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I Am...The Regime Of The Tear The Queer Thoughts Of The Time-Image

Author: Supervisor: Dimitrios Poteas Patricia Pisters Second Reader: Abe Geil

MA Thesis Media Studies: Film Studies Department of Humanities

June 24, 2016 Word Count: 22970

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Contents

INTRODUCTION ...... 4

1. THE IDEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE ...... 12

1.1 IDEAS AND TIME IN THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE ...... 12

1.2. NEUTRALIZING QUEERNESS IN THE RELATION-IMAGE ...... 20

2. NEW QUEER THOUGHT ...... 28

2.1. FROM HITCHCOCK TO KALIN, FROM THE WHOLE TO THE OUTSIDE ...... 29

2.1.1. Living Between ...... 31

2.1.2. Thinking Outside the Body ...... 36

2.1.3. Do Robots Think of Electric Sex? ...... 43

2.2. FINAL THOUGHTS ...... 50

CONCLUSION ...... 52

NOTES ...... 54

WORKS CITED ...... 56

FILMOGRAPHY ...... 59

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Introduction In the preface of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, published in 1983 as the first part of a project that would be completed two years later with Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze makes a striking comparison: “The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts” (xiv). Already from the preface, Deleuze elevates cinema above the other arts and gives it a great sociological and philosophical importance. It’s only fitting then that Deleuze in his two cinematic books will not follow an orthodox attempt at creating a film theory or a historiography of cinema. His aim instead, is to create a new language and methodology for talking about cinema, one that would befit the status of cinematic images as units of thought. It is not an approach of cinema through a philosophical filter, nor cinema analyzed in sociological terms. Deleuze may be referring to these fields, as wells as science and semiotics, but he does so only to contextualize the cinematic concepts and terms cinema gives birth to. This might seem limiting at first: what use is a theory that approaches cinema as a self-contained unit that has little to do with technological, ideological or political issues? But it’s a limitation only if we don’t take into account that in Deleuzian thought nothing is completely self-contained. At the very least a set might be artificially closed, but never fully isolated from other sets and relations. If Deleuze creates a completely new cinematic vocabulary, it is exactly because he leaves the door open for a productive meeting of this vocabulary with other disciplines. A theory of cinema, he reminds us, should be “about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices” (Cinema 2 280). Deleuze treats cinema as a machinic assemblage whose connections with other epistemological fields await their exploration by a visionary seer. Or, to borrow another one of his terms, we can say that Deleuze harvests the crystalline seeds that blossom in the cinematic screen and can be transplanted to impregnate different milieus. In a way then, Deleuze’s project was not completed with the publication of Cinema 2, but remains perpetually open. My own attempt to productively exploit this openness will see me discussing another kind of openness: the open, diffused identity and subjectivity of the spectator, engendered by a new relation between cinema and thought that the time-image allows; a relation that as I will posit is inherently queer. This openness and perceived inaccessibility of Deleuze’s cinematic theory however, has generated criticisms about its usefulness and influence, with commentators mentioning the impossibility of trying “to apply' Deleuze, to simply 'translate' analysis into a Deleuzian

Poteas 5 language", and theorists treating it as a footnote in the history of film, merely as an "orthodox historiography of style" (Stam 262; Bordwell 116). Similarly, the supposed apolitical philosophy of Deleuzian thought has created harsh but misguided criticisms and notable scholars such as Slavoj Žižek have labeled Deleuze “a highly elitist author, indifferent towards politics”, while Peter Hallward famously proclaimed that “those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere” (20; 164). It is true that in his Cinema books, Deleuze avoids, with the exception of a short chapter on minor cinema, a direct involvement with politics. A closer reading however can disclose the unspoken political implications of his theory as well as a more overt consideration of cinema as a political tool that, unlike Hallward’s claim, can lead to change. But as we’ll see, it’s a different change than the one Hallward was envisioning. The clearest and most useful to us politicization of Deleuze’s theory comes in Cinema 2, where the time-image brings forth a new relation of cinema with thought, the body and the world. When acknowledging the Marxist criticism of the apolitical evolution of Neo-realism and Japan cinema -a criticism that was based on the inaction of the characters- Deleuze offers his own vision of what constitutes meaningful political involvement: For him, it is exactly the characters’ inaction that allows them to see what a man of action can’t. It is through action Deleuze claims, through one’s ability to turn away from what she should confront, to rationalize that which should be condemned, that oppressions exist and multiply. What the Marxist critics refer to as passivity then, for Deleuze is a creative mental activity. Thus, his analysis of a cinema populated by ailing neurotics that are mentally confused, falsifying forgers who can’t be trusted and aimless heroes who are passively strolling is by default a political cinema. It is these political anti-heroes who can become seers and uncover the unbearable situation that actions hide. That isn’t to say that Deleuze condemns action per se. What he opposes is the automatically, habitually produced chain of perception-action. What Deleuze proposes is that cinema, as a pure optical and sound situation that immobilizes the audience, should function as the pure optical and sound situations that the characters of the film confront. The inter- assemblage film-audience is a babushka doll: a pure optical and sound situation that fractures the sensory-motor schemata of the audience, and should contain pure optical and sound situations that weakens the sensory-motor schemata of the characters. The optical and sound situation that is the film, should reveal then the intolerable in the same way that the opsigns and sonsigns of the film reveal the intolerable to the characters. What is important, Deleuze stresses, “is always that the character or the viewer, and the two together, become

Poteas 6 visionaries” (Cinema 2 19, my emphasis). Deleuze doesn’t ask for the passivity of the spectator but for the action of watching filmic images to become an act, a mental relation. His cinematic theory is not apolitical but proposes a reevaluation of our political and cinematic perceptions (and affections). It is a different version of politics that Hallward got only partially right: It can empower people by divesting them of what is perceived as power. And it can’t bring change to the world, but like the time-image, it can change our relations with – and within- it. Deleuze is clear in that. The world doesn’t need to be transformed. Only our belief in the world needs to. It is a provocative proposition that is worth examining a little bit further. How does Deleuze understand our relation with the world and why is the severance of the sensory- motor schema and its reevaluation necessary for this relation to change? And why through cinema? To answer this, we should shortly analyze some aspects of the human consciousness that form the basis of Cinema 1 and how they compare with the consciousness of the camera. Deleuze states that montage “is the assemblage of movement-images” (Cinema 1 70).1 The same claim is made for the universe: “The material universe … is the machine assemblage of movement-images” (C1 59). This tautology is of course at the heart of Deleuze’s belief in the universe as “a metacinema”, but interestingly enough, there is a third part in this relationship: the human being (C1 59). For Deleuze, humans are also “an assemblage of … perception-images, action-images and affection-images” (C1 66). The first important point to be made is that this relationship is not an equation. While universe and cinema are equated as an assemblage of movement-images, humans are described as an assemblage of the three varieties of the movement-image. So there is already an implied difference between cinematic and natural perception. This is because for Deleuze, like Bergson whom he draws from, perception is subtractive. In his analysis, human perception functions as the “black screen” of the photographic plate that allows light, i.e. movement images, to become visible. But at this point, two reductions happen. Firstly, through framing, the perceiving subject isolates only specific images and excludes the rest. Secondly, he perceives only those aspects of the framed images that serve a function for his needs. So, natural perception actually hides facets of an image instead of fully revealing them. “We do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it” (C2 20). This is the first material aspect of subjectivity, which is connected to the functions of perception. The second material aspect of subjectivity, related to how perception extends to action, dictates that a horizon is formed in the universe that depends on the proximity of the perceiving subject to the object he perceives. The universe incurves around the perceiver and

Poteas 7 surrounds him as it expects his actions. Consequently, human subjectivity defined by the sensory-motor schema of perception-action, creates an anchored center that subtracts facets from the images and limits in a finite horizon the acentred, infinite universe. Yet, the camera although it functions in a similar way -the light passes the camera’s sensor, hits the plate/film and the images that have been framed by the monocular vision of the camera become visible- has none of the limitations of human consciousness. Cinema’s framing is not reductive since “the variability of its framings always lead it to restore … deframed zones” (C1 64). The possibilities of the cinematic shot, which can go from the micro level of the atom to the macro level of the universe and the infinite and instantaneous transitions through these framings via montage, create an all-encompassing continuous result, which is in contrast with the “fixed, instantaneous views” of human consciousness (C1 57-8). The cinematic image then, is not subtractive and also “lacks a centre of anchorage and of horizon” (C1 58). Human perception brings the world closer to us, but cinema brings us closer to the world, it can “bring us close to things or take us away from them” (C1 57). And if human consciousness incurves the universe to place the human in its center, with cinema it is us who are incurved around a deframed world. The significance of the tripartite relationship then is this: The camera is the only non- living matter that can perceive the universe as movement-images. Cinema, as the assemblage of these images, becomes a presentation of the universe,2 as is, to humans who can however only perceive some aspects of it, thus reducing the movement-images to perception, affection and action images. This is what Deleuze means when he defines montage also as “the inter- assemblage of perception-images, affection-images and action-images” (C1 70). The set of film-human, the “inter-assemblage”, turns the pure movement-images of the intra-assemblage (montage) into their subtracted varieties. A logical consequence is that since humans are an assemblage of perception-images, affection-images and action-images, any set that involves humans, is bound to be reduced to these types, thus effectively turning it into a reflection of ourselves. The Universe created our images, and we are creating a universe -and a cinema- in Our own image. This is why Deleuze believes that we “normally perceive only clichés”, that clichés “penetrate each one of us and constitute his internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which he thinks and feels, is thought and is felt, being himself a cliché among the others in the world” (C2 20; C1 209). A cliché is “a sensory-motor image of the thing”, it is images reduced and limited by our partial sensory-motor schema (C2 20). As long as this schema governs our subjectivity, it becomes impossible to stop seeing, creating

Poteas 8 and internalizing clichés, it is impossible to escape ourselves. It is a vicious circle where what we perceive turns into a cliché because it’s an extension of ourselves which has become a cliché by what we perceive. Experiencing the universe without clichés, in its diffused, acentered totality, beyond a subjectivity that is conditioned by “our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands”, requires a similarly diffused and acentered, consciousness (C2, 20). This is the consciousness of the camera and the consciousness that “good” cinema –to use Deleuze’s simple description- can bring through the severance of the sensony-motor linkage and the direct presentation of time. Since we live in “a civilization of the cliché, where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us”, discovering and seeing through the cliché is a political (in)action (C2, 21). This is where I believe exists a pivotal affinity of queerness with Deleuze’s cinematic theory that this paper will examine: Queerness as a political practice expresses a similar depersonalized consciousness that breaks through the clichés. The queer thought and the thought of the time-image then, have the same effect, produced by ruptures in the commonsense connections between images, between man and the world, between man and his/her own self. There is a tear that characterizes both queerness and the time-image and which expands in multiple aspects of one’s life. Strangely, this conjunction remains mostly unexplored. Queer theory and film theory are not a stranger to Deleuze’s philosophy, but always separately from each other. There have been many assessments of the queer implications of Deleuze’s writing, with most noteworthy Chrysanthi Nigianni’s and Merl Storr’s edited volume on Deleuze and Queer Theory. By applying Deleuzian thought to queer theory, the book seeks to redefine –if not altogether abolish- queer associations with identity and representation, and is an approach that has informed my project as well. Deleuze’s cinematic theory however remains mostly absent from the volume. Even Nigianni, where in her own contribution cine-schizoanalyzes in an almost experimental way Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss (1995), scantily uses the Cinema books and instead –like the rest of the authors- draws primarily from the rest of the spectrum of Deleuze’s philosophy. Similarly, J.J. Halberstam, a queer scholar who in all her books takes a special interest in film and whose thought alligns in more ways than one with Deleuze’s, never refers to the Cinema books. The triangle of queer-Deleuze-cinema seems to be a blind spot in film and queer analysis, with only one recent exception. The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema by Nick Davis is the only book so far that has attempted to systematically examine queerness and queer cinema under the prism of Deleuze’s cinematic theory. By focusing on a variety of styles and

Poteas 9 queer movies of the last 25 years but also by uncovering the queer undercurrents of films that do not directly address LGBT topics, such as the films of David Cronenberg, Davis appropriates the Deleuzian lexicon of images to demonstrate how their functions and significance aligns with the production and multiplicities of non-normative desire. It is a comprehensive account that covers many of the aspects of the Deleuzian theory, but in its examination of queered time-images, there is one conspicuous omission: time itself. By keying in on desire, Davis many times simply substitutes the function of time on the image with that of an anti-Oedipal desire machine, creating parallels between the two but leaving the role of time within his desire-images curiously unexamined and thus divesting the Deleuzian theory of its principle tenet. During his analysis of the crystalline regime of the image, Davis states his conviction about the centrality of queer desire(s) in cinema, surprised that Deleuze appears “unconvinced that even the most capacious, depersonalized, anti-Oedipal model of desire could in fact prove so capacious as to rival the fecundities of time as a productive immanence, as a philosophical preoccupation, and as a genome of cinema” (159). It is not Deleuze however who is unconvinced about the importance of desire in the formation of cinematic images, but Davis who fails to see the inexorable connection between Deleuzian time, queer thought, practices and experiences and the functions of the time-image. If I avoid talking about queer desires, it is not out of antagonism to Davis’ extremely valuable and pioneering project. This distancing from a desire-driven exploration of queerness and cinema is mandated by my different approach than Davis’. As I will explain, it is my contention that the modernist conception of time through its imposition as a rationalized, measurable linearity is inextricably linked to the continuous normalization of heteronormativity and the nuclear, heterosexual family. The time-image by contesting this conception and presenting a layered, non-rationalized and contingent time, bodies and identities, questions the entire heteronormative basis of society and is imbued with the same qualities that queer theory has attributed to non-normative bodies and experiences. The queering of the cinematic theory of Deleuze then, doesn’t have to come via the proxy of desire but by it’s integral component: time. To that end, I will adopt Mary Ann Doane’s analyses of modernist time in The Emergence Of Cinematic Time as serving the needs of industrial capitalism and attempt to reconcile them with the oppressive needs of heteronormativity via Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity that entails the hegemonic manipulation of time for capitalist and heteronormative needs. Simultaneously, I don’t wish to approach queerness through the lens of desire -or at

