The Digital and Immanence Co-Implicated, or A Minor-Digital

In reading Hansen I've been returned back to the concept of the smooth and the striated being co-implicated. One of the most interesting aspects of this was illustrated by Deluze and Guattari in ATP when they said that all progress must take place within striated space while all becoming occurs in smooth space (ATP, 486). I talked about this a little in my presentation (part B). Immanence is implicated by striated technology that operates at such a scale and velocity that immanence is able to be implicated. The way in which striation is connected to technology is given an example in Mandelbrot's fractals (ATP, 486-488). These fractal images would not have been possible with out the increasingly iterable computational tools available to Mandelbrot. The systematic approach of fractal geometry is a good example according to D&G because it "provides a general determination for smooth space that takes into account its differences from and the relations to striated space" (ATP, 488).

The example is but one of many instances in which a striated system can function in a way that implicates an immanent concept. For me, I think that this is also the case in cinema. The technology of the movement-image is such that it accelerates the static technology of photography to such a velocity that not only is movement implicated, but time as well. Deleuze would argue that the implicated becoming in cinema is not movement but time. Hansen's search for what is "new" in new media holds a similar affinity to Deleuze's search for what is co-implicated in cinema (Hansen, 21). Although he takes his conclusions in a rather non-Deleuzian direction I believe his starting point is very important. What does the striation that produces the digital (image/media) co-implicate? What kind of immanent concepts can the digital imply? Hansen seems to focus on the way in which the digital striates the status of representation in media and therefore shifts the origin of meaning and interpretation to the body.

If we put Hansen's conclusions aside how would we provide a "general determination [of] smooth space that takes into account the differences from and the relations to striated space"? (ATP, 488) A single equation can be repeated enough to imply a conception of natural forms in the case of fractals (ie. the geometry of leaves and mountains). A single frozen slice of action/time can be taken again and again a such a rate such that it implies movement and time in the cinematic image. What does the digital striate? How are these qualities expressed in the 'major" media of digital? How are they different and related to the immanent qualities that it quantifies? If there are indeed immanent potentialities within digital technology would a "minor" digital be possible? What would minor digital be like?

For this reason I'm not sure that the reason that data-moshing as Benjamin posted for us implicates movement or time but something quite different (see Movement and the Digital Image). Just as the cinematic image implicates movement and time because of its unique relation to time so then would minor digital implicate immanence due to it's unique relation to smooth space. Data-moshing perhaps asks questions about the digital itself. It foregrounds what Lev Manovich describes as the digital image as only being the surface of pure data (Hansen, 32).

As you may of noticed, I'm not really sure what the digital truly striates. My initial instinct is that the digital striates process and procedure. This is what Manovich calls the processural image (Hansen, 9). Maybe what the digital striates is then a certain cognitive logic and the thing that a minor digital can implicate is a continuum of thought.

-Ariel

Deleuze and (Modern) Political Cinema: “The People are Missing”

In chapter eight of Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses what he calls “minor cinema,” and in the context of the modern political cinema of such filmmakers as Glauber Rocha, Ousmene Sembene, and Pierre Perrault (a Brazilian, an African, and a French Canadian, respectively). Political film of the classical period is premised on the idea that “the people are already there” (C2: 216): the people pre-exist their representation in film. In this cinema the filmmaker’s role is to bring to light, in a representative fashion, the concerns and struggles of the people. As Rodowick says (in Deleuze’s Time Machine, the first book-length study of Deleuze’s two volume work on cinema to appear in English and still probably the best one), the goal of political film in the classical period is “to represent the masses or ‘the people.’ They may be oppressed or in the process of liberation, alienated or awakened, but representation is nonetheless their right. That they are representable as a collective image, and that their political self-consciousness is also renderable in images, are givens” (1997: 152). All political films, documentary or otherwise, premised on the notion that the filmmaker is simply and objectively recording a reality to which he or she remains external or detached would be an instance of this kind of classical political cinema.

Modern political cinema begins from a very different position, premised not on the “already there” of the people but on their absence. In the words of the experimental Italian theatrical director Carmelo Bene, “the people are missing.” Bene says this in response to the query: for whom is your theatre addressed, to which people are they addressed? Bene’s answer: his work is addressed to a people who do not yet exist; a people who do not preexist their performative enunciation through, or with, the work of art. This, according to Deleuze, is also the answer found in modern political cinema. The stakes involved in proclaiming the people “missing” is nowhere more evident than in the postcolonial cinema of Rocha and Sembene. These filmmakers, Deleuze argues, understand that what is required is not simply an assertion of an identity counter to the one proposed in colonial rule; they thus resist the urge to evoke dubious notions of “origins” – a true identity, a unified peoples, prior to colonialist domination – and, instead, actively seek to forge a new collectivity, a people who belong not to the past, to history, but to the future: the people as future conditional. “This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema,” Deleuze writes, “but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded” (C2: 217). It is because the people are missing, rather than present, that there is a necessity for political art.

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For me, Deleuze’s remarks on “minor cinema” remains the most interesting of all his discussions of the “minor” in art (far more convincing than the arguments about “minor literature” that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to Kafka). I find compelling his commentary on Rocha and Sembene and, along these lines, if I had time, I could add a few examples of my own (including the work of the great heretical Italian Marxist filmmaker and provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini). Having said this, I’ve never been entirely convinced by Deleuze’s critique here of the work of Sergei Eisenstein as an instance of classical political cinema (and which has been repeated rather thoughtlessly by various Deleuze scholars, including R. Bogue). Does Eisenstein really presume the existence of a revolutionary proletariat, or does he see it as his – and other artist’s – responsibility to provoke or stimulate this revolutionary form of consciousness through the work of art? In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the revolution has already occurred – literally so – but what remains unknown is the nature of the future communist society: what will it look like and what role the people will play. It is to this future collective that Eisenstein pitches his works. What interest Eisenstein is the ability of cinematic montage to stimulate both affective and cognitive responses and it is the imbrication of these two modes of spectatorial activity that allows cinema not simply to entertain its audience but also to transform them.

