This article was downloaded by: [University of Newcastle, Australia]

On: 01 January 2015, At: 03:32

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:
1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK

South African Journal of

Philosophy
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsph20

Technology and the Time-

Image: Deleuze and
Postmodern Subjectivity
a
Clayton Crockett
a
Department of Philosophy and Religion
University of Central Arkansas Conway, Arkansas
72035USA E-mail:
Published online: 28 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Clayton Crockett (2005) Technology and the Time-Image:
Deleuze and Postmodern Subjectivity, South African Journal of Philosophy, 24:3,
176-188

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/sajpem.v24i3.31423

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all
the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our
platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors
make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,
completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of
the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.
The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and
 Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,
demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in
relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study
purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,
reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access
and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-
conditions
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015
 Technology and the Time-Image: Deleuze and
Postmodern Subjectivity
Clayton Crockett
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

University of Central Arkansas

Conway, Arkansas 72035
USA
E-mail: ClaytonC@uca.edu

Abstract
This article develops an argument about the time-image in the thought of
Gilles Deleuze, and relates it to a broader Continental philosophy of technol-
ogy and culture, including Kant, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean Bau-
drillard, Paul Virilio and Antonio Negri. After grounding a consideration of
Deleuze in relation to Heidegger's thesis concerning technology, a construc-
tive interpretation of the time-image is developed in the context of Deleuze's
work. The time-image is related to Deleuze's early work on Kant's philoso-
phy and his book Difference and Repetition, as well as to his important books
on cinema, in which the time-image is opposed to the movement-image. The
time-image is seen to make up the heart of subjectivity, because it concerns
not only external technologies, but also how the self relates to itself inter-
nally. This understanding of the time-image is then contrasted with the work
of Baudrillard and Virilio. Finally, the contrast between the time-image and
the movement-image is shown to possess political implications, partly with
the help of Negri.

1. Introduction
According to Martin Heidegger, technology is a mode of revealing, a ‘bringing-forth.’
The Greek tevcnh refers not primarily to a mechanical construction, but essentially to
truth. In ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ ‘technology comes to presence in
the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, hap-
pens’ (Heidegger, 1977:13). This event of technology, which waxes in the contempo-
rary Western world, is for Heidegger both a great opportunity and a great danger. The
event of truth reveals itself in technology, which is not simply an external force by
which we shape instrumental tools to assist our existence in practical ways, but funda-
mentally a self-shaping force, because it determines and reveals who we are in terms
of our very being.
Enframing (Ge-stell), and the world-picture (Welt-bild), are two essential aspects of
technology, according to Heidegger. A picture or worldview is determined by how it is
framed, and it is taken in a flash (Blick), literally if you use a camera and take the pic-
ture outside or at night. The resulting picture that is formed can be called an image,
which is something we can see or perceive. The image is framed, for many of us by
television sets, and we are currently awash in images to the extent that it has become
almost impossible to separate image from reality. The overwhelming proliferation of
 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3) 177

images, and the fact that their presence puts reality into question, is one way of desig-
nating the postmodern condition, and Continental philosophers influenced by
Heidegger have taken up the question of technology in its relation to virtual reality.
According to Walter Benjamin, philosophy is influenced by technological reproduc-
tion. His famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’
shows how processes of photography and cinema alter our perceptions of art and re-
veal ‘entirely new processes of the subject’ (Benjamin, 1968:236). In his essay, ‘The-
ses on the Philosophy of History,’ Benjamin claims that history is a dynamic process
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

where ‘the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image
which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again’
(Benjamin, 1968:255). History is created by seizing the past as an image, an image
that is formed technologically according to particular mechanical forms of reproduc-
tion.
Although Benjamin's language is very different from Heidegger's, Benjamin and
Heidegger can be read in complementary ways concerning the question of technology
and its production of an image. According to a contemporary scholar of information
science, ‘Heidegger's and Benjamin's works both share a common concern with the
technically formed image of reproduction in information and the power of that image
to cancel out the very powers of design that construct and organize that image in soci-
ety and culture’ (Day 2004:77). This analysis is useful in describing the converging
significance of Benjamin and Heidegger, but it also remains too instrumental and ex-
ternal.
Insofar as Heidegger and Benjamin give us tools to analyze historical and theoretical
relationships among processes of external reproduction in culture, we miss what
makes their thinking revolutionary. We ‘are’ the ‘technically formed image of repro-
duction,’ that is, we are not simply bombarded with images, but the experimental sig-
nificance of our visual culture fashions our self-perceptions and our self-understand-
ings in terms of images. Benjamin and Heidegger both approach a relationship among
being, art, image, philosophy and technology in such a way that it forms a nexus for
thinking about the self, particularly in terms of its relationship to itself, its self-percep-
tion. My thesis is that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is related to that of Heidegger
and Benjamin, because it builds upon and draws out the significance of these connec-
tions that constitute self-perception and subjectivity. As I will demonstrate, Deleuze
develops the notion of the time-image in a way that links technology and temporality,
and in such a way that it directly informs self-perception. Furthermore, by opposing
the time-image to the movement-image, Deleuze offers a framework to comprehend
the significance of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, two other important French
thinkers of the image. Finally, I will suggest that this distinction between time-image
and movement-image possesses a political importance, in addition to its technological
and philosophical significance.
It should be noted that I am using an extremely broad understanding of technology,
which is related by Heidegger explicitly to the Greek word tekhne, that is, the art of
doing or making, sometimes referred to as technics. According to Bernard Stiegler in
Technics and Time, for Heidegger tekhne is a poiesis, a ‘way of revealing;’ both bring
‘into being what is not’ (Stiegler, 1998:9). In a Deleuzian sense, philosophy is also a
tekhne, an art of experimentation. Furthermore, technology is essentially related to
time; as Stiegler explains, ‘technics, far from being merely in time, properly consti-
tutes time' (Stiegler, 1998:27). Technics, or technical being, is the temporality of being
 178 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3)

