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Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty Author(s): Elena del Rio Reviewed work(s): Source: SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 3, Issue 108: French Cinema Studies 1920s to the Present (2005), pp. 62-78 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685732 . Accessed: 16/12/2011 13:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to SubStance. http://www.jstor.org
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Page 1: Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-PontyAuthor(s): Elena del RioReviewed work(s):Source: SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 3, Issue 108: French Cinema Studies 1920s to the Present(2005), pp. 62-78Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685732 .Accessed: 16/12/2011 13:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toSubStance.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Elena del Rio

Notwithstanding Deleuze's indictment of phenomenology for its

alleged failure to meet the challenges of immanence and difference, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's philosophies and their implications for a

theory of cinema remain close in many important respects. Both Merleau-

Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Deleuze's transcendental

empiricism dismantle epistemological systems that are grounded in non-

corporeal acts of signification or cognition. The drive to determine a clear

dividing line between subject and world, perceiver and perceived, objective reality and subjective experience, is equally suspected and

accordingly undermined by both thinkers. In the continuity of human

body and world that both these philosophies propose, a sensational and affective approximation to the world replaces the purely mental and visual methods of the disembodied cogito. As made apparent in his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze shares Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the world-

body of sensation as a continuum between viewer/artist and art work: "sensation has no [objective and subjective] sides at all; it is both things, indissolubly; it is being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say: at the same time I become in sensation and something arrives through sensation, one through the other, one in the other" (Francis Bacon, 27).

But despite the many ideas Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze share, it is also important to acknowledge the difference that separates them-a difference that renders their respective modes of thinking unique and therefore equally necessary. As many commentators have noted, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze part ways at the juncture where sensation and affect are variously theorized as either belonging to the realm of

subjectivity or as operating in a desubjectified field of forces. Thus, while for Merleau-Ponty sensation and affect are subjective phenomena arising out of an intentional and individuated rapport with the world, Deleuze

regards the sensational and the affective as material flows whose individuation and exchange does not rest upon subjectified intentions, but rather upon the workings of a non-organic, anonymous force or life.

? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2005 62 SubStance #108, Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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I would like to use the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as a testing ground for the potential reversibility, as well as the tensions, that arise when one applies Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's diverse modes of thinking to a kind of cinema that seems equally suited to both. In many notable ways, the examples of Godard's 1980s cinema that I will discuss--Passion (1981), Scenario of Passion (1982), and Histoire(s) du Cinema (1989)- can be seen as film performances of paramount philosophical concerns in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's writings. The micropolitics of perception exemplified in Godard's cinema counters the ideology of the visible at work in Western forms of representation by restoring the materiality and physicality and the sense of duration to acts of (technological) perception. Godard

strips the image of its representational properties, while foregrounding the incantatory qualities that turn the image into a disclosing event or

gesture. Godard is not interested in the visible as a static aesthetic form or fixed ideological construct; rather, his attention to bodily gesture and movement acts out an involvement with the visible as a mode of constant

becoming, where figures come into being from a latent ground of visibility and virtuality. Furthermore, the body figures so prominently in these films by Godard as to transform what initially might be construed a

proliferation of individuated bodies into a corporeal continuum of sensation and affect.

But besides using the image to interrogate the material and sensory continuity between body and world, Godard's cinema explicitly addresses the very point of contention between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze: the subjective versus the non-subjective perspectives. Godard's

tendency to include his own body in these works does not answer the

question by either privileging the subjective or the non-subjective. Instead, as I will try to show, Godard's ambiguous stance between a

potentially narcissistic self-presentation, and the dissolution of identity into anonymous material sensation affirms the continuity of subjective and non-subjective as overlapping, coexistent planes. In this way, Godard's films unwittingly reveal the philosophical impossibility of

keeping the subjective and the non-subjective locked into a binary relation. For while Merleau-Ponty's position may emphasize the

subjective pole, his phenomenology does contemplate the role of the

prepersonal and pre-reflective in a way that approximates his thinking to the anonymity of material forces and affections espoused by Deleuze.

