Colin Gardner

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE:
TIME, CINEMA AND THE BRAIN.
By Colin Gardner

1. TIME AND MOTION: GILLES DELEUZE & BERGSONIAN MOVEMENT
To movement, then, everything will be restored, and into movement everything will be resolved. -- Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson was one of the first twentieth-century philosophers to develop an ontology predicated on movement and duration (and, by extension, memory) rather than a discourse grounded in spatial metaphors (static matter). In Creative Evolution (1907) Bergson systematized his ontology in terms of a basic contradiction between the experienced nature of time and how we actually measure and conceptualize it. For Bergson,
time is experienced as a flow; but the concepts through which time is measured are static. The moments of experienced time shade into each other without clear boundaries; but measured time contains sharp cuts...We commit a grave error, therefore, when we confuse the former with the latter, for we thereby substitute a static, spatialized dimension for a dynamic and qualitative flux.
Real time is a continuous, non-segmentable stream which cannot be captured or framed with mechanistic concepts. According to Bergson, ‘there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow...The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.’ Moreover, this durational flow is ceaselessly active and creative, an affirmative spirit that Bergson calls élan vital. The latter opposes mechanistic theories of evolution, with their finalist, teleological trajectories, with a more fluid, affective, bodily weave or braid of forces that constantly evolve and branch out in new, ever-changing directions. In this respect élan vital resembles Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic, molecular instincts, with their unpredictable forkings, deterritorialized lines of flight and nomadic becomings. Like the rhizome, Bergson’s evolutionary impetus contains an infinity of potentialities and trajectories in a state of mutual interpenetration.
More importantly, for our purposes, Bergson also argues that the brain is incapable of understanding real duration and its creative biological processes. Instead, he privileges instinct over concept. Unfortunately, instinct is non-reflexive, it cannot intellectually know what it ‘knows’ as percept or affect. Bergson, in a somewhat uncharacteristic dialectical move, turns to a third term for the solution: Intuition. Intuition is a combination of instinct and intelligence that provides us with a philosophical method capable of generating new, non-spatial paradigms, as well as new abstractions and symbols. Among these new paradigms is Bergson’s conflation of élan vital and its creative invention with duration itself, and more importantly, with memory. Thus, for Bergson, ‘duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation.’ In this sense, Bergson redefines the very nature of time, dismantling the convenient temporal boxes of past, present and future created by the intellect. Instead, the present always already contains the past, and together they form a dynamic movement, creating the future-as-becoming. The past and memory thus act as a dynamic motor, pushing the present which contains them, as if from behind, into a future that makes a new present, and what was present, past. As Deleuze eloquently puts a very complex notion,
the image has to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. If it was not already past at the same time as present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.

This coexistence of past and present, virtual and actual, can be best illustrated by the phenomenon of déjà vu, where the recollection of the present is exactly contemporaneous with the present itself. This dynamic model sees time as a stream in which the virtual is already contained in the actual, the cause in the effect, so that the latter can constantly move on into its new actuality-as-future-anterior.
However, Deleuze ultimately moves beyond Bergson by re-reading this temporality-as-becoming in Nietzschean terms, re-posing the question of movement as, ‘What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming?’ The answer:
Returning is the being of that which becomes...The eternal return is thus an answer to the problem of passage. And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, that is ‘one’ or the ‘same.’ We misinterpret the expression ‘eternal return’ if we understand it as ‘return of the same.’ It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity.

This is an important conceptual move, for it allows us to reframe difference as temporal, repetitious and affirmative, as becoming and as a multiplicity. Being is durational, but also a diversity of co-existing cycles, as well as diversity within each cycle. Eternal return thus expresses difference and its repetition: ‘Nietzsche presents this principle as one of his most important philosophical discoveries. He calls it will to power. By will to power “I express the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order without thinking away this order itself.”’ If real duration gnaws on things, ‘if everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs...We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.’ In this respect, duration is ‘incommensurable with the idea, and its “rationality” must be defined by this very incommensurability, which admits the discovery of as much intelligibility within it as we will.’ The real durational whole is thus an indivisible continuity, a becoming of eternal return-as-difference that is incommensurable with the idea. The systematic parts that we cut out within it when we try to conceptualize it are thus not really parts at all, but rather partial views of the cyclical whole. It is only intuition that is capable of reflecting on this totality and enlarging it indefinitely.
The importance of Bergson for Deleuze and his subsequent theorization of the cinema thus lies in the former’s definition of difference in terms of the flux of élan vital. Differance marks the dynamic of being as eternal return; not a Hegelian dialectic of the static contrast of qualities, but a movement that grounds being-as-temporal-flow. Moreover, Deleuze also makes the crucial move of defining difference as an internal difference of indeterminacy, rather than a determined, exterior difference based on the necessity for an Other. Difference is now immanent to being, not an external, relational contrast based on dialectical negation. It can be said to found being, rather than the other way round. For Bergson, this internal motor is intuition itself. This is clearly outside the Platonist trajectory where the motor of causality is always external, determined by its destination or telos: the Good as final cause. For Bergson, difference-as-duration-as-becoming is immanent to the thing itself: there’s no longer room for it to receive difference from an outside or a goal.
Armed with an affirmative, internal difference-in-kind, Deleuze is able to re-read traditional dialectics - i.e. the movement of the One (Being) into its opposite (non-Being) - as an external difference in degree. This externality is not an intrinsic part of the One’s creative dynamic force but is merely an accidental relation, tacked on from the outside. As Deleuze points out, ‘What Bergson calls for - against the dialectic, against a general conception of opposites (the One and the Multiple) - is an acute perception of the “what” and the “how many”, of what he calls the “nuance” or the potential number. Duration is opposed to becoming precisely because it is a multiplicity...’ ‘Difference-as-intuition’ becoming ‘difference-as-multiplicity’ is an extremely important concept, indeed the key ontological move, for it allows us to re-theorize the cinematic image (itself a multiplicity) as a fugitive, asignifying figure, instead of an intellectualized sign attached to a linguistic code of signification. Multiplicity is important in Bergson and Deleuze for, as we have seen, it saves us from having to think in the dialectical, binary terms of the One and Multiple. Instead, in Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson distinguished between two kinds of multiplicity immanent in/to the One: one objective, actual, spatial and discontinuous, the other subjective, virtual, temporal and continuous. As Deleuze points out,
One is represented by space...It is a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, or organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers.
