ANGELAKI

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 9 number 3 december 2004

illes Deleuze is no phenomenologist. At least that is what he leads us to believe in his strident efforts to distinguish his radical empiricism from phenomenology. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, he puts his position clearly, stating that:
What phenomenology sets up as a norm is natural perception and its conditions. Now, these conditions are existential co-ordinates which dene an anchoring of the perceiving subject in the world, a being in the world, an opening to the world which will be expressed in the famous all consciousness is consciousness of something [Whereas] [t]he cinema can, with impunity, bring us close to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world. Hence it substitutes an implicit knowledge and a second intentionality for the conditions of natural perception. (57)

maria walsh
THE IMMERSIVE SPECTATOR a phenomenological hybrid
next. This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent.1 However, not taking a psychoanalytic/structuralist approach to lm need not automatically exclude the notion of the spectator. I shall argue in this article that while Deleuzian concepts are crucial to conceiving of a relation to the image in terms of immersion rather than alienation (much cultural theory adopting the latter position), the concept of the spectator is still useful. Without a concept of the spectator, it is difcult to consider how the body is imbricated in the state of being immersed in the image. In order to consider immersion and embodiment as co-existent, I shall perform a juggling act between Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenology. Again, this may seem to be a paradoxical position, as it is Mer-

Deleuzes critique of phenomenologys anchored subject and his revision, for cinema, of Henri Bergsons model of perception as a owing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable (Cinema 1 57), opens up the possibility of theorizing spectatorship as a form of immersion in an image. This may seem to be a paradoxical claim. After all, Deleuze is quick to cast aside the category of the spectator in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, as the term, in its usage in psychoanalysis-inuenced lm theory, introduces categories of subjective identication and position that are antithetical to Deleuzes emphasis on the ow of images. In Deleuzes cinema of direct time-images, the spectator disappears, becoming a seer absorbed into and by the image, immersed in the lms unfolding from one image to the

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/04/03016917 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725042000307709

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leau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception that Deleuze is critiquing in the above citation. However, turning to the Merleau-Ponty of The Visible and the Invisible, one nds a theory of embodiment that is strangely commensurate with aspects of the subjectless subjectivity that Deleuze explores in his two cinema books. A hybridization of these two thinkers is not only in line with Deleuzes own philosophical procedure of assemblage but also allows for the insertion of embodiment into the innite unfolding of images that Deleuze describes. It simultaneously prevents Merleau-Pontys notion of embodiment from being reduced to traditional notions where embodiment is considered as the sensuous, mute, ground of being.2 The background to my desire to theorize a form of spectatorship where the spectator is immersed in the image yet is aware of his or her bodily coordinates stems from distinctions between cinematic and digital media that are currently in vogue. In contemporary media discourse, immersion is largely referred to in relation to digital technology where principles of envelopment and temporal simultaneity are contrasted with the distance and sequential unfolding of the cinematic apparatus.3 However, these distinctions stem from literal categorizations of medium specicity and do not take into account the fact that a spectator (or user) may be engaging with the image in a mode that is not reducible to the mechanics of the medium. A cinematic spectators engagement with the screen is not bounded by his or her location in front of it and immersion in the diegesis need not be thought of as illusory, as it has been conceived in much lm theory. A digital users engagement with the computer screen need not mean the disappearance of the body in favour of a free-oating, dislocated engagement in the deep space of an immersive environment. Instead, a case can be made for crossovers between these media-based categorizations. Immersion in the image can be theorized, I shall argue, as a mode of spectatorial engagement whereby the simultaneity of envelopment and the sequential nature of montage are not mutually exclusive. The notion of immersive spectatorship can be applicable to specic instances of moving-image work rather than immersion being the sole feature of a medium per se. There is no doubt that digital technology recongures how we think about spatial density and temporal ow but there is no reason to suppose that engagement with cinematic images cannot follow the principles of immersion that have been identied with the digital.4 Deleuzes writing on cinema suggests the possibility for conceiving of immersion as a more generalized form of image engagement, bypassing the reduction to medium specicity. In what follows, I shall attempt to combine the usually distinct categories of immersion and spectatorship to theorize a state where a viewer is enveloped by a moving-image scenario, yet, at the same time, is aware of shifting bodily coordinates in relation to the image ow. I am not claiming that all images have the same effects but that instances of contemporary cinema, experimental lm, gallery lm installation, and digital media that emphasize the senses in a way that seems to dissolve bodily boundaries can engender the state I am calling immersive spectatorship. In beginning to theorize this state, Deleuze is an inspirational guide. As I have already said, in Deleuzes taxonomy of images the spectator becomes a seer absorbed into and by the image, immersed in the lms unfolding from one image to the next. His concern is not with the narrative trajectory of a characters passage from one state of being to another but in the way a characters hallucinatory visions allow the director to move from one kind of image sequence to another. This proffers a different kind of narrative trajectory for the viewer where images follow one another according to their own logic rather than following the dictates of (linguistic) narrative. In this, Deleuze takes issue with dominant psychoanalytic/structuralist approaches to lm, claiming that, in replacing the image by an utterance, those approaches give the image a false appearance, and its most authentically visible characteristic, movement, is taken away from it (Cinema 2 27). On the face of it, Deleuzes dynamic suggests a smooth, nonconictual image-space rather than the tension of conictual identication that abounds in psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorship. While this

