I Am...The Regime Of The Tear
The Queer Thoughts Of The Time-Image
Author:
Supervisor:
Dimitrios Poteas Patricia Pisters
Second Reader:
Abe Geil
MA Thesis
Media Studies: Film Studies
Department of Humanities
June 24, 2016
Word Count: 22970
Contents
INTRODUCTION ... 4
1. THE IDEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT-‐IMAGE ... 12
1.1 IDEAS AND TIME IN THE MOVEMENT-‐IMAGE ... 12
1.2. NEUTRALIZING QUEERNESS IN THE RELATION-‐IMAGE ... 20
2. NEW QUEER THOUGHT ... 28
2.1. FROM HITCHCOCK TO KALIN, FROM THE WHOLE TO THE OUTSIDE ... 29
2.1.1. Living Between ... 31
2.1.2. Thinking Outside the Body ... 36
2.1.3. Do Robots Think of Electric Sex? ... 43
2.2. FINAL THOUGHTS ... 50
CONCLUSION ... 52
NOTES ... 54
WORKS CITED ... 56
Introduction
In the preface of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, published in 1983 as the first part of a project that would be completed two years later with Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze makes a striking comparison: “The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts” (xiv). Already from the preface, Deleuze elevates cinema above the other arts and gives it a great sociological and philosophical importance. It’s only fitting then that Deleuze in his two cinematic books will not follow an orthodox attempt at creating a film theory or a historiography of cinema. His aim instead, is to create a new language and methodology for talking about cinema, one that would befit the status of cinematic images as units of thought. It is not an approach of cinema through a philosophical filter, nor cinema analyzed in sociological terms. Deleuze may be referring to these fields, as wells as science and semiotics, but he does so only to
contextualize the cinematic concepts and terms cinema gives birth to. This might seem limiting at first: what use is a theory that approaches cinema as a self-contained unit that has little to do with technological, ideological or political issues? But it’s a limitation only if we don’t take into account that in Deleuzian thought nothing is completely self-contained. At the very least a set might be artificially closed, but never fully isolated from other sets and relations. If Deleuze creates a completely new cinematic vocabulary, it is exactly because he leaves the door open for a productive meeting of this vocabulary with other disciplines. A theory of cinema, he reminds us, should be “about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices” (Cinema 2 280). Deleuze treats cinema as a machinic assemblage whose connections with other
epistemological fields await their exploration by a visionary seer. Or, to borrow another one of his terms, we can say that Deleuze harvests the crystalline seeds that blossom in the cinematic screen and can be transplanted to impregnate different milieus.
In a way then, Deleuze’s project was not completed with the publication of Cinema 2, but remains perpetually open. My own attempt to productively exploit this openness will see me discussing another kind of openness: the open, diffused identity and subjectivity of the spectator, engendered by a new relation between cinema and thought that the time-image allows; a relation that as I will posit is inherently queer.
This openness and perceived inaccessibility of Deleuze’s cinematic theory however, has generated criticisms about its usefulness and influence, with commentators mentioning the impossibility of trying “to apply' Deleuze, to simply 'translate' analysis into a Deleuzian
language", and theorists treating it as a footnote in the history of film, merely as an "orthodox historiography of style" (Stam 262; Bordwell 116). Similarly, the supposed apolitical
philosophy of Deleuzian thought has created harsh but misguided criticisms and notable scholars such as Slavoj Žižek have labeled Deleuze “a highly elitist author, indifferent towards politics”, while Peter Hallward famously proclaimed that “those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere” (20; 164). It is true that in his Cinema books, Deleuze avoids, with the exception of a short chapter on minor cinema, a direct involvement with politics. A closer reading however can disclose the unspoken political implications of his theory as well as a more overt consideration of cinema as a political tool that, unlike Hallward’s claim, can lead to change. But as we’ll see, it’s a different change than the one Hallward was envisioning.
The clearest and most useful to us politicization of Deleuze’s theory comes in Cinema
2, where the time-image brings forth a new relation of cinema with thought, the body and the
world. When acknowledging the Marxist criticism of the apolitical evolution of Neo-realism and Japan cinema -a criticism that was based on the inaction of the characters- Deleuze offers his own vision of what constitutes meaningful political involvement: For him, it is exactly the characters’ inaction that allows them to see what a man of action can’t. It is through action Deleuze claims, through one’s ability to turn away from what she should confront, to rationalize that which should be condemned, that oppressions exist and multiply. What the Marxist critics refer to as passivity then, for Deleuze is a creative mental activity. Thus, his analysis of a cinema populated by ailing neurotics that are mentally confused, falsifying forgers who can’t be trusted and aimless heroes who are passively strolling is by default a political cinema. It is these political anti-heroes who can become seers and uncover the unbearable situation that actions hide.
That isn’t to say that Deleuze condemns action per se. What he opposes is the
automatically, habitually produced chain of perception-action. What Deleuze proposes is that cinema, as a pure optical and sound situation that immobilizes the audience, should function as the pure optical and sound situations that the characters of the film confront. The inter-assemblage film-audience is a babushka doll: a pure optical and sound situation that fractures the sensory-motor schemata of the audience, and should contain pure optical and sound situations that weakens the sensory-motor schemata of the characters. The optical and sound situation that is the film, should reveal then the intolerable in the same way that the opsigns and sonsigns of the film reveal the intolerable to the characters. What is important, Deleuze stresses, “is always that the character or the viewer, and the two together, become
visionaries” (Cinema 2 19, my emphasis). Deleuze doesn’t ask for the passivity of the
spectator but for the action of watching filmic images to become an act, a mental relation. His cinematic theory is not apolitical but proposes a reevaluation of our political and cinematic perceptions (and affections). It is a different version of politics that Hallward got only partially right: It can empower people by divesting them of what is perceived as power. And it can’t bring change to the world, but like the time-image, it can change our relations with – and within- it. Deleuze is clear in that. The world doesn’t need to be transformed. Only our belief in the world needs to.
It is a provocative proposition that is worth examining a little bit further. How does Deleuze understand our relation with the world and why is the severance of the sensory-motor schema and its reevaluation necessary for this relation to change? And why through cinema? To answer this, we should shortly analyze some aspects of the human consciousness that form the basis of Cinema 1 and how they compare with the consciousness of the camera.
