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Review: Deleuzism: A Metacommentary

Much of the content of this book applies only generally to media studies. By “Deleuzism” the author means the core of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy as it applies to cultural studies. Like Darwinism or Marxism, Deleuzism would be a mosaic of many facets and readings of a given canon. It would be comprised from Deleuze’s own studies of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Proust. But it would also include his two comprehensive volumes on film, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image (in French in 1983 and 1985) that appeared on the heels of 1000 Plateaus (1980), a work in itself endowed with cinematic form by virtue of its wondrous mix of discourse and images. In these works Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari showed that, far from being an abstraction reserved for a lettered elite, philosophy is everywhere available in popular media. In cinema it has a special place, not because film offers images and narratives as subjects of reflection, but for the reason that by dint of its own mechanism it remains an apparatus endowed with the power of thought. It is a philosophical machine in which images and sounds replace propositions and concepts. A viewer of cinema engages philosophy through the many forms of the medium that philosophize in the mechanism of their construction. For Deleuze a new taxonomy of cinema affords reflection about its philosophical agency. He replaces the standard terminology of the shot (long, medium, and close-up) with the qualifiers, respectively, of the “perception-image,” “the action-image,” and the “affect-image.” Thus in a western an establishing shot of a great landscape in deep focus appeals to our consciousness of the birth of visibility. Perceiving the image, we feel our ocular consciousness come forward as it moves about the landscape on the screen. Our experience of the space born in the frame rehearses the psychogenesis of sight. In a film noir a jewel heist (say, in Rififi) is seen in a medium range, an area well suited for the passage of bodies across and about the field of view. The shot favors action whereas the close-up, usually fixed on human faces, appeals to affect and emotion. This style of image is often saturated with sentiment and pathos because its surface appears to be epidermal or even endowed with visuality, especially if eyes or glances on screen respond to the viewer’s sense of seeing emotion emanating from the image of a face. The new terminology allows the philosopher to rethink cinema on the grounds of its myriad forms of content that emerge from montage and editing. Such is the beginning of Deleuze’s two books on film, which are indeed a feast for speculation. Buchanan is not directly concerned with these works, but their impact is felt in the last chapter of Deleuzism, in which, taking up Deleuze and music, Buchanan in fact touches on the philosopher’s work on cinema. “It seems clear to me that philosophy is truly an unvoiced song, with the same feel for movement music has,” notes Deleuze in a conversation that serves as epigraph to the final pages of Deleuzism. Buchanan’s treatment