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45INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND MOVEMENT
Continental Philosophy Review 34: 4567, 2001. 2001 Kluwer Academic
Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Into the interval: On Deleuzes reversal of time and movement
STEPHEN CROCKERDepartment of Sociology, Memorial University of
Newfoundland, St. Johns, Newfoundland,Canada, A1C 5S7 (E-mail:
[email protected])
Abstract. The reversal in the relation of time and movement
which Deleuze describes in hisCinema books does not only concern a
change in the filmic arts. Deleuze associates it with awider
Copernican turn in science, philosophy, art and indeed modern
experience as a whole.Experience no longer consists of an idea plus
the time it takes to realize it. Instead, time isimplicated in the
determination, literally the creation of the terminus of any
movement ofexperience. Deleuze describes this open movement
structure as determinable virtuality.Because it is determinable,
experience as a whole is neither actual nor actualisable. Thewhole
is virtual. I use the phrase determinable virtuality as a kind of
organizational devicewith which to organise a study of the reversal
of time and movement in Deleuzes work. Istudy the concept of
determinability as it appears in Deleuzes reading of the relation
of timeand movement in Kants description of the whole of possible
experience, or the Transcen-dental Ideas. In a following section I
take up the idea of virtuality which I trace back to DunsScotus who
uses the idea of the virtual to distinguish between univocal and
equivocal move-ments, forms of movement which, I argue, anticipate
the kinostructures and chronogeneses,or movement and time-images
which Deleuze places at the center of his work on cinema.
Introduction: Interval and movement
Movement of a dancer, an assembly line, or even a movement of
the soul is a whole made of three moments: a beginning point, a
final aim, and betweenthese an interval of time in which the change
in motion takes place. Thesemoments can be organized in different
ways. Most often, we imagine them toform a series in which times
interval serves only to communicate an idea froman origin to a
terminal point. The interval itself does nothing to determine
thevalue, or purpose of the motion. Millenarian movements provide
an exagger-ated version of this common structure of time and
movement, but it is presenttoo in the more familiar motions of
daily life. It is there in the time we wastewaiting for visas to
arrive, for medical diagnoses to be processed, for com-puters to
load up and shut down.
The desire we often feel, in these moments, to kill time
originates in adifficult problem at the heart of our common
perception of temporality. Weimagine times interval to be not only
a means of consummating some idea,
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46 STEPHEN CROCKER
but also, paradoxically, an obstacle in the way of its
consummation. A formalresemblance between the idea and the
impending moment of its realization(i.e., an investment and its
future maturation), seems to precede the intervalof time necessary
to achieve the change. As a result, we experience time as
anextraneous obstacle, the elimination of which is necessary to
secure plans. Themore efficiently we can eliminate time with
agenda, planners and efficiencyexperts the more readily we can
accomplish our goals.
How does this confusion concerning the contradictory functions
of timesinterval as both means and obstacle arise? Interval is
intervallum, literallybetween the walls, or in the case of a
temporal interval, between present andfuture. This spatial imagery
creates the impression that the future is determinedat the same
time (or in the same space) as the present. But if the future
wasalready present, we would never have to wait for it to arrive.
We have to waitand live through intervals because the sequences in
which we find ourselvesare not yet complete. The intervals we live
through do not impede our accessto anything actual and real. We
remain caught in time, and are never able fi-nally to kill it,
because the interval is that moment of hesitation in which
thefuture, terminal point of our actions is de-termined. This image
of timesinterval as period of determination suggests a much
different structure of timeand movement, one in which the interval
does not impede movement, but isitself the process of the creation
of a movements terminal point.
In his Cinema books Gilles Deleuze shows that the history of
cinema isdefined by a progressive tension between these two
kinesiological structures,as they may be called. The
kinostructures, or movement-images of classicalcinema subordinate
times interval to a predetermined course of successiveshots, so
that time is derived from movement, as Deleuze puts it. The
post-war cinema introduces chronogeneses, or time-images which
reverse therelation of time and movement so that the interval
assumes a power to pro-duce unpredictable aberrant movements. What
I want to show here is thatthe kinesiological theory (i.e., the
theses on time and movement) whichDeleuze develops in the Cinema
books does not only concern a change in thefilmic arts. The
reversal in the relation of time and movement is, in Deleuzeswork,
the basis of a wider Copernican turn in science, philosophy, art
andindeed modern experience as a whole.1
What does it mean to speak of a Copernican turn in our
experience oftime and movement? Kant likened himself to Copernicus
because he discov-ered in reason what Copernicus had discovered in
the heavens, namely thatwe participate in the movement we
experience. Kants highest principle ofsynthetic judgement says that
the object we experience, and our experienceof the object emerge in
one and the same movement of reason. This Kantian
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47INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
principle, which initiates philosophical modernity, and makes
possible, amongother things, the reflexive basis of knowledge in
the human sciences, supposesa wider kinesiological change, indeed a
reversal, in the value we assign to timeand movement. Experience no
longer consists of a movement of resemblancebetween being and
phenomena, plus an interval of time it takes to actualizeit. With
Kant, the subject participates in the determination of the objects
ofexperience, and so what had formerly been an inert interval, and
a space to beovercome, becomes now the site of an active ability to
determine experience.In the Copernican turn, determinability, which
Deleuze describes as the pre-cise moment when the indeterminate
maintains its essential relation with thedeterminate thing, gets
its own concept, and the relation of time, movementand the whole in
which they participate is radically transformed (DR, p. 29).
The Copernican turn does not only produce a new image of the
interval asperiod of determination. It also demands a new concept
of the whole in whicheach of the moments of experience
participates. Because it is determinable,experience as a whole is
neither actual nor actualizable. The whole is virtual.Deleuze says
that the whole is a determinable virtuality (DR, p. 201).
In what follows, I use this phrase (determinable virtuality) as
a kind oforganizational device with which to structure my remarks
on the reversal oftime and movement in Deleuzes work. I comment
first on the concept ofdeterminability as it appears in Deleuzes
reading of the structures of move-ment and time in Kants
description of the whole of possible experience, orwhat Kant calls
the Transcendental Ideas. In a following section I take up theidea
of virtuality which, I argue, describes a certain kind of movement
betweenan agent and its terminal effects.