that characterises the human, or Dasein. According to Deleuze, philosophy, like cin-
ema, performs conceptual experiments with time-images.
2. Deleuze
In order to clarify and elaborate this insight into the nature of technology and tempo-
rality, I turn directly to the thought of Deleuze. In the context of Heidegger's and
Benjamin's thoughts on image and technology, the philosophy of Deleuze allows us to
understand a technological and philosophical shift in human self-perception that be-
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

gins with Kant and culminates in the late twentieth century. By focusing on the
time-image in Deleuze's work, we can follow a trajectory from his early book on
Kant's Critical Philosophy through his central work, Difference and Repetition, and
eventuating in his two books on Cinema.
Deleuze published Kant's Critical Philosophy in French in 1963, shortly after his
important book on Nietzsche and Philosophy. In Kant's Critical Philosophy, Deleuze
surveys the diverse arrangements of the Kantian faculties in the three famous Cri-
tiques. But it is not until 1978 that Deleuze fully expresses the significance of Kant's
understanding of time in his seminar at Vincennes, part of which constitutes the Pref-
ace for the re-publication of the book in 1983, and the English translation published in
1984. Deleuze claims that with Kant, for the first time, movement becomes subordi-
nated to time. That is, instead of occurring by passing through a series of periodical
movements that provide its measurement, time for Kant becomes fundamental. ‘It is
now movement that is subordinate to time’ (Deleuze, 1984:vii). From Kant on, ‘time is
no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to the
time which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the Critique of Pure
Reason’ (Deleuze 1984:vii).
This distinction between time and movement is crucial for understanding the two
books Deleuze wrote on cinema: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, and Cinema 2: The
Time-Image. The initial significance of cinematic technology is the construction of a
new image of movement, a new form of motion, the movement of film and the way it
alters perception and self-perception, as well as understanding. But the ultimate theo-
retical significance of cinema concerns how it constructs a time-image, and in this it
follows broadly Kantian lines. According to Deleuze, time is not primarily the external
movement or passage of events, but constitutes the internal self-relation of auto-affec-
tion. Kant splits the self into the passive self that exists in time, and the active self that
performs the temporal synthesis of transcendental apperception that constitutes time.
In this way, ‘time moves into the subject’ and becomes ‘the form under which the I
[active self] affects the ego [passive self], that is, the way in which the mind affects it-
self’ (Deleuze, 1984:ix). Time constitutes the self, but it does so in a disjunctive way,
because time is the form of interiority that ‘constantly divides us from ourselves, splits
us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end’
(Deleuze, 1984:ix).
Kantian philosophy is actually a technology that alters our fundamental self-relation
and self-perception, and the pure form of time that splits the self becomes the defini-
tion of the image, or more specifically, the time-image, in Deleuze's books on cinema.
The external technological devices (camera, film, screen, theater, editing devices) that
construct the means for presenting this time-image do not create it in a simple causal
manner, because the time-image has already been pre-figured in Kantian thought. I
want to show how Deleuze expresses the time-image in his second cinema book, and
 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3) 179

then suggest some further implications for thinking about philosophy and technology
in relation to the work of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, but first I will turn briefly
to the formation of the time-image in Difference and Repetition.
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze's most creative philosophical work, inaugurates
a new philosophy of difference that possesses many parallels as well as differences
from Derrida's Of Grammatology. Both books were published in French in the water-
shed year of 1968. In Chapter 2, ‘Repetition for Itself,’ Deleuze elaborates three syn-
theses of time. The first synthesis occurs under the sign of the present, and is called
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