Conversely, although Deleuze undoubtedly favors the molecular plane of consistency/immanence over the molar plane of organization, he does admit in A Thousand Plateaus that an excessive stripping away of subjective

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forms and functions may result in a dangerous regression to the undifferentiated. In this text, he asks whether it may be "necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal

subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages" (270). It is not my intention here either to prioritize Godard's film work

over the philosophical work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, or vice-versa. Instead, if any priority should be acknowledged from the outset as an

underlying concern of this essay, I would point to Deleuze's insistence

upon the naturally shared affinities between cinema and philosophy: "Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind.. .One naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy" ("Interview with Deleuze," 366). In the same non- hierarchical spirit that animates Deleuze's words, I will try to avoid a model of reflection whereby one discipline is considered the dominant or privileged term in relation to the other. Instead, I will attempt to show how cinema and philosophy can resonate with each other by enacting the same problems and posing the same questions. Godard's cinema and

Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's philosophies are thus different terrains with conditions similar enough to allow for the same tremors of thought to occur("Interview with Deleuze," 367). And it is in the intersection between the two disciplines that I would like to situate this analysis. More specifically, I will set such dialogic encounter of cinema and

philosophy in relation to two areas explicitly explored in Godard's cinema: the filmmaker's passive and receptive role in his conception of the film, and the use of montage as a privileging of the temporal and affective dimensions of the image over its mimetic properties.

Witnessing the (In)Visible / Actualizing the Virtual In the words of Jean-Luc Douin, the anecdotal level of Godard's film

Passion may be explained as follows: "We see a Polish filmmaker (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) engaged in making a film where he stages some tableaux vivants executed by the great masters. The filmmaker is attracted to the

manager of the hotel where he is staying (Hanna Schygulla). This woman is married to a factory manager (Michel Piccoli) dealing with his workers'

impending strike. The factory manager is assaulted by a union worker

(Isabelle Huppert), who in turn is in love with the Polish filmmaker"

(Godard par Jean-Luc, 213). This banal plot aside, Passion stages the kind of

perceptual drama that is already afoot in Godard's 1965 film Pierrot le Fou -a drama Pierrot/Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) tenuously reveals as he reads from a book about Velazquez during the film's opening

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sequence: "After fifty years, he did not paint anything definite... He did not capture anything in the world except the mysterious exchanges that drive forms and colors to penetrate each other."

Like the Spanish master Velazquez, embarked on a search for

transparency and shadow, Godard shows no interest in representing sharply defined characters or situations. Instead, the filmmaker's gaze turns its activity of seeing back on itself, looking not to what appears as visible, but to the visible's mode of appearing. At the most fundamental level, the tableaux vivants in Passion conduct their investigation of

appearance by stressing the shared reliance on lighting of both painting and the cinema. Godard uses the first tableau, Rembrandt's Nightwatch, to meditate on the ontology of the painted image and the cinematic image alike. While the camera slowly scans the faces of these characters, a female voice-over says: "It's not a lie, but something imaginary. Never

exactly the truth, but not the opposite either. It's something separated from the real world by calculated approximations of probabilities." As Godard interrogates the coming into being of figures from the indeterminate and latent ground of the visible, his gaze bears a striking resemblance with the painterly gaze described by Merleau-Ponty:

Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all the objects of his quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence...The painter's gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose this worldly talisman and to make us see the visible. (Primacy of Perception, 166)

If Godard's preference for tracing the visible's mode of appearing can be elucidated through a phenomenological perspective, so it can be

through Deleuze's theory of cinema. When describing the power of the

affection-image in the cinema, Deleuze stresses the same fundamental conditions of perception that draw the phenomenologists' attention, conditions he calls "pure singular qualities or potentialities... pure possibles" (Movement-Image, 102). In reference to G. W. Pabst's film Lulu, he writes:

There are Lulu, the lamp, the bread-knife, Jack the Ripper: people who are assumed to be real with individual characters and social roles, objects with uses, real connections between these objects and these people-in short, a whole actual state of things. But there are also the brightness of the light on the knife, the blade of the knife under the light, Jack's terror and resignation, Lulu's compassionate look...these are very special effects: taken all together, they only refer back to themselves, and constitute the "expressed" of the state of things. (102)

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Thus Deleuze distinguishes the actual state of things of the visible, which in cinema coincides with objects, characters, and their actions at the level of plot, from the affective qualities brought on at the point where faces or whole bodies are touched by different configurations and movements of light. Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze is equally intrigued by the question of what the light does "to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing." And he reaches a similar conclusion: what is expressed by the image is never entirely explained or exhausted by the spatiotemporal connections the plot establishes as sufficient rational causes. As he remarks, "however much the precipice may be the cause of vertigo, it does not explain the expression it produces on a face...For the expression exists without justification...as expressed, [it is] already the event in its eternal aspect" (102).

