notes on complex urbanism

Couple of notes on Andrew Benjamin’s complex urbanism which he presented in a most articulate manner yesterday. Chimes with conversations that I seem to have on a recurring basis with an architect friend about the implications of constitutive networks around built projects. He calls it planning, but I want to disassociate the kind of ideological implications associated with urban planning, moving towards a concept of network as informative relational framework with the double articulation of theoretical and material influence. In other words – wondering whether it’s possible to build out of a network? So that individual buildings, and we can think of examples of social condensers and projects designed to change ethical and social relations, are informed as much by the environment they sit in – indeed, not even immediate environment but wider infrastructural provision – as the design elements that exist in them.

Firstly, by way of context, this here article on the Burj Khalifa (the idea that you can watch the sunset twice still holds some bizarre romanticism for me), which nicely illustrates the ‘jewel in mud’ problem – in Benjamin’s terms – that consists in the delinking of building from environment. Or, in theoretical mode that was stressed as the analytic core of the formulation on complex urbanism, construction without analysis of the environment in which it sits.

Benjamin stresses that his formula for complex urbanism consists in the integration of potentiality, the possibility of unforeseen potential, into the urban environment. What’s meant by this within the constraints of a planning configured as a re-regulation, he illustrated with the formula x + y = x + y + z. The idea being that planning consists in the integration of elements that will give you more (unplanned potential) than what you had in the first place. It’s an additive problem that Benjamin constructs as addition. Simply, that if you add something, it is additive. Tautology sure, but the abstract nature of the term is derived from a couple of initial steps that I’ll mention subsequently. The z then, is the representation of the unknown or unplanned consequence of the additive process. It’s a way of modelling unforeseen outcomes by way of allowing them space: a prior acceptance of the consequences of allowing for unpredictable consequence.

What’s derived from the inclusion of the unpredictable is the widening of the scope of architectural practice as both transformative and analytic tool. Not a acquiescence to planning as a mode of control aligned with pre-existing built logics, but planning as the analytical pursuit of a wider consequential mapping of the results of construction, with the all important embrace of the potentiality of the unpredictable included in.

Underpinning the additive formula, is I think, the unspoken assumption that the outcome of the z – the unpredictable – is positive. What’s interesting here is that Benjamin did some preliminary work on arguing that his conception of human being consisted in the being of human placed, that is, expanded in his ‘ecology of relations’, humans being within relation to other humans. They are then, existing within relational networks. This is abstract, and he concedes it as abstract, but is done in order to reach some kind of non-normative starting point out of which to build a conception of human, human environment, and an ethics deriving from a shared conception of commonality. However, the non-development of an ethical system has implications for the embrace of the potentiality of the unpredictable precisely because without the political and ethical framework built from, as opposed to imported onto, the idea of human as placed, the outcome of the unpredictable simply is.

Some kind of posting interregnum

Some more non-revised fragments. Currently preoccupied with imagining a conversation between Adorno and O’Hara based around the latter’s ‘The Critic’. Beyond that, predominately Benjamin’s convolute N. The engine of his time-travelling conceptual locomotive in avuncular Dr Brown style.

‘The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus Strindberg (in To Damascus?): hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now.’ [N9a,1] Around this the methodology is constructed. Earlier Benjamin writes of conversation with Brecht that you ‘don’t start with the good old things, but the bad new ones’. The focus of his method is not grounded in a longing for things as they were, but through the exploration of things as they could have been, a generation of possibility beyond what they are now. A methodology of excavating the false starts of history, an integration of the countervailing as valid political thought. Benjamin states that concepts are words. The role of the philosopher, and by extension the political agent, is to set these concepts to best use. In his nautical imagery; a trimming of sails, a setting of course.

On a loose conceptual tip, this here is an ex-lecturer’s lecture on Deleuze’s Cinema 2 as his most political work.

