My PhD Project: Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency

Introduction | Chapter One – The Ecological Emergency | Chapter Two – Grief, Sensation, and Dissensus | Chapter Three – Contextual Review of Practice
Chapter Four – Positioning of Practice | Conclusion | Bibliography

Chapter Two – Grief, Sensation and Dissensus
As a way to connect viewers with the ecological emergency, Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency has experimented with cinematic devices to produce an emotional response through the affect of sensation.  This chapter positions the provocations for thinking through this objective theoretically. It covers the writers, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.  Each has stimulated strands of thinking around political and ethical considerations and provided tools for iterative reflection on aesthetics that have informed the creative outcomes of this project.

From the position of the research outlined here, corporeal vulnerabilities, evoked from sensations of loss and sadness have influenced the thinking and the making.  Throughout this process I have wrestled with the painful affects of melancholy, which then evolved into a kind of coping through making. Working on the creative outcomes and thinking through the critical frameworks has been an existential process of mourning the loss of an imaginary world, while recalibrating my senses through an even stranger, ambivalent experience of attempting to reimagine it again through practice.  To capture the sense of melancholy that activated this project, a discussion on the political potential of grief serves as a way to understand the socio-political responses to the ecological crisis.

This argument has been motivated by Judith Butler’s work on collective grief and the processes of mourning, as articulated in Precarious Life and Frames of War.  She extends her discourse into the social experiences of affect and how “it disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way, to let certain dimensions of the world in and to resist others.”[1]

Grief, Mourning, Vulnerability and Response:

Butler’s writing on the political potential of grief and mourning is drawn from the context of her post-9/11 experience of living in the United States.  In the shadows of the wars that occurred in its aftermath, Butler asks: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?”[2]  Her expanded contributions on collective, affective responses in politics and conflict have supported my thinking about ethical and political positioning of this project. 

Precarious Life and Frames of War are concerned with human responses—corporeal (affective), ethical and political—to catastrophic events. Butler asks in what ways do mediated political narratives and social experiences drive or deflect perceptions of loss? One provocation is her question: “Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives?”[3]  The politico-militaristic reactions to the attacks on America are rationalised in such away that the ‘Other’ lives (Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani) are deemed of less value or not ‘lives’ at all, effecting social perceptions.[4]  The State response to the violence incurred on the victims in New York in 2001 was more violence and revenge over reconciliation; “consolidating [the United States’] reputation as a militaristic power with no respect for lives outside of the First World.”[5]  This reputation was exacerbated by the swiftness with which President Bush directed the country (just ten days after the attacks) to dispense with grief and move towards “resolute action.”[6]

Butler’s argument is that when we fear the act of grieving, such fear will push us to quickly resolve the grief and “banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly.”[7]  What we lose by doing this is the opportunity to be vulnerable under the painful spell of grief.  To replace vulnerability with one of violence disallows a capacity to empathise, and in doing so we forgo “our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another.”[8]

Butler offers methods for thinking through responses to crisis subjects as collective responsibility.  This position is a little different to Bennett’s and Morton’s presented in Chapter One and I understand the humanist approaches of Butler’s run counter to the neo-materialist philosophies of Bennett and Morton. Although they are each calling into question “ontolog[ies] of individualism,”[9] Butler remains wholly humanist in her approach. Where Bennett and Morton offer an alternate for conceptualizing the subject as just another vibration in the world,[10] deprioritising the human in favour of a more interconnected and interdependent material position.  Essential to Butler is her stress on the collective good, filtered through the recognition of a Levinasian ‘Other’ who must be recognised as coming before the self-interest of a subjective ‘I’,[11] believing that the self cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world.”[12]

Central to Levinas’ theory of the other is the ‘face’, which Butler adopts as an ethical commitment in her essay “Precarious Life”, clarifying that his use of the face does not encompass the full recognition of the face, since the face of the other is never representable, but is the key to one’s moral obligation to the other’s otherness in the face’s its non-representability. 

For Levinas… the human face is not represented by the face. Rather the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give.[13]

Thomas Claviez, in his attempt to reconcile an ‘ecocentric’ argument within Levanasian ethics, identifies the problem of situating the ecology as the ‘Other,’ because “in the context of [Levinas’s] philosophy [it] is a human other – as arising out of a moment of confrontation (of the face-to-face) that precedes all knowledge about this other.”  My ethical position, in this context, relies on thinking the ecological emergency through a humanist lens that wants to take account of us (the humans), reconsidering the methods in which we encounter and respond to the world, and the other non-human entities we share it with.  Claviez points out that any “ecocentric” environmental ethics demands that it be communicated in “anthropocentric” ways.  As well as citing his position on what makes us “other than nature” and “nature our ‘other’:

Our abilities to love, to talk, to reflect, to plan, to dress, have all been drawn upon to distinguish us from animals, plants, microbes, and stones. These distinctions all point to what is different from us, that is, what makes us other than nature, or rather, what makes nature our “other”.[14] 

Butler’s reworking of Levinas’ ethics calls on us to sense the loss of the ‘Other’ affectively, perceiving it and valuing it without knowing it.[15]  Claviez argues, “if reason tells us that we should preserve nature, the prescriptive term ‘should’ in this formulation cannot, according to Levinas, be deduced from reason but has to precede it.”[16]  The Earth cannot easily be reconciled as a Levinasian ‘Other’ in his strictly human-centred methodology.  Christian Diehm concludes that the transgression of attempting a “Levinasian non-anthropocentrism” requires “developing aspects of Levinas’s thought in less strictly Levinasian directions.”[17]  These approaches imply…

…another concrete way of ‘awakening to the precariousness of the other’. A world in which myriad others follow their own trajectories appears to be one in which there are myriad possibilities for ethical encounter, innumerable occasions for realizing that we ought to arrange our lives such that we do not leave others in disarray.[18]

Butler says, “loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all.”[19]  We are all connected by loss in that we have all lost someone or something we care about.  How we respond to this sense of loss is at the ethical core of what Butler proposes is the political potential of grief.[20]

To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief – ‘Who have I become?’ or, indeed, ‘What is left of me?’ ‘What is it in the Other that I have lost?’ posits the ‘I’ in the mode of unknowingness.[21]

A physical register in the “mode of unknowingness” that Butler refers to, is a state of vulnerability that connects one to the world beyond the everyday experience of it.  To feel loss of the ‘Other’ means an alternate thinking of it; one that reaches beyond rational registers and seeks out an emotional connection.  To lose something we care about requires that we understand our own precariousness in relationship to it.  “One mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever.”[22]  Eileen Joy, in her essay “Blue,” makes a similar connection to the social potential of these affects to join collective human perception to the ecological emergency, suggesting that the world is now steeped in melancholy, our experience of it now enmeshed with its sadness:

Is depression, sadness, melancholy—feeling blue—always only taking place within the interior spaces of individually bounded forms of sentience and physiology, or is it in the world somehow, a type of weather or atmosphere, with the becoming-mad of the human mind only one of its many effects (a form of attunement to the world’s melancholy)?[23]

From the position of this research feeling sad and grieving about the world is a good thing.  Sadness is the emotion that emerges from the affective response to loss.  There is, Butler notes something enigmatic in the experience of loss.  It is a perplexing, ambiguous, one might say, heightened, but inexact corporeal state. “If mourning involves knowing what one has lost (and melancholia originally meant, to a certain extent, not knowing), then mourning would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom.”[24]  As noted earlier, part of the potential for empathy lies in the recognition that we cannot truly know the ‘Other’ and that that is okay, since the unknowable is also respect for the other’s distance.[25]  I am not suggesting that breaking free from a collective melancholy for the loss of natural environments, through a grieving process, will lead to an immediate shift in the polity to step up and stop the violent impacts contemporary modes of living have on the planet.  The barriers that confront such a radical reassessment and reaction to how we act in the world are complex, and the forces that resist such change are powerfully entrenched in the current conditions of our economic and political systems.  But maybe opening ourselves up to grief and owning up to a kind of unknowingness of the world, may present a hopeful shaft of light in the darkness. 