Godard's semi-scientific, semi-philosophical observation of the primordial elements that ground appearances and their perception demands attention not only to lighting, but also to gesture and movement. In his filmic recreation of Rembrandt's Nightwatch, the female voice-over accompanying the image also emphasizes the capacity of the body to speak for its subject: "Don't scrutinize the structure or the distances...do like Rembrandt, examine human beings attentively, at length. Look at their lips and into their eyes." Immediately thereafter, the film cuts to an image of Isabelle Huppert, the factory worker, her back to the camera, looking sideways, with her eyes and lips unmistakably fleshing out her expectancy and her frustration. Godard's belief in the revealing function of the gesture is fully shared by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, as shown in their respective writings on film. In "The Film and the New Psychology," Merleau-Ponty writes:

Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness: they are types of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside. They exist on this face or in those gestures, not hidden behind them. (52-53)

Implicit in Merleau-Ponty's reading of gestural style is the lack of distinction between signs and their significance, between the gesture and its meaning as affective content. Thus the meaning and intentionality captured in Isabelle's gesture resonate with the phenomenological notion that the body functions as a primordial ground of semiosis. As film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack notes, it is at the radical level of the lived-body where the genesis of speech and writing occurs (Address of the Eye, 41).

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Turning to Deleuze's cinema books, we find an equally strong emphasis on the body as the constantly moving and deterritorializing surface that can put us directly in touch with the unthought. Deleuze's attention to the close-up as an instance of the expressive powers of faciality in The Movement-Image is matched by his concern with the bodily attitudes and postures that form the locus of affection in The Time-Image. Here, he writes of cinema's capacity to restore belief in the world via the body:

The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself...It is on the contrary that which it plunges into...in order to reach the unthought...the body...forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life...To think is to lear what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures. (189)

In Passion, Godard materializes the sense of embodiment of the painterly gaze by allowing the figures to move and change positions in front of the camera. This mobility, enacted as a series of entrances and exits, appearances and disappearances, of the human figures, recreates in cinematic form the intermediate stages in the process of painterly creation-its invisible hesitancies as well as its visible choices. But even more importantly, the "otherness" of the cinematic tableaux in relation to the paintings lies in a conceptual difference between the painting and its reenactment as a performative event. Rather than representing static wholes aspiring to reproduce the original painting with exactitude, Godard's tableaux act upon our senses as moving fragments that reintroduce the body and the notion of temporality into the acts of perception and expression. Implying a shift from representation to performance, these tableaux constitute unique and original events of perceptual interrogation in their own right.

While Passion investigates the perceptual conditions of painting and the cinema, Scenario of Passion is doubly marked by this inquisitive mode, for in it Godard traces the conception and birth of Passion itself. Standing before a blank screen, and waiting for the film to materialize on it, Godard tells us about his preferred method of creating a screenplay--seeing comes before writing.

The world described in Passion had to be seen first, to see whether it existed before being filmed... You have a writer's job, but you don't want to write. You want to see, to receive. You're before a white page, a beach, but there's no sea. You can invent the waves. You have only a vague idea, but [it] is already movement.

In Scenario, Godard becomes a witness to the process whereby latent/ virtual movements and tendencies sediment in the form of a particular film. As practiced by Godard, the work of seeing involves the acceptance

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and testing of possibilities that already exist at the level of the virtual, and not simply the creation of something out of nothing. This distinction is important because it subverts the dichotomy of actual and virtual by placing these terms in a processual continuum. In Ronald Carrier's words, "while the virtual and the actual differ from one another, they are not

opposed to one another because they are both real" ("Ontological Significance," 194). As he engages in the labor of "seeing," Godard comes close to describing his job as a process that turns the virtual into actual, hence he does not begin with stories, but with places and movements. The actors have to be seen before they are assigned their lines, and, instead of embodying roles, they are to be considered first and foremost as

inscriptions of movement. Godard rejects the position of perceptual mastery sometimes

attributed to the filmmaker in favor of a kind of perceptual work or labor. Just as in Histoire(s) Godard's body is seen moving and speaking amidst the visual and aural apparatuses of the film's body, in Scenario he shows himself not as a disembodied creator of the film's script, not even

primarily as a pair of eyes, but rather as a perceiving hand that strives to trace the movements and gestures that constitute the possibility of a

story. Jacques Aumont has described Godard's corporeal investment in Scenario as "the bold mise-en-scene of a body embracing the fantasy- screen" ("The Medium," 207). As Aumont has also noted, it would be easier for Godard to do his job as a filmmaker blind than without hands

