The Image of Thought in Modern Cinema: The Brain Machine (ca. 1985)

The problem we have been preoccupied with concerns the renewal of the image of thought experienced by modern philosophy, given the new situation I described in the Introduction where the classical image of thought has either grown stale, or philosophy is no longer a machine for producing real intensive ideas coexisting with signs and impressions on a plane of immanence. However, this problem is not experienced by philosophy alone, but is also present in the development of modern cinema. In fact, the problem of renewal of the image has been the basis of the various renewals that have occurred in modern cinema, particularly in what is commonly referred to as “intellectual cinema,” and is present from the very beginning of this modern industrial art form. For this reason, in the mid-1980s, immediately following the completion of the second volume with Guattari, Deleuze turned his attention to this corollary crisis around the “image of thought” in modern cinema, especially in what he calls “the cinema of the brain.” The two volumes of the cinema studies, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, should in no way be understood as “film theory”; rather, they are Deleuze’s attempt to draw a map of the situation confronted by modern cinema concerning its own image that might provide philosophy with a new means of creating concepts that would replace its earlier universals. Concerning the relationship between cinema and thought, Deleuze writes in the conclusion to Cinema 2:

Cinema is not a universal or primitive language system [langue], nor a language [langage]. It brings to light an intelligible content, which is like a presupposition, a condition, that is, a necessary correlate by which language constructs its own “objects” (signifying units and operations). But this correlate, though inseparable, is specific: it consists of movements and thought processes (prelinguistic images), and of points of view on these movements and processes (pre-signifying signs). It consists of a whole “psychomechanics,” the spiritual automaton.1

Moreover, in Cinema 2 we find another installment of our earlier chapters on “the image of thought” that we have discussed in relation to Proust and Signs and Difference and Repetition, this time in relation to what Deleuze calls “the cinema of the brain.”

Once again, let’s recall our guiding questions: What kind of image is to be deduced from thought? How can thinking be determined by the image, and where does image first acquire its power over thought—that is, to induce, to provoke what is called “thinking” to occur within the subject? In attempting to respond to these questions around the relationship between modern cinema and thought (or the brain), Deleuze recounts a story of modern cinema concerning a vague and nebulous interval where thinking is attached to an image, only later to go astray and to lose its way back through “the image” to the actualization of the interval in thought. As I have already discussed in chapter 1, cinema is immanently machinic (i.e., a machine for producing images of perception, language, emotion, and thought—a “brain machine,” or what Deleuze calls a “spiritual automaton”), which is shown to succumb to repeated and frequent crashes in the modern period, either by getting trapped in reproducing a habitual automatic movement (clichés of perception and stock experience), or by being “stolen away” by other technical machines that transform its creative powers and cause it to serve their own ends in reproducing national or class interests, or simply in making money. Walter Benjamin had clearly perceived these dangers when he stated that modern cinema represents the technological synthesis of the goals of art with the goals of politics, which could produce nothing more than the very conditions necessary for the emergence of fascism. (Albert Speer’s crystal palace of National Socialism prefigures Industrial Light and Magic by only half a century.) The fact that Benjamin’s early assessment of the industrial art form has been surpassed by more difficult and finer analyses of the problems of mass art and mass politics in “an age of mechanical reproduction” does not make his argument any less accurate or thought provoking for us today.

On the second level, intimately bound up with the first, Deleuze locates the point of divergence in a veritable crisis around the “image of thought” that takes as its goal a “total provocation of the human brain” (i.e., the principle of “nooshock”) as it is first defined by Sergei Eisenstein. For Eisenstein, the early lesson of the Kabuki offered a highly artificial and stylized set of conventions for the production of cinematographic representation while avoiding the trappings of “naturalism,” or “vulgar realism.”2 Its contrapuntal method provides the example of an extreme formalism with regard to the possibilities of construction and, at the same time, an extremely free and indeterminate range of possible combinations with regard to the elements of expression. Consequently, there is a certain freedom sought in the ensemble of the elements of the spectacle, although this does not presuppose that they are uncoordinated. Rather, their assemblage bears the collective unity of a team working toward a common goal—“Kabuki is soccer”—and the “goal” is precisely the event that is defined above as the “total provocation of the brain.”3 In fact, the “goal” in soccer is a perfect illustration of the nature of the cinematographic event. Although the various components and elements that come together as its condition (the ball, the players, the grid or field of play, the rules of the game, etc.), they do not take the form of a direct causality, because the scoring shot is an effect that surpasses all of the former even though it presupposes their free and indeterminate coordination. Without this freedom and play between the various components, scoring a goal would simply be a matter of following a predetermined order or causal sequence like a physical process or a mathematical equation. Thus, it is by a strict adherence to technique that film becomes a process that can break open the already established forms of perception and thought and discover a fresh syntax before words, before images.