In simpler terms, this second multiplicity is pure duration, a flow/becoming of internal mutation that cannot be carved up or segmented into isolatable units, the way we divide up duration into time units such as years, months, days, hours and seconds. It is what Bergson calls ‘a qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution which is yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not external to one another.’ Virtual and actual, subject and object, are no longer posited as inside vs. outside, but attributes of interiority, qualified by this internal process of differentiation. Being differs with itself internally and transforms itself through creative affirmation. Within Deleuze’s extended schema, the latter is as much libidinal and instinctual as it is consciously constructed. However, rather than operate as rigidly separated ‘entities’, the two multiplicities in fact imbricate each other in a fluid weave of creativity, in which percept, affect and concept produce an internal motor function that is the vital spirit of evolution itself.
This is extremely heady stuff, and one might legitimately ask, what does it have to do with an affective, fugitive notion of the cinema and its relation to the brain? This skepticism is pertinent because Bergson himself saw the cinematographic apparatus, with its artificial movement - the segmentation of durational flow into twenty-four still frames crossing a projected light source per second - as a mechanical equivalent of the static, spatializing processes of the intellect. Indeed, the cinema allowed Bergson to conflate the machine, the filmic apparatus, form, and the intellect with the non-intuitive:
In reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real...Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially...Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up...that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.
How can Deleuze move from this equation of the cinematic apparatus with the formalizing tendencies of the intellect to a theory of the cinematic image as a libidinal, durational becoming? He does so by redefining the nature of the cinematic image as equivalent to the two types of Bergsonian multiplicity. The movement-image is a quantitative multiplicity of space, actuality, externality, differences in degree; while the time-image is a qualitative multiplicity of duration, virtuality, internality, differences in kind. In this respect, Deleuze re-theorizes what we mean by image by tying it to Bergsonian intuition instead of to intellect or dialectics. He states his position very clearly: ‘The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that is, a pre-verbal intelligible content (pure semiotics), whilst semiology of a linguistic inspiration abolishes the image and tends to dispense with the sign.’
Instead of a Saussurian-based semiology of the image-as-langage, Deleuze turns to a C.S. Peirce-based semiotics (i.e. pre-linguistic typology) of the image-as-parole. Deleuze’s complaint against Christian Metz and other advocates of the semiological paradigm is that they reduce the image to an utterance and thus part of a syntagmatic chain:
It is a typically Kantian vicious circle: syntagmatics applies because the image is an utterance, but the image is an utterance because it is subject to syntagmatics. The double of utterances and ‘grand syntagmatics’ has been substituted for that of images and signs, to the point where the very notion of sign tends to disappear from this semiology. It obviously disappears, clearly, to the benefit of the signifier.
Semiology allows the image to be regulated by linguistic structures, in the form of syntagms and paradigms. It thus controls the image through a double schema. The image is reduced to an analogical sign belonging to an utterance, which then allows the codification of these signs in order to discover the inevitable linguistic structure beneath. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, it is another case of ‘all power to the critic’, but particularly the critic-as-structuralist.
As we have seen, Deleuze turns away from cine-structuralism to a semiotic model of the image rooted in Bergson and Peirce. However, Deleuze is drawn less to the anti-cinematographic Bergson of Creative Evolution than to the earlier Bergson of Matter and Memory (1896). Here, Bergson defines matter as an aggregate of images: ‘and by “image” we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing - an existence placed halfway between the “thing” and the “representation.”’ This very between-ness of the image makes it extremely difficult to conceptualize: it is forever vacillating between definitions that are incapable of framing it. The body, in turn, is an image which acts like other images in the aggregate of images: it receives and gives back movement (its mode of action and reaction). But it also chooses the manner in which it restores what it receives. Thus, amid this image world, perception displays the eventual or possible actions of the body: ‘Whence, provisionally, these two definitions: I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body.’
Deleuze begins Cinema 1 by reiterating in different terms what we have already discussed in terms of virtual and actual, namely that ‘movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering...You cannot reconstitute movement with positions in space or instants in time: that is, with immobile sections [coupes].’ The next move is critical, for it allows Deleuze to conflate movement with the aggregate of images itself, including both the cinematic apparatus and the spectatorial body-as-image: ‘In short, cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image. It does give us a section, but a section which is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract movement.’ The mobile section or shot, constructed into sequences through montage, ceases to be framed as a spatial category and, as movement-image, becomes a temporal one. The section, the building block of film, is now mobile, a true movement-image.
Cinema as an industrial art thus achieves an automatic self-movement as the immediate given of the image. As Deleuze explains,
It is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly...Automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts in turn on movement.
The cinema as a machinic apparatus of automatic images thus gives rise to an automatic intuitive response from the viewer which touches both affect and intellect, producing a combination of intuition and automatism (the spiritual automaton) which feeds back into the initial movement. This circuit of movement-image and spirit creates a shared power that shocks the viewing body into thinking. ‘It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you. A subjective and collective automaton for an automatic movement: the art of the “masses.”’