Sadness, like other emotions, changes us physiologically in its affects.  It potentially opens us up to thinking about our vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of human and non-human others.  This is empathy.  With empathy comes contemplation.[26]  It slows us down, concentrates us, and alters the way we see the world and our place in it.  Val Plumwood reminds us that the “moral reasoning” underpinning many “ethical theories” have “some version of empathy, putting ourselves in the other’s place, seeing the world to some degree from the perspective of an other.”[27]  I view the way we are treating the planet as sadly confusing, induced by a state of collective, cognitive dissidence, provoked by the dominant capitalist systems under which we exist.[28]  In short, as Levinas has already argued, it befits us, even if only selfishly, to adjust our worldview and by consequence our behaviours.

Butler notes:

To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt.[29]

With these thoughts of the ‘Other’ in mind, the experience of filming the world during this project taught me some ways to see and feel it anew.  It is not that I am out there diligently filming ecological disaster-sites as some kind of bearing witness, in fact I am resistant to this kind of representational mode. Rather it is my altered state of thinking that has directed the choices and consequently the recorded materials.  Brian Massumi describes this as “a thinking of perception in perception, in the immediacy of its occurrence, as it is felt — a thinking-feeling, in visual form.”[30]  From Butler’s perspective “one modality that defines the body,” and “animates responsiveness” is how we encounter our “unwilled proximity to others,” or “’come up against the world.’”[31]  The potential of this responsiveness exists in the possible affects that it evokes, becoming “not just the basis, but the very stuff of ideation and critique.”[32]  Affective encounters are transformative. To sense the world is more than just to see it.  Through sensations our perceptions enter into another state, moving feeling, and thus, thinking that moves into a different register.[33]

Butler’s argument stems from a critique of how we interpret the world around us and therefore how we respond to it, as an experience “that depends on social structures of perception.”[34]  The hegemonic forces that desire to mediate those responses have crafted the collective affect she describes, determined by dominant media.  It is not enough to destroy these “interpretive frameworks,” rather we must challenge these forces in order to be able to perceive the importance of other lives.  “Another life is taken in through all the senses, if it is taken in at all.”[35]  Our sense of loss is bound up in our interconnection to the ‘Other,’ our very survivability relies upon its survival, but we often do not to see it, or more specifically do not acknowledge, interpret, or respond to it.  It has been rendered invisible.  Inside this argument is a potent call to action. It is a call for social disruption and a reconfiguring of political ethics through redirecting our encounters with the world. “In creating new affects and powers of perception, percepts, monuments of sensation make us see and feel in a different way.  Peter Canning writes on Deleuze’s project, “Ethics means discovery, rediscovery of the virtual; invention, reinvention of the possible.”[36]

Most people do not pass through their days in a heightened state of receptivity to the nuances and layers of time, space and action that unfold around them.  Deleuze reflected that: “we perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs.”[37]  Our minds edit what is important for us to perceive in order to navigate our way successfully through our actions. Manning and Massumi point out that things fall away during our neurotypical journeys through life that displace “experiential immediacy.”  

The shortening of experience by habit and its reconstitution by reflection go neurotypically hand in hand with the greatest of fluidity. What falls out between habit and reflection, leaving a gap they work in concert to smooth over with the aid of language coming from the field of memory, is the coming alive of the field of experiential immediacy, in its emergent dance of attention.[38]

When I draw on Rancière’s project for support later, it is to find ways to agitate the “emergent dance of attention,” rupturing quotidian experiences of the world. As a method of connection it is central to the concerns of the practice.  Similarly, Manning and Massumi use the experiences of an autistic dispensation to articulate the differences between those in a neurotypical state and those who encounter the world in what one might say is a heighted or differently alerted state.  The “gap” that is “smoothed away,” normally, seems to me to be the affect that spills away and is lost in order to find our way through all of the noise of life.  In the spilling away we are directed to perceive of some things while blinded to others.  In a state of autism we might experience the world in a constant “dancing of attention,”[39] but most people do not.  Sometimes there is a physiological shift that affects subjective perception on the world.  Sickness, sadness, happiness, pharmaceuticals, trauma, myopathy, tiredness, psychopathy, time of life, and on, all of these things can cause us to perceive of the world through an adjusted lens.  This lens may sharpen or soften or bend our experiences of the world. One may feel more acutely connected to it, or radically alienated from it, by this shift in perception.  Altered states of experience affect us and make us think differently.

Deleuze – Sensation and Cinematic Time:

This project has sought approaches in the making that emphasise sensational encounters with the world through the material affects of cinema. For Deleuze “the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.”[40]  It is the aim of art through the material to “to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations.”  Each art form and artist will have their own methods to achieve these aims.  [41]

Steven Shaviro takes his lead from Bergson’s and Deleuze’s projects to argue: “cinematic perception is primordial to the very extent that it is monstrously prosthetic. It is composed, one might say, of the unconscious epiphenomena of sensory experience.”[42]  Percepts and affects are what are captured or made concrete in the material.  They are not in themselves perceptions or affections rather they are “the two basic types of sensation, of which the artwork may be said to be a composite.”[43] What makes cinema unique in the arts is that its percepts and affects might be seen as continuously becoming, while being fixed in the material as each frame advances, leaving lingering moments or echoes in the retina, persistence of vision, to which the brain responds as it is continuously becoming.  This quality of cinema is of significant philosophical interest for Deleuze’s project because “it is the form or rather the pure force of time which puts truth into crisis,”[44] and evidenced in his concept of the time-image, where for example, extended duration of shots, non-linear sequencing and irrational cutting evoke in the viewer a corporeal experience of time through the image. 

Deleuze’s books, Cinema 1 and 2, understand the importance of time or duration (durée) in cinema.  The books have allowed me to think more deeply about the material affects that exist in the construction of a cinematic image.  After WW2, symbolised by the horrors that came into the world with the holocaust and the new perceptual complexities this wrought, there was in Deleuze’s thesis a “shattering” of the “sensory-motor schema” of the movement-image (the indirect image of time as movement) that located his discourse in Cinema 1.[45]  This break opened cinema up to direct images of time, the time-image, which Deleuze focuses his attention on in Cinema 2.  Correspondingly this resonates most closely to the intent of the practice outlined here.  Contextually, I locate my discussion on elements concerned with qualities of duration, as well the power of the irrational cut (in sound and image) as an indexical element of temporal dislocation in the ‘image.’