Eisenstein contrasts this technique with the function of “orthodox montage” in cinema, which operates by means of the “dominant” (a leading indicator or guiding shot). For example, taking the following sequence of montage images—a gray old man, a gray old woman, a white horse, a snow-covered roof—the meaning of the sequence will be determined, in orthodox montage, by the guiding shot, which “‘christens’ the whole sequence in one direction or another.”4 For example, we might add, preferably earlier on in the series, the whiteness of cataracts in a pupil, thereby producing the feeling of the hardening of old age, or a rheum of saliva forming at the corner of the mouth expressing its concomitant regression, or “becoming a child”; perhaps even a wide-angle shot of a winter field in which all distinguishable boundaries are erased by snowdrifts producing the impression of the fading of memory and the approach of death. These elements come together to produce the illusory effect of cinematic duration much in the same manner that cognitive science might account for the “illusion” of conscious duration by constructing the following sort of formula: a red light is followed by a green light, producing in the spectator’s consciousness the “illusion” of continuous movement, or “red becoming green.” This illusion, baptized as such by the presence of a subject who determines the separate components as synthetically real, is precisely the shadow traced by the movement-image across an interval made up of overtonal associations and undertonal depths. That is, “the central stimulus . . . is attended always by a whole complex of secondary stimuli” that are spatially inexpressible and constitute a dimension that is exterior to the image, but from which the image draws its components for expressing a feeling of lived duration, a duration that closely resembles “intuition,” although this must be understood as overflowing a purely psychological determination.5

The goal of “thought montage” exemplifies a break with preestablished forms of visibility and sense in order to restore the immanence between thought and the brain: to give thought a sensible form, one of shock, which yields an emotional intelligence (one of conviction, or belief), and which, in turn, lays claim to the reality of what is perceived. Taking up Deleuze’s account of the character of “automatic thinking” that appears as a result of the early dominance of the movement-image, the image first acquires this power over thought because the industrial art of cinema already “makes movement the immediate given of the image” and it is only a small step between movement and thought in as much as “automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts in turn on movement.”6 In other words, cinema achieves by direct means what was only indirectly present (or even demanded) by the other arts where it is spirit (or mind) that causes movement to occur: for example, the eyes to trace the words across the page, to follow the curvature of the lines in painting or sculpture, or to apprehend the composition of bodies in dance or theatre, or the ears to discern the melody across a surface of notes. Within cinematic duration, on the contrary, “it is the image itself which moves in itself” (i.e., automatic-movement), no longer dependent “on a moving body or object which realizes, nor on a spirit which reconstitutes it.”7 The movement-image is primary and now occupies the position of the subject-that-moves or the subject that causes movement; the mind must react or respond to the movement that is immediately given, and this response is organically part of the image itself, marking an event that Deleuze will define by the concept of “nooshock.” The cause of thinking and perceiving is no longer on the side of the subject, and so thinking is no longer a logical possibility that one can either take up or not, but instead becomes a physiological imperative, a “totally physiological sensation.”8 The mind of the spectator is forced to respond, to react, to think; and this, in turn, changes the shape and the sensibility of thought, which appears from a shadowy region that is outside the subject’s own powers of auto-affection. Henceforth, it appears as if in this moment receptivity of the image assumes a command structure: LOOK! In other words, REACT!

We might take these remarks concerning Eisenstein’s theory of intellectual montage as preliminary to a more general discussion of the relationship between cinema and thought, so long as we keep in mind that a battle is being waged over the territory of the human brain, which appears here as both the “spiritual automaton,” the dummy of natural consciousness, and as its double, “the cinematographic I THINK.” If the threat of “naturalism” is what Deleuze calls a certain “spiritual automaton” that exists within each one of us, cinema solves this problem by the artificial creation of another automaton that enters into conflict with the first by causing it to react. The explosive shock, therefore, is simply the registered effect of an opposition between two “spiritual automatons” on the brain, which is then mediated by the dialectic of intellectual montage. Deleuze describes this dialectic as follows:

[Intellectual] montage is in thought, “the intellectual process itself,” or that which, under the effects of the shock, thinks the shock. Whether it is visual or aural, the image already has the harmonics which accompany the perceived dominant image, and enter in their own ways into super-sensory relations . . .: this is the shock-wave of the nervous vibration, which means that we can no longer say “I see,” “I hear,” but “I FEEL,” “totally physiological sensation.” And it is the set of harmonics acting out on the cortex which gives rise to thought, the cinematographic I THINK; the Whole as subject.9

Thus, as “the most notable of arts,” the industrial art of cinema assumes the pinnacle of the progression that Hegel had earlier established for philosophy; Eisenstein himself had described the potential for cinema to replace philosophy as the true and authentic expression of dialectical materialism. If the “dialectic” can be understood as the movement-image that causes thinking to occur in the subject, even as the unfolding of thought itself in its relationship to perception and to language, then the movement-image in cinema has a more direct means of causing movement to occur and to make language and perception the material of a brain machine; therefore, “the form of montage is a restoration of the laws of the process of thought, which in turn restores moving reality in the process of unfolding.”10 If Deleuze shares in this optimism, however, the experience has been modified by the direction taken by both cinema and philosophy in the postwar period. If the event of thought itself, which has been named by Heidegger and differently by Artaud, is the moment when we are confronted by the fact that we are not yet thinking (impouvoir), then cinema shares in this event by establishing as its highest goal that moment when we apprehend that we are not yet perceiving or hearing “the world as it is.”