It’s important to remember that these images are pre-linguistic, semiotic signs. They can only be theorized as relations of visibility, as intersections of light and sound, not as freestanding pictures or representations (the product of linguistic organization). Visibility is constituted by the movement of images from the worldly aggregate of matter-as-light to a body possessing memory capacity. It is the latter, a sensory-motor machine, that translates and organizes the incoming matter-as-images that pass though it in terms of its own interests and actions. In this sense, Bergson and Deleuze’s model is very close to Freud’s, which sees the body as a sensory-motor apparatus, a conductor placed between objects which act on it and those which it influences, by which incoming perceptions are translated into immediate motor actions by the intercession of memories. The latter are called up to receive perceptual input and meet it with the memory trace of the appropriate motor response. What is important for Bergson, is ‘not how perception arises, but how it is limited, since it should be the image of the whole, and is in fact reduced to the image of that which interests you.’ Perception is thus highly selective, editing out from a stream of images those which memory deems relevant to the body’s specific motor needs. It is therefore memory that gives perception its subjective character.
According to Bergson, then, we start from the aggregate of images of which our body is a part. We then limit these images to adopt our body and brain as centers based on the sensory-motor power of certain images. However, certain percepts escape motility and action and become internalized as mnemic traces, affects and concepts. As Richard Dienst has noted, ‘This alteration and reconfiguration of images occurs through one of three mental “powers”: the concept that translates, the percept that contracts, and the affect that expands the force of a particular image in relation to the image of oneself.’
If Bergson’s ontology is thus a circulation and interchange of different types of image, viewers-as-bodies can themselves be seen as images, on the same plane of immanence as the filmic image. This allows us to radically deconstruct theories of spectatorship, dissolving hierarchical differences between spectator and screen, and the question of the controlling ‘gaze’, into a difference-as-multiplicity. Our terms of reference are now various types and classifications of cyclical movements between and across images, in which neither spectator, screen, apparatus, nor viewed object are privileged. Instead, a deterritorialized flow exists between images, which constantly reformulate themselves in various forms of combination and separation. With this definition of the image, desire is no longer the privileged realm of the spectator but must now ‘be posited as the unifying force of the entire cinematic plane.’
Using Deleuze’s ontology of the image, we can now supersede apparatus theory via a de-hierarchized schema of movement-images. The camera-as-apparatus, far from being a seductive pleasure-machine, perpetuating the hated Lacanian ‘Imaginary’, is now merely a mechanical duplicator and disseminator of cyclical simulacra. It makes it possible to ‘lose objects in a nonconscious circulation of images, to snatch things from the universe of intentional gazes. Only images taken in this way can be composed into sets having a mobility beyond that of subjectivity.’ The organization of images into semiotic sets determined by the bodily functions of percept, affect, and motor-action now becomes the ground for a new classification of the cinema-as-movement-image. This in turn overturns the Metzian hegemony of narrative as the rule of the syntagm. ‘On the contrary’,argues Deleuze,
it seems to us that narration is only a consequence of the visible images themselves and their direct combinations - it is never a given. So-called classical narration derives directly from the organic composition of movement-images [montage], or from their specification as perception-images, affection-images and action-images, according to the laws of a sensory-motor schema.
Instead of the twin axes of paradigm and syntagm, the movement-image operates on two other co-ordinates: the Whole (the process of differentiation), and the Interval. It is the latter that determines the different types of images and the signs that constitute them: i.e. perception, affection, action. The interval is thus part of a process of specification. But Deleuze is careful to stress that these signs constitute neither a language system (langue) nor a language (langage). Instead, ‘it is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically.’ The image-sign is not an enunciation, in the sense that Raymond Bellour, for example, theorized structures of syntagms as reflecting a directorial voice (‘Hitchcock the Enunciator’) or narrative code (The Classic Hollywood Model). Instead, the image-sign is an utterable, closer to Saussure’s unstructurable parole. As Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier has pointed out, ‘filmic mass - this unexpressed expressible (énoncable-nonénoncé) of a language without signs - is transformed by Deleuze into a kind of speech (parole) that never stops collecting, citing, situating, and repositing, in short, which never stops expressing and enumerating that which is innumerable and unnameable in the cinema.’ Thus, for Deleuze, cinema is not a language, but is inevitably transformed by language: ‘the language system only exists in its reaction to a non-language-material that it transforms. This is why utterances and narrations are not a given of visible images, but a consequence which flows from this reaction. Narration is grounded in the image itself, but it is not given.’
This is why Deleuze turns to Peirce to create a semiotics of the movement-image, for ‘Peirce’s strength, when he invented semiotics, was to conceive of signs on the basis of images and their combinations, not as a function of determinants which were already linguistic.’ Peirce’s classifications of firstness (affect), secondness (action) and thirdness (relation) are deduced from movement-images only as they are related to intervals. They qualify perceptions, not meaning. This is why the interval of film - the gap between a received movement and an executed movement, an action and a reaction, represented by the cut and montage - becomes a determining factor in how certain films and national cinemas are characterized, as we shall see.
In many ways, perception can be seen as the zero-degree in this deduction: the movement-image is already perception, and its two poles are movement and the interval. The three images give rise to the sensory-motor whole, which grounds narration in the image. However, when the motor aspect is weakened, the discreet parts of the movement-image become more manifest. We can diagram this relationship as follows:
Affect
Perception: (movement -- interval) Æ Action Æ Motor Whole
(Narration)
Relation
Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image is an attempt to create a taxonomy of the cinema based on the translation of perception-images by the body into their various sub-types. Deleuze then catalogs the tendencies of certain national cinemas and directors to favor one type over another, via differing uses of montage, sequence shots, depth of field, etc., although never to the total exclusion of the other types. Thus the three types of movement-image are associated with a camera shot: perception-image (long shot); affect-image (close-up); action-image (medium shot), while ‘a montage develops from a particular attitude toward the material image, an attempt to arrive at different kinds of Wholes from the same given capacity of capturing instants.’
