone the perpetrators sought to remove from their communities, including ethnic Chinese Indonesians and Christians), by government backed militias, the film sees actual perpetrators of the massacres recruited into the project of producing a narrative film about their own exploits.

This ‘film within a film’ is as chilling as it is absurd, with the group of ageing self-professed paramilitary ‘gangsters’ producing elaborate costumes and dance routines, stylising their violence in accordance with their acknowledged obsession with Hollywood genre films: musicals and Westerns. The locus of the film is perpetrator Anwar Congo, who, initially a thug frequenting the local movie houses, eventually found himself leading a death squad in North Sumatra and purportedly killing 1,000 people himself – primarily by garrotting. Early in the film, Congo takes Oppenheimer and his crew to the rooftop of a building where he murdered these ‘communists’, proudly dancing the cha-cha-cha for which he was infamous at the time.

Through a string of outlandish and gratuitously violent self-staged scenes, however, the unrepentant Congo appears to become gradually aware of the gravity of his crimes. At one point, he is hooded and ‘tortured’ by his fellow perpetrators, ultimately stopping the shoot as he suffers a nervous breakdown. Through the inhuman presence of the camera, and the impersonal theatricality of performance, Congo’s ‘sensory-motor’ justification for his actions appears to fall away in the context of an ‘encounter’ with their pure ‘intolerability’. Later, he returns to the rooftop, retching repeatedly in a ‘pure’ bodily response to his own violence, consecrating one of the most arresting scenes in contemporary cinema. ⁷

This transformative production of affects at the individual level is replicated across the social body, with underground showings of the film in Indonesia sparking widespread critical discussion of the killings in the context of a state which still sanctions and protects their perpetrators (Simpson 2014). The relatively simple machinery of the film − far from a sumptuous blockbuster or a complex narrative − judiciously inserted and set to work in Indonesian society, not to mention in a West blithely unaware of its own implication in the killings, demonstrates the powerful political affectivity open to cinema ‘when it stops being bad’ (Deleuze 2013, 177). At the individual level of Congo’s body, and at the molar level of the social body, this is an instance of change. In a world which appears so irrevocably unchangeable, we must make a careful note of it.