Once again, in Deleuze’s account the figure of Antonin Artaud occupies the pinnacle moment of this break where the “image of thought,” instead of becoming identified with the power of a subject capable of externalizing itself in a series of images by which the Whole undergoes change, instead becomes fissured and more receptive to a fundamental powerlessness that testifies to “the impossibility of thinking that is thought” (Artaud). “It is indeed a matter, as it was for Eisenstein,” Deleuze writes, “of bringing cinema together with the innermost reality of the brain,” but this innermost reality is not the Whole, but on the contrary a fissure, or “crack.”11 In other words, thought does not accede to a form that belongs to a model of knowledge, or fall to the conditions of an action; rather, thought exposes its own image to an “outside” that hollows it out and returns it to an element of “formlessness.” We might conceive of this event in terms of the notion of formlessness that we explicated earlier in relation to modern art or literature, except in this instance the relationship to the Whole undergoes an absolute break, which in the subject takes the form of a permanent and irreparable state of disbelief. Thus, the problem of ideology receives its most authentic expression from Artaud when he cries: My body was stolen away from me before birth; my brain has been used by an Other who thinks in my place. Artaud experienced and gave expression to this problem in its most extreme form, as if suffering from the memory of a physical, mental, and spiritual rape. However, “rape” is being employed here not as simple metaphor but instead as the most direct translation of Artaud’s complaint; it reveals the nature of “the total physiological sensation” of the spiritual automaton that enters in to violate the subject even before birth.

In response to this new situation of thought, our question then becomes: How can we distinguish between all the images that compose the subject’s conscious existence, or extract thought from all these clichés in order to set it up against them? How does thinking become truly “critical” of its own image? According to Deleuze, Artaud experienced this problematic concerning the image of thought, which can be summarized as follows: the impossibility of not thinking, the impossibility of thinking, and the impossibility of thinking differently. The first part of this triad, “the impossibility of not thinking,” in relation to the subject of cinema, concerns the automatic character of thought which it shares with the movement-image, since even my refusal to think only signals that place where another thinks in my place. Not thinking, therefore, appears to Artaud as impossible a priori. Likewise, the second and third parts concern thinking as a special power or quality that belongs to the subject, which is also found to be impossible in the sense that thought (or “what is called thinking,” whether this activity is represented as a common notion, a special class of opinions, or by a dominant historical image—e.g., “Hegelianism”) must ultimately be determined as a transcendental cliché (or Ur-doxa).

Was it only because the automatic character of thought already found a resemblance with the automatic character of the movement-image that cinema discovered the dynamic principle by means of which it could appear as the force that causes the subject to think? The dominant image of thought appears within in this resemblance as a power in accordance with the power of Nature, or with the order of technology by which knowledge intervenes to “work over,” to fundamentally transform the interval Nature-Culture. According to this dynamic representation, thinking is a Power that has as its beginning a point of projection (a subject) and as its end a transformed nature or a fabricated object (a world); between these two points there is a certain directionality or orientation by which thought is translated spatially from subject to object, from culture to nature, and from the idea of Whole to the Whole transfigured. Therefore, because of this mere resemblance the movement-image acquires a certain power to determine the Whole, and the appearance of this power is then consolidated as a specialized technical knowledge, and finally, the whole problem of the resemblance between the movement-image in cinema and the images deployed by the apparatus of the ideology ensues. Only on the basis of this understanding is Virilio’s earlier thesis correct: that there has been no diversion of the movement-image to ideological ends, but rather the “movement-image was from the beginning linked to the organization of war, state propaganda, ordinary fascism, historically and essentially.”12 However, this resemblance in fact only implies that the problem of ideology was already latent in the subject and was simply awaiting its final birth. The monster that emerges is the automatic character of thought as a power that could internalize the Whole within a subject, and then externalize the collective subject as a Whole (a national conscience, a state, a world-order).

Should the failure of a classical cinema founded upon the movement-image, such as its goals and aspirations were formulated early on by Eisenstein, not be inferred from an image of thought that was still attached to this problematic resemblance? Did this resemblance not condition Eisenstein’s belief that cinema will eventually achieve, by perfecting its knowledge of the movement-image, the means to repair the broken interval that appears as the cause of the subject’s collective fragmentation? To unify the subject by crossing in both directions the gap between instinct and intelligence, and between thinking and action—both would amount to absorbing the interval into the synthesis of the movement-image. Because this perfection was understood primarily in terms of the action-image, conceived as the solution to neurosis of bourgeois art forms and to collective fragmentation effected by the ideological apparatus of mass culture, it is finally ironic to see that precisely the action-image itself was the cause of this neurosis in the first place. Thus, the “action-image” was itself a cliché of a very special type; to evoke the “revolutionary” potential of the new cinema seems contradictory. It was, in fact, a false solution that only furthered the break between the human being and the world, even realizing this impasse as an absolute and giving it an objectified form of purely optical and sound situations in which the subject appears to be trapped. Deleuze argues that this is an impasse upon which the new postwar cinema is founded—nihilism is not a spirit that is restricted to philosophy alone. At the same time, as he suggests, there may still be hope.

