Ernst Gombrich must have had a share in creating the cloud that hangs over Hans Sedlmayr and the members of the ‘New Vienna School of Art History’. In his Introduction to Art and Illusion (1960) he declared:

Perhaps those were the lessons that Sedlmayr wanted to draw from Riegl. However, his attentive reader will discover that, rejecting Riegl, he explicitly ruled out such explanations as deeply unsatisfactory:

Readers of his ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’ (1931), so roundly condemned by Meyer Schapiro in 1936, will discover that Sedlmayr described his own notorious distinction between ‘first’ and ‘second’ art histories as ‘theoretically incorrect and admissible only as a hypothetical construct’. He did not need that to be pointed out by anybody else.

Following the lead of Gombrich and Schapiro, subsequent commentators have seen Sedlmayr’s two essays as manifestations of Nazi ideology. While it is certainly true that Sedlmayr had illegally joined the Nazi Party for a year in 1930–1932 and was an active member from 1938 to the end of the war, the time has come for his work to be re-assessed.

Ray's cinema, as noted before, offers a consistent and perceptive critique of the nation and the citizenry it created. His ‘locatedness’ – in inhabiting the imaginative as well as geographical terrain of the nation – is clearsighted. To either take a position as a critic of the nation – as many leftwing filmmakers did – or embrace it patriotically as many popular films did after 1947 was not an option to him; what was possible and necessary however was to lay claim to it even as it was being spoken for by sectarian economic and cultural interests, not to forget political ones at the time of Independence. Without taking these paths, Ray instead laid claim to Indian history, seeing it unfolding under the first prime minister of India, Pandit Nehru, and then his later successor Indira Gandhi. One recalls here what Edward Said proposed about the role of the intellectual: ‘With regard to the consensus on group or national identity it is the intellectual's task to show how the group is not a natural or god-given entity but is a constructed, manufactured, even in some cases invented object with a history of struggle and conquest behind it, that it is sometimes important to represent.’

Postcolonial ‘masculinities’ have been studied by Mrinalini Sinha, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Sikata Banerjee and Sanjay Srivasatava, but these studies have mostly been studied in conjunction with violence, religiosity et cetera, the most blatant manifestations. In dealing with the Indian male, Ray was not concerned with ‘Indian masculinity’ per se as much as the Indian subject actively interacting with the nation, being created by it and directing its future. In patriarchal societies national subjecthood is usually exemplified by the male citizen. If the male subject's masculinity is problematic, it could be interpreted as a critique of emergent India – which is how I propose to read Ray's films set after 1947.

From the Colonial to the Postcolonial

India and Pakistan became two sovereign states on 14–15 August 1947, which marked the formal transfer of power from the British imperial government to the newly formed governments of India and Pakistan. This moment in Indian history is specially marked by Nehru's historic speech ‘Tryst with destiny’. While there were celebrations on the streets, there were also riots.

Deleuze argues that a fundamental mutation in the concept of time occurred in Kant. In antiquity, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept of movement: time was a ‘measure’ of movement. In Kant, this relation is inverted: time is no longer subordinated to movement but assumes an autonomy of its own, becoming the pure and empty form of everything that moves and changes. In what follows, we will examine how the inversion of the relation between time and movement came about, and how Deleuze’s own theory of time builds on Kant’s revolution and extends it further.

Originary, Aberrant and Ordinary Time

1. Originary time: the ancient coordination of extensive and intensive movement

For the ancients, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept of movement. Aristotle, in the Physics, writes that time is the measure or ‘number of movement’. A day is a unit that measures a single revolution of the earth on its axis (the movement from sunset to sunset); a month measures a single revolution of the moon around the earth (a cycle of the moon’s phases); a year measures a single revolution of the earth around the sun (a cycle of the seasons). But since there is a plurality of movements, there is necessarily a plurality of times. When a lion chases a gazelle, the different movements of each animal cannot be said to unfold in a homogeneous time. Each movement has its own duration, its own articulations, its own divisions and subdivisions; in subduing the gazelle, the lion incorporates the gazelle into its own movements, its own time. This heterogeneity of movements is equally true of celestial bodies, and the complex history of the calendar is a history of attempts to coordinate and impose order on these heterogeneous movements (see Aveni 1989). Given the heterogeneity of movement, the ancients were led to ask the question: Is there something immobile or invariant, outside of movement – or at least a most perfect movement – through which all other movements could be measured? Is there a movement of movements in relation to which all other movements could be coordinated – a great celestial schema, or what Leibniz might have called a kind of ‘metaschematism’?