(209). In the case of Godard, the act of "embracing" the screen is no mere

metaphor, but rather a literal action that brings together the filmmaker's

body and the screen as body temporarily in one single corporeal assemblage. The synthesis Godard achieves with the screen is powerfully conveyed at the end of Scenario, where Godard literally embraces the screen, thereby underscoring his role as a kind of shepherd or guardian of the cinema. Recalling his playful tendency to split words into their

phonetic materiality and their semantic content, Godard uses the French

phoneme "mer" to mean simultaneously "sea" and "mother." Godard addresses himself to an anonymous man standing on a pier and

encourages him to go back home to the outstretched arms of both sea- mer-and mother-mere. The affecting aspect of this moment lies in the

way Godard puts his arms around the man's body, keeping him in a kind of protective aura as he walks away from the sea and back into the land. Godard's gesture shows a total, uncompromising belief in the image- the ability to dwell in the image and to let the image inhabit his body.

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The filmmaker thus performs what he himself says at one point in Scenario: "The screen is a wall made for jumping over." Crossing over to the other side, Godard becomes at once everyman, child, mother, seer, and above all, cinema. Rather than simply authorizing images and sounds, he witnesses the autonomous unraveling of the cinematic process - a process that includes but outstrips him.

At this juncture it would be pertinent to recast the central question that I posed in my opening remarks: Is Godard's explicit contemplative activity in Scenario better understood by reference to the

phenomenological idea of expression as creation or emanation from consciousness, or is it more appropriately situated in a subjectless field of perceptions, sensations, and affects? Does human consciousness- however embodied or even prereflective-lend organization and transcendence to a chaotic circulation of material flows, or is consciousness simply one material flow overlapping with others? Rather than attempt to offer a definitive answer, I will argue that Godard's way of being-in-the-world as a filmmaker has a somewhat deconstructive effect on the binary structure of such questions. That is, Godard's presence instantiates a web of actions and passions that is irreducible either to conscious subjectivity or to a subjectless circulation of perceptions and affects. Instead, I would say that Godard lends his mind and his body to a process that allows these perceptions and affects to take place. In so

doing, he acts as a stage, channel, or catalyst-the meeting point where certain processes of perception, sensation, and affect can converge and interact to produce something new. Godard's reflexive activity searches and investigates, yet his prevalent attitude is that of one who waits for

something to be brought forth from its latent state. As he says in Scenario

referring to his own role, "you're there in the dark, lying in wait for sound and language."

If we look at Histoire(s), the video work that I will come back to later, Godard's agency continues to be inscribed as a perpetually reconfigured combination of actions and passions. Here, the continuum of filmmaker and electronic typewriter forms a bodily assemblage that gathers intensity from Godard's own presence, while at the same time rendering it remarkably impersonal. In Histoire(s), Godard undertakes a writing of cinema history through cinema's own images and sounds, repeatedly insisting on the irrelevance of he or she who might tell the story of the cinema: "L'HISTOIRE -PAS CELUI QUI LA RACONTE" (The [hi]story, not s/he who tells it), he says; it is the images themselves, Godard implies, that write their own concealed history. Furthermore, Godard uses a

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typewriter whose electronic memory allows it to act independently of the human writer. This electronic machine functions to dissolve the very idea of authorship into a complete physical involvement with the object being examined: the body of cinema itself. As the typewriter spits out Godard's words, these rhythmic sounds become a live soundtrack, which in turn models the very rhythm of the images as they appear and

disappear in front of our eyes. The process of turning thoughts into sounds rids Godard's statements of their analytical baggage, lending them instead the gravity and material weight of bodily processes. With this series of transformations and unlikely combinations, Godard proves that his true vocation is not so much to be a masterful cinematic author as it is to experiment with and observe the autonomous processes of a kind of cinematic alchemy.

As Leonard Lawlor argues, much of the difference between

phenomenology and Deleuze's philosophy lies in their respective stresses on generality and singularity as constitutive of sense. The common sense

espoused by phenomenology constitutes for Deleuze the loss of

singularity, ultimately resulting in a "cliche [or] generality under which

particulars would be subsumed" ("End of Phenomenology," 16). Yet, according to Lawlor, the generality of sense Merleau-Ponty speaks of "cannot be reduced to a law or formula" (23); rather, the notion of

generality itself is always rooted in the singularities of the sensible (23). Godard's is undoubtedly a cinema of singularities and multiplicities that can hardly buttress the kind of familiar expectations forged by common sense or general opinion. The function of Godard's conscious agency in the midst of his cinema is to provide a sensitive point or conscience where singularities of perception and affection can form, coalesce, and continue to transform even beyond his punctual intervention. Lawlor refers to this conscience as a "boiling point," perhaps borrowing from the kind of scientific, empiricist discourse Deleuze himself uses in his first cinema book, where he writes that "[Affects] have singularities which enter into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex entity. It is like points of melting, of boiling, of condensation, of coagulation, etc."(Movement-Image, my emphasis,103).