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trajectory is liberating in terms of releasing the image from the dictates of language, it is my contention that in Deleuzes embrace of image narration something vital is lost, i.e., the spectators embodiment. Merleau-Ponty also employs the term seer, in his case to refer to an embodied and yet immersed subject in the world. For Merleau-Ponty there is always a strange adhesion of the seer and the visible, rather than the dispersal of the seer into the acentred state of things, which is why I will go on to appropriate aspects of Merleau-Pontys philosophy for a theory of immersive spectatorship.5 Also, in a twist to my argument, Deleuze, read in tandem with lm theorys appropriation of phenomenology in the 1970s, will be shown to recuperate phenomenologys transcendental subject which he claims is antithetical to his project and which is certainly antithetical to mine.6 sive spectatorship as a state that involves an awareness of change rather than hypnotic dissolution is Deleuzes discussion of the dynamic exchange in Ozus lms between empty interiors and still lifes (for example, the vase in Late Spring). For Deleuze, [i]f empty spaces, interiors or exteriors, constitute purely optical (and sound) situations, still lifes are the reverse, the correlate (ibid. 17). Still lifes show the changing states of a duration, which would otherwise be invisible, pure perhaps, and thereby without the capacity to register the human passage of time. While time does not itself change, it needs to be embodied in human terms to punctuate and change the direction of its eternal nature (ibid. 17). Otherwise, the immersive, hypnotic encounter with the image would dissolve into the ux of the inhuman narration of a non-organic lifeworld, Deleuzes ultimate trajectory (ibid. 102). As we shall see shortly, the emphasis on a pure perception that moves beyond human embodiment is the direction that Deleuzes discussion of Michael Snows lms takes and is perhaps why Deleuze is referred to by theorists who celebrate the supposed escape from the body in virtual space.7 While Deleuze does insist on the body as a marker of temporal change in chapter 8 of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, he generally abandons the emphasis on everyday banality in neo-realism and in Ozu in favour of references to the production of images as a kind of perceptual cosmological dust. For example, in discussing the importance in contemporary cinema of the image of absence, the black screen or the white screen, Deleuze states that in the lms of Philippe Garrel:
the series of anterior images has no end, while the series of subsequent images likewise has no beginning, the two series converging towards the white or black screen as their common limit. Moreover in this way, the screen becomes the medium for variations: the black screen and the under-exposed image, the intense blackness which lets us guess at dark volumes in the process of being constituted, or the black marked by a xed or moving luminous point, and all the combinations of black and re; the white screen and the over-exposed

from duration to dust: immersion as disembodiment in deleuze

Initially at least, Deleuzes dissolution of the spectator into the seer offers possibilities for theorizing immersive spectatorship. Deleuze articulates the dissolution of the seer in the screened image by way of the innite spiralling motion of temporality itself. In the shift from the pre-war cinema of the movement-image to the post-war cinema of the time-image (Deleuzes loose historical categorization), perceptions, actions and affects underwent such an upheaval [] because a new element [time] burst onto the scene [] to prevent perception being extended into action in order to put it in contact with thought (Cinema 2 1). In this process, action is transformed into hallucination, an expanded duration in which a character, as seer, becomes immobilized. The sensori-motor schemata are suspended and a pure optical situation takes over (ibid. 2). In relation to the shots of empty interiors and deserted exteriors in Yasujiro Ozus lms, Deleuze claims that these instances of pure optical situations become instances of pure contemplation (ibid. 16). However, more pertinent to my purposes in theorizing immer-

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image, the milky image or the snowy image whose dancing seeds are to take shape (Ibid. 200) of the intrinsic quality of that which becomes in time. Becoming can in fact be dened as that which transforms an empirical sequence into a series: a burst of series. A series is a sequence of images, which tend in themselves in the direction of a limit, which orients and inspires the rst sequence (the before), and gives way to another sequence organized as series which tends in turn towards another limit (the after). The before and the after are then no longer successive determinations of the course of time, but the two sides of the power, or the passage of the power to a higher power. The direct time-image here does not appear in an order of coexistences or simultaneities, but in a becoming as potentialization, as series of powers. (Ibid. 275)

Deleuze, in expanding the eld of the lm scenario to the expanse of a temporality without limit, moves towards the end of the spectrum whereby the spectator becomes vaporized in a pure perceptual unfolding. Initially locating time in the body, Deleuze goes on to divorce the two, or rather, to locate the body in the empty form of time. Appropriating Henri Bergson, Deleuze writes:
Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life. And it is true that Bergson had to express himself in this way, at least at the outset. But, increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round. (Ibid. 8283)

While Deleuze does say that [t]ime is [] the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change, his processual occlusion of space from this picture makes it difcult to see where, and in relation to what, movement and change could occur, other than being the innite unfolding of pure virtuality (ibid. 82). To be subject to this virtual unfolding paralyses the body. When Deleuze, in relation to Louis Malles Lift to the Scaffold, says that bodily states themselves link up with movements of the world, he is referring to the murderers movements in the lm which are blocked by the halting of the lift and which, in turn, extend into a kind of cosmic dream-like state (ibid. 60). But what of the spectators bodily states? By inference, they perhaps mirror those of the character become seer. However, while Bergson does insist that the body is a special kind of image within the eld of images, what interests me is how this imagistic body differentiates itself in relation to other images rather than melting into the vertiginous mass of an innitely unfolding cosmic vision.8 For Deleuze:
the before and after are no longer themselves a matter of external empirical succession, but

For Deleuze, the before and after, the passage of time through the body, becomes liberated from any particular body. However, I would insist that, rather than dissolving the body into the heady vaporosity of the movements of time itself, the problematic of thinking the body still remains here, albeit a different kind of body.

from luminous dust to material affect: the return of mute phenomena

Attempting to marry thinking the body and Deleuzian theory, Barbara Kennedy unabashedly embraces Deleuzes language of ows and intensities to discuss the affective nature of immersive lm experience. For Kennedy, a Deleuzian approach situates the spectators body beyond phenomenologys emphasis on the lived body, instead proffering the complex understanding of body as processes of congealment, imbrication, consilience, assemblage, aesthetics and the molecular.9 Kennedys thesis is relevant to my argument. Desiring to counter the negativity of cine-psychoanalysis, she too is attempting to articulate an immersive spectatorial scenario, but her consumption of Deleuze causes her to celebrate subjectless subjectivity on the one hand, and to emphasize the visceral nature of affect on the other (Towards an Aesthetics 2, 45). This reassertion of binary thinking re-substantializes the visceral body as the ground of anonymous being, a position which Deleuze is