Poteas 10 least not exclusively through that lens- even if that is an anti-Oedipal, non-normative and diffused desire. I want to build upon the paradigm of contemporary radical theorists, who create new discourses on queerness that investigate it from unconventional angles that pivot away from mainstream respectability politics and psychoanalytic theory and produce new understandings of the queer, beyond the binary and identity-based logic of heterosexuality/homosexuality, male/female, normative/non-normative. David Halperin and Valerie Traub for example in their Gay Shame conference and the corresponding publication, associate queerness with a series of –seemingly- negative feelings such as shame that can engender radical, subversive modes of anti-capitalist and anti-heteronormativity politics. Halberstam, on The Queer Art of Failure, examines queerness as an anarchic practice that is more relevant to childish and incompetent attitudes like failure, forgetfulness and passivity than organized LGBT politics. I will particularly utilize Halberstam’s book and approach in my second chapter, in order to expand upon the Deleuzian concept of the spiritual automaton. My project also falls into a recent trend of investigating the disciplinary effects of the institutionalization of time on bodies and behaviours, such as Freeman’s project mentioned above, and Stockton’s “growing sideways” theory on The Queer Child. By denying to concretize it, treating it instead as a floating signifier whose meaning and significance are impossible to fully articulate, queerness is always in a process of a Deleuzian becoming, a machinic assemblage of new and unpredictable connections –exactly like cinema. I believe that as Cohen and Ramlow argued, “the definition and status of "queer" must never be finalized, circumscribed, or unitarily representative” (7). What interests me then, is not a singular, precisely defined queerness that can easily be appropriated and reterritorialized, but a multiplicity of queernesses, temporally and spatially malleable. It is not an identity-based queerness of the transcendental “I” of the cogito but of the rhizomatic, non-personal individuation of the “I is another”. It is the consciousness of a queer camera. This approach will allow us to expand our understanding of queerness and discover its inherent cinematic qualities, but also to stress the political functions of cinema as a counter- hegemonic apparatus. Like the Cinema books, this paper has two parts that refer to the movement-image and the time-image. In the first chapter I examine the ideological implications of the cinema of the movement-image and explain how through its process of integration and differentiation can support oppressive institutions and perpetuate a transcendental, totalizing idea of the True that constructs rigid and inflexible identities. In the second part of the chapter I concretize this and relate it to queerness by examining the relation-image. I will show how the relation-

Poteas 11 image can make the audience think, and through one of its signs, the demark, can give rise to a queer thought which however can be neutralized and normalized. The second chapter examines the three aspects of the time-image that create a new relation with thought: the interstice, the Outside and the spiritual automaton. By examining movies that Deleuze himself analyzes but also contemporary queer films, I will argue that this new relation subverts the problematic associations of the movement-image with ideology, resists reterritorialization and brings forth a queer subjectivity that challenges normative conceptions and constructions.

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1. The Ideological Appropriations of the Movement-Image

1.1 Ideas and Time in the Movement-Image One of the most famous excerpts from Plato’s Symposium, is Aristophanes’ speech about the origins of love that aims at explaining why people when fall in love feel whole. In primal times, says Aristophanes, existed three distinct sexes: the first was the descendants of the Sun, two men –as we currently know them- united in the back, the second two women united, descending from the Earth and the last one a man and a woman, the children of the Moon. But defiant as these people were, they tried to climb Olympus, the mountain where the gods resided, so Zeus to punish them, split them in half, resulting to the present, two-legged form of human beings. So now, humans incomplete and separated from their other half, are looking for their pre-assigned lover which can be of the same or of the opposite gender depending on who the person was united with before Zeus separated them. Aristophanes closes his narration with a warning about man having to remain obedient to the Gods lest they split us again. Beyond its obvious –and problematic- queer connotations to which I will return later, what I want to extract from this myth at this point, is the ancient conception of movement and time, a conception that as Deleuze explains at the beginning of Cinema 1, was to be reversed in modernity. In the old dialectic, movement was conceived as “the regulated transition from one form to another, that is, an order of poses or privileged instants, as in a dance” (C1 4, emphasis in original). Thus, movement is thought of as a series of privileged, eternal, transcendental poses, with the transition between them being of no interest, functioning simply as the means towards the next privileged pose. Time, in this case, is a linear movement towards a telos through a series of privileged instants. This is a model of time that is subordinated to movement, with man being subordinated to the transcendence of Ideas, the unchangeable, intelligible elements that reside beyond the visible world. The privileged poses are the imperfect embodiment of these Ideas in the physical realm. The platonic myth of the nature of love aptly demonstrates this conception. Humans are initially complete, defined by three separate and clearly distinct genders that are associated to the natural, transcendental objects of the Earth, Moon and Sun. After Zeus split them in half, humans spend their lives trying to become whole, to be reunited with their soul mate and assume their original, perfect form coming as close as possible to the Idea of Gender, Love and Sexuality. Under that logic, time spent between the first privileged instant of wholeness as a children of the

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Sun/Moon/Earth and the second privileged instant of being with your other half, is merely an unimportant transition towards reaching the eternity expressed in Ideas. It was modern epistemologies that brought a reversal of this conception of movement and time. When Kepler and Galileo for instance conducted their experiments, they were aiming on determining a relation between the traversed space of a body and the time it takes to traverse it, movement thus being perceived as a mechanical succession of instances of equal importance. The apple then that Galileo supposedly dropped from the tower, didn’t pass through any privileged poses to arrive to the bottom. Movement was henceforth related “not to privileged instants, but to any-instant-whatever”, that is singular, equidistant points that might become remarkable, but have been produced by an “accumulation of banalities” and can therefore be considered interchangeable and non-privileged (C1 4; 6). These points therefore are not an expression of the eternal, but of a rationalized, quantified and spatialized time: it is an abstract time that can be counted by the arbitrary, equidistant ticks of a clock. Mary Ann Doane in the Emergence of Cinematic Time, straightforwardly connects the rapid ubiquity of this model to industrial capitalism, that demanded the worldwide standardization and homogenization of time. Trains needed to run on time and be synchronized and the factories’ whistles had to sound after specific periods to mark the workers’ shifts. Taylorism, the scientific management of employees, is a direct result of this process. Frederick W. Taylor and later Frank B. Gilbreth used the cinematic camera to time, record and study each action of the worker in order to eliminate any excessive movements and maximize their productivity. Like in the old dialectic, we have again minimization of transitions that are unimportant so that the worker will reach its goal, but now, the movement doesn’t occur between privileged instants that reflect the transcendence of time, but between immobile sections in which time is immanent. But what Doane fails to note, is that the modern rationalization of time didn’t see the abolition of the ancient notion of transcendental Ideas, something that becomes apparent in Deleuze’s analysis of the movement-image, which is in essence platonic. What classical cinema has in common with the modern dialectic of time, as well as with the ancient one, is that time remains subordinated to movement. In all three cases, time is indirectly expressed via the movement between one pose/any-instant-whatever/movement- image to the other. And the accumulation of those instants constructs a whole which can theoretically can be expanded on to infinity, and whose change they express. This is what Deleuze describes as a process of integration and differentiation. The series of images are integrated within a whole, and at the same time, the changing whole is expressed in the

Poteas 14 images. In classical cinema then, “on the one hand the images were linked or extended according to laws of association … on the other hand, associated images were internalized in a whole as concept (integration), which was in turn continually externalized in associable or extendable images (differentiation)” (C2 276). Thus, the definition of montage as “the determination of the whole” (C1 29). But then a significant consequence arises. If the movement-images can be infinitely linked by association, then the concept of the whole they simultaneously construct and express can be projected beyond their limit and into the “extendable world” they form (C2 277). The concept of the film then will transcend its personal, social origins and will be promoted to a universal Truth. The idea becomes an Idea. And indeed, Deleuze doesn’t define montage only as the determination of the whole, but borrows Eisentein’s formulation to declare that “montage is the whole of the film, the Idea” (C1 29). However, he only subtly studies the political implications of the elevation of the movement-image from the particular to the universal. So, the four different schools of montage that he delineates are actually indirect expressions of time that present a whole as four different Ideas: the transcendence of organisms into a great organic unity in the parallel montage of Griffith; the unity of Man and Nature into the transcendental form of the One in the dialectical montage of Eisenstein; the mathematical Sublime of the superimpositions and multiple screens of Gance as a transcendental Thought; the dynamic Sublime as the transcendence of Spirit in the intensive montage of German expressionism. And later on, continuing his platonic associations, Deleuze will relate these schools with the Small and the Large form of the action-image, stressing the fact that “Small and Large are used in Plato’s sense” (C1 178). These Ideas designate “conceptions, ways of conceiving and seeing a ‘subject’, a story or a script”, effectively describing two different methods the movement-image expresses an ideology (C1 178). This relation explains for instance the ideological battle behind Eisentein’s and Griffith’s montage style which conveys two conflicting, political conceptions of history and society. The first’s dialectical whole reveals and tries to dismantle the underlying causes of social oppressions, while Griffith’s organic whole treats these issues as a simplified opposition between two binary forces (e.g.: poor VS rich, black VS white), never examining the complex sociopolitical matrix that creates them. But even if Deleuze surveys mainly the innocuous or even auspicious ideological appropriations of the movement-image, the dangers are obviously there. The famous movement-images of Taylor’s experiments, with the chronometer counting the time the worker needs to stamp the papers, placed a rational time in the actions of the employee,

Poteas 15 monetizing them both. What Taylor’s filmed experiments demonstrated, was that time is in our every movement and can be counted, exchanged, spent and therefore valued. Exemplifying “a process of dematerialization and abstraction that fuels a capitalist economy”, time had literally become money (Doane 8). But the chain of association doesn’t stop in the simple equation time=money and extends to movement=time=money. So at the same time that the movement-images established an immanent time, they elevated money to a universal standard of worth of our of our every movement, without leaving space for an alternative. As if it was a platonic Idea that gives form to the visible world, the capitalist conception of money was to condition now our every action. In a synchronous movement, time became money and money became an Idea. In Cinema 2, Deleuze will shortly address the dangers of this fusion of the social with the –supposedly- Eternal. Talking about Hitler and Riefenstahl’s propagandistic films that were masked as objective cinéma vérité, he is lead to accept Virilio’s pessimistic thesis that “the movement-image was from the beginning linked to the organization of war, state propaganda, ordinary fascism, historically and essentially” (C2 165). But if we go down that road we can’t just stop in cinema. Rodowick summarizes the platonic essence of the movement-image, its passage from the particular to the universal as such: “The integration of parts into ensembles, and ensembles into wholes, culminates in a totality where image, world, and spectator are identified through a grand image of Truth” (12). But isn’t that valid for every hegemonic force at large? Doesn’t Capitalism, the State or Heteronormativity, establish themselves deep into every aspect of everyday life, delimiting a whole whose relations they control and regulate? And by doing so don’t they assume a supposedly transcendental, unquestionable and unchanging nature that our lives are obliged to become an expression of? Passports, flags, national anthems, patriotic values, military, wars, relationships, marriage, family, reproduction, a nice job, career success, promotions, a bank account, money…clichés, everyday expressions of the rigid, social constructions of Nation, Sexuality, Gender, Capitalism that masquerade as Eternal. It is the same process of integration and differentiation Deleuze described for the movement-image, applied in one’s life. Only now the concept, the whole that our lives construct and constantly express has been conditioned by hegemonic Ideas, which are externalized within our lives. “It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film” (C2 171). The quantification of time only made more appealing the utopic pursuit of these Ideas, establishing them deeper into the quantified time of everyday life: Regardless of one’s background, the employee by working harder and longer, by spending more time, can reach the American Dream. And this effort

Poteas 16 could now be measured: forty hours per week? Forty hours per week plus overtimes? Forty hours plus overtimes and a second job on the weekends? How much time, how many actions in exchange for a chance at some point, somehow, living the American Dream? But there can be no equal exchange between time and money. This purposely perpetuated illusion is produced from time’s false quantification; “time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal change or the impossibility of an equivalence” (C2 77-8). So of course there is no reaching the Ideas, their appeal lies exactly in the fact that they are always just out of one’s grasp. And so, capitalism and the American Dream presuppose hard work but deny upward mobility, they advertise equal opportunities but remain gendered and racialized. “One cannot, therefore, criticize the American Dream for being only a dream”, Deleuze notes almost cynically, “this is what it wants to be, drawing all its power from the fact that it is a dream” (C1 148). All the Ideas have this double side: they establish themselves as rational and graspable but are elusive and unattainable. It is the absolute confirmation of Zeno’s paradox. No matter how hard he’ll try, Achilles will never reach the tortoise. This is the first aspect of time and the movement-image that relates to the connections between man and the world and the perpetuation of oppressive institutions. But there is another aspect that has to do with the connection of man with himself/herself and the construction of an identity. We can most clearly see this in modern heteronormative discourses on gender and sexuality that don’t differ much from the essentialist Platonic myth we presented at the start. Instead of the three transcendental Forms of the Sun/Moon/Earth we now have the two distinct biological genders that are considered Natural and unchangeable. But at the same time that society exalts the naturalness of gender, it also protects and regulates it so strictly, that it is as if it implicitly acknowledges that it is a socially constructed and not a natural concept. “If we were all already normative”, Halberstam wonders, “then presumably we would not need such strict parental guidance to deliver us all to our common destinies of marriage, child rearing, and hetero- reproduction”(28). And due to this constant social conditioning, one has to relentlessly strive to meet the unrealistic standards and limitations that heteronormativity imposes on gender. The heteronormative conceptions of masculinity and femininity are still treated as intelligible and yet unattainable Ideas that shape the world and our identities. John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) perfectly exemplifies the harmful consequences of this insistent pursuit of goals that have been set and defined by outside forces in such a way so that their appeal lies exactly in that continuous –and futile-

Poteas 17 pursuit. Hedwig is a punk rock transgender singer who after an early-age, unsuccessful sex change operation was left only with the eponymous “angry inch” as her genitalia. Although in her songs she proudly exalts her unspecified gender, her daily life reveals a desire for the appealing and elusive normative Ideas. In “The Origin of Love”, Hedwig sings a quite literal interpretation of Aristophanes speech from Symposium. As the song about the perfect children of the Sun, Moon and the Earth who became “lonely, two-legged creatures” ends, she laments the difficulty of finding her soul mate, the one who will complete her: “It is clear that I must find my other half. But is it a he or a she? … What about sex? Is that how we put ourselves back together again? Can two people actually become one again?” Being neither a man nor a woman, not knowing if she was a child of the Sun, of the Moon or the Earth, there is no space for Hedwig in the myth she just sang. The realm of Ideas, of heteronormativity, leaves no room for chance, for contingency, for non-normative people, for those who don’t fit into the “natural”, predetermined genders. But how can Hedwig stop the search for her other half, cease her attempts to proceed to the next privileged pose, that of the couple, to reunify with her soul mate, when without her/him she is considered imperfect and incomplete? This is the implicit consequence not only of the Platonic myth of love, but of the perseverance of Ideas in general: For human time to have meaning, it is necessary to actively look for your other half, to be partnered, normative, to reach the realm of Ideas. Our current, rationalized times only make the pursuit more urgent, since any moment we spent in transition is not just wasted anymore, but this waste is now quantified, valued. As long as Hedwig isn’t reunited with her lover, all her actions, in which time is immanent, are meaningless. And so, Achilles must keep running. Hence, a life of Ideas is a goal-oriented life, clearly delimited in distinct poses, with goals imposed by external, uncontrollable forces. In Deleuze’s words, it is a life governed by the sensory-motor schema, “concretely located in a ‘hodological space’ which is defined by a field of forces, oppositions and tensions between these forces, resolutions of these tensions according to the distribution of goals, obstacles, means, detours” (C2 127-8). It is both a normative life in the world and the cinema of the movement-image. We have already mentioned the problems Deleuze associates with a sensory-motor perception of reality: We perceive less of what really is, that is, we “perceive only clichés” (C2 20). It is with the dissolution of the sensory-motor schema that the cliché might recede and the whole image can appear. And Hedwig’s life and persona, is an accumulation of ceaseless movements and clichés.