We talk about the movement of time but does time move, or does movement occur in time? This is a fundamental question in the philosophy of time that philosophers and physicists are still trying to answer. Interestingly, one of the most original and shockingly contemporary answers to this question was given by the first-century Roman poet Lucretius almost two millennia ago. Lucretius believed that nature was composed of continually moving matter whose spontaneous swerving occurs in ‘no determinate time and space’ (incerto tempore, incertisque loci). Some ancient philosophers and scientists believed that time was linear, others that it was cyclical. Virtually no one thought it was ‘indeterminate’. So, unfortunately, Lucretius’ theory of time sounded so strange that it was either ignored or misinterpreted as a reference to the soul’s freedom.

It was not until the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze returned to this idea in his 1969 book, Logique du sens, that Lucretius’ theory of time’s ‘swerve’ was taken seriously. In the appendix of his book, Deleuze was the first to argue that Lucretius had put forward an indeterminate (non-linear and non-chronological) theory of time. Deleuze argued that the swerve of falling atoms in Lucretius’ philosophy was not the result of a determinate collision with other atoms but was caused by a vital force or conatus immanent to them. This was a brilliant and vital insight but also a strange one. Lucretius was a materialist, not a vitalist, and never used the word conatus to describe the swerve of matter. Therefore, it is hard to reconcile Deleuze’s conatus theory of the temporality of the swerve with Lucretius’ text. It is even harder to reconcile Deleuze’s ‘static’ view of time in Difference and Repetition with Lucretius’ kinetic materialism. Deleuze explicitly subordinates movement to time: ‘The [third] synthesis is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change’ (1994: 89). Similarly, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze subordinates movement and matter to time in his theory of ‘an empty form of time, independent of all matter’ (1990: 62).

This chapter is an intervention into the strange history of the ‘indeterminist’ theory of time first put forward by Lucretius and partially recovered by Deleuze.

Introduction: Time and History

The relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault was, if not untimely, then at least out of joint. Both thinkers acted counter to their time. Deleuze was an empiricist and a metaphysician in the time of phenomenology and structuralism. Foucault frequently shifted shape as he strove to develop a method for diagnosing the present. Deleuze and Foucault seemed to dance around each other on the margins of the intellectual stage that was France in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, coming closer to the centre as their disruptions came, perhaps inevitably, to define an age. Nietzsche deeply influenced both thinkers, but their respective uses of Nietzsche led them down quite distinct intellectual paths. Likewise, both frequently engaged the literary avant-garde, but Deleuze became a champion of Anglo-American literature while Foucault’s tastes skewed continental. Both found fault with the dominant trends in psychology and medicine, which led Deleuze (and Guattari) to develop schizoanalysis, and Foucault into studies of madness, hermaphrodism and sexuality. Foucault rejected the term desire, while Deleuze made it a central concept of his philosophy. At the same time, Deleuze criticised Foucault’s attempts to rehabilitate the notions of pleasure and truth. Their magnetic dance of attraction/repulsion led to a genuine friendship between the two, although collaboration between them was scant, and as their careers progressed their friendship cooled. Deleuze frequently wrote about and through other philosophers, but he wrote Foucault only after Foucault’s untimely death in 1984. Foucault contributed a flattering preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. The two collaborated in the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons in the early 1970s, and they commented on one another from time to time in interviews and articles. Yet these encounters did not much lessen the gap between them.

Of all of Gilles Deleuze’s weekly activities, teaching his seminar ranks among the most important given the considerable preparation and energy, both physical and mental, that he devoted to each session. However, a recurring theme revealed by the session recordings is the challenges to class time and duration faced by Deleuze, who was acutely aware of the temporal limitations for a full development of seminar topics. Although Deleuze attempted to maintain focus, and, dare I say, control, in order to complete adequately the segment under consideration according to his demanding standards, time within his seminar teaching was decidedly ‘out of joint’. Furthermore, besides such time constraints, Deleuze faced an even greater challenge, one that was self-imposed, in terms both of the conditions in which he taught his seminar and of the methods for encompassing the concepts that he wished to impart to his students. From this perspective, he was ‘out of time’ not simply due to temporal limitations but, more importantly, due to the difficulty of synchronising his immense grasp of the material with the participants’ possibilities for understanding.

I propose to examine the time of Deleuze’s seminar in light of these temporal and epistemological disjunctions by considering the obstacles that Deleuze faced and the many tactics that he developed to unfold successive facets of his complex thought, thereby clarifying Deleuze’s distinct relationship with the time of the seminar. I argue that, despite the many challenges, his goal was to practise a pedagogy of ‘Deleuze-time’, a deliberately focused creative unfolding of concepts relying on the participants’ active attention and participation. I also consider how space in the seminar rooms was linked to the temporal challenges of these weekly encounters. For while the exchanges between Deleuze and the participants offered openings for potential creation, such encounters were menaced in terms of limitations to actual duration as well as compression of space upon time.