Deleuze states that montage “is the assemblage of movement-images” (Cinema 1 70).1 The same claim is made for the universe: “The material universe … is the machine assemblage of movement-images” (C1 59). This tautology is of course at the heart of
Deleuze’s belief in the universe as “a metacinema”, but interestingly enough, there is a third part in this relationship: the human being (C1 59). For Deleuze, humans are also “an
assemblage of … perception-images, action-images and affection-images” (C1 66). The first important point to be made is that this relationship is not an equation. While universe and cinema are equated as an assemblage of movement-images, humans are described as an assemblage of the three varieties of the movement-image. So there is already an implied difference between cinematic and natural perception. This is because for Deleuze, like Bergson whom he draws from, perception is subtractive. In his analysis, human perception functions as the “black screen” of the photographic plate that allows light, i.e. movement images, to become visible. But at this point, two reductions happen. Firstly, through framing, the perceiving subject isolates only specific images and excludes the rest. Secondly, he perceives only those aspects of the framed images that serve a function for his needs. So, natural perception actually hides facets of an image instead of fully revealing them. “We do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it” (C2 20). This is the first material aspect of subjectivity, which is connected to the functions of perception. The second material aspect of subjectivity, related to how perception extends to action, dictates that a horizon is formed in the universe that depends on the proximity of the
surrounds him as it expects his actions. Consequently, human subjectivity defined by the sensory-motor schema of perception-action, creates an anchored center that subtracts facets from the images and limits in a finite horizon the acentred, infinite universe.
Yet, the camera although it functions in a similar way -the light passes the camera’s sensor, hits the plate/film and the images that have been framed by the monocular vision of the camera become visible- has none of the limitations of human consciousness. Cinema’s framing is not reductive since “the variability of its framings always lead it to restore … deframed zones” (C1 64). The possibilities of the cinematic shot, which can go from the micro level of the atom to the macro level of the universe and the infinite and instantaneous transitions through these framings via montage, create an all-encompassing continuous result, which is in contrast with the “fixed, instantaneous views” of human consciousness (C1 57-8). The cinematic image then, is not subtractive and also “lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon” (C1 58). Human perception brings the world closer to us, but cinema brings us closer to the world, it can “bring us close to things or take us away from them” (C1 57). And if human consciousness incurves the universe to place the human in its center, with cinema it is us who are incurved around a deframed world.
The significance of the tripartite relationship then is this: The camera is the only non-living matter that can perceive the universe as movement-images. Cinema, as the assemblage of these images, becomes a presentation of the universe,2 as is, to humans who can however only perceive some aspects of it, thus reducing the movement-images to perception, affection and action images. This is what Deleuze means when he defines montage also as “the inter-assemblage of perception-images, affection-images and action-images” (C1 70). The set of film-human, the “inter-assemblage”, turns the pure movement-images of the intra-assemblage (montage) into their subtracted varieties. A logical consequence is that since humans are an assemblage of perception-images, affection-images and action-images, any set that involves humans, is bound to be reduced to these types, thus effectively turning it into a reflection of ourselves. The Universe created our images, and we are creating a universe -and a cinema- in Our own image.
This is why Deleuze believes that we “normally perceive only clichés”, that clichés “penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the others in the world” (C2 20; C1 209). A cliché is “a sensory-motor image of the thing”, it is images reduced and limited by our partial sensory-motor schema (C2 20). As long as this schema governs our subjectivity, it becomes impossible to stop seeing, creating
and internalizing clichés, it is impossible to escape ourselves. It is a vicious circle where what we perceive turns into a cliché because it’s an extension of ourselves which has become a cliché by what we perceive.
Experiencing the universe without clichés, in its diffused, acentered totality, beyond a subjectivity that is conditioned by “our economic interests, ideological beliefs and
psychological demands”, requires a similarly diffused and acentered, consciousness (C2, 20). This is the consciousness of the camera and the consciousness that “good” cinema –to use Deleuze’s simple description- can bring through the severance of the sensony-motor linkage and the direct presentation of time. Since we live in “a civilization of the cliché, where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us”, discovering and seeing through the cliché is a political (in)action (C2, 21). This is where I believe exists a pivotal affinity of queerness with Deleuze’s cinematic theory that this paper will examine: Queerness as a political practice expresses a similar depersonalized consciousness that breaks through the clichés. The queer thought and the thought of the time-image then, have the same effect, produced by ruptures in the commonsense connections between images, between man and the world, between man and his/her own self. There is a tear that characterizes both queerness and the time-image and which expands in multiple aspects of one’s life.
Strangely, this conjunction remains mostly unexplored. Queer theory and film theory are not a stranger to Deleuze’s philosophy, but always separately from each other. There have been many assessments of the queer implications of Deleuze’s writing, with most noteworthy Chrysanthi Nigianni’s and Merl Storr’s edited volume on Deleuze and Queer Theory. By applying Deleuzian thought to queer theory, the book seeks to redefine –if not altogether abolish- queer associations with identity and representation, and is an approach that has informed my project as well. Deleuze’s cinematic theory however remains mostly absent from the volume. Even Nigianni, where in her own contribution cine-schizoanalyzes in an almost experimental way Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss (1995), scantily uses the Cinema books and instead –like the rest of the authors- draws primarily from the rest of the spectrum of Deleuze’s philosophy. Similarly, J.J. Halberstam, a queer scholar who in all her books takes a special interest in film and whose thought alligns in more ways than one with
Deleuze’s, never refers to the Cinema books. The triangle of queer-Deleuze-cinema seems to be a blind spot in film and queer analysis, with only one recent exception.
The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema by Nick Davis
is the only book so far that has attempted to systematically examine queerness and queer cinema under the prism of Deleuze’s cinematic theory. By focusing on a variety of styles and
queer movies of the last 25 years but also by uncovering the queer undercurrents of films that do not directly address LGBT topics, such as the films of David Cronenberg, Davis
appropriates the Deleuzian lexicon of images to demonstrate how their functions and significance aligns with the production and multiplicities of non-normative desire. It is a comprehensive account that covers many of the aspects of the Deleuzian theory, but in its examination of queered time-images, there is one conspicuous omission: time itself. By keying in on desire, Davis many times simply substitutes the function of time on the image with that of an anti-Oedipal desire machine, creating parallels between the two but leaving the role of time within his desire-images curiously unexamined and thus divesting the Deleuzian theory of its principle tenet.
During his analysis of the crystalline regime of the image, Davis states his conviction about the centrality of queer desire(s) in cinema, surprised that Deleuze appears
“unconvinced that even the most capacious, depersonalized, anti-Oedipal model of desire could in fact prove so capacious as to rival the fecundities of time as a productive
immanence, as a philosophical preoccupation, and as a genome of cinema” (159). It is not Deleuze however who is unconvinced about the importance of desire in the formation of cinematic images, but Davis who fails to see the inexorable connection between Deleuzian time, queer thought, practices and experiences and the functions of the time-image.