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During the course of the movie, Hedwig is following Tommy Gnosis, her ex- boyfriend who became a successful rock star by stealing her songs. It is he who was supposed to be her other half, the one she would be reunited with.3 As he is touring throughout the US, performing in big, crowd-filled venues, she stalks him, travelling in the same cities and singing in small, decadent restaurants that often feature the same wallpaper: the image of a sinking ship. If the dialogue informs us that she is constantly travelling, the mise-en-scène shows that her constant movement not only takes her nowhere but, like the ship that slowly moves towards its own destruction, it actively harms her. What continuously changes though is Hedwig’s wig. In the film, wigs have a prominent role since Hedwig uses them as a means of evading reality by assuming different personas. And as the clichés hide aspects of an image, the wigs hide Hedwig. In the song “Wig in a Box” she informs us that when she’s “on the verge of going mad” she puts on her wigs and turns into a series of clichés: From a small town “Miss Midwest Midnight checkout queen” to “Farrah Fawcett from TV” to a “punk rock star of stage and screen”. It is the cliché of the beauty pageant winner, of the TV celebrity, of the rock star; an unattainable Idea of femininity expressed via ubiquitous cliché images of female personages that circulate in the external world and infiltrate and condition our internal world. The internalized Ideas construct an inflexible identity that is based on lack –not Man enough, not Woman enough, not working enough, not whole yet- and promise a perfect identity somewhere down the road. That’s the promise of a self-contained wholeness, a static, eternal, privileged pose of a universal Idea of Human. But it is another false promise, a very problematic notion of selfhood since “if the living being is a whole… this is not because it is a microcosm as closed as the whole is assumed to be, but, on the contrary, because it is open upon a world” (C1 10). Ironically, the self-contained wholeness is achieved precisely by its futile pursuit since, as we saw, the pursuit of the Ideas presupposes the elimination of transitions and leaves no room for contingency and experimentation. If we paralleled the ways the Ideas operate in the world with the Zeno paradox, then the subject they create is an ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail: In an endless pursuit of a futile and hazardous goal, it turns into an artificial, closed whole all by itself. It becomes clear then that in conjunction with traditional power structures and institutions, time can be used as a disciplinary method that modulates bodies, thought and behaviors. This is why queer theory has been particularly concerned, especially during the last decade, with queer and heteronormative temporalities. In perfect accordance to everything we have described so far, Elizabeth Freeman coined the term chrononormativity to designate the institutional manipulation of time aiming at the organization of individuals in

Poteas 19 collectives –nations, communities, families- and the maximization of their productivity. One of the basic cells of chrononormativity is the reproductive, nuclear family, which safeguards the renewal of the working force and the perpetuation of the conditions of capitalist economy. It is both a linearity of time –from one generation to the next- and a cyclicality –a repetition of conditions, concepts and Ideas throughout generations- that chrononormativity necessitates, since “the idea of time as cyclical stabilizes its forward movement, promising renewal rather than rupture” (Freeman, Time Binds 5). Consequently, as Halberstam explains, there is a continuous heteronormative conditioning of the human who must, from an early age, be “converted to a protoheterosexual by being pushed through a series of maturational models of growth that project the child as the future and the future as heterosexual” (73). Obviously this description doesn’t differ much from the notion of privileged poses, where in antiquity “[t]he growth of an adult man was thought of as a passage from one fixed and quintessential statue-like pose to another, “the infant”, “the boy”, “the adult”, each statue summing up a phase of a process” (Bogue 22). Chrononormativity assures that the poses which will express the Ideas, will be that of “the straight infant” who will become “the straight boy”, “the straight adult”, “the straight worker” and will bring to the world another “straight infant” who will become “the straight boy”, etc., completing the circle and continuing the line. A heteronormative ouroboros of privileged poses, running behind the tortoise’s linear, predetermined path. The social and the personal, the institutions and the subject-positions constantly give birth to one another. As an apparatus shaped and conditioned by sociopolitical and economic forces, cinema can’t escape becoming part of this process. But from a Deleuzian perspective cinema isn’t simply an ideological tool, but a model for the connections we form with the world and ourselves. I have demonstrated how the movement-image operates as a model of a world governed by hegemonic powers that influence institutions and identities in what Deleuze calls “the model of the True as totalization” (C2 277). In the next section I will expand upon this and concretize it in relation to queerness, by examining closely the relation- image, which is a limit case of the movement-image. A case such as this will illustrate that the functions of expansion, integration, differentiation and totalization still operate in the movement-image even when it tends towards the time-image. But more importantly the relation-image, that introduces “a new, direct, relationship with thought”, will be our first entrance to the thought of the image and the spectator (C1 198).

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1.2. Neutralizing Queerness In The Relation-Image At the limit of the movement-image lies the relation-image. This is the image that brings a mental dimension to cinema, not by visually representing one’s thoughts, but by revealing the network of relations between the elements of a frame/set. It was Hitchcock who, for Deleuze, perfected the relation-image since in his films what is essential is the constantly transforming relations between the characters, their actions and their surroundings. The whodunit is secondary to the web of these relations, which remain mostly invisible to the characters themselves and can therefore, be communicated to the audience only via the camera. A triadic relationship is then created between the film, the director and the spectator who is directly implicated since she knows more than the actual characters and can interpret and reinterpret the images on her own volition. In Rope (1948) for example, the audience has seen from the beginning Philip and Brandon, the film’s stand ins of infamous criminals Leopold and Loeb- committing the murder and putting the body in the chest. The rest of the movement-images that follow will continuously modify the fabric of relations that surrounds this initial action, as the camera, the audience and the unsuspecting guests move around the chest, and learn more about the motivations of the killers. A whole is still being created and externalized in the images, but with the relation-image we already start seeing its dissolution since it is no longer the whole, the Idea, that determines the images. On the contrary, now “the shot subordinates the whole (relations) to the frame” and the images establish an unstable whole whose relations are in an unceasing flux (C1200). In this limit case of the movement-image, “the whole which changes is the evolution of relations”, so we are not talking about a rigid, transcendental concept that conditions the images anymore (C1 203). The signs of the relation-image are the mark, the demark and the symbol. The first two belong to what in philosophy is referred to as natural relation: the logical, habitual linkage of images that form a series. One, for instance, can easily link an image of a plate of soup and that of a spoon, their relation being automatically conjured up by habit. While the mark however keeps the image within this logical succession, the demark produces an image which is “torn from its natural relations” and breaks the linkage (C1 218). To make sense of this estranged image the audience needs to discover new relations between the terms of the series and to critically reevaluate their own relation with the image. The demark is therefore a force of deterritorialization, that disconnects its object from its conventional, habitual functions. So, in Hitchcock’s cinema an ordinary glass of milk becomes luminous, a common seagull and a crop-duster turn predatory, and a windmill can defy natural forces. These images challenge the spectator’s customary perceptions and affections and require the mental

Poteas 21 engagement of the audience who now doesn’t simply have to view the images but read them in order to discover their meaning. But one of the most significant aspects of Hitchock’s films that Deleuze doesn’t mention, is that Hitchcock’s greatest demarks are not objects, but people. His cinema is one where ordinary people either by force or choice are placed outside the normativity of their everyday life and become spies, investigators, adulterers and murderers. If with Hitchcock “the detective only has a mediocre and secondary role” it is because it has to be an ordinary person who will jump out of his unremarkable series of relations and do the investigation (C1 203). If in Hitchcock the killers are so often unsuspecting, restrained people –a maid, a hotel owner, two students, a tennis player, a husband- instead of common criminals, it is because the murder needs to be an act that will rip one’s regular identity from its customary, everyday associations, turning them into a demark. These displaced identities function as “an unsettling, anomalous element”, as Bogue describes the demark, and is what has enabled multiple queer readings of Hitchcock’s almost entire oeuvre (103). The butch maid with the unhealthy obsession for her dead female boss and her underwear in Rebecca (1940), the effeminate, murderous roommates in Rope, the homoerotic relationship between the two men in Strangers on a Train (1951), the man with the split personality who cross dresses in Psycho (1960), they are all sexualized and gendered demarks: people whose relationships, appearance or behavior go against societal norms and break free from the habitual and social associations of masculinity and femininity. But beyond these more or less obvious homosexual and genderfluid undercurrents of Hitchcockian characters, theorists have examined the queer connotations of even the more traditionally straight acting heroes and heroines.4 White for example, examines Rebecca as a narrative that positions its heterosexual heroine, the second Mrs. De Winter, “in relationship to a desirable female object”, as she becomes increasingly fascinated by the dead, titular character (xxi). Psycho’s Lila, the straight sister of the protagonist, also gets a queer reading by Doty as a “brash, heroic dyke”, not due to a queerness comparable to Norman’s obvious genderfluidity, but because she steps outside the usual narrative limitations of female roles within which we originally perceived her (Flaming Classics 180). More than a passive female character, the victim’s sister, or a possible love interest, she undertakes the investigation for her sister’s disappearance and becomes the narrative center of the film, a demark that “will take over the narrative functions of both the lover and the law … functions almost always fulfilled by heterosexual male characters” (Doty, Flaming Classics 175). What makes these characters queer is less their coded homosexual desire and more their ability as

Poteas 22 demarks to claim a place outside the chain of pre-determined relations that wants to homogenize them and confine them within normative structures. As Todd Haynes believes, Hitchcock’s films “have these weird, perverse, complex perspectives that can be far more gay than most movies about gay themes—because they’re coming from an outsider’s perspective and change how you see things” (qtd. in Benshoff, and Griffin 228). Queerness under this regime, is a demark that threatens not only to “destabilize the gender identity of protagonists and viewer alike”, as one commentator notes, but to undermine the whole ideological foundation these identities are built on (Modleski 5). This kind of relation-image, allows the viewer to reinterpret his gendered perceptions and feelings about femininity and sexual relations, exposing the social laws that create and condition them. Indeed, Deleuze highlights that the relation image doesn’t simply extend the affection and action-images into thought, but “transforms them by penetrating them” (C1 204). Deleuze here, appropriating and expanding on Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, in which he provided a classification of types of signs, equates this transformation with Peirce’s concept of Thirdness. Thirdness refers to the relations that frame perceptions, affections and actions and can transform them to interpretations, intellectual feelings of relations and acts. It is consequently no longer a perception for itself, but a cognitive interpretation of the perception; not affections that merely fill the gap between perception and action but feelings induced by sense; not a goal-driven action but an act whose undercurrent symbolic element of a law is exposed. The Thirdness of the relation-image can thus stimulate a critical positioning of the audience towards the image and its relation with it. In its proper form then, the demark can reveal that social constructions such as gender, sexuality and relationships that we perceive, feel and enact as something given, are in fact social constructions permeated by arbitrary laws that have to be subjectively interpreted and critically thought out. In an interesting convergence of Deleuze and Kracauer, the latter in his Theory of Film attributes a similar purpose to those cinematic images that “tend to reveal things normally unseen” (46). Like a Deleuzian demark and a Peircian Thirdness, for Krakauer certain images can illuminate those “blind spots of the mind” that “habit and prejudice prevent us from noticing” (53). Also bringing the mental dimension into the relationship of cinema with its audience, Kracauer reminds us that those images aim “at transforming the agitated witness into a conscious observer” (58). For him, it is the familiar that is the enemy of thought, “that which condition[s] our involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses” and restricts us from seeing all the facets of an image and its underlying relations (57). In a process of defamiliarization then, the familiar must turn into something alien to reawaken

Poteas 23 conscious thinking and expose the roles which “cultural standards and traditions may play in these processes of elimination” (53). Deleuze, like he does with all his cinematic terms, only implicitly hints at these political aspects of the relation-image. But they are there nonetheless. What is the natural chain of relations designated by the mark if not blind spots, images understood only by an automatic sensory-motor operation conditioned by habit and prejudice; in other words a series of clichés? And what is the function of the relation-image and the demark then if not to break that habitual linkage and reveal those aspects and relations of the cliché that remain undisclosed, to “restore the lost parts, to rediscover everything that cannot be seen in the image” in a constant attempt “to break through the cliché, to get out of the cliché” (C2 21)? The relation-image then is the first type of Deleuzian image that attempts to rise against those cultural standards and traditions, against the “civilization of the cliché where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us” (C2 21). But it doesn’t fully succeed. With the relation-image and its Thirdness comes a re-examination of the movement- image and a rupture of the sensory-motor link. The demarks of Hitchcock not only implicated the spectator in the image but also turned the protagonists into spectators. The demark, the familiar that turned alien, has the power to immobilize the person whose quotidian movements and thoughts are interrupted by the unfamiliar. Kracauer again seems to be in agreement, when he describes the disruption of a person’s routine after finding the familiarity of his room disturbed. We ignore our everyday objects of perception since “we would be immobilized if we focused on them”, he notes (55). But he never examines why the defamiliarization process might fail and instead of revealing the cliché, reinforce it. Deleuze on the other hand acknowledges that “it is not enough to disturb the sensory-motor connections”, since “maltreated, mutilated, destroyed, a cliché is not slow to be reborn from its ashes” (C2 22; C1 211). Cinema 2 is dedicated in examining those mental-images that fulfill what the relation-image started, but we can extract reasons for its occasional failure that are inherent in the relation-image. The first point of contention is that the thought the relation-image engenders, is not autonomous but dependent on a chain of associations, even if these associations can be jarring. The queer element will jump out of this chain of habitual associations, but still relates to it via a negative or reverse association. This means that the demark is Othered since its entire identity is defined by what is considered normative. At the same time, the thought goes from one node of the chain to the next, completely disregarding what might lie in between. And no matter how much the chain will be extended, how many nodes will be added, there

