Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 14:40:10 +1000
From: amiles-AT-insane.apana.org.au (Adrian Miles)
Subject: Re: A qui est le cinema?


Louis has bought me to heal and to task so I reckon I'd better say some
things. As I have already said, I'm sorry that the posts approached the
personal in a way other than friendly...

After reading Louis's long post I'm not sure what to do, for example I do
actually feel that most film theory is irrelevant to what the cinema is, or
is based on very dubious analogies. Of course this is partly addressed in
something like Carroll's _Mystifying Movies_ etc but from my point of view
these texts are themselves are just as theoretically reductionist. I don't
want to argue some big claim about why I don't like Mulvey's seminal essay,
(for example) but I hope it should be evident to other list members that I
have a sad pedantic streak that interjects whenever some film theory
shibboleth is wheeled out as self evident proof or truth. For example the
recent Peirce, photography, reference discussion we had is a case in point.

OK, I also don't want to end up having a big argument about my claims re:
Louis's reading and argument, versus my reading and argument since I think
we would just end up agreeing to disagree after much spilt pixels. So, and
please understand I am choosing these as just representative bits, flavours
if you like, what I will do is just nudge a couple of Louis's points.
Unfortunately, the post will become obscenely huge, probably closer to an
essay than email, and for this I apologise, but I feel that a lot of words
need to be placed to make all this a bit firmer.

Louis wrote:
>When Adrian accuses me of interpretive vilolence in attempting to reintroduce
>alterity into Deleuzian though, or more precisely to criticize Deleuze's
>thought as an elaboration of the same, does he not ignore the metaphysical
>violence by which Deleuze excludes otherness from his thought? This is at the
>heart of my previous posts.

I understand that this is at the heart of your comments. This exclusion of
otherness *is* the heart of Deleuze's project, so to say that it should be
there, or needs to be reintroduced, is like reading Derrida and saying
there is no such thing as Otherness. Now there might not be, but our
reading is to elucidate Deleuze and the questions of whether Deleuze is
right in excluding altereity I believe needs to be discussed elsewhere in a
different context. Related to this is simply a question of reading style
and strategy, if I can keep the Derrida example for a moment, it is one
thing to argue contra Derrida about whether Otherness is a legitimate
category or not, I believe it is another thing to read Derrida and try to
understand what he has to say. These two things are clearly related, but
also clearly different. The first becomes a critique of the Derridean
project, the other a critique of a particular Derrida text. This is why, in
this reading, I keep being rude and putting the onus on you to demonstrate
why we should grant otherness a jumper in the game.

As I have and others have said otherness is not a part of the Deleuzean
game. For convenience here is a general comment from Hardt's _Gilles
Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy_ after he has elaborated on
Deleuze's use of Bergson:
        The negative movement of dialectical determination, while
        purporting to establish the basis for real difference, actually
        ignores difference all together. Deleuze has managed to turn Hegel's
        argument for determination completely upside down. Hegel proposes
        the negative movement of determination on the basis of the charge
        that Spinoza's positive movement remains abstract and indifferent;
        here, however, on the basis of classic ontological argumentation,
        Deleuze turns the charge of abstraction against Hegel and claims
        that dialectical determination ignores difference . . ." (9.)

Finally, the claim to 'metaphysical violence' in Deleuze's exclusion of
otherness remains inappropriate if a) we take it as a part of Deleuze's
metaphysics that otherness as such is unnecessary and b) that Deleuze
offers a metaphysics that is based on a positivity not a negativity. (The
two are obviously the same points, differently expressed.)

To put it another way, one specific to *Cinema I*
>& *Cinema II,* Deleuze is trying to find out what cinema is, but Deleuze
>assumes that cinema is one entitiy with an essence that emerges and then
>disappates at the advent of the electronic image. I would content that cinema
>"is" not, not as such. Cinema is a set of institutions that are different
>across space and time .

Why? What about "cinema is an essence that has been made use of in
different ways by different institutions at different spaces and times"?
And this is easily extended so that the film's Deleuze seems to watch, and
like, are those that according to Deleuze (and here we can definitely
contest his list) approach this essence. (I am uncomfortable with essence,
by the way.)

>This means that cinema is always other than itself.

No it doesn't. All that has been demonstrated in the argument is that there
are many cinemas - if we accept your terms. This is very different from
saying it is other than itself. To use other here I want to know what the
founding negation is grounded on, what act of negation produces cinematic
otherness (at a historical and/or institutional level)?

[deleted an important paragraph of Louis's about politics...]

>An important question about cinema that Deleuze does not ask, but which I
>have been trying to ventriloquate through Spivak is "Whose cinema is it?"
>Adrian may want to say soemthing like "it is not cinema that belongs to us,
>but we who belong to cinema" but I can still ask, why does cinema chose to
>use some of us and not others.  Despite Deleuze's posture that cinema uses
>people to think its thoughts, or to derive its concepts, his arguments work
>as if people made films. His claim to the contrary does not change the
>structure of auturism in his books significantly. The same old subject is
>still in place as is the same old cannon of films.

If we take my point that cinema uses people to think itself (a point I
offer only for speculation) then we do not need to retain people in the
sense that this argument proposes. People become audiences where 'audience'
might be defined as some sort of site, or sedimentation, around all sorts
of qualities and quantities; political, cultural, social, psychological,
historical, technological, etc. Rather than drop it all back down to a
subject, centred or otherwise, why not constitute the subject in the same
way as I am arguing about the cinema? We're just nodes in some sort of
chain (this is easy to understand if you just think of yourself as DNA).

Also, and this is something that the Deleuzean's can help us with, don't
Deleuze and Guattari have a lot to say about the problems of language, and
presumably authors, in the plateau in MP on linguistics?

>This being said I'd  like  to point out again that I like these books a great
>deal. Chapter 8 of *Cinema I* on Naturalism is very powerful, teh
>any-space-whatever is a cool way to put an old idea, the simple narrative
>about the Second World War giving rise to the modern cinema is a lie, but a
>great teaching tool for undergrads. However I  think that Deleuze needs a lot
>of criticism and I am not convinced by  posts that defend his arguments by
>using his terms as a closed system to prove he is right.  As I have tried to
>show many of those terms function to avoid the problems of other traditions.
>I simply don't believe that writing as if there weren't a problem makes the
>problem go away.

Personally I am (obviously) entranced by Deleuze's writing on the cinema so
I guess my over reactions are from an effort to figure out what the fuck he
is talking about before I decide whether I want to believe it or not. And
given my extreme suspicion of the 'tradition' of film studies as taught to
me (and sometimes as others expect me to teach it) this work appears as
something offering possibilities I just can't ignore. Then again, maybe I
just want to legitimate my own patch of informed and generally ignorant
expertise.

Adrian Miles

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amiles-AT-insane.apana.org.au
http://insane.apana.org.au/~amiles
PhD student: Centre of Comp. Lit. & Critical Studies, Monash Uni.
Teach: Cinema/Media Studies, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
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