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actually at pains to avoid, as it falls back into the trap of positing a mute materiality beneath or beyond symbolic meaning.10 As she puts it: mind/body/brain meld with the image in an assemblage of lmic sensation where affect affords the ultimate material emotion which is beyond any subjective vision (ibid. 53). Kennedys tendency to reduce the viewing space to an undifferentiated mass of matter, whereby brain/body/image are coagulated into a malleable set of images, into a materiality of emotion (ibid. 144), can perhaps be seen in her attribution of the same descriptive terms to different lms. Discussing the landscapes in Orlando, The English Patient, and The Sheltering Sky she says: Something grand, intangible and molecular is emitted across the gestural movements of the screenic event. The emptiness and solitude of the landscape enable a connection of intensities which are about process, continuums, becoming, and, ironically, are far removed from transcendent notions of inorganic origins, death, and xity.11 This position would tend, in Deleuzes terms, to actually deny difference, resulting instead in undifferenciated being, without difference.12 Undoubtedly, there is much in Deleuzes trajectory in the cinema books that lends itself towards this vision of undifferentiated mass, and Kennedy is not the only reader to proffer it. While Kennedy emphasizes an undifferentiated visceral ground of affect, John Johnston embraces the innity of Deleuzian gaseous perception as a way of describing the decoded eld of electronic imformational impulses of global telecommunications. Johnston appropriates the chapter on the brain in Cinema 2: The Time-Image where Deleuze identies the irrational cut of modern cinema with a specic type of synaptic, neuronal transmission.13 In that chapter, Deleuze claims that:
[e]verything can be used as a screen, the body of a protagonist or even the bodies of the spectators; everything can replace lm stock, in a virtual lm which now only goes on in the head, behind the pupils, with sound sources taken as required from the auditorium. A disturbed brain-death or a new brain which would be at once the screen, the lm stock and the camera, each time membrane of the outside and the inside. (Cinema 2 215)

This move in Deleuze exemplies the merging of screen and disembodied consciousness that features in much theorizing of digital media. It is this sentiment of the screen as a boundless mental landscape, a new brain that I am taking issue with. The emphasis in digital media on immersion need not rule out embodiment and in effect redraws our attention to the fact that, in the early days of lm theory, cinema itself was seen as an immersive environment capable of carrying the spectator away.14 The issue here in theorizing immersive spectatorship via Deleuze is whether the absorption of the seer in the image can also be considered in terms of embodiment, in terms of location rather than purely mental contemplation. Before moving on to a consideration of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, which, contrary to Kennedys alliance of subjectless subjectivity with the viscerality of material affect, allows for a process of differentiation between the particularity of subjective vision and the anonymity of a-subjective vision, I now want to look at another attempt in lm theory to marry a Deleuzian approach to the image and embodiment. The purpose of this is to show why traditional readings of embodiment are to be avoided and to extract other elements from Deleuze that I will hybridize with Merleau-Ponty for my theorization of the paradox of immersive spectatorship.

deleuzian derangement of the senses vs. the sensuous phenomenological body

Laura Marks The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, which refers to both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, gives credence to Kennedys otherwise debatable claim that the phenomenological body is somewhat regressive.15 Marks reads Deleuzes assertion that cinema can give us the genesis of an unknown body, which we have in the back of our heads, like the unthought in thought as a commonsense assertion that cinema may indeed be capable of bringing us to our senses

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(14748). However, the senses as Deleuze conceives them are certainly not the senses we assume as being rooted in the body and are far removed from the traditional phenomenological framework that Marks uses.
Given the nature of memory, the audiovisual image necessarily evokes other sense memories, perhaps even memories that belong to that unknown body. For example, when I am watching a scene shot in a garden in Shani Mootoos Her Sweetness Lingers (1994), closeups of magnolia owers remind me of how they feel and how they smell, and the buzzing of insects reminds me of the heat of summer. For me the tape calls up associations with gardens I have known in my ancestral Alabama, associations that are probably somewhat different from the artists and other viewers associations with them. (Marks 148)

painter Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation.

To characterize the connection between eye and hand, it is certainly not enough to say that the eye is innitely richer, and passes through dynamic tensions, logical reversals, organic exchanges and vicariances We will speak of the haptic each time there is no longer strict subordination in one direction or the other but when sight discovers in itself a function of touching that belongs to it and to it alone and which is independent of its optical function.16

I cite this lengthy quotation as an example of the personal, autobiographical level of association that pervades Marks analysis of the tactility of immersive spectatorship. While I am sceptical of Deleuzes emphasis on pure contemplation, I would not want to reassert a return to the particular in terms of the corporeal self-possession of the spectator. For Deleuze, the unknown body is removed from autobiographical knowledge and ownership, which is why it can offer liberation and transformation rather than habitual repetition. Marks does not examine the constitution of the body that she claims is a container of sensuous knowledge. Also, in emphasizing how postcolonial cinema and experimental lm use senses beyond the visual, such as smell and touch, to engage and recover bodily memories, she unwittingly reasserts the very hierarchy that she wants to readdress between mind and body, dominant and marginal. She claims that lms that blur and mufe the experience of the visual point to the possibility of less ocularcentric ways of seeing (Marks 13536). While there is a case to be made for this opposition between the ocular and the haptic in Deleuzes own work, his endowment of touch with haptic vision is not to assert a specic bodily sensation of tactility but to overrule such distinctions between eye and hand. This is exemplied in his book on the

The fact that the sensations engendered by lm stem from or lean on the visual realm does not necessarily mean that the visual operates as an isolated facet in the space of viewing. Nor does it mean that soft-focus or blurry imagery is necessarily tactile, bodily and in opposition to the supposed distancing of harsh contour. Taking a Deleuzian approach, the visual becoming haptic does not necessarily mean that one is propelled out of the optical. What this means is that the visual is broken down as a component sense. In fact, the capacity of the component senses is broken down by the impact of the image of sensation and what is unleashed is a kind of sensory chaos. No one sense is available for any recognized channel. Rather than the return of a familiar memory or the rupture of a buried one, for Deleuze the image of sensation generates the return of something new. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze refers to the famous scene from Prousts Remembrance of Things Past, where the taste of a madeleine cake sends a shudder through Marcel and he begins to hear the echo of great spaces traversed. Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind.17 For Deleuze, the visual memory that occurs here is not the return of the Combray that Proust knew as a child. What returns in the image is Combray not as it was experienced in contiguity with the past sensation, but in a splendor [] that never has an equivalent in reality.18 In other words, the process of translation, or medi-