It is common to regard the virtual as a kind of radicalized
pure, Heideggerianpossibility. This image is partly correct, but it
obscures a still more complexentwinement of the virtual in
questions concerning time, movement and de-termination. I will
argue that we stand to learn more about Deleuzes kine-siological
use of virtuality if we return to the medieval sense of the
term,which describes the modality the kind of existence possessed
by a beingthat is able to give rise to terminal effects (roughly,
causal results) differentin nature and kind than itself. In the
14th century, Duns Scotus used the con-cept of virtuality to
challenge the basis of Greek and Thomist philosophy whenhe put
forward the radical notion that Gods creatures were capable of
mov-ing themselves, without the intervention of a prime mover. In
his treatise onself-motion, Scotus refuted the idea that all
movement could be divided intoan active origin (i.e., a prime
mover) and a passive terminus (its creature). Inthe interval
between these two moments, he located an equivocation a ca-pacity
of an agent to produce terminal effects different in kind from
itself.
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48 STEPHEN CROCKER
By means of the concept of virtual, equivocal movement Scotus
broke withthe reigning conception of existence as a unilinear
unfolding of resemblance,and ascribed to immanent, finite things a
capacity to move themselves. I wantto show that the distinction
Scotus established between univocal and equivocalmovements in many
ways anticipates Deleuzes classification of kinostructuresand
chronogeneses.
What is the point of returning today to medieval, scholastic
philosophiesof virtuality and movement? It is not to locate
ancestors or trace genealogies,but to better understand the
metaphysical significance of the kinesiologicalelement in Deleuzes
work, and develop it beyond its obvious uses for researchareas such
as cultural and cinema studies. Important as those might be, theydo
not always get to the wider cosmological changes in the relation of
timeand movement that, Deleuze wants to show us, are at stake in
modern phi-losophy, science and art.
In the final sections of the essay I try to address the social
and politicalsignificance of the tension between competing
structures of time and move-ment as it appears today in the
imperative to speed up time, and to controland subordinate its
interval to what too often appears to be an already deter-mined
sequence of events.
Empiricism: Experience as movement and practical activity
Interpretation of Kants contribution to questions concerning
time most oftenfocuses on his discussion of time as the form of the
intuition. Heidegger, forexample, wonders whether, for Kant, time
is something we simply receive, orwhether we have first to give
ourselves what we receive, and so whether givingand receiving,
action and passion are themselves rooted in some more primor-dial
ecstatic time.2 Deleuzes reading of Kant is unique because he
identifiesa tension between two different structures of time and
movement that circu-late throughout Kants work. This tension is
clearest in Kants discussion of therelation between the whole of
experience (the Transcendental Ideas), and theinterval of time that
separates the whole from its phenomenal appearance. It isDeleuzes
description of the relation of time and movement in the Kantian
Ideathat will initially concern us here. But we first need to set
the stage a little. Forwhat leads Kant to suppose that there is a
transcendental whole of experience ishis dissatisfaction with the
program of empiricism as set out by Hume.
To best grasp the thesis of Deleuzes reading of Kant, we should
thereforebegin with the relation of time, movement and
determination in Deleuzes firstbook Empiricism and Subjectivity. In
that text, Deleuze corrects the mistakenimage of empiricism as the
derivation of knowledge from experience. The
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49INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
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mind does not derive knowledge from experience. Experience is
itself cre-ated by the movement of the mind organizing sense
impressions. Hume showsthat human nature participates in the
creation of what it experiences, and indoing so he overturns the
Platonic image of thought as a reminiscence ofalready existing
connections and correspondence in the external world. Thereis no
sequence of events that thought represents or remembers. It is
humannature that allows us to infer relations, to create beliefs
and posit rules, and soto produce sequences of experience.
For Hume, experience is a creative action, a practical activity
of form-ing a distribution of discrete elements into a functional
organization that isuseful for action in the world (ES, p. 107).
When I say because, always, nec-essarily, or as a result, I am not
pointing to any real or pre-existing connec-tions in the world. I
am actively organizing the elements of experience into aform that,
until now, they had not known. I eat something and it does not
tasteright, later I get sick. These basic elements of experience
are discontinuous first I eat, then I get sick. If these are to
form the moments of an experiencethey must be contracted
together.
Humes new image of thought as creative motion raises difficult
questionsconcerning time and determination. Schelling said that
Hume supposes thatthere is first a time when we do not judge
experience according to laws ofassociation and causality, as though
we first experience impressions in the raw,and then infer relations
from them.3 But before we every subject them to prin-ciples of
association, we have to first contract the impressions into a
sequence.We have to provide a manifold or whole even if it is
entirely projective orfictitious with which we can hold together a
set of impressions. We are there-fore a priori involved in the
creation of the object of knowledge in a way stillmore primitive
than Hume supposes. Empiricism ultimately requires that weattribute
a far greater constituting power to human nature than Hume had
al-lowed. Kants Copernical turn should then be understood as a
correction, ora fine-tuning of empiricism. Kant shows that human
nature does not only createour knowledge of the object (e.g. the
relations we infer among them), it alsoactively participates in the
constitution of the object from which the inferenceis made. Kant
dissolves the dualism between nature and human nature into asingle
architectonic of human reason. The object and the conditions of
itsexperience are given together. They form a whole. It is however,
an odd sortof whole since it is immanent to experience, and must
therefore be determinedin the very same movement which it
conditions. The whole is not given. It isdeterminable. A capacity
to determine a determinability thus becomesthe basis of any
movement of actualization between impression and inference,Idea and
phenomena, or conditions and contents.
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50 STEPHEN CROCKER
Kants Copernican turn supposes this changed relation of movement
anddetermination, even though Kant himself falls back on a
principle of whole-ness and pre-determination more in keeping with
the dogmatism and theologyhe attacks. Somewhere between Humes
empiricism and Kants transcenden-talism there lies an empiricism of
the idea (DR, p. 278), or a transcenden-tal empiricism (DR, p. 56).
Deleuzes aim is to get to that precise momentwithin Kantianism, a
furtive and explosive moment which is not even contin-ued by Kant
(DR, p. 58). He does so, as we will see, through a reading of
theambiguous relation of movement and time in Kants description of
the wholeof reason, or the Transcendental Ideas.
Ideas and the difference between analogy and univocity
It is common to picture Kant as a kind of philosophical
bureaucrat applyingconcepts to objects. But Kant knows that if
thought were nothing more thana series of isolated, conceptual
procedures we would have only a limited,episodic knowledge of
things: this is an x, that is a y what passes for knowl-edge on
quiz shows and multiple choice exams. Kant said that we all
possessa greater, metaphysical impulse because reason is by its
nature architectonic,and leads us to project a whole of which each
of our separate moments ofexperience would form a part.