For Deleuze, the language of cinema is consequently a mode of delimiting into parts what amounts to an ever-changing Whole. ‘In fact, to recompose movement with eternal poses or with immobile sections comes to the same thing: in both cases, one misses the movement because one constructs a Whole, one assumes that “all is given”, whilst movement only occurs if the whole is neither given nor giveable.’ We are faced with a construct that only provisionally ‘frames’ or closes movement, that barely contains an immanent totality that is itself incommensurable. However, depending on the type of organization of the parts - whether it be Soviet-style associative montage or the Classic Hollywood Model - there will be a different translation of parts in space and therefore a qualitative change in the Whole. This is the main reason why the bi-play between organization (parts and sets) and the fugitive (the ever-changing Whole) is intrinsic to all studies of the cinema, and allows us to theorize it historically, in terms of national tendencies, and subjectively, in terms of specific auteurs like Antonioni, Godard, or Buñuel.
Deleuze delineates four main national schools of montage, defined as follows:
1. The Organic Trend: The American School. This is epitomized by Griffith’s parallel montage, which attempts to portray unity in diversity, largely through contrasting binaries such as men and women; rich and poor; town and country. However, this is not an oppositional, conflictual binary with specific causes rooted in historical determinants, but an active empiricism that favors a causeless organicism, where groups and classes are forged into parallel but separate and unchangeable universes.
2. The Dialectic Trend: The Soviet School. This is represented by the montage of attractions of Sergei Eisenstein, which combines organic and material dialectics into an ideological cinema demonstrating a determinist ontology of historical materialism. Both the American and Soviet models thus delineate time as a succession of historical movements.
3. The Quantitative Trend: The Pre-War French School. Typified by Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and Marcel L’Herbier, this is a cinema based on the quantity of movement, which Deleuze sees as a gaseousness and liquidity of the movement-image: ‘This is the second aspect of time…it is no longer time as succession of movements, and of their units, but time as simultaneism and simultaneity.’ In this case, the two aspects of the movement-image, time as interval and time as the Whole, imbricate each other, where time vacillates between a variable present and an immensity of past and future.
4. The Intensive, Spiritual Trend: The German School. This is Expressionist Cinema, a dark, swampy life into which everything plunges, as shadows or mists. In this case, the extensive is subordinated to intensity. There is no organic contour, no vertical or horizontal co-ordinates, but instead, a broken, constantly forking line, with constant changes of direction, the power of ever new impulses.
The different varieties of the movement-image each reflect different relationships of the part to the ever-changing Whole that is time. In this sense, the movement-image is an indirect image of time, for it relegates the immanent unity of the Whole to the immediate exigencies of the body’s motor needs. Thus, Deleuze’s first type of movement-image, the Perception-Image, is defined as a ‘set [ensemble] of elements which act on a centre, and which vary in relation to it.’ This center can be a subjective body, ‘one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image’, or objective, ‘where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts.’ The varying degree of stasis of the subjective center will determine the variety of discourse, whether it be self-reflexive, seemingly objective, or a vacillation between the two, as in the case of free indirect discourse. However, ‘the more the privileged centre is itself put into movement, the more it will tend towards an acentred system where the images vary in relation to one another and tend to become like the reciprocal actions and vibrations of a pure matter. What can be more subjective than a delirium, a dream, a hallucination?’ In the latter case, we come closer to the liquidity of the French school.
In the case of Dziga Vertov, we discover a perception-image that conflates the gaseous perception of a molecular universe with the machinic apparatus itself. Thus the Kino-Eye of The Man with a Movie Camera (1928) couples together any point of the universe whatsoever, in any temporal order whatsoever:
You’re walking down a Chicago street today in 1923, but I make you greet Comrade Volodarsky, walking down a Petrograd street in 1918, and he returns your greeting. Another example: the coffins of national heroes are lowered into the grave (shot in Astrakhan in 1918); the grave is filled in (Kronstadt, 1921); cannon salute (Petrograd, 1920); memorial service, hats are removed (Moscow, 1922) - such things go together, even with thankless footage not specifically shot for this purpose…I am kino-eye. I am builder…From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head – and through montage I create a new, perfect man.
Vertov’s montage actually brings us closer to the time-image – an expression of direct, non-chronological time – for ‘what montage does, according to Vertov, is to carry 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...it is the eye of matter, the eye in matter, not subject to time, which has “conquered” time, which reaches the “negative of time”, and which knows no other whole than the material universe and its extension...’
In contrast, the Affection-Image is ‘that which occupies the gap between an action and a reaction, that which absorbs an external action and reacts on the inside.’ In other words, affect internalizes an incoming perception and fails to translate it successfully into an external motor action. Instead, the motor tendency turns inward onto a sensitive nerve. Deleuze equates the affection-image with two sites. Firstly,
the affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face...it is both a type of image and a component of all images...The moving body has lost its movement of extension, and movement has become movement of expression. It is this combination of a reflecting, immobile unity and of intensive expressive movements which constitutes the affect.
Secondly, appropriating Pascal Augé’s term, affect manifests itself in the qualities and powers of the ‘any-space-whatever’:
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.

Here, typified by the films of Antonioni, characters, paralyzed by affections, have little or no impact on their surroundings or on each other. Space is less a product or determinant of bodily motility than a neutral ground of infinite possibilities. It lacks defined characteristics other than those of a homogeneous blankness or objective chaos: the post-war, rubble-strewn cities of Italian neorealism are obvious examples. Affected characters do not so much act on, as experience space. They lack agency. Thus at the end of Antonioni’s The Eclipse (1962), the two lovers fail to turn up for their rendezvous, reducing the film’s last ten minutes to a largely de-peopled universe in which place, lacking subjective bodies to animate it, merely exerts its own actuality-as-space.