Aesthetics of time travel

After a long time doing nothing but writing essays I celebrated – in the most minor way – by watching the first Terminator movie last night. I hadn’t seen it for years and a couple of things struck me about it. Firstly, you can see Schwarzenegger’s penis when he initially appears from the future. Secondly, that the film is loving immersed in 80s music culture until Sarah Connor disappears off to Mexico at the end, at which point the perm goes and the bandanna / jeep / aviator combo of the future revolutionary leader appears. And, thirdly, it borrows a huge amount from La Jetée.

Following La Jetée’s aesthetic of a time travelling minimalism in which the apparatus needed to hurl someone through time looks like the following picture, Terminator’s resolution of the end point of time travel – the arrival – consists in some lightning and lack of clothing. It’s easy to imagine that the time travelling apparatus in Terminator shares an aesthetic similarity with La Jetee because they’re both created out of necessity. In that the conditions of the emergence of time travelling technology is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the end goal is not so much the changing of history to change the future-present, but a preservation of it on its own terms.

If this minimal aesthetic is derived of necessity – of the sparse conditions of emergence – it evolves because of the eventual primacy of a military-industrial complex that induces catastrophe. Compare this to the representation of time travel as developed, not out of necessity, but curiosity, and the opposite aesthetic emerges. Not a stripped back minimalism of a lone time travelling man. But one of cluttered, accidental emergence, where pieces of trash, clapped out bits of machinery and odd cogs and gizmos are stuck on to a basic container for transportation. See the DeLorean of Back to the Future and H G Wells’ time machine.

There’s surely more instances of representation but I can’t currently think of any that sit between these two poles. This leaves us between the forced minimalism of aesthetic representation beyond the catastrophic triumph of the military-industrial complex, and the cluttered junk-machines of the accidental inventor. The wider implications of this I’m not so sure about. But the lack of space between the two poles, of a time machine available in the supermarket that looks something like a dirt devil, seems like a missed narrative opportunity.

Taut!

Note towards planning (1 of n)

“The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure that the roof rested on columns.”

The above, courtesy of Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. I’ve mentioned Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s The International Style before, and I just wanted to place it in a slightly wider context, or to qualify that precisely why I like it is because they got it wrong. So, the book originated out of a 1932 exhibition (Modern Architecture: International Exhibition), at the New York MOMA, and curated around the European Modernist movement. What it marks is a divorce of an aesthetic style from the political orientation of the project: the utopian drive of the Crystal Chain letters and the Marxist conviction of Meyer that the purpose of building was to meet social need. As an avowed functionalist, Meyer insisted that the production of an aesthetic style was a secondary – although unavoidable – step in meeting that need. In that the Modernism of the Neues Bauen was the result of the form-content dialectic of a functionality placed at the heart of construction. In Benjamin’s sense: the politicisation of art – the art of construction – not just a museum or institutionally generated architectural style that was subsequently transposed to categorise Wright et al.

In developing a rigidly categorised set of tropes and stylistic markers, Hitchcock and Johnson allowed for the aesthetic element of the style, but lost its political context. Indeed, the output of the Neues Bauen was centred around both planning – and I think there’s more space to develop a wider theory of socialist planning over aesthetics here – and construction of social housing. However, this did not fit with the ideological trajectory of the Nazi party. An ideology that demanded a mix of classicism in projects of substantial scale, and Bavarian folksiness in estates such as those built for the SS outside Berlin; not the inherent and progressive political activism of the Neues Bauen: for rarely do flat roofs rest on columns.

The Sacrifice

 

‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’

Democracy for (re)sale

Old revolutionary boredom got it in there first, which, I guess, saves me the trouble of writing up some thoughts on the Kristin Ross talk, ‘Democracy for Sale’. What I am going to do is suggest a couple of things as regards to the question at the end of the piece concerning Ross’s insistence on the “importance of ‘democracy’ as a label”.