By itself, the conceptual faculty of the understanding would
never allowus to ask about the whole sequence of which it forms a
part. It is the faculty ofreason that leads us to wonder about the
whole sum of conditions, and so theunconditioned in which all other
conditions find not only their origin and truthcontent, but their
purpose and value as well. Reason represents the uncondi-tioned
whole in the form of what Kant calls Transcendental Ideas. Like
Pla-tonic Ideas, these are neither inferred from sense, nor derived
from re concepts.Unlike Platonic Ideas, however, they originate
inside re architecture of thought.The Idea enables us to situate
each separate conceptual event as a moment in awhole, so that each
time a particular judgement is considered, the sum total ofall
given judgements is already presupposed and implicit in our
judgement.
The Idea is not a thing, but a projective movement in which we
may dis-tinguish three separate moments. There is first the
indeterminate whole whichis projected outside experience, and which
unifies the concepts and, as a re-sult, the objects of sense
experience; secondly, the concrete determination the phenomena in
which the whole is represented; and finally, our maininterest in
all of this, the act of determinability itself, the actual movement
ofthought by means of which the indeterminate condition and the
phenomenalthing encounter and structure one another.
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Our understanding of the movement and structure of thought
depends onthe relations and hierarchies we establish among these
three moments of ex-perience. For it is here that we are compelled
to say precisely what is theontological status of the indeterminate
whole of experience, and what is thenature of the interval that
separates the indeterminate from its actualization.
To describe the relation of the Idea to the experience it
organizes, Kant turnsto a theory of analogical relation, more
precisely to what Thomas Aquinascalled an analogy of
proportionality. Aquinas saw in analogy a middle waybetween
complete ignorance and knowledge of Gods nature. To speak of
ananalogy of proportion between God and creatures does not mean
that we com-pare our attributes and Gods attributes. Instead, we
compare the relation thatexists between, on the one hand, humans
and their attributes, and, on the other,God and his attributes. An
analogy of proportionality is thus a comparison notof terms, but of
relations between sets, or series of terms. The supreme causeof the
world remains unthinkable, but we can nevertheless say that the
causeholds, with respect to the world, the same relation that, by
analogy, humanreason does with its own creations. Gods relation to
the world is the same asour relation to, for example, works of art.
It is by means of this equality ofrelation that we can establish
some indirect knowledge of the unconditioned.
It is this sort of analogy of proportion, Kant suggests, that
exists betweenthe Idea and the field of experience. The Idea shares
with experience the samerelation that the concept maintains with
the objects of experience. The abso-lute the Idea cannot itself be
directly presented, but we can know that theIdea is related to the
field of experience in the same way that the concept isrelated to
the object. The conceptual unification of the object
analogicallyrepresents the relation of the Idea to the
understanding, and therefore to theobject as well.
It is, according to Deleuze, this recourse to analogy that
steers Kant awayfrom the furtive, explosive moment of
determination, and so from thechanged relation of time and movement
implicit in the Copernican turn. Toretrieve that moment, Deleuze
follows Duns Scotus criticisms of analogicalthought. Scotus argued
that analogy must itself always depend upon a priorunivocal
understanding of the kind of being attributed to God and
creatures.To compare God and creatures supposes that a common
conception of ex-istence is first attributed to each. Put simply,
before we say what God andcreatures are, we have to say that they
are. Deleuze restages this analogy-univocity debate on the
empirical, immanent ground opened up by Hume.The question is no
longer whether or how we can know God, but how canwe speak of a
finite whole and, by what means does it become determinedas
actuality?
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52 STEPHEN CROCKER
Analogical thought cannot help but steer us away from the period
of deter-mination per se. Analogy establishes a difference between
series, i.e., betweenthe general and specific, the infinite and
finite, the genus and species. A dif-ference is established between
the indeterminate and the individuals it deter-mines. This
difference is thought in terms of proportion, of quantity and
degree,in terms of the more or less, of the large and small, of
degrees of resemblance.One series presents itself a second time in
the other. Kant distributes the Ideain the separate judgements of
the understanding. But it is in the nature ofanalogy that one
series the infinite, the indeterminate contains not onlythe form of
the other, but the relation of determination that exists between
thetwo. Analogy therefore presupposes the relation it sets out to
explain, or it canonly represent it indirectly. The second term
mimics the first. If we think ofanalogy as a movement of
actualization, or a kinesiological structure, we cansee that in
this movement the interval of determination does not really add
tothought anything that did not already exist. Determinability the
precise mo-ment at which the indeterminate maintains a relation
with the determinate thing is, in the analogical theory of
relations, a consequence of the positive iden-tity and equality of
the series it relates. Analogy subordinates the intervalbetween
origin and terminus to a predetermined formal relation between
themoments it relates.
The peculiar objectivity of Kants Idea, however, points to a
more com-plex and more dynamic relation between the three moments
of thought. Kantsays that the Idea has a problematic objectivity
because it is itself depend-ent for its existence on the phenomena
it unifies and determines. Kant callsthe Idea a focus imaginarius,
and he likens it to the imaginary space whichwe must suppose to lie
behind a mirror in order that, upon looking into it, weare able to
see not only the objects which lie before us (the sink, our
handswashing themselves), but those at a distance behind our
backs.4 The mirrorillusion allows us to synthesize different
elements and planes of experienceinto a whole, as though to
transform the flat two-dimensional relation of con-cept and object
into a three-dimensional plane with depth somewhat likethe device
of depth of field in painting and photography, which occupies
apivotal place in Deleuzes history of cinematic images.5 This
reciprocal de-termination of whole and part, of Idea and
phenomenon, makes it difficult tosupport the analogical view that a
higher order series defines both the natureof the other series, and
the relation that joins the two. The Idea, the whole,gives things
unity, but the unity attained by the field of experience at the
sametime confers a determination on the Idea, makes it concrete,
gives it an actu-ality without which it would not be. There is then
an empiricism of the ideathat is poorly understood or even
misunderstood as a relation that comes
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53INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
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to be established between two series. It seems rather that Idea
and phenom-ena have a common genesis and structure one another.
Their co-existenceforms an idea-structure.
An idea-structure is an open whole. It is open, because both the
elementsand relations that constitute it are in a state of mutual
transformation, andneither can attain an identity apart from the
other. The structure is whole andcompletely determined because the
interaction of elements and relations re-sults in the creation of
some phenomenal experience, which is in no way de-fined by a lack
of a form, or principle which it must wait to receive, as
Kantimagines the object must wait to receive its form from the
Idea. What we needto examine more closely now is the modality the
kind of existence weattribute to this open structure. The structure
is whole because it is actualizedin some determinate phenomena.
What gets determined though, is not any setof positive properties,
or propositions of consciousness, but virtuality. Deleuzecalls the
structure of finite experience a determinable virtuality. Thus far,
Ihave focused on the first of these two terms: the determinable,
and the natureof determinability. I now want to turn my attention
to the meaning of virtuality,and its role in the reversal of time
and movement, which we can trace not onlythrough Deleuzes work, but
back to the dawn of early modernity in DunsScotus break with
medieval Aristotelian theories of movement and time.