Godard's positioning between activity and passivity can also be

explained by reference to what Carrier calls a "passive/connective synthesis," which provides a way of addressing human being and even

agency while avoiding the potential pitfalls of a discourse of consciousness. Carrier defines the passive synthesis as "tak[ing] place prior to conscious activity" ("Ontological Significance," 191). The passive

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synthesis thus seems rather analogous to the notion of pre-reflective/ unreflective vision, the transcendental field of the prepersonal and

anonymous described by Merleau-Ponty. Drawing from Brian Massumi's

example of the natural process of sedimentation (User's Guide, 48), Carrier

explains that human affections are produced through a similar process involving a series of contractions and contemplations:

Grains of sand come to rest next to one another, accumulating in a layer of muck at the bottom of a body of water. Each grain is an element drawn from a flux...and contracted into the muck at the bottom. Which grains are selected to make up a particular muck is at once a matter of chance...and of necessity...The process of sedimentation results in the production of a new individual being (the muck), which is the product of a process of contraction (of the grains of sand) and contemplation (the selectivity being explicable in terms of physical laws)...For Deleuze and Guattari, an individual human being...is composed of a multitude of such contractions and contemplations taking place at several levels at once...The subject as conscious agent, insofar as its conscious agency is the product of the synthesis of actions, is itself the ongoing product of a complex and unconscious passive synthesis...as collections of affections produced by the connective synthesis of contraction and contemplation, an individual human being is caught up in a multiplicity of series of actions and passions. ("Ontological Significance," 191- 92)

Like the grains of sand that accumulate and contract through a selective

process over which they have no grasp or control, the passage of Godard's virtual images into actuality is equally bound by laws of both chance and necessity. Thus, for example, the fact that the first image appearing in Godard's screen in Scenario is that of a woman (Hanna Schygulla) running with a bouquet of flowers toward a car must be at once a matter of pure randomness and of absolute necessity. While it does not follow

any readily apparent logic, it nevertheless must be connected to a multitude of other material flows and affects that determine its

appearance at that particular moment in time beyond all conscious

predictability or calculation. Godard as subject is thus not altogether absent from the "complex and unconscious passive synthesis" that takes

place in Passion and Scenario of Passion. Moreover, passivity does not mean absence of action. On the contrary, the passive synthesis implies a

heightening of the power one has of being acted upon, no less a power than that involved in acting itself. And this is what I think the very title of Godard's film points to: Passion names the transmutation of perception into affection by virtue of the power Godard has to be acted upon or to be affected by the very things or images he perceives.

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The Cinematic Body without Organs: Montage as Auto-Affection Whether in their emphasis on art or nature, Passion and Scenario revel

in open spaces and in the phenomenological enigmas of perceptual receptivity. Such philosophical inclinations are matched by a cinematic

style of sweeping camera movements and long takes--a decisive

preference for space and mise-en-scene over time and montage. In

Histoire(s), on the other hand, Godard collapses all sense of discernible, locatable space into the dimension of temporality. Here, the work of

montage transforms perception into sensation. As Godard juxtaposes image and sound fragments from a myriad of films and other textual sources, the resulting amalgamation of incompossible realities produces nothing of the order of usable perception, instead triggering pure affective

intensity. In Histoire(s), Godard takes the cinema beyond the intentional

phenomenological project of the lived-body to situate it firmly within the deterritorialized plane of the Body without Organs (BwO). Montage is the method that enables Godard to harness the force of the image in such a way as to evacuate its identitary form and function, and to transform this force into a ceaseless becoming in excess of all use or reason.

My argument here is that Histoire(s) performs the history of cinema as the becoming of a BwO. Godard's work conforms to the basic premises of this Deleuzian notion. To sum these up, the BwO is not opposed to the

organs, but to the organism's restricting organization, which, in Deleuze's words, "tr[ies] to stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization" (Thousand Plateaus, 270). The BwO belongs to the

plane of consistency, where individuations are formed and dissolved

according to desubjectified forces or affects called haecceities. These "consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected" (261).