habit. We are composed by ‘thousands of habits,’ which ‘form the basic domain of
passive syntheses,’ or the passive self (Deleuze 1994:78). In this context Deleuze ref-
erences the thought of David Hume on habit. According to Deleuze, ‘habit is the foun-
dation of time,’ from which memory is derived as an active synthesis reaching towards
the past. Memory, under the sign of the past, constitutes the second synthesis of time,
and this is a more active synthesis. Deleuze's understanding of memory is deeply influ-
enced by Henri Bergson as well as Marcel Proust. Memory crystallises the past into a
point, which can then function as a technical lever of intervention into the present.
Finally, with the passage to the third synthesis, Deleuze discusses Kant in terms sim-
ilar to the Preface of Kant's Critical Philosophy, because it is the Kantian ‘I think’ that
fractures the I by means of the form of time: ‘it is as though the I were fractured from
one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time’ (Deleuze
1994:86). Kant introduces time into thought internally, and this pure form of time
splits the I into active and passive self. The third synthesis is the pure and empty form
of time, which is an active synthesis because it allows for productive repetition even as
it disallows complete identity. The third synthesis is inherently futural, and Deleuze
refers to Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return in order to elaborate a model of repeti-
tion based on difference. Eternal return ‘is repetition by excess which leaves intact
nothing of the default or the becoming-equal. It is itself new, complete novelty’
(Deleuze 1994:90). The pure and empty form of time takes the form of an image, a
pure image, that becomes the basis for the creativity of the third synthesis of time. The
pure and empty form of time, or what Deleuze later calls the time-image, is what al-
lows repetition to occur, just as its emptiness means that every repetition recurs differ-
ently.
Deleuze does not use the language of image in Kant's Critical Philosophy or Differ-
ence and Repetition, but with the Cinema books he does contrast the movement-image
and the time-image in almost precisely the same way as he does with time as move-
ment and time as order in Kant. The movement-image is the first sign of cinema, ac-
cording to Deleuze, and most film theorists remain entirely under the spell of this im-
age. Here it is the movement, or the speed of images, that disorients natural perception
even as it amplifies and extends it. The action image involves predictable motor-link-
ages that eventually deteriorate to the level of clichés. Ultimately, for the move-
ment-image, ‘the image constantly sinks to the state of cliché: because it is introduced
into sensory-motor linkages, ... because we never perceive everything that is in the im-
age, because it is made for that purpose’ (Deleuze, 1989:21). Cinema retraces the de-
velopment of modern philosophy; it must free itself from a notion of time as move-
ment, in order to experience ‘time itself, ‘a little time in its pure state’: a direct
time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is
produced’ (Deleuze, 1989:17). Freed from the form of clichéd movement, cinema is
able to experiment with time itself, to become a brain.
 180 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3)

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, non-chronological time is understood through the

image of the crystal. ‘We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time,’ Deleuze
says, because the crystal refers essentially to the splitting of time as it unrolls. Time
‘splits into two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while
the other preserves all the past’ (Deleuze, 1989:81). The essence of time is this split,
which, recalling the language of Kant's Critical Philosophy, is the ‘pure virtuality
which divides itself in two as affector and affected, the ‘affection of self by self’ as
definition of time’ (Deleuze, 1989:83).
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

Inspired partially by Charles Sanders Peirce, Deleuze elaborates a semiology of cin-

ematic signs that he calls chronosigns, lectosigns and noosigns. Chronosigns refer to
the distinction set up by Bergson between peaks of the present and sheets of the past.
Lectosigns refer to the speech-act, which is a reading or a storytelling, that is, the ca-
pacity of film to signify and tell a story in an active sense. Finally, noosigns refer to
thought in the form of an idea, which refers to the capacity of the film to generate in-
sight. Deleuze explains, ‘what the past is to time, sense is to language and idea to
thought’ (Deleuze, 1989:99). They are all three directly related to time, and all three
signs pertain to the crucial distinction between sight and sound, or seeing and hearing,
which Deleuze calls opsigns and sonsigns. Ultimately, what is essential about all of
these signs of time is that they involve a splitting, an interval or a cut. In a cinematic
sense, it is the cut between what is seen on the screen and what is heard aurally. The
cut or the splice draws the audio and the video together and keeps them apart in con-
stituting the disjunction of the audiovisual image (see Deleuze, 1989:256, 260).
Although Deleuze's discussion of time is extremely complex, it can be clarified
somewhat by reference to the Kantian splitting of time as auto-affection, and it directly
concerns the cut or the split. In the direct time-image, movement is subordinated to
time rather than time being subordinated to movement. Here ‘the interval is set free,
the interstice becomes irreducible and stands on its own’ (Deleuze, 1989:277). The in-
terval in itself is no longer simply a rational cut, but appears as irrational, or at least set
free from any particular constraints of rational standards defined in terms of move-
ment, such as a ruler or canon. The interval appears as ‘this thought outside itself and
this unthought within thought’ (Deleuze, 1989:278). The interval or the cut, which
also defines the essence of the brain, is the direct time-image, set free from movement.
The image is unlinked not from a body, but from the train of thought and action al-
ready laid out as movement. The time-image not only refers to the brain of cinema, but
also the body of cinema, as well as the body in general. The body forces us to think,
and ‘to think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its pos-
tures. It is through the body ... that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with
thought’ (Deleuze, 1989:189). There is a cinema of brain and a cinema of body, and
Deleuze challenges us to think of the time-image as the cut that relates them disjunc-
tively without thereby forming a dualism.
Deleuze's language is abstract, because it is theoretical, and it is both derived from
and applied to particular works of cinema, to particular films. Deleuze argues that
the fact is that the new spiritual automatism and the new psychological autom-
ata depend on an aesthetic before depending on technology. It is the time-image
which calls on an original regime of images and signs, before electronics spoils
it or, in contrast, relaunches it (Deleuze, 1989:267).
 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3) 181