The virtual and the possible as kinds of movement
Deleuzes descriptions of virtuality are famously difficult. The
virtual maywell be his most important and least understood idea. It
is often associatedwith pure indeterminacy or pure possibility.
What I wish to make clear is thatvirtuality describes a certain
relation of time and movement. To be more pre-cise, it describes a
kind of relation between an origin and a terminal point ofmotion.
Virtuality is, on this account, closest to Duns Scotus, whose
interestin the virtual was very similar to Deleuze. As we shall
see, Scotus too usedthe idea of virtuality to reverse the relation
of time and movement and toovercome the kinesiological principle,
inherited from Aristotle, which regardedmovement as a relation of
formal resemblance between an active agent anda passive recipient
of change. Deleuze uses virtuality in a strikingly similarway to
distinguish between two very different kinesiological
structureswhich, in the Cinema books, he calls kinostructures and
chronogeneses. Butbefore we proceed any further in discussing the
kinesiological roots of thevirtual, let us recall how questions of
time and movement figure into thedistinction Deleuze makes between
virtuality and possibility, in his readingsof Bergson and
Proust.
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54 STEPHEN CROCKER
Deleuze often opposes the virtual to the possible (B, pp. 96
ff.; DR, pp. 211ff.). In this respect, he remains a disciple of
Bergson who criticized the clas-sical formulation of possibility
because it described only a false movement,i.e., one in which
nothing new was created or accomplished. The possible,according to
Bergson, is not a rigorous concept on its own, but is defined byits
lack of actuality.6 The possible is weak actuality. It is the real,
minus thelife blood that makes it actual. This image of the
possible can be traced backto Aristotle who, in the Metaphysics,
says that the actual is both logically andtemporally prior to the
potential. The potential is a being of the same kind asthe actual.
Logically, a thing is potential because it can become actual,
andreason or knowledge of its actuality must be present before we
can speak ofa knowledge of its possibility. Temporally, an actual
being is ahead of anotherbeing of the same kind that is only
possible. The possible becomes actual byactualizing some previously
existing form of being. Each being can be tracedto a previous one
from which it derived, and ultimately to a first mover, i.e.,a
primary eternal being. Aristotle says that actuality is prior in a
more fun-damental sense. For eternal beings are by their very
nature prior to those thatperish since nothing eternal is
potentiality.7
In this Greek image of the possible, the interval of time
between possi-ble and actual is subordinated to a false movement.
Deleuze explains thatthere is no difference between the possible
and the real (B, p. 97). Theinterval of time between origin and
terminus is only an obstacle in the wayof a more efficient
realization of a given end. It is the preformism of thisfalse
movement that Deleuze wants to overcome with the concept of
thevirtual. Virtuality facilitates a real, creative movement in
which the intervalis no longer defined by a pre-existing formal or
diachronic resemblance butis rather a difference that
differentiates among the origin and terminus, andis thus the
condition of any movement at all. In a moment we shall see thatthis
is how Scotus used the concept. But Bergson had described
somethingsimilar in his work on memory and this remains the main
reference pointfor Deleuze.
We usually imagine memory to be the recollection of events which
are nolonger present. In memory, an image which we recollect from
the past seemsto co-exist along with a present perception. So long
as we conceive of memory,in this way, as merely recollection, it
involves only differences of degree be-tween presents, i.e.,
between a past present and a present present, and every-thing we
said about the possible applies to memory. The past is, like the
imageof the possible, a weak actuality that must borrow its
presence and life-bloodfrom the new present in relation to which it
is past. What Bergson wishes toshow is that this image of memory
throws no light on the mechanism of
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55INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
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associationism8 which joins past and present and facilitates
movement amongthem. Memory, understood as recollection runs up
against all the same diffi-culties we found earlier in the model of
analogy, namely that the moment ofassociation is derived from what
is associated.
In Bergsons re-formulation, memory is more than simple
recollection, itis a kind of creative movement. In memory, past
events participate in rela-tions of association and resemblance
with a new, present perception. Imagesof tensed events are
disembeded from their original context, and reembededin a new
empirical and diachronic continuum. Bergsons whole point
aboutmemory is that it requires a capacity to differentiate among
presents and con-struct among them relations of resemblance which
make possible new move-ment structures. This difference is not a
consequence of a movement ofresemblance. It is its a priori
condition.
To describe, in a more precise way, this non-actual, virtual
capacity to re-late presents and create movement structures,
Bergson developed his famousconcept of the Past in General. It
describes the organization the whole inwhich different moments of a
movement structure participate. The Past inGeneral is not a
property of any past present. Bergson describes it as a
purerecollection. Deleuze explains that it has no psychological
existence, whichis to say that is not defined by diachronic and
empirical resemblance (B, p.55). It possesses an ontological
character different in kind than the memoryimages and movement
structures which it makes possible.
Deleuze liked to explain the peculiar ontological status of the
virtual byborrowing from Prousts description of states of
resonance. The virtual is,as Proust says of resonance, Real without
being actual, ideal without beingabstract (quoted in B, p. 96). In
what sense is real being used here? WhenDeleuze explains that The
reality of the virtual is structure (DR, p. 209) wemust understand
structure in a quite rigorous sense. A structure is a set of
el-ements and relations which are separate but nevertheless related
in so funda-mental a manner that neither moment of the structure
can attain an identityoutside of this interrelation. In the case of
memory, the present perceptionimage and the formerly present
recollection image may be thought of as struc-tural elements which
are joined by a relation of resemblance which makesrecollection
possible.
Now if, in keeping with the empiricist impulse, we want to argue
that thestructure is not an emanation of any extra-worldly, or
extra-structural force,then the elements only exist to the extent
that they are structured by relations,and the relations, in turn,
do not have any reality apart from this activity ofrelating terms.
In short, the elements have no identity apart from the
relationswhich bind them into a system, and the relations are
themselves dependent
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56 STEPHEN CROCKER
on their actualization in a set of terms. The elements and
relations of a struc-ture reciprocally determine each other, and so
neither is able to attain a finalidentity that would not be open to
the transformative effects of the structureas a whole. It is
important to insist on this reciprocal determination of elementand
relation. Otherwise, the structure could be regarded as simply a
functionof either the elements or relations. This is the trouble
with various forms ofbiological or economic determinism where the
determining moment classrelations or genetics, for example is not
itself affected by the structure itmakes possible. If the elements
and relations are structurally determined, thenstructure is a name
we should reserve for the unity, the open whole in whichelements
and relations participate. Structure is the relation of elements
andrelations. This is how we should understand the difficult thesis
Deleuze putsforward in the Cinema books, if one had to define the
Whole, it would bedefined as relation (C1, p. 10). In other words,
the whole is the relation ofelements and relations.
