Conceal, reveal, revisit

“We know that things and people are always forced to conceal themselves, have to conceal themselves when they begin. What else could they do? They come into being within a set which no longer includes them and, in order not to be rejected, have to project the characteristics which they retain in common with the set. The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured” (3).

At first glance, the quote above seems to suggest a progression characterized by linearity. There is an initial “coming into being” that leads to an intermediary state marked by the appearance of an essence. What would follow “the middle” as the course of “development” extends? One could imagine a sort of “regression/development,” where the thing or person turns to attend to the initial stage and probes the nature of the “coming into being within a set which no longer includes them” with acquired knowledge of the essence at its disposal, in a sense, causing the trajectory to stray from what initially appeared to be a sense of linearity. The stages of this “development” would appear able to converse with and translate each other. I am not sure that there is any direct way of mapping this concept onto the nature of the linkages inherent in the three levels discussed by Deleuze (sets and closed systems, the movement of translation, the duration or the whole), but it is not surprising that his discussion of these three levels would lead one to dwell on the quote above. In moving past the notion of simple linearity – in the mind, if not in time – one is enticed by the idea of oscillations between “divisions and reunions,” which may be sensed in the quote above, and is certainly present elsewhere in Deleuze’s exploration of the cinema…

“Given that it is a consciousness which carries out these divisions and reunions, we can say of the shot that it acts like a consciousness. But the sole cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, not the hero; it is the camera – sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman” (20).