Flirting with Masochism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

notes

1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas; trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 238.

2 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1989) 14.

3 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997) 3.

4 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) 346.

5 It should be noted that Deleuze employs the term “clinical” quite differently in Essays Critical and Clinical than he does in the earlier “Coldness and Cruelty.” In Essays Deleuze refers to the “clinical state,” in which new possibilities for thought and art-making occasioned by delirium become foreclosed: “Words no longer open out onto anything, we no longer hear or see anything through them except a night whose history, colors, and songs have been lost” (Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical lv). In keeping with “Coldness and Cruelty,” I utilize “clinical” to foreground the productive and positive aspects of health, as opposed to the “chronic,” which is meant to signify an ossified and debilitated state of literary and cinematic health.

6 This question haunts Deleuze's entire corpus, but perhaps focuses most intensely in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988) 17–18.

7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987).

8 Ibid. 152.

9 Ibid. 159.

10 Ibid.

11 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). Deleuze transposes Foucault's term into his own system of thought in “Desire and Pleasure” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 183–92.

12 Deleuze and Guattari 262.

13 Ibid. 271.

14 Ibid. 296.

15 Ibid.

16 Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Deidre M. Mahoney and Sally O’Driscoll (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 62.

17 Ibid. 80.

18 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 56.

19 Hegel quoted from Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit [1974], trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1997) 11.

20 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 32–40, for a cogent discussion of Eisenstein montage, the pathetic, and dialectical thought.

21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Time and Timing: Law and History” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, eds. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 99–117 (112).

22 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Form [1957], trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian, 1965) 173.

23 As Dana Polan aptly remarks: “Affect was the key to the unity of reality and industry; affect, if properly used, could bring the spectator into consonance with the ‘beat’ of reality” (Polan, The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985) 45).

24 Ann Nesbet, “Savage Thinking: Metamorphosis in the Cinema of S.M. Eisenstein” in Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism, ed. Peter I. Barta (Budapest: Central European UP, 2000) 149–79 (156).

25 Astutely drawing from Deleuze's Logic of Sense, particularly the tension between Aeon and Chronos, Layleen Jayamanne notes how Chaplin's burlesque resists the reduction of time to the present: “Chaplin's mimetic performance at its peak takes the linguistic form of the infinitive–to delay, to spin, to groom, to eat, to slide, to roll, to run, etc.” In such instances, the comedian perverts the present by always arriving too late or too soon, in the time of Aeon, so that “a performative act can draw out this kind of temporality from the relentless pressure of Chronos” (Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 195). A foil to Chronos, and the calculated mastery it implies in Fordism and Taylorism, Chaplin the acrobatic performer invents a BwO that tactically perverts time.

26 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) 136.

27 When recalling his childhood interest in the circus and music hall entertainments, Eisenstein placed Chaplin and French comedians within this tradition that developed the basic principles of montage. See Film Form 12.

28 Quoted from Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1972) 27.

29 Eisenstein, Film Form 91; emphasis added.

30 Nesbet emphasizes the disciplinary aspects in Russian Modernism:

The chopping up of the actor into component “axes” was a project with a theatrical past; Meierkhol’d and other avant-garde directors (including Eisenstein in his Proletkul’t Theater days) were committed to disciplining the bodies of their actors, a discipline which included the control over each distinct part of the body. (Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (New York: Tauris, 2003) 221)

31 Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management [1911] (New York: Norton, 1967) 24.

32 Wollen 27.

33 Ibid. 70.

34 Nesbet, “Savage Thinking” 174.

35 Eisenstein, Non-Indifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 28.

36 Ibid. 281.

37 In “The Third Meaning” Roland Barthes provocatively explores such danger zones, in which the obtuse meaning “flouts logical time” by undermining narrative and signifying registers, or first and second meanings. Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Several Eisenstein Stills” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) 41–62. Speaking figuratively, Barthes focuses on unanticipated moments when the acrobat falls and cannot be recuperated within a meaningful visual discourse, dialectical or otherwise. By arresting the flow of what he sees as over-determined meaning and temporality in Eisenstein, Barthes discerns in film stills details, or signifiers without signifieds, that carry affective force. Barthes playfully freezes dialectical movement to unleash indeterminate “future figures” that cannot be determined by its totalizing logic. Yet as I have tried to demonstrate, dialectical time produces meaning through the interval rather than in images themselves or in montage. Affect arises between images and behind our backs, so that by arresting movement, one still misses the essentially perverse dialectical character of Eisenstein's timing.

38 Eisenstein, Non-Indifferent Nature 333.

39 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (London: British Film Institute, 1987) 141.

40 Eisenstein, Film Form 174.

41 Idem, Non-Indifferent Nature 173.

42 Ibid. 27.

43 Eisenstein, Film Form 23.

44 Idem, Non-Indifferent Nature 178–79.

45 Idem, Film Form 29–30.

46 Nesbet, “Savage Thinking” 151.

47 Ibid. 172.

48 In the English literature on Eisenstein, Ian Christie, along with Nesbet, emphasizes the 1930s as a means of re-evaluating Eisenstein's career: “Western scholarly opinion has largely adopted a consensus on the radical ‘early’ and mystical ‘late’ periods, corresponding roughly to the 1920s and the 1940s, separated by little more than a traumatic chasm occupying the 1930s” (Christie, “Eisenstein at 90,” Sight and Sound 57.3 (1988): 181–88 (184)). Christie and Nesbet seek to fill in the “traumatic chasm” by noting Eisenstein's productivity in writing, sketching and traveling in the 1930s.

49 Nesbet, Savage Junctures 41.

50 Patricia Pisters alertly explores the relationship between becoming-animal and zones of proximity within the context of film. She argues: “‘Becoming’ is never an imitation but always an entering into a zone of proximity, an in-between status on a microlevel. Therefore, the pain and humiliation of the masochist are driven by a becoming-animal; they do not–metaphorically–lead to becoming an animal” (Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003) 69).

51 Quoted from Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998) 85.

52 Peggy Phalen concentrates on the unified, yet formless and mutating, body in Artaud's theater. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, she suggests that the Artaudian Body without Organs invites a “different way to think about both the present tense and theater's faith in presence” (Phelan, “Performing Talking Cures: Artaud's Voice” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, eds. Jeffrey Master, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997) 233–51 (234)). One can conjecture that Artaudian time erodes presence through unstable chronotropes that resist recovery or sublation in a rationalized temporality or Chronos.