The gist of the talk then, was an assertion of the need to reclaim democracy as a term of the left, of a signifier of a genuine emancipatory politics as opposed to the rather meaningless tag that it has become today. So, first up, problems with democracy as term: arguably, its current use as empty signifier is caught in the double bind of being validated only with a (usually prefixed term) such as representative, direct, or parliamentary. What democracy signifies then, is a mode of governance, but the actual content and structural action of this mode are governed by the qualifier that the comes before the term democracy, the signifier before the empty signifier, which is itself, empty, without the attachment of the empty signifier of ‘democracy’.

Why ‘democracy’ as label is important is that in spite of the contemporary emptiness of the term – it affords the recognition of a democratic immanence within democracy – of a democratic spirit understood by Ross in the original sense. In eschewing the recent calls for new names in order to orientate the project towards the reclaiming of existing terms, Ross provides accessibility and makes the project relatable. At the conference on Badiou (words to come) Ross questioned Badiou qua philosopher, for dealing in a philosophy that she thought had passed, a philosophy of abstracts rather than ideals: of words over practice. I think this indicates the real nature of the project, it exists for Ross, not in the abstract, but must be grounded in terms relevant to the real world: to be understandable to the people in order to achieve the desired efficacy.

The suggestion of this came in the example of the Irish no vote. When an audience member asked why she had picked this example, as opposed to the more direct democratic moments of the Greek riots, the response was that it caused “panic” in the European elites. That in discovering a democratic moment within an oligarchal democratic system, the obvious immanence of the project of reclamation is revealed. While Ross was happy to acknowledge the Greek riots as a democratic moment, she chose not to make it the focus of the talk – and of the wider project – precisely because of its (radically) oppositional status. Whether this is a positive thing is debatable as it accedes to the hegemonic drive that contrasts such moments (of direct action) as oppositional, as other, and as a threat to the existing order. But in doing so, both gives them validity and shapes the conception of the whole in relation to them.

Space and non-place

Interesting discussion last night about the nature of space. While this is going to be fairly standard stuff for those who spend time reading theory there are a couple of things that I want to note down here, in part because they follow some of the older stuff thematically, and for the rather more prosaic reason that I won’t lose or forget them. But first: a quick note on the photo. One of Arnold Odermatt’s (relatively) famous depictions of the aftermath of road accidents. I want to come back to this in a moment to address the issue of non-places.

Firstly some thoughts on the discussion of yesterday. If we follow Lefebvre’s notion that spaces are slices of time; a record of time in time, and that for Marx, “economy of time” is that which “all economy reduces itself” what are the implications for space? To take a quick step back, the contention here is that capitalism generates time, it requires a formalised and universalised time in order to function. The capitalist tool of the railroad that Pynchon quite neatly sums up with through Frank in Against the Day, asking “who at some point hadn’t come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love.”

The railroad is then, a transformative tool of spatiotemporal application. It is used to move things rapidly, and over vast distances. It compresses the space and time but requires a rigidity of time to operate. Gone are the localised notions of time, the pursuits that Lefebvre would charaterise in terms of rhythms; time according to community, to local conditions, and instead, a time is imposed. A universal time, with Greenwich as its epicentre. So if capitalism is by extension time, if it implies a level of generative interdependence, can this extension be applied to space? If space is time recorded, can we then say that capitalism is space? That it generates the spatial conditions of its realisation concomitantly with this realisation?

Lefebvre argues for the stratification of space into the absolute (space that is used to satisfy peoples needs and desires – a space of use value), and abstract space (the space of domination – of manufactured needs and desires – the space of capitalism. This distinction then, draws on the separation of use and exchange value in Marx, a distinction that has itself come under ontological scrutiny, that the emergence of use value only comes with that of exchange value. Does this then hold for the split of space into the absolute and abstract? Is there an issue with the notion of an absolute space as defined against the abstract space of capitalism? I think that it’s perhaps useful to view this in terms of the underlying spatial constraints of private property: that in the ownership of land – and the subsequent ownership of space that’s derived from it – we have to define absolute space. So, I’d suggest that absolute space does not exist prior to abstract space, but emerges in a state of flux, as the dialectical generation of a dominated-non-dominated, owned-non-owned, formulation.