In this sense, we can’t say that the revolutionary proletariat pre-exist the cinema; the revolutionary proletariat is a being-in-formation and the cinema is one of the mediums through which it comes into existence. For Eisenstein, this meant that cinema needed to be pure experimentation, a mode of non-representational art in which the cinematic “image” is produced by the spectator in their encounter with a series of shots whose meaning is relational, whose meaning results from the tension produced by individual shots placed in conflict or collision, and which the viewer must resolve for himself or herself. This kind of experimentation became anathema in Stalinist Russia and precisely because the central administration no longer wished to provoke an (unpredictable) becoming; instead the goal became the affirmation of an identity that is already formed and complacent and a “true” ideology that doesn’t require thinking or feeling, only obedience. (Is it any surprise that Socialist Realism took the exact same "form" as classical Hollywood films, with their stories centered on the heroic exploits of the protagonist and the editing as unobtrusive as possible, so as to facilitate the suture of spectator to narrative, spectator to representation. Thought is no longer mandatory. Thought becomes optional.)

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Those interested in the topic of art and the political, as well as Deleuze’s notion of the “minor,” might take a look sometime at Nicholas Thoburn’s excellent book on the “minor politics” of Karl Marx entitled simply Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Thoburn argues that Marx doesn’t posit communism as the simple description of a predetermined, and fully worked out, perspective or methodology but rather “a process of continual engagement with the flows and constraints of the capitalist socius towards its overcoming” (2003: 3). If it takes Marx sixteen years to complete the endlessly-revised Capital, Thoburn says, it is precisely because he is sensitive to the mutations that capitalism undergoes in the second half of the nineteenth century and because he is aware that such a strategic, dynamic mode of critique must also characterize communist politics. Marx thus re-configures communism as an immanent political practice, one that continuously discovers, or creates, a line of flight through the networks of capitalist production. “Marx presents the Communist Party, then, not as a distinct and timeless organizational form, but as a mode of engagement that is immanent to the content of the proletarian-in-struggle, which in turn is immanent to the particular configurations of capital” (Thoburn 2003: 40). The "proletariat" thus no longer simply refers to a particular group of people but to a revolutionary potential – a virtual potential – that awaits its actualization in, and as, our future.

S I-G

A Minor Cinema

In Chapter 3, Imprinted Time, Tarkovsky explains how he sees "chonicle as the ultimate cinema; for [him] it is not a way of filming but a way of reconstructing, of recreating life." (p.65) What I wish to draw out here is the emphasis that he places on the "recreation of life." Cinema here is not a reproduction or a retelling of an event but it is in itself the creation of life (a new event). Perhaps though, I am reading too much into this statement and Tarkovsky is not advocating for the construction of new realities through cinema but instead for the creative construction of time passed/passing, of blocks of time (life re-arranged, life re-constructed, new life?).

I think what I would like to incorporate into this line of thinking about cinema is the idea of minor practices, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, and more specifically the notion of "becoming stranger." Not only "becoming stranger" in one's own language (as in their literary examples), but I am wondering if cinema, through the "appropriation of time" cannot act as a minor practice and enable a "becoming stranger" in ourselves and throughout our territory? Considering our "immanent becoming," as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, it seems as though cinema might be an appropriate medium for not simply "capturing" time (because that would attempt to trace it and render it solid), but instead to map, through/with time, and become along with the territory. Like the map, the attempt would be to engage in "an experimentation in contact with the real."

Not knowing really how to conclude these thoughts, I should add that the ideas presented here are part of a larger project of mine that is trying to conceive of documenting (documentary practices) in relation to a constantly moving self/territory. How can a documentary film map instead of trace? How do you work with a shifting terrain? Can this be a minor practice?

Vanessa Meyer

Art as Commodity?

Commodity is defined as some good for which there is a demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. Can Art be a commodity? Can artists and their chosen practices be bought and sold? How do artists balance creating, pure, meaningful work with paying the bills and living in a free, capitalistic society?

Herbert Berghof, an Austrian-American theatre performer, director and writer stated the following: “If we truly want a theatre, which is more than a commodity, we must omit the buying and selling and function as free artists. And, if we agree that freedom can’t be bought, we must face that it is based on responsibility to our fellow man.” Mr. Berghof was also a socialist, born in Vienna who was accustomed to the theatre system in Europe, where actors are continually employed. He immigrated to the United States in 1939 and also enjoyed great success in the Hollywood movie industry. He made a lucrative living practicing his art in the United States.

What made me think about Mr. Berghof was the following Deleuze quote, “…this minor practice is produced through a manipulation of the elements of the major.” Deleuze further states, “ What defines majority is a model you have to confirm to…” Mr. Berghof is an example of an artist who participated in mainstream Hollywood in order to fund and create his “minor art”. Herbert Berghof created H.B. Play Writes Foundation with the money he earned from working as an actor in the film Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. From this one Hollywood acting job he was able to purchase an old garage on bank Street and turn it into a theatre; he created “minor art” in this space.

Deleuze states, “ A minor art is involved in the invention and imagining of new subjectivities as well as turning away from those already in place […] It is once inside and outside the major, in the ‘world’ but not quite of it.” Mr. Berghof in spite of his bitterness at the mismanagement of Broadway Theater and mainstream Hollywood, was able to practice and create art on his terms. Would this have been possible to achieve without his financial success in the great Hollywood machine? Mr. Berghof was a man who was in the “world” but not quite of it.

Deirdre