Deleuze Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student (Contemporary Thinkers Reframed)

Deleuze AJ

m, a 3

CD Q

Damian Sutton Be David Martin-Jones

LB. TAU R IS

Published in

2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com

In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press, New York NY

Copyright

175 Fifth Avenue,

10010

© Damian Sutton and David Martin Jones, 2008

The right of Damian Sutton and David Martin Jones to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN:

978 1845115470

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full

CIP record for this book is available from the Library of

Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available

Typeset in Egyptienne F by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Page design by Chris Bromley Printed and bound in the

UK by TJ International. Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

Acknowledgements List of illustrations

vii ix

Foreword: Deleuze reframed?

xi

Part One Introduction. What is a rhizome?

3

Chapter 1. Gaming in the labyrinth

11

David Martin-Jones Chapter 2. Virtual structures of the Internet

Damian Sutton Part Two Introduction. What is becoming? Chapter 3. Minor cinemas

45 51

David Martin-Jones Chapter 4. Becoming art

Damian Sutton

65

27

Parf Three I ntroduction. What is duration?

85

Cha pter 5. Movement-images, time-images and hybrid-images in cinema

David Martin-Jones Cha pter 6. Time (and) travel in television Damian Sutton Conclusion: Reframing Deleuze Notes

129

Select bibliogra phy Glossary I ndex

141 145

137

123

107

91

Acknowledgements

This book i s the product of many fruitful discus sions that we have had together over many years , as well as discus sions we continue to have as s cholars of philosophy and visual culture. We have both been excited and frus trated by Deleuze, and we both continue to enjoy the cut and thrust of the debate ove r h i s work, and are genuinely thankful that we were introduced to a philosopher who could make so many new thoughts ari s e in u s . We are aware that Deleuze and his work can s eem remote or impenetrable to others , however, and thus it is als o from the discussions we have had with colleagu e s and students that we h ave been able to fo cus out attenti o n on the extrao rdinary contribution of Deleuze to philosophy, as well as his contributi on with Felix Guattari. We have re solved to help others understand what we consider to be the most important concepts that Deleuze developed, and we hope that this gui de i s succ e s s ful in introducing new thinkers to Deleuze and his work. We hope the reader will not stop at this book but remain thirsty for more by and on Deleuz e , as we do. There are numerous commentari e s on Deleuze, and many useful analyses made that help develop his ideas and provide new methods of understanding. It has been a great privilege to get to know so m any of tho s e writers from whom we h ave drawn ide a s , and who have b ecome welcome friends and colleagues . This guide would not have been pos sible without the fruitful and challenging discus s i on s we have had with them, almo st too numerous to mention. For support, information and inspiration we would like to give special thanks to Antonio C arlo s Amorim, B ettina Bildhauer,

Philip Drake, Amy Herzog, L aura U. Marks, Bill Marshall, Helen Monaghan, Soledad Montane z , John Mullarkey, Nicholas Oddy, Patricia Pisters , Anna Powel l , John R ajchman, Angelo Restivo , D avid R o dowi ck and Karen Wen ell. In addition, we would like to thank the staff in our departments for their supp ort, and especially the students in our undergra duate and p o s tgraduate classes at Glasgow School of Art, Northumbria University and the University of St An drews . In particular, thanks should go to students on the MA in Film Studies at Northumbria University in 2 0 0 3-4, for engaging deb ates over recent films such as The Cell. Finally, we would like to thank the editorial team at LB. Tauris for helping us develop this guide, and for their advice and support throughout.

List of illustrations

Figure 1 . Mysterious Skin (d. Gregg Araki , Desperate Pictures/

Antidote Film s , 2 004) supplied by the Ronald Grant Archive . 5 9 Figure 2. Rachel Whiterea d , House ( 1 993) courtesy of the Gagosian

Gallery © Rachel Whiteread. Photo c redit: Sue O rmerod.

77

Fig u re 3. The Cell (d. Ta rsem Singh, New Line C inema, 2000)

supplied by the Ronald Grant Archive . Figure

4. Doctor Who

99

(B B C , 2007) copyright © B B C .

1 13

Foreword: Deleuze reframed?

This book is a brief introduction to some of the key phil o sophical motifs , theori e s and approaches of one of the twentieth century's most imp ortant philosophers , and one who s e ideas have strongly i nfluenced our p a s s age into the twenty first. Gilles Deleuze ( 1 925 95) was b orn in Pari s , and studied under Ferdinand Al quie and Jean Hyppolite . As a philosopher he developed a fairly predictable career, which s aw him work at I'Universite de Provence and later at l'Universite de Paris VIII, Vincennes/Saint Deni s , where he worked until h e retired in 1 9 8 7 . His colleagues included Jean Fran-

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than it i s a game about impris onment and escape. C ertainly, the

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sirens that s ound as the Pac Man nears es cape suggest as much.

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As the Pac Man eats each of the little pills he creates a cleared

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channel. and the more channels he clears the closer he is to

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escaping from the maze. In fact, the only way for the Pac Man to

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deterritoriali s e

to literally move on from this s p ace

is to

continually move in different direction s , hide , avoid the gho sts as much as possible, and use the supercharge to ambush them as they converge on him. In this respect, Pac Man can be considered les s a representation of the process of colonis ation than a representation of the process of perpetual evasion and deterritorialised movement deployed in order to combat colonisation. To return to our example from the intro duction to thi s p art, the movements of the Pac Man are a little like that of the Vietcong in their tunnels . His constant shifting of direction traces the trajectory of hit and run guerrilla warfare . Thus , although the s tatic space through which the Pac Man m oves is n o t rhizomati c , his m ovements are rhi zomati c , because they deterritoriali s e and transform the sp ace through which he move s . In addition to the textual level. though , what

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II

potenti al i s there for de

or reterritorialis ation of the gamer's

identity while playing video games? The ga ming experience: de- and reterritoria lisations

Several theories exist that view the gaming process as offering the p otential for the gamer to deterritori alise his or her identity. Most obviously, gaming i s a form of play, an action in which people tradition ally 'l o s e themselves'. When playing a game the gamer usually experience s the game world through an avatar. An avatar is a character in the game world that stands in for the gamer. S ome c la s s ic examples of avatars would include Pac Man (and, indeed, Ms Pac Man) , or Mario from Donkey Ko ng and the Super

Mario game s . More recent examp les would include third person shooters , such a s Lara C roft in Tomb Raider and Solid Snake in "tl

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Metal Gear Solid, characters in first person shooters , such as the anonymo u s space marine in Doom, or Gordon Freeman in Half

Life, the various family members that garners give their own names to in The Sims, and so on. At its most b asic level, then, the presence

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of the avatar means that, once immers e d in a video game , the

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gamer c an literally become another p erson for a while . Moreover,

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in first and third person shooters it is not uncommon for a m ap indent als o to appear in the c o mer of the s creen, requiring the gamer t o maintain a rather s ophisticated visual overview of the game world, noting the p osition of his/her avatar on the m ain s creen and on the map in the corner. Here the gamer is further deterritorialised from his/her own identity, controlling an avatar that is at once visibly 'here' and 'there ' , at once both T and 'he/she'. More over, each time we play a vi deo game the experience is different. As we learn to play games more and more effectively we transfo rm ourselves , the development of the avatar's progre s s within the game mirroring the improvement of our skills a s garners

improving o u r knowledge a n d exp ertis e i n the pro c e s s .

Thi s c o u l d b e considered a form of deterritoriali s ation of the gamer that is built into the computer game . Gonzalo Fras ca, for

instance , argues that some games are less interested in p roviding the gamer with a s e t goal to reach ( a s first

and third person

sho oters generally dol than with enabling the gamer to explore multiple creative possibilities. Frasca cites SimCity as an example of this type , a s it has the p otential to b e noticeably different every time the gamer constructs a new city." In s u ch games there is an open ended p otential for the gamer to deterritori ali s e his/her identity. Thi s p o tential is multiplied again in multiplayer game s such as Quake, The Thing and Half Life: Counter Strike, where there are more possibiliti e s for new experiences each time the game is p l ayed, because different players will react differently both to events in the game world and to the pres ence of each other. The most p o sitive take on this form of immersion is that it has the p otential to lib erate garners from their u s ual identity. It enables them to act in ways they never would normally in reality. Viewed in this way, video games are s o cial s afety valve s . They let people experiment with their identiti e s , imagine ideal identiti e s , o r simply let off steam by breaking rules a n d destroying things they would u s ually have to respect. On the other hand, some critics of video games see this a s a dangerous illusion that can lead to s erious anti s o cial b ehaviour. More to the p o int, the i d e a that garners deterritori alise their identity and b e come other people when immers e d in the game is easily criticised. For many people the exp erience may feel no different from that of playing with a doll or an action figure as a child. Why should we necess arily believe that, when g aming, we h ave left our own b o di e s and

become Pac Man, Mari o , Lara C roft or Solid Snake? After all, although frus trating, it i s unusual to feel physical pain when Pac Man is eaten by Pinky the little pink gho s t. MMORPGs, mods a nd the rhizome

A more sophisticated way of consi dering the way games enable garners to deterritorialise their identities is through the creation of virtual gaming communities .lO Indee d , drawing on Deleuze and

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Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Miroslaw Filiciak has noted that gaming communities can enable rhizomatic i dentities to emerge." One example of this typ e of rhizomatic interaction would b e a LAN party, where garners congregate to interact virtually over a local area network, or LAN. For the peri o d of the game these garners form a c ommunity, sharing a set of rules established by the game that is p l ayed. After the game the garners disp ers e again, their temporary group identity illustrating how a rhizome i s formed by

a

shifting mass of deterritorialised individuals who meet and

temporarily reterritoriali s e , only to di s p ers e (deterritori alisel once again. I ' Further exampl e s of this typ e o f rhi z o m e are found in MMORPGs such a s EverQ uest, Star Wars Galaxies, WarCraft and Ultima Online. When p laying these games the garners may never physically me et, but there may be thous ands of online us ers involved simultaneously, interacting in the s ame virtual environment. E ac h user creates his/her own avatar or avatars, which can b e considered virtual versions of the user's self, through which they c an experiment with their identity. Filiciak state s : In t h e case o f MMORPGs, there i s no need for strict diets , exha usting exercise program mes , or cosmetic surgeries

-

a dozen o r so m ouse

clicks is enough to adapt one's 'self to expectations . Thus, we have an opportu n i ty to p a i n l essly manipulate o u r i d entity . . . 13

Through interaction with other online users, us ers in these virtu al gaming c o mmunities are then a b le to exp eriment by u s ing the s e other, virtu a l s e lve s to interact with others . This exp erimentation with identity c a n be unders tood a s deterritoriali s ing in numerous ways , b u t , just as o n e s imple example . let us c onsider gendered identity. Although a male gamer may only try on the identity of a virtual female character for a few hours (or vic e vers a) , there is no doubting that in some ways this experience becomes a p art of his 'real life ' exp e rience , a p art of his identity. If any proof of this were nee ded, EverQuest a lone is

reported to have 'generated a (real world) economy c omparable to that of a medium sized country', with one third of its adult us ers s pending longer in the game than they do in work. I. In addition to this deterritorialisatio n of the user's or gamer's self, some video games enable the gamer to adapt or construct his/her own game environment, to create modifications, or 'mods ' . Above a n d b eyond the choosing or adapting of 'skin s ' for avatars (turning the avatar into a character of the gamer's choice) , in certain games the gamer has the option of creating his/her own characters and leve l s . This potential for video games to enable garners to adapt their game world was app arent once Doom 's source code was released to the general public, allowing its users to adapt the game environment. I S Nowadays games such as Quake

and HalfLife similarly allow the gamer to create his/her own mods . I ' In the s e instances, rather than characters exploring an

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environment of the game designer's invention, the gamer is able (to

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a certain extent) to play God. This practice ensures that the g amer

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- rather than c o n s t antly running for his/her life in o rder to

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deterritorialise the s p ace of the game world (like Pac Man or Lara

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Croft)

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can deterritori ali se the very maze in which he/she runs.

