An Audiovisual Brain: Towards a Digital Image of Thought in Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma Pasi Vliaho, University of Turku

papeva@utu.
I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by - Georges Dahumel1 moving images.

Chapter Four in Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma (France, 1989-1998) is titled Le contrle de lunivers. It starts off with an investigation into, what thinking is, and then proceeds to explore how the cinema, under the name of Hitchcock, is able to take almost total control over human thought, memory, perception, and sensibility. The implicit question deduced from the ones above goes: Is there a substantial connection between the cinema and thought? In its formal organization as well as in its subject matter, Histoire(s) questions what cinematic thinking is, or, what is called thinking in the age of cinematographic technologies. Of course, when posed in the form of What is?, the question concerns transcendental critique. Histoire(s) reects upon thought and the cinema by plunging into the universe of moving images and meditating on its working mechanisms. Essential here, as Friedrich Kittler describes, is that the cinema is a psychotechnology, a medium that instantiates the neurological ow of data (Kittler 1999, p.159-161). In other words, the circuit between the cinema and thought is of a special kind. Gilles Deleuze calls it a spiritual automaton producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly (Deleuze 1989, p.156). In my analysis I shall pick three machines an editing machine, a typewriter, and a television set which function as circuits, through which the transcendental critique of cinematic thinking in Histoire(s) proceeds. In fact, these machines are parts of the concrete assemblage of concepts, i.e. the spiritual automaton of Histoire(s). However, the transcendental critique in Histoire(s) presupposes an immanent principle of functioning, an image of thought, of its own. Shifting the emphasis from What is? to a simple How?, I nd through a more direct study on the aesthetics of Histoire(s) a digital synthesizer underlying the audiovisual events on the screen. Although the digital synthesizer refers to the digital image processing techniques used in Histoire(s), it exceeds a purely technological denition, for it aims at naming the force and the structure (of digitality) immanent in the distribution of the spiritual automaton in play. The digital synthesizer is a concept that describes the digital Idea an Idea which Deleuze denes as a system of multiple, non-localisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms (Deleuze 1994, p.183). The digital synthesizer traces here presicely the way in which consistency is given to audiovisual assemblages in order to enable something to be thought. Thinking, determined by Ideas, takes place in spatio-temporal dynamisms, and therefore focus shall be put on space and time special for the digital circuit produced by the synthesizer. A Conceptual Machinery One recurring visual theme in Histoire(s) du cinma is a close-up of a strip of lm rolling back and forth, accelerated and decelerated in an editing machine. In Deleuze and Flix Guattaris terminology, the machine would be called an abstract machine and
Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds),Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, N:o 49 E-book at [http://www.utu./hum/mediatutkimus/affective/proceedings.pdf], Media Studies, Turku 2001.

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the results of production machinic assemblages. In the cinema, a machinic assemblage can be dened as a shot, or as a composition of signaletic material which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written) (Deleuze 1989, p.29). The abstract machine, on the other hand, is the principle or logic of composition of assemblages, i.e. montage. Especially in the case of Histoire(s), montage plays a central role; being the main subject of concern, montage is the principal tool used to explore movement and therefore cinematographic thinking as such.2 As the strip of lm rolling in the machine suggests, the connection between thought and the cinema relies on the autonomic status of cinematic movement. According to Deleuze, cinematic movement is independent of a moving body or of individual consciousness. Movement has two aspects, a translation of parts in space and a qualitative change in duration. Movement crystallizes in the shot which expresses both a relative change in space and an absolute change in time. In addition, montage constitutes the shot by forming intervals of movement and therefore introduces the temporal dimension into the cinema. This temporal dimension, an interval, acts like a consciousness. It is in the rst place a mental dimension, and it founds the connection between the cinema and thought. Deleuze thinks there is no difference between the working of the brain and the cinematographic interval: both function by forming a temporal gap, a duration, between action and reaction. (Deleuze 1986, p.11 & 19-20 & 61-64.) In this way, it is to be understood that [t]he brain is the screen. [] Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion [auto-mouvement], never stops tracing the circuits of the brain (Deleuze 2000, p.366). Consequently, there is a spiritual aspect a priori in the cinema, the thinking machinism. Being the logic of the composition of assemblages, montage consitutes an audiovisual image of thought an image of the preconditions for thinking, of what it means to think and to direct oneself in thought (Deleuze & Guattari 1993, p.45). But this does not mean abstract reasoning conditioned by, or pointed towards, supersensible transcendental ideas, since a lm is always already a body composed of sensible material. This is suggested in Histoire(s) 4A, when a decelerated shot of moving hands follows a voice-over saying:But the real human condition is to think with ones hands.3 Being and thought go hand in hand; they presuppose one another and are inseparable from one another (ibid., p.46). In addition, we are repeatedly (e.g. 2B) told that only the hand that effaces can write4. Along with the editing machine, an electronic typewriter (an old IBM) is a recurring theme in Histoire(s): usually Godard taps a few letters and then the machine starts its own, seemingly endless writing process like the constant ow of images in Histoire(s) in general. According to Trond Lundemo, the basic visual element, or alphabet, of the cinema is the photogram, which in Histoire(s) is scrutinized in various ways, like for example, by images of paintings set in motion, by shots of a moving lm strip, by extreme decelerations, or by dissolvings of two or more layers of images. For Lundemo, the status of the photogram is paradoxical as it constitutes the premise for the visual dimensions of a lm, but it is never visible in isolation (Lundemo 1995, p.32). The photogram cannot be singled out into a frame on a lm strip and therefore it cannot be regarded as an empirical object solely. In addition, the photogram is not a privileged instant in space and time. Rather, the photogram exists and can be conceived only in movement. It is the matter of movement central to the interval, and therefore it can be posited as the germ of a mental activity in a lm, constantly shifting between visibility and invisibility. (ibid., p.32-37.) Being material as well as immaterial, the photogram marks the immanence between the cinema and thought. The ambiquity of visibility and invisibility, of being and thinking, gives the photogram an existence as a cinematic Idea (ibid., p.44). A decelerated shot of moving hands is a reection on the movement of cinematic thinking proceeding through photograms a decomposition of movement and thus a dif271