A typical cinematic construction of the any-space-whatever is the use of shadows in German Expressionism and film noir. In this case, ‘the shadow extends to infinity. In this way it determines the virtual conjunctions which do not coincide with the state of things or the position of characters which produce it...’ Alternatively, in a director such as Dreyer, space becomes an expression of the byplay between actual and virtual-as-spirit, usually generating affect through a preponderance of blackness or light, rather than a dialectical battle between the two. A third manifestation of space as affect can be found in colorism, in which color doesn’t represent something, but is its own affect. ‘Godard’s formula, “it’s not blood, it’s red” is the formula of colorism. In opposition to a simply coloured image, the colour-image does not refer to a particular object, but absorbs all that it can: it is the power which seizes all that happens within its range, or the quality common to completely different colors.’
The third primary movement-image of Deleuze’s schema is the Action-Image, the ‘reaction of the centre to the set [ensemble].’ Here, centered on an acting body, the action-image is all motility: bodies determining place as the product of a movement through and across space. Epitomized by the realist model of the Classic Hollywood Cinema, its defining characteristics are active modes of behavior taking place within determined milieux: e.g. the law of the gun vs. the Law-Book in the Western town in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962. Here, affects and impulses are embodied in modes of behavior which lead to motor action that mutually transforms both the body and the context of its action (the milieu). Thus,
what constitutes realism is simply this: milieux and modes of behaviour, milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody. The action-image is the relation between the two and all the varieties of this relation. It is this model which produced the universal triumph of the American cinema, to the point of acting as a passport for foreign directors who contributed to its formation.
Following Noel Burch, Deleuze distinguishes between two types of realist action-image. In what Burch calls ‘The Small Form’ or A-S-A_ (action-situation-action_), we move from an initial action, to a situation that seemingly results from it, to the revelation of a new action that modifies how we read the earlier situation. In this case, ‘a very slight difference in the action, or between two actions, leads to a very great distance between two situations....It is an index of equivocity, or of distance, rather than being one of lack.’ It is most common in comedy, where the nuances between two actions can create completely different readings of the situation they represent (and thus the humor comes from the conflict of situations), but it can also occur in drama. Thus the detective story moves from blind actions, as indices (a seeming murder), to obscure situations (who did it and why?) which vary or fluctuate, depending on a miniscule variation in the index (it was a staged murder, for example, designed to conceal a real one elsewhere).
In ‘The Large Form’, or S-A-S_ (situation-action-situation_), we move from an initial situation (e.g. a town terrorized by the law of the gun) to the transformed situation (the law of the book) via the intermediary of an action (the killing, say of Liberty Valance by Rance Stoddard). The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a particularly important example of the form, because it repeats an image, the mythic ‘killing’ of Valance by Stoddard, followed by the real killing by Tom Doniphan, in order to reinforce and foreground the differences between S and S_ and the important role of myth in its perpetuation.
Realism is thus a dynamic, transformative form, in which both individual and context undergo change for the better and learn to co-exist for each other’s mutual benefit. The most important quality of the action-image is that it is an entirely organic representation. It is dependent on the foundation of a large gap existing between encompasser and hero, milieu and modifying behavior, situation and action, which can only be bridged in progressive increments throughout the course of the film. This is because the hero is rarely ripe for action; ‘like Hamlet, the action to be undertaken is too great for him. It is not that he is weak: he is, on the contrary, equal to the encompasser but only potentially. His grandeur and his power must be actualized.’ Realist violence is thus active, constructive, and generative of change and the building of character.
2. CIRCUITS OF TIME: NIETZSCHE, ARTAUD AND THE APORIA OF THOUGHT
The time is out of joint: Oh cursed spite, That ever I was borne to set it right! - Hamlet.
It is of time and becoming that the best parables should speak: let them be a praise and a justification of all impermanence. - Friedrich Nietzsche.
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze takes his Bergsonian and Peircean schema of the cinema one step further. What happens when the action-image of cinema as a whole becomes stalled? What happens to the immanent quality of the image -- i.e. indirect time -when the motility that makes it subservient runs out of gas? The answer for Deleuze is that ‘the movement-image of the so-called classical cinema gave way, in the post-war period, to a direct time-image...what tends to collapse, or at least to lose its position, is the sensory-motor schema which constituted the action-image of the old cinema.’ The result is a switch in the relationship between movement and time, for ‘it is no longer time which is related to movement, it is the anomalies of movement which are dependent on time. Instead of an indirect representation of time which derives from movement, it is the direct time-image which commands the false movement.’ We have, in effect, the time-image acting as the agent of the simulacrum, transforming the movement-image into the terrifying power of the false.
Deleuze sees the roots of this direct time-image in the crisis of the action-image that followed World War II, particularly in Italian neorealism. It is here, around 1950, that Deleuze finds an historical and aesthetic break separating a temporal cinema based on the movement of action and the organic linearity of narration from one whose time is non-linear, repetitive, and discontinuous - what Deleuze calls ‘crystalline cinema.’ However, it’s important to realize that Deleuze allows for these two types of temporality - indirect and direct time - to coexist. He doesn’t think them through dialectically or attempt to overcome the contradictions between them. Instead, Deleuze teases out and celebrates the aporias that arise from their conjunction, without trying to cope with them. Indeed, if we re-read Cinema 1’s movement-image in light of Cinema 2’s time-image, we find the latter always already immanent in the former. We re-read Eisenstein, for example, not only in terms of the dialectical shock across images, but also in terms of the immanence of historical time that lies hidden between them.
Ropars-Wuilleumier has, correctly I believe, read this move as an attempt to transform matter (images in movement) into memory (images as time), so that the present becomes doubled with the virtual image of the past it will always become. Cinema itself becomes time, its present always ahead of itself, its actuality a becoming-virtual at all times. She makes the logical conclusion that Deleuze has moved out of a Bergsonian ontology into a directly Nietzschean one:
it is to Nietzsche that Deleuze intends to graft the cinema, a Nietzsche for whom the circular becoming of time precipitates (as it does in modern cinema) short-circuits, bifurcations, detours, and irrational divisions, where the notion of intensity is substituted for that of truth.