Our experiences of duration in a cinematic context, indirect or direct, affect the capacity in which we register and think about the world. In this way, Rajchman notes, the experience of the cinematic “is a way of having ideas with images that introduces a new ‘psychomechanics,’ a new way of affecting us and our nervous systems.”[46]  The aspects of Deleuze’s thesis of the movement-image in Cinema 1, to which I have aligned my own concerns and practices, are focused on the transactions that occur in the transfer from perception into affection in the movement-image.  For Deleuze, these are cinematic images that are consistent with the kind of perception available to a pre-WW2 European world.  He provides examples of “great directors’” practices of the classic era to articulate how the three parts of the movement image operate in cinematic contexts.[47]  The affection-image operates as a pre-subjective interval between the perception-image and the action-image.  Colebrook summarises the movement image thus: “what makes the machine-like movement of the cinema so important is that the camera can ‘see’ or ‘perceive’ without imposing concepts. The camera does not organise images from a fixed point but itself moves across movements.”[48]  In short, it is an image of movement, and this image of movement is reliant on montages that collect the three parts of perception, affection, and action together in unbalanced combinations and concentrations of dominance. The dominant image of interest in this case is the affection-image with a particular focus on Deleuze’s borrowing of Pascal Augé’s notion of “any-space- whatevers [espace-quelqonques].”[49]

The Movement-Image:

In the “universe” of the movement image,[50] three distributed avatars — the affection-image, the perception-image and the action-image[51] — “determine a representation of time, but it must be noted that time remains the object of an indirect representation in so far as it depends on montage and derives from movement-images.”[52]  The perception image (the first material aspect of subjectivity) and the action-image (the second) make up two sides of a gap (the interval) of an indeterminate centre, which is the fleeting space occupied by the affection-image.[53]

Affection is what occupies the interval, what occupies it without filling it in or filling it up. It surges in the centre of indetermination, that is to say in the subject, between a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action. It is a coincidence of subject and object, or the way in which the subject perceives itself, or rather experiences itself or feels itself ‘from the inside.’ [54]

All films contain a combination of the three parts.  Although in every film, in its most elemental aspects, there is one type of image that dominates: “one can speak of an active, perceptive or affective montage, depending on the predominant type.”[55]  Throughout Cinema 1 Deleuze categorises and subcategorises the films and filmmakers he cites through these elements of the movement-image, identifying them by their most dominant characteristics. For example he defines Vertov’s as a cinema of the perception-image, Dreyer’s as affection, and Griffith’s as action. [56]  

The acentring and haptic qualities of cinematic perception open up limitless possibilities for ways of seeing the world.  Deleuze observes that one of cinema’s great advantages is “it lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon, the sections which it makes would not prevent it from going back up the path that natural perception comes down.”[57]  Because the cinema does not possess the capacity for “natural subjective perception…the mobility of its centres and the variability of its framings always lead it to restore vast acentred and deframed zones.”[58]  The indeterminacy of its centre in relation to cinematic perception, the movement between bodies and objects (nouns),[59] is what constructs a perception-image.[60]

The ocular grasping of the perception and its transfer into action is imperceptible as it passes through the interval.  “When qualities and powers are apprehended as actualised in states of things, in milieux which are geographically and historically determinable, we enter into the realm of the action-image.”[61] The world is perceived and then reacted to – but the amount of distance, lesser or greater, between the gap affects action. “The more the reaction ceases to be immediate and becomes truly possible action, the more the perception becomes distant and anticipatory and extracts the virtual action of things.”[62] In the interval sits the third material aspect of subjectivity, which is affection.[63]  Flaxman reads Bergson’s description of the neuro-network of perception and action as the “’sensory-motor schema…’ [where] images are recognized (as perception) and, in the interval (or affection), they are transformed (as action).”[64]  Deleuze extrapolates on this by identifying the relationship between affection and movement as:

The movement of translation is not merely interrupted in its direct propagation by an interval, which allocates on the one hand the received movement, and on the other the executed movement, and which might make them in a sense incommensurable. Between the two there is affection, which re-establishes the relation. But, it is precisely in affection that the movement ceases to be that of translation in order to become movement of expression, that is to say quality, simple tendency stirring up an immobile element.[65]

In its foundational aspects, I have thought about the movement-image in the construction of the movement vocabulary when I am framing the images in my practice.  For example, I have posited the questions, how does movement in the composition indirectly image time and to what purpose might that movement be harnessed or resisted to disrupt perceptual attention to that image, and direct affective responses through those disruptions?  Techniques utilised have included the use of linear framing, compression in the photography, and high-speed cinematography, in line with Vertovian applications of the material elements of cinema.[66]  In addition – I asked – how might the placement of dislocated content draw attention to the material by subtracting it from representational contexts? 

The Perception-Image and the Theory of the Interval:

Deleuze refined Vertov’s theory of the interval, “the space or division between photograms, shots, sequences – and how the organization of intervals informs the spatial representation of time in cinema,” conceptualizing it as a method to think about cinema as a kind of geometry.[67]  He considered Vertov “the inventor” of a particular type of objective perception-image,[68] which he alternately referred to as the “’gramme’, the ‘engramme’, [or] the ‘photogramme’.”[69]  Vertov’s methods were directed by his notion of the non-human kino-eye,[70] constructed through placing “together any given points in the universe, no matter where [he] recorded them.”[71]  Deleuze emphasises that the cine-eye is not just in reference to the camera, but also crucially it is the role of montage around the construction of cinematic perception.  Claire Colebrook’s tautology productively encapsulates this when she argues, “this liberation of the sequencing of images from any single observer, so the affect of cinema is the presentation of an ‘any point whatever,’” is what makes “cinema cinematic.”[72]  Montage carries “perception into things, to put perception into matter, so that any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however far these actions and reactions extend.”[73]  This carrying of perception into things and “gathering of any points in the universe” has been a consistent point of reference.

Vertov’s is a materialist cinema of montage, where “the photogramme is inseparable from the series which makes it vibrate in relation to the movement, which derives from it.”  He composed “the differential of perception” in his cinematic constructions, putting “the three inseparable aspects of a single going beyond into effect: from the camera to montage, from movement to the interval, from the image to the photogramme.”[74]  Rodowick summarises Deleuze’s reworking of Vertov’s theory thus:

…the interval no longer simply marks the distance between two consecutive images. Rather, on the one hand it correlates two or more images whose distances are incommensurable from the standpoint of human perception; on the other, it figures variation as the power of the whole, matter reacting on all its facets and in all of its parts, regardless of distance.[75]

Thinking the interval continues to elicit considerations on the assemblage of the cinematic whole.[76]  Vertov argued that the interval was the material transaction that emphasised the “art of movement.”[77]

In Vertov the interval of movement is perception, the glance, the eye. But the eye is not the too-immobile human eye; it is the eye of the camera, that is an eye in matter, a perception such as it is in matter, as it extends from a point where an action begins to the limit of the reaction, as it fills the interval between the two, crossing the universe and beating in time to its intervals.[78]

Throughout my practice I have experimented with Vertovian methods of cinematography and montage, applying multitudes of filming techniques,[79] and rapid and/or rhythmic cutting as a way to hold the viewer’s attention through carefully crafted cadences and graphic matches.  However, focusing in on the technical aspects of his cinema is only skimming the surface of his thesis.  Vital to understanding his cinema, is that it is more than a collection of special effects.  The “kino-eye, from the very moment of its conception, was not a matter of trick effects, or of kino-eye for its own sake…[but] the opportunity to make the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest…”[80] In 2012, while working on a project dedicated specifically to exploring these ‘techniques,’[81] I found myself perplexingly inoculated from their ‘charms’ and looked for other ways to reinterpret Vertov’s manifesto.  On the one hand I was still interested in the capacity of placing discontinuous action together and by what means connections can be made, tenuous, imagined, intended or not, and contra to that subverting that placement either by the extended duration of shots where nothing much happens in them or between them, through irrational cutting choices, or the dissociative use of sound; methods more in tune with Deleuze’s concept of the time-image.