Now the game environment itself becomes

an

adaptable rhizome.

Garners effectively become producers of the game, not just because they interact with the game world (design and build a city, kill the zombies, etc . ) and therefore 'design' the narrative of their g ame exp eri ence , but a l s o because they c an , quite literally, help to design the world in which they play. I7 Here the space of the game becomes rhizomatic. If we return to the example of Pac Man and its correlation with guerrilla warfare, it is a s though the gamer - rather like the Vietcong

is now able to dig his/her own tunnels,

to increase the p o s s ibilities of surprising his /her opp onent s , and of influencing the o utcome of the gam e . However, it i s always worth rememb e ring that, even in MMORP Gs

where there seem to be almost infinite p o s s ibilities

for rhizomes to d evelop

there is a strong reterrito rialising

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influence exerted by the virtual gaming community. As Sue Morris docum ents , in multiplayer games s o c i al rul e s s o o n develop among the garners involved: 'C ertain actions are considered to be unsporting or forms of cheating even though they are well within the p o s sibilities of the game . " · Where such norms appear it i s evident that the rhizomatic pos sibilities offered by thi s particular grouping of g arners is in the proce ss of reterritorialising. Video games a re bad?

One question arises from this analysis of the p otential for identity deterritoriali s ation offered by the video game. If video games offer so many p o s s ib ilities for p o tenti ally lib erating i dentity exploration, why are they regarded with suspicion by the general public and the media? The most obvious answer is that no one can really explain the allure of video game violence, a violence in which the gamer willingly p articip ate s. In 2 002 a l awsuit filed against the m anufacturers of video games by p arents of s choolchildren killed in the C ol umbine mass acre in 1 99 9 was dismi s s ed. Many people accordingly hold the view that video games in isolation could not caus e a m a s s acre such a s C o lumbine . " E ven so, the debate continu e s . The question th at D e l e u z e 's idea of the rhizome enab l e s u s to ask of this debate is: does this violence enable a deterritori alis ation of the g amer's identity, or i s it s omehow reterritorialising? F urthermore , video games are also regarde d with suspicion by some theori s t s , but for a very different reason. To consider the extent to which video games also reterritorialise the gamer we mus t consider the related question of ideology

or, put another

way, the p olitics of the v i d e o game . Here again, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome is extremely helpful. For s ome criti c s , video games can be l o o s ely interpreted as practice for c ap it a li s m . They expre s s the i d e o l o gy of market c apitalism, which is transmitted to the psyche of the gamer under the cover of a s eemingly innocent game. Leaving aside the fact that

very few games are actually innocent, Pac Man again offers a clear examp le of thi s working o f ideology. In Trigger Happy, Steven Poole notes how the Pac Man is the 'pure consumer' , only happy when he i s eating, and never fini s h e d eatin g . 20 In s hort, he i s a repres entative of consumer capitalism, and the gamer who contro l s him is simply p e rforming the logic of c o n sumpti on. C onsume and you will be rewarded with p oints (consume and you will b e p aid) , cons ume and you will be temp orarily freed . . . and then returned to the s ame environment in order to consume some more . Indeed, Pac Man i s far from the only such example, as very many video games revolve around completing jobs or tasks and collecting p oints as a reward. Thus there is a general feeling that video games are dangerous, either because they are too viol ent, or because they are so much 'c apitalist brainwashing' .21 C ombining the s e two approaches , in some cases they are regarded with suspicion b e c ause they u s e violence as p art of this brainwashing. This feeling i s exacerbated by the development and use of video games by the military. Not only were the first games developed by workers in the military sector ( such as Higinbotham and E aerl , but so too has military investment in arcade technology Lockheed Martin

for instanc e , on behalf of

advanced its development." The very existence

of the flight s imulator as b oth video game and tool for combat training reinforces awarene s s of the link b etween video games and the dominance of the military industrial c omplex under market capitalism. For thi s reason, Poole initially begins by celebrating the free circulation of the original source code for Spacewar, calling it a 'b enign virus . . . eating up time all over the world on government, military and scientific mainframes ' ." Once such a commo dity has been appropri ated by major corporations and has become a saleable product, however, thi s idea that it is somehow a benign virus is o ften replaced with the notion that it has b een reterritori a l i s e d and i s a commo dity that s erve s the needs of

capitalism. We might be forgiven for wondering how such a product can be potentially deterrito rialising for its consumer. Surely it must expre s s a very reterritori alising agenda? In answer to thes e questions , the fact is that whether video games are viewed a s de

or reterritoriali sing i s a m atter of

perspe ctive. For every argument that the video game is reterritori ali s ing there is a counter argument that the use of the game is p otenti ally deterritorialising. As Po o le also notes of Pac

Man, its popularity with female garners may have been due to its unb ridled celebration of consumption in a very literal sens e . In a world where there i s peer pressure to remain slim, Pac Man offers an opportunity for its us ers to embrace virtual e ating. Far from a s u b liminal trick encouraging p e o p le to be more avi d consumers (an ideological reterritorialisation of the gamer), in this instance Pac Man offers lib eration from the pressures of the cult of the ideal s lim b o dy.24 Research into the effect of video games on the gamer h a s failed to provide conclu s ive proof either way, with various writers in the 1 980s concluding that video games either c orrelate d with aggre s s i o n among u s e r s , o r worked to calm them." Thu s , while D erek A. Burrill convincingly argues (in 2002) that video games b as e d on James B ond films ins cribe a certain typ e of mas culine b ehaviour on the gamer characterised by a ' s tealthy, violent s exism'," Mia C ons alvo just a s convincingly argues (in 2 003) that The Sims offers the gamer numero us p o s s ibilities for trying out new gendered and s exual identities." The final s ection of this chapter examines how this ambiguity i s evident i n the first three versions of Grand Theft Auto. Grand Theft Auto

The original Grand Theft A u to (hereafter G TA) is a crime spree game, in which the gamer has an aerial view of the activitie s of h i s /her avatar a s h e/she travels around the maze like roads of 'Liberty C ity ' . The avatar i s guided by an arrow that leads him/ h e r to phone b o oths . On answering the p h one , mob jobs are

outlined in text on the screen. The arrow then leads to the job . Once the job is compl e ted (often the removal or retrieval of a vehicle ) another job become s available, and so on. The purpose of the game is to complete the jobs, and in o rder to do so the gamer is required to steal cars , motorbike s , bus e s , or trucks, develop s ome proficiency in driving these different vehicles, and avoid the police. On route to jobs he/she i s also able to kill pass ers by, gangs ters or p olice, either with his/her vehicle or the various weapons left in crates scattered about the city. Grand Theft Auto 2 (GTA2) was somewhat simil ar, except that the game environment was more deadly due t o the controlling presence of s everal warring gangs. In GTA2 it i s p o s s ible to get mugged or killed simply by s tanding s till for too long in the wrong are a , the traffic is more aggres sive generally, and after capture the police unceremoniously dump the avatar on the road from a m oving s quad car. The aerial view of the avatar in the first two versions of GTA provides the garner with a somewhat similar experience to that of

Pac Man , only o n this occasion there is o nly ever a small section of the city visible at any one time. GTA therefore contains more sudden surpri s e s , as the police may arrive on s c reen from any directi on. It is also more difficult always to know where you are going. The arrow points in the general direction of the job, but the roads themselves may wind away from the direction of the arrow, making the inexperienced garner take a circuitous route. More experienced garners , however, will have explored short cuts acro s s the city's various p arks and half completed bridges , and so will get there more quickly. In terms of mapping, then, the exp erience of playing GTA is one of constant exploration. As with Pac Man , although this could b e considered to be i n line with the notion that the gamer colonises the space of the game world, the constant uncertainty over direction, the danger of imminent capture and the perpetual unfol ding o f off s creen s p ace all ensure that the gaming experience is more one of deterritorialisation than of reterritoriali s ation. As each of the games also includes a p aper

fold out map of the city, should a gamer wish to learn the space in a more c alculated manner this is also pos sible, but the expe rience of gaming is in effect one o f exploration, p roviding therefore the usual ambiguity a s to how capable the gamer is of reterritorialising (colonising) the s p ace, and how much he/she must manoeuvre (deterri toriali s e ) to avoi d b eing reterritori a l i s e d (captured or killed) by the game. In terms of ideology, in spite of the emphasis on criminality,

GTA initially app e ars to conform exactly to the idea that video g ames are practi c e for capitalism. Most obviously, the game is s tructured around a s eries of jobs completed for a p oints reward. Admittedly, the s e are all c riminal activiti e s , but, even s o , the argument remains valid. After all, who would buy a game in which the jobs the gamer had to complete were photocopying or filing? Moreover, tapping into ideas of individual freedom prevalent b oth in the United States and more generally under market capitalism,

GTA is built upon the p remise that you are 'free ' (this is Liberty City, after all) to steal a car if you so desire. In fact, as m oving around the city without wheels is so time consuming that it often negates any pleasures the game offers , stealing a c ar is practically e s s ential. Here the game expre s s e s the ideology of automobile freedom on which the United State s built its Fordi st economy in the early twentieth century. Finally, although the game s e ems to celebrate criminal activity, a s the g amer i s p erpetually at risk of imprisonment by the police, GTA actually shows how diffi cult it i s to make crime p ay. The above notwithstanding, there is debate as to whether GTA , and the public controversy surrounding it, necessarily imply that it is reterritorialising of the identity of the gamer. Taking the view

that the violence of the game leads to violence in the gamer, the British Police Fe deration condemned GTA as ' sick, deluded and b en e ath contemp t ' . S urpris ingly, h owever, the New York Police D e p artment t o o k the o p p o s ite view of G TA2, s tating tha t th ey would rather have such criminal activity take place in a game than

on the streets .'S C ontrary to the idea that game violence breeds real violence, the p ositi on of the New York Police expresses the notion that the g ame p rovi des a s afety valve mechanism that allows p e ople to l o s e themselves (deterritori alise) fo r a while in a new i dentity, getting fe elings of rep re s s e d violence out of their sys tem. More imp ortantly, p erhap s , all the G TA game s , and esp eci ally

Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3) , enable further deterritorialisation of the gamer from the goal oriented ideology of the marketplace. By the time of GTA 3 ( 2 002) the graphics had changed considerably, and, rather than an aerial view of the city, the game is constructed as a 3D environment with a third-person avatar seen from eye level. as in games such as Tomb Raider. The choice of vehicles to steal has risen to include SUVs , s tation wagons and even b o ats , and now cut s cenes (small s ections of movie like footage) are used to intro duce mob characters and the jobs they offer. Along with this revamping of the graphics come even greater free doms for garners , who can s imply ignore the tasks they have b e en s et, and expl ore the city. Garners can ab andon cars altogether, take the train or the subway, or s imply enjoy exploring the city on fo ot. In this way, not only can a jog through the p ark be rewarding in terms of the graphics experienced ( s omething it would have b e en fairly difficult to argue of GTA or G TA2) , but so too only in this way can many hi dden p a ckages and weapons be fo und. The incre a s e d pos sib ilities for activitie s b eyond the goal oriented c ompleting of tasks has led one commentator to comp are GTA3 with a flight simulator, where the plea sure was in experimenting in a simulated environment, rather than succes sfully completing the game . '9 Admittedly, thi s experimentation can involve such activities a s carjacking, causing car crashe s , mugging, running down, shooting or violently b e ating p a s s ers by to death, and stealing. The p oint remains that the GTA games are concerned with o p ening up a s p a c e for exp e rimentati o n , an arena th at is deterritorialising of the gamer's identity.

p o tenti ally

In term s of offering a deterritorialised identity to the gamer,

GTA3 also g o e s much further than its predeces sors in certain other respects. It c ontains a ' radar' , a small map inset in the b ottom l eft-hand c o rner of the screen, enabling g arners to chart their position in the city a s b o th big screen and map ind ent. Garners experience Liberty C ity from both 'here' and ' there ' , as both ' I ' a n d 'them'. T h i s schizophrenic experience of b eing b o th pres ent i n t h e game w o r l d and a b l e t o watch yourself from afar is enhanced by the vario u s different camera angle s that can b e cho sen from which to view the avatar (including the traditional aerial view of the first two games but also the avatar's first person p oint of vi ew) , and g arners ' ability to change radio s tations in the c ars , which also changes the s oundtrack to the game they are playing. C learly, GTA3 aims to give garners the opportunity to blur the b o undary b etween 'real life' exp erience and the game. Like Pac Man, then, the GTA games are all confined within an app arently labyrinthine space, but the limits to the city are clearly defined. The one thing the avatar cannot do is swim away from Lib erty C i ty, s o , as in Pac Man, there is no e s c ape from its impris oning labyrinth. Thus the mapping of the city's streets in the process of p l aying the game may appear to repres ent a colonial c onque s t o f s p a c e (reterritorialis ation) , but from another p erspective the game i s forever creating a rhizome, forever deterritorialising as the avatar moves into unknown territory. Moreover, b eyond the level of the game world its elf, garners have the potential to deterritoriali se their usual identity as they explore the pos sibilities of a criminal life that is not normally available to them, o r s imply ignore crime and enjoy travelling around the city, creating a deterritorialising rhizome as they do s o .

Chapter 2

Virtual structu res of the I nte rnet Damian Sutton

It is p erhaps no acci dent that the mid 1 9 90s re s urgence in Deleuzian thinking and deb ate coincided with the first few years of the Internet boom. By the time that the Internet had p as s ed from being a wholly academi c or military affair to a commercial and cultural space b eyond the ivory o r s tone towers , terms such a s 'rhizome' were b eing u s e d not only a s a theorem but as a rallying cry. Now it c an s ometimes s eem difficult to move intellectually because of the sheer agglomeration of D eleuzian commentary on the Internet. To think of the Internet as oI).ly a carrier of D eleuzian thought, however, is to m i s understand the influence that 'rhizomatic' o r 'rhizomorphic' thinking had on the Internet's very etho s - an influence that continues to be felt even as we enter the days of Web 2 . 0 , an ethically inspired attempt to wrest control of the ether away from corporations and conglomerates , and leave it in the hands of the people. The rhiz ome, as a theorem, a way of moving, and a way of connecting, allows us to understand not only some of the p olitics of the Internet, but also the laws of connection and movement that give tho s e politics shape and colour. The simplest picture we can draw of Internet p olitics is one of ' Jeffersonian democracy ' , named after the United States ' third president, a champion of local, individual and state rights over big government and federalism. At the heart of this was the individual's right to make money in a free market (that i s , an individual who was white, male and who owned land) . The idea is a curious mixture of politi c s , and n o t wholly suitable for to day's

political liberalism, which s ees the championing of the free market and the right to make money as s omething that multinational corp orations do. N evertheless, the compari s on i s strangely easy to draw between the exp ansion of the New World and the s ettling of the wide open spaces of the Internet: individuals in a new terrain, s taking out their land, their place, b attling against centralised government ( e spe cially when it is repres ented by taxes or the forces of order) , s p e aking a language of lib erty and social equality, yet ready to cl aim their right to make a profit. And yet we need a strange comparison because of the strange p olitics of the Internet that exists, an intens ely charged political space in which the rights of free speech and free will are championed by commentators on all sides, provided they have money to inves t in the equipment. We also need a strange comparison because of the ways in which "tI

the Internet dis p l ays that most strange of chara cteristics in the

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reterritoriali s ation, for open, non linear, deconstructions of the

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c a p acity for deterritori a l i s ation to b e c o m e

c apitalist hierarchy to be turned into an obs cene imitation of the very thing that it aims to decompose. The Internet is significant not simply because it has p ervaded our lives to such an extent, but b ecause in so doing it is a s o cially structured space that reflects the s ame formati ons we walk through and drive through in real life , the virtual counterp arts of the shopping and leisure centres, financial centre s , cafeteri a s , l ecture theatres and libraries. New s o cial areas of interaction, such as photo and video sharing sites s uch as Yo uTube, are incorporeal or virtual spaces hosting the s ame kinds of s o cial interaction as do the dorm room, TV ro om, book club or film club. The immanent I nternet

The best place to start is by describing what the Internet is made of, and the Internet is made of immanenc e . Well, almo st. Ordinarily, we c an't see immanence, we c a n only sup p o s e that it's there. All we ever see is the shape that it leaves

in the matter around us. The Internet helps here because we can easily unders tand that it has form and shape that is substantially different from the matter with which we encounter it. If you were to read this b o ok online, you would be able to turn pages (by scrolling or clicking) , read the lines , even perhap s mark the 'page', but you would still not be interacting with the 'matter' of the b ook in any way. You woul d b e using a mouse or keybo ard. You would have the idea o f the b ook in mind, however, and that idea would have a shape that you give it or perhap s the shape that is suggested by the computer (images of page s , for instance) . Where the s e two shapes inters ect is the cl o s e s t thing we ' l l get to a phy s i c a l manifestation of immanence

t h e plane o f immanence. It i s the

plane, the intersection or c o a l e s c ence of the material and immaterial, that matters . At first glance, we can understand that we have a general sense that everything we see around us has form or shape, from the materi al world to l arger s ets o f force s and pressure s . For instance, we can eas ily obs erve that the lecture hall we enter has rows o f s eats , a lectern, a data proj ector, a microphone, that thes e are in p l a c e f o r a reason: a l l t h e s eats , for instance, a r e b anked to face the lectern; the le ctern may even be on a dais or platform. We might a l s o be aware that thi s organis ation of the material corresponds to larger, more intangible forces and organis ation: the education system, its theories and methods , the wealth or poverty of the college and so on. Thes e levels of organis ation operate together, and are mutually dep endent. To peel them away might des troy other layers . In this sense, the layers of organi s ation are like strata, in that they are both integral components, and fault line s , o f the l arger structure. The whole, the larger substance, is what Deleuze and Guattari call the 'plane of organi sation ' , the materi al intersection of all forms, subjects , organs and functions . Deleuze and Gu attari are doing more than simply describing social or cultural formations in a novel manner, however. Instead, they want to ask: what happens

when you remove all form, all the strata? Is there anything left? The answer is 'yes ' , since there would be forces and energies that remain, that never go away: 'Pure relations of speed and s lowness betwee n particles imply movements of deterritorialis ation, just as pure effects imply an enterpris e of desubjectification . " This is the pl ane of consistency, the plane of immanence. So, while we might n ever be able to remove all form, what D eleuze and Gu attari are sugges ting is that to di s m a ntle p art of it stratum , to reduce a function

to p eel away a

is to let s ome of those forces loose,

to b egin the pro c e s s of dete rritorialis ation. For D eleuze and Guattari , to think immanence i s the greatest challenge; that is why it is the ultimate task of the philos opher: 'We will s ay that THE p lane of immanence i s , at the s ame time, that which must b e thought but which cannot b e thought. I t i s the non thought within thought. " Even after thi s there is a greater calling , however. A detached observer might watch for the p l ane to break free, might be able to talk about its existence, but the real task is to provoke the p rocess of deterritori alis ation in others . ' Perhaps this i s the supreme act of philos ophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show it is there . " So the Internet immediately offers its elf as something within which to glimp se immanence. It is a virtual reflection of the real world, but one that b oth mimic s and is clearly different from the real spaces it reflects . The Internet is les s a s eries of o bj ects and sp aces than a s eries of movements between them. Thi s movement can be in 'logical' linear s e quence

from b ank account to online

shop - or it can take new pathways linked only by the random thoughts of the surfer. Indeed, movement through the Internet can s eem sep arate from the us er, in that the user rides the movement, rides the wave : henc e 'to s u rf ' . The Internet therefo re already b egins to peel away the s tratum that forms society, since that s tratum relies on clear conne ctions of obj e cts and space s , connected broken a n d reconnected i n new formation s . N o matter how m any new c onnecti o n s are made , whatever formatio n ,

what is constant is the movement, no matter how quick or how slow. The real boom time for the Internet came in the mid 1 990s, when it flowered from a largely academic and business medium into one of social interaction. The Internet started as a military application, ARPANET, designed in the 1 960s as a network of computers that would survive even if one or more were destroye d, as in a nuclear attack. By 1 989 the population of Internet users in the United States, its largest community, stood at about 400,000, mostly academic and research users . This was the year that the first commercial Internet service providers commenced op eration, some of them already existing companie s such as C ompuServe. By 1 994 C o mpuS erve , America Online and Prodigy shared eight million subscribers in the United States" This period of growth was further accelerated in the late 1 990s by the falling price of personal computers (PC s ) . This included the widespread manufacture of comp onents for us ers to build p e s at home, as well as the introduction of models such as the bubble shaped Apple iMac G3 in 1 99 8 . The Internet thus quickly b ecame interesting as a s o cial medium, to the amateur user as much as the scholar. There are few web logs that do not, at some stage, reflect upon the very ability of the Internet to traffic their thoughts and ideas acro s s the world, producing the exact same data in different countries and contexts seemingly indep endent of the equipment it is s e en on. Even now it is often the medium of the Internet that is discuss ed, rather than the content per s e , and, in dis cussi ons (as we have s e en) about MMORP G s such as Ultima Online and Seco n d Life, it is not so much the us ers or the game itself that i s discu s s e d but the difference b etween the life of one and the life of the other. What is discussed is the deterritorialisation immanent in the difference b etween one's home in real life and one's home online. Some of the first s tudies of the Internet, such as tho s e by Arturo E s cob ar, recognis ed this as 'technosociality'

sociocultural

construction according to technology.' Life begins to move to new

beats and rhythms, to a p oint of irreversibility, when it is realised that there i s no g o in g b ack. Furthermore, the b e at of the Internet

d rum wa s marking time for the politics of the media, which, for many, h a d until then been c o nfine d to the p ag e s of a c a demic studies

or liberal and radical new s p a p ers . The Internet's

technos o ci ality is not connection (it rides on the back of the telephone network), even though the study of the Internet is turning

toward thi s . Its techno sociality is not information (it op erates like any other d atab a s e , only on a vast s c ale) . The Internet's

te chno s o ci ality is in its fl ows of information and the control of those flows; hence the p o litics of the hacker culture that grew up in tho s e first few years of the Internet's boom

the s ame few years

of that tremendou s resurgence in interest in Deleuze and Guattari. Thi s was a p oliti c s of deterritorialisati o n , for which the cry was "CI