Beginning from this situation, and even affirming it as the fundamental condition of a new image of thought, is the solution Deleuze presents as the major thesis of Cinema 2: not to attach thought to a motor image that would extinguish it in action, or absorb it in knowledge, but to attach it directly to the interval itself so that thought would find its cause no longer in the image, but in what in the image refuses to be thought. In other words, if the whole problem of thought was that it was attached to an image that represented it, then postwar cinema turns this problem around to reveal its true experience of thinking for the subject. “The spiritual automaton is in the psychic situation of a seer, a true visionary who sees better and further than he can react, that is, think.”13 What this experience reveals is precisely the automatic, habitual, and instinctual character of the thought that thinks within me, interpellating me with its image, and determining me as a subject. One might still define this experience under the principle of “nooshock” as in the classical cinema of the movement-image; however, the nature of this experience of thinking has undergone a radical transformation. Under its previous image, shock, the neuronal messenger, simply travels along the same path that was opened by a more fundamental power that appears as the goal of both modern cinema and ideology. But this implies that the cause of thinking remains unconscious in principle, because it can never really emerge as a motive of conscious understanding or become the condition of deliberative action. Instead, thought leaps over the interval to become in principle the conditions of an action that remains fundamentally unthought, like an involuntary reaction, habitual response, or nerve impulse. Under its new image, this dynamic representation of thinking as a force is no longer “the goal,” and the problem is no longer in attaining an “image of thought” that would be equal to the force of the Whole (i.e., the perfection of “the action-image”), but rather that this image of thought itself, defined as a force or a power, is suddenly revealed as an “Other.” It reveals precisely the shock that “I am not yet thinking” or that “what is called thinking” is a power that belongs to a subject whom I am not (“I is an Other”). The effect of this awareness, moreover, bears a certain “dissociative force” that pries thought from its image, at the same time as it cuts the image off from the world, and exposes it to what Deleuze calls its “reverse proof,” the fact that we are not yet thinking.14

Because cinema and ideology are equally expressions of the same broken interval between the human and the world, an interval that has reduced the link to only what the subject hears and sees, this has precipitated in the transformation of the world as an object of belief, even if this belief should prove illusory. Precisely because everything I see and hear is capable of being false, only my belief is capable of reconnecting me with what I see and hear. “It was already a great turning-point in philosophy, from Pascal to Nietzsche: to replace the model of knowledge with belief.”15 This is what Deleuze calls the “reverse proof of thinking,” which bears a resemblance to the Cartesian proof, except that the powers of the false do not lead to the certainty of the modern cogito, but only to the creative discovery of the false as a higher power that belongs to thought itself. (In some ways, this also recalls a statement made earlier in Difference and Repetition: “It is repetition that has made us ill; therefore, it is only repetition that will heal us.”16) If there is a resemblance to the Cartesian solution, therefore, it represents a solution without any recourse to the principle of God who provides the subject with any certainty with regard to the true source of its perceptions, feelings, and desires. Likewise, the subject of modern cinema, after reducing the world to the conditions of the image, can only intervene into the fold that runs between the brain and the world in order to effect a transformation in the signs of perception and consciousness. After all, all thought is full of clichés, all memory is not to be trusted, and all perception is made-to-order. It is ironic then, that the only means we have of restoring a connection that has been broken or damaged is by the very means that has caused our separation, by means of perception-images, memory-images, sounds and statements. This is why postwar cinema, according to Deleuze, will be concerned with rendering an experience or connection between the brain and the world, creating new visual and sound images that might “give back” the brain’s relationship to the world, which has been lost in a chaos of clichés. Even though cinema has lost the belief in its own “action-image,” and cannot intervene directly into the world or cause this world to be transformed into another, cinema might be one of the only means we have of restoring our belief in the world as it is. Deleuze’s optimism here is a strange optimism: to continue to believe in cinema, despite everything, despite even the repeated “failures” of cinema itself, is also to restore our belief in the world.

To summarize our brief historical trajectory from the dominance of the movement-image to a moment of crisis that reveals the conditions of the time-image, if Deleuze shares with Eisenstein a certain guarded optimism for intellectual cinema, he descends to discover its true principle, freedom, and its true subject, the brain. Freedom of what, or rather, freedom from what? Here Deleuze’s response is quite simple: freedom from the motor-unity coordination of the movement-image and from the teleological unity of action-image. All of the different solutions to the problem of the image that cinema invents are real paths leading to the brain, in the sense that all paths lead to the brain, although the images that these paths actualize never resemble the brain. Therefore, the brain is not an image, even though every image actualizes a certain aspect (or lobe) of the brain. Thus, in a 1986 interview, “The Brain Is the Screen,” Deleuze directly addresses the relationship between cinema and thought in terms of the brain:

The brain is the unity. The brain is the screen. Around this point, I don’t think that linguistics or psychoanalysis will offer much assistance, but rather the biology of the brain, or even molecular biology. Thought is molecular and is made up of molecular speeds that come together to compose the slower bodies we are. This is what Michaux said: “The human is a slow being, which is only possible thanks to the most fantastic speeds.” The circuits and cerebral connections do not precede stimuli, nor the corpuscles and grains that trace them. Cinema is not theater, it composes bodies with grains. These connections are often paradoxical, and exceed in every sense the simple association of images. But precisely because it places the image in movement, or moreover makes of it an auto-movement, cinema never ceases to trace and retrace the cerebral circuits. Here, again, this could be for better or worse. The screen, that is we ourselves, can become a deficient brain of an idiot just as easily as a creative brain.17

In other words, the brain is the “goal.” Of course, it was the goal all along, as we have seen in Eisenstein’s remarks on the Kabuki. However, instead of conceiving of the brain as an organ, where thought is essentially a muscular contraction between stimulus and response, we might instead conceive it as the sensible screen (a membrane), an interval that is interposed between the human and the world (the chaos of clichés), as the quality of a creative emotion that is capable of revitalizing the link between the human and the world. That is to say, with the discovery of the time-image, cinema achieves a freedom from the sensory-motor schema, the spatial coordinates of the action-image and the movement-image. Eisenstein had already raised this possibility in 1929, concerning what he calls the “fourth dimension” of the cinematic image:

For the musical overtone (a throb) it is not strictly fitting to say: “I hear.”

