What a Difference a Difference Makes.

In a text I’ve been working on titled What is an act of creation? Deleuze addresses a group of filmmakers in 1979 and asks them a number of questions pertinent to the cinema: “What is an act of creation?” “What is the truly cinematic?” and “What is a cinematic idea?” I’d like to share his answer to the third question because I was thinking and writing about Solaris in pretty much the same way but in a more “concrete” manner. The translation of Deleuze’s text is kinda choppy—you can ascribe that to the translator (yours truly) or to the fact that it was based on an audio transcript... I didn’t try to smooth it out any more than this because I wanted to show Deleuze’s formulation of ideas as he presented them.

“It’s in what’s proper to the cinema that one finds cinematographic ideas. To dissociate the visual from the aural, is… why can’t it be done in theatre? Why? It is possible, but when it is done in the theatre, unless the theatre has the means to do it, we say that the theatre has adopted it from the cinema. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is such a cinematographic idea to ensure the dissociation of the seen and the heard and the spoken—of the visual and the aural, that... that it would seem to address the idea of what is it to have a cinematic idea? Everyone knows what that consists of. I will answer in my own terms because... a voice speaks of something, at the same time. Thus, we speak of something, while at the same time, they make us see something else, and finally, that which they speak to us about is underneath what we are being made to see. That third point is really important. You can feel that, and that is a place the theatre cannot follow. The theatre can adopt the first two propositions. They show us something but we are made to see something else. Meanwhile, that which is spoken of lies beneath that which we are made to see—and it is necessary, or else the first two operations would have absolutely no sense, they would be utterly uninteresting. If you prefer, we could say, in other terms more..., the word rises into the air. The word rises into the air at the same time that the earth, which we can see, sinks more and more, or rather at the same time that this word which rises into the air speaks to us, that which it speaks to us about sinks beneath the ground.”

I had been thinking about Solaris (what else is there to think about?)and about what makes it such an engrossing film. From the point of view of the average North-American spectator whose sci-fi expectations have been modelled around Hollywood sci-fi fare such as Bladerunner (1982) or The Terminator (1984), Solaris has no sexiness or pazazz. In comparison to The Matrix (1999), the visual effects are totally unspectacular. As entertainment, Solaris lacks an action-motivated plot that is engaging and easy to hook into like Star Wars (1977) or War of the Worlds (2005). In contrast to Alien (1979) the horrific aspect of the “alien monster” is totally played down and unlike Close Encounters (1977), the alien contact angle is anti-climactic. In comparison to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) or 12 Monkeys (1995) the time-travel aspect is totally downplayed. The narrative itself is intractable and refractory: as a drama, the average viewer would likely have no patience or common-ground with Tarkovsky’s humanistic intellectual vision and would find the whole thing boring. There’s also a disconnect from the alienating and distancing effects of non-North-American cultural artefacts (art direction, unfamiliar wardrobe, foreign language, unhabitual concerns, unfamiliar talent, etc). From a North American perspective and its deeply entrenched generic expectations, we are presented with a film that on all surficial considerations comes up short on every front.

In spite of this, the film is consistently mentioned on the lists of best sci-fi films of all time. What exactly is it about the film that makes it so engrossing? If this cannot be gleaned from the surface aspects of the filmic image, where do we find the value-added content? We have no choice but to look at the film in a different way, not for what’s there on screen but to how it means or to what it points to. But just how does the film mean other than what is on screen? What is it about the image being shown that points us to look at the image in a different way? What exactly constitutes this different way?

If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark and compare that to the everyday reality on the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen on Earth the same way. How the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does. If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs from that which we have come to expect as reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.

In linguistics, this methodology is known as the analysis of deep structure and allows us to analyse the temporal manifestation of abstract meanings as a narrative whose parts are constituted by what we are seeing on screen but not necessarily a part of it. This kind of analysis allows us to discern narrative structures based on the progression of pictorial stylistics, issues of temporality, the representation of consciousness, the manifestation of the intrusion of memory, individuation, becoming, psychological concerns, etc. i.e. any metaphorical or conceptual process, in terms of its manifest temporal unfolding.