Although Deleuze contrasts aesthetics and technology here, I would argue that
technics in a broad sense incorporates a Deleuzian aesthetics. Or rather, technics as
tekhne and aesthetics as (the result of) a poiçsis converge. Here Deleuze is criticizing
technology in its external, motor or movement form, under the sign of electronics.
This is also what Virilio will later critique, the technology of the movement image
driven by the motor. I am suggesting that the time-image is still technological in a
deeper sense, however. Deleuze affirms the possibility of the brain of cinema, ‘a new
brain that would be at once the screen, the film stock and the camera, each time mem-
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

brane of the outside and the inside’ (Deleuze, 1989:215). The time-image refers to the
brain/body of cinema at the same time as it affects and transforms our understanding
of our own brain/body and our opportunities of self-projection and self-perception.
The time-image appears as the cut, the creative interval, and thus it is the basis for
linkages and relinkages, for assembling ideas, images, thoughts, words, sounds, etc.,
into a series.
What is at stake in our contemporary forms of self-perception? The stakes are enor-
mous, because what is at stake is belief. The challenge for cinema and philosophy is to
relink humanity and the world, because our clichéd movements have worn thin the
tracks of our thinking, as well as made our contemporary world unbearable. According
to Deleuze, the great turning point of modern philosophy is the replacement of knowl-
edge with belief, ‘but belief replaces knowledge only when it becomes belief in this
world, as it is.’ Our belief in this world has become incredible, because our world is in
many ways intolerable. The task for cinema is to
film, not the world, but belief in the world, our only link ... Restoring our belief in
the world-this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we
are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in
this world (Deleuze, 1989:172).
Technology ultimately concerns self-perception, self-understanding, and belief.
Deleuze's philosophy amplifies and extends the work of Heidegger and Benjamin by
developing the notion of the time-image, and its importance for subjectivity, philoso-
phy and technology. By way of elaborating on the significance of the time-image, I
would like to consider two contemporary French theorists, Jean Baudrillard and Paul
Virilio, who both can be read within the arc of Deleuze's philosophy of the time-im-
age. Finally, I will conclude with an argument for the political significance of De-
leuze's juxtaposition of the time-image with the movement-image.
3. Implications: Baudrillard and Virilio
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze calls his philosophy an anti-Platonism, because
his understanding of repetition challenges the distinction between copy and original.
Repetition of identity would be the repetition from an original that makes a copy. But
a repetition of difference, as Deleuze suggests, means that there is no original form to
anchor the process of repetition. A copy of a copy is a simulacrum, which in Platonic
terms is worse than a copy, but for Deleuze the ‘triumph of the simulacra’ overcomes
the traditional model of representation that posits an original and a copy (Deleuze
1994:128). Baudrillard takes off on a line of flight from Deleuze by developing a phi-
losophy of simulacra. If simulacra are all that exist, then there is no prior reality to
copy, but all copies are copies of copies, or simulacra. Reality becomes eclipsed by
hyperreality. In his book, Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard mentions Disneyland
as an example, because ‘Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country,
 182 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3)

all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland’ (Baudrillard, 1994:12). That is, ‘Disneyland is
presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of
Los Angeles and America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the
hyperreal order and to the order of simulation’ (Baudrillard, 1994:12).
The first chapter of Simulacra and Simulation reads: ‘The Precession of Simulacra.’
A precession of simulacra is not a procession of simulacra, because that would reduce
simulacra to an order of time as movement, a sequential or linear notion of time that is
called into question by Deleuze's time image. So long as time is movement, we can ap-
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

peal to it to support order, representation and repetition. A procession is an orderly