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ation, which could also be called time itself, has transformed the image into a scene both familiar and estranged. Rather than the senses being interrelated as in traditional phenomenology, Deleuzian derangement of the senses causes each one to attain its own singularity, a singularity that is not owned by a particular body but casts that body adrift on a clamorous ocean in which each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return (Difference and Repetition 304). Deleuzes notion of the derangement of the senses is crucial to avoid the reassertion of the selfsame body, a body re-found or a body returned to its owner in the immersive spectatorial space. To be fair to Marks, and also to Kennedy, on occasion Deleuze seems to come close to asserting a kind of phenomenology. As Gaylyn Studlar points out, while Deleuze is critical of phenomenologys insistence on the anchored subject, he is interested in the power of the image in phenomenologically positive terms, in the cinemas ability to provoke wonder, awe, and astonishment.19 While Kennedy attempted to combine a subjectless subjectivity with viscerality, the problem in Marks analysis is that bodies are assumed to have denite owners and are culturally bounded by custom and personal memory. I do not want to make a claim for the meltdown of cultural specicity per se, but for me the sensations unleashed in the immersive encounter with the moving image exceed personalized frames of reference. (Here I agree with Kennedys emphasis.) As Deleuze puts it:
[I]t is no longer a motor extension which is established, but rather a dreamlike connection through the intermediary of the liberated sense organs. It is as if the action oats in the situation, rather than bringing it to a conclusion or strengthening it. (Cinema 2 4)

reifying the work of art as a form of abstraction without a link to anybody.

Perceptions are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.20

When Deleuze, with Guattari, says that sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression (What is Philosophy? 177), I nd myself saying yes, but by whom or what?

glimpses of embodiment
In The Deleuze Connections, John Rajchman suggests that habitation and abstract derangement are not mutually exclusive in a Deleuzian framework, as they would not be in MerleauPontys phenomenology where, as we shall see, anonymity and particularity are always interrelated. The following rather lengthy quotations from Rajchman are suggestive, perhaps unwittingly, of some connection between Deleuzian anonymity and the particularity of habitation in these moments of sensory derangement. Rajchman refers to Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway:
When in What is Philosophy? Deleuze says that art is sensation and nothing else, he is trying to capture an idea that runs through his work [] Affects and percepts are the two basic types of sensation, of which the artwork may be said to be a composite. [] affects go beyond the subjects that pass through them, and they are impersonal, even inhuman; and percepts are not ways of presenting nature to the eye, but are rather like landscapes, urban as well as natural, in which one must lose oneself so as to see with new eyes, as, for example, with Mrs. Dalloway. [] the aim of art is, through expressive materials, to extract sensations from habitual sensibilia from habits of perception, memory, recognition, agreement and cause us to see and feel in new or unforeseen ways. (13435)

However, in terms of my claim for immersive spectatorship, these liberated sensations intercede with personalized frames of reference in their passage through the body, whereas Deleuzes evacuation of agency from this sensational disordering is so absolute that it ends up

Rajchman also writes:

An hour of a day, a river, a climate, a strange

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moment during a concert can be like this not one of a kind, but the individuation of something that belongs to no kind, but which, though perfectly individuated, yet retains an indeniteness, as though pointing to something ineffable. (125)

Rajchmans formulation is useful in that he suggests that the impersonal intuitions in sensory derangement are dependent on the particular bodies they pass through. As he adds:
A life is in fact composed of many such moments that is part of what makes it singular. They are the sorts of occurrences that come to us rather like the waves of which Virginia Woolf spoke bits of experience that cant be tted into a nice narrative unity, and so must be combined or put together in another way. [] They precede us as subjects or persons, and yet they are always expressed in our lives. (85)

could almost be an answer to Deleuzes rhetorical question: But how is it possible to speak of images in themselves that are not for anyone and are not addressed to anyone? How is it possible to speak of an Appearing [Apparatre], since there is not even an eye?21 In Deleuzes description of the lm, we nd a succinct example of how cinema is viewed as an Appearing without a seer, external or otherwise. He says:
Michael Snows The Central Region does not raise perception to the universal variation of a raw and savage matter without also extracting from it a space without reference points where the ground and the sky, the horizontal and the vertical, interchange. Nothingness itself is diverted towards that which comes out of it or falls back on it, the genetic element, the fresh or vanishing perception, which potentialises a space by retaining only the shadow or the account of human events. (Cinema 1 122)

While I would want to hold onto Deleuzes notion of sensory derangement and anonymity in considering immersive spectatorship, contextualizing Deleuzian sensory liberation in relation to lm history can show why it is desirable to temper his readings of lm with a phenomenology of embodiment such as Merleau-Pontys. In a surprising twist to my argument, an aspect of phenomenologys transcendental subject returns in the destruction of the human world that Deleuze associates with cinematic vision. Contrasting Deleuzes writing on Michael Snows lms with Annette Michelsons writing on the same lms in the 1970s, using the phenomenological methodology of lm analysis available then, delivers the strange proximity of Deleuzes analysis to this aspect of phenomenology.

There is precedence in Bergson for this kind of puried vision. For Bergson:
Pure perceptions or images are what we should posit at the outset. And sensations, far from being the materials from which the image is wrought, will then appear as the impurity which is introduced into it, being that part of our own body which we project into all others. (Matter and Memory 23435)

the return of the transcendental subject in deleuze: the disembodied eye

For Deleuze, Snows lms generate a puried vision devoid of human agency. In fact, The Central Region (1971), Snows three-hour lm of a remote Canadian landscape, recorded by the pre-programmed choreography of a machine that endlessly turns and swivels like an automaton,

The notion that the sensory body is a contaminant is one that Bergson keeps on repeating in the rst sections of Matter and Memory. Linking affection with sensation, he says that [a]ffection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of external bodies; it is what we must rst of all subtract from perception to get to the image in its purity (ibid. 58). However, there is a productive tension between this desire for a pure perception and Bergsons equal insistence on the body as a special kind of image within the eld of images, one which:
constitutes at every moment, as we have said, a section of the universal becoming. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me

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and the things upon which I act the seat, in a word, of the sensori-motor phenomena. (Ibid. 15152) the apparatus and a conrmation of the status of the subject, and it is in those terms that we may begin to comprehend the profound effect it had on the broadest spectrum of viewers especially upon those for whom previous assaults on the spatiotemporality of dominant cinema had obscured that subjects role and place. The spectator for whom that place was obscured and threatened by the spatial disorientations of, say, Dog Star Man (a space purely optical and a temporality of the perpetual present) could respond, as if in gratitude, to Snows apparently gratifying conrmation of a threatened sovereignty. (118)