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ferentiating study on the immanence (see ibid.). However, as the differentiation of the simultaneously writing and effacing hand suggests, an Idea consists of only partial, or even disparate combinations, and therefore it lacks in its essence a coherent identity. An Idea is not a representation but an act movement of thought. In this sense, Ideas should be considered, as Deleuze suggests, pure multiplicities which do not presuppose any form of identity in common sense but, on the contrary, animate and describe the disjoint exercise of the faculties from a transcendental point of view (Deleuze 1994, p.194). An Idea is a differential of thought, which is actualized in spatio-temporal dynamisms in accordance with a time and a space immanent in the Idea. The actualization is a violent event, in which the spatio-temporal determinations incarnated in the Idea are capable of directly affecting organisms. (ibid., p.194 & 211-219.) A third encounter with a machine takes place in Histoire(s) 2B, in which Godard puts his head into an empty television set. This is a rather fundamental way of exhibiting the connection between man and machine which resembles the state of almost total immersion: the brain can be said to be the screen. According to Philippe Dubois, in Histoire(s) Godard plunged into a sort of absolute of image-being, where video as a state, a mode of being, thinking, and living, became a second skin, Godards own second body (Dubois 1992, p.182). In this circuit, the signaletic material in movement forms neuronal shock waves, which force us to think (see Deleuze 1989, p.156 & 189). The act of thinking is a shock created by cinematographic signs, the violent actualization of an Idea. Thinking is an affect forced by a fundamental encounter which is to be separated from recognition, for it can only be sensed (Deleuze 1994, p.139-140). A lm can not be reduced to an object of recognition consisting of perceptible qualities only, and as an assemblage of imperceptible signs it exceeds the limits of human consciousness, those of a Cogito. There is an unthinkable modality in cinematographic technologies. The actualization of Ideas is an accidental event, which occurs like Godards brain in between the constant ow or noise of moving images reacting to each other. The Digital Circuit In Histoire(s) du cinma there is an invisible machine that pre-exists and is immanent in the three other machines considered above the digital synthesizer, of which the principle of functioning extends both to visual and auditive assemblages. The digital synthesizer encodes all auditive and visual information into virtually innite number of combinations between 0s and 1s, and consequently renders malleable two hitherto distinct formal categories. Without this malleability of categories into an unexplored synthesis, the transcendental critique of the three machines would not be possible, for every conscious exercise implies the unconscious of pure thought, in this case the digital Idea (see Deleuze 1994, p.155). Or, as Kittler asserts, [t]echnologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse (Kittler 1990, p.232). According to Philippe Dubois, a completely new gure of style in Godards video works emerging after 1988 is the repetitive, blinking effect of super-fast ash shots (Dubois 1992, p.182). In Histoire(s) shots accelerated to their extreme make up the breath-taking pulse of formal organization of assemblages inscribed in computerized editing system. Extremely rapid, ickering montage between two images or two or more layers of images obscures contours and characteristics of objects even to a point of irrecognisability, and the accelerated throb of images constitutes a perception that is closer to vibratory sensation than to visual recognition (ibid.). The screen becomes a eld of energetic rhythms instead of a locus of representation. Blinking video-vibration approaches pure movement and thus pure form (see Aumont 1999, p.98). Vibrating reverberations and superimpositions call for what Paul Klee named point gris, the gray point that is non-dimensional, situated in the 272