If I avoid talking about queer desires, it is not out of antagonism to Davis’ extremely valuable and pioneering project. This distancing from a desire-driven exploration of
queerness and cinema is mandated by my different approach than Davis’. As I will explain, it is my contention that the modernist conception of time through its imposition as a
rationalized, measurable linearity is inextricably linked to the continuous normalization of heteronormativity and the nuclear, heterosexual family. The time-image by contesting this conception and presenting a layered, non-rationalized and contingent time, bodies and identities, questions the entire heteronormative basis of society and is imbued with the same qualities that queer theory has attributed to non-normative bodies and experiences. The queering of the cinematic theory of Deleuze then, doesn’t have to come via the proxy of desire but by it’s integral component: time. To that end, I will adopt Mary Ann Doane’s analyses of modernist time in The Emergence Of Cinematic Time as serving the needs of industrial capitalism and attempt to reconcile them with the oppressive needs of
heteronormativity via Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity that entails the hegemonic manipulation of time for capitalist and heteronormative needs.
least not exclusively through that lens- even if that is an anti-Oedipal, non-normative and diffused desire. I want to build upon the paradigm of contemporary radical theorists, who create new discourses on queerness that investigate it from unconventional angles that pivot away from mainstream respectability politics and psychoanalytic theory and produce new understandings of the queer, beyond the binary and identity-based logic of
heterosexuality/homosexuality, male/female, normative/non-normative. David Halperin and Valerie Traub for example in their Gay Shame conference and the corresponding publication, associate queerness with a series of –seemingly- negative feelings such as shame that can engender radical, subversive modes of anti-capitalist and anti-heteronormativity politics. Halberstam, on The Queer Art of Failure, examines queerness as an anarchic practice that is more relevant to childish and incompetent attitudes like failure, forgetfulness and passivity than organized LGBT politics. I will particularly utilize Halberstam’s book and approach in my second chapter, in order to expand upon the Deleuzian concept of the spiritual automaton. My project also falls into a recent trend of investigating the disciplinary effects of the
institutionalization of time on bodies and behaviours, such as Freeman’s project mentioned above, and Stockton’s “growing sideways” theory on The Queer Child.
By denying to concretize it, treating it instead as a floating signifier whose meaning and significance are impossible to fully articulate, queerness is always in a process of a Deleuzian becoming, a machinic assemblage of new and unpredictable connections –exactly like cinema. I believe that as Cohen and Ramlow argued, “the definition and status of "queer" must never be finalized, circumscribed, or unitarily representative” (7). What interests me then, is not a singular, precisely defined queerness that can easily be appropriated and reterritorialized, but a multiplicity of queernesses, temporally and spatially malleable. It is not an identity-based queerness of the transcendental “I” of the cogito but of the rhizomatic, non-personal individuation of the “I is another”. It is the consciousness of a queer camera. This approach will allow us to expand our understanding of queerness and discover its inherent cinematic qualities, but also to stress the political functions of cinema as a counter-hegemonic apparatus.
Like the Cinema books, this paper has two parts that refer to the movement-image and the time-image. In the first chapter I examine the ideological implications of the cinema of the movement-image and explain how through its process of integration and differentiation can support oppressive institutions and perpetuate a transcendental, totalizing idea of the True that constructs rigid and inflexible identities. In the second part of the chapter I concretize this and relate it to queerness by examining the image. I will show how the
relation-image can make the audience think, and through one of its signs, the demark, can give rise to a queer thought which however can be neutralized and normalized. The second chapter examines the three aspects of the time-image that create a new relation with thought: the interstice, the Outside and the spiritual automaton. By examining movies that Deleuze himself analyzes but also contemporary queer films, I will argue that this new relation subverts the problematic associations of the movement-image with ideology, resists
reterritorialization and brings forth a queer subjectivity that challenges normative conceptions and constructions.
1. The Ideological Appropriations of the Movement-Image
1.1 Ideas and Time in the Movement-Image
One of the most famous excerpts from Plato’s Symposium, is Aristophanes’ speech about the origins of love that aims at explaining why people when fall in love feel whole. In primal times, says Aristophanes, existed three distinct sexes: the first was the descendants of the Sun, two men –as we currently know them- united in the back, the second two women united, descending from the Earth and the last one a man and a woman, the children of the Moon. But defiant as these people were, they tried to climb Olympus, the mountain where the gods resided, so Zeus to punish them, split them in half, resulting to the present, two-legged form of human beings. So now, humans incomplete and separated from their other half, are looking for their pre-assigned lover which can be of the same or of the opposite gender depending on who the person was united with before Zeus separated them. Aristophanes closes his narration with a warning about man having to remain obedient to the Gods lest they split us again.
Beyond its obvious –and problematic- queer connotations to which I will return later, what I want to extract from this myth at this point, is the ancient conception of movement and time, a conception that as Deleuze explains at the beginning of Cinema 1, was to be reversed in modernity. In the old dialectic, movement was conceived as “the regulated transition from one form to another, that is, an order of poses or privileged instants, as in a dance” (C1 4, emphasis in original). Thus, movement is thought of as a series of privileged, eternal, transcendental poses, with the transition between them being of no interest, functioning simply as the means towards the next privileged pose. Time, in this case, is a linear
movement towards a telos through a series of privileged instants. This is a model of time that is subordinated to movement, with man being subordinated to the transcendence of Ideas, the unchangeable, intelligible elements that reside beyond the visible world. The privileged poses are the imperfect embodiment of these Ideas in the physical realm. The platonic myth of the nature of love aptly demonstrates this conception. Humans are initially complete, defined by three separate and clearly distinct genders that are associated to the natural, transcendental objects of the Earth, Moon and Sun. After Zeus split them in half, humans spend their lives trying to become whole, to be reunited with their soul mate and assume their original, perfect form coming as close as possible to the Idea of Gender, Love and Sexuality. Under that logic, time spent between the first privileged instant of wholeness as a children of the
Sun/Moon/Earth and the second privileged instant of being with your other half, is merely an unimportant transition towards reaching the eternity expressed in Ideas.
It was modern epistemologies that brought a reversal of this conception of movement
and time. When Kepler and Galileo for instance conducted their experiments, they were aiming on determining a relation between the traversed space of a body and the time it takes to traverse it, movement thus being perceived as a mechanical succession of instances of equal importance. The apple then that Galileo supposedly dropped from the tower, didn’t pass through any privileged poses to arrive to the bottom. Movement was henceforth related “not to privileged instants, but to any-instant-whatever”, that is singular, equidistant points that might become remarkable, but have been produced by an “accumulation of banalities” and can therefore be considered interchangeable and non-privileged (C1 4; 6). These points therefore are not an expression of the eternal, but of a rationalized, quantified and spatialized time: it is an abstract time that can be counted by the arbitrary, equidistant ticks of a clock.
Mary Ann Doane in the Emergence of Cinematic Time, straightforwardly connects the rapid ubiquity of this model to industrial capitalism, that demanded the worldwide
standardization and homogenization of time. Trains needed to run on time and be synchronized and the factories’ whistles had to sound after specific periods to mark the workers’ shifts. Taylorism, the scientific management of employees, is a direct result of this process. Frederick W. Taylor and later Frank B. Gilbreth used the cinematic camera to time, record and study each action of the worker in order to eliminate any excessive movements and maximize their productivity. Like in the old dialectic, we have again minimization of transitions that are unimportant so that the worker will reach its goal, but now, the movement doesn’t occur between privileged instants that reflect the transcendence of time, but between immobile sections in which time is immanent. But what Doane fails to note, is that the modern rationalization of time didn’t see the abolition of the ancient notion of transcendental Ideas, something that becomes apparent in Deleuze’s analysis of the movement-image, which is in essence platonic.