Initially, at least, Histoire(s) presents itself to us as a seemingly chaotic and borderless multiplicity of bodies. But, regardless of patterns and tendencies that we may be able to discern through multiple viewings, the deterritorializing effects of its images remain. As in Scenario, Godard's own body is also visible at some points in these video works, either

quoting from books or manipulating different writing or filming machines. Another form of possibly individuated bodies is, of course, the staggering number of both well-known actors and anonymous people that populate the screen, and lastly, Godard's decision to offer an embodied

history of cinema by establishing a strong corporeal link between the movements and gestures of collective history and those performed by

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the individual body. But any attempt to separate out the different

corporeal axes of Histoire(s) is likely to be superseded in the viewer's

experience of these works by a more enveloping and overwhelming sense of embodiment that does not withstand analytical distinctions between

planes or levels. Simply put, all of these different bodily manifestations coalesce in one single body, a univocal plane of consistency that disregards clearly defined borders or identities, hence a BwO.

Enormously effective in producing the all-enveloping sense of

anonymous corporeality characteristic of Histoire(s) is Godard's

manipulations of the speed of the image. Through a jerky succession of frames, Histoire(s) decomposes the cinematic construction of movement. As Godard attempts to visualize the minimal units of bodily movement, naturally impossible accelerations or decelerations of the visual track extricate the body from its subjectifed status, pushing it to the limits of

impersonal, molecular existence. But, contrary to all conventional methods, Godard entrusts such molecular intensities and singularities with the task of conveying the force and violence of collective history. Godard's historical method is thus ostensibly at odds with the traditional

dichotomy between the individual body and the collective trajectory of

history. Here, the larger historical forces and movements are referred back to those minimal gestures of the body where intentions and desires are more likely to be recognized.

In the Nazi sequence of Episode 1, one of the most historically charged segments in Histoire(s), the historical gesture is not confined, for example, to newsreel images of Hitler. In a seemingly arbitrary manner, the images of historical "truth" are interspersed with bodily fictional

representations that range chronologically from such Fritz Lang movie classics as Dr Mabuse (1933) and M (1931) to more contemporary references to Nazism in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lili Marlene (1981). Thus, to establish the historical significance of the body, the segment opens with a familiar cinematic icon - the close-up of the murderer in M (Peter Lorre) pulling a knife out of his pocket and showing his readiness to strike

again. To the sound of Nazi military music, the image-track then cuts to the close-up of an isolated hand against a dark backdrop, tensely clenched and closing in slow motion. As Godard's voice-over repeats the hypnotic line "HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA," the image of the closing fist reappears, this time rapidly alternating with flashing, still images of Hitler against a similar dark backdrop, one arm raised in megalomaniac defiance, the other one resting over his own chest. Godard's voice-over then repeats "HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA," this time adding "WITH AN'S'; WITH AN

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'S.'" Hitler's hysterical voice is then heard over a succession of images of

anonymous bodies of ordinary people being displaced by the war. Godard's choice of images and shots shows to what extent he thinks of the body as fully involved in a collective network of meanings and affections: a hand being raised, a look averted, a forward movement

stopped in mid-action, a fist closing in a menacing gesture-these are the

signifiers of history at its most revealing. Histoire(s) implements to great effect the relation between speed and

affect as theorized by Deleuze. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze defines the

body as the "sum total of the material elements belonging to it under

given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness... the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of

potential" (260). Insofar as Histoire(s) treats the image as a body-a material and sensible aggregate-it seems totally appropriate to see the film's orchestration of the moving image through the lens of the Deleuzian

body. The image, then, works as "the sum total of the material elements

belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness... the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential."

Like the BwO, the Godardian image is free from a static form or substance, and equally free from the responsibility of either reflecting or

obscuring the so-called "real" world. Whether moving or still, the image is never stable, fixed, or truly arrested, but rather always in between movement and rest, and always capable of affecting or being affected by other images. The intrinsic connection between montage and affect is crucial in this regard. In his "Notes on the Translation" of A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi provides a definition of Deleuzian affect that is easily transposable to the context of montage; the image's affective potential is thus "simply an ability to affect and be affected...a passage from an

experiential state of the body [image] to another...an encounter between the affected body [image] and a second, affecting, body [image]" (xvi). In the cinema, it is the temporal succession of images in montage that materializes the image's "ability to affect and be affected." As Histoire(s) implies both visually and verbally, the kind of image that does not contaminate or become contaminated by other images is void of any cinematic significance. A female voice-over makes precisely this point while images from Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) are shown on the screen: "An image seen out of context, as long as it is clear and interprets an expression, will not alter on contact with other images. Other images will be impervious to it, and it will be impervious to them.