But, the larger concern here then is space outside of capitalism. With the globalised nature (I’m not going to even try and define globalisation here but follow me if you will) of capitalism, is there space outside of capitalism? Foucault talks of emergent heterotopias, areas of freedom that occasionally emerge under the manifestations of the power relations of capital but are these spaces outside of capitalism? Is there room to allow a hegemonic drive for the incorporation of oppositional cultures both residual and emergent that allows space for these to develop, or is there space of genuine rupture – of absolute rather than abstract nature?

Just to go back to the photo: non-places, in the Kantian formulation spaces that are means to an end as opposed to the location of ends? That of transition: motorways, lifts, in Augé’s definition, supermarkets. Does the event of the car crash redefine the non-place as means-to, into a place of an end? I’d suggest that it does, where there exists a break in the mimetic or automatic routine, a change in the function of the non-place there exists scope to redefine non-place as place. There is, a certain systemic closure that takes little account of temporality in defining non-places; a non-place may be such now, but not tomorrow and yesterday. More account of the practice of spatiotemporal flows, less categorisation of spatiotemporal objects, then.

Deleuze and the crystal-image

Just found this in my Google documents. Written about 3 years ago. But, it means I can put some more pictures here.

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Deleuze’s crystal-image purports to offer us an insight into the operation of time. In order to explore this claim I will provide a synopsis of Bergson’s though on time and memory, which informs Deleuze’s work concerning the crystal-image. The crystal-image is a logical culmination of a trajectory that Deleuze sees in cinema. This essay will deal with this trajectory that operates through the movement-image, time-image and into the crystal-image: the Second World War providing the paradigm shift in underlying cinematic style. Finally, and in order to determine how the crystal-image is delineated visually I will look at its portrayal in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

In each moment that we inhabit in the present there exists, for Bergson, a split between a present that passes, and a past which is preserved. Bergson’s description of time is derived from Xeno’s paradoxes of movement, and seeks to explain how we move through time. In order to make sense of this, Bergson ascribes to our subjectivities ‘duration’. “Pure duration is the form taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states.”¹ This notion of duration provides the basis of Bergson’s work on memory and features in Deleuze’s analysis of the crystal-image; itself a portrait of duration, a depiction of “the foundation of time, non-chronological time”.² It is only through looking at Bergson’s work on memory that we can fully make sense of duration (and thus the crystal-image); though it is itself, a concept that superintends the memory schema.

In order to explain how the past survives in the present, and how the splitting of time is facilitated, Bergson divides the operation of memory into two distinct aspects. The two forms that memory takes are of spontaneous memory and habitual or automatic memory. Spontaneous memory deals with the past in images and representations; it is entirely virtual.³ Habitual memory, unlike spontaneous memory, engages with the present. In elaborating on Bergson’s work, Guerlac uses the example of driving a car and then failing to acutely remember the journey afterwards.⁴ The mechanism of habitual memory, through the learned skill of driving, engages with the present. The practical collaboration of the two types of memory can be referred to as actual memory and is necessarily expedient in dealing with the world.

Bergson illustrated this interaction between spontaneous and habitual memory, and perception through his inverted cone. What we see is a distinction between the virtual – that which is pure memory, and the actual – pure perception, involved with the present. This gap is bridged through the use of memory. The ellipse AB at the base of the cone is totality of memory. Point S is the body, the self, in contact with the present (shown as the plane P). What needs to be considered is that the diagram is not meant to convey stasis; point S is in constant motion, engaged in a perpetual surge towards an immediate future and linked with an immediate past. This is how time is experienced, through the mechanism of memory Bergson describes. Time is not linear, but amorphous and in flux. The past exists concurrently with the present and each point in the future splits into a present that passes and a past that is preserved, without this there could be no motion through time: time would not move if the present could not pass.