process. Once the time-image breaks free from the movement-image, time does not
flow in an orderly manner, and simulacra precess, although Baudrillard's usage of this
term is unconventional. According to Benjamin, history involves seizing upon an im-
age and tearing it out of the flow of time. But for Deleuze and Baudrillard, time does
not flow from past to future, so images or simulacra form a precession that undoes a
linear sequence. We are bombarded with images, and we no longer possess the ability
or the confidence to peel away the virtuality in order to penetrate to the core reality,
and this is the postmodern condition.
Baudrillard's conception of simulacra derives directly from Deleuze, but whereas
Deleuze views the affirmation of simulacra in Difference and Repetition as a libera-
tion, Baudrillard's embrace of simulacra is more cynical and ironic. Baudrillard at-
tempts a desperate affirmation of simulacra, hoping against hope that championing
hyperreality will somehow loosen its grip or unravel its web of interpenetrating im-
ages. Baudrillard believes that we can no longer simply oppose reality and hyper-
reality, or original and copy, because we are overwhelmed with a proliferation of im-
ages that cannot be sorted out and put into order. This is the postmodern condition,
and Baudrillard's solution is to cure us of our nostalgic desire for an original or pure
reality that is not simulated. At the same time, Baudrillard cannot hide his disdain for
this hyperreality, since he devotes all of his considerable intellectual powers to critique
its deceptive workings. His affirmation of simulacra is desperate, because simulacra
are destabilising of truth, but there is no other option or alternative. Baudrillard's
thought is ironic, because we cannot simply affirm simulacra immediately, but instead
we can do so only through the theoretical distance from which we can determine that
they are not and cannot be original. I think that Baudrillard's hope is not nostalgic, that
hyperreality will give way to a new reality, but it is hopeful in the sense that what
Deleuze calls ‘the powers of the false’ may be weakened enough that hyperreality will
lose its ability to deceive us about its true nature. That is, Baudrillard's ironic affirma-
tion of simulacra would ideally weaken its deceptive power, even though it cannot dis-
solve it.
Baudrillard does not specifically use the idea of the time-image, but a Deleuzian
time-image underlies his theoretical and cultural observations. In America, Baudrillard
shows how three stages commingle in the image of the American desert, which is es-
sentially cinematic. Death Valley presents at once ‘the geology of the earth, the mau-
soleum of the Indians, and the camera of John Ford’ (Baudrillard, 1988:70). These
three distinct time frames coincide to form a spectacle; and furthermore, ‘the only nat-
ural spectacle that is really gripping is the one which offers both the most moving pro-
fundity and at the same time the total simulacrum of that profundity' (Baudrillard,
1988:70).
 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3) 183

Baudrillard's nihilism shows through, because he cannot quite cure himself of his
nostalgia for the real, however much he forswears it. Baudrillard expresses awe at the
achieved utopia of the United States, but there remains a certain horror in his affirma-
tion: ‘the US is a paradise ... mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be,
it is paradise.’ He struggles to penetrate ‘the mystery of American reality’ by regard-
ing it with the ‘same enthusiasm which Americans show for their own success, their
own barbarism, their own power’ (Baudrillard, 1988:100). This enthusiasm is nihilistic
because of the distance between Europe and America that Baudrillard cannot fully
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

overcome. He doubles the naïve and primitive original ‘American’ enthusiasm with a
forced repetition, a repetition from the perspective of European ‘knowing better’ but
wishing to divest itself of this awful self-knowledge. Deleuze, on the other hand,
would view Baudrillard's repetition as a repetition based upon a prior identity, rather
than difference. Deleuze sees the productive possibility of the time-image, and this is
why his separation of the time-image from the movement-image is so crucial, and this
separation becomes even more important for reading Virilio. Ultimately, both Virilio's
and Baudrillard's emphasis upon speed and movement betrays their reduction of tech-
nology and its possibilities to the motor-image. This emphasis is evident in
Baudrillard's ambulations across the United States, but becomes much clearer philo-
sophically in Virilio's work.
The mechanism for the production of images is a motor, but the motor distributes
images chaotically and randomly, at least apparently. In The Art of the Motor, Paul
Virilio explains that our technology invades and explodes our bodies, creating a new
physiology. According to Virilio, ‘technology is no longer exploding a long way away
from the body, it is exploding inside the body,’ specifically in the form of miniaturisa-
tion or nanotechnology (Virilio, 1995:113). Technologies invade the body, transform-
ing our physiology, altering our perception and self-perception in dramatic ways. We
are experiencing ‘the motorization of the living being,’ which is the breakdown of the
distinction between organic and machinic (Virilio, 1995:111).
The motorisation of humanity involves the production and intensification of images
designed for the representation and control of complex processes, including images of
the brain. Virilio emphasizes the negative, dystopian aspects of these processes, partic-
ularly the interaction of military and information technology and their complicity in
war. From the ‘simultaneous invention of gunpowder and printer's ink,’ he affirms, to
a similar connection between
the machine gun and the camera, nitrocellulose and film, radar and video-but
also between the trick effects of the depiction of actual events in graphic illus-
tration, photography, film and television and good old fashioned camouflage ...
[we are] no longer able to tell where reality begins or leaves off (Virilio,
1995:54).
Virilio waxes apocalyptic, arguing that the technical creation of images screens us
from reality, as well as from ourselves, and this is both an aesthetic and a military pro-
ject. The most important aspect of the time-image is the speed of its motor, a speed
that approaches the speed of light and overwhelms critical or self-conscious thought
and reflection. Authoritarian forces benefit from the proliferation of images that con-
fuse and disorient thinking. As Virilio explains in Desert Screen, his reflections on the
first Gulf War of 1991, ‘no politics is possible at the scale of the speed of light. Poli-
tics depends upon having time for reflection’ (Virilio 2002:43).
 184 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3)