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No action, no reaction. Therefore that image is useless within the

cinematographic system." While Godard's montage techniques undermine the exercise of a

rationalist epistemology (by blurring distinctions between films, genres, or art forms), they are no less effective in shattering the veneer of

sentimentality that has informed the mainstream reading of images from the cinematic classics. Godard's practice of montage not only interferes with the viewer's cognitive mastery of the isolated image/film, but it also generates an affective or pathetic charge in the image that is decidedly of a different order than the pre-packaged emotion elicited by the original film. Repeatedly throughout Histoire(s), the juxtaposition of images and sounds from different films, concepts of filmmaking, or genres is uncannily orchestrated to bring to the fore that which remains unspoken in the

original movie. Pathos thus arises as the viewer is shocked by the uncanny simultaneity of two facts or realities that cannot be reconciled through rational means. On the other hand, an ineluctable interdependence between the two elements juxtaposed impresses itself upon us. The

paradox informing the logic of montage favored by Godard exemplifies the inextricability of sense and nonsense that both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze stress. As Lawlor explains, "not imprisoned in a sense, the

paradoxical element actually generates too much sense... Having no sense and producing too much sense, the paradoxical element is a repetition without original" ("End of Phenomenology," 20-21).

For example, at one point, the image of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), the epitome of Hollywood's ideal of female glamour, alternates with images from two films by Carl Dreyer: Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955). The narcissistic isolation of the Rita Hayworth image is

challenged here by the pathetic force of Dreyer's images-the woman

charged with witchcraft and burned at the stake in Day of Wrath, and old father Borgen calling out for his mad son Johannes in Ordet. Another

telling example of this kind of montage consists in the juxtaposition of the Lillian Gish character walking in a deserted street in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) and the Marlene Dietrich character reveling in a saloon game where women ride on men's backs in Lang's Rancho Notorious

(1952). The pathetic or affective qualities readily available in both the Dreyer

and Griffith films are superseded here by a more encompassing sense of

pathos that we may very well call historical. The affect arising in the interstices of these juxtaposed images is related to cinema's memory of itself; it is not a human-centered affect, but rather an instance of cinema's

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self-affection-the "affection of self by self" as the definition of cinema's

temporality. This self-affection leaves aside facile and self-indulgent sentiment to interrogate instead the necessary interdependence between cinematic constructions of sexuality and morality that are conventionally held to be worlds apart from each other. For example, to what extent does the body of the glamorous woman necessitate the simultaneous deployment of the victimized or forsaken woman in order to perpetuate the pleasure-effects it calls forth in the viewer? Is not the Hollywood star, despite the star's claims to inhabiting a world beyond ordinary morality, very much the result of a displacement and repression induced by the dominant moral codes of sexuality, gender, class, age, and race?

As these examples show, the Godardian montage functions as a BwO insofar as it opens the field of cinema's potential powers beyond formal, narrative and ideological restrictions. The BwO does for an individual human being what Godard's montage does for the history of cinema-- they both instantiate a process that "deactualizes the affections [one] possesses in virtue of having been subjected to organization" ("Ontological Significance," 203). By separating images from the narrative organization that constrains them, and by juxtaposing them with other images through principles of dissociation rather than resemblance, montage deactualizes the organized affections of classical cinema and actualizes potential affections that concern cinema's memory of itself, its potential for auto-affection. The BwO consists of affections that are assembled without regard for dominant or hierarchical organizations. Similarly, the juxtaposition of images in Histoire(s) follows a logic that does not withstand the binaries and repressions shaping the actual history of cinema. Neither objective nor subjective, the history of cinema we are given opens up the medium to the possibility of revision in desiring-production, offering a virtual performance of what cinema could have been, of the powers of affection it could have mobilized. In drawing upon "that which was never present to reflective consciousness, but fully present to pre-reflective consciousness" ("End of Phenomenology," 23), Histoire(s) also enacts Merleau-Ponty's correlation between the unreflective and an originary past. Just as mimicry repeats an object by performing what is virtual in the object, Histoire(s) repeats its object-the history of cinema-by performing history as a becoming and cinema as montage. This is a performative rather than a representational activity insofar as the work produces a reality in excess of its object. Instead of lacking in relation to the object, which is always the lament inherent in

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representation, performance conceives and generates a new object, hence the false begins to resonate with the power of truth.