The notion of the body as an image within the eld of images seems far removed from the situatedness of phenomenologys perceiving subject, but Bergsons qualication of this as a place of passage maintains a dynamic relationship between a screened image and the spectator which can be linked to the Merleau-Ponty of The Visible and the Invisible. Bergsons notion of the body (spectator) as a place of passage creates an interval between movements received and movements thrown back. Although body and image are essentially of the same matter, if the body did not act as a differentiating passage, the universal variation of movement-images would have the quality of an eternal force or a dreamerless dreamscape, a drugged vision (the latter a motif Deleuze is fond of). By contrast, Bergson insists on the balance between action and recollection for the successful operation of the sensori-motor system. The purity of either the pole of action, i.e., the present divorced from the planes of memory, or the pole of recollection, i.e., immersion in the planes of memory without extension in the present, would result, according to Bergson, in a pathological subjectivity (ibid. 155). Although taking a direction opposite to that of traditional phenomenology, Deleuzes acentred universe has a strangely similar outcome. In both veins, the embeddedness of a particular body in a scene is eradicated. The proximity of both veins becomes clear when one looks at Annette Michelsons analysis of Michael Snows lms. For Michelson, the spectator Snow engenders is in fact phenomenologys transcendental subject, which she describes as being an eye unfettered by the body. By contrast to Deleuzes celebration of the decentring effects of Snows camera and the attainment of gaseous perception, Michelson sees Snow as reintroducing, albeit in a questioning way, a sovereignty of the spectator which had been threatened by the spatial disorientations of Stan Brakhages experimental lm-making (118). She says:
Wavelength, then, appeared as a celebration of

The claims that Michelson makes for Brakhages Dog Star Man are ostensibly closer to Deleuzes analysis of Snows cinema as engendering a puried, unlocatable, luminous, vision. In fact, Deleuze, in his lm historiography, refers to both these lm-makers as creating a cinema that attains a pure perception. His description of Wavelength exemplies this viewpoint. He says:
If the experimental cinema tends towards a perception as it was before men (or after), it also tends towards the correlate of this, that is, towards an any-space-whatever released from its human coordinates [] In Wavelength Snow uses a forty-ve minute zoom in order to explore a room lengthwise from one end to the other, as far as the wall on which a photograph of the sea is stuck: from this room he extracts a potential space, whose power and quality he progressively exhausts. [] The space re-enters the empty sea. All the preceding elements of the any-space-whatever, the shadows, the whites, the colours, the inexorable progression, the inexorable reduction, elevation plane [epure], the disconnected parts, the empty set: all come into play here in what, according to Sitney, denes the structural lm. (Cinema 1 122)

Deleuzes adherence to P. Adams Sitney here (the 1970s lm historian who employed a loosely phenomenological approach to lm analysis) is telling. Sitney considered Wavelength as a metaphor for human consciousness per se, a notion that ts in with Deleuzes emphasis on a cinema of the brain that I have already referred to.22 For Michelson, there is also a link between Snows and Brakhages ostensibly different

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styles of lm-making, although she reads this differently from Deleuze. Her reading allows me to introduce the possibility that the transcendental subject returns in Deleuzes analysis. While Brakhages emphasis on a vision uncorrupted by language what Michelson refers to as the gaze of fascination may seem different from Snows use of lmic signiers to create spaces of analytic inspection, Michelson sees these moves in terms of the continuity of American avant-garde lm-making rather than the occurrence of a different strain (Michelson 116). The hallucinated viewer was, so to speak, replaced by the cognitive viewer, but common to them both was the status of transcendental subject (ibid. 116). She claims that, while Snow in The Central Region does subject spatio-temporal certainties to questioning, the lms innitely mobile framing:
[its] mimesis of and gloss upon spatial exploration offer, most importantly, a fusion of primary scopophilic and epistemophilic impulses in the cinematic rendering of the grand metaphor of the transcendental subject. (Michelson 123)

For her, and I agree, The Central Region hyperbolizes the disembodied mobility of the eyesubject (121). This corresponds with Snows assertion that:
I wanted the spectator to be the lone center of all these circles. It had to be the place where you can see a long way and you cant see anything man-made. That has something to do with a certain kind of singleness or remoteness that each spectator can have by seeing the lm. (Snow quoted in Michelson 120)

Central Region. This is opposed to the kind of immersive spectatorship I am attempting to formulate, where the viewer is not recentred but is continually open and opened by movements (sensations) that pass through him/her and on which s/he is unable to attain the perspective of a disembodied consciousness capable of rational synthesis. Unlike the subjection of the spectator to replicating the movements of the camera in Snows The Central Region, a mirroring which, while being destabilizing, simultaneously afrms the sovereignty of the subject, the sensations unleashed in the immersive texture of the moving image are not formally recomposed. Rather, they generate a kind of invisible drawing which captures spectator and image in movements that exceed their boundaries. The spectator becomes a point in the vectoral crossing of these sensations, the spectators body a kind of passive join in a criss-crossing loop, which spatializes duration and temporalizes space. One could say that the viewer is subjected to the construction of space in Wavelength, even more so in The Central Region where the viewer becomes a kind of involuntary camera, but passivity here is still bound up with the centralized viewpoint from which the viewer follows the cameras movements, restoring and remapping the space of perspective construction (Michelson 118). While I am arguing for a sense of location in the state of immersive embodiment that I am attempting to theorize, this sense is not stable and perspectival, but is itself subject to the unhinging force of temporality.