Through access to the seminar recordings and transcripts from 1979 to 1987,4 I consider the numerous ways in which time and duration played fundamental roles in Deleuze’s articulation of his ongoing research within the pedagogical framework.

Preamble

In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s collaboration, or deindividuated authorial coupling ‘between you and me’, we speak together (or not at all) as a fused reader-writer becoming-couple; a reader reading written signs of some writer(s) is the minimal threshold or condition.

In the imperative mode: disjoint, multiply, time or times, that is. An imperative, however, of exhortation, not command. We speak together, for the displacement and disjointing of unitary imposed time, that is, work time.

Presuming for now, at least at the limit (and the limit is, as we shall see below, the measure of the gradient or scissor angle between formal and real subsumption), more and more, all time is work time, as if all digital clocks had hidden punches. Work time is the marching time of ‘one-two-three-four-one-two-three-four’: regular, automatic, endlessly repetitive, instituting fast grooves to follow-fill. So on and so on and so on and so on.

Dis-joint, de-couple, dis-place. Favour, instead, multiplication. Love multiplies. Add and add and then take adding to the next power. Increase and fold over the increases to increase faster and at different scales. Release the folds of plural times, bloom a hundred flowers, explicate a thousand plateaus or levels.

Practice over theory, action over representation, knowing full well that as we use the technology or machine of language, the name of the thing tends to insist it is done and finished, pushing any dynamic tendencies, flows and fluxes of time to the margins, peripheries, and dumping lots of error.

As if time does not infect all things. As if names as fixed identities do not always fail.

In a text on the relation between the music of Pierre Boulez and the literature of Marcel Proust, Deleuze observes that the nameless narrator of Proust’s expansive masterpiece was a person haunted by time (2007: 297). Indeed, the same might be said of Deleuze himself. Temporality is a near constant theme from Deleuze’s earliest publications (on Hume, as well as a scintillatingly brief review of Simondon) to his final publication (‘Immanence: A Life’). Much like Bergson did with his unique concept of duration, Deleuze continually added further nuances to his philosophy of time. Temporality is a theme to which Deleuze continually returned throughout the twenty-five monographs that were published during his lifetime, in countless seminars and interviews, as well as in the texts co-authored with Félix Guattari – the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, the book on Kafka and What is Philosophy?

The ambit of Deleuze’s philosophy could scarcely be more expansive. In the Foreword to Éric Alliez’s Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, Deleuze explicitly affirms Plotinus’ claim that time is involved in the movements of the universe’s soul (1996: xii). A few lines later – through oblique reference to Fitzgerald, Iberall, the Stoics, Nietzsche, Kant and Shakespeare – Deleuze further characterises these movements as aberrant, in the sense that they are akin to the decoupling of a door flying off its hinges; time is a cosmic dice throw that affirms the actualisation of possibilities. In his two Cinema texts, as well as his other works on Bergson’s philosophy, Deleuze suggests that temporal movements involve the ongoing creation of virtual and actual modes of being. (Here, one might also observe a subtle modification of Étienne Souriau’s aesthetics.) The sheer number of texts that Deleuze published also hints at a further aspect of his philosophy of time: it is non-reducible to the thought of one key figure – to encounter Deleuze’s concept of time is to participate with a plurality of thinkers.

In this chapter, I want to explore the relationship between Kant’s account of the constitution of experience and the accounts developed by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze both hold ambivalent attitudes toward Kant’s account of how experience is to be understood. It is Kant who places synthesis at the centre of the constitution of the world, and who discovers the concept of a transcendental illusion, a concept central to the thought of both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Kant holds that basic ontological concepts such as that of an object are simply ways of organising experience, rather than fundamental structures given in space and time. Furthermore, Kant breaks with the metaphysical tradition in recognising that time itself has a positive existence outside of categorial thought. ‘Time is not a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition’ (Kant 1929: A32). Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze argue, however, that Kant leaves unexamined the nature of the world which is to be explained through the transcendental idealist method. Similarly, both seek to replace the notion of synthesis as a process that takes place from nowhere with one that unfolds within the temporality of the world. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty expresses this most clearly when he writes that:

Now, there are a number of key claims in this passage that will be central to both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s readings of Kant. First, we can note that Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction here between thinking and experience.

Deleuze’s concept of temporality undergoes radical revision with his elaborations of time’s expressions in cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze elucidates aspects of Bergson’s thought to present a concept of time that is no longer tethered to the movements of entities. Deleuze – in what is perhaps one of the oddest definitions in the history of western philosophy – characterises cinema as attempting to move beyond the representation of the movements of existents to give viewers a ‘direct presentation of time’ (1997b: 38). In the present chapter, I elucidate Deleuze’s tantalising suggestion that cinema, the art form that has moving images as one of its ontic bases, involves a direct representation of a sort of temporality that is conceptually discrete from the movement of existent entities. I further suggest that filmic expressions of time reveal it to be a singularity that enjoys the attribute of radical indeterminacy. Deleuze further suggests that time – as it is presented in film – obtains as that ongoing continuum of variation.