Nor for the visual overtone: “I see.”

For both a new uniform formula must enter our vocabulary: “I feel.”18

In this sense, a third kind of image appears in the interval between perception and reaction—“emotion,” understood as the “I FEEL” of the cinematographic subject, which occupies the interval without “filling it up.” Thus, it shares a certain attribute with the image of the brain, which is simultaneously outside movement, before movement, and the cause of movement. “The interval is set free, the interstice becomes irreducible and stands on its own.”19

Deleuze returned many times to what he described as “our new relationship to the brain.” How does Deleuze define this relationship? In Cinema 2, Deleuze replies that because we now understand that “the brain is no more a reasonable system than the world is rationally constructed,” now “the brain becomes our illness, our passion, rather than our mastery, our solution or decision.”20 What is crucial to observe in this description of the brain as a “symptom” is Deleuze’s assertion that the interval between brain and world, between stimulus and response, is now governed by the irrational cut, marking the gaps (écarts) or the points of uncertainty between inside and outside (perception or hallucination, associative memory or representation of the past); hence, the relation between brain and world becomes a topological point between inside and outside in an uncertain, probabilistic, and a-centered system. In other words, this describes precisely our current relationship to the brain, to the world, one that psychoanalysis has also proposed by consciousness within an a-centered system of unconscious processes, and by asking the question whether it is “I” who thinks, perceives, wills, desires, or rather an “Other” that thinks in my place. At the same time, Deleuze argues that psychoanalysis is still based on a rational cerebral model (or system) of structure or language; consequently, the relationship between brain and world still appears “rational,” “ordered,” according to certain laws or principles that can be mapped onto Euclidean space. A psychoanalytic image of the brain, in other words, is still deterministic and based on the idea of an absolute causality even when this is assigned to an unconscious level of the psychic apparatus. Freud was absolutely certain that everything happens by necessity and that there are no accidents in the Unconscious, for without this certainty, the logic of the lapse, of the slips of the tongue, of wit or humor, would remain meaningless. Even with Lacan, the relationship between signifier and signified is open to definite metonymic displacements that appear irrational until they are “interpreted” by the law of the algorithm (that is, the bar that both separates and unifies both series, and allows for infinite substitutability in the signifying series), or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “The Law of the Signifier.”

We might understand the algorithmic bar that separates signifier and signified as an image of the interval (écart) between inside and outside, which still functions according to a certain model whereby irrational significations refer to an underlying grid of semiotic determinations (hence, the image of the dream work). This is because pure associations are still determined as unconscious semiotic acts that can be reconstructed by analysis and shown to belong to a language, since “the Unconscious is structured like a language.” By contrast, following Guattari’s earlier rejection of the linguistic model, Deleuze refers to another cerebral model that is evolving in new studies of the Brain by modern sciences, no longer based on semiotic model, or structural paradigm, which itself is derived from an earlier metaphysical image of Reason. “The discovery of the synapse was enough in itself to shatter the idea of a continuous cerebral system (i.e., the Brain as a whole, or as a unified system), since it laid down irreducible points or cuts. . . . in the case of chemical synapses, the point is ‘irrational,’ the cut is important in itself and belongs to neither of the two sets it separates. . . . Hence the greater importance of a factor of uncertainty, or half uncertainty, in the neuronal transmission.”21 Here we see the image of an algorithmic function different from that of the bar that separates the two signifying series but that in a certain sense belongs to both series as their implicit relation. Instead, we have the image of an “irrational cut” that operates according a principle of uncertainty, which implies an entirely different cerebral model, one no longer based on the idea of a Deep Structure.

How can we imagine this new model for representing the brain? In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari argue that the brain is, very simply, a “Form in Itself” admitting no Gestalt image or exterior point of view from which it could be objectified.22 They constantly employ the term survole (meaning “survey,” or, in its verbal form, “to fly over”) as a description of the plane occupied by the Brain, defining the movement across or over this plane as one of infinite speed without delay or distance. Thus, the nature of this movement is defined by its speed, which is instantaneous, in which there is no gap, interval, or hiatus. Consequently, there is no “in-between” between the brain and the world; the subject-object relation is merely a secondary, a posteriori addition to the plane of immanence constituted by Brain-World. The question then becomes: Why does this a posteriori divide emerge repeatedly in representational systems? And here is the real question Deleuze is attempting to answer by returning to the problem of the Brain, which he regards as the primary subject of philosophy even though modern philosophy shares (partage) this subject with both science and art: Given our relationship to the brain has changed, why does Representation remain a dominant principle that continues to structure this relationship?