Deleuze suggests that Bergson’s philosophy has often, pejoratively, been reduced to the maxim that “duration is subjective and constitutes our internal life.”⁵ While there is no denying the truth of the statement it can only be made sense of in the wider context of Bergson’s philosophy. Through the schema of time and memory that Bergson outlines it is the constant production of ‘internal circuits’, the linking of present and past, which contribute to the subjectivity of duration. It is these internal circuits that Deleuze finds exemplified visually through the medium of cinema.

Deleuze argues that these internal circuits when delineated in cinema give us a picture of how we inhabit and move in time. ⁶ It is this that he terms the ‘crystal-image’ – a representation of the splitting of time, the movement of past and present reflected through these images. Deleuze states that “cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world.”⁷ He goes on to elaborate that cinema seeks to provide bigger circuits in order to link actual images with those of the past. This is the basis for what Deleuze sees as the cinema’s exposition of time. However, the purest form of the crystal-image, the manner in which we exist in time, constitutes the smallest possible internal circuit.⁸ What Deleuze seeks to provide is a taxonomy of the crystal-image. To look at the crystal-image in film we require its context in Deleuze’s cinematic trajectory.

For Deleuze the state of pre-war cinema is characterised by a portrayal of the movement-image. The movement-image arises from Bergson’s critique of cinema. Cinema “misconceives movement” in the same manner as natural perception. What it does is break down movement into a series of successive images, a misgiving that natural perception and cinema share.⁹ For Bergson a model in which things “constantly change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be assignable” would be preferable.¹⁰ It is this that leads to a plane of immanence, a universe, which is comprised in a set of movement images; everything reacts with everything.¹¹ It is this that Deleuze adopts as the basis of the movement-image.

The movement-image is fundamentally reactionary. Its archetype is in Hollywood genre cinema, built upon placing characters into situations in which they can immediately act and react.¹² Deleuze also states that the narrative of pre-war film, steeped in movement-image, carries little central to the main tenets of the plot. The construction of films is done with ease of accessibility firmly in mind. Cuts are made in order to advance in time towards the next stage of the story, which inevitably unfolds in a linear fashion, often signposted by elucidating flashbacks. It carries a sensory-motor schema through which action unfolds.¹³ The link between sense and motor, between perception and action, is unassailable. This is the basis of the movement image, the emphasis being firmly on spatial rather than temporal action.

The break with movement-image cinema originates in post-war cinema. The time-image is introduced. A method in which film-makers no longer sought to portray only the movement-image, a format that Deleuze asserts, exhausted itself of original content. It must be noted that the validity of Deleuze’s assertion – that the Second World War signalled a break in the ethos of filmmakers – is questionable. It is difficult to see just how a historical event (regardless of its size) could produce identical outcomes in a diffuse set of filmmakers spread globally. We are inclined to think of the time-image as born fully developed. This, perhaps, is a misconception. The Second World War can be said to have provided the catalyst for the development of the time-image, but this itself was a process that developed gradually: through the French new-wave, and the importation of an aesthetic from Japanese cinema. Post-war cinema did not suddenly lose its emphasis that had traditionally been placed on the movement-image, but embraced a blossoming new direction concerned with time over movement.

What the developed time-image does it to place characters in situations to which they are unable to react. The sensory-motor schema is dissolved, and prompt action and reaction consequently rendered unfeasible. Deleuze terms this type of image the opsign, and through it we gain cinematic glimpses of time in its pure state. Deleuze credits Ozu’s languorous style with the first major depictions of time in its purest essence. He notes that places devoid of people, lingering camera shots (prominently for Deleuze, of a vase in Late Spring) convey pure time.¹⁴ With time cinematically delineated, it is the work of the crystal-image to show us how we inhabit and operate within time.