The gap between the images is the pre-subjective container for affective encounters with cinema’s materiality.  This becomes more complex in the time-image, with the emergence of the irrational interval and temporal displacements through sound, which challenges what constitutes a cut or whether a cut is necessary at all for the theory of the interval to play out.  Can there be stratified layers of intervals striking a range of overlapping chords? When I film and edit I think about how to bring together what I think of as the ‘weight’ (length in time) and the ‘consciousness’ (temporal register) of the shots as points of release and relief at their moments of contact.  There are also sonic registers, which alter temporal-spatial experiences of the image.  Deleuze contemplated: “Depending on the variations of the present or the contractions and dilations of the interval, one might say that a very slow movement realises the greatest possible quantity of movement…”[82]  I understand him as acknowledging the potent capacities of the minimal to lock in the eyes and the brain to the image, and by consequence how images might affect each other by their composition of time.  The relationship that the perception-image and the concept of the interval have with affect is contained in the pre-subjective moments of physiological contact with the material.  There is no affection without perception and no action without either mental transaction, leading to thought.   

 

 

The ‘Affection-Image’ and ‘Any-Space-Whatevers’:

In Cinema 1 Deleuze introduces the affection image through his discussion of the close-up or face.  He says “it is the face, with its relative immobility and its receptive organs, which brings to light these movements of expression while they remain most frequently buried in the rest of the body.”[83]  He is careful to underline that faces have “equivalents” and can be “propositions,” saying it is “the face – or the equivalent – which gathers and expresses the affect as a complex entity, and secures the virtual conjunctions between singular points of this entity.”[84] In other words, “there are affects of things.”[85]  As noted, this project has specifically attended to drawing sensations of affect out of spatial-temporal disruptions in the world (landscapes and objects) rather than via human agents – the residue of us rather than the present us.  In this regard, his ancillary discussions on the “affects of things,” and his notion of “any-space-whatevers,” through the categorisation of the “qualisign,” is the relevant territory for the practice to reflect on the ‘affection-image.’  “The qualisign is affect expressed in ‘any-space-whatever,’ that is, as a space that does not yet appear as a real setting or is abstracted from the spatial and temporal determinations of a real setting.”[86]  Their significance in the composition of a type of ‘affection-image’ is Deleuze’s reminder that “affects are not individuated like people and things…they do not blend into the indifference of the world. They have singularities which enter into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex entity.”[87] 

Deleuze’s notion of singularities runs throughout his writing.  He uses them as part of a discussion on cinema to identify special types of images and how images operate with each other.  For his methods of enquiry in this arena there are no “universals, only singularities. Concepts aren’t universals but sets of singularities that each extend into the neighborhood of one of the other singularities.”  Rajchman offers a distillation of how to think about a singularity.  It is “…not an instance or instantiation of anything it is not particularity or uniqueness.”[88]  It has “‘indefiniteness’ or vagueness is not a logical deficiency or incoherence, but, rather, as with what Peirce called ‘firstness.’”[89]  From my perspective Deleuze’s description of ‘any-space-whatevers’ is irresistible to consider in light of how I compose the filmed elements in Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency, as an assembly of fragmented contemplations.

Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible.[90]

Deleuze presents Joris Ivens’ fragmentary montage films of the 1920s as “sets of singularities” that demonstrate a type of qualisign that draw out the ‘affect of things.’^[91]  Ivens produced a different kind of cinema; one concerned as much with the mechanics of film itself as with the modern context in which his films were produced.[92]  Die Brücke (The Bridge), “which follows the logic of its subject,”[93] a railway bridge in Rotterdam, constructs an assemblage of hundreds of shots of the bridge from different angles.  The film is visually kinetic, rhythmic, and acentring,[94] with points of view that shift dynamically with each cut.  The continuity of the bridge as subject holds the material together such that the radical spatial disruptions elevate experiences of sensation, through a different type of structure,[95] one that does not rely on narrative or conceptual continuity, but rather is in the affective qualities of the object of the bridge itself, or as Deleuze suggested: “Rotterdam itself as affect.”[96]

The rapid montage of seven hundred shots means that different views can be fitted together in an infinite number of ways and, because they are not oriented in relation to each other, constitute the set of singularities which are combined in the any-space-whatever in which this bridge appeared as pure quality, this metal as pure power. [97]

Fig. 6. Joris Ivens. [Film Still: Die Brüge/The Bridge] Railway Bridge in Rotterdam
(1927).

Regen (Rain) brings together the natural elements of weather with modern urban life.  Thefilm is structured by one event – that of a rainstorm arriving, then leaving the city of Amsterdam.  Ivens shot the footage solo, with a hand-held 35mm camera, over many months.  Deliberately poetic in its use and assemblage of impressionist imagery, and dislocated in its articulation of space and place, the anchor that is the storm forgives this disorientating approach, as it simply doesn’t matter where we are.  “The rain we see in the Ivens film is not one particular rain which fell somewhere, some time. These visual impressions are not bound into unity by any conception of time and space.”[98] The concept holds together the complexity of the approach and the time and methods it took to construct the film.[99]

Fig. 7. Joris Ivens. [Film Still: Regen/Rain] City Streets through Rain and
Window of a Tram (1929).

His methods have informed my own practice of spending extended durations in chosen locations, to absorb the environment differently, see pieces of it and connections that you might not see in a superficial glance.  Ivens composes the stratified layers of a city inside the shared experience of weather, allowing collective connection through his impressionist assembly of fragmented images, their movements against each other not organised by their relationship in time and place but by “rain as affect.”[100] 

The rain in the film, Deleuze says, is not “the concept of rain nor the state of a rainy time and place.”[101]  The film has mediated thinking about how to approach the cinematic other ways than representationally or narratively.  As Rodowick points out “the affect would be lost by attributing a specific aim or narrative trajectory to the images.”[102]  Ivens is considered one of cinema’s poets in that he is able to draw out affects from fragments of things discontinuously placed together.  Deleuze holds his methods up against, the expressionists who work in the shadows, Dreyers’ cinema of whiteness, and Antonioni’s composition of colours as examples of different constructions of ‘any-space-whatevers’ inside ‘affection images’.  It is the “shadows, whites and colours which are capable of producing and constituting any-space-whatevers, deconnected or emptied spaces.”^[103] 

For Antonioni, materials for construction were not fragments drawn together, but, rather, the application of colour in space.  His frames extract the emptiness of a space, “the void,” accentuated by a limited colour palette. “Colour elevates space to the power of the void, when that which can be realised in the event is accomplished. Space does not emerge from it depotentialised, but on the contrary, all the more charged with potential.” [104] For Deleuze, Antonioni’s cinema demonstrates two types of ‘qualisigns’, which operate simultaneously and are always implied within the other.  They are the qualisigns of “deconnection and of emptiness.”

The any-space-whatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has co-ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actualise them (have actualised them or will actualise them, or neither the one nor the other – it hardly matters).[105]  

What is alluring about Antonioni’s construction of space in his cinema is that it provides a bridge for thinking about the coexistence of the movement-affection-image as an indirect representation of time with the affective qualities present in direct representations of time in the image.  His is a cinema that contains both. 

The Time-Image:

Cinema changed the idea of art because of the new ways it invented to show or render movement and time, participating in a distinctive manner in a larger aesthetics of duration, connected not simply with new technologies or new forces, but also with new ways of thinking, new questions and paradoxes, new political uses.[106]

Rajchman elegantly summarises Deleuze’s concept of the ‘modern cinema.’