Perhaps this might explain Deleuze’s own interest in modern cinema, in particular, which he argues also opens to a different manner of depicting thought (or the cerebral interval), one that is no longer isomorphically modeled on the semiotic system of language, as in the statement from the conclusion of Cinema 2 quoted at the beginning of this chapter; rather, “it consists of movements and thought processes (prelinguistic images), and of points of view on these movements and processes (pre-signifying signs).” Of course, cinema has always been conceived as a supplemental perception-consciousness apparatus that is built upon the scaffolding of the faculties of perception and the imagination—and let’s not forget desire!—but how would we revise this secondary or supplemental function when viewed from the perspective of the Brain itself? This is the importance of Eisenstein for Deleuze, who constantly challenged the growing dominance of linguistic formalism for understanding the purely visual logic of cinema. Deleuze takes up Eisenstein’s classic cause against the “talking cinema” and attempts to develop a new model for understanding the assemblage of optical and sonorous signs (but also “lectosigns,” “chronosigns,” “noosigns,” and so forth) in film language, creating a new logic of montage itself. It is here that Kubrick and Resnais become important modern figures (or auteurs) in the period of the time-image, in some ways complementary to Eisenstein’s role in the period of classical cinema, because the cinema of both directors functions as a mise-en-scène of the brain.

For example, in Kubrick’s films the depiction of this mise-en-scène can be understood, on one level, as the depiction of the brain-world that is organized according to a rational model of the brain. Deleuze recounts many examples in the discussion of Kubrick: the alignment of the trenches in Paths of Glory, the apparatus of SAC and the military machine or chain of command in Dr. Strangelove, the regimented barracks or prison in A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, the instrument panels and architecture of the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the symmetrical patterns of carpeting in the hallways of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. These form the background of all of Kubrick’s sets, providing a “feeling” of an organization of all elements that is highly structured according to the image of the rational model of the brain. At the same time, there is always another image of the brain introduced around the point of an “irrational cut,” representing a lapsus, an error, a moment of dementia that gradually enters into combat with this other image of the brain and threatens to overturn it entirely, producing disturbances of association, hallucination, memory, even wild disturbances that are interpreted through the conventions of psychosis and paranoia. For example, in Dr. Strangelove we have the demented mind of General Jack D. Ripper, who functions as the expression of an irreducible cerebral crash in the military brain (or the chain of command of SAC), but whose dementia cannot be accounted for according to a rational model. Here, Kubrick presents us precisely with the improbable synapse or connection (communist conspiracy = attack of precious bodily fluids, producing the signifiers O.P.E. and P.O.E.), which functions as the “irrational cut” that suddenly causes the whole system to crash. It is interesting to note that in a rare interview Kubrick himself commented on the question of the potential that the irrational cut poses in the military brain and its complete lack of any defense against its organic counterpart.

It’s improbable, but not impossible, that we could someday have a psychopathic president, or a president who suffers a nervous breakdown, or an alcoholic president who, in the course of some stupefying binge, starts a war. . . . Less farfetched, and even more terrifying is the possibility that a psychopathic individual could work his way into the lower echelons of the White House staff. Can you imagine what might have happened at the heights of the Cuban Missile Crisis if some deranged waiter had slipped LSD into Kennedy’s coffee—or, on the other side of the fence, into Khrushchev’s vodka? The possibilities are chilling.23

Of course, the most commonly discussed example is the simple computational error that eventually leads to “paranoid break” of the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, producing an uncertain and unfathomable point of view concerning HAL ’s actions or perception of the astronauts. (To view this as paranoia, however, is only a purely psychoanalytic interpretation of the HAL ’s mechanical decision to erase the astronauts as anomalous elements in his own program.) In The Shining, the primary topical location of the irrational lapse of memory and hallucination is the demented mind of the caretaker in the Overlook Hotel; it is also reflected in the hallucinatory visions of the gifted child, Danny (whose gift, moreover, is the result of physical abuse by the father, producing a consequent clairvoyant state, the production of a double as a form of defense against death), and in the Overlook Hotel itself, which represents the mise-en-scène of an overly traumatized brain producing the “feeling” (and the horror) of a psychotic interiority populated by the events of violence and perversion that have composed its past.

Building on many of these examples, Deleuze employs Kubrick’s films to illustrate our new relationship to the Brain—our relationship to the world (the topological relationship between consciousness-thought and perception-reality) is governed by an uncertain and irrational principle that is represented by the Brain, producing an outside that extends much farther than external perception and an inside that is deeper than any subjective interiority of the subject. Thus, in place of the linguistic model of the Unconscious, whose origins are actually owed to Lévi-Strauss, who first proposed that the Unconscious is not reservoir for contents any more than the stomach has any relation to the food it digests. Following the work of Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze proposes a new model that is both nonlinguistic (nonstructuralist) and “a-centered”: “a relative distribution of organic internal and external environments (milieus) on a plane that represents an absolute interiority and exteriority, that is, a topological structure of the brain that cannot be adequately represented in a Euclidean way.”24 As also demonstrated by the above examples from the cinema of Kubrick, the existence of an a-centered cerebral system, governed by uncertainty, is what actually determines our relationship between different levels of reality. In other words, the relationship between Brain and World is determined by an irrational cut, which cannot be re-centered in an image of a rationale structure, but opens to multiple levels where the de-cision between reality and hallucination, present and past, cannot be topologically determined. In other words, what is real in this a-centered system no longer refers to the position of external reality, because the real may also be located at another point of interiority, or deep in the past. It is precisely for this reason that the system is a-centered and the interval between stimulus and response, perception and hallucination, cannot be mapped on the coordinates of external space or interior subjectivity, for these were simply the earlier coordinates or vectors used to orient perception-consciousness in representation systems.

