Time - Deleuze on Bergson, Aristotle and Leibniz

Time - Deleuze on Bergson, Aristotle and Leibniz

"The first shift observed by Deleuze leaves behind the Euclidian geometry of movement

as an essential character of time. It also leaves behind Aristotle, who follows

the Platonic logic to proclaiming that ‘time is a number’ (Deleuze 1989: 130). For

Aristotle, time moves by increments, some of which are so small as to allow us to call

them instants. Once divided into instants, time becomes the purview of sciences, first

abstract, such as mathematics, physics and astronomy and then bio-technological:

cryogenics, bionics, robotics, etc. The connection of time to technology makes Deleuze

use Ford’s assembly line as a metaphor for the movement image; it is a line that moves

and, as it moves, it accumulates, adds to the original image thus making the image

appear as if it gets fuller and fuller with every frame and every cut until it reaches completeness.

Charles Chaplin’s 1936 fi lm Modern Times serves as an illustration of this

model; in general, argues Deleuze, the old cinema fi lls up the space of perception

by showing time as a sequentially ordered movement toward a pre-specifi ed point

of destination (imaginary) or backward toward an achieved product (memory).

Leibniz

Deleuze contrasts this naturalistic concept of time with Leibniz’s process-oriented

concept, which he summarizes in The Logic of Sense:

Time is the result of the operation of compossibility. The latter means that, with the

monads being assimilated to singular points, each series is extended in other series

which converge around these points, another world in another time begins in the

vicinity of points which would bring about the divergence of the obtained species

(2001: 297, italics in the original)

The syntactic complexity of this quote matches its logic. Traditional interdisciplinary

divides point to the incompatibility of ‘points’ and ‘species’, making it impossible to

conceive of a system that would position a mathematical and a biological concept next

to each other without creating some kind of ambiguity. However, argues Deleuze, if

we approach ambiguity not as a mathematical defi ciency, as would Aristotle, but as

Leibniz did – in line with his differential mathematics – in terms of a space created by an

addition to nothing (defi ned as ‘zero plus one,’ where ‘one’ is an instant), time would

indeed show itself as ambiguous. But unlike Plato’s thinking of time as the ambiguity

of pursuit, which can only lead to the past, or as the progressive development in a

series along an infi nitely long path, which is but a prolongation of the present, Leibniz

thinks of time as if it were a forgotten future, or a future that has been committed to

memory before it actually occurred."

Second shift: From Leibniz to Bergson

However, for Leibniz, time is still bonded by number; moreover, like Aristotle, Leibniz

gives absolute priority to number ‘one’; hence, monadology. Both mathematics and

philosophy begin with ‘one’, leaving us little if any room to think time as ‘many’. At

the same time, claims Deleuze, it was Leibniz who fi rst suggested that time should

be viewed as ‘a movement’. Following this logic, Bergson suggested that time was

the movement of number ‘one’. If Leibniz begins and ends with ‘one’, Bergson takes

‘one’ as the nexus of multiplications: ‘“One” can only multiply itself. It is the most

abstract number’ (2002: 58). In multiplication, time is non-directional; hence, the

human ability to experience time as it moves for itself. ‘For Leibniz’, Deleuze writes,

‘the countdown never begins and never stops, or, rather, “everything is the beginning”’

(1989: 45). For Bergson, time runs like a stream, everything is movement, or ‘durations

of different tensions’ as opposed to ‘the homogenous time of beginnings and origins’

(2004: 275). In this definition of time, the tensions should be understood as the

temporal effects of the matter on the world and the world on the matter. This kind of

genesis was particularly attractive for Deleuze given his interest in the empiricism of

a transcendental kind.

After Bergson

As a philosopher of time, Bergson is defi nitional for Deleuze, who begins his Cinema 1

and Cinema 2 with one of many commentaries on Bergson and essentially constructs

his own model of time on the basis of the Bergsonian view of time: ‘a state of things

that would constantly change, a fl owing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor

center of reference would be assignable’ (1986: 57). No wonder then that Deleuze

approaches time at the intersection of memory and matter. At the same time, concerned

with both semiotics and phenomenology, Deleuze makes sure that he puts a

hyphen in the compound word ‘time-image,’ stressing our understanding that image

belongs to time and does not just represent time. It also designates a relationship of

mutual contamination of the two terms. The content available to consciousness blends

with the subconscious absorption of this content, bringing memory to perception. This

is to say that ‘time-image’ collapses the two parallel times together in a space which,

as I argued earlier, can be defi ned as ‘liminal’. This kind of space does not know the

distinction between the past, present and future. In that space, time appears only as

singular memory.