A break away from the ‘sensory-motor schema’ of the movement-image opens the possibility for a direct image of time.  Through this “emancipation of the senses,”[107] the ‘time-image’ offers “a pure optical, sound (and tactile) image,”[108] revealing new connections, making “time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and of sound.”[109]  It is not that ‘movement-images’ disappear it is more that they fade into the background of perception when parcelled within the ‘time-image.’  Deleuze explains this release from the “sensory-motor schema” through his notion of the cliché, which “is a sensory-motor image of the thing.”  Citing Bergson’s thesis on how the cliché functions, in relation to quotidian perception, he says:

…we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive… We therefore normally perceive only clichés.[110]

If there is a blockage or break in the schema then a different kind of “pure-optical-sound” image can emerge, which “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’.”[111]  Given the aforementioned concerns of the practice around disrupting perceptual orders to draw out sensational encounters with the material, Deleuze’s articulation of the ‘time-image’ aligns richly with the intent of the practice, and provides helpful contemplations around the techniques deployed in the composition of images.   He says: “What is specific to the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present.”[112]  In my current works I attempt to direct the viewer into an acute awareness of time, through extended duration and shot construction, aiming to activate contemplative or thoughtful states of engagement with the subject, contained in the image through its aesthetics.  Rajchman says that “the cinematic lies in the distinctive ways filmmakers invented to disjoin the forms of sensation from the understanding, using them, instead, to give us ‘ideas’ and so new ‘personae’ in thinking…”[113]  This reflection also produces an alternate way to think about montage in the ‘time-image,’ which can emerge from the image itself, rather than from its placement in relation or conflict with other images.  “Sometimes montage occurs in the depth of the image, sometimes it becomes flat: it no longer asks how images are linked, but ‘What does the image show?’”[114]  For example, by compressing the image through telephoto cinematography, the lens captures time that pours in from the distance of the shot in stratified layers.  This is particularly apparent in compositions that draw on the movement of atmospheres in the frame, like heat or dust, which appear to move at different speeds dependent on the distance, close (faster) or far (slower), to the focal plane.  This temporal rupture of atmospheres combined with the spatial compression of the landscape produce a strange sensational experience of the time in the image.  Montage in this example “changes its meaning.”

[Montage] takes on a new function: instead of being concerned with movement-images from which it extracts an indirect image of time, it is concerned with the time-image, and extracts from it the relations of time on which aberrant movement must now depend.[115]

Fig. 8. Andrew Denton. [Film Still: Crude] Palm Springs: The Road to Desert Springs,
California, U.S.A. (2013).

Necessitated by needs of the ‘time-image’, this change in how montage functions has meant moving my own thinking into different (albeit connected) territory. Deleuze best expresses this in his conceptualisation of the ‘irrational cut’. As part of the ‘sensory motor’ crisis that emerges from the time image, the break from the indirect to the direct image of time means a change in the way images are contained in the cinematic ‘whole.’[116]  Rodowick summarises: 

The plane of consistency of the time-image is best characterized by seriality: the irrational interval assures the incommensurability of interval and whole. Succession gives way to series because the interval is a dissociative force; it “strings” images together only as disconnected spaces. The rational interval is a spatial conjunction since it belongs simultaneously to the end of one set and the beginning of the set that follows. But the irrational interval is autonomous and irreducible. It is not spatial, nor does it form part of an image. Rather, it presents the force that unhinges images and sounds into disconnected series, which can no longer form a whole.[117]

What has been nagging at the project from the beginning is how to construct an assemblage out of my collection of disjointed images and sounds, without falling into a succession of images, or classical montage, as Deleuze would understand it, and harmonic sound. My whole thinking needed to change around how to edit the sound and the visual materials.  Without cutting on movement I think about the shot exhausting itself before dropping the next one in.  I’m thinking also of the irruptive cuts that sit underneath in the sound and the cuts of information in the image itself that release from the composition as it unfolds.  This means the thought that emerges from the image is not merely extracted from the visual composition.  The ‘serialty’ of the images means that they do not work next to each other but rather they operate together collectively in the whole. “It is thus no longer a lacuna that the associated images would be assumed to cross; the images are certainly not abandoned to chance, but there are only relinkages subject to the cut, instead of cuts subject to the linkage.”[118]   One of the ‘creative restrictions’ I applied to the making was to film everything at 200 frames per second.  This slows down the world significantly in regards to what can be drawn out of these images that would not emerge in ‘real’ time capture modes.  The compositions are in themselves compelling and have an aesthetic charm that affected me from the moment I began experimenting with them. The shots are not only slow but also long in duration, which also charges the footage with what Tarkovsky refers to as the “pressure of time” in the cinematic.[119]  They are also rigorously formal in their framing.  Because of the choices made in the collection of the shots I have had to think about their seriality rather that how they cut together next to each other spatially.  “What the irrational interval gives is a nonspatial perception – not space but force, the force of time as change interrupting repetition with difference and parceling succession into series.”[120]  One of the rules of editing is to cut on movement, when you remove that option the images have to work by adding to the whole regardless of their placement and without necessarily connecting as an elegant transition between spaces.[121]

The ‘time-image’ is the realm of the irrational cut, which is not as literal as it sounds.  Deleuze explains that “…the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not form part of either set, one of which has no more an end than the other has a beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut.”[122]  This is true of the sound as well, which can add another layer of information but also can adjust our temporal experience of watching.  The most elemental example of this at work is when music is added to moving image.[123]  Music adds meaning, emotion, and context to the shot even if it hasn’t earned them, it also changes how fast or slow time feels when we view it.   Sound can also fracture and displace time, which makes it a potent tool for layering meaning and conceptual development in the image.  The most basic example of this is the voiceover which can in its most simple deployment tell another story over an image (film noir), and in its most complex interrogate the reliability of the narrative and displace time and memory as a contemplation. This can be seen in the letter narrative constructed by Marker in Sans Soleil (1983).  

Environmental sound can also be used to throw time out of joint, in cinema as often seen in Tarkovsky’s films.  This is the sound of leaves on the spaceship in Solaris (1972), or the sound of lamps swinging over images of the lamps suspended in utter stillness, as seen in Stalker (1980).  These examples extract a sensation of other time in the image, which disrupts our cognitive capacity to construct order out of it.[124]  Specific care has been taken in the collection and editing of the sound elements, in my films, with consideration as to how the sonic compositions can perceptually disrupt the viewer into a strange experience of the subject. This is in order to think about the subject in other ways, therefore eliciting an audible world that one would not normally experience.   As well as these elements, the collection of audio from radio, television and the Internet, acknowledges that at all times there is another frequency of sound activity around us, and in us.  Stressing the sensational register is one of the key concerns of the practice. It provides perceptual recalibrations, sensed corporeally, which are then transacted into thought.