Poteas 24 will always be something that falls between, that doesn’t fit. The gendered chain of male- female can expand to Sun-Moon-Earth but there will always be Hedwigs who don’t belong. The second point is linked to the functions of the third sign of the relation-image, the symbol. Deleuze defines the symbol as a bearer of abstract (i.e. non-habitual) relations through which a whole is constituted. The first seagull attacking the protagonist in The Birds (1963) is a demark since it alienates the customary relations between birds, man and Nature, explains Deleuze. But all the birds together become a symbol that designates the now inverted relationship between Man and Nature and the naturalization of human relationships. The symbol thus operates as a node of relations that connects images that wouldn’t be habitually connected. This operation creates a whole governed by the relations described by the symbol, relations which can modulate within the whole of the film. In The Birds for example, the birds as a symbol create a whole that is in constant flux as the movie progresses: from a whole of a humanized Nature, to a bird-centered Nature and finally to that of a Nature in a precarious equilibrium with man. The transformation of the demark to a symbol and the variations of the whole it presents, is reflected in the subjugated queerness of Norman in Psycho: Norman is originally presented as a shy, stuttering, slightly effeminate, single man, in vast contrast with the more traditionally masculine and determinate Sam whose sexual prowess is the first image of the film. Norman’s identity displaces him from the customary series of characteristics that connect him to other men, women and masculinity, becoming a queer demark that estranges the ordinary relations between man, gender and sexuality. By the end of the film however, with the image of the dead mother superimposed on his queer body and his identity consumed by the identity of the mother, Norman awaits completely still and silent a life of confinement both externally, in mental institutions, and externally inside his own body. He has become a symbol of a pathologized queerness that needs to be punished, confined and extinguished as it presents a direct danger to the individual and the social order. And in the final scenes of the film, we are transferred from Bates Motel to the police station. From the place where the queer symbol reigned, creating a threatening whole where social order and gender were out of balance, we go to the place of the Law where the masculine representatives of that social order –the lover, the doctor, the police- stand victorious over a now subjugated queerness, reestablishing the whole of a heteronormative, lawful and safe reality. On contrary to the natural relations of the demark that constitute a series, the symbol creates a whole based on abstract relations, that is, relations “through which one compares

Poteas 25 two images which are not naturally united in the mind” (C1 198). This is how the image of a queer man can be associated to sickness, sexuality to Evil. What is furthermore noteworthy is that within that whole, not even the queer demark of Lila can exist. As we saw, Lila as a demark that severs the normative social codes that condition femininity and sexuality, forces the spectator to acknowledge that “he himself has blindly adopted conventions which now seem naïve or cramped to him” (Kracauer 56). This reframing and reevaluation of our gender-coded perceptions and affections and the potential illumination of the arbitrary laws that govern them is enabled by the Thirdness of Psycho’s relation-images. But in the end, Lila is “subdued when the narrative forces her to encounter the perils and terrors of queerness” and stands quiet amongst the expertise of the men who provide the final heteronormative explanation of the story (Doty, Flaming Classics 180). It is they, who define the final relations of the whole. By being forced to step back into her habitual chain of relations and the safety of her normative identity, her queerness is not punished and destroyed as Norman’s but is normalized and transformed into a non- threatening mark that adheres to the social series of characteristics that define her role as a woman. And of course it isn’t just Norman and Lila who get assimilated within a heteronormative whole. Hitchcock’s identity demarks, all these queer-coded characters who dared to defy the law and claim their own positions outside their socially constructed roles, get punished, captured, killed or simply return to their predetermined social position, in what Doty has called a Hitchcockian “queer apocalypse” (Flaming Classics 180). And so, for instance, after a short walk to the dark side of queerness, the female protagonist of Rebecca, known only by her husband’s last name, has to go back to the safety of her identity as Mrs. de Winter, while Mrs. Danvers’ more obvious lesbianism must be extinguished in the fire, her queerness a symbol of a primordial evil that was haunting the normative couple and needs to be cleansed in a ritualistic pyre. In the same fashion, we can consider the locations in Hitchcock’s films as queer demarks that become symbols. The gothic mansion in Rebecca, the house in the shadows in Psycho, or the apartment in Rope that seems isolated from the outside world, all function as breaks from the normality of the heroes’ everyday life. And by the end of the film their anomaly has become a symbol of the unknown that needs to be normalized or destroyed. So Manderley is burned down, the mysterious house is abandoned and the outside world enters into the isolated apartment. But the spatial relation of the frame with the whole is a matter of another Deleuzian concept, the out-of-field. For Deleuze, each frame has an out-of-field with

Poteas 26 two aspects: a relative aspect that refers to a spatial set which is not seen and an “absolute aspect by which the closed system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe” (C1 17). This double aspect of the out-of-field expresses the process of integration and differentiation: a continuous expansion of the cinematic images that are thus integrated to a whole, and the externalization and expression of the changing whole in the images. Therefore, even the most isolated sets/frames that characterize Hitchcock’s films always refer to a whole that can be potentially expanded on to infinity. This is how the demark stops being a localized relation and can turn into a symbol that refers to the whole of society. Rope for example, takes place entirely within the apartment of Philip and Brandon. It is a space completely isolated from the outside world, an entirely closed up relative out-of-field, with the external world visible only through the window of the apartment. Like the Bates Motel, here is a space where disorder rules, with an unspoken, incomprehensible evil at its center that has to be neutralized. And indeed, at the end of the movie, Rupert, the traditional American hero played by James Stewart, after discovering the dead body in the trunk, opens up the window of the apartment and fires several shots on the air to notify the police. Promptly, sirens are heard approaching the house. The previously sequestered space of lawlessness is reconnected with the normative, lawful, outside world, which is about to violently barge in. The fluctuating fabric of relations and the unstable whole they created are finally stabilized by the power of the Law. By expanding the relative aspect of the out-of- field to the supposedly infinite outside of the normative society, the demark of queerness becomes a threatening symbol for everyone, necessitating its reterritorialization and justifying the narrative of normativity. The demark’s queerness can be normalized, or mutate into a symbol manipulated in such a way as to be riddled with abstract relations that assign to it moralistic values. In both cases, the demark is reterritorialized and stripped of its revelatory potentials. And the whole that is created might oscillate throughout the film, but by the end it can still be stabilized and made to refer back to an Idea. The relation-image doesn’t lose its basic characteristics. It is still a Thirdness that reveals the element of a law in its relations and implicates the viewer, allowing for a reframing of his perceptions and affections. But these characteristics are ideologically appropriated by the powers that control the images, by those who “have an interest in hiding images from us”, returning us again to the previous discussion on the dangers of the movement-image (C2 21). So instead of pushing the image to its limits and reveal that which is hidden, the relation-image can return it to the state of the cliché. What it reveals then, isn’t necessarily the arbitrariness of a social law, but its supposed transcendence

Poteas 27 and inevitability. And the intellectual feelings and interpretations it generates might have already been tainted by ideology. Deleuze then was right in asking for “an autonomous mental-image” (C1 214). For the relation-image thinks, but its thoughts are not always independent. This is why the Hollywood industry made sure that cinematic images would be under its control and from 1934 until 1969 it imposed via the Hays code the prohibition of any “inference of sexual perversion”, demanding additionally “that Hollywood films depict married, procreative heterosexuality as the only proper sexuality” (Lewis 301; Benshoff, and Griffin 9). During the last decade of its application, when for financial reasons the rules of the code became more flexible, the Production Code Administration started allowing the depiction of what it considered sexual deviancy, under the condition that all morally dubious actions will be punished. In other words, the demark had to fall back in line, or die; it had to be a symbol of the moral decadence and dangers of living outside the acceptable societal spectrum of behavior. And if the heteronormative whole was threatened, in the end it had to be restored, stable and intact, further establishing the necessity and naturalness of its laws. Because that’s how cultural hegemony works: By establishing an artificial whole whose symbols, meanings and relations are appropriated, distorting and manipulating our perception of them so that ideologically constructed institutions and beliefs that perpetuate the status quo will appear natural and predestined. But consequently, if even the relation-image can be institutionally controlled and transformed back into a cliché, if queerness can be turned on its head and become an image of evil, what remains for a cinema that wants something new to emerge from the clichés? “[H]ow can an Image be extracted from all these clichés … With what politics and what consequences? What is an image which would not be a cliché?” (C1 214) There are the questions with which Deleuze concludes his examination of the movement-image, and which will drive his analysis of the time-image. For these questions to be answered, cinema had to develop a new relation with thought and “[t]he mental image had not to be content with weaving a set of relations, but had to form a new substance. It had to become truly thought and thinking” (C1 215). The whole then would not be a creation of the movement-image, a creation that could be manipulated by claiming to be representing reality, but would be the outside, that which exists in the interstice between the images. And in that interstice, thought will confront its own limits and a new queer subject will emerge.

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2. New Queer Thought Block the tortoise or untangle the ouroboros. Throw a wrench in the cogs of the clock and jam its rationalized, chrononormative ticks, or introduce a subject that can’t be entrapped inside his own self. These are the two choices we have at this point if we want to avoid the pitfalls of the movement-image. In one fell swoop the time-image achieves both. The direct presentation of time in the image, its contingency and uncertainty, subverts the linear, modernist model and all the constructions that came with it: “It is the crisis of both the action-image and the American Dream” (C1 210). But at the same, the time-image brings forth a new relation with thought and a novel understanding of selfhood. Pisters describes that “according to Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed and transcendentally controlled entity but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood (or subjectivity) are challenged in time and by time” (20). It is not then merely a new subject-position that the time-cinema creates but a reconceptualization of the meaning of human. “Human” is no longer the gendered, racialized, rational, self-aware and self-contained Enlightenment subject -the subject of the movement-image and the Ego=Ego- but it’s something new that can only be defined by its inherent impossibility to be defined, by its “irreducible multiplicity” (C2 133). This is a human with the diffused, acentered consciousness of the cinematic camera that dares to utter the famous proclamation of -a very queer- Rimbaud: “I is another.” Block the tortoise or untangle the ouroboros. These are the goals of queer theory as well. Queerness, like cinema, realizes its full potential when it challenges our conceptions of time, when it contests a linear progression from one pose to the other and a goal-oriented life. And in parallel, queer theory has a lot to gain by challenging the “human” identity, and opening it up to new formulations and connections. These are two equally viable and productive projects. So on one hand, we could explore the time-image directly and investigate how queer bodies and the signs of the time-image converge and together they destabilize heteronormative constructions. And multiple theorists have theorized about the queer body as what I believe is a time crystal: The queer child “grows sideways” and not linearly, argues Stockton, since she is displaced in time due to her knowledge that she lays outside the heterosexual future her family destines her for; she is not part of the succession of poses of chrononormativity and so she is blocked from the promised land the Idea of hetero- futurity offers. Halberstam, picking up that thread argues that kids are always anarchic, “out of place and out of time” (27). And for others, the act of coming-out is a temporal process that, as another crystal of time that merges the virtual and the actual, compells “the queer individual to claim a new identity that has been there all along” (Rohy 157).

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And on the other hand, we could hear Cohen and Ramlow’s still relevant call: “One of the urgent needs of queer theory today, a need for which Deleuze and Guattari are indispensable, is to challenge the very norms and limits of the ‘human’” (10). By studying this, we will be exploring the time-image indirectly, since we will be seeing its results in human thought. This is the approach I will take, since I believe that examining the effects of the time-image, the culmination of Deleuze’s cinematic project, might create a more fertile ground for its transplantation to different epistemological milieus. And even though that means that time will not appear directly in my analysis, we’ll have to keep in mind that it is its direct effects that we are seeing. This chapter then will revolve around the new relation with thought that the time- image created, and which develops from three points of view: “the obliteration of a whole or of a totalization of images, in favour of an outside which is inserted between them; the erasure of the internal monologue as whole of the film, in favour of a free indirect discourse and vision; the erasure of the unity of man and the world, in favour of a break” (C2 187-8). This is the regime of the tear: A tear in the images, a tear in subjectivity, a tear between man and the world. So, I have chosen to untangle the ouroboros even if it means tearing it up.