Post-war cinema is thus marked by a paradoxical time, a circuitous temporality of repetition and eternal return, whereby the logic of sense is itself the logic of paradox, for ‘sense confirms itself only in the experience of nonsense, because it expresses itself only in a language that, while speaking, runs after the sense of what it says.’ We thus discover a new aporia at the heart of the time-image, between Peirce’s exhaustive cataloguing, that was so pertinent to the more indirect form of the movement-image, and Nietzsche’s paradoxical logic that seems to defy all attempts at classification. Once again, this is treated not so much as a problem, but as an impasse to be exploited and celebrated. Ropars-Wuilleumier stresses the import of the aporia-as-paradox as central to a cinema of time, to cinema-as-simulacrum. Thus, ‘this ephemeral instant, when sense and being coincide, belongs to the cinema as an art of the figure, in that cinema restores the possibility of making this instant coexist with the awareness of paradox.’ Ropars-Wuilleumier sees the cinematic time-image as a sort of machinic structure that metacommunicates its own incommensurability, producing ‘a veritable “spiritual automaton”, connecting man to machine, [which] blends contradictions and materializes the dream of a world where disjunctions communicate and where fusion operates within rupture.’ We can consequently see a double trajectory at the heart of cinema, based on the following contradiction:
Classification: Peirce and Bergson - the movement-image (organic, classical narrative cinema, the dialectic, sense).
PLUS
Displacement: Nietzsche - the time-image -- (the figure, a ‘crystalline cinema’
of temporal immanence, non-sense).
Film language is now readable along two axes that cannot be synthesized: Organic synthesis + Discontinuity and disconnection, or powers of the same and similar + powers of the simulacrum or phantasm. In this sense, we can read cinema as a unity that is Open (temporal), divided, and disjunctive but that attempts to reconcile the unreconcilable by creating a space where the mind can contemplate the unthinkable of thought.
How can we theorize this unthinkability of thought? How can we translate it into a cinematic utterance or style? What are some of the characteristics of this crisis of the action image? Firstly, we find a tendency toward a dictatorship of mental relations, which give
birth not to actions but to ‘acts’ which necessarily contain the symbolic element of a law (giving, exchanging); not to perceptions, but to interpretations which refer to the element of sense; not to affections, but to intellectual feelings of relations, such as the feelings which accompany the use of the logical conjunctions ‘because’, ‘although’, ‘so that’, ‘therefore’, ‘now’, etc.
Cinema becomes a realm of ideas and concepts rather than a field of motility, an aggregate of images geared toward relations, symbolic acts and intellectual feelings instead of actions. For Deleuze, its new master is Hitchcock, whose films reduce actions, affections, and perceptions to a question of interpretation, from the beginning of the film to the end. ‘What matters is not who did the action - what Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit - but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught.’ The only thing that evolves in Hitchcock is the evolution of relations, which become the subject of the film as a whole. Hitchcock thus pushes cinema to its limit by penetrating all the images with the mental-image.
In neorealism, the image no longer refers to a situation which is globalizing or synthetic; instead it’s dispersive. We find weak linkages, connections and liaisons, and chance becomes the sole guiding thread. We find an interchangeability of the actuality of the action-image and the virtuality of affection image: both have fallen into the same context of indifference. Narrative sets are now formed only by clichés, so that the plot becomes unbelievable, contemptible. Context is itself indeterminate, for ‘in the city which is being demolished or rebuilt, neo-realism makes any-space-whatevers proliferate - urban cancer, undifferentiated fabrics, pieces of waste-ground - which are opposed to the determined spaces of the old realism.’ Neorealist characters tend to stand outside of events as spectators, so that narrative shifts from the SAS_ formula to the nomadic drift of the balade, which in French can simultaneously mean voyage and ballad.
Instead of montage, the post-war cinema gives us montrage, the showing of images in duration, opticality, sonority. However, this is not a showing of a stable ontology, but a world in disorder. As Godard puts it, to describe is to observe mutations. It is also a cinema of chronosigns, where time ceases to be subordinate to movement and appears in and for itself; lectosigns, images which must be ‘read’ as much as seen; noosigns, which go beyond themselves as images towards something which can only be thought; opsigns, which break the sensory-motor schema, and where the seen is no longer extended into action but remains autonomous. Moreover, what is seen, heard or thought is no longer clear-cut:
We run in fact into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask. It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each was being reflected in the other, around a point of indiscernibility.
This shift into pure temporality also affects the mechanism of montage. With the primacy of the action-image, the momentum of motor-action moves us quickly and easily across cuts and splices, linking segments and sequences in a fluid, mechanistic continuity driven by cause and effect relations. Thus a character leaves a room, we cut to them stepping into the street, and we make the necessary linkages to assume that the character has ‘gone outside.’ If we then cut to them sitting in the back of a taxi, it is not difficult to assume that they are on their way somewhere. What happens when this degree of motor-connection breaks down? We find it difficult to link together scenes in a logical continuity. We become more aware of the cut and splice between scenes than the scenes themselves. The latter become autonomous and self-contained, forcing us to read continuity as a disjuncture or simple case of addition, as in the alternating shifts between the Black Panthers and The Rolling Stones - a rehearsal of the revolution PLUS the rehearsal of Sympathy for the Devil - in Godard’s One Plus One (1968). In fact, in extreme cases - Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Losey’s The Go-Between, Duras’s India Song - the sheer discontinuity produced by motor breakdown opens up the gap of the interstice as itself the immanent content of the film as (a) Whole. Hamlet’s famous observation that, ‘Time is out of joint’ can be read simply as temporal discontinuity, but also in its more literal sense in that time has escaped out of the ‘between of the joint’, like steam escaping from a crack in a pipe, disclosing the immanent, ever-changing temporal Whole that is usually covered up by the smooth sequencing of montage itself. It is the autonomy of the interstice that allows the immanent Whole - Bergsonian difference as a durational multiplicity - to well up from below. In effect, then, the time-image is cinema as a multiplicity, cinema as difference. It is only discernible because of the aberrant movement that the montage of the time-image makes manifest, for ‘aberrant movement speaks up for an anteriority of time that it presents to us directly, on the basis of the disproportion of scales, the dissipation of centres and the false continuity of the images themselves.’