'Information wants to be free', and in which it was realis e d that it

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A geology of hacktivism

'Hacktivism', a s an oppositional strategy o f political resistance to state control or global corporatism, is made of an older stone, one that has been recut or carved again. This is the hard, sandy stone of Marxis m , form e d in the writings of Karl Marx a s a sediment that would be revealed (when the tide of C ommunism had begun to roll b ack from left wing intellectual writings) in some of the best media analy s i s to emerge fro m the l ate 1 9 6 0 s and e arly 1 9 7 0 s . The s andstone is now weathered and eroded, repointed by new media theory. If we look at some of its most vivid thinkers , however, then the s tone, like the blondest s andstone , s till h a s luxurious and colourful strata. On e key thinker fro m that early period was Hans Magnus Enzensb erger, who, like others , s aw that the telecommuni cations

medium was linear and centralised, that it was a one way flow of information from the centre to the periphery. Viewers , listeners and readers were reliant upon this s ervice, alienated or es tranged from the source and from each other, since this one way communication precluded contact with the community in any meaningful, mediated way: 'The distinctions between receivers and transmitters reflects the social divis i o n o f l ab o ur into pro ducers and consumers . " Of course, this notion of alienation or estrangement was profoundly influenced by Marx and his identification of estranged or alienated labour. In mass manufacturing, workers are far removed from the final object of p ro duction, in which they have o nly a contributing hand. They are paid directly for their labour, and the commodity value of the pro duct is far removed from them and their own Iwhich is only the direct value of their work, for which, as labourers, they are practic ally interchangeable ) . What excited Enzensberger at the time, however, was the burgeoning growth of video and other media technologies, such as wireless radi o , for instance, that were p otentially available to new communitie s . What he s aw was the p o s sibility of media control wrested fro m c entral i s e d , state owned organis ati o n s

and

corporations and put into the hands of workers' communiti e s , because thi s technology could b e situated in the h o m e or the workplace and u s e d to broadcast across the p athways of s ocial interaction. Thi s would be a social formation used to transmit news, which normally comes from the authoritarian centre, that would have new agency because it would be free of state b i a s . The idea of video technology within the h o m e , expre s s e d by Enzensb erger in 1 970, still carries vital relevance to new models of news and information s ervices . He imagines

(n) etworklike c o m m u nications m o d e ls b u i l t o n the p r i n c i p l e o f reversibility o f circuits . . . a mass newspaper, written and distributed b y its rea ders, a v i d e o n etwork of politically active g roups .s

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The c ontemporary realis ation of this kind of network can b e s een i n collab orativ'i' news networks such as Indymedia, a n d even in the princip l e of wiki and the development of Wikipedia. Where

Indymedia is a news s ervi ce that is cons ciously opp o s itional. its real political p ower i s in the connections it cre ates between l o cal. amateur news gatherers that would not have b een created by normal, centralised, broadcast news coverage by televi sion and radio corporati ons . This is a public vo ice create d by s hared ideas and the u s a b ility of the technol ogy, rather than th e combined reception of the s ame mes s age. Indeed, what can often happen is that p olitical i s s ues are rai s e d on a global scale because of the connections, rather than shared political i deals . Thi s is reflected in the growth of Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that is created by the contributions of us ers , and which e s chews the clearly defined 'authoritative' voices of academia or commerce, for instance, which are s een to reflect centralised and dry accounts of the worl d , its s ocieties and histories. Instead, contributors come from the b o dy of users , often with no recognised authority (indeed, it is possible to be virtually anonymous) . and the shared knowledge can be constantly edited by others . Thus the knowledge deposited for reference in

Wikipedia, which often tops any online s earch for information on a given topic, is created through contestation and debate. The veracity of this knowledge is often at stake, and pages devoted to c o ntroversi a l s u bje c ts such as politicians and p o litical i s s u e s , celebrities, a n d even sports teams , often have

a

large discus sion

forum and a long history of editing and counter editing. It is even possible to e dit one's own entry, and there is no guarantee that any entry is written by an authoritative contributor or edited by a genuine p eer. Wikipedia therefore b alances the weakness of inexactitu de and inaccuracy against the p owerful connections it make s between us ers and the ability it has to become, through a genuine notion of common sense, the authoritative voice on a s ubject. Web sites such as Indymedia and Wikipedia can therefore be seen as p owerful agents for deterritori ali sation, de stabilising the

social forces of the state, which are inve sted as much in cultural formations as they are in the government, or law and order. The connections are no longer made between the centre and a disp arate community of is olated users, but across u s ers and b etween each other, and the ' c entre' (the news corporations, for example, on the lookout for gra s s roots news) i s left following in the fo otstep s of a new, emancip ated p opulation. Nonetheles s , Enzensberger's enthusiasm for the media a s a technology of emancip ation w a s couched within an imp o rtant warning against the ever more p owerful culture industry, which seeks to create new u s e r s , viewers and particip ants who will continue to consume. Mo st importantly, it will look for any way to do this , and the very means of resistance are a p rize target. Much of the content of Enzensberger's e s s ays echo e s the work of his contemp oraries , p arti cul arly, perhap s , in thi s respect the work of Louis Althus s er, who wrote of how the state app aratuses of repre s sion, such as l aw and order, are joined by ideo logical apparatu s e s such as the school, the C hurch or even the family. These are app aratuses whose role is to reproduce 'the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation'.' Effectively, we as subjects

as learners, users , viewers , consumers

are called

into b eing by the systems within which we grow up, and which give us our ideology. No matter how independent we think we are, no matter how much we resist what we see as the cultural mains tre am, we will eventu ally b e c ome a p art of it. We will eventually b ecome good little capitalists , because even the means of resis tance involves consumption. What does this mean for Enzensb erger? First, he s aw that it was too easy for new u s ers to b ecome detached from culture, or in a nihilistic fashion b e come reduced to 'is olate d tinkering' . 10 Such users might s peak out against consumerism or state p ower, but eventually their anger dissipates or i s turned inwards. We can see this in websites such a s C harlie B rooker's TV Go Home (www.tvgo home.com), which introduced British culture to his sharp criticism

of the m e dia e c o n o my. Real and fictional characters were developed over a series of spoof pages from the B B C 's televi sion guide the Radio Times, which placed them in o d d juxtap o s ition, lamp ooning celebrity culture and its trivialisatio n of p olitical and s o ci al i s s ue s . This included the ficti onal character of Nathan Barl ey, who eventually became the subject of his own televi sion seri e s . Ironically, however, Brooker's own trajectory with TV

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was predicted in s ome of the acid attacks in the Nathan

B arley column on the ways in which media creatives are constantly trying to capture the contemp orary mood or zeitgeist, often with the l atest technology, in order to market it b ack to the mainstream: Playing table football i n a Hoxton juice bar, Nathan Barley and three near-Iookalikes decked out in regulation Carha rt u niforms excitedly discuss their plans for a five-minute Real Player comedy sketch destined for an a bsurdly over-designed online entertainment ' porta l ' r u n by one of t h e i r o w n schoolfriends, w h o h a s c o m missioned them to d eliver six comedic ' webisodes' despite the fact that none of them can write , perfo r m , or be trusted to deliver the goods on time, and that even the fastest a n d smoothest of RealPlayer video streams is basically fucking unwatc h a b le . "

The fact that streaming video and 'web i s o d e s ' later b e c ame a major p art of Internet media content for busines s es and amateurs alike is perhap s also illustrative of Enzensberger's second concern: that capital reco gni s e s the power o f new technologies and the attractivene s s of cultural re sistance, but ' only so as to trap them and rob them of their explosive force' . 1 2 New cultural formations created and enhanced by new technologies are not only us eful in their attractivene s s to youth markets , but any effectiveness can be dissipated as they are made more mainstream and a bigger part of wider consumer culture. Businesses, especially thos e appealing to young people with disp o s able income , are constantly on the l ookout for new avenues for marketing.

For example, in 200 1 a new type of graffiti began to appear in the United Kingdom on electric junction boxe s , rubb i s h bins and boarded up shop s : a black stencilled image of a baby's face, tightly cropp ed in a four inch square. The appe arance of thi s image immediately echoed the already wi despread images of Andre the Giant, the French wrestler. He has become something of a poster boy of cultural resis tance as the fac e of the ' O b ey Giant' street art campaign (www. obeygiant. coml . the work of arti st Shepard Fairey. Indeed, as with the ' Obey Giant' campaign, the b aby p ictures were accompanied by an amateur website, dedicated to investigating the phenomenon of the se slightly unsettling images of a b aby a s ' B i g Brother' , a n d mirroring the multiple sites devoted to Fairey and his work. The now defunct investigative amateur web site www.whois lupo .com had crude graphics, a weblog and links to 'si ster' site s , one of which was the Jap ane s e site for the auto manufacturer Volkswagen. As cultural commentators , s u ch as Need to Know (www. ntk.netl , quickly pointed out, the ' s treet art' was, in fact, p art of a teaser c amp aign for Volkswagen's new mo del, the Lup o , which had at that time just b e e n rel e a s e d in Jap a n . 1 3 The viral marketing involved mimicking the ways in which word of mouth, and now new media networking, creates a 'buzz' within which to l aunch marketing camp aigns . The quick adoption of a new phenomenon of cultural commentary, s uch as street art, by adverti sing companies h a s made it difficult fo r the l atter to maintain its grass roots , p opuli s t image. Even Need to Know acknowledged the Lupo teaser camp aign a s 'Nathan e s que'. The episode casts a harsh light on the activities of cultural resistance group s that appeal to youth markets , exchange art

s cho o l

trained personnel a n d enrol followers through t h e consumption of T shirt s , music and collectibles . The effect can b e seen in the widespre a d adoption of s o cialist o r communi s t revolutionary imagery by high street stores that m arket politi c al resis tance as a commo dity.