2.1. From Hitchcock To Kalin, From The Whole to the Outside When Tom Kalin’s Swoon premiered in 1992, it was met with skepticism both from the LGBT audience and the critics. The viewers were hesitant to accept “yet another film about killer queers” (Benshoff, and Griffin 226) created this time by an openly gay director, and Kalin in a recent interview recalled the hostility that surrounded his movie and how he was deemed “a bad homosexual” for regurgitating one of the oldest and most harmful Hollywood stereotypes (Film Society of Lincoln Center). Especially at this historical conjunction where the AIDS epidemic and the criminal negligence of the Reagan administration had awaken a new generation of activists but at the same time and for the same reasons, homosexuality was being more than ever associated with sin, moral decadence and morbidity, negative representations seemed to be counter-productive. As the gay critic Steve Warren noted in his review, “if Swoon had not been made by gay filmmakers, it would be the kind of movie we should picket” (qtd. in Benshoff, and Griffin 226). These kinds of concerns about the burden of representation a single work or a single artist carries for the entire LGBT community existed since the abolition of the Code and the first attempt of Hollywood to seriously explore

Poteas 30 the issue of homosexuality in The Boys in the Band (1970) and still exist today.5 But the provocative characters of Tom Kalin and of the rest of the New Queer Cinema (NQC) filmmakers, were never meant to be poster boys of an ACT UP campaign. On the contrary, they defiantly reject the obsession with positive images and reverse the entire discourse to become a commentary on the limitations of representation. The goal that B. Ruby Rich –who coined the term and first documented the birth and evolution of New Queer Cinema- ascribed to Swoon could be the motto of the whole movement: “Claim the heroes, claim the villains, and don’t mistake any of it for realness” (28). The killer queers of Hollywood then, are very different from the killer queers of NQC, and not only because the latter were created by queer artists. The distinction is that Hollywood images proclaimed to be representing a supposedly independent, pre-existing reality, while the images of NQC reject the notion of a reality that can be singularly and objectively presented. This contrast reflects the transition from the organic to the crystalline regime of the image, which signaled the constant displacement of preexistent, independent descriptions, the increased indiscernibility between real and imaginary and the collapse of a rationalized, hodological space. This is the transition from the Platonic model of the movement-image that “proceeds by linking through rational divisions, projecting a model of Truth in relation to totality” to the collapse of the sensory-motor schema and the various levels of indecipherability of the time-image that create a new relation with thought (Rodowick 13). To better track and explain what these changes mean in the context of queerness, I want to interrogate how Swoon on the surface tells the same story as Hitchcock’s Rope -that of real life lovers Leopold and Loeb who wanted to commit the perfect murder- but with vastly different ideological connotations. I’m using Swoon not only because it can provide a stark contrast between the classical and the modern regime but also because it shares many aesthetic characteristics with the rest of the NQC films and their cinematic descendants, which for Rich “embodied an evolution in thinking” (xv).6 So this contrast will be used only as a starting point for a wider exploration of queer and queered images and which will revolve around three interrelated concepts that the crystalline regime gave rise to: the interstice, the outside and the spiritual automaton. These concepts presuppose each other and together they produce the three aspects of the new relation with thought we saw above, i.e. the regime of the tear.

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2.1.1. Living Between The first images of Swoon is a series of bodies in exaggerated, theatrical poses, reciting excerpts from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel on sadomasochism, Venus in Furs.7 It’s a highly artificial scene that is revealed to be taking place in a film set, whose purpose and context will never be rationally explained. Staging a queer film within a queer film, from the very first shots Kalin responds to the inevitable criticisms about art’s function as a representation of reality and establishes a queer space whose artificiality and disinterest in being a representation of the LGBT community is immediately revealed. At the same time, the extravagant stance of the multitude of bodies parading before the spectator’s eyes, their sliding via an invisible platform across the screen and their direct looks into the camera turns the scene into a literal presentation of those bodies for the viewer. And it is a presentation that doesn’t validate any hierarchy of one body over the other but that at the same time is centered on less privileged bodies (black, trans, queer) and non-normative sexual practices (sadomasochism, homosexuality). It is not only an obviously artificial whole that Swoon presents, but a queer, artificial whole. This means that there is no default normative chain of association out of which queerness can jump in order to be treated as a demark. The latent homosexuality in Rope, here becomes primary as it is no longer the negative of normativity. It is still a displaced identity but is precisely this displacement, this cut between normativity and queerness that is significant and defines it. This is exactly what Deleuze calls the interstice between two images. It is a cut that “begins to have an importance in itself” and is not dependent on the images that preceded it or will succeed it (C2 213). The images don’t dictate the significance of the cut anymore, it is the cut that delineates the significance of the images: “The interstice is primary in relation to association … The fissure has become primary, and as such grows larger. It is not a matter of following a chain of images, even across voids, but of getting out of the chain or the association” (C2 180). The habitual chain of association that connected the images no longer exists, even if one of the images were to jump out and become a demark (this is still a negative or reverse association). What counts now is the differential power that exists between the images and is created (in one of its aspects) by irrational cuts and aberrant movements (C2 213-4). So in Swoon for example, the inserts of archival footage that sever the progression of a narrative which is already loosely connected, and their jarringly different aesthetic style from Kalin’s original footage, create a non-commensurable discontinuity between the images. The importance now doesn’t lie inside those images, but within their discontinuity that creates a differential power between them: The queer world claims

Poteas 32 historical images and inserts itself where it was expelled from. The archival footage is queered and the whole of history is revised. And all this happens within the interstice. The interstice can also exist between different elements of the set that exist within the same frame, as it happens at the depiction of Leopold and Loeb’s trial. During the psychologist’s testimony who is asked to reveal the details of the couple’s sexual relationship, a bed with Leopold and Loeb having sex on it, inexplicably appears in the middle of the courtroom. The coexistence and simultaneous reciprocal negation of the image of the court and the image of the bed, induces an interstice between the two. The artificiality of the trial is revealed then, not as an attempt this time to reject the idea of an artistic objective representation, but to refute the notion of an objective Law under which all subjects are equal. The intended criminalization of Leopold and Loeb’s homosexuality has as much to do with the murder, as the bed in the center of the courtroom. And again, this is extracted not from the images themselves but from their interstice. These types of interstices proliferate in Swoon and queer films in general that more often than not become an exercise in historical revisionism. But that’s hardly a revolutionary assertion. What is ideologically relevant for us, is that queer films position the interstice in the body. As we saw, in Swoon queerness has become primary. It is not defined anymore by its negative association with what is considered normal, but exists for itself. We are outside the chain and queerness is what exists between the disconnected nodes, subjecting them to new and unpredictable relinkages. Queerness is the interstice that informs and conditions the images. But more importantly, the interstice and the differential power that engenders, is what defines the queer body which becomes a battleground of social oppressions and limitations and reveals the intolerable, impossible –but also beautiful- conditions of its existence. When the series of disenfranchised bodies parades before the audience in the opening scene of Swoon, what we see is a function of the interstice that Deleuze describes as “the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two images’ … the method of AND, ‘this and then that’, which does away with all the cinema of Being=is. Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible” (C2 180). Swoon is not concerned only with the historical persecution of homosexuality that is reflected via Leopold and Loeb. Kalin depicts the existence of a multiplicity of oppressions that appear at any given time and which intersect, constantly feeding and giving birth to each other. Leopold and Loeb are homosexuals whose “lack of moral values” is ascribed to their “perversion” during the trial, but can also “be directly attributed to [their] upbringing by a

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Catholic mother and a Jewish father”. And they themselves although are at ease with their sexual identity, seem more ambivalent about their Jewish heritance which they reject and embrace at the same time. Gay AND Jewish AND atheists AND murderers, in a method that does away with the enterprise of positive images. A black female stenographer in the 1920s can exist in the film’s universe only due to the intentional anachronisms the filmmaker has spread throughout the film. But if thanks to that anachronism she escapes the racism of the era that would have never allowed her a job like that, she can’t avoid the rampant sexism she has to endure as a woman. Black AND Woman. And if she was treated as such, one can only imagine the web of oppressions the transgender black woman, or the other non-normative bodies of the opening body parade would endure. Black AND Woman AND Trans AND Man…AND everything AND nothing in between. The interstice expands, in a method that does away with the cogito, with the “Ego=Ego form of identity” (C2 153), but without denying the bodies their specific individuation. I is another. It is a diffused identity then that the interstice reveals in the body, a non-identity that always remains malleable and permeable since it can’t be defined, pinned down or named. This is a queered body because it can’t be touched by social constructions of sexuality, gender or race; a body that has been given its own discourse, has been reached “before words, before things are named”, although normative society will try to do just that: name it, categorize it, reterritorialize it (C2 173). But unlike the demark which relied on the normative chain of associations and could easily return to it, with the interstice the chain is broken and its nodes depend on it to be relinked in a multiple number of ways: “there are only relinkages subject to the cut, instead of cuts subject to the linkage” (C2 213-4). A logical consequence of this diffused non-identity, is that an interstice will exist also outside the body, turning it into an unlinked node that awaits a new, unforeseeable connection with a different body, the two of them becoming a new node that will be united with others to create groups which in turn will form communities and so on. These kinds of unforeseeable kinships have been explored by Freeman in Queer Belongings and thrive in the queer world where there is no linear, predetermined, genealogical movement. In the heteronormative reality, Freeman describes, it’s expected that, “a child will move from nephew to uncle, from daughter to mother, but rarely the other way. Similarly, a child may not cross from one gendered position in the symbolic order to another” (310). But the interstitial queer bodies do not conform to these limitations, so that “gendered and even generational crossings, at least, are eminently possible: consider the male-to-female transsexual who has been a nephew but becomes a niece and then an aunt” (310). The

Poteas 34 unconventional kinship formations presented in Paris is Burning (Livingston 1990), where disenfranchised queers form intentional familial bonds under a chosen “house mother” are another real life example of the ways the queer body can be “relinked”. The parade of bodies in Swoon, the homeless hustlers and thieves in My Own Private Idaho (1991), the protesters in Edward II (1991) or more recently the mass of bodies conjoined in uncountable combinations of sexual positions in Shortbus (2006),8 are all cinematic, queer bodies that unite and expand in unpredictable configurations while retaining their individuality and resisting the disciplined, institutional organization of chrononormativity. The bodies in that case adopt the functions of the any-space-whatever, the place that “no longer has co- ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities”(C1 120). We can consider then, queer bodies as any-bodies-whatever, images of pure potentiality that “can be fitted together in an infinite number of ways” (C1 111). The most beautiful example of this probably comes from Sebastien Lifshitz’s Wild Side (2001). Lifshitz opens his film with a series of close ups of a naked female body: the red toenails; the long curly hair; the buttocks; the hairless arm… the penis. The parts of the body become pieces of a puzzle that has multiple solutions. The body loses its social inscriptions, is decontextualized and deterritorialized and becomes an any-body-whatever that “expresses an alternative between the state of things itself and the possibility, the virtuality, that goes beyond it” (C1 112). And within that any-body-whatever, lies an interstice, which makes the gender frontier visible and obliterates it at the same time: Stéphanie, the film’s heroine, is a woman AND has a penis. From then on, this any-body-whatever will be implicated in multiple different formations with other displaced and disenfranchised bodies and much like in Bresson’s films, it is the hand that functions as the connecting tissue. With more than thirty close ups of hands throughout the movie, this isolated part of the body is bequeathed with a role “which goes infinitely beyond the sensory-motor demands of the action” (C2 12). Hands, and by extension bodies, in Wild Side escape their predefined social and capitalist function of producing material goods, and instead produce affect, tenderness and care that don’t alienate, but link members of the community. Whether it is close ups of Stéphanie’s hands feeding or washing the hair of her ill mother, being fed herself as a child, tenderly touched by her father, or sexually caressed by her boyfriends, the deterritorialized hand allows a reciprocal relationship to grow between Stéphanie and those around her so that her queer any-body-whatever enters into new configurations. And the three main characters of the film, within their volatile polyamorous relationship are often filmed so closely together that Stéphanie’s transgender body, Djamel’s postcolonial body and the immigrant body of

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Mikhail become interchangeable. Most noticeably, in the only love scene between the three of them we see them as interchangeable; the extreme close ups of their skin creating a cartography of bodies which can’t be differentiated. And the warm, oneiric quality of the scene provides no hierarchy between male and female, active and passive, bringing this formation in stark contrast to the cold and distant sex scenes between Stéphanie and her clients where there is a clearly identifiable power structure. The identities of the three lovers, their shared or unique oppressions with which their bodies have been clearly marked, intermingle. This would also be the final image of the film where the three of them, cramped in the same sit of a moving train, sleep almost on top of each other with their heads appearing as if they come out of the same body. A similar effect plays out in another scene where, locked in a tight embrace they form a sphere of bodies that playfully rolls down a hill, their rapid movement making distinguishing them an impossible and unnecessary task. It is as if, through their constant expansion, their connecting, unifying, splitting, reconnecting, they fight and transform the movement they are always somehow in; their continuous temporal process of becoming, subordinating the incessant movement of a world that wishes to subordinate them. We shouldn’t however think that what they form is a closed whole, a realization of the platonic “completeness” that supposedly comes with the relationship. As already mentioned, Stéphanie enters in multiple formations so she always remains open upon a world. After the first scene with the close ups of Stéphanie’s body parts, we move to a communal space where she socializes with other transgender women with Lifshitz framing the individuals in medium shots. Following that, is a series of long shots of Stéphanie and the other sex workers looking for clients out on the street. From the small to the large, from the private to the collective and then to the public, there is a line that connects even the smallest part of one’s being to the world. The body parts constituting a borderless body, the individual as a part of a communal body, the community as part of an even larger societal body. As a cinematic realization of Susan Stryker’s call for a new “useful forms of alliance politics … that are not organized around sexual identity”, the interstice expands beyond the individual (149). Trans AND postcolonial AND undocumented immigrant AND working class. In a minoritarian fashion, we imperceptibly move from the private to the communal, “the private affair merges with the social –or political” (C2 218), the interstice of the body expands and becomes the interstice between groups, becomes a collective utterance of previously unconnected communities.

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Audre Lorde wrote, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives” (138), and as the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ acronym shows, intersectionality has been a major tenet of queer theory in an attempt to include different disenfranchised communities of people who might face different problems, but whose struggles always stem from the same normative society. Lorde used to remind her readers of all her different identities and struggles, which she refused to hierarchize, and every time introduced herself as a black, feminist, lesbian, mother, warrior poet. She proudly lived “between”, which reminds me of the scene in Stephen Frear’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) where Cherry, a Pakistani woman with an American name living in England, says to Omar, the main character: “I'm sick of hearing about these in-betweens. People should make up their minds where they are.” In a film where everyone seems to be suffering for not accepting their multiple, diffused non-identity, Omar remains in the space between, on the interstice, and resists people’s attempts to define him, even if it means being perceived in a negative light. He remains Pakistani and British, native and immigrant, thief and businessman, and he’s much happier for it. So, it is no wonder that the film, and the book it was based on, generated discussions for what was seen as a negative representation of its subaltern subjects. Stuart Hall, debating the burden of representation that befalls to minorities who have to represent themselves and tell their own stories with the additional responsibility of painting themselves only in the most positive light, defended the film exactly for the reasons it was attacked for. He called it “one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years” due to “its refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilized and always ‘right-on’” and for knowingly and methodically crossing “those frontiers between gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class” (449). By rejecting an orthodox hierarchy and categorization of positive/negative, moral/immoral identities and practices, My Beautiful Laundrette, as a valiant precursor of NQC, signaled the beginning of the fight against a fossilized representation of a self-contained queerness allowing it to finally become interstitial.