What classical cinema has in common with the modern dialectic of time, as well as with the ancient one, is that time remains subordinated to movement. In all three cases, time is indirectly expressed via the movement between one pose/any-instant-whatever/movement-image to the other. And the accumulation of those instants constructs a whole which can theoretically can be expanded on to infinity, and whose change they express. This is what Deleuze describes as a process of integration and differentiation. The series of images are integrated within a whole, and at the same time, the changing whole is expressed in the
images. In classical cinema then, “on the one hand the images were linked or extended according to laws of association … on the other hand, associated images were internalized in a whole as concept (integration), which was in turn continually externalized in associable or extendable images (differentiation)” (C2 276). Thus, the definition of montage as “the determination of the whole” (C1 29).
But then a significant consequence arises. If the movement-images can be infinitely linked by association, then the concept of the whole they simultaneously construct and express can be projected beyond their limit and into the “extendable world” they form (C2 277). The concept of the film then will transcend its personal, social origins and will be promoted to a universal Truth. The idea becomes an Idea. And indeed, Deleuze doesn’t define montage only as the determination of the whole, but borrows Eisentein’s formulation to declare that “montage is the whole of the film, the Idea” (C1 29). However, he only subtly studies the political implications of the elevation of the movement-image from the particular to the universal. So, the four different schools of montage that he delineates are actually indirect expressions of time that present a whole as four different Ideas: the transcendence of organisms into a great organic unity in the parallel montage of Griffith; the unity of Man and Nature into the transcendental form of the One in the dialectical montage of Eisenstein; the mathematical Sublime of the superimpositions and multiple screens of Gance as a
transcendental Thought; the dynamic Sublime as the transcendence of Spirit in the intensive montage of German expressionism. And later on, continuing his platonic associations, Deleuze will relate these schools with the Small and the Large form of the action-image, stressing the fact that “Small and Large are used in Plato’s sense” (C1 178). These Ideas designate “conceptions, ways of conceiving and seeing a ‘subject’, a story or a script”, effectively describing two different methods the movement-image expresses an ideology (C1 178). This relation explains for instance the ideological battle behind Eisentein’s and
Griffith’s montage style which conveys two conflicting, political conceptions of history and society. The first’s dialectical whole reveals and tries to dismantle the underlying causes of social oppressions, while Griffith’s organic whole treats these issues as a simplified
opposition between two binary forces (e.g.: poor VS rich, black VS white), never examining the complex sociopolitical matrix that creates them.
But even if Deleuze surveys mainly the innocuous or even auspicious ideological appropriations of the movement-image, the dangers are obviously there. The famous movement-images of Taylor’s experiments, with the chronometer counting the time the worker needs to stamp the papers, placed a rational time in the actions of the employee,
monetizing them both. What Taylor’s filmed experiments demonstrated, was that time is in our every movement and can be counted, exchanged, spent and therefore valued.
Exemplifying “a process of dematerialization and abstraction that fuels a capitalist
economy”, time had literally become money (Doane 8). But the chain of association doesn’t stop in the simple equation time=money and extends to movement=time=money. So at the same time that the movement-images established an immanent time, they elevated money to a universal standard of worth of our of our every movement, without leaving space for an alternative. As if it was a platonic Idea that gives form to the visible world, the capitalist conception of money was to condition now our every action. In a synchronous movement, time became money and money became an Idea. In Cinema 2, Deleuze will shortly address the dangers of this fusion of the social with the –supposedly- Eternal. Talking about Hitler and Riefenstahl’s propagandistic films that were masked as objective cinéma vérité, he is lead to accept Virilio’s pessimistic thesis that “the movement-image was from the beginning linked to the organization of war, state propaganda, ordinary fascism, historically and essentially” (C2 165). But if we go down that road we can’t just stop in cinema.
Rodowick summarizes the platonic essence of the movement-image, its passage from the particular to the universal as such: “The integration of parts into ensembles, and
ensembles into wholes, culminates in a totality where image, world, and spectator are identified through a grand image of Truth” (12). But isn’t that valid for every hegemonic force at large? Doesn’t Capitalism, the State or Heteronormativity, establish themselves deep into every aspect of everyday life, delimiting a whole whose relations they control and regulate? And by doing so don’t they assume a supposedly transcendental, unquestionable and unchanging nature that our lives are obliged to become an expression of? Passports, flags, national anthems, patriotic values, military, wars, relationships, marriage, family, reproduction, a nice job, career success, promotions, a bank account, money…clichés, everyday expressions of the rigid, social constructions of Nation, Sexuality, Gender, Capitalism that masquerade as Eternal. It is the same process of integration and
differentiation Deleuze described for the movement-image, applied in one’s life. Only now the concept, the whole that our lives construct and constantly express has been conditioned by hegemonic Ideas, which are externalized within our lives. “It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film” (C2 171). The quantification of time only made more appealing the utopic pursuit of these Ideas, establishing them deeper into the quantified time of everyday life: Regardless of one’s background, the employee by working harder and longer, by spending more time, can reach the American Dream. And this effort
could now be measured: forty hours per week? Forty hours per week plus overtimes? Forty hours plus overtimes and a second job on the weekends? How much time, how many actions in exchange for a chance at some point, somehow, living the American Dream? But there can be no equal exchange between time and money. This purposely perpetuated illusion is
produced from time’s false quantification; “time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of an equivalence” (C2 77-8). So of course there is no reaching the Ideas, their appeal lies exactly in the fact that they are always just out of one’s grasp. And so, capitalism and the American Dream presuppose hard work but deny upward mobility, they advertise equal opportunities but remain gendered and racialized. “One cannot, therefore, criticize the American Dream for being only a dream”, Deleuze notes almost cynically, “this is what it wants to be, drawing all its power from the fact that it is a dream” (C1 148). All the Ideas have this double side: they establish themselves as rational and graspable but are elusive and unattainable. It is the absolute confirmation of Zeno’s paradox. No matter how hard he’ll try, Achilles will never reach the tortoise.
This is the first aspect of time and the movement-image that relates to the connections between man and the world and the perpetuation of oppressive institutions. But there is another aspect that has to do with the connection of man with himself/herself and the construction of an identity.
We can most clearly see this in modern heteronormative discourses on gender and sexuality that don’t differ much from the essentialist Platonic myth we presented at the start. Instead of the three transcendental Forms of the Sun/Moon/Earth we now have the two distinct biological genders that are considered Natural and unchangeable. But at the same time that society exalts the naturalness of gender, it also protects and regulates it so strictly, that it is as if it implicitly acknowledges that it is a socially constructed and not a natural concept. “If we were all already normative”, Halberstam wonders, “then presumably we would not need such strict parental guidance to deliver us all to our common destinies of marriage, child rearing, and hetero- reproduction”(28). And due to this constant social conditioning, one has to relentlessly strive to meet the unrealistic standards and limitations that heteronormativity imposes on gender. The heteronormative conceptions of masculinity and femininity are still treated as intelligible and yet unattainable Ideas that shape the world and our identities.