New class structu res

While Enzensberger was enthused by the new technologies of video, what was really imp ortant to him was the connections such technologies offered. Later theorists, esp ecially tho s e who have fo cused on the p olitical p otenti al of new medi a , have taken thi s c riti que in a new directi on. They have acknowledged that what u l timately deterritoriali s e s is c apital i t s e l f, and i t is the indep endent control of c apital by the indivi dua l . as a process of s e lf- determination, that leads to true political emancip ation. This is the idea that media theorists such as McKenzie Wark have put forward, p articularly in rel ation to his argument that a new c l a s s system has developed through new medi a . Where once was discuss ed a s chism between the labouring c l a s s and the state or corporate clas s , there now exists a new division between massive media conglomerates and an ' underclas s ' of s o cial activists as h ackers . Thi s i s a s ituation created by the new production of immaterial g o o d s in to day's new media econ omy. The mo dern worker in the We stern world is less likely to create objects, and more likely to create knowledge, informati on, concepts, and the means of c ommunicating them. These might be s ervices offered at a call centre, or an artwork sold in order to enhance the emotional response to an office s p a c e . Even if the new We s tern worker creates things, they are not as important as the immaterial value that such things accrue. This means that, for Wark, the two new c l a s s e s that h ave emerged are the hacker class, whi ch ' ari ses out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property' , and the vectoralist class, which controls 'the vectors along which information circulates ' . Most imp ortantly, Wark al s o notes that 'the vectoralist class goes out of its way to c ourt the hacker class ideologically' . 1 4 Hacking as a practice of resistance is always on the verge of co option into the mainstream. Wark is p rofoundly influenced by Michael H ardt and Antonio Negri , economic philosophers who were thems elves inspired by D eleuze and Guattari . It is thi s influence that can be traced to

Wark's unders tanding of the vectoralist class . C apital. suggest Hardt and Ne gri , ' op erates on the plane of immanenc e ' , relying on the e quival ence of money to bring all values to gether in

' quantifiable, commensurable relations ' . The rh i z om o rp hi c spaces of the Internet, which allow for the fre e flow o f information a s a

commo dity, create an ideal place for capital to flourish because, as they make clear, cap ital 'tends toward a smo oth space defined by

unco ded flows, flexibility, continual modulation, and tendential equalization' . " C apitalism a s a c o m m ercial force needs to deterritorialise, to create smooth, unhindered space, in order to reterritorialise and create new money making formati ons . This can be seen in the example of media conglomerates such as Sony C orp oration. In 2004, as p art of a consortium, Sony bought legendary Hollywo o d studio Metro Goldwyn M ayer (MGM) for a reported $5 billion. This included the rights to the James Bond franchise, produced by EON Productions , with which it had already established connections for the last Pierce Brosnan film in the series ,

Die A nother Day (2002 ) . The purch a s e of MGM, however,

allowed Sony to fully exploit the franchise for the ' reboot' of B ond with D aniel C raig in the role for Casino Royale (2006) . The film was made by C olumbi a Pictures and MGM, b o th now p art of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who would go on to distribute the DVD.

The music, by David Arnold, would be distributed by Sony's joint owned subsi diary, S ony BMG. Arnold had p reviously produced his own interpretation of Bond themes for East West Records,

Shaken

and Stirred ( 1 997), before coming into the Sony fold after he had worked on the Warner Brothers distributed music for previous Bond films . This me ant that, for Sony, any arti s tic decisions they made on the film could refer back to the Bond b ack catalogue with

impunity, since there would be no 'rival' comp any or artist with intellectual property rights . At the s ame time a massive multimedia camp aign wa s launched, which included silver special edition models of the S ony Ericsson K800 and K790 Cyb er shot mobile phones , designed to evoke the vintage Aston Martin DB5 that C raig

drives in the film in homage to p revious Bond incarnation S e an C o nnery. The Bond 'pro duct' for S o ny was not so much the film but a notion around which to orient an array of products that u s e d the fre e fl ow of S ony's internal organis ati on to create a network of franchi s e opportunitie s linked by the film's web site. To draw a picture of vectoralism as entirely mainstream, as Wark tends to do, would be inaccurate , however. The penetration of these umbrella corporations into 'grass roots ' or cult forms, such as comic b ooks , means that they are able to successfully tap new emerging you th m arkets, especially when they s e em to b e in oppos ition to mainstream modes of authorship. Eileen Meehan had very quickly noted this in her analy s i s of the Batman ( 1 9 8 9 ) film and merchandising phenomenon, whereby Warner C ommunications Inc. were s e en to 'cash in' on the succes s of the graphic novels that reanimated the sup erhero 's career. In fact, as owners of DC comics from 1 9 7 1 , Warner i s s u e d the graphic novel The Dark Kn ight

Returns a s p art of their own marketing strategy to create a buzz i n t h e run up to releasing t h e movie. Warner's inves tment built the 'basic infrastructure' " for future franchising, a model to which can be added information technology and the Internet. In 2002 Sony released Spider man, with a major webs ite that acted a s the hub for a fan network, and allowed them to 'pre s ell' the movie by encouraging fan art and fan fiction. What this means is that resistant objects and practices, such as comic b o ok s , culture j amming, viral art , o r h a ckin g , which deconstruct capitalism'S old hierarchie s , can therefore be seen to

assist in its new formations . The clearest illustration of this i s the confu s e d m e s s age of lib ertarianism put forward by Wark, who campaigns intellectually for an exploited undercla s s , the hackers who produce intelle ctual p rop erty that will be exploited by c apitalism's facele s s and soull e s s c orp orations. Wark asks us to sympathi s e with in divi duals who are unab le to a s s ert their intellectual prop erty rights in online gaming, who labour within new 'life ' games such a s Ultima Online to create the world that

Electronic Arts (the game's owner) will exp loit. Wark and other new media p ro ducers in the hacker classes are really a middle class of wo rke r s , however; an aspirational new c l a s s that has managed to ri s e above the conditions of manual toil in order to become an emp owered p art of the new economy. A s a middle clas s , tho ugh, they exp l o i t in their own turn the l a b ourers in China, Mexico and other countries, many of them women, who manufacture the equipment (the latest P C , the l atest Apple) with which hackers create the new intellectual property. This is the real divide between the clas s e s in the new media economy, a global structure m aintained by the virtual structures of the Internet, in which capital deterritorialises and reterritorialises the economy. This is where Deleuz e, Guattari and the politics of connection come in. For E nzensb erg er, it was important that p o litical empowerment comes not from the complete deconstruction of the apparatuses of ideology, but from an effort to realis e the promises that their technologies make. This involves new connections and new types of s ocial interaction, and also involves recognising their power before the state d o e s , b efore capital does . In this s ense it invo lves s e eing the immanent p ower of the technologies of connection quickly enough to take control in such a manner that they can no l onger be c o opted. Thi s is why p roj e cts such as

Wikipedia, for all their factual inaccuracie s , have the great potential they do. In making the access to information free, or as free a s the a c c e s s to a comp uter entai l s , they take away the investment of money and commerce that normally flows in the free s p a c e of the new connecti ons . All that is l eft is the connection itself. In thi s way one need only be watchful against reterritori ali s ation. Wikipedia needs to b e a contested space in order to prevent it settling into a se dimentary rock of white, We stern i d e o l ogy, in order to prevent a p articular way of writing history and re cording knowledge from starting to lead or create that knowl edge. It needs to be a contested space in order to resist reterritorialis ation, in order to fulfil

one day, p erhaps

its

potential to host the knowledge of a truly worldwide community.

Part Two

!

Introduction

What is beco m i n g ?

One o f the sens ations any rea der might exp ect from reading Deleuze, especially from reading the work with Guattari, i s an overwhelming sense of restles sness, p a rticularly when i dentity is concerned. Not only is the issue of identity an urgent one for them as philosophers , but their style makes it a recurrent subject around which they orient much of their philo s o p hy. Inde e d , this is s o becau s e , for D e l e u z e , identity itself i s always in motion: the identity of the individual subj ect, pre s s ur e d from all s i d e s by forces that will make him or her, articulate him/her, o rgani s e him/her; but als o the collective subject, p u s h e d together through environmental, governmental, o r s ocial forces, or coming together in a resi stance to the s e . This restles s n e s s creates the s ubj ect through coalescence, co agulation and co ordination, here moving swiftly, there moving slowly. Identity i s always in motion, no matter how rooted it seems or how fixed. Not only that, but all identifications are in motion, since any fixed s tate of an object is merely a stage of app arent rest before another change . If we pick up a c offee mug and look at it, we can have n o doubt that it is a fixe d o bject in time and space. It i s , in fact, fixed to the extent of being brittl e . It will smash if we drop it, and its 'es sential ' identity would be at an end. What we are really lo oking at, however, is a moment (no matter how long) of apparent rest in the life of its molecules and atom s . It was once wet clay, formed and shaped, glazed and fired under pressure. It continues to change, cracks and fissures forming on its surfa c e , until we b reak it, when it will b e

tossed asi de as rubbish, returning it to the earth. This 'fixed' o bject in s p a ce is also a fixed o bject i n time (Deleuze c alled thi s an ' o bjectile" ) o nly ina smuch as we i s o l ate it in our minds from the continual change of the universe . This p l a c e s D e l eu z e 's phil o s ophy at odds with any other phil o s o phy that focuses on 'being' and what it is ' t o b e ' . Ins tead, if i dentit y i s always in motion, it i s always coming into being, a never ending project of becoming. It is the simple fact of becoming th at i s b e h ind the creati o n of the rhizome, since the rhi z o m e exploits and enjoys continual change and connection, rather than s e eking t o fix or prevent it. Simil a rly, as we shall s ee, it i s this continual coming into being of all things that is the only thing we can rely on, the o nly thing that allows us to mark time against the sheer vas tness of eternity. B ecoming, then, i s perhaps the single contribution around which all Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy revolves

the keystone of their philos ophy of life itself. For this

last reason, becoming i s b o th a guiding principle for the analysis of culture , and an ethical call for a different way of being ( o r b e coming ! ) . The ideas they develop from this central discovery b e c o ming wom an, b e coming animal, becoming imperceptibl e have become currency in an array of ethical debates including femini s m and p o s t femini sm , enviro nmentali s m and p olitical scien c e . ' This has o c curred through the philos ophy's central u s efuln e s s as an interpre tive strategy u n d e rstand how hierarchies

its abili ty to help us

of i d entity and e s s ence are

constructed and resisted. To appreciate becoming a s a fact of life, a s tage of critical s elf awarenes s , o r even an ethical response i s to a p p r e ciate how i dentity its elf is formed through opposition, alterity and difference. Deleuze and Guattari note that culture o rgani s e s itself along principles of 'propo rtionality', in that, within a symbolic structure where an equivalence of terms is reached, a hierarchy of relations is created as a ' s erializ atio n o f res emblances with a structuration o f difference s ' .3 This i s a rationalis ation of culture made in order

to understand it

as much by sociologists as by ourselve s . The

problem here is that the p rincipal identity against which thi s proportionality is measured is man, as the s creen upon which all identities are p rojected and found different. The ethical p o s ition that Deleuz e and Guattari take relies upon the realis ation of this principle of difference, even for thos e who are 'naturally' relegated to a p o s ition of sub ordination. Deleuze and Guattari replace the binary structure with one based on a kind of substantial quality : instead of the binary structure of man woman, for instance, they suggest that man is the maj o r or molar entity, against which woman is minor. As with much of Deleuze and Gu attari's philo sophy, h owever, it is never as simple as that. To truly b egin to dismantle and rebuild the hierarchies created by culture's p atriarchy, one has not only to confront and p a s s through the p o s ition of the minor, but to appreci ate thi s as a becoming , rather than e s s ential and fixed. Put another way, in order to dismantle a p rejudiced system based on s ex, gender or race, one has to understand from within the things that make differences

different. A woman cannot s imply b e different, she has to pass through this difference, she has to appreci ate this difference as being at once symb olic and artificial . Difference has to b e felt as a construction rather than as an essence. The s ame situation o btains for any minority, and, indeed, the collective term that Deleuze and Guattari u s e is becoming minoritarian . The p o s ition becoming woman take s in this ethic al p ro ces s i s s ignificant, since it is the p rincipal bin ary organi s ation that culture adopts . Simp l e oppo sition t o the patriarchal hierarchy is n o t a n option, though; the ethical p ath is not to be different , but to be imp erceptib l e . This h a s caused femini st phil o s ophers , s u c h as Rosi Braidotti, to criticise Deleuze and Guattari for suggesting that women give up the only weapon they have, the only agency they p o s s e s s , in the struggle against discriminatio n

their femininity.'

Fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari's phil o s ophy, however, is the fact that i dentity is created not by any kind of essential or

material b eing, but only by re acti ons by others to what are s een as characteri stics . B ecomings are made up of a variety of these th at act as markers , or comp ositional elements. Any e s s ential i dentity, no m atter how different from man, would s imply be another molar one . True becomings are mol ecular, since they are made up of elements and chara cteristics that m ay at any time change and reform. For this re a s o n the notion of contagion and cro s s

contamin ati on becomes e s s enti al to understanding identity as contingent, to create a sense of s elf awarenes s and empowerment. When a man turns into a wolf in horror fiction he does not become just another wolf, he is infected with the characteristics of the wolf (as we have seen, the wolf is a co nstant pres ence in A Thousand

Platea us) . Simil arly, t h e soldier w h o dres ses a s a woman i n o rder to escap e , or even in order to entertain other s o l diers, does not imitate a woman, nor b ecome a woman, b ut unders tands suddenly the struggle that women fa ce when reduced to their ess ential characteristics . It help s , here, if we use an example that illustrates not just

becoming woman, but also the wider aspect of identity spread through contagion

thi s time in the wartime concert party. This

has b een a staple of Briti sh culture for many years , perhaps having its m o st famous manifestation in the B B e TV show It Ain 't Hal/Hot

Mum ( 1 974-8 1 ) . The s how followed the exploits of a Briti sh army concert p arty stationed in Burma during World War II, with epi s o des that often revolve d around the staging of the shows to tro o p s , and i n which the s o l diers p l ay b oth male and female ch aracters . While some of the s o l diers, especially Bombardier B eaumont (Melvyn H ayes) , are p l ayed along the lines of lower middl e c l a s s high camp, it is o ften the burlier characters , M a ckinto s h ( S t u art M c G u g a n)

and Evans

(Mike K i n s ey) ,

representing working class backgrounds from provincial Britain, who get the b est laugh s . It is when the se men complain of the impracticality of wearing women's underwear, rather than the o stensibly homo s exual B e aumont, that we see the s o l dier as

becoming-woman. This is b ecause their b ecoming woman occurs not through sexuality but, instead, toward affinity : it allows them to engage in the kind of social bonding and subsequent loyalty that is normally off limits to men but expected in women , and seen as a sign o f their social difference and inferiority. Becoming is an operation of the social a s well as p ersonal identity, in that the collective i dentity of groups also works through contagion. It help s here if we continue to think of the group of soldiers who

are brought together by circumstance (often hardship, catastrophe) and who form a collective b ond. As Deleuze and Guattari describ e : 'Bands , human or animal . proliferate by contagion, epidemi c s , battlefields, a n d catastroph es . " Their multiplicity i s a n e s s ential part of the war machine, the unit being made up not only of gunners and bombardiers, but also of piani s t s , s ingers, dancers . We understand them as having a filial bond even though they are brought together by events and kept together by camaraderie. Jus t

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as when King Henry, in Shakespeare's Henry V, describes h i s 'band

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of brothers ' , we recognis e that it i s a shared i dentity of affinity,

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rather than blood connecti on, that is exp erienced by this b and of brothers in the jungle . They share a becoming animal in living in trenches and especi ally 'foxhol e s ' , but, most importantly, their affinity is created by shared humour in the fac e of adversity humour that is the contagion that connects them all. This is what we mean when we s ay that 'l aughter is infectiou s ' . S o how, then, d o e s o n e locate oneself within thi s dizzying multip licity of becoming, this restless change of identity? Deleuze and Guattari's answer i s that we repres ent intersections of time and p l a c e , coordinates within social s tru cture s . They u s e the analogy of longitude and l atitude. The geographical metaphor i s succinct: culture i s dizzying, i t i s easy to g e t l o s t , a n d what we need is a kind of GPS (Global Posi tioning System) device that will pinpoint us and our identity. The metaphor doesn't res t there , however, even though Deleuze and Guattari were writing long before hand held devices and global s atellite surveillanc e .

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Latitude, for them, is a way of des cribing the accidental genesis of our identi ty - it i s an accident of b irth that we might b e white or s o uth Asian, that we might be male or female. Intersecting this is the s p ecific materi ality of our own b o die s , longitude, and together they create only an intersection of degrees, what Deleuze and Guattari call

a

'haecceity' .' The metaphor is app osite, though :

what you get at the intersection is a point, a location, which tells us very little until it move s . It might be an accidental genesis that gave us our p oint on a cultural , societal map, but it's up to us how we use our potential becoming, up to us how we move. After ali, a s Deleuze and Gu attari s ay: 'We know nothing about a b o dy until we know what it can do . "

Chapter 3

M i no r c i n emas David Martin Jones

Deleuze and Guattari's c oncept of the minor is an extremely useful way of understanding p ower relations in to day's world, in particular in contexts where i ssues such as p o st colonialism and globali s ation influence how people conceive of their i dentities . This chapter first describ es the origins o f the term . I t then briefly dis cus s e s s everal of the different ways in which it has b e en applied to cinema , creating the concept of a minor cinema. Finally, the American indep endent film Mysterious Skin (2004) , by cult director Gregg Araki , i s analy s e d as a work of minor cinema.

Mysterious Skin i s a work of minor cinema created outside the mains tre am and d e signed to que stion the 'norm s ' of i dentity usually prop agated by Hollywo o d . It suggests the p o s s ibility of various different typ es of minoritarian American i dentity by examining s exual desire in the contemporary United States . What does 'minor' mean? In 1 975 Deleuze and Guattari introduced the idea of the minor in a

book on Franz Kafka, Kafk a: Toward a minor literature. In 1 9aO they developed the idea in A Thousand Plateaus. In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari argue d that, as a C z ech Jew living in Prague but writing in German, Kafka's work c ould be considered an example of minor literature . For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka took the major, or dominant language that spoke for the various countries in the Austro Hungarian Empire (i . e . German), and made this official or 'paper language'!

which was not sp oken by the majority of Czechs

speak in a minor way. In p olitical terms, Kafka's grotesque, surreal and bizarre world could b e interpreted a s a pro duct of the colonial s ituation in which he wrote, as the C ze chs s truggled for independence from the Austro Hungarian Empire. ' In A Thousand

Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari note that to make a major language s p eak in a minor way i s to make it stutter, stammer or even wail .' Thus a minor language is not establi shed in oppo sition to a major language. After all , Kafka did not use the C zech l anguage to oppose German. Instead a minor langu age, takes a major language, and , b y deterritori ali s ing i t , forces it t o become s omething else. At the extreme end of this pro c e s s of becoming, Deleuze and Gu attari des crib e the deterritorialis ation of a major language as its transfo rmation into s omething more like mus ic.' The terms ' m ajor' and 'minor' , they exp lain, can be understood a s musical terms . A minor language p l ay s the s ame tune a s the maj o r language, it just plays it i n a minor key.' For instance, a C aribbean C reole might jumble together a colonial European language and an Afri can language derived from a slave community's country of origin. It thereby makes a major E urop ean voice s ound in a minor key. Alternatively, the rhythmical rhyming of rap or hip hop can be considered minor when used to express a different typ e of i dentity

such a s that of African Americans , or France's different

ethnic and racial minoritie s

from that usually s poken by the

dominant l anguage of the s e countri e s . It mu s t b e unders tood, however, that 'minor' d o e s n o t always e qual 'minority ' . While Kafka was a C zech Jew subject to a colonial s ituation, and in that s ense in the minority, he was al s o a wealthy member o f the bourgeoisie who spoke German as his first language. To work in a minor way, then, is not necessarily to b e a 'minority' in the way this term i s u s ually deploye d , with all its negative c onnotati ons of economi c , gender, racial and ethnic s tatu s . To b e minor is to take a major voice, and speak it in a way that expresses your preferred identity. This political aspect of the minor is cruci al, for minor practices (art, literature, language) have

the potenti al to destabilise the normal conventions of the major voice of a s o ciety. To act in a minor way, then , i s not to opp o s e a dominant p olitical system, but to inhabit the system and change it from within. Thu s , although Deleuze and Guattari's work on Kafka was originally fo c u s e d on the way a minor language could b e created i n literature, their idea o f the minor c a n be app lied to any numb er of contexts , including cinema. Modern pol itical cinema

Deleuze and Guattari did not define clearly how their idea of the minor could be appli e d to cinem a . Rather, it was in the second volume of D eleuze's solo work on cinema, Cinema 2 ( 1 985), that he began to illustrate how the minor could exist in cinema. In Cinema

2, Deleuze returned to the idea of the minor under a different name. Discussing what he now called 'modern political cinema',' D eleuze draws parallels b etween certain filmmakers and his earlier ideas concerning Kafka . ' Initially he mentions several French directors , such as Alain Resnai s , Jean Rouch and Jean Marie Straub, but

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before long his work fo c u s e s on more globally marginali s e d

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filmmake r s , such as Yilmaz Guney, You s s ef C h ahine, Glauber

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Rocha, Pierre Perrault and Ousmane Sembene. The works of these directors

from Tu rkey, E gyp t , Brazi l , Quebec ( C anada) and

Senegal respectively

more clearly illustrate what i s at stake in the

notion of modern political cinema. The films of these directors contrast the output of the mainstream film industries in their countries of origin, as many of them have renounced commercial gain and attemp ted to use cinema to create new i dentities under difficult p olitical circums tanc e s . I n a l l these instance s t h e countries i n question were facing political turmoi l . For instance: S embene's Senegal was a n ewly post colonial country; Rocha's Brazil was under military rule, a s was Guney's Turkey (whose population w a s a l s o divi ded over the issue of Kurdis h i dentity in Turkey) ; Perrault's Quebec struggled for independence from C anada; and so on. At one point Deleuze