Montage constitutes the Whole that is time and thereby gives us the direct image of time through its very discontinuity. With modern cinema we see the sensory-motor schema shattered from the inside. However, Deleuze argues that time has always ‘haunted’ the cinema, much like the specter of the simulacrum, the libidinal image itself: ‘The direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom. This image is virtual, in opposition to the actuality of the movement-image.
The key image of this liberated temporality in post-war cinema is what Deleuze calls the Crystal-Image or Hyalosign: ‘the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished.’ Bergson calls this a fluctuation between ‘peaks of present’ and ‘sheets of past’, their only meeting place being the brain, or, in cinematic terms, the screen. The crystal-image is a fuller realization in cinema of the truly temporal nature of Bergson’s ontology, the chiasmic interchange between past and present, virtual and actual. However, as one would expect, Deleuze puts his usual Nietzschean spin on the image, for the double-sided nature of the crystal - actual and virtual - is not only placed in a constant correspondence, but also a mutual usurpation, what Deleuze calls a double circuit of creation and erasure:
Each circuit obliterates and creates an object. But it is precisely in this ‘double movement of creation and erasure’ that successive planes and independent circuits, cancelling each other out, contradicting each other, joining up with each other, forking, will simultaneously constitute the layers of one and the same physical reality, and the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory or spirit.
The Nietzschean nature of the crystal-image is clear insofar as each side of the seeming binary is in a constant game of tag with its opposite, so that opposition is subsequently aporetic, forging a circuit of eternal return of difference as multiplicity, a celebration and affirmation of the indeterminacy of chance. A key objective metaphor for the crystal-image is the mirror, whereby the reflected image assumes independence of its host and passes into the actual, while the actual image returns into the mirror, creating an endless reversibility, a circuit of liberation and capture. Because actual and virtual are also linked with the real and the imaginary, with the present and the past, perception and recollection, the crystal creates an indiscernibility which allows time and memory to be released and to become actualized. The crystal-image is thus the actual representation of split time, since
the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past...Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal.
The powers of the crystal also return us to the powers of the false. The crystalline resembles the excessive, asignifying power of the simulacrum. Thus, ‘what we will call a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it...and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones. It is now the description itself which constitutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object.’ Nietzsche is the philosopher of the crystal-as-simulacrum, for it is in the guise of ‘will to power’ that he substitutes the power of the false for the form of the true, favoring the former for its artistic, creative power.
We have argued so far that these crystalline forces re-found thought on the models of temporality, difference and the simulacrum. Stripped of its innateness, we are now forced to re-evaluate the function of thought and, by extension, the brain. An important first step is to realize that thought doesn’t presuppose thinking. Instead, thinking is created out of thought (engendered) and is opposed to Hegel’s recognition. Thinking is thus an encounter with its own aporetic paradoxes, an encounter that opens up the idea to the influence of the imagination and the libido, producing the ability to think the unthinkable of thought that defines the aporia as such. Here, imagination is forced to confront its own non-limit as the unimaginable, the unformed or deformed nature, in short, a confrontation of the infinity of the sublime. Within this model, Hegel’s thought as recognition and the form of common sense are found wanting. Instead,
when the imagination in turn is raised to the level of transcendent exercise, it is the phantasm, the disparity within the phantasm...which is both that which can only be imagined and the empirically unimaginable. With regard to memory, it is not similitude in the reminiscence but, on the contrary, the dissimilar in the pure form of time which constitutes the immemorial of a transcendent memory.

Significantly, Deleuze’s conflation of thought with the tropes of the imagination, the phantasm or ghost, memory and the temporal, mirrors the very turns of phrase associated with the Bergsonian image.
Deleuze’s founding of thought on the image, rather than its Hegelian inverse, finds a powerful ally in Heidegger. The latter argued that as long as thought proposes its own good will in the form of common sense it will think nothing at all but stay trapped in opinion. In his essay, ‘What is Called Thinking?’, which can also be translated as ‘What Calls for Thinking’, Heidegger underlined the fissure and paradox between thought and thinking that Hegel had earlier conflated via the tropes of recognition and symbol. For Heidegger, ‘man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking.’ At this point we discover, once again, a return to Bergson and the élan vital of movement/memory, because what makes thinking possible is memory, for ‘memory is the gathering of thought. To what? To what holds us, in that we give it thought precisely because it remains what must be thought about...Only when we are so inclined toward what in itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking.’ To be capable of thinking, we need to learn it, and we do this by giving heed to what there is to think about. The fact that we are still not thinking comes from the fact that what is to be thought about has its back turned to man. It has been turned away from the very beginning, in a perpetual state of withdrawal. This withdrawing, in turn, is an event of movement - it draws us along by the very nature of its withdrawal. Man is in the pull of withdrawal and points toward what withdraws. However, we point at something which hasn’t yet been transposed into the language that we speak, so the sign remains without the possibility of interpretation. The withdrawal is thus captured not by the idea but by movement itself: it must be gathered and shepherded - which is the role of memory. But what calls on us, gives us impetus, motion to think, so that we become capable of thinking and shepherding this withdrawal? Heidegger’s answer is that the path to thinking begins with sensibility: it’s always via the intensive that a thought comes to us, not from ideas. As Deleuze confirms, when we think, ‘it is not the gods which we encounter: even hidden, the gods are only the forms of recognition. What we encounter are the demons, the sign-bearers: powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant; powers which only cover difference with more difference.’ For Deleuze, ever the Spinozan, the unthinkable of thought, the aporia that decenters thinking from thought in the form of a movement of difference, lies in the motion of a body, with all of its affects, percepts, impulses and intensities.