According to Virilio, the time-image is ultimately the sinister construction of a vi-

sion machine for authoritarian and anti-democratic purposes. In The Vision Machine,
Virilio provides a genealogy of the technologies of perception and memory across
modern Europe. He argues that dyslexia and amnesia are the product of the standard-
isation of ways of seeing, which constitutes a ‘progressive disintegration of a faith in
perception founded in the Middle Ages.’ This disintegration of natural perception ful-
fils itself in the twentieth century ‘death of art,’ which represents ‘the zero degree of
representation’ (Virilio, 1994:16-17).
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

Paradoxically, the proliferation of images induces a breakdown in perception, and

brings about blindness, a blindness caused by the overwhelming intensity of the speed
of light. The vision machine is an autonomic, inhuman entity that bypasses thought
and reflection. Human reflection is cut out of the loop, in order to perfect and extend
authoritarian control, which is the thesis of Manuel De Landa's book, War in an Age of
Intelligent Machines. In this context, it is interesting to reflect upon the February 2005
New York Times story, ‘Military Predicts Robot Soldiers in Decade,’ which seems to
confirm the pessimistic picture that Virilio portrays. A representative of the Pentagon's
Joint Forces Command is quoted as saying ‘the lawyers tell me there are no prohibi-
tions against robots making life-or-death decisions.’
Virilio captures the very real dangers of our technology and its impact on our per-
ceptions and self-understanding. In Open Sky, he states:
I personally fear we are being confronted by a sort of pathology of immediate per-
ception that owes everything, or very nearly everything, to the recent proliferation of
photo-cinematographic and video-infographic seeing machines. Machines that by
mediatizing ordinary everyday representations end up destroying their credibility
(Virilio, 1997:90).
The vision machine discussed by Virilio would seem to be an enlarged, dystopian
time-image, sort of a time-image on steroids. The vision machine appears to be the vir-
tual shadow of the Deleuzian time-image, but in fact it is also still tied to the move-
ment-image. I am not trivialising Virilio's fears, which are more intense and severe
than Baudrillard's ironic and insightful observations, but in Deleuzian terms he is elab-
orating the danger of our enthrallment by the movement-image, rather than treating the
time-image directly. That is, a superficial reading of Virilio suggests that Virilio un-
derstands and criticises the way the movement-image and time-image work together in
our contemporary culture in sinister ways for the purposes of authoritarian control.
The image is divided into time-image and movement-image, twin aspects of the mon-
strous vision machine.
On my reading of Deleuze and Virilio, on the other hand, Virilio in accord with
Deleuze, understands the extraordinary dangers of our entrapment by the move-
ment-image, with its worship of light and speed. What Deleuze understands by the
time-image, however, constitutes the hope for an interval of reflection that destabilises
the movement-image and renders it inoperable. Would the time-image, then, be an
anti- or a- technological entity, and thus what Deleuze calls more properly an aesthet-
ics? I would appeal to Heidegger here, and suggest that Deleuze's distinction between
time-image and movement-image is also a way to read Heidegger in ‘The Question
Concerning Technology.’ According to Heidegger, technology is not simply a danger,
a negative to be decried and resisted. Although ‘the rule of Enframing threatens man
with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original reveal-
ing and hence to experience the call of truth,’ the extreme danger of the Enframing
 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3) 185

Ge-stell is also ‘a destining of revealing [that can] bring into appearance the saving
power in its arising’ (Heidegger, 1977:28). Technology is the destiny of being for
Dasein. Building upon Heidegger's philosophy, Stiegler contends that human being is
technical being in its essence, understood as both a lack and an advantage, or as
Stiegler explains in reference to the myth of Epimetheus, a fault. For Stiegler, technics
is ‘the horizon of all possibility to come and of all possibility of a future’ (Stiegler,
1998:ix). As a fault, or a fault-line, time as the essence of being constitutes the time-
image, which is the paradigmatic image of tekhne. In Deleuzian terms, the fault is time
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