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points out that it was much easier for such filmmakers to see that the p e ople were mi ssing 'in the third world, where oppre s s ed and exploited nations remained in a state of p erpetual minorities, in a c ollective i dentity crisi s ' .s Mo dern p olitical cinema, then, was mo s tly likely to be found in the Third World, a s it was concerned with the creation of new identiti e s , of a people who are 'mi s s ing' or yet 'to come ' " Effectively, modern p olitical cinema is minor cinema. In Cinema 2, D e l euze only slightly adapts the three characteri stics of minor

literature found in chapter 3 of Kafka (,What is Minor Literature? ' ) t o create the i d e a of a modern political cinema. Firstly, he notes how modem p olitical cinema attempts to create a new sense of identity for the future, or a people yet to come. Thi s he does by contras ting it w i th the unp roblematic conception of ' the p eo p l e ' fo und in "C!

clas s i cal cinema s , such as the films of Frank C apra in the United

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States (think of Christmas time classics such as It's a Wonderful Life

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Sergei E i s enstein, who s e ' O d e s s a Step s ' sequence in Battleship

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Potemkin ( 1 9 2 5 ) is one of the most famous in cinema history. In

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United States , or the Soviet people, already exist. For the filmmaker

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( 1 94 6 ) ) , an d the m o s t distinctive of the Soviet Montage directors ,

the s e clas sical cinemas it is taken as read that the p eople of the it i s s imply a question of shaping the identity of that p eople. In C apra's cinema this is often done by evoking the righteousness of democrati c, small town family values in the Unite d States or, in Eis enstein, the revolutionary potenti al of the proletari at in the Soviet Union. In the works of the directors of modem political cinema, however, the p eople do not exist in a readily acces sible ma s s . Rather, the s e films show the people s truggling to emerge under political conditions that would deny their different identities. S e con dly, D eleuze discu s s e s the eradication of the divi sion between public and p rivate spaces in modem p olitical cinema, noting how this makes all personal actions inherently p olitical. Protagonists in these cinemas do not have the luxury of a s ecure, distinctive space of the family. Rather, characters often inhabit the

'cramp e d s p ac e s ' of s o ciety's margin s , spaces that are too easily invaded by the official forces of the public realm. iO For this reason it is not p o s sible for minor characters to transfer a certain set of value s learned in the home to their public live s , as private acts quickly become public acts due to the monitoring of the lives of minor characters by the controlling forces o f s o ciety. For a concrete filmic example of this type of existence, consider the French film La Raine ( 1 9 9 5 ) . Set in the Pari sian banlieue (the run down housing proj ects on the outskirts of Paris) . La Raine follows the adventure s of three unemp l oyed teenagers , Vinz (Vin cent C a s s ell) , Hub ert (Hub ert Kounde) . and SaId (S aId Taghm a o u i ) . With France's manufacturing indus try in decline, the male p opulation of the banlieue finds itself redun dant, and violent clashes with the police soon follow. The three post colonial youths find their cramped home lives cons tantly invaded and monitored by the p o lice and the media. Practic ally every action they take therefore has a political edge, as is seen most clearly in the desire of Vinz to take revenge for the murder of their friend at the hands of the riot police. Under such circumstances, whenever and however the individual acts , he or s h e makes a p olitical statement that resonates within the public sphere. Although this is a rather negative s ituation to exi s t in, it a l s o contains the potenti al for minor actions to imp act directly upon society. Finally, Deleuze argues that modern political cinema is marked by a refu s a l either to repro duce negative stereotyp e s , or to oppo s e such typ es with 'positive ' stereotype s . For D eleuze, either practice creates a colonising (or in s ome c a s e s a neo colonising) image of the people. Rather than enabling the creation of a new people, this practice fixes one image of the p eople in place, thereby halting their transformation into s om ething els e in the future. Instead, mo dern political cinema multiplies characters , to illustrate how the identity of the p eople to come will never stop transfo rming. As p art and p arcel of thi s proces s , directors of mo dern p olitical cinema often b ase stori es around characters

involve d in creating s tories of their own identity. In this way the films thems elves refu s e to establish one singl e , authori al p oint of vi ew. After all, to posit one authoritarian view on a p o l itical s i tuation is not a minor action, it is an o p p o sition. Instea d , minor films o ften enter into a dialogue over which fiction (that of the film, o r the stories told within the film) c an best estab l i sh a new i dentity for a people yet to come. For this r e a s o n minor cinema can at times appear self c onsciously s tyl i s e d . D i r e c tors of minor film do n o t create a s o l i d image of a new identity s o much a s question the manner in which i dentities are usually constructed in mains tre am cinema. In this way, the m ajor voice of cinema b e gins to stutter, stammer or wail, with o ut to o quickly reterritori alising ' the p e o p l e ' into a new stere o typ e . Neverth ele s s Deleu z e 's theory o f m o d e rn po litical cinema is in many ways quite vague. He never really gives concrete examples of exactly how it takes the dominant language of classical cinema and makes it speak in a minor voic e . His ideas are practic ally imp o s s ible to grasp unless you have s een the films he briefly reference s , and even then his lack of sustained concrete analysis erects further b arriers to our understanding. Fortunately, several schol ars have taken his i d e a s and applied them with rig our to vari ous cinemas. Let us now turn to a few of them to enhance our unders tanding of m o d ern p o liti c a l cinem a , o r, minor cinema. M i nor cinema

Probably the first person to coin the phra s e 'minor cinema ' in English was D. N. R o dowick, in Gilles Deleuze 's Time Machine ( 1 9 9 7 ) . 1 1 R o d owick d i s cu s s e d how p o st col onial west Afric an nations, such as Senegal in the 1 9 6 0 s , used cinema to rethink their identity after an extensive period of occup ation by the French. Previously, cinema h a d b een used by the French to repres ent the native west Africans . French cinema was a m ajor voice that very

often rep res ented west African identity in a negative m anner, as a primitive culture. For this reason west African filmmakers had to struggle against not only the dominant language of the colonis er, French, its elf, but also French cinema when it p o sitioned west African people as colonial subjects. Rodowick analys es Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret ( 1 963) as a work of minor cinem a . " O ften consi dered the first indigenous African film, Borom Sarret is the story of a taxi driver (with a horse drawn cart) from a poor dis trict of Dakar, the capital of Sene g a l . Ro dowick comments in p articular on Sembene 's utilis ation of African oral storytelling traditions to make a minor use of the norms of Western cinematic representation. R odowick demonstrates how the sound recording of the film gives it the feel of a story told verbally, as though in the African oral tradition. The s ound is deliberately non naturalistic (Le. it does not always match the image) , and many of the characters ' voices are spoken by Sembene himself. This has a peculiar effect on the spectator, who is used to seeing images constructed to appear 'naturali stic ' , or as though

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they obj ectively reflect reality. In the case of French cinema's

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previous representation of west Africans , this naturalism was used

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as a disguis e b ehind which to propagate the negative image of west African culture as essentially primitive. By contrast, S embene creates a film in which images and soundtrack are di slocated, and the normal experience of watching a story unfold in cinematic images suddenly appears to stutter, due to the minor actions of the filmmaker. Instead, the film appears rather like a story addressed to the various types of native Senegalese people that it depicts , asking them to que stion how they c an create a new coll ective, how they can become a people of the future. Since Ro dowick's intercession a number of works have emerged that des cribe how minor cinemas are created in different contexts, from small national cinemas, to exiled and diasporic cinemas, to women's cinema . 13 As one illustrative examp le, let us now consider the US independent film Mysterious Skin.

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A m e rican i ndependent c i n e m a as m i n o r cinema: Gregg Ara ki

The films of iconoclastic director Gregg Araki b elong to a long tradition of queer American indep endent cinema that includes s uch notab l e directors as Kenneth Anger, John Waters and Andy Warhol. As queer cinema is usually created outside the mainstream it very often has the p otential to be minor, although it is often more o p p ositional than minor. O n the other hand, in The Celluloid

Closet ( 1 987), Vito Russo has exhaustively charted the long history of m ainstream Hollywo o d fil m s that were queered in a minor way by writers , directors or actors willing to slip a queer theme o r sub text into a m ainstream film. Here we see a far more minor queering of the accepted norms of the mainstream. Araki 's films are p art of a movement that developed in the 1 990s calle d N ew Queer Cinema, and as such they often straddle these two worlds . " Many o f h i s films are independent films with queer subject s , and as such are perfect for creating minor cinema. In addition, though, they very often attempt a degree of crossover into the mainstream by utilising established genres or styles, even while queering them, and making them speak in a minor way. Thus it is primarily through his fo cus on queer s exualities (be they homos exual or otherwise ' devi ant' from the established heteros exual norm) that Araki is able to que s tion various d ominant norms of US identity. Mysterious Skin

(2004)

Mysterious Skin i s the story of two young teenagers , Neil McC o rmick (Jo s e p h Gordon L evitt) and Brian La ckey ( B r a dy Corb etl , living in the small town of Hutchinson, Kans as. B oth b oys were s exually abused by the local Little League baseball co ach (Bill Sage) when they were eight years old. Brian is now a sad teen, troubled by traumatic memories for which he has no rational explanation. Inste ad, he concocts theories of alien abduction to explain his b l a ckouts and lost memories. Neil, on the other hand, had his heart b roken at eight by the co ach (who disapp e ared

suddenly) . and has since become a rent boy with a nihilistic, even s elf destructive approach to life . When Brian seeks out Neil looking for answers Neil takes him to the co ach's old house and reve als the truth to him .

Mysterious Skin clearly conforms to the three characteristics of a work of minor cinema . Firstly, its teenaged p rotagonists create

a biz arre a s s emblage that deterritorialises stan dard norms of behaviour, suggesting

a

new mo del for a people yet to come . Neil's

homosexuality ensures that Wendy (Michelle Tra chtenb erg) and he, although friends since chil dhood, do not b e c ome lovers . The protagonist's romance with the 'girl next door' s een in s o much US suburban drama is thus unavailable to them. B rian, for his p art, is so traumatised by his p artial memories of abuse that he has become, as Neil's friend Eric (Jeffrey Licon) describes him, 'weirdly as exual ' . When fellow alien nutcase Avalyn Friesen (Mary Lynn Rajskub) attempts to s e duce him, B rian is unable to reciprocate.

1 . Mysterious Skin (2004).