2.1.2. Thinking Outside the Body Establishing a queer world in Swoon doesn’t stop in the opening scene but extends into the rest of the film, where Kalin frames Leopold and Loeb in tight close ups inside their suffocatingly small apartment, or in wide external shots where they are surrounded by vast, empty spaces. Similarly to the isolated apartment in Rope, the mise-en-scène of Swoon

Poteas 37 testifies to the absence of an external world, which at some point however will forcefully make its presence visible. But there is again, a fundamental difference between the two films. In Rope the opening of the window and the sound of police sirens signified the intrusion and unequivocal domination of the law that represents a normative society which extends well beyond the closed set of the apartment and onto a seemingly universal whole. In Swoon on the other hand, the external world, signified again by the law, appears as a relatively closed system. The tight framings, the unconnected spaces, the rarefied, naked backgrounds, turn the milieus of the law –the police station, the prison, and to a lesser extent the courtroom- to any- spaces-whatever. This has a twofold effect. On one hand, the law, which as the bed-in-the-courtroom scene demonstrated becomes entangled with the law of heteronormativity, emerges not as a given, transcendental moral and just code, but as a potentiality that can only operate on discontinuous blocks. Law is thus denuded of any transcendental, objective interiority but nonetheless still exerts its power over its subjects. By oscillating between its actualization and its virtuality, the authority of the (heteronormative) law, the power of the outside world, becomes apparent but is never justified. But the more profound effect is that the spatiotemporal continuity of the world is fractured. Gone are the images of classical cinema, linked by association and rational cuts that “formed under this condition an extendable world” (C2 276). The disconnected, decontextualized any-spaces-whatever of Swoon and the re-linkages of the interstice, testify to the fracture of the coherence of space and time. When the geometry of the prison becomes disorienting, when different spaces mix and the rarified background of the interrogation room blends with the white setting in Loeb’s dinner, when the naked, neutral walls provide no differentiation between the police station and the couple’s house, or when sheets of the past provide different versions of the murder, it is as if space is suspended on a timeless abyss. The inexistence of causal relations between the images, means that there is no whole anymore that the images weave and into which are continuously integrated. The world doesn’t extend beyond the images, but remains fragmented and with it, man’s rational link to the world also breaks. “There are no longer grounds for talking about a real or possible extension capable of constituting an external world: we have ceased to believe in it, and the image is cut off from the external world” (C2 277). The whole now is the Outside, what lies beyond commonsense thought. Rodowick rightfully calls the Outside “without doubt the most complex and elusive idea in The Time Image” and goes on to deliver a series of loose definitions, while Flaxman in his introduction on The Brain is the Screen resigns to a simple “let us call it both memory

Poteas 38 and the future” (140; 20). Deleuze himself seems to always return to more or less the same formulation: The Outside “is something more distant than any external world. But it's also something closer than any inner world” (Negotiations 110). Without adhering to any concrete definition –if a concrete definition is even possible- I want to approach the Outside not by what is, but by its effects in the cinematic image and the human thought and body. The first major implication we already encountered it in the interstice, which function as our entry point into the void of the Outside. Next, I will challenge the ways the new status of the whole as the Outside, and the spiritual automaton that comes with it, negates heteronormative totalizations and practices and further advances a diffused identity that aligns with queer performances and bodies. In that regard, my approach comes close to Rodowick’s assertion that “[t]he whole as outside –a pure virtuality that opens between images, between image and sound, and between image and perception - is the force that produces a serial image of time, an image of becoming rather than being -- becoming other in thought and becoming other in identity” (141, my emphasis). As a starting point I take the transformation of the out-of-field that comes with the evolution of the whole in the time-image, a change that is primarily expressed through the dislocation of sound from the visible image. We have seen that as long as the images were constructing a whole that was expressed through them, they had an out-field which referred to the external world and connected them to the changing whole. But when “each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it” (C2 179), and what exists between the images is only the irrational fissure of the interstice which cuts them off from any exterior world, then there can be no out-of-field. If then, Rope ends with the diegetic sound of the sirens, which brings the out-of-field into the frame and unites the images, Swoon ends by expanding the chasm between them, and making that fissure palpable. The final sequence of Swoon, shows a slow dolly-in towards a TV screen that displays a press conference of the real Nathan Leopold reciting a Jewish prayer. As the grainy, low resolution archival footage slowly overcomes the cinematic image, an explanatory voice-over narrates Leopold’s life after his release from prison. What seems though like a reasonable transition from the isolated space of the prison to an open, external world that would reconnect and neutralize queerness through the supposedly objective nature of the archive, has already been falsified. The voice of the real Leopold in his prayer recital has been dubbed by the voice of Craig Chester, the actor who depicts him in the film, and the documentational narration has been framed by the non-diegetic sounds of birds that inexplicably come into the sound mix. There is a “difference between what is seen and what is heard, and this difference

Poteas 39 is constitutive of the image. There is no more out-of-field” (C2 180-1). The interstice that exists between the sound image and the visual image, signals the dissolution of an out-of- field that was commensurable with the visual framing, and is another sign of the severance of the bond between the images and the external world. Thus, similarly to Leopold who, as the narration informs us, often violated his parole responsibilities, the interstitial queerness persists over the external tide of legality and normativity that threatened to rationalize and normalize it. But the dubbing of Leopold’s voice has also another aspect. As in the case of the non-normative bodies and the any-bodies-whatever that testified to the existence of the interstice in the body, the split between the body and the voice imposes an interstice between them and brings the individual in contact with the power of the Outside. In these cases, the characters enunciate a free indirect discourse, “a speech disconnected from any particular speaker or point of view, as if their words issued from some place beyond any external world” (Bogue 177). We can find this not only in this short scene of Swoon, but also at the Shakespearian dialogue the characters in My Own Private Idaho suddenly start conversing in, or the anachronistic dialogues in Edward II. The effect of the free indirect discourse is that it blurs the boundaries of subjective and objective, it creates two subject positions that exist simultaneously and indiscernibly in the same set. In classical cinema, subjective and objective images might coexist and intermingle, as in the case of the misidentifications in Hitchcock films, but in the end their true nature was always affirmed. All identities then were stabilized and reterritorialized within the logical narrative of the whole. In modern cinema though, the identities can’t be made whole and remain unstable, their subjectivity oscillating between the inside of the voice and the outside of the body. Deleuze analyzes this operation in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s opera film, Parsifal (1982). Syderberg uses as soundtrack a pre-recording of Wagner’s opera with professional singers, but has different actors lip-syncing over the recording. There is a clear division between the body and the voice, an interstice that becomes disturbingly evident by having the eponymous male role portrayed by an actor who halfway through the film is replaced by a female actress: her appearance in stark contrast to the stentorian voice of the male tenor whose singing she lip-syncs to, or to the polyphony of voices that seem at times to be coming out of her body. It is a free indirect discourse, a voice and an act that are foreign to the body that contains them. In a comment that would be just as valid for Swoon, Deleuze explains that “there is no whole” in Parsifal, but only “the regime of the ‘tear’, where the division into body and voice forms a genesis of the image as ‘non-representable by a single individual’” (C2 268). Deleuze here, in the conclusion of his book, arrives to the point we made when we

Poteas 40 applied the interstice to (a series of) queer bodies. Much like non-normative bodies live “between”, the disjunction of voice and body creates a subject that is between identities. In both cases, the image and the individual can’t be reconstituted into a coherent whole and reflect an acentered, machinic individuation that resists artificial totalizations and representations. So, whether he intended to or not then, Deleuze here is very close to formulating his own version of a queer theory. Besides, what is Parsifal if not an epic drag performance? What fascinated Deleuze in Syberberg’s film, the disembodied voice and the voiceless body, the role-play and gender reversal, the tear between body and mind, are all characteristics that define drag performance, as this was described by Judith Butler when she argued for the social performativity of gender. Linstead and Pullen have already attempted a conjunction of Butler and Deleuze, via the first’s theory of performativity and the latter’s concept of rhizome. In their article, they argue that Butler’s conceptualization of gender as a performance limits the possibilities of thinking about it as a constantly differentiated multiplicity. So they theorized a rhizomatic gender that proliferates connections, “a performance of becoming which is brought together momentarily, interrupted constantly, and dispersed consistently” and noted “the creative significance of rupture, breaks and new connections” (1291; 1306-7). These productive constant interruptions and creative ruptures stem of course from the interstice and the Outside, but Linstead and Pullen never make the connection and don’t explore all the possibilities of their Deleuzian and Butlerian crossover. Following then our own thread from Swoon’s voice dub to Parsifal’s lip-sync to drag and gender performance we can see that the “regime of the tear” that characterizes them, is also what constructs a Deleuzian psychological automaton: an entity, who entirely dispossessed of his own thought, can only think thoughts that are not his and utter words that don’t come from him. The psychological automaton then becomes a reflection of “a profoundly divided essence of the psyche” that is unable to access his thoughts, but that simultaneously expresses a non-personalized machinic identity (C2 268). This approach opens up a door for a new appreciation of drag that remains in line with Butler’s analysis and Linstead and Pullen’s approach, but enriches both with a newfound understanding. In this case, drag expresses not simply the masquerade of femininity, but also the psychological automatism of gender, with the drag queen performing an exaggerated version of this feminized automaton: a woman, who can’t reach her own thoughts because they have been replaced by heteronormative clichés that take control of her exteriority and interiority. And at the same time due to the same fracture in her identity, she embodies the possibilities of a gender-rhizome, of a continuous becoming other.

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More so, if in drag the influence of external clichés in the constitution of femininity is revealed through their performative amplifications, Parsifal has a similar device: Front- projections of various images –people, landscapes, scenery- that are superimposed on the bodies of the actors and mix with their psychical exteriority. These external images occupy the bodies and inform the characters’ appearance without their volition, introducing “a visual space not only not seen by the actor himself, but with which he is associated without ever being a part of it” (C2 267). Like the heavy make-up and dresses layer the male body of the drag queen creating a hybrid identity, the front-projections of Parsifal, turn the body of the characters into a screen of outside influences. In the first case, these external influences are reappropriatted and defused through mockery, in Parsifal they are reconstructed and turned into a myth by revealing their source as “the redemptive voice” of Wagner (C2 270). Both performances then, become modes of resistance against regulatory institutions that want to discipline and inform the body. As long as it neutralizes its out-of-field and comes in touch with the Outisde, the psychological automaton can become something more than a mere puppet of out-of-field clichés. The divided bodies then can become an “absolute receiver or addressee” of the redeeming power or the falsehood of these influences and return in the space “between” (C2 332). This is what’s at stake at the “regime of the tear” in general. Whether it’s the sound of sirens that invade a queered space, the archival footage that takes over the images of Kalin’s camera, the clichés of the drag performances, and the front-projections that dominate genderfluid bodies, the external world of clichés always aims to inform the queer dissident and reterritorialize her. But the Outside, when it becomes constitutive of the image and of the bodies, allows for a resistance that the causal relations of the whole didn’t allow against the Law of the sirens. How can something as rigid and static as the Law inform an identity that can’t even be named, whose instability and malleability is not a mere characteristic amongst many, but exactly what comprises its acentered subjectivity? Perhaps this is why Kalin ends Swoon with one final image of resistance against a stable center of identity and representation. Creating a direct connection between the beholder of the cinematic image, the film and Leopold, Swoon ends with the image of an open eye as the narrator informs us that Leopold sued for “willful misrepresentation of his character” the writer of a book based on his life, and that after his death his eyes were transplanted to a blind woman. Leopold, even after his death, remains non-representable and diffused. Derek Jarman took the power of this instability to its limit, diluting even further the borders of selfhood so that internal and external, private and social, objective and subjective,

Poteas 42 mind and body become indiscernible. Partially blind from AIDS-related complications while making his last film Blue (1993), Jarman used only a static monochromatic blue image as the visual of his movie. This was the only thing he could see. In a way, we can consider it the ultimate subjective image, a consistent point-of-view shot, a literal representation of the artist’s vision throughout the whole film. But what constitutes this subjectivity? The body is absent, and yet present in its failing, an any-body-whatever in its absolute limit between actual and virtual, life and death, with a voice that belongs to it and with a voice that comes from elsewhere: The narration of personal stories about his sickness and the philosophical musings about death and the color blue that comprise the soundtrack of Blue, are provided by Jarman himself but also by his friends, their reciting anonymously passing from one female voice to the next male one. We are inside Jarman’s mind, we see what he sees, hear what he thinks, but it’s not a singular mind. Blue is an intimate, personal portrait of Jarman but it captures him through his connections, his diffusions, his becomings. Jarman is another. He is his friends, he is his influences, he is his clichés, he is the thousands of people who have died of AIDS, casualties of a senseless world. Like all the films that we examine, Blue is queer not because its maker was gay, but because it manages to capture the irreducible multiplicity that is selfhood and confront it with a world that insists on rationalizing its cruelty by irrationally labeling people, experiences, behaviors, identities. And by doing that, it blows wide open the boundaries of humanity and the rigid categories that come with it, categories that like the identity-based demark, have been created based on normalization, othering and exclusion. Tilda Swinton narrating Jarman’s thoughts is not a gender-bending queerness, but a queer human-bending. A homofluidity. A blind Jarman who thinks in a communal voice; a dead Leopold transplanted in someone else’s vision. They both become-others, challenging the idea of a sovereign, stable identity –especially one that is built upon the sensory-motor schema that extends from a supposedly veridical vision to action- and become a testament that to be a visionary seer who sees behind the clichés of the world, eyesight is not always necessary. And as a film that seizes images, bodies, thoughts directly from the Outside and brings them face to face with an intolerable situation –an imminent death, the criminal negligence of the world- Blue brings forth as we are about to see, an automaton very different from the one in drag performance and Parsifal. This automaton will be the culmination of the effects of a direct time in the image, the outcome of the regime of the tear in the thought both of the image and the spectator.