Perhaps now we can see in what sense the virtual whole is at
once real andideal (as opposed to actual and abstract). It is real,
and not actual, because theactual is what is defined by empirical
and diachronic relations of resemblanceamong structured events. The
virtual is real as opposed to abstract becausethe reciprocity of
element and relation (the whole as relation) is not an ab-stract,
detached condition, but is always realized in the structuration of
events,and it has no existence or reality apart from this activity.
The virtual is idealin the sense that it is an ideal whole that
transcends any local moment. How-ever, as a whole, it is not a
separate and abstract ideality but is rather, like theKantian Idea
which we described earlier, a whole that can only be given inthe
act of unifying its parts. In fact, in Cinema II, Deleuze says that
theBergsonian past is to time what the Idea is to thought.9 The
Kantian Idea, inthe sense discussed above, shares, with concept and
object, the same relationthat the Bergsonian past does with
recollection and perception images. In otherwords, both the Past
and Idea are virtual because they facilitate the formationof formal
and diachronic resemblance between different moments of
experi-ence, and so form them into structures and sequences.
Like the Kantian Idea, the Past is a kind of whole that is
neither an a prioriideal entity (form or Idea) that precedes the
elements it unites. Nor is it assimply a sum, or the set of all
sets. For each of these images of the whole sup-poses a fully
determined totality that resembles the events and practices inwhich
it is instantiated. In the place of the false, abstract movement of
possi-bility, where time is an obstacle, a virtual whole allows
objects and events tobe determinable, and time a generative
force.
In order to more precisely describe the relation of virtuality,
time and move-
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57INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
ment, I want to situate these ideas in a wider history of
kinesiology. For it isnot only in Deleuzes work that the concept of
the virtual has played a pivotalrole in distinguishing
kinesiological structures, and even reversing time andmovement. In
his thesis on self-motion, Duns Scotus developed a concept
ofvirtual act to try to overcome the image of resemblance and
preformism atthe heart of Greek theories of movement that were then
finding their way intoChristian cosmology. The distinction Scotus
developed between univocal andequivocal forms of movement is a
precursor, perhaps even a precondition ofDeleuzes reversal of time
and movement, and the distinction of kinostructuresand
chronogeneses.
Omne Quod Movetur Ab Alio Movetur
Everything moved is moved by another thing: Aristotles
kinesiological prin-ciple comes into medieval thought by way of
Thomas Aquinas. The principlestates that movement requires a mover
which is in act, and contains a perfec-tion (or terminus of
motion), and a moved thing which is passive and lacksthe perfection
which it must wait to receive in order to accomplish the move-ment.
The self-motion of Gods creatures is thus impossible for two
relatedreasons: (i) all movement can be divided into active and
passive parts; and(ii) no being can be simultaneously active and
passive with respect to a givenend state (or perfection) since that
would require that it both lack and possessthe perfection.
Aristotles principle directs our attention away from the
observable motionof the world to, ultimately, a prime mover which
is why Thomas Aquinas placedit at the center of his first proof for
the existence of God.10 It separates the ter-tium a quo (the
beginning of motion) from the tertium ad quom (the final aimof
motion), and assigns to them active and passive functions. The
mover is ac-tive, and contains the principle or cause of change.
The moved thing is passive,and lacks the perfection which will
define it as the terminal point of motion. Itis this separation of
active and passive moments that Duns Scotus challengeswhen he sets
out to show that Gods creatures may be capable of moving
them-selves. He does so by distinguishing first, among different
kinds of causal agents,and then among the different ways in which
these agents can contain their per-fections.11 Both of these
distinctions (of kinds of agency and modes of posses-sion) converge
in what will be our main interest here, his concept of virtual
act.
Self-motion is impossible because agent and patient are
distinct, and onelacks the perfection which the other possesses. To
move itself an agent wouldhave to possess and lack the same form.
But, as Scotus shows, while all agents
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58 STEPHEN CROCKER
possess effects, there are different kinds of agents which
produce effects likeor unlike themselves. In the language of
scholasticism, causes may be univo-cal or equivocal in their
effects. When agent and patient share the same form,we say that the
agent is a univocal agent. Univocal here means that its termi-nal
effect what it determines the patient to be is of the same nature
andform as the agent. A univocal agent is one which communicates
its own formto a patient which lacks that form, as when a man
begets a man. Movementinvolves a mutual exclusivity of agent and
patient, and a formal resemblancebetween them.
An equivocal agent, on the other hand, is not governed by the
same rule ofresemblance. The equivocal cause does not possess the
form to which it givesrise, but the virtus, or power to create a
form. The relation of the agent to itsterminal effect is not based
on the presence or absence of a given form, be-cause to possess the
virtus, the agent need not formally resemble the effect itis
capable of creating. It is able to produce effects that are
different in natureand kind than itself.
Medieval thinkers commonly applied the distinction between
formal andvirtual possession of a terminal effect to both divine
and worldly causes.Aquinas, for example, taught that God does not
formally resemble the crea-tures he brings into existence.12 God
has the ability to create bodies withoutthese bodies actually
formally existing, or formally resembling him. He pos-sesses our
bodies in a virtual way. The sun maintains a similar relation tothe
effects which it causes. The sun is not itself hot (because heat
was thoughtto be a property of corruptible bodies, which the sun is
not), but it producesheat. Like God, the sun is also outside the
species of its effects, i.e., not of thesame form as its effects.
Heat, therefore, is in virtual actuality in the formallycold
properties of the sun. Or, still more interesting, the sun, through
the proc-ess of putrification, causes maggots to form. Does the sun
then have the formof a maggot? No, it possesses the virtual power
to give rise to maggots with-out actually possessing this form.
Heat and maggots are in virtual actualityin the formal actuality of
the sun.
Henry of Ghent used this sense of virtuality to understand the
relation of asubject to the cause of its accidents. The subject
does not possess its acciden-tal quality formally or actually. For
it is in the very nature of an accident thatwe do not possess it
beforehand. The form of the accidental subject pos-sesses the form
of its accident virtually. The Scotus scholar Allan Wolterexplains
that an object too may be said to virtually contain a notion if
theobject has the power or virtus of producing the notion in the
mind.13 A spheri-cal object, for example, may be thought to contain
the notion of a circle, eventhough it is not itself circular. It is
this sense of virtuality that we commonly
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59INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
use today when we speak, for example, of virtual reality. A
computer programthat simulates architectural designs virtually
contains a house, which meansthat it possesses the ability to evoke
the image of a house on the screen, or inthe mind, but does not
actually have the form of a house.