Once again, the relationship to psychoanalysis and its positive discovery of the Unconscious is relevant here, although Kubrick might owe more to Kafka than to Freud in his depiction of the reality of the Unconscious. For example, The Shining is perhaps the most perfect depiction of this new topology; the Overlook Hotel is the main point of view (or brain-image), the name itself meaning both “a state of survey,” “a mistake,” and “trance” (or hallucination). Of course, it could be understood to represent Jack’s psychotic interiority, but this is quickly dismissed by Kubrick as we understand that the reality of certain scenes and events depicted are not “projections” of Jack’s demented mind. In this sense, Kubrick uses Danny’s visions (as well as those of the chef, played by Scatman Crothers) as counterproof, thereby producing an a-centered cerebral image in which the position of reality cannot be resolved, topologically speaking, by referring either to some external point of view that would be determining or to the place of the subject determined by the principle of internal projection. Jack’s perceptions are, at once, imaginary and real, virtual and actual. They are the internal associations of memory belonging to the hotel and, at the same time, external perceptions of actual events and characters from Jack’s point of view. What is most important about this uncertainty is that it actually presents a discontinuous image of the brain—what is real external perception for Jack is identified as psychotic hallucination from the point of view of Mrs. Torrance, but is perceived in a trance or vision from Danny’s perspective, and is a memory association from the point of view occupied by the Overlook itself, in which every event happens internal in a timeless present. What is important, for our purposes, is that Kubrick uses this topology to map all the coordinates that belong to the current position of “reality” in order to depict a new—and troubling—relationship between brain and world.

At the same time, we might ask what has happened that has made the brain appear as the object of the new cinema, something that Deleuze finds explicitly in the films of Resnais, where characters become the shadows of the living reality of mental theatre, and where feelings become “the true figures in a ‘cerebral game’” that is nonetheless concrete.25 Perhaps this is because to a great degree modern memory is already cinematographic, and the brain of the world (the past) is already produced from cinema, or fashioned after the manner of cinema. According to Deleuze, this is what happens when the image becomes time-image: “The world has become memory, brain, superimposition of ages or lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of ages, growth of ever new lobes, re-creation of matter.”26 The matter of cinema thus shares a material aspect of memory by which it descends into the interval to create memory and to actualize the past; whether this past is one of a people or a culture (monumental past) or of a person (private associations) is simply owed to the quantitative volume of images. This recalls a passage from Bergsonism where Deleuze first posits a fictive and fabulous faculty, or “storytelling function,” which appears in the interval between intelligence and society.

Virtual instinct, creator of Gods, inventor of religions, that is, of fictitious representations which will stand up to the representation of the real and which will succeed, by the intermediary of intelligence itself, in thwarting intellectual work.27

At the same time, as Bergson had earlier argued, it is also within the very same interval that something appears without “filling it up” or causing it to contract into the form of an instinct. This “something that appears,” according to Deleuze, is emotion, because “only emotion differs in nature from both intelligence and instinct, from both intelligent individual egoism and instinctive social pressures.”28 It is around the nature of this emotion that Deleuze resorts to the solution that Bergson used to characterize the interval between perception and response as the “gap” that allows the human being to become open to a duration that remains “outside” its own plane, to transform the limited and “closed” present of habit or instinctive reaction into the openness of creative intuition.

Finally, we must ask why emotion is here described as primarily an expression of the brain rather than the body. Does this alternative even make sense? First of all, is there any body without a brain? In other words, is the body not merely an image first produced by the brain and invested with a degree of conviction, almost certainty? In response we must recall the situation we earlier described in which belief was the only thing capable of restoring our connection to the world. Thus, in the statement “I FEEL,” we have, not an image, but rather a mode that expresses a degree of openness that only then is filled by an image (joy, sadness, pain, conflict, and so on). Here we must understand belief (or disbelief) as a fundamental expression of creative emotion; therefore, if the human being finds itself in the situation where its only connection to the world is by what she sees or hears, then the belief in what she sees or hears determines the strength or weakness of this connection, as well as characterizes the creation or invention of the qualitative intensity that defines these connections. We could say the same of disbelief. For example, in the statements we often hear ourselves and others pronounce these days—“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” or “I can’t believe what I’m hearing”—there is a certain quality that characterizes the connection to our perception or understanding. At what level do we separate thought from this emotional quality? Is not thinking itself a manner of developing perceptions and statements under the signs of belief or disbelief, in such a way that what we describe as real or true are simply the objective signs of belief that thinking has created? In other words, reality itself is composed of signs that produce a lesser or greater degree of belief, and these signs in turn are qualities that one finds in the world and are bound up with the qualities of conscious-perception or subjective memory, or with the qualities of objects themselves.