Thus Araki 's qu eer p o liti c s deterritorialises the heterosexual coupling typ ical of the us teen film . I f there i s a people yet t o come in this film it i s clear that i t will have t o emerge from the wounded teens who have spent their lives having their expectations of what life ' should' b e like (which they have learned from the movies) dashed by reality. Thus Wendy often performs the role of caring mother to Neil , and Neil and Eric take turn s caring for the traumati s e d Brian. Unlike the teens in typical teen movies there is no romantic resolution for any of these characters. Instead , they all learn to face the uncertain future and to try and support each other. The c asting of Jos eph Gordon Levitt as the teen hustler Neil is key in this respect, as he is well known for playing wholesome hetero teens who do get the girl in b oth the TV s erie s Third Rock from the Sun ( 1 9 96 2 00 1 ) and the teen flick

10 Things I Hate About You

( 1 99 9 ) . Audience expectations are

rocked by his p e rform a n c e , a s Araki p l ays out our normal exp e ctati ons in

a minor key, forcing us to

co nfront the

p o s s ibility that the normative representation that we are u s e d to may require deterritorialising if a new identity i s to be created. Indeed, it was undoubtedly this uncharacteristic performance that enabled Gordon Levitt to cro s s over into the US independent s e ctor and then s e cure the lead in the teen noir Brick (2006). The second criterion for a work of minor cinema is also met, a s t h e film eradicates the b o undary b etween political and private spaces. As a hustler, Neil inhabits marginal space s , such as motel rooms , cars , bus terminal toil ets and the chil dren's playground where he waits for client s . Through Neil's illicit sexual a ctivities we witn e s s a life live d aimle s s ly in p ublic p l a c e s . In fact, it transpires that Neil 's relationship with the private sphere was a dversely affected when he was a chi l d . His first ej aculation o ccurred when he was just a small boy, watching his mother give her latest boyfriend a blow job on the la dder of his garden swing set. Here the public sphere inva ded his childhood s anctuary, and it is no accident that, as a teenage hustler Neil hangs around a

public children's playground ( c o mplete with swings and slide) . waiting for clients. Public and p rivate have b ecome one and the same for Neil, who associates sex with symbols of childhood that for him have lost their usual connotations of innocent play. In fact, as his mother is fre quently drunk or absent, Neil effectively functions without the p rivacy of a secure home. For this reason he falls for the co ach, who stocks his house with foo d and games appealing to young chil dren, and generally p erforms the role of Neil's ab s ent father by giving him l ifts home after b a s eb all practice. The invasion of sex into Neil's fractured home life , and the false security offered by the co ach's house (where his surrogate father sexually abus es him) , have destroyed Neil's access to a private life , and as a teenager he lives his life entirely in public s p a c e s . The sanctuary of white suburbia usu ally uph e l d by Hollywoo d (again, think no further than It 's a Wonderful Life) is here shown to b e a lie. Fulfilling the third criterion of a work of minor cinema , Araki's s elf c onscious cinematic style is u s e d to ins ert the film into a

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dialogue between filmmaker, fictional story and audience, in a

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similar manner to that which Ro dowick describes in Semb ene's

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Borom Sarret. In doing so he avoids the creation of new, 'positive' queer stereotypes, preferring instead to proliferate the possibilities of divers e teenage identities. Part and p arcel of this approach is a self conscious exploration of style. As numerous critics have noted, Araki's films stand out from the mainstream due to his incorporation of asp ects of the avant garde . l5 As opposed to the transp arency of fo rm adopted by Hollywo o d (which attempts to suck the viewer into its fictional world and avoids drawing attentio n to its constructed nature at all costs) . the avant garde foregrounds the fictional status of the film, asking the viewer to think about how the world is 'normally ' repre sented to them by film. In Mysterious Skin the effect of distancing the spectator from the story is achieve d by stylistic ally inhabiting the Hollywo o d norm and using it to tell a story that

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questions the u s ual s exual identity of the Hollywood teen film, while self cons c iously referencing previous famous Hollywo o d productions ab o ut small town life. I n this way Mysterious Skin appears as though a story told in cinematic quotation mark s . The viewer is confronted with numerou s images that seem familiar, but have b een ' queered' to such an extent that they can only question our p erception of what i s normal. E arly on in the film Wendy and Neil stand in a d e s erted drive in, and fant a s i s e about how their lives might look if they were in a film. As they listen to the 'voice of God' through the sp eaker it b egins to snow. Neil and Wendy look up to the heavens . A revers e shot then follows , taken from a crane l o oking directly down on them, s howing them looking up as the snow fall s . This i s in fac t a direct cinematic reference to the op ening of Frank C apra's tale of s mall town American life, It 's a Wonderful Life. In the earlier film a shot/reverse shot s e quence is u s e d to create a dialogue b etween a family praying for their father George B ailey (Jam e s Stewart) in the s mall American town of B e dford Fall s and an answering d i s cus sion between angels in heave n . " We literally fo llow the p r ayers a s they fly t o h e aven , and witne s s a convers ation b etween angels as they decide how to respond. In

Mysterio us Skin, however, a shot of the heavens s een from the p oint of view of the characters on e arth is a b s ent. Even though the characters claim to hear the voice of God from the silent drive in movie s p eakers , their view of heaven i s not shown to the s p ectator, and there i s no convers ation between protective angels . In fact, a s the impassive camera's aerial stare suggests , heaven has

abandoned the s e characters , just a s both Neil and Brian's fathers have ab andoned them to the care of their working mothers . The effe c t of thi s s e eming renunci ation of all p atriarchal values , whether religious or familial, is c o mp ounded when teenage Neil gets drunk one night and visits the coach's old house. C onfronting this closed door to the past, he mutters bitterly that the co ach, his s urrogate father figure, had once referred to him as his 'angel ' . The

film uses the notion of abandoned souls to suggest that, for Wendy and Neil, the heavenly redemption available to George Bailey in the small American town of Bedford Falls in It 's a Wonderful L ife is not available. Their identity i s no longer that o f the whol e s ome, ' s aved' America of the immediate p ost war years . Thi s replaying of Hollyw o o d myths in a minor way o c curs several times in the film. When Neil and Wendy are in New York , Wendy warns Neil to be c areful by referencing Dorothy in The

Wizard of Oz ( 1 9 3 9 ) , s aying: 'We 're not in Kansas anymore . ' This time, however, unlike Doro thy, the s e characters have no utopian family home to return to by clicking their heel s . More obviously, during the film's Halloween s e quence

the

s afe sub urb an

excitement of H alloween seen in Hollyw o o d classics of the past such a s Meet Me in St. Louis ( 1 944) and E. T. : The Extra Terrestrial ( 1 982) is made to s tutter when Neil physically and s exually abuses a disabled boy in the manner he has learned from the coach, and when B ri an is once again sexually abus ed by the coach. Finally, Araki's decision to shoot the scenes of child abuse in a

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manner that did not traumati s e the child actors creates a further

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minor effect. For the abu s e s e quences Araki filmed the chil dren

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and the coach sep arately, as though they were rea cting to each other, although in reality the o ther party was absent. He then edited the shots together, creating the illusion that both p arties were present at the s ame time . 1 7 This technique is called the Kuleshov effect after the S oviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov who , in the l ate 1 9 1 0 s , dis covered that audiences would infer that shots filmed s ep arately belonged to the same s p a c e and time. In Hollywo o d cinema the Kuleshov effect is typically used to bolster the illusion that the fictional world of the film is 'real ' , and not a created fiction. It furthers the aim of Ho llywo o d cinema, to suck th e viewer into an unquestioning relationship with the n arrative world. For instance, the Kuleshov effect is often used to make spectacular stunts appear real in acti on p acked blockbu s ters . A shot of an explosion may be followed by a shot of an actor reacting

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to it, even though he or she is nowhere near the actual event. In this instanc e , however, a technique usually deployed to make the audi ence feel unquestioningly s ecure in their relati o nship with the film (even as it constructs ideological norm s , such as that of heterosexual primacy) actually makes the viewer feel extremely unea sy. The s cenes look so real that they are twi ce as frightening, e s pe cially when we are placed in the p o sition of the children, l o oking up fro m their p oint of view, at c l o s e ups of huge adu l t fa c e s that fill the screen. The spectator's desire to believe that fictional images are real is purposefully played upon, the illusion of re ality that n o rmally enhances n aturali s m here m aking us s quirm, as it p o s itions u s in the role of abus e d chil d . Replaying this major technique in a minor way renders literal the way this proce dure usually makes us, a s spectators , subject to a p otentially "tI

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abus ive ideology. In the final s cene, Mysterious Skin provides some respite for its

characters , as Neil and Brian break into the co ach's old house, and Neil helps Brian come to terms with what happened to them when they were eight. In one respect, then, the film finally recoups the s uburban home as a place of s anctuary and healing. This private s p a c e is only a temporary sp ace for thes e characters , however, who will ultimately have to leave it again to get on with their live s . On c e again , t h e film plays t h e accepted image o f t h e suburb an home in a minor key, and it does s o to suggest that a p eople of the future can b e created only by excavating the dark and hidden p a s t s ob s cured by thi s homely image s o often p eddled by Hollywoo d, just as Neil and Brian are 'healed' by their final encounter with it. In this way the film refuses to prop agate either exis ting s tereotypes of homos exuality or hetero s exuality, and instead develops the narratives of s everal damaged teens , who s e identities a r e constantly in t h e proce s s of renegoti ation in the narrative

a process that is mirrore d in the film's renegotiation

of Hollywo o d myth s .

Chapter 4

Becom i n g a rt Damian Sutton

What does it mean, for Deleuze and Guattari, to be an artist? Deleuze and Guattari consider artists almo s t within the s ame breath as philos ophers, in the sense that arti sts have glimps ed something of the immanence that holds the universe together in its tremendous forces and flow s : ' They have s e en s omething in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves . ' l This idea of the arti st a s a kind of philosopher i s attractive , but we might struggle if we attach it to any artist, or any artwork. Art can be a kind of philosophy, but this is not the same thing as saying that art is philosophy. The idea of the artist as philos opher sounds us eful when attache d to Pablo Picasso, and the notion can even seem to elevate your p ractice or ours as artists . What happens, however, when we attach the term ' art' in this context to Thomas Kinkade or Jack Vettriano? Is the artist a philos opher then? Perhap s this is why, for D e l e u z e and Gu attari , art i s one s tep remov e d from philo sophy. Art is, as Gregg Lambert has sugge sted, a kind of 'non philos ophy ' , an approach that cannot b e philosophy, but which ultimately has the cap acity to enliven philosophy. For instance, the philosopher has a responsibility to knowledge that the artis t d o e s not, that of the creation of concepts . L amb ert suggests , however, that 'it is only in its encounters with non philosophy that, following Deleuze's assertion, the task of concept creati on can b e proposed anew'.' Art exists to reveal and give shap e to the prob lems and concepts with which phil o s o phy grapp les. When philosophy grows tired, or reaches an imp asse, it

is the arti s tic event that throws up new challenge s as it pres ents tho s e concepts and problems afres h . What, then, d o e s art d o , i f i t cannot b e philosophy? For Deleuze and Guattari, thi s i s very clear. Only philosophy can supp ose the plane of immanence, the non organ i c life that run s thro ugh the univers e , giving it shape and form. Art can sup p o s e the shap e s themselves , however, and can give us

a glimp s e o f that immanence.

It does this by creating p ure s en s ations that exi s t b eyond parti cul ar readings; Deleuze and Guattari call these percepts, and call the p ure responses that exi s t b eyond p articular meaning

affects. In so doing, art is able to do more than simply illus trate the problems and concepts with which philosophy works: it is able to ask some of the same questions of culture that philos ophy does , even if it g ets different kinds of answers .

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