Returning now to the relation of virtuality and motion:
According to thekinesiological principle, self-motion is impossible
because it would requirethat a thing be simultaneously in act and
in potency to act. Because I cannotpossess and lack the same thing
at the same time, self motion is impossible.Why does virtuality
challenge this principle? Because nothing prevents anequivocal
agent from being effected by the form that its virtual quality
evokes.If an agent can give rise to a form different than itself,
then it may be possiblefor it to be subsequently acted upon by that
other, now distinct form. In sucha case, mover and moved are not
distinct. The mover is itself changed by theform to which it gives
rise, as though it were the effect of its own secretionto borrow a
fitting image from Deleuze (DR, p. 289).
It is conceivable then that one and the same thing might be in
virtual actwith respect to one perfection (i.e., possessing the
capacity to create differentform) and in formal potency to it (able
to receive, or be acted upon by theperfection). In such a case, the
active agent is not distinct from the passiverecipient of motion.
This is not true of all equivocal agents. God is not trans-formed
by the perfections he possesses, even though he may contain them
ina virtual way. But it is true of some, and Scotus ultimately
wants to show thatit is possible that God could create beings that
are themselves capable of self-motion. Scotus will claim that this
is true of many things. Many of his exam-ples the movement of heavy
bodies and the local motion of animals areunderstandable only in
light of obscure debates in medieval physics. Moreintelligible to
us today are his comments on the will. The will is a power tocreate
acts of volition, but it possesses this power without possessing
the ac-tual form of the acts it brings about. And, since the agent
or suppositum who possesses the will, is changed by the acts of
volition to which the willgives rise, the suppositum is effected
and moved by the acts it brings into being.
Kinostructures and chronogeneses: From cinema to kinesiology
Duns Scotus distinction of virtual and formal act blurs the
boundaries betweenthe production and reception of a terminus. These
moments collapse into theinterval that had separated them. The
interval ceases to be an inert space be-tween agent and patient and
now facilitates, and even produces movement. Inow want to suggest
that this reversal in time and movement, initiated by
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60 STEPHEN CROCKER
Scotus, passes into modern philosophy via Kant, not only in his
descriptionof the Idea, which we have already discussed, but in the
problem of self-af-fection. For Deleuze, Kant defines the basic
problem of modern thought whenhe questions the ability of the
Cartesian cogito to appear as a phenomena inthought. The problem of
self-affection which Kant raises eats away at thedistinction of
active and passive moments of experience, and produces a ten-sion
in modern thought between two different structures of time and
move-ment which Deleuze will identify as kinostructures and
chronogeneses.
Let us recall the problem of determination as Kant formulates it
in his cri-tique of Descartes. According to Kant, the Cartesian
proof of existence (cogitoergo sum) fails to explain precisely how
indeterminate being (I am) becomesdeterminable, and thus capable of
appearing in a phenomenal form (as whatI think). Kant argues that
thinking cannot bear directly on a pure being sincebeing, in order
to be an object of thought, must take the form of a phenomena(CPR,
331 ff.) I think is always an I think that. It is only as I receive
thismemory, or experience this perception that I can know that I
am. But how doesthe indeterminate being that I am actively present
itself in the particular,determined phenomena that I think? Kant
questions the form under whichthe indeterminate moment may become
determinate. The determination Ithink appears to refer immediately
to the indeterminate existence I am. Butwithout a form of
determinability the Cogito remains only the possibility ofthinking
(DR, p. 276). Descartes attributes to it both being and its
sensibleappearance. And yet, his formulation of the cogito rests on
an irreducible dif-ference between being and thinking. The self
experiences its own being as another that affects it. Deleuze
explains: I am therefore determined as a pas-sive self that
necessarily represents its own thinking activity to itself as an
Other(Autre) that affects it (WP, pp. 2435). The form of
self-affection which thecogito assumes is then a difference, or an
interval.
Let us see now how time and movement are implicated in this
problem.When Kant raises the problem of determinability, he places
in doubt the modelof movement and time that underlies the classical
image of thought. The formof self-affection is the difference the
interval between the indeterminatepossibility of thinking and its
concrete determination as phenomena. Insteadof being an obstacle in
the way of actualization, the interval in the movementof thought
has become the very form of experience. This interval is not
sim-ply an empty space. It is the condition of the possibility of
any distinctionbetween being and phenomena. The interval the form
of determinability produces difference. As a result, indeterminate
being is determinable only intime. I am determines the existence of
a self [moi] that changes in timeand presents a certain degree of
consciousness at every moment.14 It is a
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61INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
difference that differentiates. It is a difference that
distributes itself through-out the self, and it is only on this
basis that the self thinks and produces anymovement between I and
ego, or concept and object.
Time is the form by which the mind affects itself. It is the
form of differen-tiation on the basis of which it is possible to
construct any movement of re-semblance and actualization among
being and thought, I and ego, or conceptand object. This time may
be described as an empty and pure form because itis not in the
service of any given movement. It is a generalized principle
ofdifferentiation. Time the form of determinability is the formal
relationby which the mind affects itself (CC, p. 30). It is a
machine that turns theindeterminate into a determinate phenomenon
(DR, p. 276). Time is a prin-ciple of internal difference and it is
in this difference that movement is pro-duced as an effect (DR, p.
57). We no longer have a resemblance of beingand phenomena, plus an
interval of time it takes to realize it. Instead, Kantgives us a
self-affecting subject which produces movement, and can give riseto
new and different terminal effects.
We already saw how Deleuze finds in Kants presentation of the
whole ofexperience the Transcendental Idea a tension between open
and closedkinesiological structures. Underneath the analogical
structure which Kantpresents. Deleuze finds a univocity of being.
Underneath the closed and sealedarchitectonic an open, furtive and
explosive moment. The very same tensionbetween two different
structures of time and movement is expressed in theproblem of
self-affection. Kants solution to the problem of determinationopens
being directly onto difference (DR, p. 58). It introduces a
schizo-phrenia in principle (DR, p. 58), a crack in the self, which
remains at theheart of modern thought, in spite of all the efforts
of Kant and his followers toexpunge it and bring thought back to a
principle of identity. Deleuze writes:
. . . when Kant puts rational theology into question, in the
same stroke heintroduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or a
crack in the pure Self ofthe I think, an alienation in principle,
insurmountable: the subject canhenceforth represent its own
spontaneity only as that of an Other . . . Itmatters little that
synthetic identity and following that the morality ofpractical
reason restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of
god,thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a
brief momentwe enter into that schizophrenia in principle which
characterizes the high-est power of thought, and opens being
directly on to difference, despite allthe meditations, all the
reconciliations, of the concept. (DR, p. 58)
This play between the latent and manifest structures of time
surfaces inDeleuzes reading of Rimbauds poetic formula I is another
which, he claims,summarizes the Kantian philosophy. In a letter to
Georges Izambard, Rimbaud
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62 STEPHEN CROCKER
writes: I is an other . . . so much the worse for the wood that
finds itself aviolin! . . . if the copper wakes up a bugle, that is
not its fault (CC, p. 30).Deleuze reads this as a poetic formula
which summarizes the problem of self-affection in Kant. The
thinking being experiences the thing that thinks thething that it
is as an other that arrives in thought: So much the worse for
beingthat finds itself a phenomena. If the I wakes up an ego, that
is not its fault.