as the cut or the creative interval that determines the brain as well as the cinematic im-
age.
The possibility of a time-image is the possibility of a brain, or the possibility of
thinking, even if technics is also determined as the mechanical, autonomic, or un-
thought. That is why the possibility of a time-image is the possibility of a future, what
is possible or unforeseen, which is given rise to by the creative interval of time that
constitutes the fault-line of the brain. And that is why Deleuze in some ways goes be-
yond both Baudrillard's and Virilio's extension of his thought. Both Baudrillard and
Virilio extend and apply Deleuze's notion of the time-image in technological and theo-
retical terms, but they also lose sight of the positive significance of his thought, or the
essence of the time-image, because they both ultimately conflate time-image with the
movement-image. Ultimately, as Deleuze states in his essay, ‘Postscript on the Societ-
ies of Control,’ we should resist the temptation to cast new developments in technol-
ogy and philosophy in extreme utopian or dystopian narratives. He says, ‘there is no
need to fear or hope, only to search for new weapons’ (Deleuze, 1992:7). The time-im-
age: a weapon?
4. Conclusion
In some ways, the culmination of Deleuze's political thought (in collaboration with
Guattari) is the shaping of the desiring machines of Anti-Oedipus into a war machine
in A Thousand Plateaus. Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus make up the two vol-
umes of an experimental, philosophical and revolutionary work, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus uses psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist philoso-
phy to critique Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, in order to focus on the revolu-
tionary nature of desire. In A Thousand Plateaus, desire is generalised beyond any lit-
eral, sexual desire, and extended throughout history and thought. At the center of A
Thousand Plateaus lies a long section called ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ in which
Deleuze and Guattari contrast the nomad with the State based upon an alternative rela-
tionship to territory. The nomad is nomadic, mobile, whereas the State is static, seden-
tary.
In opposing the nomad to the State, Deleuze develops to its logical conclusion the
strategy of resistance, based on territory and movement. In setting up two different
kinds of war machine, Deleuze and Guattari stage a confrontation around terri-
tory-territorialisation and deterritorialisation. As they conclude the ‘Treatise on
Nomadology,’ ‘war machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the
machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear
against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture and domination’ (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987:423). Again, these connections are always territorial, or pertain to
movement. As Virilio puts it in Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, ‘it is time
we realized that the most important ecological struggles in these last years have had a
 186 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3)

common denominator: they have all taken place and been organized around the prob-
lem of speed and its vectors, of the expansion of its area’ (Virilio, 1990:89). The prob-
lem of speed and territory is that it remains captured by the movement-image, which is
the only image of technics or technology that most of us can imagine. The political di-
lemma is that ‘the true physical body of the modern totalitarian State’ is based upon
the movement-image, even though the speed of its proliferation of images, spectacles,
and information disorients us and confuses us about its very nature.
I am arguing that, to read the time-image in Deleuze as technological and as a break
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

with the movement-image is both a philosophical and political reading. Around the
same time that Deleuze and Guattari were developing their radically experimental po-
litical project to its end in the late 1970s, Deleuze was giving his seminar on Kant at
Vincennes. In the 1980s, Deleuze developed the distinction he had made, in the Pref-
ace to Kant's Critical Philosophy, between time as movement and time as order, into
the contrast between the movement-image and the time-image in his two influential
books on cinema. A number of works have appeared that teach us to read Cinema 1
and Cinema 2 as constructive philosophical books, and not merely as film criticism
(see Flaxman 2000). This is correct, they are genuinely and constructively philosophi-
cal; however, I am arguing further that the cinema books should be read politically.
They are radically political, because they assemble the time-image over against the
movement-image, and this within a framework at once philosophical, technological (in
the Heideggerian sense) and aesthetic.
I am arguing against the claim that Deleuze retreated into aesthetics at the end of his
life, abandoning his political engagement with the completion of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, developing a metaphysics of the fold in Leibniz and the Baroque, and
toying around in his old age with the definition of philosophy in What is Philosophy?,
a reprise with Guattari, but here without the intensity and passion of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (see Badiou, 2000). No! The construction and elaboration of the time-
image is a radically political event, an explosive and powerful conception that disman-
tles the very basis of our perception and its conformity to the speed-body of the State,
with its spectacular images and dissimulative strategies of biopolitical control. Virilio
helps us uncover their true nature, and we recoil in horror. But, and this is the revolu-
tionary potentiality of Deleuze's thought, they are based only on movement, all-too-
simple-movement. There is no brain; the State, not to mention the Empire, cannot
think, even as it exerts all its powers over death and life to capture and control the
body, or what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life.’ Deleuze sketches for cinema the pos-
sibility of a brain, even though he knows that most movies are tedious and trivial. The
‘brain’ of technology is the time-image, and opens up techniques of thinking and liv-
ing beyond the power of movement and its control.
In Cinema 2, Deleuze underscores the political possibility of cinema. He argues that
modern cinema has the potential to function as the ‘art of the masses,’ it ‘could be the
supreme revolutionary or democratic art, which makes the masses a true subject’
(Deleuze, 1989:216). Unfortunately, this vision was compromised by fascism, totali-
tarianism and capitalism. ‘If there were a modern political cinema,’ he writes, ‘it
would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet ... the people are missing’
(Deleuze, 1989:216). The promise of modern cinema is unfulfilled, because the people
are missing or left out. The political task of cinema is to contribute to the invention of
a people, and the time-image is what enables this possibility, because it allows for
linkages and relinkages among ideas, images and bodies not merely for the sake of
 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3) 187