That this sense of remoteness occurs from a central position is exemplied in The Central Region by the gure X that appears at regular intervals throughout the lm, stretching from corner to corner of the frame. Snow discusses this gure X as recentring the viewer: a reminder of the central region the whole thing is about being in the middle of this the camera and the spectator [] from the ecstatic centre of a complete sphere.23 The viewer as disembodied eye is continually being recentred in relation to the transcendence of space and time in The

the mutuality of becoming and location

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty suggests a way of conceiving of the spectator as both dislocated and located at the same time, where location, as a kind of temporalized spacing, subjects the individual body to the same force of change that occurs via the liberated sense organs. Merleau-Ponty suggests a way of conceiving of the sensibility of being subjected to the unhinging of sensation and of being trans-

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ported elsewhere in a way that is not beyond the body or that does not position the body in a static frame outside the image. In contrast to the emphasis on a disembodied brain in Deleuzes trajectory, in Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, communication or interimplication between body and world is always occurring.24 The questions What time is it? and Where am I? are questions that Merleau-Ponty poses as being continuous motivators of the process of moving across the gaps between time and space (The Visible and the Invisible 105). These motivators are to do with both location and becoming, a notion of location being necessary to obviate the vertigo of becoming which would propel one into a sidereal time, a system of relativity, where the characters would be not so much human as planetary, and the accents not so much subjective as astronomical, in a plurality of worlds constituting the universe (Cinema 2 102). While Merleau-Ponty discusses mainly natural objects attached, as Deleuze would say, to the phenomenological lifeworld, he also discusses a subjectivity constituted by means of a crossing over between the virtual and the visible. This is not dissimilar to aspects of Deleuzes thinking. Indeed, Deleuze goes so far as to credit Merleau-Ponty with following a Heideggerian inspiration in speaking of folds and pleating (by contrast with Sartrean holes and lakes of non-being) from The Phenomenology of Perception onwards, and in returning to an ontology of difference and questioning in The Visible and the Invisible (Difference and Repetition 64). The main difference between them is that Merleau-Ponty locates the body in the intersection between the points of crossover of the virtual and the visible. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:
[I] the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the esh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous a whole virtual center. (The Visible and the Invisible 11415; my emphasis)

particularity and anonymity, Merleau-Ponty maintains a tension between these two aspects or faces of subjectivity. He says:
we are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, and the very Being they think, and which therefore do not hold under their gaze a serial space and time, not the pure idea of series, but have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity ontological vibration. (Ibid. 115)

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty alludes to a kind of dynamic passivity that resonates with the scene of immersive spectatorship that I am attempting to articulate, whereby one is captivated by/in an image, yet dynamically moving within that incorporation. In the notion of dynamic passivity that I glean from MerleauPonty, the positions of subject and object are superseded by an emphasis on the chiasmic coiling up of experience over experience (ibid. 113). Elizabeth Grosz summarizes:
[I]n his last text he [Merleau-Ponty] explores the interrelations of the inside and the outside, the subject and the object, one sense and another in a common esh which he describes as the crisscrossing of the seer and the visible, of the toucher and the touched, the indeterminacy of the boundaries of each of the senses, their inherent transpossibility, their refusal to submit to the exigencies of clear-cut separation or logical identity.25

It is this movement of crisscrossing that articulates the scenario of a dynamically embodied immersive spectatorship. For Deleuze, cinemas great advantage is that:
because it lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon, the sections which it makes would not prevent it from going back up the path that natural perception goes down. Instead of going from the acentred state of things to centred perception, it could go back up to the acentred state of things, and get closer to it. (Cinema 1 58)

In this description of the interrelation between

Now while the proximity to an acentred state of things is inspirational for theorizing the scene of immersive spectatorship, it needs to be hy-

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bridized with Merleau-Pontys phenomenological approach to avoid the (lm/image) encounter becoming absolutely ungrounded. For MerleauPonty, the indeterminate eld of the gaze can never be isolated in such a manner. The seer always retains a sense, albeit a shifting one, of her own place and time within the transcendent space of what Merleau-Ponty calls esh, or anonymity.
The supercial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence contains my vision. My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles with it. There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other. Or rather, if, as once again we must, we eschew the thinking by planes and perspectives, there are two circles, or two vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when I live naively, and as soon as I question myself, the one is slightly decentred with respect to the other (The Visible and the Invisible 138)

dynamic passivity: beyond the transcendental subject and visceral being

Thus the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity which is the second and more profound sense of narcissism: not to see in the outside, as others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (The Visible and the Invisible 139)

However, this notion of two circles or vortexes is not unlike the impetus of subjectivity Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition. In fact, as I have already mentioned, Deleuze credits Merleau-Ponty for theorizing an approach to subjectivity whereby subjectivity is constituted by means of the motion of folds and pleating rather than presence and absence. This is not unlike Deleuzes own model of subjectivity where the subject is constantly and simultaneously forming itself out of two sides that play across the interstices of difference. For Deleuze, the two sides of subjectivity (its splitting) are as follows: On one side, nothing but an I fractured by that empty form [of time]. On the other, nothing but a passive self always dissolved in that empty form (Difference and Repetition 284). To further develop my notion of immersive spectatorship as both dispersal and embodiment in relation to the image, I want to link Deleuzes notion of passive contraction and what Merleau-Ponty would call emigration into the outside.

In the above citation, Merleau-Ponty suggests a form of movement which occurs when one is captivated by the outside (an image), a movement where the poles of passivity and activity are continually crossing over and being exchanged with one another due to the embeddedness of the subject in the world. This resonates with Deleuzes account of subjectivity and passivity in Difference and Repetition. For Deleuze, too, the subject is the result of a contemplation of the world. The self contracts itself out of what it contemplates. Deleuze calls this movement passive synthesis. Deleuzes model is comprised of three passive syntheses. The rst passive synthesis initially binds the scattered and diffuse excitations the self is subjected to in its encounter with the outside, reproducing them on a privileged surface of its body (Difference and Repetition 96). The self is the result of this contracting of the chaotic energic eld in which it is immersed. Rather than this being a once-and-for-all occurrence,
[a]t the level of each binding, an ego is formed in the Id; a passive, partial, larval, contemplative and contracting ego. The Id is populated by local egos [] The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulllment

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of a self-image through the contemplation of something else. (Ibid. 97)