John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) perfectly exemplifies the harmful consequences of this insistent pursuit of goals that have been set and defined by outside forces in such a way so that their appeal lies exactly in that continuous –and futile-
pursuit. Hedwig is a punk rock transgender singer who after an early-age, unsuccessful sex change operation was left only with the eponymous “angry inch” as her genitalia. Although in her songs she proudly exalts her unspecified gender, her daily life reveals a desire for the appealing and elusive normative Ideas. In “The Origin of Love”, Hedwig sings a quite literal interpretation of Aristophanes speech from Symposium. As the song about the perfect
children of the Sun, Moon and the Earth who became “lonely, two-legged creatures” ends, she laments the difficulty of finding her soul mate, the one who will complete her: “It is clear that I must find my other half. But is it a he or a she? … What about sex? Is that how we put ourselves back together again? Can two people actually become one again?” Being neither a man nor a woman, not knowing if she was a child of the Sun, of the Moon or the Earth, there is no space for Hedwig in the myth she just sang. The realm of Ideas, of heteronormativity, leaves no room for chance, for contingency, for non-normative people, for those who don’t fit into the “natural”, predetermined genders. But how can Hedwig stop the search for her other half, cease her attempts to proceed to the next privileged pose, that of the couple, to reunify with her soul mate, when without her/him she is considered imperfect and incomplete? This is the implicit consequence not only of the Platonic myth of love, but of the perseverance of Ideas in general: For human time to have meaning, it is necessary to actively look for your other half, to be partnered, normative, to reach the realm of Ideas. Our current, rationalized times only make the pursuit more urgent, since any moment we spent in transition is not just wasted anymore, but this waste is now quantified, valued. As long as Hedwig isn’t reunited with her lover, all her actions, in which time is immanent, are meaningless. And so, Achilles must keep running.
Hence, a life of Ideas is a goal-oriented life, clearly delimited in distinct poses, with goals imposed by external, uncontrollable forces. In Deleuze’s words, it is a life governed by the sensory-motor schema, “concretely located in a ‘hodological space’ which is defined by a field of forces, oppositions and tensions between these forces, resolutions of these tensions according to the distribution of goals, obstacles, means, detours” (C2 127-8). It is both a normative life in the world and the cinema of the movement-image. We have already mentioned the problems Deleuze associates with a sensory-motor perception of reality: We perceive less of what really is, that is, we “perceive only clichés” (C2 20). It is with the dissolution of the sensory-motor schema that the cliché might recede and the whole image can appear. And Hedwig’s life and persona, is an accumulation of ceaseless movements and clichés.
During the course of the movie, Hedwig is following Tommy Gnosis, her
ex-boyfriend who became a successful rock star by stealing her songs. It is he who was supposed to be her other half, the one she would be reunited with.3 As he is touring throughout the US, performing in big, crowd-filled venues, she stalks him, travelling in the same cities and singing in small, decadent restaurants that often feature the same wallpaper: the image of a sinking ship. If the dialogue informs us that she is constantly travelling, the mise-en-scène shows that her constant movement not only takes her nowhere but, like the ship that slowly moves towards its own destruction, it actively harms her. What continuously changes though is Hedwig’s wig. In the film, wigs have a prominent role since Hedwig uses them as a means of evading reality by assuming different personas. And as the clichés hide aspects of an image, the wigs hide Hedwig. In the song “Wig in a Box” she informs us that when she’s “on the verge of going mad” she puts on her wigs and turns into a series of clichés: From a small town “Miss Midwest Midnight checkout queen” to “Farrah Fawcett from TV” to a “punk rock star of stage and screen”. It is the cliché of the beauty pageant winner, of the TV celebrity, of the rock star; an unattainable Idea of femininity expressed via ubiquitous cliché images of female personages that circulate in the external world and infiltrate and condition our internal world. The internalized Ideas construct an inflexible identity that is based on lack –not Man enough, not Woman enough, not working enough, not whole yet- and promise a perfect identity somewhere down the road. That’s the promise of a self-contained wholeness, a static, eternal, privileged pose of a universal Idea of Human. But it is another false promise, a very problematic notion of selfhood since “if the living being is a whole… this is not because it is a microcosm as closed as the whole is assumed to be, but, on the contrary, because it is open upon a world” (C1 10). Ironically, the self-contained wholeness is achieved precisely by its futile pursuit since, as we saw, the pursuit of the Ideas presupposes the
elimination of transitions and leaves no room for contingency and experimentation. If we paralleled the ways the Ideas operate in the world with the Zeno paradox, then the subject they create is an ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail: In an endless pursuit of a futile and hazardous goal, it turns into an artificial, closed whole all by itself.
It becomes clear then that in conjunction with traditional power structures and institutions, time can be used as a disciplinary method that modulates bodies, thought and behaviors. This is why queer theory has been particularly concerned, especially during the last decade, with queer and heteronormative temporalities. In perfect accordance to
everything we have described so far, Elizabeth Freeman coined the term chrononormativity to designate the institutional manipulation of time aiming at the organization of individuals in
collectives –nations, communities, families- and the maximization of their productivity. One of the basic cells of chrononormativity is the reproductive, nuclear family, which safeguards the renewal of the working force and the perpetuation of the conditions of capitalist economy. It is both a linearity of time –from one generation to the next- and a cyclicality –a repetition of conditions, concepts and Ideas throughout generations- that chrononormativity
necessitates, since “the idea of time as cyclical stabilizes its forward movement, promising renewal rather than rupture” (Freeman, Time Binds 5). Consequently, as Halberstam explains, there is a continuous heteronormative conditioning of the human who must, from an early age, be “converted to a protoheterosexual by being pushed through a series of maturational models of growth that project the child as the future and the future as heterosexual” (73). Obviously this description doesn’t differ much from the notion of privileged poses, where in antiquity “[t]he growth of an adult man was thought of as a passage from one fixed and quintessential statue-like pose to another, “the infant”, “the boy”, “the adult”, each statue summing up a phase of a process” (Bogue 22). Chrononormativity assures that the poses which will express the Ideas, will be that of “the straight infant” who will become “the straight boy”, “the straight adult”, “the straight worker” and will bring to the world another “straight infant” who will become “the straight boy”, etc., completing the circle and
continuing the line. A heteronormative ouroboros of privileged poses, running behind the tortoise’s linear, predetermined path.