Cognitive science makes use of these elements of abstract meaning based on embodied metaphors as constitutive of sets which can be analysed through set theory or Boolean logic to analyse their constitution and interaction in order to create blocs of conceptual meaning as duration. Set theory in itself provides an interesting metaphor for conceiving the plane of immanence as the open, divergent infinite set of all possible elements of meaning and subsets as durations as presented in the philosophies of Bergson, Bachelard and Deleuze. The process of constituting and deriving meaning in cinema can be looked at in terms of set theory, where the infinite but closed number of cells of manifest and abstract meaning constitute the work. The subsets constituted by these various elements can be dissolved and reconstituted into different sets with different scope, emphasis, scale i.e. a variety of intervals, in order to investigate different concerns or affinities such as auteurism, the evolution of meaning of camera movement within the works of a particular filmmaker, etc. And these affinities do not only manifest themselves at a surficial level but at a hidden or abstract level.

Heidegger in Identity and Difference writes:
“Always and everywhere Being means Being of Existence... In the case of the Being of Existence and the Existence of Being we are concerned every time with a difference. We think of Being, therefore, as object only when we think it as different from Existence and think Existence as different from Being. Thus difference proper emerges. If we attempt to form an image of it, we shall discover that we are immediately tempted to comprehend difference as a relation which our thinking has added to Being and to Existence. As a result, difference is reduced to a distinction, to a product of human intelligence. However, let us assume for once that difference is an addition resulting from our forming of a mental image, the problem arises: An addition of what? And the answer we get is: to Existence. Well and good. But what do we mean by this “Existence”? What else do we mean by it than such as it is? Thus we accommodate the alleged addition, the idea of a difference, under Being. Yet, “Being” itself proclaims: Being which is Existence. Wherever we would introduce difference as an alleged addition, we always meet Existence and Being in their difference... Existence and Being, each in its own way, are to be discovered through and in difference... What we call difference we find everywhere and at all times in the object of thought, in Existence as such, and we come up against it in a manner so free of doubt that we do not pay any particular attention to it... What is the meaning of this oft-mentioned Being? If under these conditions Being exhibits itself as a being of..., in the genitive of difference, then the question just asked would be more to the point if rephrased: What in your opinion is difference if both Being as well as Existence each in their own way appear through difference?

There is something here, except I don't know what it is... equating the process of subtraction as differenciation. It would seem to mean that the parallel in the processes imply that the secondary meanings operate as a state of Being... Interesting...

Perception’s force field

« Le grand William James a été l’objet de nombreuses critiques injustifiées pour avoir suggéré que
chez certaines personnes,
l’inhalation de l’oxyde nitreux conduisait à la manifestation brève
d’un état psychique qui est toujours virtuellement présent. »
Richard P. Marsh, « La signification des drogues mentales »
paru dans Essai sur l’expérience hallucinogène,
Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1969, p. 53.

Le concept « champ de force de la perception » me fait penser à ce que j’ai voulu exprimer par l’expression « situation configurationnelle » en ce qui a trait aux forces qui soutiennent l’expérience psychédélique. Seulement, la configuration situationnelle fait état de toutes les forces autant virtuelles qu’actuelles à l’œuvre dans l’expérience pure. C’est comme une photo instantanée qui serait capable de montrer l’aspect d’ensemble de tous les éléments composant la singularité que l’expérience pure véhicule. Cela dit, la configuration situationnelle incarne l’expérience pure à son niveau le moins abstrait, soit dans l’actuel, mais juste avant l’expérience de registre de cette qualité.

En contre partie, le champ de force de la perception me semble se situer en tant que mouvement qui va de l’expérience pure au registre de l’expérience. Autant que la configuration situationnelle est statique, le champ de force de la perception appelle au mouvement pour se présenter. Alors que la configuration situationnelle peut même se présenter en tant que simple énumération, le champ de force de la perception apporte une perspective de durée aux éléments de la relation. Une surface incorporelle donc, qui est aussi pur mouvement et qui englobe beaucoup plus que ce que la conscience réflexive peut contenir, mais que la conscience affective absorbe pour composer l’expérience.

C’est un peu comme si la conscience affective était composée de milliards d’yeux et pouvait tout voir, alors que la conscience réflexive condense toutes ces données en un seul œil, une seule synthèse : « It’s not just that we see what we’ve already seen – it’s that what we’ve already seen contaminates what we feel we see and re-composes what we’re actually not seeing. » (Erin Manning)