As Deleuze explains: It (the eye or seeing ego) produces itself or draws itself from what it contemplates (and from what it contracts and invests by contemplation) (ibid. 97). The rst passive synthesis produces passive selves. However, unlike psychoanalytic accounts of the ego where this kind of self-affection would be a turning back of libido on itself and therefore destructive (masochistic), for Deleuze this selfaffection produces a play of differences which move in two directions simultaneously. This is the second passive synthesis. One direction moves towards identity, the other direction moves towards a deepening of the rst passive synthesis and organizes itself in relation to virtual objects.
Whereas active synthesis points beyond passive synthesis towards global integrations and the supposition of identical totalisable objects, passive synthesis, as it develops, points beyond itself towards the contemplation of partial objects which remain non-totalisable. (Ibid. 101)

of representation. The exchange between virtual and actual images, their continual interchange with one another, is how Deleuze characterizes the cinema of the time-image. As he states: there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation: it is a place and its obverse which are totally reversible (Cinema 2 69) The spectator is immersed in this circuit of exchange rather than assuming a critical perspective on a real that eludes our grasp except as an idea.

becoming as reversibility
The shifting interrelation between anonymity and particularity is key if one is to avoid falling back onto the notions of a primordial materiality that pre-exists identity or of identity as knowable in terms of its ownership of individual sensations and memories, as we saw in Marks return to phenomenology in lm. The Deleuzian model of subjectivity in Difference and Repetition is not incommensurate with Merleau-Ponty when he makes statements such as: In reality there is neither me nor the other as positive, positive subjectivities. There are two caverns, two opennesses, two stages where something will take place (The Visible and the Invisible 263). This something that takes place is the crossing of the two movements of what Merleau-Ponty calls reversibility. The example from MerleauPonty that is always taken up to illustrate this notion of reversibility is that of the left hand touching the right hand. Both Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz take it up, Irigaray to critique Merleau-Pontys reassertion of mastery, in that the hands are in an asymmetrical relation, one having dominance over the other.26 However, it must be pointed out that the example of the hands comes from Phenomenology of Perception and that, although Merleau-Ponty discusses tactility in The Visible and the Invisible, reversibility is not necessarily reducible to a commonsense notion of tactility. It is a much more interesting concept, which can protably be related to the immanently transcendent space of an immersive spectatorship.

For Deleuze, these (virtual) partial objects are absent in terms of representation, but they are not absolutely absent. They are always folding over and exchanging places with totalizable objects, objects of desire and need, forming a pattern like a Mobius strip. As opposed to a psychoanalytic approach where absence is registered as a limit of representation, for Deleuze absence or the virtual is an unstable category which is continually generating the new, totalizable object. In this dynamic, activity and passivity are not opposite poles on a spectrum, but forces that perform criss-crossing movements, where the I is continuously forming versions of itself that are fractured by the empty form of time, which is the third synthesis. In this form of movement, the I is both identity and nonidentity and thereby can be thought of as a body and as virtuality. The real as sensuous phenomena is not the privileged ground of representation. Rather, the real as virtuality, which splits itself into the interchangeable bifurcation of actual and virtual images, becomes the generator

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In fact, what Merleau-Ponty develops out of this concept of reversibility is a preobjective, anonymous visibility which includes my particular carvings out of vision and those of others, but extends further than the things I touch and see at present (ibid. 143). He does discuss the hands, the handshake in terms of a reversibility of touching and being touched; however, he dislocates this mutual touch from a perceiving consciousness. It is rather a general eld in which I revolve, displaying an inside and an outside. The only gap between inside and outside is the folding of the body as it coils around the eld of visibility.
The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two laps: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born by segregation and upon which, as seer, it remains open. (Ibid. 136)

embodiment. It does not have a life of its own. A rather lengthy citation from The Visible and the Invisible makes apparent this interconnection and interdependence between the idea and the sensible:
But this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching, between my voice heard and my voice uttered, between one moment of my tactile life and the following one, is not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of my body, and by that of the world; it is the zero of pressure between two solids that makes them adhere to one another. My esh and that of the world therefore involve clear zones, clearings, about which pivot their opaque zones, and the primary visibility, that of the quale and of the things, does not come without a second visibility, that of the lines of force and dimensions, the massive esh without a rareed body, the momentary body without a gloried body. (14849)

The body as seer is propped on the visible.

What we call a visible is, we said, a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle borne by a wave of Being. Since the total visible is always behind, or after, or between the aspects we see of it, there is access to it only through an experience which, like it, is wholly outside of itself. (Ibid. 136)

The dehiscence of the body, its two parts, being seen and seeing, is a way of locating what is rather sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled, i.e., visibility itself (ibid. 138). The abstract nature of the invisible ground of visibility can be linked to Deleuzes concept of virtuality. In fact, Merleau-Ponty refers to the virtual dimension of invisibility in The Visible and the Invisible (112). Both terms are used to replace the notion of an ontological or absolute void or absence that constitutes the subject in metaphysics and which nds its way into lm theory via the theories of Jacques Lacan. For Merleau-Ponty our openness upon something (ibid. 162) is beyond the oppositional parameters of identity and non-identity, as it is for Deleuze, but the merit of Merleau-Pontys approach is that invisibility or virtuality is co-dependent on

It is not at all necessary to see this emphasis on depth as opposed to Deleuzes emphasis on surface in identity-as-becoming. In fact, MerleauPonty, like Deleuze, equally insists that the way things appear is how they mean. The invisible idea, he says, cannot be detached from the sensible of appearances and be erected into a second positivity or abstraction (ibid. 149). Ideas appear in sensible disguises, not to reveal a hidden depth but rather to voice an invisible yet transparent depth a surface depth, the double lining of the sensible to which we are ourselves attached. It is this supercial depth that I wish to appropriate for the sensation of what is happening when the I is carried away and moved between the ow of images in a scenario of immersive spectatorship. What is occurring is a double movement, one side of which is always extending beyond itself, the other side of which coils in upon itself, this double movement producing the interimplication of states of difference in which the spectator is immersed. Bodily depth is turned inside out, as it were, and dispersed in time as a form of spacing. Merleau-Pontys concept of openness has similar ramications to Deleuzes notion of be-

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coming becoming is not the opposite of being, as openness is not the opposite of closure but a state which allows both being and nothingness to circulate intertwined.
It has seemed to us that the task was to describe strictly our relation to the world not as an openness of nothingness upon being, but simply as openness: it is through openness that we will be able to understand being and nothingness, not through being and nothingness that we will be able to understand openness. (Ibid. 99)