The social and the personal, the institutions and the subject-positions constantly give birth to one another. As an apparatus shaped and conditioned by sociopolitical and economic forces, cinema can’t escape becoming part of this process. But from a Deleuzian perspective cinema isn’t simply an ideological tool, but a model for the connections we form with the world and ourselves. I have demonstrated how the movement-image operates as a model of a world governed by hegemonic powers that influence institutions and identities in what Deleuze calls “the model of the True as totalization” (C2 277). In the next section I will expand upon this and concretize it in relation to queerness, by examining closely the relation-image, which is a limit case of the movement-image. A case such as this will illustrate that the functions of expansion, integration, differentiation and totalization still operate in the movement-image even when it tends towards the time-image. But more importantly the relation-image, that introduces “a new, direct, relationship with thought”, will be our first entrance to the thought of the image and the spectator (C1 198).
1.2. Neutralizing Queerness In The Relation-Image
At the limit of the movement-image lies the relation-image. This is the image that brings a mental dimension to cinema, not by visually representing one’s thoughts, but by revealing the network of relations between the elements of a frame/set. It was Hitchcock who, for Deleuze, perfected the relation-image since in his films what is essential is the constantly transforming relations between the characters, their actions and their surroundings. The whodunit is
secondary to the web of these relations, which remain mostly invisible to the characters themselves and can therefore, be communicated to the audience only via the camera. A triadic relationship is then created between the film, the director and the spectator who is directly implicated since she knows more than the actual characters and can interpret and reinterpret the images on her own volition. In Rope (1948) for example, the audience has seen from the beginning Philip and Brandon, the film’s stand ins of infamous criminals Leopold and Loeb- committing the murder and putting the body in the chest. The rest of the
movement-images that follow will continuously modify the fabric of relations that surrounds this initial action, as the camera, the audience and the unsuspecting guests move around the chest, and learn more about the motivations of the killers. A whole is still being created and externalized in the images, but with the relation-image we already start seeing its dissolution since it is no longer the whole, the Idea, that determines the images. On the contrary, now “the shot subordinates the whole (relations) to the frame” and the images establish an unstable whole whose relations are in an unceasing flux (C1200). In this limit case of the movement-image, “the whole which changes is the evolution of relations”, so we are not talking about a rigid, transcendental concept that conditions the images anymore (C1 203).
The signs of the relation-image are the mark, the demark and the symbol. The first two belong to what in philosophy is referred to as natural relation: the logical, habitual linkage of images that form a series. One, for instance, can easily link an image of a plate of soup and that of a spoon, their relation being automatically conjured up by habit. While the mark however keeps the image within this logical succession, the demark produces an image which is “torn from its natural relations” and breaks the linkage (C1 218). To make sense of this estranged image the audience needs to discover new relations between the terms of the series and to critically reevaluate their own relation with the image. The demark is therefore a force of deterritorialization, that disconnects its object from its conventional, habitual
functions. So, in Hitchcock’s cinema an ordinary glass of milk becomes luminous, a common seagull and a crop-duster turn predatory, and a windmill can defy natural forces. These images challenge the spectator’s customary perceptions and affections and require the mental
engagement of the audience who now doesn’t simply have to view the images but read them in order to discover their meaning.
But one of the most significant aspects of Hitchock’s films that Deleuze doesn’t mention, is that Hitchcock’s greatest demarks are not objects, but people. His cinema is one where ordinary people either by force or choice are placed outside the normativity of their everyday life and become spies, investigators, adulterers and murderers. If with Hitchcock “the detective only has a mediocre and secondary role” it is because it has to be an ordinary person who will jump out of his unremarkable series of relations and do the investigation (C1 203). If in Hitchcock the killers are so often unsuspecting, restrained people –a maid, a hotel owner, two students, a tennis player, a husband- instead of common criminals, it is because the murder needs to be an act that will rip one’s regular identity from its customary, everyday associations, turning them into a demark.
These displaced identities function as “an unsettling, anomalous element”, as Bogue describes the demark, and is what has enabled multiple queer readings of Hitchcock’s almost entire oeuvre (103). The butch maid with the unhealthy obsession for her dead female boss and her underwear in Rebecca (1940), the effeminate, murderous roommates in Rope, the homoerotic relationship between the two men in Strangers on a Train (1951), the man with the split personality who cross dresses in Psycho (1960), they are all sexualized and gendered demarks: people whose relationships, appearance or behavior go against societal norms and break free from the habitual and social associations of masculinity and femininity. But beyond these more or less obvious homosexual and genderfluid undercurrents of
Hitchcockian characters, theorists have examined the queer connotations of even the more traditionally straight acting heroes and heroines.4 White for example, examines Rebecca as a narrative that positions its heterosexual heroine, the second Mrs. De Winter, “in relationship to a desirable female object”, as she becomes increasingly fascinated by the dead, titular character (xxi). Psycho’s Lila, the straight sister of the protagonist, also gets a queer reading by Doty as a “brash, heroic dyke”, not due to a queerness comparable to Norman’s obvious genderfluidity, but because she steps outside the usual narrative limitations of female roles within which we originally perceived her (Flaming Classics 180). More than a passive female character, the victim’s sister, or a possible love interest, she undertakes the
investigation for her sister’s disappearance and becomes the narrative center of the film, a demark that “will take over the narrative functions of both the lover and the law … functions almost always fulfilled by heterosexual male characters” (Doty, Flaming Classics 175). What makes these characters queer is less their coded homosexual desire and more their ability as
demarks to claim a place outside the chain of pre-determined relations that wants to
homogenize them and confine them within normative structures. As Todd Haynes believes, Hitchcock’s films “have these weird, perverse, complex perspectives that can be far more gay than most movies about gay themes—because they’re coming from an outsider’s perspective and change how you see things” (qtd. in Benshoff, and Griffin 228). Queerness under this regime, is a demark that threatens not only to “destabilize the gender identity of protagonists and viewer alike”, as one commentator notes, but to undermine the whole ideological
foundation these identities are built on (Modleski 5). This kind of relation-image, allows the viewer to reinterpret his gendered perceptions and feelings about femininity and sexual relations, exposing the social laws that create and condition them.
Indeed, Deleuze highlights that the relation image doesn’t simply extend the affection and action-images into thought, but “transforms them by penetrating them” (C1 204).
Deleuze here, appropriating and expanding on Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, in which he provided a classification of types of signs, equates this transformation with Peirce’s concept of Thirdness. Thirdness refers to the relations that frame perceptions, affections and actions and can transform them to interpretations, intellectual feelings of relations and acts. It is consequently no longer a perception for itself, but a cognitive interpretation of the
perception; not affections that merely fill the gap between perception and action but feelings induced by sense; not a goal-driven action but an act whose undercurrent symbolic element of a law is exposed. The Thirdness of the relation-image can thus stimulate a critical
positioning of the audience towards the image and its relation with it. In its proper form then, the demark can reveal that social constructions such as gender, sexuality and relationships that we perceive, feel and enact as something given, are in fact social constructions
permeated by arbitrary laws that have to be subjectively interpreted and critically thought out. In an interesting convergence of Deleuze and Kracauer, the latter in his Theory of
Film attributes a similar purpose to those cinematic images that “tend to reveal things
normally unseen” (46). Like a Deleuzian demark and a Peircian Thirdness, for Krakauer certain images can illuminate those “blind spots of the mind” that “habit and prejudice prevent us from noticing” (53). Also bringing the mental dimension into the relationship of cinema with its audience, Kracauer reminds us that those images aim “at transforming the agitated witness into a conscious observer” (58). For him, it is the familiar that is the enemy of thought, “that which condition[s] our involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses” and restricts us from seeing all the facets of an image and its underlying relations (57). In a process of defamiliarization then, the familiar must turn into something alien to reawaken
conscious thinking and expose the roles which “cultural standards and traditions may play in these processes of elimination” (53).