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2.1.3. Do Robots Think of Electric Sex? Swoon never attempts to provide any internal or external justification for the actions of its main characters. Leopold and Loeb’s homosexual relationship, sadomasochistic tendencies and their fascination with death that will lead to the murder of a 14-year-old boy, go beyond any psychological or sociopolitical rationalization. They don’t kill due to external influences like the intellectual crypto-queers of Rope who give a detailed exposition of their Nietzschean influences, nor duo to a pathologized pseudo-Oedipal complex like Norman Bates in Psycho. The couple, similarly to the birds they kill and mummify, operates based on instinct, driven by an animalistic obsession that defies explanation. But this isn’t a dialectical monism where man becomes an affective expression of nature, the two reunited in a rational whole. The any- spaces-whatever and the visual isolation of the characters we have already described, but also the mediation of nature by an artificial human element and vision (grainy archive footage, Leopold’s camera, taxidermied birds) leave no room for romanticism. Leopold and Loeb are as cut off from the natural world as they are from a heteronormative, lawful society. What is at play here is another kind of automatism, one that stresses the “difficulty of being, this powerlessness at the heart of thought” (C2 166). Deleuze is inspired by Heidegger’s infamous proclamation: “Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking” (qtd. in C2 156). The spiritual automatism that certain cinematic images advance exposes exactly that powerlessness to think which is inherent in our thought and uncovers “the fact that we are not yet thinking, the powerlessness to think the whole and to think oneself” (C2, 167, emphasis in the original). That the images don’t construct a whole but on the contrary are issued from an irrational Outside that severs our logical connections with the world, has the capacity to reveal the ineffectiveness of commonsense logic and by doing so to invigorate a truly independent thought. As Deleuze explains: “Thinking doesn't come from within, but nor is it something that happens in the external world. It comes from this Outside, and returns to it, it amounts to confronting it” (Negotiations 110). The distinction between the spiritual and the psychological automaton might seem trivial at this point but this is because the psychological automata we examined were limit cases. The two are in fact completely oppositional and that opposition is central to the political implications of Deleuze’s theory. The thoughts of the psychological automaton have been “stolen” and replaced by foreign ones; it is a rationalized powerlessness of thought that refers to external and internal conditions, society and psychology. The psychological

Poteas 44 automaton is a problem that rationality can confront and solve: its condition has a reasonable explanation that can be described, justified and treated. This restores thought to a powerful force that can logically deduce and rationalize everything, creating a centered subject thought is anchored to. But by losing its autonomy, thinking is conditioned by the internal and external clichés that govern the thinker and becomes a cliché itself. As we explained in the introduction then, all the supposedly objective explanations, rationalizations and solutions are doomed to become a projection of the thinker’s limited perception. With the spiritual automaton however, the “outside of the problem is not reducible to the exteriority of the physical world any more than to the psychological interiority of a thinking ego” (C2 174-5). What it presents is not a dispossession of thought by someone, for a series of reasons. It is dispossession of thought by thought itself. Thought then comes up upon a wall. It is not challenged by an external problem that tries to solve but by its own inability to think. “It is no longer thought which confronts repression, the unconscious, dream, sexuality or death” –which is as we saw a futile attempt- but “it is all these determinations which confront thought as higher ‘problem’” (C2 167). When we are confronted with the limitations of our thought, how can we claim to comprehend, quantify, label, measure or rationalize sexuality? The psychologist in Swoon, with his stilted, robotic delivery resembles a psychological automaton, believing he can construct a logical narrative about the internal situation of the characters and their external actions, falsely connecting the crime with their sexual identity. His alleged objectivity is riddled with clichés that hide the whole image and yet claim to reveal it. But when we have come vis-à-vis the limits of thought, these explanations fall flat and if anything, uncover the artificiality and shallowness of the institutions they are based on. It is clichés that the spiritual automaton exposes and achieves what the relation-image couldn’t: An independent thought. So curiously, “what forces us to think is ‘the inpower of thought’” (C2 168). The spiritual automaton par excellence for Deleuze, appears in Carl Th. Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964), the film “that inaugurates a new cinema” (C2 171). It is very telling that the inauguration of a cinema that introduces a new relation between film and thought comes from a movie with queer undertones. Gertrud is the story of a woman who refuses to compromise her ideas and expectations on love. Demanding the complete, unwavering devotion of her lovers, she abandons one by one all the men in her life that can’t fully commit themselves to her. What Deleuze reads in the character of Gertrud, is a woman who is able to see and experience the lack of love and affection in the world, the irrationality of men who believe they know how to love but instead, obsessed with riches and fame, dedicate their lives to

Poteas 45 meager activities. Struck by this intolerable situation that the mind can’t comprehend, Gertrud becomes mummified, and thus Dreyer films his characters as if they were hypnotized, performing choreographed, robotic movements. But in contrast to the psychological automatism of the men in the film, who appear hypnotized because they are the puppets of the intolerable, of the clichés that govern their internal and external world and make them convinced they have really loved her, Gertrud is mummified because as a spiritual automaton she can see beyond that. She can see that their love is insufficient and leads to the subjugation of women, that the entire world as we understand it and act on it is irrational. Gertrud then, dismissing our conventional ideas about love, marriage and relationships and refusing to settle for anything less other than unconditioned love, ends up rejecting all men. It is not difficult to see the queer connotations of this narrative and its rejection of heteronormativity that has lead critics to argue that what is “represented in the interstices of the text … is bisexuality, which constitutes the trouble of the text and generates and organises its complete set of displacements and exchanges" (Nash 12). Ignoring the semiotic structuralism of the argument, it is interesting that more than twenty years before Deleuze’s cinematic project, Nash located the bisexuality in “the interstices” of the images which generate displacements, since as we saw it is exactly there that queerness lies, on the space “between” that refuses territorialization, constantly displacing descriptions and meanings. The Gertrud-mummy creates a queer subversion of the world so it is not surprising that she has a NQC equivalent: Mike from My Own Private Idaho, a homeless, queer hustler who suffers from narcolepsy. Mike’s own intolerable is also an absence of love and affection. An absence that starts from his personal life as he was abandoned by his family and rejected by his love interest, and extends all around him as he is forced to do a job that requires him to exchange an artificial love for money. And like Gertrud who, after having been betrayed by her lover is so overwhelmed by the intolerable that she’s unable to speak and can only communicate via a song before finally collapsing, Mike every time his own intolerable engulfs him, automatically faints. And when Mike will confess his unrequited love to his gay-for-pay friend in the darkness of the night, he can only do it in whispers, the stuttering sentences barely coming out of his mouth. So great is the intolerable, the illogicality of the world that has left him without a family, a partner, friends; without love. At the end of the film, similarly to Gertrud who is alone and isolated from the world in her generic, empty house, Mike ends up on the same deserted road he inexplicably always finds himself at; a vacant any-space-whatever where clocks can be heard ticking but their pointers don’t move, an impossible road that “probably goes all around the world”. With their bond with the

Poteas 46 rational world severed, they are both in the interstice between the Outside where thought comes from, and the visible world where thought gets filled with clichés. The exact representation of the spiritual automaton is of no importance. It can be the mummified Gertrud, the narcoleptic Mike, the sadomasochistic killers Leopold and Loeb, the similarly disillusioned, HIV-positive, gay murderers in Araki’s The Living End (1992) who go on a killing spree motivated only by their intention to “fuck everything”, or Derek Jarman and his intercessors. What matters is its confrontation with the limits of thought, the rupture of its link with the logical, goal-oriented world and the reevaluation of this connection that it forces on thought. This understanding and acceptance of the failure of our own intellectual processes has the potential of undoing the entire sociopolitical construction that has been based on the infallibility of thought and the transcendence of truth and knowledge. This powerlessness is not an inferiority, but “part of thought, so that we should make our way of thinking from it” (C2 170). It is a rejection of traditional politics that are based on action and intellectual thinking. The theory that Judith Halberstam advances in The Queer Art of Failure, seems to be an extension of this Deleuzian mode of politics. In her book, Halberstam attempts to “locate all the in-between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony”,9 and imagines failure as a queer practice of resistance and subversion of heteronormativity” (2). By examining how forgetfulness, passivity, powerlessness, ignorance and stupidity –in other words the failure of intellect and the sensory-motor schema- can become “a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of the normal and the ordinary”, Halberstam echoes both Deleuze’s concept of spiritual automatism and Sedwick’s assertion that “[k]nowledge, after all, is not itself power … Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons” (70; 4). Halberstam and Sedwick of course don’t suggest we should all become amnesiacs and stupid, any more than Deleuze advocates for the audience’s inaction. Halberstam acknowledges the obvious dangers entailed in forgetting historical realities and the replication of political mistakes it can lead to, such as the repetition of the Iraq war and the Bush administration in the 90s and 00s. Like the mummy of Deleuze, Halberstam’s “failure” is merely a model of alternative thinking and being that interrogates the validity of widespread conceptions -of clichés- that limit our perception. These models permit us to examine what can we learn by questioning and devaluing –even momentarily- our ideas of success, intelligence or memory. I wish to investigate a bit deeper that crossroad between Deleuze and Halberstam, examining other forms and modalities of productive knowledge- powerlessness that are in tandem with the “queer failures” of Halberstam, since it is a

Poteas 47 synthesis can give us a different outlook on the queer functions of the spiritual automaton. In her own subversive reversal of politics and academic authorship, Halberstam gives an extensive analysis of the queer capacities of Dude, Where’s My Car (Leiner, 2000), a low- culture, abysmally bad film. The film provides a nonsensical plot that involves aliens, time travel and a lot of scatological humor and revolves around two completely oblivious and stupid white men who operate based not on a logical evaluation of themselves and their surroundings but based on a kind of automatism that stems from their low intellectual function. In one scene for instance, one of the characters automatically mimics the behavior of a monkey that he sees on TV and manufactures a hand-made tool, while every morning the characters forget the occurrences of the previous day and repeat the same actions over and over again. It is an “inpower of thought” taken to its absolute limits, a dude-bro version of spiritual automatism on steroids. Their powerlessness to think however, to construct a stable, coherent identity and a logical whole out of their situation, allows them to experience and be receptive to situations they wouldn’t otherwise be engaged in. Their forgetfulness and stupidity, says Halberstam, allows “for a free space of reinvention, a new narrative of self and other (60). So, during their absurd adventure they will be immersed in immigrant and queer spaces, socialize with transgender strippers and even partake in some guilty-free man-on-man French kissing. In parallel, Halberstam examines modern animated films that can become gateways to “alternative imaginings of community, space, embodiment, and responsibility” (44). She posits that the animated films she baptizes Pixarvolts –a portmanteau of Pixar and revolt- contain antihumanist discourses that “connect individualism to selfishness, to untrammeled consumption, and they oppose it with a collective mentality” (47). Dory in Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003) for example, is an example of a Pixarvolt character, whose silliness and forgetfulness leads her to constantly form new connections and relations without caring for their exact nature, purpose and goal. She is next to Marlin and Nemo, the separated father and son, neither as a mother nor a lover, she can inexplicably communicate with whales and every other species of the ocean, and will end up leading a small fish revolution. Given her affinity both to animation and simplemindedness, I find surprising that Halberstam dismisses Wall-E (Stanton, 2008) as merely providing “a critique of bourgeois humanism only long enough to assure its return” (22). I believe that Wall-E contains all the aforementioned elements of a Pixarvolt and brilliantly combines its communitarian message with the subversive, revolutionary queer potentials of failure and Deleuzian automatism. The film’s eponymous hero is a robot programmed to collect garbage in a post-apocalyptic, waste-filled Earth. Abandoned alone for centuries, sometime during his stay he developed

Poteas 48 sentience and although he continues to undertake his programmed tasks, he can also engage and appreciate activities that go beyond his original purpose. So, he salvages items from the garbage whose use and commodity value he ignores but repurposes them to his own needs, he makes friends with a cockroach, and watches on repeat Hello, Dolly! (Kelly, 1969) dancing to the tune of “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”. His simplemindedness and disregard of artificial sociopolitical human constructions, lead to a rejection of consumerism and commodity fetishism, to an inter-species friendship with what would have been considered a useless pest and to a queer obsession with old-timey musicals. He even seems indifferent in establishing a stable, embodied center of selfhood as -in a fascinating continuation of Leopold’s and Jarman’s homofluidity- he is seen substituting his broken eye with a discarded, spare eyepiece. And in a simple but effective scene, this little robot and his ignorance, destroy the gender binary. In his cluttered house, where he proudly keeps all his (useless to us) valuables, perfectly organized and categorized in little shelves and boxes, lies a collection of spoons and forks separated inside two plastic cups. But when Wall-E finds a spork –a singular utensil that is a combination of a spoon and a fork- which goes beyond the binary logic that he was used to, he doesn’t hesitate nor throws the item way. Making space for what he doesn’t understand, he simply puts it between the cups. Fork AND spoon. This is what happens when the psychological automaton fails, its thoughts reach its limits and turns queer. Wall-E the robot, an automaton by default, exemplifies the transition from psychological to spiritual automatism, from the external programming and conditioning of thought to the possibilities the acceptance of intellectual powerlessness allows. There is a perfectly queer sub-plot that demonstrates this even further. When Wall-E is inside the Axiom, the spaceship the last of humanity is sheltered, he goes into the repair ward where malfunctioning robots are being kept. These robots fail their predestined, singular purpose and, as if it was a mental facility where women were held as hysterical when they couldn’t accept their predetermined, gendered social role, the defunct automata are imprisoned in the ward awaiting for their involuntary, social reconditioning. Treated as useless, dangerous or sick, the robots reflect how society treats non-normative people who refuse to conform to its norms. But once again, it is this non-conformity, their failure and powerlessness to fulfill their role that permits the automata to see beyond the habitual everyday life and clichés and to short-circuit the psychological automatism of the world. The defective make-up robot assistant for example, fails to recognize Wall-E’s gender and oblivious of arbitrary social codes, applies some gorgeous eyelashes and pink blush on him. And when Wall-E frees the robots, they unite and as a heterogeneous, queer collective

Poteas 49 of proudly failing, inter-species dissidents repurpose their unique, “faulty” abilities against the uniform robot agents of the law that attempt to modulate their behavior. So, an electronic umbrella and the make-up helper with its mirror deflect laser shots and an overzealous boxer robot attacks the policing robots while a CPR resuscitator electroshocks them. And at the same time, all together they manage to reinvigorate the atrophic humans, whose perception extends only as far as their clichés-filled screens that constantly float in front of their eyes. By disrupting their habitual operations, the robots end up destabilizing everything humans thought they knew or believed they were seeing. They become harbingers of change, uncovering “what does not let itself be thought in thought, and equally… what does not let itself be seen in vision” (C2 168). This is the relation that Deleuze envisioned for cinema and the spectator. For as long as cinema “jolts the viewer into thought beyond thought, the spiritual automaton is … both inside and outside, inside the viewer and outside in the images” (Bogue 178). This is the babushka doll of Deleuze we mentioned in the introduction, where instead of the constant circulation of clichés that give rise to more clichés, cinematic images of visionary seers give rise to the internal spiritual automaton of the viewer, allowing him to see with an internal vision, what the clichés were hiding from his eyes. Of course we can argue that in the center of the film lies a heterosexual relationship between the clearly gendered Wall-E and EVE, whose happy ending restores normativity. We have to consider though, that this is a relationship between two completely dissimilar robots of different generations who have no obvious software (sexual?) compatibility. This interspecies, intergenerational, mismatched bond, forces us to rethink and reevaluate our definitions of relationships and their purpose, unlocking possible new modes of affection, belonging and connection. Wall-E does exactly that when his lack of self-identity drives him to fall in love with an incompatible model, forcing him to discover new ways to approach his love interest. In a beautiful scene, Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher to thrust himself in space and dance with EVE, who as a more advanced model can self-propel. Or, we can say that in this erotic scene between two individuals seemingly incompatible by any common logic, Wall-E, neither a spoon nor a fork, uses a detachable phallus to please his sexual partner. Like so many queer people who fall outside the gender binary and the multiplicity of “incompatible” sexual practices they can engage in, Wall-E ignores the imaginary barriers raised by thought. Faced with cases like these, where the commonsense, limiting human knowledge can’t explain or understand everything, the question by the psychological automaton of society always is: “how do they do it?” The reply of the defiantly ignorant spiritual automaton of queerness can only be: “Out there / Full of shine and full of sparkle /

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Close your eyes and see it glisten” (“Put On Your Sunday Clothes”, Hello, Dolly! OST).