Dissensus, Politics of Aesthetics, and Art:

Jacques Rancière’s writing on dissensus (disagreement)and its formation inside a politics of aesthetics has provided a context for engaging with the ecological subject through art practice.  His project helped develop approaches for thinking the political potential in art, as a companion to aforementioned OOO[125]/new materialist ecological (Morton, Bennett), and humanist (Butler) discourses.  It is important to emphasise that Rancière’s project is not set out as a series of guidelines on how to produce political works of art – it is not “‘art must do this.’”[126] What it offers “is an account of art’s political capacities.”[127] He states clearly “practices of art do not provide forms of awareness or rebellious impulses for politics. Nor do they take leave of themselves to become forms of collective political action.”[128] This positioning has assisted thinking around the aims of the practice, in seeking and experimenting with methods that disrupt recorded materials to evoke sensational affects, rendering the familiar unfamiliar; teasing out the uncanny in order to draw in the eyes and ears to the subject through a lethargic and ambivalent lens.  “The politics of art is not oriented at the constitution of political subjects. It is much more oriented at the reframing of the field of subjectivity as an impersonal field.”[129]  This view on the political in art releases the practice from frameworks of causes and effects, and the pressure of producing “a kind of calculable transmission between artistic shock, intellectual awareness and political mobilization.”[130]  An alternate approach – one that disrupts the senses with political capacities that can spool from cinematic encounters with the ecological subject – becomes an iterative negotiation within the aesthetics of the work.[131]  “Rancière maintains, “suitable political art ensure[s], at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.”[132]  How this plays out in regards to practice is through an awareness of this untethered tension between these two effects, and an understanding that while there might be a political intent at work in the process, this is not where the political emerges from the aesthetics; “artworks can produce effects of dissensus precisely because they neither give lessons nor have any destination.”[133] 

Rancière defines his concept of a politics of aesthetics, arranging this discussion around his notion of les partages du sensible (the distribution of the sensible),[134] which is “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”^[135]  Rancière applies the word sensible to that which can be received and understood by the senses: “The ‘sensible’, of course does not refer to what shows good sense or judgement but to what is aisthēton or capable of being apprehended by the senses.”^[136]  Rancière’s deliberately fluid use of language and definitions makes his work a dynamic space to test out ideas around the making. He says of this fluidity that, “firstly that it is not his fault if some words span such a wide range of meanings, secondly that it is no accident that they do so.^[137] Davide Panagia notes that in French partager can mean either “to share” and/or “to separate,” which means the sensible are separated, though never independent, and connected at the same time; interdependent.[138]  

For Rancière there is a blurry “dividing line” that squiggles inside the distribution of the sensible, delimiting those who have voice and those who do not.[139]  “Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the natural order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled.”[140] The visible exists alongside the invisible, but it is when the invisible disrupts the “police order” (the consensus, status quo, those taking part) that politics emerges. The “police order” can be defined as “the general law that determines the distribution or parts and role, in a community as well as its forms of exclusion, the police is first and foremost an organization of ‘bodies’ based on a communal distribution of the sensible.”^[141]  This disruption of the ‘police order’ is ‘dissensus,’ loosely defined as disagreement, but not in the sense of a subjective discourse, rather “it is a political process that resists juridical legislation and creates a fissure in the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and action with the ‘inadmissible’, i.e. a political subject.”^[142]  These ruptures in the normal order of things, the moments where silence became vocal and that the invisible reveals itself, are compelling because the position of the practice outlined here is not to present a didactic view of the world.  Instead it aims to unsettle viewers’ encounters through tempered perceptual disruptions and affective encounters with the material.  Resisting representational registers that seek to define a problem are, for Rancière, the “strategic aims” of art.

Such strategies are intended to make the invisible visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated.[143]

One of the ways this surfaces in the works produced for Cinematic Affect in a Time of Ecological Emergency is the notion that visual and aural core samples, captured with imposed formal restraints, emphasising “their proximity rather than their differences,”[144] anywhere at anytime, can render strange feelings (discomfort, confusion, disorientation, dread, boredom, irritation etc.) that do not rely on a deliberate ironic connection, or rhetoric, to evoke a state of contemplation about the selected theme.  In this case the theme is the notion that oil, as a thing and as a metaphor, has made its way into everything.  By filming the world I saw as awash in the affects of fossil fuelled capitalism I hope that the sensations already present in the images rupture the frame; that they are sensible and therefore thinkable.  In regards to how we perceive the ‘real world,’ Rancière argues there isn’t one. “Instead, there are definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions. The real always is a matter of construction, a matter of ‘fiction.’”[145]

It may be that a work that does nothing more at the level of reception than evoke a gently subversive vibration through the viewer—with its affects being a stickiness that weaves into the body—is enough.  Like an earworm caught in the elevator, or listening to the radio on a long cross-country journey, alternate frequencies begin to penetrate from the outside as your distance from the transmission constantly changes.  The voices of others not intended to be tuned into ripple across the airwaves leaving snippets of their thoughts between the crackling and the pops; imbuing memories of things not intended.  From my early experiments with different camera techniques I searched for methods to make images of the world aesthetically alluring rather than violently arresting.  It is my position that the collection of smaller ruptures distributed over extended forms of duration can develop accumulative affects that can redistribute thought.  This is what drew me towards the subtle nuances of slow-motion cinematography. 

A less subtle but appropriate supporting example for this discussion is Richard Mosse’s hyper-aestheticised images of conflict.  He is a practitioner who deploys experiences of strange “beauty” to engage with the ugly subject of war.  The video installation Enclave (2013) uses discontinued infrared film stock, designed for surveillance, to record images from war stricken Congo that pop with colour and render the landscape as lush magentas.  The camera is also mounted on a Steadicam rig framed with wide-angle lenses, giving the compositions a floating effect of subjectivity that is accentuated by extended shot duration.  He says of his work, “Beauty is one of the mainlines to make people feel something. It’s the sharpest tool in the box… If you’re trying to make people feel something, if you’re able to make it beautiful, then they’ll sit up and listen.”[146]  But the work isn’t merely about making something difficult attractive to the eye in order to hold attention.  The double effect of a politics of aesthetics is at work in the construction of a beautiful image of something as horrific as human suffering. It “creates an ethical problem in the viewer’s mind,” a disorientating confusion or anger that causes them to “think about the act of perception, and how this imagery is produced and consumed;”[147] Although as Rancière cautions, “there is no straight path from the viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the state of the world.”[148]  However, in the rupture that the spectacle evokes there is the potential for a recalibrated worldview that is infused with political capacities.

Fig. 9. Richard Mosse. [Film Still: The Enclave] Soldier in Long Grass (2013).

Chantal Akerman understood that her film D’Est (From the East) (1993)was not an answer to the horrific memories of Eastern Europe, nor an attempt to arrange some kind of meaning of it through making a political statement.[149]  She says, “I was just looking around, I didn’t know exactly for what, but as soon as something was telling me something ­— I don’t mean with words, just when I was feeling something — I would say “Stop! Put the camera here, and shoot.”[150]  Her work, for me, demonstrates how Rancière’s notion of a politics of aesthetics can manifest in the cinematic.  “The film has its own way of looking, not only in terms of aesthetics, the way it looks as a film, but in respect to the active engagement of its (visual) subjects, the way it looks at its subject.”[151]  The long duration shots, of strangers in strange lands, change the way we encounter and therefore see these images.  It is a corporeal experience of the material; an extended stare into another world that is familiar in its human presence, yet unfamiliar in its rendering of that humanity.  As Alice Lebow puts it, “there is an intensity in the manner of looking; but at the same time, there is a sense of looking beyond what one sees to the unseen.”[152] Akerman says of her working methods on D’Est, “the only way to film that reality was to proceed by a form of stuttering, a slow hesitant approach.”[153]  The experience of watching the film evokes sensations of waiting for not very much to happen.[154]  This captivating, hypnotic register holds attention intensely on its subject to draw the viewer deeper into her cinematic milieu. “[Her] long takes have been likened to blocks – distinct, separate scenes that follow a linear progression, like the compartments of a train.”[155] The sensations that emerge from her reframing of the ‘real’ comes both from the durational pressure of the images and the way she pieces those images together.