However, the reading of Rimbaud is more subtle than at first
appears. Whenhe reads the formula, Deleuze is careful to show that
Kant goes further thanRimbaud (CC, p. 30). The images with which
Rimbaud brings the formulato life are classically Aristotelian. The
concept (wood-copper) remains theactive form and the object
(violin-bugle) its potential matter, so that the twomoments are
clearly separated into passive and active moments. I is
anothermeans simply that I experience myself as an other subject,
or I become an-other subject. At this level, however, there are
still two entities which func-tion as origin and terminus, and if
there is a becoming it is only a passagethrough an empty interval
between cardinal points. But Deleuze takes fromRimbauds formula a
far more radical image of a subject that is a becoming-other, or a
determinable capacity to differentiate and build relations
betweencardinal points of movement. Thus, in What is Philosophy?
Deleuze explainsthat we are not referring to another subject but
rather the subject who be-come another. (WP, pp. 3435). The
self-affecting subject does not just movefrom one ideal point to
another. In a medieval terminology, it is self-movingand able to
produce terminal effects different in nature from itself.
Kantsimage of determinability as self-affection gives us a
cracked-I which experi-ences itself through a process of internal
differentiation that ends in the pro-duction of something that did
not previously exist.
There are then two kinesiological structures at work in Kant. In
the rela-tion of concept and object, and in the analogical
description of the Ideas, Kantmaintains a classical kinesiology
where time remains an inert vehicle forconveying a given movement.
But this is accompanied by another, more ex-plosive structure.
Deleuze explains:
The concept-object relation subsists in Kant, but it is doubled
by the I-Selfrelation, which constitutes a modulation, and no
longer a mold (CC, p. 30).
Modernity, in Deleuzes work, is defined by the tension between
these twovery different but nevertheless related kinesiological
structures. The false andabstract movements of conceptual
recognition, the form of movement that,as we have seen, can
ultimately be traced back to the Greek kinesiologicalprinciple, are
(in the lexicon of the Cinema books) kinostructures. These are
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63INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
structures of experience which privilege movement (conceived as
formal re-semblance) over time (conceived as simply space between
agent and patient),and which steer us away from the specific nature
of the interval and the powerof determination as such. The interval
is subsumed as a part of an antecedentor succeeding block of
movement. It is the last image of the first sequence,or the first
of the second. (CII, p. 277).
Modernity not only of science, but philosophy and art too
emerges fromout of a new kinesiological structure. Kinostructures
give way to chronogeneses.Time no longer flows from movement, it
produces aberrant movements. Theinterval is not superfluous or
supplemental. Instead, it assumes a central rolein the
determination of the whole of movement. Deleuze writes: The
inter-val is set free, the interstice becomes irreducible and
stands on its own. (CII,p. 277). The whole is determinable and
virtual, or a determinable virtuality.Movement still involves a
reciprocal action of moments or parts in change.The parts enter
into relation. They form a unity and can be assigned value
andsignificance because they participate in a whole. The whole,
however, becauseit is dependent on the moments of movement for its
actuality, is itself dividedin the parts. Objects change their
relative positions and, through this change,the whole of which they
form a part is transformed and changes qualitatively.Movement among
the parts therefore expresses a qualitative change in theduration
of the whole. This kind of qualitative change is possible because
thewhole that is changing is neither given nor giveable. Whole now
means thatthe interval is not superfluous to the determination of
the sequence. A finitewhole does not complete the sequence, and
insure against aberration. It in-sures that there is no absolute
and finally fixed totality that either precedesthe parts
(transcendentalism) or follows them (empiricism).
It is in his books on cinema that Deleuze goes furthest in
differentiatingthese kinesiological structures. As concepts,
though, kinostructures andchronogeneses do not concern only the
reality of cinema. We might say thatthey describe the cinematic or
kinesiological nature of any experiencewhatever. Jean-Luc Nancy has
suggested that Deleuzes interest in the cin-ema is not just
appended to his work: it is at the center, in the projective
prin-ciple of this thought. It is a cinema-thought.15 Indeed, in
the Cinema booksDeleuze descries the universe as cinema in itself,
a metacinema. (CI, p. 59)We miss the significance of this claim if
we see in cinema only a kind of art,or a region of aesthetics. If
the universe can be described as cinematic it isbecause
kinesiological questions questions concerning the relation of
timeand movement run like a watermark through our metaphysics,
cosmologyand social and political theory.
Since I have already said a good deal about the metaphysics of
cinema, it
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64 STEPHEN CROCKER
seems appropriate to say some final now words about the wider
social andpolitical consequences of the tension between different
temporal structuresin modernity. Kinostructures are different way
of anaesthetizing time, andreducing it to a sort of a negative
space between points of movement. Heretime plays two contradictory
roles: it is both a means of communication be-tween agent and
patient, and an obstacle in the way of a more expedient
reali-zation of the perfection. Because it plays these two roles,
time has an aura ofduplicity about it: time is a trickster, an
avenger or a thief because it threatensto produce aberration in
what should otherwise be a relation of formal resem-blance.
This, our common conception of time as obstacle rests on the
illusion thatthe future is already given, and that the interval
between now and then is onlyan obstacle. This image is, of course,
illusory because if the future was alreadygiven we would not have
to wait for it to arrive. But it is an illusion with veryreal
social and political consequences. Isnt this illusory subordination
of in-terval to movement what Marx found when he set out to study
the laws of themotion of capital: Capital is a motion (M-C-M-C-M)
that is dynamic andexpansive, but whose accomplishment does not end
in the creation of any-thing whose form and nature was not already
realized in its initial moment.And because the form of the final
aim is realized in the movements begin-ning, the interval of time
(and the forms of labour and nature that are con-sumed there) is
only a means of relaying the cause (M) to the perfection (M),and is
not itself the source of any potentiality or historical force. Marx
saysthat The events that take place outside the sphere of
circulation, in the inter-val between the buying and selling, do
not affect the form of this movement.16
In fact, the effective realization of the movement of capital
depends on anability to reduce, and, if possible, remove the
interval.