My argument progresses through four stages: (1) I will critically assess the suggestion of various commentators that the Cinema texts offer a fraught addition to Deleuze’s philosophy of time; (2) I suggest that Deleuze’s innovative reading of Bergson’s concept of duration is key to understanding how time is expressed in cinema; (3) I observe – through reference to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s theory of artistic descriptions – that a direct image of time enjoys nascent expression in the form of ‘pure optical and acoustic situations’ (i.e., moments of profound change in any of the diegetic elements of a film story); (4) finally – through reference to Deleuze’s nuanced reading of Bergson’s ontology of virtual and actual modes of existence – I suggest that time gains direct cinematic expression in the peculiar ‘crystal-images’ that proliferate in post-Second World War cinema. I observe that time’s expression in cinema involves a diminishment of the relative importance of the relation of temporal succession, a prioritisation of time’s involvement with fundamental ontological change, and a specification of the strictly simultaneous emergence of past and present. Further, I suggest that this temporality forms a continuum of variation without end.

In his parabolic masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche famously writes, ‘Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child’ (1966: 25). Nietzsche traces a progression – of a people or of an individual – through the laborious and toilsome bearing of a culture’s ‘truths’ and values, to the sacred no-saying of leonine adolescence whereby those truths are cast off, and finally to a renewed power of innocence and forgetfulness – akin to the affirmation and openness of childhood – that enables genuine creation. The child knows no shame or inhibitions, longs for and believes in the impossible, and forms playful assemblages with anyone (human or non-human, real or imaginary) willing and able to do so. Each day she creates her world anew, while the man of the so-called ‘real world’ fritters his life away resentfully paying obeisance to his ideological and corporate masters. In a surprising proximity to Nietzsche’s philosophical nemesis, we might say that to enter the kingdom, one must become a child. Truth itself, Nietzsche also famously (some might say ‘infamously’) claims, is a ‘movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms … illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’ (1979: 84). Unlike most of the philosophical tradition before him, Nietzsche calls into question the very value of truth itself and of the drive that sets truth upon its pedestal in the clouds, sacrificing everything upon its altar: ‘The will to truth is in need of a critique’ (1998: 110). In its place, Nietzsche provocatively emphasises the process of truth-creation, which, he argues throughout the body of his work, is a kind of artistry.

Given the pride of place that Nietzsche occupies in the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, it is hardly surprising that when Deleuze approaches the question of truth, and in particular in relation to creation, as in his expansive, two-volume taxonomy of the cinema, his discussion is framed by Nietzsche’s critiques and reformulations of truth. In place of Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, Deleuze recasts the chain of the ‘truthful man’, ‘the forger’ and ‘the artist’.

Creation?

Philosophy, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is ‘the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (1994: 4). More specifically, it is ‘the discipline that involves creating concepts’, because concepts are not ready-made, and even though they are incorporeal, what we usually refer to as intellectual or mental, there is no heaven of concepts; they must be created (1994: 5, 21). There are creators; creators are not persons but personae, a force of ideas that provide a signature, a name like Descartes or Kant that is a cluster or assemblage of concepts, and every concept is a multiplicity as there is no concept with only one component. Every concept has some sort of history as well as a becoming; it undergoes evolution, and so is both absolute with respect to the problem it addresses but also relative to its components, as well as infinite in its survol, its reach, but finite with respect to its Leibnizian indiscernibility (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15–21). Although many things can be said about this designation, what I wish to draw attention to here is the problem of the creation of concepts. What does it mean to say that the creation of concepts is possible? How can we justify even the possibility of creation, not merely as a linguistic phenomenon but as a reality, even if an incorporeal one?

The reason creation rises to the level of a problem has to do both with Deleuze and Guattari’s own philosophy and with the mathematical and scientific framework, which their philosophy must confront in utilising the tools offered by the mathematics and cosmology upon which they are reliant. Beginning with a schematic history of philo-scientific accounts of the universe, and not simply of nature, western philosophy of science was formalised by Plato’s (fourth century BC) and Ptolemy’s (100 AD) models of the universe, both grounded in the idea of heavenly bodies moving in perfect circular motion guided by either Plato’s ‘pilot’ (in The Statesman) or Ptolemy’s Aristotelean god’s realm of heavenly perfection in which nothing that is true undergoes change. Much later (1687) there is Newton’s similarly eternal and cyclical universe (inherited by Albert Einstein) in which any event, no matter how improbable, must occur an infinite number of times (Smolin 1999: 143–4).