Rancière suggests artists’ strategies that reframe the ‘real’ through this type of practice “might be called the labour of fiction,” but that we need to reconceive the meaning of the word fiction, as “far more than the constructing of an imaginary world, and even far more than its Aristotelian sense as ‘arrangement of actions’. It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the ‘real’, or the framing of a dissensus.”[156]  This redefinition of the word ‘fiction’ crystallizes Rancière’s conceptual arguments, in regards to approaches I have identified in my own practice.  He identifies the slippery paradox that faces all artists when they attempt to engage their practices with the world as it happens in front of them.  If we agree with Rancière that all forms of the real are a construction, this also displaces our understanding of a documentary practice as one that can expose reality as it is.  That is why the attempts of an essayist form to negotiate around notions of the real are so compelling to my interests.  The univocal “mainstream fiction of the police order” is an edifice, which “draw[s] a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions and utopias.”[157]  This is consensus, or the sensory configured as a single voice – the drone of mainstream agreement.  What ruptures consensus are “political and artistic fictions [which] introduce dissensus by hollowing out that ‘real’ and multiplying it in a polemical way.”[158]

There is a certain letting go of a calculated ethic to be factual or actual, in favour of contemplative ethics that seek to tighten the knots for a bumpier, more perplexing line into the subject.  Mosse provides an arresting example of a labour of fiction at work in a single (or was it?) shot in Enclave.  A soldier slings his rifle over his shoulder turns and walks into Lake Kivu.  The water goes over his head, the camera, it seems keeps rolling and rolling and we never see him emerge.  The image is simple in its construction but arrestingly affective in its crashing of ethics and perception of a quiet, potentially violent act.  There is only sensation and then thought rushes in.  You hope that it is a camera trick, but doubt keeps feeding back. 

---

[1] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London New York : Verso, 2009), 50.

[2] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 20.

[3] Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 12.

[4] “…not only organis[ing] visual experience but also generat[ing] specific ontologies of the subject.”  Ibid., 3.

[5] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 17.

[6] Ibid., 29.

[7] Ibid., 29-30.

[8] Ibid., 30.

[9] Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 33.

[10] I am using Deleuze’s notion of the vibration in relation to concepts as fragmentary irregular totalities. “Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other.” See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 23.

[11] In an interview Levinas explains his ethics on the foundational concept of the ‘Other’, saying, “My ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world… In ethics, the other’s right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other.” Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986), 24.

[12] Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 33

[13] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 144.

[14] Thomas Claviez, “Ecology as Moral Stand(S): Environmental Ethics, Western Moral Philosophy, and the Problem of the Other,” in Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, ed. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (Amsterdam ; New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006), 436.

[15] “Affect depends upon social supports for feeling: we come to feel only in relation to a perceivable loss, one that depends on social structures of perception; and we can only feel and claim affect as our own on the condition that we have already been inscribed in a circuit of social affect.”^[15]  Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 50.

[16] Claviez, “Ecology as Moral Stand(S): Environmental Ethics, Western Moral Philosophy, and the Problem of the Other,” in Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism, 452.

[17] Christian Diehm, “Alterity, Value, Autonomy: Levinas and Environmental Ethics,” in Facing Nature Levinas and Environmental Thought, ed. Christian Diehm, James Hatley, and William Edelglass (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press,, 2012), 22.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 20.

[20] “What, politically, might be made of grief [?]” Ibid., xii.

[21] Ibid., 30.

[22] Ibid., 21.

[23] Eileen Joy, A, “Blue,” in Prismatic Ecology : Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2013), 213-14.

[24] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 21-22.

[25] Another way of The ‘Other’ “…is not unknown but unknowable, refractory to all light. But this precisely indicates that the other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a common existence.  The relationship with the other is not an idyllic and harmonious relationship of communion, or a sympathy through which we put ourselves in the other’s place; we recognize the other as resembling us, but exterior to us; the relationship with the other is a relationship with a Mystery. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Time and the Other,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Oxford, UK B. Blackwell, 1989), 43.

[26] Empathy “entails an intellectual engagement with the plight of the other; when one talks about empathy one is not talking simply about emotion, but about contemplation as well.  Alison Landsberg, “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22, no. 2 (2009): 223.

[27] Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture : The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Environmental Philosophies Series (New York: Routledge, 2002), 132.

[28] Psychologists and social psychologists have described flawed cognitive and mental models that limit people’s ability to grasp what is going on, and sociologists have documented the manipulation of climate science (especially in the United States) and the media’s role in misinforming the public by magnifying the perception of uncertainty. Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,, 2011), 64.

[29] Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 29.

[30] Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Technologies of Lived Abstraction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 44.

[31] Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 34.

[32] Ibid.

[33] “Interpretation does not emerge as the spontaneous act of a single mind, but as a consequence of a certain field of intelligibility that helps to form and frame our responsiveness to the impinging world (a world on which we depend, but which also impinges upon us, exacting responsiveness in complex, sometimes ambivalent, forms).” Ibid.

[34] Ibid., 50.

[35] Ibid., 51.

[36] Peter Canning, “The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema,” in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 345.

[37] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63.

[38] Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience, 17.

[39] Manning and Massumi describe a type of autistic encounter with the world:  “To experience the texture of the world “without discrimination” is not indifference. Texture is patterned, full of contrast and movement, gradients and transitions. It is complex and differentiated. To attend to everything “the same way” is not an inattention to life. It is to pay equal attention to the full range of life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhierarchized commitment to the way in which the organic and the inorganic, color, sound, smell, and rhythm, perception and emotion, intensely interweave into the “aroundness” of a textured world, alive with difference.” Ibid., 4.

[40] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 164.

[41] Ibid., 167.

[42] Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, Theory out of Bounds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 31.

[43] Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 134.

[44] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 135. See also: “Actual and virtual images are constituted around the splitting of time, and this indiscernibility, and our concomitant inability to designate either as the true image, is what Deleuze calls the powers of the false.” Dudley Andrew, “The Roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa,” in The Brain Is the Screen : Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 207.

[45] Deleuze says the time-image “perhaps suddenly appears in a shattering of the sensory-motor schema: this schema, which had linked perceptions, affections and actions, does not enter a profound crisis without the general regime of the image being changed.” Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, xii

[46] John Rajchman, “Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art,” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, ed. David Norman Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 284.

[47] “In all these respects, it is not sufficient to compare the great directors of the cinema with painters, architects or even musicians. They must also be compared with thinkers.” Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 10.

[48] Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, Routledge Critical Thinkers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 32.

[49] “Augé would prefer to look for their source in the experimental cinema. But it could equally be said that they are as old as the cinema itself.” Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 109.

[50] Ibid., 58-64.

[51] Deleuze relies predominantly on Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, as a referent text to support his arguments. Henri Bergson, Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey (New York: Continuum, 2002).  He also draws on Charles Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness, particularly in his descriptions on the affection-image. “The three categories constitute the foundation of Peirce’s body, work and thought, and all his other logical elements rest on his own threesome divisions…[of his] triad terminology, moving from undetermined to determined motifs in all realms and disciplines… There is a real connection between sign (Firstness) and object (Secondness), but thought — the interpretant (Thirdness). Dinda L Gorlée, “A Sketch of Peirce’s Firstness and Its Significance to Art,” Sign Systems Studies, no. 1-2 (2009): 207.

[52] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, ix.

[53] Ibid., 64.

[54] Ibid., 65.

[55] Ibid., 70.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid., 58.

[58] Ibid., 64.

[59] Ibid., 59.

[60] “In fact, it travels the route in both directions. From the point of view which occupies us for the moment, we go from total, objective perception which is indistinguishable from the thing, to a subjective perception which is distinguished from it by simple elimination or subtraction. It is this unicentred subjective perception that is called perception strictly speaking.” Ibid., 64.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid., 65.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Gregory Flaxman, “Introduction,” in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17.

[65] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 66.

[66] It is significant in Man with a Movie Camera that there are shots of editor Yelizaveta Svilovo, splicing together celluloid as well as of cameraman Boris Kaufman filming. 

[67] David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 8.