Crystal-images, formed by the collision of the actual and virtual, allow us to see time. The limpid, actual image and the opaque, virtual, become accessible in the crystalline form.¹⁵ What constitutes the purest crystal image is when the “actual optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image”.¹⁶ This image that consists of the smallest internal circuit, where the actual image finds its own ‘genetic’ element, forms a pure crystal. The image becomes irreducible to the actual and virtual, the present and contemporaneous past. The image cannot be broken down into its constituent parts because they become indiscernible from each other. Deleuze even suggests that in the light of the actual, the virtual becomes the actual and the actual, virtual, in the crystal.¹⁷ There is fluidity in the crystal that means its parts cannot be demarcated.

The crystal-image is the present and past, co-existing. Bergson holds that this is evinced in the form of déjà-vu.¹⁸ The phenomena of finding a place familiar, of feeling as if we have been somewhere or done something before, is the simultaneous existence of the past and present: where the pure-virtual image interacts fleetingly with present. This virtual image, in its pure form, exists outside of the consciousness in time. In the crystal-image, in déjà-vu, we glimpse this vision of an anterior state in collaboration with the present. This, is for Deleuze, how we operate in time, time holds us in its interior and we move through it as such.¹⁹

There are only three films that Deleuze attributes with showing us how we move in time; of forming crystal-images composed of the smallest interior circuits: Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora, Resnais’s Je t’aime je t’aime and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.²⁰ It is telling that there are only three examples of the crystal-image for Deleuze. It is an image of unrivalled specificity whose potential we can see in many films, but whose existence is only available to us in few. The theory of the crystal-image and the intricacy of its composition, often lead to situations where a lacuna is required to complete the crystal. This means that although the theoretical apparatus of the crystal-image can be applied to many films, we can rarely use it as an explanatory tool. Indeed, for Deleuze, it is not the crystal-image that can be used to further our understanding of specific films, but that these films further our understanding of the fundamental metaphysics of time and memory.

In Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, in the Casablanca bar, the memories of Elle are projected onto Lui, so that in conversation he becomes her German lover. The crystal though is not quite completed, as it lacks the synchronous unity of a moment shared through past and present. Similarly, Lynch often offers us images of a virtual past imposed upon the present (think of line “Dick Laurent is dead” in Lost Highway) that leads to an exploration of a fugue state with continual references to events both present and past. What Deleuze does not allow for in the crystal-image is the construction of an implicit state of reference that has the same temporal significance. What the crystal-image requires is an explicit exposition; a full visual representation of the workings of memory in time. It is for this reason that I shall focus exclusively on the portrayal of Deleuze’s crystal-image in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Chris Marker puts forward the idea that Scottie’s acrophobia in Vertigo is a “clear, understandable and spectacular” metaphor for the vertigo of time.²¹ What Scottie tries to overcome through his makeover of Judy into Madeleine is time itself. His obsession, born from his love for Madeleine realises itself in his project to makeover a small town Kansas girl into the lady he covets. It is this fight against time that Vertigo portrays. It shows how Scottie inhabits time, and the function of his memory in his interaction with the present.

Vertigo is constructed in a manner that betrays its ostensible fascination with spatial vertigo. Vertigo contains multiple instances of repetition, semiotics, mirror images and duplicitous appearances. Dialogue is repeated, most notably the line about ‘power and freedom’, first uttered by Elster as a lament for a San Francisco past. These are the concepts that underline Elster’s machinations. What we are witness to is an elaborate plot to rid himself of his wife, thus gaining freedom, retaining her money as a key to power. In the Argosy bookstore the line is repeated alongside the rather portentous statement from Pop Leibel (‘he threw her away’) about Carlotta Valdes. Something that Elster manages to do literally, discarding his wife from the bell tower while Judy stands complicit.