2.2. Final Thoughts When we last left Hedwig, she was still in the organic regime of the movement-image, a victim of non-achievable Ideas who is continuously travelling, hiding behind cliché wigs and looking for her other half to make her whole again. During her parallel travels with Tommy, Hedwig hopes to either be reconciled with him or to prove that it is her songs that made him famous. She actually achieves both, gaining fame and –briefly- mending things with Tommy. But neither goal, the capitalist Idea of financial success or the platonic Idea of Love, that would also allow her a relatively stable gender identity, brings her the desired catharsis and wholeness. The closest that Hedwig comes to happiness is when she allows to open up her identities and completely reject the notion of completeness. Not coincidentally, this happens when she stops travelling, when her sensory-motor schema fails and she experiences her own (metaphorical) death and we progressively plunge deeper into the Outside. Halfway through her performance of “Exquisite Corpse”, Hedwig’s dancing suddenly becomes jerky and uncoordinated. Screams replace her singing as she drops on the floor looking like she’s convulsing. At this point, Hedwig finally removes her wig. This is the movement when she stops performing –her song, her identity, a predefined, closed Idea of gender- for an audience and instead performs her own death. And with her death, the cinematic image becomes aberrant as the disorienting, frantic cuts, the sudden fast motion, and the clash of different temporalities of images of the past and of a future we have not yet seen, fracture the sensory-motor schema of the audience who can’t unify all these irrational cuts and techniques into a totalizing, sensible whole. The Outside has torn the image. Within this chaos, a disconcerted Hedwig leaves the venue and the rest of the movie takes place outside any concrete place and time, as Hedwig undergoes a series of transformations, a continuous becoming of identities and bodies that have not been touched by social discourses, transcendental Ideas and clichés. As the final scene of a now completely naked and wigless Hedwig stumbling in a dark alley fades out, the spectator doesn’t know who that body is anymore, and has to confront his own preconceived notions about the constitution of subjectivity and selfhood. The last thing heard in the distorted audio before Hedwig leaves the venue, her final thoughts in a rationalized space, reflect her struggle throughout the film: “the words to

Poteas 51 complete the sentence that I began: I am ...”. Throughout the film Hedwig has assumed many identities: “I’m the new Berlin wall”, “I’m Farrah Fawcett”, “I’m a punk rock star”. But as we saw, these transformations are not an interstitial diffusion of selfhood, but the distinct poses of a very closed identity. It is not the rolling of a continuous becoming, but the rolling of the ouroboros towards the Ideas. It is only when the thought is powerless to finish the sentence, when there is nothing remaining that can complete Hedwig or the sentence, that she can find happiness. This is when the “I am…” is replaced by the “I is another”, when confronted with the intolerable she “dies”, when the Outside has torn her apart, untangling her ouroboros-identity and dissecting it in multiple acentered pieces that Hedwig will become whole, but a whole that is as open as the universe. “I is another…AND another… AND another…” The only words to complete the sentence then, are “I am… the regime of the tear.”

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Conclusion It might appear from our analysis that the movement-image is a problem that the time-image came to solve. This is far from true. The investigation we provided was based on a few key characteristics of the movement-image -namely the creation of a whole, its extendibility towards an external world, the process of integration and differentiation- that made the organic regime vulnerable to dangerous ideological totalizations. But the problem isn’t the movement-image itself, and the proof is the numerous masterpieces of classical cinema. The issue is the degenerate form that it can take when appropriated and manipulated to support an ideology, as I hope was made clear by my analysis of the relation-image. As an image of thought, the relation-image has vast capabilities for stimulating the critical thinking of the viewer. But as part of the organic regime, it doesn’t always have the necessary autonomy to do that. Thus, while we could read the demark as a sign of an identity-based queerness, at the same time we saw its mutation to a symbol of evil. So, the problem that we forced the time-image to confront hadn’t been set by the movement-image but by an institutionalized system of oppressions. But here’s the difference between our approaches in the two chapters. If we used he movement-image as simply a model for how certain ideological and hegemonic powers operate and the effects they have on human thought and identity, the time-image managed to subvert these powers due to its inherent characteristics. The movement-image wasn’t the problem but the time-image was the solution. It can be argued however, that we still used the time-image as merely a model in our examination: a model of queerness thought. But that is also false. We didn’t move from queer theory to cinema but the opposite. We used the Deleuzian cinematic concepts to reconceptualize queerness. So if anything, it was queerness that became a model for the multiplicity and immense political possibilities of the time-image. Therefore, we revealed its queer affinities but we didn’t exactly queer the time-image… we cinefied queerness. But what does that mean then, and why is it significant? The entire analysis of chapter two revolved around the new relation with thought that modern cinema developed and which is the result of the time-image’s unique ability to directly present time. What we examined was how the interstice and the Outside, agents of time, create tears in the sensory-motor schema, in and between the images, between the images and the external world, tears that are transferred in the spectator who experiences his own fractures with his internal and external world, with his own thoughts. The Outside then, gives rise to a spiritual automaton both in the image and the viewer, that contests the logic of

Poteas 53 hegemonic institutions. This is the automaton of the “I is another”, of a depersonalized, diffused and acentered camera-subjectivity that can see beyond the clichés of the world. But as we saw, this subjectivity and fight against the clichés is what characterizes queer thought as well, so that the activation of the spiritual automaton means an activation of a queer thinking. Does that mean the cinema of the time-image makes us queer? If we accept Ahmed’s simple definition that “[t]o make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things” then yes (161). The awakening of the automaton disturbs the internal and external order of things so significantly, that it definitely makes us queer. But if we consider that the spiritual automaton exists within thought as “an ‘unknown body’ which we have at the back of our heads”, then the time-image doesn’t queer us. We are already queer. It’s just that our queerness, like the automaton, has been deactivated by clichés and totalizations of the truth that create rigid, closed identities instead of opening upon the world. I do not propose here the queer as a universal subject, nor as a model of living and being. There is no queer subject to elevate to a universal level, but only ruptures, tears, so that becoming queer is becoming-other. And there is no queer model of being since queerness is the proliferation of connections, an unstable polymorphy of practices and ideas that can’t be homogenized. Besides if everyone is queer, then no one is! What I wish to advance is the idea of finding all those practices that, like “good” cinema” and queerness, have the potential of awakening the dormant spiritual automaton inside us; of enabling us to see and think without restoring a transcendental, platonic system of judgment centered around a sovereign subject. Cinema by itself, or queer theory and practice by itself can’t bring on this universal becoming. We need a synthesis of practices. “The question's nothing to do with the character of this or that exclusive group”, reminds us Deleuze. “[I]t's to do with the transversal relations that ensure that any effects produced in some particular way (through homosexuality, drugs, and so on) can always be produced by other means” (Negotiations 11). So we need to find the queerness in things, or cinefy them, tear them up so that everyday practices and experiences that have been conditioned by Ideas and clichés, can reveal all their facets to us instead of short circuiting the automaton. The challenge is about creating an assemblage of transversal relations, an ever expanding machine that can explore the vastness of the metacinematic universe though grant practices and intelligence, thorough art and through the largest, most daunting philosophical questions. But at the same time –and most importantly- it is about finding cinema in the smallest of things, in the powerlessness of thought, in forgetfulness and silliness, in rarified blue images and in our singing while we gather up trash and make friends with pests.

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Notes

1. For brevity, from here on out I will be citing Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 simply as C1 and C2 respectively. 2. Deleuze himself uses the word “presentation” when talking about images, avoiding the word “representation” –a word that has connotations of imitation or replacement. With representation, the set that represents things is a centre that attempts to draw “things out of their native darkness” (C1 60). What is being represented can’t have its own, independent substance. With “presentation” however, an equal and acentred relationship is formed between the thing and the set that functions as a presentation of the thing. “Presentation” reflects that “all consciousness is something” (C1 56). This distinction will lose its meaning in the time-image, since there can be no differentiation between objective reality and its (artistic) depiction. The actual and the virtual are indistinguishable so that the re-presentation of the thing is the thing and vice versa. 3. In the off-Broadway musical the film is based on, John Cameron Mitchell was playing both Hedwig and Tommy, further intensifying the impression of two halves that will be reunited in a complete whole. 4. Alexander Doty in “Queer Hitchcock” provides a exhaustive overview of scholarly queer readings of Hitchcockian characters. He mentions at least 29 characters that have been associated with queerness. 5. For a comprehensive historical analysis of images of homosexuality in Hollywood and their institutional censorship, refer to Russo’s seminal book The Celluloid Closet, and the 1995 documentary film with the same name. 6. Ruby B. Rich described NQC as Homo-Pomo (from homosexual postmodernism) since the films shared a series of postmodern characteristics and politics: “appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history … breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics … irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive” (18). 7. The allusions to sadomasochism don’t stop there. There are multiple references to relationships of domination, depictions of slavery, and a sexualized fascination with death that make the movie an excellent study case for a Deleuzian schizoanalysis. 8. These are all sexually diverse masses but the diversity unfortunately stops there. These groups of people are overwhelmingly white, young, traditionally beautiful and predominantly male.

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9. It is remarkable how close Halberstam is to Deleuzian thought, without ever examining him closely in her entire oeuvre, other than referencing his analyses on sadomasochism. Here she even uses language that could have been taken straight out of a Deleuzian lexicon, talking about locating the “in-between” spaces, and at another passage discussing how academic disciplinary correctness does not allow “for visionary insights or flights of fancy” (6, my emphasis).

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Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print. Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., 2006. Print. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print. Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Cohen, Jeffrey J., and Todd R. Ramlow. "Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer theory and Inhumanism." Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 11 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006): 12. Davis, Nick. The Desiring-image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-image. London: Athlone, 1986. Print. ---. Cinema 2: The Time Image. London: Athlone, 1989. Print. ---. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Print. Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. ---. "Queer Hitchcock." A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. Ed. Thomas M. Leitch and Leland A. Poague. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 473-90. Print. Film Society of Lincoln Center. “"Swoon" 20 Years Later: Tom Kalin & Craig Chester.” Online video. YouTube. YouTube, 15 June 2012. Web. 18 May 2016. Flaxman, Gregory, ed. The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2000. Print. Freeman, Elizabeth. "Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory." A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 295-314. Print. ---. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

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Hall, Stuart. "New Ethnicities." Ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley. London: Routledge, 1996. 441-49. Print. Hallward, Peter. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Halperin, David M., and Valerie Traub, eds. Gay Shame. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2009. Print. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film; the Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford UP, 1960. Print. Linstead, S., and A. Pullen. "Gender as Multiplicity: Desire, Displacement, Difference and Dispersion." Human Relations 59.9 (2006): 1287-310. Print. Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York UP, 2002. Print. Lorde, Audre. "Learning from the 60s." Sister Outsider. Revised ed. Berkeley: Ten Speed, 2007. 134-44. Print. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988. Print. Nash, Mark. Dreyer. London: British Film Institute, 1977. Print. Nigianni, Chrysanthi, and Merl Storr, eds. Deleuze and Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Print. Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. Print. Rodowick, David Norman. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Print. Rohy, Valerie. "Return from the Future." Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen. Albany: State U of New York, 2011. 151-60. Print. Rich, B. Ruby. New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Print. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995. Print. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Axiomatic." Introduction. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: U of California, 1990. 1-63. Print. Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Maiden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Print. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.

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Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Stryker, Susan. "Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity." Radical History Review 2008.100 (2008): 144-57. Web. 10 Oct. 2014. Žižek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Print.

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Filmography Blue. Dir. Derek Jarman. Channel 4, 1993. DVD. Dude, Where's My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2000. DVD. Edward II. Dir. Derek Jarman. British Screen Productions, 1991. DVD. Finding Nemo. Dir. Andrew Stanton Stanton and Lee Unkrich. Pixar Animation Studios, 2003. Gertrud. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Palladium Film, 1964. DVD. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Dir. John Cameron Mitchell. Fine Line Features, 2001. DVD. Hello, Dolly!. Dir. Gene Kelly. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1969. DVD. My Beautiful Laundrette. Dir. Stephen Frears. Working Title Films, 1985. DVD. My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. New Line Cinema, 1991. DVD. Parsifal. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Bavaria Film, 1982. DVD. Paris Is Burning. Dir. Jennie Livingston. Miramax, 1990. DVD. Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Shamley Productions, 1960. DVD. Rebecca. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Selznick International Pictures, Inc., 1940. Rope. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Bros., 1948. DVD. Strangers on a Train. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Warner Bros., 1951. DVD. The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures, 1963. DVD. The Celluloid Closet. Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Arte, 1995. DVD. The Living End. Dir. Gregg Araki. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1992. Shortbus. Dir. John Cameron Mitchell. THINKFilm, 2006. DVD. Swoon. Dir. Tom Kalin. New Line Features, 1992. DVD. Wall-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Pixar Animation Studios, 2008. DVD. Wild Side. Dir. Sébastien Lifshitz. Maïa Films, 2004. DVD.