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intersection between dimensions (Klee 1985, p.56). In this sense, the synthesizer is a purely expressive machine that harnesses the intensive and informal forces of Cosmos. In the digital circuit thinking becomes a creative, rather than a pre-modeled event, for it takes place in the rhythmic synthesis between malleable material and force, not between matter and form.5 In terms of technology, the material circuiting in the synthesizer are electrons. Therefore, as Laura U. Marks notes, the digital synthesizer, even though encoded in a string of 0s and 1s, does not form purely symbolic and immaterial space. Electrons partake in wave forms that unify all matter, and consequently digital image in its essence plunges into a material being which it owes to interconnected subatomic particles. (Marks 1999.) However, the logic of the connections of electrons does not conform to traditional modes of representation (e.g. logical causality). In accordance with the quantum theory, the relations between electrons are non-localisable. Electrons perform discontinuous quantum jumps. As Arthur Miller describes, The electron makes a quantum jump by disappearing from one stationary state and reappearing in another one, somewhat like the Cheshire cat (Miller 1996, p.92). Therefore electronic space cannot be viewed in Cartesian terms as consisting of constants and organized in privileged directions. Space has no center and it is conceived as being under continuous becoming. Yvonne Spielmann notes that this transgression of coherence and xity concerns the ination and mapping of space rather than its depiction (Spielmann 1999, p.138). Relatedly, Deleuze denes that space approaches omnidirectionality, constantly varying its angles and co-ordinates. Digital images are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. (Deleuze 1989, p.265.) In Histoire(s) boiling lava is a constant gure; at this point the screen reaches, as Jean-Louis Leutrat puts it, a veritable atomism consisting of bombardment of aural and visual particles (Leutrat 1992, p.27). The digital image is a condensation, and perhaps in the last resort even a burst, of pure energy. The condensation is achieved with matte and layering techniques, through which the synthesizer produces clusters of multiple layerings of different images or image elements. These clusters form a huge collage called Histoire(s) du cinma. The method of assembling images or layers of one image together, in other words of cutting and pasting, is precisely what Deleuze suggested when speaking of Godard: the conjunction AND (Deleuze 1992, p.40). However, ANDs between visual and aural images do not mean dialectical either-or relations. After having taken his head out the TV set, Godard yells Albertine, the words un mystre appear on the screen, and the image of Godard begins to dissolve with an image of a boy playing a ute; at a certain point of the dissolving, the combination of the two images forms vague contours of a female body. The AND is a multiplicity that includes all actual and virtual relations and destroys existing identities situated on a boundary between the two elements. The digital synthesizer is able to afrm what is as well as what is not even difference as such (see Spielmann 1999, p.143). It can simultaneously present the factual and simulate the non-factual and thereby form disjunctive syntheses between traditionally contradictory elements. Consequently, in Histoire(s) unitary or organic being is replaced by synthetic becoming. Thought that proceeds by disjunctive ANDs is always acentered in between as a rhizomatic system that makes disparate connections between remote things. As Gregory Ulmer suggests in his teletheory of electronic audiovisual technologies, a logic of conduction has priority over traditional modes of inference (e.g. induction, deduction) (Ulmer 1989, p.61-67). AND-assemblages emphasize spatial density and texture. Multi-layered images, superimpositions, and vibrations are devoid of out-of-eld, and therefore, as Deleuze argues, the screen itself constitutes an opaque and intensive surface of information on which data are inscribed (Deleuze 1989, p.265). This results in breaking up the linear continuity and temporal connecting function of montage of classical (analogue) cinema (Spielmann 1999, p.139). Instead of a chronological and rational linkage, 273