Nowhere is this drive to eliminate times interval and its
potential aberra-tion more evident today than in the so-called new
modernization of financewith its sophisticated devices for
compressing times interval and neutraliz-ing risk. Derivative
financial instruments such as futures, options, andswaps are means
of trading in profits derived from speculation on the
assetsunderpinning them. The spread of global wide chains of
systemic risk re-quires ever more sophisticated controls to produce
a risk free environment.17
In the last 50 years, we have produced a dazzling array of
social and politicaltechnologies which neutralize the potential
aberrations of time: the manipu-lation of genetic systems;
pesticides; growth hormones, the rapid exhaustionof species too
costly to genetically manipulate (e.g., marine life), but also
flex-ible labor, contracting out, rapid reskilling, NAFTA, FTAA,
MAI all serve tosubordinate times interval to what seems to be a
complete and determined
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65INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
whole.18 These mechanisms rest on our continued belief that the
whole ofwhich our actions form a part is already complete, that we
are being propelledthrough time by a system of political and social
relations that are formed inde-pendently of our actions and will.
It is ultimately this transcendental illusionthat is at stake today
in the tension between kinostructures and chronogeneses.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H.
Tomlinson and B. Habberjam(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986 [1983]) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H.
Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press,1989 [1985]), hereafter cited in the text as CI and CII,
respectively. The most importanttexts of Deleuzes for this study of
the reversal of time and movement are Empiricismand Subjectivity:
An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature, trans. ConstantinBoundas
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1953]), cited as ES;
Bergsonism,trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone
Books, 1988), cited as B; KantsCritical Philosophy: The Doctrine of
the Faculties, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam(Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1963]), cited as KCP;
Differenceand Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994 [1968]),cited as DR; The Logic of Sense,
trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale (New York: ColumbiaUniversity
Press, 1990 [1969]).
From a later period, we should mention Deleuzes book on Michel
Foucault, Foucault,trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1988), What is Phi-losophy (co-written with
Felix Guattari), trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson (New
York:Columbia University Press, 1994), cited as WP, and finally the
interviews on Cinemawhich form Part Two of the collected interviews
published as Negotiations 19721990,trans. M. Joughin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).
This short bibliography by no means exhausts Deleuzes comments
on time and move-ment. These texts have been the most important in
my preparation of this study. There islittle secondary literature
on the reversal of time and movement. The most compre-hensive is
D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (Durham: Duke
UniversityPress, 1997). This text is concerned almost exclusively
with Deleuzes work on Cinema.Also helpful is Dorothea Olkowskis
Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (LosAngeles:
University of California Press) and Constantin Boundas
Deleuze-Bergson: AnOntology of the Virtual in Paul Patton (ed.)
Deleuze: A Critical Reader (New York:Routledge, 1996).
2. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th
ed., trans. Richard Taft(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997).
3. F.W.J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy,
trans. Andrew Bowie (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 97.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (New York: St.Martins Press, 1965), p. 533, cited in the text
as CPR.
5. It is through the device of depth of field that time-images
are first achieved in the cinema.6. Henri Bergson, The Possible and
the Real, in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L.
Andison, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1946).
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66 STEPHEN CROCKER
7. Aristotle, Metapysics, Book Theta, 1050b, 30.8. Henri
Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (Lon-
don: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1911), p. 212.9. What the past
is to time, sense is to language and idea to thought. Deleuze, CII,
99.
10. The division and mutual exclusivity of active and passive
moments of motion can beseen in the following passage, from
Aquinas, on the first proof for the existence of God:
Now anything in process of change is being changed by something
else. This is so be-cause it is characteristic of things in process
of change that they do not yet have theperfection towards which
they move, though able to have it; whereas it is characteristicof
something causing change to have that perfection already. . . . A
thing in process ofchange cannot actually cause that change, it
cannot change itself of necessity, thereforeanything in process of
change is being changed by something else. Moreover, this
some-thing else, if in process of change, is itself being changed
by yet another thing; and thislast by another. . . . Hence one is
bound to arrive at some first cause of change not itselfbeing
changed by anything, and this is what everyone understands by God.
ThomasAquinas, Summa Theologica (London: Blackfriars, 1964), Ia,
2,3,1, pp. 1315.
11. Scotus discusses the kinesiological principle in John Duns
Scotus, Questions on theMetaphysics, Book Nine: Potency and Act,
trans. Alan Wolter (Washington: CatholicUniversity of America,
1981), see especially Question Fourteen Could Something beMoved by
Itself? pp. 5777. For commentary see Peter King, Duns Scotus on
theReality of Self-Change in Mary Louise Gill et al. (eds.),
Self-Motion from Aristotleto Newton (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994) pp. 227290, and Roy Effler,John Duns Scotus
and the Principle Omne Quod Movetur Ab Alio Movetur
(St.Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, 1962). Joseph Owens
discusses Scotus use ofvirtuality in The Conclusion of the Prima
Via, The Modern Schoolman, 30 (1953),3353.
12. A similar distinction can be found in related medieval
debates on mixed and pure per-fections and in questions concerning
the resemblance of God and creatures. St. Thomas,for example, says
that there are as many sorts of resemblance as there are ways of
shar-ing a form. Thus, God possesses all the qualities of
creatures. Some of these intel-lect, for example he possesses in a
formal manner. Our intelligence is of the same formas Gods, though
less perfect. But our corporeality, he possesses in a virtual
way,because it differs in kind from our own. See his response to
the question Can creaturesbe said to resemble God in Summa
Theologica, Ia 4,30, pp. 5759.
13. See the glossary appended to John Duns Scotus, God and
Creatures: The QuodlibetelQuestions, trans. Felix Alluntis and
Allan B. Wolter (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1975), p.
528.
14. On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarize the Kantian
Philosophy, in GillesDeleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 29, cited as CC.
15. Jean Luc Nancy, The Deluzian Fold of Thought in Deleuze: A
Critical Reader, ed. PaulPatton (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), p.
110.
16. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of
Political Economy (Rough Draft),(London: Penguin, 1973), p.
451.
17. See Ibrahim Ware, The Banking System in Turmoil, Le Monde
Diplomatique, Novem-ber 1998.
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67INTO THE INTERVAL: ON DELEUZES REVERSAL OF TIME AND
MOVEMENT
18. For more on the neutralization of time in capitalism see
Teresa Brennan, Why the Timeis out of Joint: Marxs Political
Economy Without the Subject, in South Atlantic Quar-terly, 97/2
(1998), 6380.
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68 STEPHEN CROCKER