The spiral of the opening credits, Madeleine’s hair and the stairs of the bell tower symbolise the circular nature of time in Vertigo. Things are brought back to approach their origins but the circuits can never quite be completed: the death of Madeleine prevents the logical culmination of the love she shares with Scottie, a situation that repeats itself with Judy’s death in the finale of the film. All symbols for Deleuze, of the operation of time. Indeed the prevalence of ‘mirror’ shots and the duplicitous nature of Madeleine further blur the distinction between the actual and the virtual. A technique used in the construction of the film as a whole. The ending mirrors the start, Scottie hanging once literally and then metaphorically in grave danger, the first physical and the second psychological. The pattern of following Madeleine and her death mirrors that which occurs, in the second half of the film, with Judy.

As Bergson saw, time is often viewed as secondary in function to space: in noting that we count in space, not time; that each object requires juxtaposition with another to make sense of them numerically.²² It is this reversal that constitutes metaphor of acrophobia that Marker uncovers in Vertigo. Indeed Deleuze states that the crystal-image “does not abstract time; it does better: it reverses its subordination in relation to movement”.²³ This is what Scottie is seeking in making over Judy, to reverse this spatiotemporal hierarchy in order to recover what has been lost; Madeleine, but survives outside of his consciousness in time, in the realm of the virtual. The pure crystal-image – where the actual: the reshaping of Judy into Madeleine, meets the virtual: Scottie’s memory of Madeleine – is the zenith of time’s representation in Vertigo.

The pure crystal-image, where the actual meets its virtual image occurs in Vertigo, after Scottie has successfully remade Judy into Madeleine. In Judy’s room at the Empire Hotel, as her hair is twisted into Madeleine’s spiral, the transformation is completed. What follows is a kiss between Judy and Scottie. As they embrace in the room the camera begins to rotate around them, Scottie opens his eyes and the scenery changes. He is no longer in the Empire Hotel, but in the livery stables at the mission, with the memory of the kiss he shared with Madeleine before her perceived death. As the camera completes its circuit Scottie is returned to the hotel room.

It is this image, this pure crystal, which portrays time so effectively for Deleuze. What we are presented with is an irreducible image. The actual (the room in the Empire Hotel) and the virtual (the kiss in the livery stable) cannot be separated; there is no longer a distinction between the present and the past for Scottie at that moment. The virtual image becomes actual and limpid, while the actual becomes opaque.²⁴ This is evinced in Vertigo. As the camera rotates, the virtual is shown to us; Scottie’s memory becomes actual, while the present, the actuality of the hotel room, disappears into the realm of the virtual. What we see in the crystal-image is the “gushing forth of time”. ²⁵

It is through Scottie’s obsession and “thanks to the most magical camera movement in the history of cinema” that Vertigo portrays the crystal-image.²⁶ This image is a product of Deleuze’s wider philosophy and a belief that through art we are able to reconcile ourselves with an alienated world: to come to terms with our position within it, and attempt to understand it more fully. In film – through the crystal-image – we are able to see the “most fundamental operation of time”.²⁷ In Vertigo, we are shown time’s operation, how Scottie is positioned in time, and thus, how we inhabit time.

Bibliography

Barr, Charles, 2002, Vertigo, British Film Institute.

Bergson, Henri, 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness. (Pogson Translation) Dover Publications.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books.

Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press.

Marker, Chris, 1995 ‘A free replay (notes on Vertigo)’in John Boorman and Walter Donohoe (ed) Projections 4 ½, Faber and Faber Ltd.

Pearson, Keith Ansell, 2002. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. Routledge.

Filmography

Hiroshima Mon Amour. Resnais, Alain. 1959 Argos Films.

Lost Highway. Lynch, David. 1996. Asymmetrical Productions.

Sans Soleil. Marker, Chris. 1983. Argos Films.

Tokyo Story. Ozu, Yasujiro. 1953. Artificial Eye Film Company Ltd.

Vertigo. Hitchcock, Alfred. 1958. Universal.

1 Bergson, Henri, 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness. (Pogson Translation) Dover Publications. P. 100.

2 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 79.