For this reason Bergson characterized thought or creative memory as in principle an emotional being, because thinking operates on the objective signs and traces of belief and disbelief, which compose the material connections that make up a world. Thinking operates on these signs either by giving them fresh new perceptions and reestablishing their connection, or by destroying them and working them over in favor of new connections. As Deleuze writes very early on concerning the creative principle by which thinking operates:

The principle that works in this way does so through a notion of “detonating the past”: a virtual or fabulous instinct in the human is super-added to the animal instinct, producing the capability of “destroying” previous relations between perception-images and recollection-images, thereby creating the path toward new linkages and associations.29

This could be called the primal work of intelligence. We can find this principle in “dream-work,” where the brain is constantly “working over” and preparing matter by destroying previous relations (the residual traces of the day’s experiences) and creating a complex assemblage of new linkages. However, when the form of the dream itself is mistaken for this principle, as it was in the solution offered by Surrealism, making the form of the dream represent the power of this principle, then we lose the principle by enclosing it within the image of the dream—that is, by subordinating the principle under its image, or representation. A similar state of affairs was already discussed concerning the relationship of cinema and thought, which was enclosed in the form of the movement-image and its resemblance to the automatic character of thought. As a result, thought was enclosed in this resemblance and lost touch with the principle of thinking. This is the principle of memory that plunges into the interval between perception and consciousness, that expands or scrambles the residues of perception and prepares them for new combinations and rearrangements by conscious recollection. Here, the “past itself” cannot be determined outside this possibility of being scrambled and entering into new combinations with the present, with any present whatsoever: thus, memory conditions the principle of freedom whereby life frees itself from determination from the past and its “it was.” In other words, as Deleuze says, “freedom has precisely this physical sense: ‘to detonate’ an explosive, to use it for more and more powerful movements.”30

How does this come about? Following Bergson’s earlier intuition in Matter and Memory, it is possible only because the brain constitutes a special type of matter that is more supple and less “closed.” Therefore, “nothing here goes beyond the physico-chemical properties of a particularly complicated type of matter.”31 Contrary to a kind of matter that is “determined,” the matter of the brain is capable of becoming “determining determination” (a naturing nature). This is why, in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari will later identify the brain (le cerveau) as nothing less than spirit itself (l’esprit), or the “spiritualization of matter.” Deleuze’s Bergsonism already contains this insight as well, and Bergson’s concept of élan vital represents the positive “discovery” of the privilege of the brain, by which Life “makes use” of the matter of the brain (that is, the matter of memory) in order to “get through the closed nature of Man,” to leap from the closed circle of an already determined and “closed” nature. This would appear to be a problematic moment, because Deleuze is here affirming that the form of Man “is the purpose of the entire process of evolution”;32 in other words, he would appear to be saying that the nature of human beings is of the highest duration, and occupies the pinnacle, of the teleology of all of Nature, as if all of nature not only is determined by the nature of the human, but even has as its only goal to become human. However, this would not be an accurate conclusion, which is why Deleuze and Guattari return to the very same argument in What Is Philosophy? to propose it again, since it was badly understood the first time around. If the nature of human beings is (quid facti?) the naturing nature of the brain, then the question becomes, What is human? With this question, the priority is reversed and the duration occupied by the human is thus opened again to the principle creation of memory (of the brain). “Nature” does not find its end with the form of Man, because this form is closed, is alienated from itself, and must be overcome, and the brain is the machine that is capable of making this happen.

Concluding with these observations from Bergsonism and on the importance of the brain in Bergsonian philosophy, this may help to clarify why Bergson returns later on as a central figure in the cinema studies. Using Bergson’s distinction, there is only a quantitative difference in degree between the human brain (as “spiritual automaton,” or determined determination) and the cinematographic automaton, although there is equally for both a qualitative difference, or difference in kind, when we speak of the brain in principle. That is, when we speak of cinema as a process (as both Eisenstein and Deleuze speak of it), the quantitative differences between the two brains are dissolved into a single dynamic principle of creation and order, similar to Whitehead’s understanding of a “subject superject.” This might also clarify why, for Deleuze, the “cinematographic subject” (I THINK) can sometimes provide an image of “a people who are missing,” according to the famously misunderstood refrain, as in the examples of the American Westerns of John Ford and the Soviet cinema that Eisenstein dreamed of creating but never fully realized. The subject of such a cinema would necessarily have to be outside language and national culture (or story); that is, it would have to be a “people” that was created by cinema itself, and could not depend upon politics for its creation, because politics actually “creates” nothing but only makes use of the creations of philosophy, art, and science.

In an original manner, in some ways similar to the writing machines invented by early modernist writers (Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Durrell), Eisenstein discovered in the “machine” of cinema a means of transcending the mechanisms of perception, opinion (common ideas, or views), and cliché in order to invent newer and finer articulations of the linkages between the human and the world (linkages that Deleuze would later call the creation “percepts and affects”). Modern cinema does this precisely by making use of stock conventions and habitual determinations “to pass through the net of determinations that have spread out” into a world (determinations of perception, opinion, character, etc.); however, it fashions its own conventions, which become doxa as well—and there is always a danger that these forms will become too rigid and dominant. There is also the danger of cinema in the service of an already existing national character, a kind of monumental cinema, which represents both the propagandistic function of Soviet cinema, but also of American popular cinema. Applying the above statements to the brain constructed by cinema, we might recognize in the “goal” of intellectual cinema the desire to build a better brain, “to leap from the circle of closed societies”; cinema “makes use” of the matter of the brain (that is, the matter of memory) in order to “get through,” to leap from the closed circle of natured nature, “to make a machine to triumph over mechanism,” “to use the determination of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very determination has spread.”33 Finally, does this not imply a doubling of an earlier solution Bergson found in the élan vital? That is, if the brain was invented to surpass a closed plane of nature, does the human in turn invent cinema in order to surpass the closed duration of Man? Here, it seems, the entire question of the relationship between cinema and thought becomes: What kind of brain do we want, the deficient brain of an idiot or the creative brain of a thinker?