[68] “In the final analysis, we would have to speak of a perception which was no longer liquid but gaseous.” Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 84.

[69] “Gramme (engramme or photogramme): not to be confused with a photo. It is the genetic element of the perception-image, inseparable as such from certain dynamisms (immobilisation, vibration, flickering, sweep, repetition, acceleration, deceleration, etc.). The gaseous state of a molecular perception.” Ibid., 217.

[70] “Kino-eye as the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manitest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted; making falsehood into truth.” Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984), 41.

[71] Ibid., 18.

[72] Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 31.

[73] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 81.

[74] Ibid., 83.

[75] Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 60.

[76] “Montage is composition, the assemblage [agencement]of movement-images” as constituting an indirect image of time. Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 30.

[77] “Intervals (the transitions from one movement to another) are the material, the elements of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves. It is they (the intervals) which draw the movement to a kinetic resolution.” Vertov and Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 8.

[78] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 39-40.

[79] Stanley Cavell points out that Man with a Movie Camera “…is at the least a brilliant anthology of the tricks a loaded camera and fixed and refixed film can play. It is a natural example for someone to appeal to who wishes to emphasize film’s independence of reality. But it is fully open to me to say that what this film shows is precisely the inescapability of reality, its fixed point within every brilliance of technique.” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enl. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 191.

[80] Vertov and Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 131.

[81] Girl with a Movie Camera (2012)

[82] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 45.

[83] Ibid., 66.

[84] Ibid., 103.

[85] Ibid., 97.

[86] Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 63.

[87] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 103.

[88] Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 54.

[89] “Thus, as with Peirce’s talk of a ‘heterogeneity’ that comes first, Deleuze speaks of a logical ‘disparity’ that is neither a ‘diversity’ nor a simple disorder; he speaks of ‘disparation.’” Ibid., 55.

[90] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 109.

[91] Ibid., 111.

[92] “Because cinema itself is as inseparably a part of this modern world as these objects (cities, bridges, ocean liners, department stores, etc.) any of these films is at least implicitly a film about cinema itself and about the specific ‘new vision’ that is characteristic of it.” Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, 55.

[93] Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back the European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,, 2007), 51.

[94] “Wherethe images vary in relation to one another and tend to become like the reciprocal actions and vibrations of a pure matter.” Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, and ebrary Inc., Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, Film culture in transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 391.

[95] Tom Gunning proposed that Ivens “came close to the architectural ideal of ‘visual simultaneity…[He] explores the reorganization of space, but he also shows its functioning, its processes and rhythm through cinematic time.’” Gunning translated from the original Dutch and quoted in: Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 76.

[96] Hediger, Vonderau, and ebrary Inc., Short Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media.

[97] Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 111.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Regen took more than two years to make.  “He designated ‘rain spotters’ to alert him to appropriate images and kept an oilskin, boots and two loaded cameras ready, so that he could tum out the moment the first drops fell.” Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 54.

[100] “It is a set of singularities which presents the rain as it is in itself, pure power or quality which combines without abstraction all possible rains and makes up the corresponding any-space-whatever. It is rain as affect, and nothing is more opposed to an abstract or general idea, although it is not actualised in an individual state of things.” Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 111.

[101] Ibid.

[102] Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 65.

[103] Deleuze, Cinema 1:  The Movement-Image, 120.

[104] Ibid., 119-20.

[105] Ibid., 120.

[106] Rajchman, “Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art,” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, 285.

[107] Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 18.

[108] Ibid., 23.

[109] Ibid., 18.

[110] Ibid., 20.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Ibid., xii.

[113] Rajchman, “Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art,” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, 286.

[114] Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 42.

[115] Ibid., 41.

[116] “Cinema, like everyday perception, connects a flow of different images into ordered wholes. However, there are also moments of cinema where by extending this very process cinema takes us away from actualised objects and wholes to the very flow of images. Instead of connecting or synthesising images into meaningful progressions, cinema can present images in their ‘purely optical’ form.” Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 31-32.

[117] Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 178.

[118] Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 214.

[119] “The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. “ Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 117.

[120] Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 178.

[121] “In the first place, the cinematographic image becomes a direct presentation of time, according to non-commensurable relations and irrational cuts. In the second place, this time-image puts thought into contact with an unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable. The outside or the obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same time as the interstice or the cut has replaced association.” Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 215.

[122] Ibid., 181.

[123] Tarkovsky reflects that “it may be that in order to make the cinematic image sound authentically, in its full diapason, music has to be abandoned. For strictly speaking the world as transformed by cinema and the world as transformed by music are parallel, and conflict with each other. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, 159.

[124] “In itself, accurately recorded sound adds nothing to the image system of cinema, for it still has no aesthetic content.” Ibid., 167.

[125] OOO (Object Oriented Ontology)

[126] Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 111.

[127] “He achieves this by describing the way art alters the distribution of the sensible through the creation of experiences that are opposed to it.” Jacques Rancière et al., “An Exchange with Jacques Rancière,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 1 (2008): 3.

[128] Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London Continuum, 2010), 157.

[129] Ibid., 149.

[130] Jacques Rancière and Sudeep Dasgupta, “Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It,” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 1 (2008): 74.

[131] “In a certain way, the political interpretation of the uncanny in terms of effects is always a kind of negotiation.” Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 143.

[132] Rancière and Dasgupta., “Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It,” 74.

[133] Rancière and Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 63.

[134] “Aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.” Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 140.

[135] Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. (London; New York: Continuum, 2006.) 12.

[136] Jacques Rancière. Ibid., 83.

[137] Rancière and Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 13.

[138] Rancière’s conceptual innovation of a partage du sensible (variously translated as “partition” or “distribution” of the sensible); – a term that refers at once to the conditions for sharing that establish the contours of a collectivity (i.e. “partager” as sharing) and to the sources of disruption or dissensus of that same order (i.e. “partager” as separating). In every respect, a partage du sensible is a liminal term…” Davide Panagia, ““Partage Du Sensible”: The Distribution of the Sensible,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 95.

[139] “A partage du sensible is thus the vulnerable dividing line that creates the perceptual conditions for a political community and its dissensus.” Ibid., 97.

[140] Ibid., 98.

[141] The sensible: “a system or coordinates define modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable. Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. (London ; New York: Continuum, 2006), 89.

[142] Ibid., 85.

[143] Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 139.

[144]“Constituting what Godard calls a ‘fraternity of metaphors’.” Ibid., 141.

[145] Jacques Rancière, interviewed by Sophie Berrebi, “Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics Is Politics,” Art & Research 2, no. 1 (2008): 3.

[146] Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 148.

[147] John Mahoney, “Richard Mosse’s Hypercolor Congo, Now in a Short Film,” accessed July 19, 2015. http://www.americanphotomag.com/richard-mosses-hypercolor-congo-now-short-film.

[148] Ibid.

[149] Akerman says, “in my films I follow an opposite trajectory to that of the makers of political films… They have a skeleton, an idea and then they put on flesh: I have in the first place the flesh, the skeleton appears later.” Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 143.

[150] Steven Ball, “D’est: Spectres of Communism,” accessed October 30, 2015. http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/dest-spectres-of-communism/#7.

[151] Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005), 261.

[152] Alisa Lebow, “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akermanis D’est,” Camera Obscura 18, no. 1 (2003): 45.

[153] Ibid.

[154] “There are endless lines of people waiting indefinitely for the bus or train that never seems to come. Some take note of the camera, curious or indifferent; others ignore it completely, continuing their conversations or contemplations.” Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens : Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 211.

[155] Lebow, “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akermanis D’est,” 44.

[156] Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 149.

[157] Ibid., 141.

[158] Ibid., 148-49.