Deleuze, like he does with all his cinematic terms, only implicitly hints at these political aspects of the relation-image. But they are there nonetheless. What is the natural chain of relations designated by the mark if not blind spots, images understood only by an automatic sensory-motor operation conditioned by habit and prejudice; in other words a series of clichés? And what is the function of the relation-image and the demark then if not to break that habitual linkage and reveal those aspects and relations of the cliché that remain undisclosed, to “restore the lost parts, to rediscover everything that cannot be seen in the image” in a constant attempt “to break through the cliché, to get out of the cliché” (C2 21)? The relation-image then is the first type of Deleuzian image that attempts to rise against those cultural standards and traditions, against the “civilization of the cliché where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us” (C2 21). But it doesn’t fully succeed.
With the relation-image and its Thirdness comes a re-examination of the movement-image and a rupture of the sensory-motor link. The demarks of Hitchcock not only implicated the spectator in the image but also turned the protagonists into spectators. The demark, the familiar that turned alien, has the power to immobilize the person whose quotidian
movements and thoughts are interrupted by the unfamiliar. Kracauer again seems to be in agreement, when he describes the disruption of a person’s routine after finding the familiarity of his room disturbed. We ignore our everyday objects of perception since “we would be immobilized if we focused on them”, he notes (55). But he never examines why the
defamiliarization process might fail and instead of revealing the cliché, reinforce it. Deleuze on the other hand acknowledges that “it is not enough to disturb the sensory-motor
connections”, since “maltreated, mutilated, destroyed, a cliché is not slow to be reborn from its ashes” (C2 22; C1 211). Cinema 2 is dedicated in examining those mental-images that fulfill what the relation-image started, but we can extract reasons for its occasional failure that are inherent in the relation-image.
The first point of contention is that the thought the relation-image engenders, is not autonomous but dependent on a chain of associations, even if these associations can be jarring. The queer element will jump out of this chain of habitual associations, but still relates to it via a negative or reverse association. This means that the demark is Othered since its entire identity is defined by what is considered normative. At the same time, the thought goes from one node of the chain to the next, completely disregarding what might lie in between. And no matter how much the chain will be extended, how many nodes will be added, there
will always be something that falls between, that doesn’t fit. The gendered chain of male-female can expand to Sun-Moon-Earth but there will always be Hedwigs who don’t belong.
The second point is linked to the functions of the third sign of the relation-image, the symbol. Deleuze defines the symbol as a bearer of abstract (i.e. non-habitual) relations through which a whole is constituted. The first seagull attacking the protagonist in The Birds (1963) is a demark since it alienates the customary relations between birds, man and Nature, explains Deleuze. But all the birds together become a symbol that designates the now
inverted relationship between Man and Nature and the naturalization of human relationships. The symbol thus operates as a node of relations that connects images that wouldn’t be habitually connected. This operation creates a whole governed by the relations described by the symbol, relations which can modulate within the whole of the film. In The Birds for example, the birds as a symbol create a whole that is in constant flux as the movie progresses: from a whole of a humanized Nature, to a bird-centered Nature and finally to that of a Nature in a precarious equilibrium with man.
The transformation of the demark to a symbol and the variations of the whole it presents, is reflected in the subjugated queerness of Norman in Psycho: Norman is originally presented as a shy, stuttering, slightly effeminate, single man, in vast contrast with the more traditionally masculine and determinate Sam whose sexual prowess is the first image of the film. Norman’s identity displaces him from the customary series of characteristics that connect him to other men, women and masculinity, becoming a queer demark that estranges the ordinary relations between man, gender and sexuality. By the end of the film however, with the image of the dead mother superimposed on his queer body and his identity
consumed by the identity of the mother, Norman awaits completely still and silent a life of confinement both externally, in mental institutions, and externally inside his own body. He has become a symbol of a pathologized queerness that needs to be punished, confined and extinguished as it presents a direct danger to the individual and the social order. And in the final scenes of the film, we are transferred from Bates Motel to the police station. From the place where the queer symbol reigned, creating a threatening whole where social order and gender were out of balance, we go to the place of the Law where the masculine
representatives of that social order –the lover, the doctor, the police- stand victorious over a now subjugated queerness, reestablishing the whole of a heteronormative, lawful and safe reality. On contrary to the natural relations of the demark that constitute a series, the symbol creates a whole based on abstract relations, that is, relations “through which one compares
two images which are not naturally united in the mind” (C1 198). This is how the image of a queer man can be associated to sickness, sexuality to Evil.
What is furthermore noteworthy is that within that whole, not even the queer demark of Lila can exist. As we saw, Lila as a demark that severs the normative social codes that condition femininity and sexuality, forces the spectator to acknowledge that “he himself has blindly adopted conventions which now seem naïve or cramped to him” (Kracauer 56). This reframing and reevaluation of our gender-coded perceptions and affections and the potential illumination of the arbitrary laws that govern them is enabled by the Thirdness of Psycho’s relation-images. But in the end, Lila is “subdued when the narrative forces her to encounter the perils and terrors of queerness” and stands quiet amongst the expertise of the men who provide the final heteronormative explanation of the story (Doty, Flaming Classics 180). It is they, who define the final relations of the whole. By being forced to step back into her
habitual chain of relations and the safety of her normative identity, her queerness is not punished and destroyed as Norman’s but is normalized and transformed into a
non-threatening mark that adheres to the social series of characteristics that define her role as a woman.
And of course it isn’t just Norman and Lila who get assimilated within a
heteronormative whole. Hitchcock’s identity demarks, all these queer-coded characters who dared to defy the law and claim their own positions outside their socially constructed roles, get punished, captured, killed or simply return to their predetermined social position, in what Doty has called a Hitchcockian “queer apocalypse” (Flaming Classics 180). And so, for instance, after a short walk to the dark side of queerness, the female protagonist of Rebecca, known only by her husband’s last name, has to go back to the safety of her identity as Mrs. de Winter, while Mrs. Danvers’ more obvious lesbianism must be extinguished in the fire, her queerness a symbol of a primordial evil that was haunting the normative couple and needs to be cleansed in a ritualistic pyre.