movement or territory, but for the purpose of becoming a brain, animating a body and
restoring belief, that is, creating a people. Deleuze looks to third world cinema, which
‘has this aim: through trance or crisis, to constitute an assemblage which brings real
parties together, in order to make them produce collective utterances as the prefigura-
tion of the people who are missing’ (Deleuze, 1989:224).
It is the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri who most explicitly develops the political
implications of Deleuze's thought. For Negri, ‘the people who are missing’ are named
multitude. In Time for Revolution, Negri claims that the multitude is ‘the biopolitical
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

subject of generation constructed through language and co-operation.’ The multitude

is the postmodern subject, a subjectivity based not on any substantial identity, but a
‘singular event of the decision upon the common’ which is ‘the triumph of love that
surges up from the multitude of the poor, embodying itself in the singularity of its
common name’ (Negri, 2003:253). With the term multitude, Negri names the ‘people
who are missing,’ using the resources Deleuze has provided for ‘scripting’ them in
Cinema 2.
Earlier in Time for Revolution, Negri constructs a time-image based upon time as
kairôs, which concerns the instant, or ‘the moment of rupture and opening of tempo-
rality’ (Negri, 2003:153). The classical Greek image refers to the moment when an ar-
cher releases an arrow. For Negri, kairôs is an adventure of being in which it leans
‘out over the void of the time to-come,’ and this occurs fundamentally in the act of
naming. In naming, time as kairôs expresses a new being, which is why it is ontologi-
cal. It is the ‘flash of certainty’ ‘when kairôs exposes itself to the void and decides
upon it, that the name is born’ (Negri, 2003:154). This process of naming is the pro-
duction of a revolutionary subjectivity that is ontological, for Negri. At the same time,
Negri's discussion of kairôs as time represents a time-image, because it is the cut of
the arrow that relates imagination and being. Negri assembles a time-image in order to
envision or invent a new cinematic people, a multitude, and this possesses revolution-
ary political implications.
Negri also follows Deleuze in grounding the ‘brain’ of the multitude, which is pro-
ductive imagination, in a body, the corporeal ‘material field of the production of be-
ing’ (Negri, 2003:170). Both body and imagination are brought together or wrapped
around kairôs as it cuts across the void. According to Negri, ‘the materialist field is
productive. Its production traverses flesh, desire and the generation of the common
name expressed by kairôs’ (Negri, 2003:171). The second half of Time for Revolution
sketches the time-image for the grand cinematic productions Empire and Multitude,
starring Negri as Deleuze, with Michael Hardt playing the supporting role of Félix
Guattari. In associating Negri and Hardt with Deleuze and Guattari, and emphasising
the necessarily cinematic aspects of Empire and Multitude, I am not trivialising their
work as a simple repetition, but I do want to stress the importance of Deleuze's work
on cinema for the possibility of Empire and Multitude, and to claim that Negri's work
manifests this inherent political potential of the Deleuzian time-image.
Finally, I want to appeal to the distinction Negri makes between power as potestas
and power as potentia in his book on Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly. Negri argues that
Spinoza's thought is revolutionary and materialist, because it opposes potentia to po-
testas, or the potency of thinking in its virtuality with the actual power of the modern
state. Rather than potentia serving the ends of potestas, which is the classical image of
philosophy, in Spinoza potentia is ‘a real process of constitution’ and potestas ‘can be
understood only ... as a function subordinate to the power (potentia) of being’ (Negri,
 188 S. Afr. J. Philos. 2005, 24(3)

1991:192). One way to think about the Deleuzian distinction between the time-image
and the movement-image is to read the time-image as referring directly to potentia,
whereas the movement-image necessarily concerns potestas. What is the potential for
a new, revolutionary thinking that is directly technological and philosophical? The
time-image forged through the series Spinoza-Heidegger-Deleuze-Negri is one such
trajectory.

References
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 03:32 01 January 2015

Badiou, Alain. 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. L. Burchill. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Baudrillard, J. 1988. America, trans. C. Turner. London: Verso.
Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S.F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press.
Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations, trans. H. Zahn. New York: Shocken Books.
Day, R. E. 2004. ‘The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age,’
in Media Bytes: History, Technology and Media Culture, eds. L. Rabinovitz and
A. Geil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G. 1984. Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1992. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control.’ OCTOBER 59, 3-7.
Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press.
Flaxman, G., ed. 2000. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cin-
ema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question of Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt.
New York: Harper & Row.
Negri, A. 1991. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Poli-
tics, trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Negri, A. 2003. Time for Revolution, trans. M. Mandarini. London: Continuum.
Stiegler, B. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. R. Beards-
worth and G. Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Virilio, P. 1990. Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles, trans. M. Polizzoti. New
York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. 1994. The Vision Machine, trans. J. Rose. Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.
Virilio, P. 1995. The Art of the Motor, trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Virilio, P. 1997. Open Sky, trans. J. Rose. London: Verso.
Virilio, P. 2002. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. M. Degener. Lon-
don: Continuum.