‘CRYSTAL-IMAGE’

For accessing this kind of time, Deleuze suggests a particular visual aesthetics, – the

new cinema (e.g. Italian neo-realism, French neo-classicism, Russian neo-symbolism).

According to Deleuze, the new cinema is what produces singular memory in the

intolerable, the unbearable and the impossible. Its mission is ‘to make holes, to

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KOZIN THE APPEARING MEMORY 109

introduce voids and white spaces, to rarify images, by suppressing many things that

have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything’ (Deleuze 1986:

22). By openly embracing this agenda, the cinema of the last half of the 20th century

severed its connection with the cinema that had come before it. The latter showed just

an image; the former shows an analytic of an image. With this ‘extra’, the distinction

between the real and the imaginary had to be foregone: the new cinema was very convincing

in demonstrating its indiscernability.7 In turn, the same feature brought in a

new conception of frame and framings, which exposed ‘transcendentals’ for an analytic

intervention. For Deleuze ‘transcendentals’ show themselves as ambiguous signs (e.g.,

Peirce’s ‘thirdness’); hence the need to supply their phenomenological exposure with

a semiological interpretation, helping us follow ambiguity toward its appearance in an

assemblage, which is the minimal unit of ‘visual semiosis.’

According to Deleuze, ‘Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with

a world’ (1989: 68). An opening line of the chapter on ‘crystal-image’ in Cinema 2,

this quote not only confi rms the relationship between the world and imagery; it

establishes the direction of fi t: images to the world (e.g. memory to photographic or

cinematographic image). This is not to say that images do not come from the world; on

the contrary, the kind of analysis Deleuze presupposes deals precisely with the movement

from the actual to the virtual toward a mirror image; hence, the signifi cance

of the semiotic concept ‘mirror’ for Deleuze’s entire philosophy: ‘Mirror is a turning

crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible character … and the crystal turns

over on itself’ (1989: 88). The emergent signs and their assemblages in the fi lm are

based on the confl uence of the two.8 I see in the fi lm what I otherwise could have

seen in the mirror, except that the fi lm shows more than a refl ection, while mirror does

only that. Both create oblique, opaque and obscure images; however, only the fi lm

shows dynamic indiscernability of the actual and the virtual: ‘Distinct, but indiscernible,

such are the actual and the virtual which are in continuous exchange’ (1989: 71). This

insistence on the material presence without content (body without organs) refl ects

Deleuze’s emphasis on the pure signifi er. He fi nds it in the concept ‘crystal-image’.

The choice of the name for the concept can be explained through the physical properties

of mineral morphology: the structure of a crystal allows us to see how, with

each turn of the crystal, what is opaque and virtual becomes luminous and actual.

This reversibility makes all sorts of binaries coalesce, taking us beyond anthropological

structuralism with its staple distinctions: ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, ‘saying’ and ‘said’, ‘past’

and ‘future’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. Our thoughts become matter, while matter becomes

an object of our thoughts. The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes

the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting, or, to put it in

phenomenological terms, the ‘given’ and ‘givenness’. Once again, we must remind

ourselves that the kind of phenomenology that preoccupies Deleuze is neither strictly

speaking transcendental, although it examines ‘transcendentals’ or ‘liminalities,’ nor is

it empirical, although it presupposes ‘matter.’ The liminal in-between that it explores is

not empty; it contains a prime mover, and it is in that pivot that we fi nd one of the most

basic conditions for our experience of the world as image: ‘what we see in the crystal

… is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one after the

next, while going towards the future, but also of preserving all of the past, dropping it

into the obscure depth’ (Deleuze 1989: 87). The ‘crystal-film’ that rises from the liminal

place gives us a glimpse of time, and of course, the time that appears is inalienable

from the place of its appearance.