As one might expect, Antonin Artaud plays a key practical and theoretical role in this attempt to engender thought from the body. In his letters to Jacques Rivière, Artaud articulates the difficulties of thinking as difficulties in principle. The problem is simply to manage to think something: let’s face it, thinking is hard ‘work.’ But this work is not derived from ideas. Instead, ‘it presupposes an impulse, a compulsion to think which passes through all sorts of bifurcations, spreading from the nerves and being communicated to the soul in order to arrive at thought.’ For Artaud, thought is forced to think its own fracture and powerlessness:
Artaud pursues in all this the terrible revelation of a thought without image, and the conquest of a new principle which does not allow itself to be represented...there is an acephalism in thought just as there is an amnesia in memory, an aphasia in language and an agnosia in sensibility. He knows that thinking is not innate, but must be engendered in thought.
Thought thus brings into being that which doesn’t yet exist. Thinking is creation, which engenders thinking in thought: ‘The question for me is nothing less than knowing whether or not I have the right to continue to think, in verse or in prose.’ For Artaud then, thinking is a question not of innateness or recognition but of genitality:
I am innately genital...There are some fools who think of themselves as beings, as innately being. I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness. One who innately must be a being, that is always whipping this sort of non-existent kennel, O bitches of impossibility!...Underneath grammar there lies thought, an infamy harder to conquer, an infinity more shrewish maid, rougher to overcome when taken as an innate fact. For thought is a matron who has not always existed.
Significantly, Deleuze appropriates Artaud’s notion of engendering thought into being from the nervous system of the body as a mirror to his own theory of the cinematic image. The latter ‘makes’ movement: it is an automatic movement that gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us. Cinema is an endless becoming of image-movement-thought that eternally returns to a new circuit of image-movement-new thought. In this way thought is shocked into being. ‘It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you can't escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you. A subjective and collective automaton for an automatic movement: the art of the “masses.”’ In short, cinema is the apparatus of aporias, because it relies on the impasse between movement and idea to not only explode thinking from thought as a movement, but to return ideas to images in an endless circuit of return, in which all borders are removed.
In his brief love affair with the cinema in the 1920s, Artaud articulated this Nietzschean genealogy of thought as a pure potential. Thus, in his ‘Reply to a Questionnaire’ of 1924-25, he demanded
phantasmagorical films, films that are poetic in the accurate, philosophical meaning of the word, psychic films. Which excludes neither psychology, nor love, nor the display of any human feelings. But films in which there is a pulverizing, a recombining of the things of the heart and the mind in order to give them a cinematographic quality which is yet to be found.
For Artaud, echoing Heidegger, cinema is a matter of neuro-psychological vibrations. The image must produce a shock or nerve-wave which gives rise to thought. In this respect cinema is close to automatic writing, not insofar as it produces a lack of composition or form, but because of its higher control of the aporias of thought, which brings together the paradoxes of the critical and the conscious with the unconscious. The result is the spiritual automaton, which, in its eschewal of the organism, is closer to the Body without Organs than the psychoanalyst’s dream, with its censorships, repressions, its lacks.
Artaud’s cinema as a pure work of thought, shocked into being from the sensibilities of the movement-image, seems at first glance to be close to Eisenstein’s montage of attractions. In the latter, the image is translated into thought via the shock or vibration, which gives rise to the thinking already hidden in thought (in Eisenstein’s case, the thought in and through historical materialism). The thought then returns to the image, producing a new figure which is realized in an internal monologue, capable of giving us a new shock. Artaud’s shock is quite different. He gives us a powerlessness, which is the real object-subject of cinema:
What cinema advances is not the power of thought but its impower’, and thought has never had any other problem. It is precisely this which is much more important than the dream: this difficulty of being, this powerlessness at the heart of thought. What the enemies of cinema criticized it for...is just what Artaud makes into the dark glory and profundity of cinema. In fact, the problem for him is not of a simple inhibition that the cinema would bring to us from the outside, but of this central inhibition, of this internal collapse and fossilization, of this ‘theft of thoughts’ of which thought is a constant agent and victim.
Artaud believes in cinema only as long as he sees it as suited to reveal the aporia of the powerlessness to think at the heart of thought. Significantly, Deleuze reads this aporia as a form of specter: ‘The spiritual automaton has become the Mummy, this dismantled, paralysed, petrified, frozen instance which testifies to “the impossibility of thinking that is thought.”’
Far from being the apparatus that most closely resembles the dream, with its corollaries of repression and lack, for Deleuze and Artaud the cinema is a spiritual automaton that more closely resembles the navel of the dream, the thallus as the infinitely decentered ‘rhizome’ of the unthinkable. Instead of a fullness of being, a (W)hole, we get a crack or fissure in which cinema acts as the disassociative force which produces a hole in the appearance of the image. Artaud and Deleuze see the cinema not as coherent images of internal monologue and the rhythm of metaphors, but as unlinked images, multiple voices, each secreted inside another voice, each extending to infinity. There’s no longer a whole thinkable through montage, or an internal monologue utterable through an image. This is their main difference from Eisenstein’s fusion of thought with affect, for ‘if it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it (the nerve, the brain matter), it can only think one thing, the fact that we are not yet thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself, thought which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed.’ Thought, in other words, that is lost in the aporias of time.