In the same fashion, we can consider the locations in Hitchcock’s films as queer demarks that become symbols. The gothic mansion in Rebecca, the house in the shadows in
Psycho, or the apartment in Rope that seems isolated from the outside world, all function as
breaks from the normality of the heroes’ everyday life. And by the end of the film their anomaly has become a symbol of the unknown that needs to be normalized or destroyed. So Manderley is burned down, the mysterious house is abandoned and the outside world enters into the isolated apartment. But the spatial relation of the frame with the whole is a matter of another Deleuzian concept, the out-of-field. For Deleuze, each frame has an out-of-field with
two aspects: a relative aspect that refers to a spatial set which is not seen and an “absolute aspect by which the closed system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe” (C1 17). This double aspect of the out-of-field expresses the process of integration and differentiation: a continuous expansion of the cinematic images that are thus integrated to a whole, and the externalization and expression of the changing whole in the images.
Therefore, even the most isolated sets/frames that characterize Hitchcock’s films always refer to a whole that can be potentially expanded on to infinity. This is how the demark stops being a localized relation and can turn into a symbol that refers to the whole of society. Rope for example, takes place entirely within the apartment of Philip and Brandon. It is a space completely isolated from the outside world, an entirely closed up relative out-of-field, with the external world visible only through the window of the apartment. Like the Bates Motel, here is a space where disorder rules, with an unspoken, incomprehensible evil at its center that has to be neutralized. And indeed, at the end of the movie, Rupert, the traditional American hero played by James Stewart, after discovering the dead body in the trunk, opens up the window of the apartment and fires several shots on the air to notify the police.
Promptly, sirens are heard approaching the house. The previously sequestered space of lawlessness is reconnected with the normative, lawful, outside world, which is about to violently barge in. The fluctuating fabric of relations and the unstable whole they created are finally stabilized by the power of the Law. By expanding the relative aspect of the out-of-field to the supposedly infinite outside of the normative society, the demark of queerness becomes a threatening symbol for everyone, necessitating its reterritorialization and justifying the narrative of normativity.
The demark’s queerness can be normalized, or mutate into a symbol manipulated in such a way as to be riddled with abstract relations that assign to it moralistic values. In both cases, the demark is reterritorialized and stripped of its revelatory potentials. And the whole that is created might oscillate throughout the film, but by the end it can still be stabilized and made to refer back to an Idea. The relation-image doesn’t lose its basic characteristics. It is still a Thirdness that reveals the element of a law in its relations and implicates the viewer, allowing for a reframing of his perceptions and affections. But these characteristics are ideologically appropriated by the powers that control the images, by those who “have an interest in hiding images from us”, returning us again to the previous discussion on the dangers of the movement-image (C2 21). So instead of pushing the image to its limits and reveal that which is hidden, the relation-image can return it to the state of the cliché. What it reveals then, isn’t necessarily the arbitrariness of a social law, but its supposed transcendence
and inevitability. And the intellectual feelings and interpretations it generates might have already been tainted by ideology. Deleuze then was right in asking for “an autonomous mental-image” (C1 214). For the relation-image thinks, but its thoughts are not always independent.
This is why the Hollywood industry made sure that cinematic images would be under its control and from 1934 until 1969 it imposed via the Hays code the prohibition of any “inference of sexual perversion”, demanding additionally “that Hollywood films depict married, procreative heterosexuality as the only proper sexuality” (Lewis 301; Benshoff, and Griffin 9). During the last decade of its application, when for financial reasons the rules of the code became more flexible, the Production Code Administration started allowing the depiction of what it considered sexual deviancy, under the condition that all morally dubious actions will be punished. In other words, the demark had to fall back in line, or die; it had to be a symbol of the moral decadence and dangers of living outside the acceptable societal spectrum of behavior. And if the heteronormative whole was threatened, in the end it had to be restored, stable and intact, further establishing the necessity and naturalness of its laws. Because that’s how cultural hegemony works: By establishing an artificial whole whose symbols, meanings and relations are appropriated, distorting and manipulating our perception of them so that ideologically constructed institutions and beliefs that perpetuate the status quo will appear natural and predestined. But consequently, if even the relation-image can be institutionally controlled and transformed back into a cliché, if queerness can be turned on its head and become an image of evil, what remains for a cinema that wants something new to emerge from the clichés? “[H]ow can an Image be extracted from all these clichés … With what politics and what consequences? What is an image which would not be a cliché?” (C1 214)
There are the questions with which Deleuze concludes his examination of the
movement-image, and which will drive his analysis of the time-image. For these questions to be answered, cinema had to develop a new relation with thought and “[t]he mental image had not to be content with weaving a set of relations, but had to form a new substance. It had to become truly thought and thinking” (C1 215). The whole then would not be a creation of the movement-image, a creation that could be manipulated by claiming to be representing reality, but would be the outside, that which exists in the interstice between the images. And in that interstice, thought will confront its own limits and a new queer subject will emerge.
2. New Queer Thought
Block the tortoise or untangle the ouroboros. Throw a wrench in the cogs of the clock and jam its rationalized, chrononormative ticks, or introduce a subject that can’t be entrapped inside his own self. These are the two choices we have at this point if we want to avoid the pitfalls of the movement-image. In one fell swoop the time-image achieves both. The direct presentation of time in the image, its contingency and uncertainty, subverts the linear, modernist model and all the constructions that came with it: “It is the crisis of both the action-image and the American Dream” (C1 210). But at the same, the time-image brings forth a new relation with thought and a novel understanding of selfhood. Pisters describes that “according to Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed and transcendentally controlled entity but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood (or subjectivity) are challenged in time and by time” (20). It is not then merely a new subject-position that the time-cinema creates but a reconceptualization of the meaning of human. “Human” is no longer the gendered, racialized, rational, self-aware and self-contained Enlightenment subject -the subject of the movement-image and the Ego=Ego- but it’s something new that can only be defined by its inherent impossibility to be defined, by its “irreducible multiplicity” (C2 133). This is a human with the diffused, acentered consciousness of the cinematic camera that dares to utter the famous proclamation of -a very queer- Rimbaud: “I is another.”
Block the tortoise or untangle the ouroboros. These are the goals of queer theory as well. Queerness, like cinema, realizes its full potential when it challenges our conceptions of time, when it contests a linear progression from one pose to the other and a goal-oriented life. And in parallel, queer theory has a lot to gain by challenging the “human” identity, and opening it up to new formulations and connections. These are two equally viable and productive projects. So on one hand, we could explore the time-image directly and investigate how queer bodies and the signs of the time-image converge and together they destabilize heteronormative constructions. And multiple theorists have theorized about the queer body as what I believe is a time crystal: The queer child “grows sideways” and not linearly, argues Stockton, since she is displaced in time due to her knowledge that she lays outside the heterosexual future her family destines her for; she is not part of the succession of poses of chrononormativity and so she is blocked from the promised land the Idea of hetero-futurity offers. Halberstam, picking up that thread argues that kids are always anarchic, “out of place and out of time” (27). And for others, the act of coming-out is a temporal process that, as another crystal of time that merges the virtual and the actual, compells “the queer individual to claim a new identity that has been there all along” (Rohy 157).