Merleau-Pontys notion of an openness that generates both being and nothingness is useful in rethinking the spectatorial relation as one whereby the body is both immersed in, yet informing, the ow of images. Openness or, in Deleuzes terms, virtuality is the condition of a mediation that allows for the reversible exchange between binaries of self and other, space and time, body and mind. An a-personal intervallic mediation which prevents these positions from collapsing into an equivalent sameness. MerleauPontys emphasis on the spatial as well as the temporal dynamic, an emphasis that situates while not stabilizing this exchange, acts as a counterfoil to Deleuzes emphasis on the innite unfolding of the interval in terms of the empty form of time, what he calls the outside, a concept heavily inuenced by Maurice Blanchots The Innite Conversation. For Blanchot:
afiction holds in it the limit from which we should assume a perspective on the human condition a movement that hinders precisely all perspective we are not above but beneath time: this is eternity.27

the seer/spectator is immersed.28 Reading Merleau-Pontys phenomenology via Deleuze and Deleuze via Merleau-Pontys phenomenology allows for a theoretical conguration of a scene of spectatorship as both immersive and embodied, a space where the body is engaged in a simultaneously fracturing and constituting dynamic passivity. In this scene, envelopment and simultaneity, characteristics attributed to virtual technology, do not preclude the gaps and voids of cinemas sequential unfolding in time. Both temporal simultaneity and spatial sequentiality become the bifurcating movements performed by the embodied spectator in relation to the virtual ground of becoming. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it:
spatiality [is] just as susceptible to the movement of difference as duration [] Just as time is amenable to both ow and discontinuity [] so too is space. [] each is as amenable as the other to being disconcerted by difference, which in any case refuses such a clear-cut distinction between them.29

The differential interval that marks the scene of immersive spectatorship that I have elaborated via Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty generates a dynamic of absorption and action, of temporal ow and spatial change. The liberated sensations unleashed by immersion in the ow of images pass through the body as the body punctuates the anonymity of these intensities. The scene of immersive spectatorship thus forms a loop in which the spectator is a willing captive.

notes
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989) 2. 2 In undertaking this hybridization of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, I am deliberately running counter to positions such as Dorothea Olkowskis in Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999), who is at pains to separate them. While there is undoubtedly a case to be made for their differentiation, I am claiming that there is equally a case to be made for reading them in tandem.

For me, this sentiment encapsulates the distinction between Deleuzes Blanchot-inspired outside and a sense of embodied time. It is to avoid the static suspension of eternal time that I look to Merleau-Pontys hyperdialectics where that empty intimacy of time is always being dissected by the intervallic spacing of the body that moves in time as well as being moved by time. Hyperdialectics is a process of reversibility whereby two terms, rather than being synthesized into a whole, each continue to struggle for co-existence in a eld of discontinuities in which

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3 Margaret Morse, Body and Screen, Wide Angle 21.1 (1999): 64. 4 As well as Morses Body and Screen, Yvonne Spielmanns Aesthetic Features in Digital Imaging: Collage and Morph in the same issue of Wide Angle (special issue, Digitality and the Memory of Cinema) is also suggestive on this point. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968) 139. 6 Annette Michelson, About Snow, October 8 (spring 1979): 116. Michelson, an inuential proponent of a phenomenological approach to lm in the 1970s, uses this term to signify the ideal position of the subject from which it reects on the decentring movements of its operating consciousness. Her usage of the term derives from Jean-Louis Baudrys essay Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, trans. Alan Williams in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). Originally published in Cinethique 78 (1970). 7 For a cogent critique of such theorizing in the work of Howard Rheingold and Paul Virilio, see Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001). 8 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988) 15152. 9 Barbara Kennedy, Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation. A Reconsideration of Film Theory through Deleuzian Philosophy and Post-Feminism (Ph.D. thesis, Staffordshire University, 2000) 50. Although Kennedys thesis was brought out as a book shortly after submission Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) the detail in the thesis is more useful for my purposes, which is why I refer to it here. 10 Steven Shaviro, in The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), takes a similar position in his appropriation of Deleuze. 11 Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation 139. 12 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994) 268. 13 John Johnston, Machinic Vision, Critical Inquiry 26 (autumn 1999): 45. 14 Kaja Silverman highlights this notion in Bela Balazs writings in The Threshold of the Visible World (New York and London: Routledge, 1996) 88. 15 As well as Marks The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2000), other recent returns to a traditional use of phenomenology in lm theory include: Allan Casebiers Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) and Vivian Sobchacks The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). 16 Deleuze in Dana Polan, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, eds. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) 252. I am referring to a secondary source here as, at the time of writing this paper, Deleuzes book had not been translated into English. It has since been published by Continuum (London, 2003). Deleuze borrows the term haptic from the art historian Alois Reigl, who dened Egyptian art as a haptic aesthetic based on the attening of space in the bas-relief. For a discussion of the relation of Reigls notion to the early cinema of George Melies see Antonia Lants Haptical Cinema, October 74 (fall 1995): 4573. 17 Proust in Jodi Brooks, Between Contemplation and Distraction: Cinema, Obsession and Involuntary Memory in Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment, ed. Laleen Jayamanne (Sydney: Power, 1995) 86. 18 Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (London: Athlone, 2000) 56. 19 Gaylyn Studlar, De-territorial Imperative (Review of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image), Quarterly Review of Film & Video 12.3 (1990): 105; my emphasis. 20 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham

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Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994) 164. 21 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1992) 59. 22 See James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne UP, 1994) 74. 23 Snow in William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 170. Snow discusses the function of the X extensively in The Central Region in an interview with John Du Cane in Studio International 186.960 (1973): 179. 24 Elizabeth Grosz, in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, uses the term interimplication to describe how the virtual and the real are intertwined and how relations of embeddedness need rethinking (89). 25 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994) 94. 26 See Luce Irigaray, The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, The Intertwining The Chiasm in her An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 15184; and Grosz, Volatile Bodies (100 02). 27 Maurice Blanchot, The Innite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 120. 28 See Diana Cooles Thinking Politically with Merleau-Ponty, Radical Philosophy 108 (July/Aug. 2001): 1728 for a useful account of this dynamic. 29 Elizabeth Grosz, Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999) 22.

Maria Walsh Chelsea College of Art & Design Manresa Road London SW3 6LS UK E-mail: maria [email protected]