Godard's exploration of cinematic appearance clearly situates the medium on the plane of immanence. On this plane, cinema contains unlimited ontological possibilities. In the filmmaker's words,

As soon as you freeze an image in a movement that includes twenty- five others, you notice in a shot you have filmed...that suddenly there are billions of possibilities; all the possible permutations...represent thousands of possibilities... you notice that there are entire worlds contained within [a] woman's movement- corpuscles, galaxies, different each time--and that you can travel from one to another in a series of explosions. (Godard sur Godard, 461-62)

From this standpoint, the cinema is an infinite set of images that

distinguishes itself from chaos only by virtue of the extractive or subtractive order that the filmmaker brings to them. In this quote, and even more literally in Scenario of Passion, Godard as subject functions as a force of extraction, what Gregory Flaxman calls "the process of drawing order from [the] 'chaos of light' as if through a sieve" ("Cinema Year Zero," 93). In this Bergsonian/Deleuzian light, the subject is not so much the locus of consciousness as the interval or gap that interrupts the flux of infinite images to expose one singular shot or frame out of that flow.

If the Godardian cinema is preeminently a cinema of immanence, the

question is whether the phenomenological perspective is still capable of

addressing the force of its perceptive and affective flows without turning immanence into an immanence to consciousness. Several commentators, such as Lawlor (whom I have quoted repeatedly) and Dorothea Olkowski

("Merleau-Ponty and Bergson," 32), regard Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible as a marked departure from the philosophy of transcendental consciousness practiced in The Phenomenology of Perception. In the later work, Merleau-Ponty no longer conceives being as subject, but rather as infinity. Lawlor quotes Merleau-Ponty: "The extraordinary harmony of external and internal is possible only through the mediation of a positive infinite or...an infinite infinite...If, at the center and...in the kernel of Being, there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or

indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it" (Signs, 148-49; quoted in "End of Phenomenology," 29). With these words, Merleau-Ponty seems to recognize an immanent plane where all forms of life, intelligence, and meaning are simultaneously created as differential strands of elan vital that form by internal differentiation and division. Merleau-Ponty's positive infinite may be regarded as a pure

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plane of immanence that "expresses itself without end" and without the

possibility of transcendence "enter[ing] and limit[ing] it" (29). It is in this sense that cinema, as Godard sees it, "expresses itself without end," pressed towards an affective self-encounter that is no longer dependent on transcendental identity. The filmmaker's quest for an open-ended, yet immanent cinema may be summarized in his own famous statement: "Ce n'est pas une image juste; c'est juste une image." It is not a just image; it is

just an image. University of Alberta

Works Cited Aumont, Jacques. "The Medium." Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991. Raymond

Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy eds. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992. Carrier, Ronald M. "The Ontological Significance of Deleuze and Guattari's Concept of

the Body without Organs." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology vol. 29, no. 2 (May 1998): 189-206.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 'Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam. Minneapolis: UMP, 1986. -. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minne-

apolis: UMP, 1989. -. "The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze" (with Pascal Bonitzer,

Jean Narboni et al.). The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Gregory Flaxman ed. Minneapolis: UMP, 2000.

-. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: UMP, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minne-

apolis: UMP, 1987. Douain, Jean-Luc. Godard par Jean-Luc. Paris: Rivages, 1989. Flaxman Gregory. "Cinema Year Zero." The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy

of Cinema. Gregory Flaxman ed. Minneapolis: UMP, 2000. Godard, Jean-Luc. "Propos Rompus." Cahiers du Cine'ma no. 316 (October 1980), re-

printed in Godard sur Godard, pp. 461-2. Lawlor, Leonard. "The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-

Ponty." Continental Philosophy Review vol. 31 (1998): 15-34. Massumi, Brian. A User's Guide to "Capitalism and Schizophrenia": Deviations from Deleuze

and Guattari. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. -. The Primacy of Perception. Trans. Carleton Dallery, ed. James M. Edie. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1964. -. Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. -. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1968 -. "The Film and the New Psychology." Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert Dreyfus

and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964, pp. 48-59. Olkowski, Dorothea. "Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: The Character of the Phenomenal

Field." Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting. Veronique F6ti ed. Atlantic

Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996, 27-36. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton

UP, 1992.

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