3 Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. P. 125.

4 Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. P. 126.

5 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

6 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

7 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 66.

8 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 68.

9 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. P. 59.

10 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. P. 60.

11 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 61-63.

12 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 145-154.

13 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 (first published 1983), Cinema One: The Movement-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 159-163.

14 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 13-16.

15 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 69.

16 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 67.

17 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 68.

18 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 77.

19 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

20 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

21 Marker, Chris, 1995 ‘A free replay (notes on Vertigo)’in John Boorman and Walter Donohoe (ed) Projections 4 ½, Faber and Faber Ltd. P123.

22 Guerlac, Suzanne, 2006. Thinking In Time – An Introduction To Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. Pp. 61-63.

23 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 95.

24 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 68.

25 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. P. 80.

26 Marker, Chris, 1995 ‘A free replay (notes on Vertigo)’in John Boorman and Walter Donohoe (ed) Projections 4 ½, Faber and Faber Ltd. P. 124.

27 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 (first published 1985), Cinema Two: The Time-Image, Continuum Books. Pp. 78-79.

—

It’s all in the spiral.

Architecture of destruction

I started writing this last week and then got sidetracked with a number of other things so an abridged version of what it was going to be (although having re-read that sentence there’s a certain ontological issue with abridging something before it fully exists, but hey), appears below. Essentially, a couple of interesting points that came out of a roundtable event on The Architecture of Destruction that the Museum of Non Participation – a project devised (I think) by the no.w.here art collective -facilitated.

Firstly, a mention of Eyal Weizman who works and helps run the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. What interested me about his contribution to the discussion was the repositioning of dialectical analysis away from the traditional oppositional binaries, preferring instead, to use language of flows; of a concept of dialectical unity. Admittedly, not a new concept (Huyssen argues it well in ‘High/Low in an expanded field’ in Modernism/modernity), but it’s illustrated well by the practico-material realisations of architecture. That is, it’s easier to conceptualise and show the influence of implications of dialectics within the context of the (materially) structured environment, I think, than through more abstract engagement with other aesthetic fields.

The not so spectral presence of Foucault’s meditations on power and control – most notably in the control mechanisms derived from medicalisation – were present in the analysis of the Haussmanisation of cities in areas of conflict. Where the presence of a military as de facto government allows for the structuring of future control mechanisms: the cultural centres (schools, roads, prisons) for the neo-liberal project of democratisation; the spreading of freedom (capitalism). Evident in Eyal’s assertion that the American Military is the biggest provider / funder of public building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The second significant thing that I’d like to mention, predominantly to question the efficacy of, is this series of photographs by Ken Gonzales-Day who has digitally altered images of lynchings in order to remove traces of the bodies and nooses leaving the “viewers attention, not upon the lifeless body of lynch victim, but upon the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, and even consider the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past.”

I saw one of the images at the Spy Numbers exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in the Summer, and without the qualification of the title of the work – captioned to illustrate what was being conducted at the time of the photograph – I think the image lacks power. It relies on a disjunction between the seen and unseen in order for us to reconstruct the violence in our minds. This, in itself, is a standard cinematic trope that heightens the sense of disgust and disturbance linked to acts of violence by forcing us to engage with them more closely through an active cognitive reconstructive. Now, what troubles me here is that the disjunction is not easy to formulate. The unfamiliarity of the images and scenes that they portray requires further contextualizing or familiarity with the original image – and it’s only upon reading that and then reevaluating the image – that the artist’s desired point (quoted above) becomes apparent.

What he’s trying to do is situate the viewer with the crowd. But, it serves the negative purpose of objectifying and isolating the crowd from the viewer. I don’t think the images manage to transcend the constraints of a body situated to elicit negative representation: the ‘it’s them not me’ response to the crowd. For featuring the crowd but removing the result of the lynching it establishes viewer / subject oppositions on which to project distance; a way of removing any sense of complicity normally associated with assimilation of the gaze by image.