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clusters induce an interstice, irrational false continuity, between two images or elements of images (Deleuze 1989, p.179). Movement in an interstice is aberrant. It proceeds by quantum jumps; it is the form of change through time. Time, on the other hand, is not subordinated to movement. Time is nonchronological and change itself, the affection of self by self which manifests in an interstice (ibid., p.83). In Histoire(s) each pixel is a transformational point; imperceptible, unthought energy glows on the image surface when one image suddenly grows out of a part of another image. Transformations are due to the pure empty form of time, the absolute outside, which breaks the order of the present and directly affects bodies causing sudden metamorphoses. The digital image regarded as a burst of energy is an event, an instant, in which the past and the future get mixed and even disperse relations in the present by opening forms with their actual qualities up to purely virtual elements.6 The extreme velocity of aural and visual particles achieved by the force of pure empty form of time in Histoire(s) exceeds the limits of formal categories of here-and-now, and brings to the surface that which was unpresentable. Thus, with the digital image perception tends towards halluzination, towards a super-human and unnatural third eye consisting of mental relations. The editing machine, the typewriter, and the television set are concepts set in accelerating motion by the digital synthesizer, which trace how cinematic thinking proceeds. In other words, they extract from an audiovisual brain called the cinema the essence or entity of its movement, i.e. the act of thinking when all qualities are erased, in its pure form. This is achieved only through disjunctive synthesis of the digital image: in Histoire(s) 4A a rapidly repeated shot of ying birds growing out of a still image of Marilyn Monroe is neither a thought or an idea of birds ying nor a thought or an idea of Marilyn, but rather an imperative to think. In this way the transcendental critique is restored in non-localisable and virtual relations in a rhizomatic digital brain, and consequently, digital assemblages can do nothing but stammer. Histoire(s) lacks self-expression: quite often the speech of Godard is rendered almost incomprehesible by metallic reverberation. In fact, there is no I to express oneself. There are only cybernetic loops or circuits of images produced by the synthesizer. However, the synthesizer never reproduces one image as it is. The machine thinks, although in a brutal way from a human point of view, since it produces absolute inhuman and unthinkable differences. The photogram, i.e. a burst of energy, in an interstice is an anomaly, a monster that effaces an individual memory7 like the repeated ickering between a porno clip and shots of corpses in a concentration camp in Histoire(s) 4A. The digital Idea is never clear. It is distinct, because it grasps the differential relations of energetic rhythms on the image surface but obscure because it is always already divided by time and therefore never actualized in its whole.

Endnotes
Georges Dahumel: Scnes de la vie future (1930) cited Benjamin 1988, p.238. For example, Jacques Aumont thinks Histoire(s) du cinma is in the rst place a study on the possibilities of cinematographic montage, especially in regard to thought:Les gestes de montage sont multiplis: plusieurs par seconde certains moments, rpts, varis grce notamment la nouvaut du mixage dimages. Mais tous ont cette mme charge dessai: il faut essayer de savoir ce que peut un geste de cinma, comme Spinoza voulait savoir ce que peut un corps (Aumont 1999, p.15). 3 Mais la vraie condition de lhomme, cest de penser avec ses mains. 4 Seul la main qui efface peut crire. 5 Deleuze and Guattari dene the synthesizer as follows:[Le synthtiseur] unit les disparates dans le matriau, et transpose les paramtres dune formule une autre. Le synthtiseur, avec son opration de consistance, a pris la place du fondement dans le jugement synthtique priori: la synthse y est du molculaire et du cosmique, du matriau et de la force, non plus de la forme et de la matire, du Grund et du territoire (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, p.424).
1 2 6

In Logique du sens (1969) Deleuze opposes the pure empty form of time that he calls Ain to the chrono-

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_affective encounters_ logical order of time, Chronos, in a following manner:Daprs Ain, seuls le pass et le futur insistent ou subsistent dans le temps. Au lieu dun prsent qui rsorbe la pass et le futur, un futur et un pass qui divisent chaque instant le prsent, qui le subdivisent linni en pass et futur, dans les deux sens la fois. [] Alors que Chronos exprimait laction des corps et la cration des qualits corporelles, Ain est le lieu des vnements incorporels, et des attributs distincts des qualits (Deleuze 1969, p.192-193). Jacques Aumont also notes the signicance of the effacement of an indivual memory in Histoire(s):Les plans reviennent, les images reviennent, mais ce nest jamais la mme part deux qui demeure obscure, jamais la mme part qui chappe au souvenir pour entamer ce dur et douloureux travail de loubli qui, seul, constitue le Souvenir sur lequel la pense existe. Le montage est un outil de loubli, parce quon ne se
7

souvient que de ce qui a dabord t oubli [] (Aumont 1999, 26).

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Marks, L.U., 1999. How Electrons Remember. Millenium Film Journal [online], 34/1999. Available from: http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ34/LUMframeset_horiz.html [Accessed 4 Sep 2001]. Miller, A.I., 1996. Visualization Lost and Regained: The Genesis of the Quantum Theory in the Period 1913-1927. In: T. Druckrey, ed. Electronic Culture. Technology and VisualRepresentation. New York: Aperture. Spielmann, Y., 1999. Aesthetic Features in Digital Imaging: Collage and Morph. Wide Angle 21 (1), 131-148. Ulmer, G., 1989. Teletheory. Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York & London: Routledge. Filmography Histoire(s) du cinma 1A-4B, 1989-1998. Video. Directed by Jean-Luc GODARD. France: Gaumont International.

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