Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

Deleuze via Blanchot

Eugene B. Young

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350272408
• eBook ISBN: 9781350176119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds.

Part One

Power and the Outside

I

Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze

Introduction

How we know, and how we express, what is really important to us is an emotionally or “affectively” driven phenomenon. To be more precise, it is a question of value: what is important to us, and what we want, is tied to the history of our beliefs, our culture, our institutions, our experiences, our language, and of course our desire. And perhaps no one better than Michel Foucault has shown that in our contemporary, “biopolitical” era, what we want, and what we value, is life. We want to extend it, improve it, and make it prosper. But we do not value all life indiscriminately; rather, we value human lives, and more specifically, those in our society over others: hence the start of a problem.

And yet, this is only part of the problem. To place value on life above all other things is to value what is. It means that we want to exist, and to continue and extend our existence. This value placed on life creates the reality and truth of our world, which is perhaps the most fundamental problem for us in Foucault’s work. And Foucault’s solution to this problem—his philosophical approach—is not to debate the merits or demerits of human life; instead, he puts forward a concept of power that produces truth and reality by fostering and enabling (or neglecting) life. In other words, there is no truth or reality that is not the effect of power. What you think you know, what you think you want, and what you value are all the effects of power. As such, Foucault looks beyond our external worlds and our practices to a metaphysical domain of power that has no truth or reality in and for itself, even though it produces both. As we will see, how it came to be this way has everything to do with the way we observe, or see, and the way we judge—which will be important in considering reversals of such power (II–IV) and ultimately crucial in terms of the values we carry over when we enter into works of fiction (V–VI), especially in the visible milieus of cinema (VII–IX). But what is this tenuous relation between visibility and power? How did it come to be this way?

Part 1: Foucault on power

1. The negativity and visibility of sovereign power

In order to understand how power works, Foucault famously considers its historical transformation from a largely negative to a largely positive phenomenon. Our values, as a society, were not always so heavily focused on life: in fact, for a long time, they were focused on death, insofar as the threat of death was the means by which power operated. As he argues, our practices in the West have an increasing tendency to “make live or let die,” in distinction from practices that preceded them, which had a tendency to “take life or let live.”¹ Such “sovereign” power was primarily “deductive”—it took (and needed no justification); it could take your time, money, property, and ultimately your life. If the active role of sovereign power was negative (taking, subtracting), the passive role involved the neutrality of “letting live”: “From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive.”² Thus Foucault’s emphasis on sovereign power as a form of “taking life” or making die (“de faire mourir”) as its ultimate force, which was otherwise a “subtraction mechanism” and a “right of seizure” (“droit de prise”), constitutes such power negatively, by what it is capable of extorting or appropriating from subjects.³

Sovereign power also concerns the way we perceive: it did not seek to make subjects visible (save as public demonstrations of torture or death)—it had little to no interest in “surveillance”—as much as it sought to make itself visible. In Foucault’s terms, “power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested … Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade.”⁴ But it was not only those subjected to sovereign power who remained in the dark. Another example of this phenomena concerned the “ostentation of palaces,” which were “built simply to be seen,” in contrast to the dungeon, which hid the prisoner in the dark, only to use their bodies for the purpose of the “gloomy spectacle” of torture.⁵ There was no interest in reform. Another related distinguishing feature of sovereign power is that possessing it involved “the legitimacy that has to be respected,”⁶ but by virtue of the need to be seen and not to see: the need to make itself emanate or be visible in a form that is feared, respected, or in any case central to the attention of those subjected to it. This effort to be seen concerns the general way society was structured according to an extreme and binary relation between the dominant and the dominated, who were not seen, such that “The history of some is not the history of others.”⁷

2. How our attitudes toward life and death have changed

Before elaborating on his concept of modern or “bio”-power, Foucault provides three major examples to characterize how our attitudes towards life and death have changed: war, the death penalty, and suicide. His first example concerns war and why we fight: in modern times, war is no longer waged in defense of a ruler’s right; rather “one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living.”⁸ But of course, this, as Deleuze puts it, may concern “the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy,”⁹ which can lead to genocides when a population is considered a toxic threat. The second example concerns the death penalty, and dovetails into Foucault’s general comments about punishment. Punishment used to be a demonstration of sovereign authority, but “By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment … had gradually ceased to be a spectacle.”¹⁰ In a society that values life, it is a contradiction to promote, ensure, and extend life and at the same time put its citizens to death—thus the death penalty is reserved only for those who pose a major threat to the lives of others. It is, as Foucault notes, no longer about punishment for the crime but the “monstrosity of the criminal.”¹¹ The third example concerns suicide. While the sovereign had the right to take your life—insofar as you are subject—taking your life meant taking their property. In modern societies, by contrast, your life is supposedly in your possession, so it is confusing and “astonishing” that someone would want to take their life. This became “one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis” and “one of the first astonishments of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of administering life.”¹² Suicide is to be studied and prevented (i.e., identifying “at risk” groups or populations) while remaining “strange” and disturbing.

3. Modern power: affect, force, and the fostering of life

In contrast to sovereign power, modern power works as a supposedly positive force to manage bodies and facilitate life as well as prosperity (though this may also lead to pernicious forms of neglect). To achieve this, society makes every effort to avoid death. As Foucault notes, “That death is so carefully evaded is linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power have not ceased to turn away from death.”¹³ In other words, it is not so much that we live in a continual state of the fear of death from a sovereign power than that we simply make every effort to evade or ignore it. Insofar as the focus is on life and the body, modern, or “bio”-power works as a positive force: we want something from any mechanism (institution, practice, or “dispositif”) that “enables” or “facilitates” us to be prosperous, efficient, secure, healthy, and so on. If the active role of sovereign power was subtractive, and the passive role involved “letting live,” the active role of modern power involves enabling us or making something possible, while the passive and negative role involves negligence, indifference, incompetence, and so on; as Foucault puts it, “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”¹⁴ Or, perhaps more succinctly, modern power makes live or lets die. In other words, “disallowing” need not involve actively “taking,” or any action, but it can involve policies that provide some opportunities over others (discrimination); the indifference or incompetence of those who administer practices; and the economic or medical neglect of groups or populations, and so on. In its positive sense, it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow”; to use Foucault’s verbs, power works to manage, facilitate, optimize, organize, monitor, reinforce (rather than to dominate or destroy).¹⁵

Power, from this perspective, is not possessed, nor does it strictly “exist”: it is determined through relations and is supported by those who are subjected to it insofar as they want something from it and value the life-centric support that it purports to offer. In this sense, “there is no … opposition between rulers and ruled,”¹⁶ no “nexus” of rulers, no conspiracy or smoke-filled room from which power operates, because no one “possesses” power. Instead, we implicitly legitimatize the structures that attempt to facilitate our needs and desires. Power thus is not “acquired, seized, or shared,” but involves “the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.”¹⁷ Power thus requires a relation between those who want something and those who provide it. It is not a “what,” but a “how”—and “to begin the analysis with a ‘how’ is to suggest that power as such does not exist.”¹⁸ That is, “something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action.”¹⁹ In short, power concerns “strategy”: it attempts to predict what others will do, and it adjusts its mechanisms and actions based on the possible actions of others. From this perspective, it was never “possessed” by sovereign rulers—this was only an illusion that Western society has largely outgrown.

In this context, Deleuze allows us to consider the key role of affect in power relations: we are driven to act in a biopolitical world by virtue of mechanisms of “incitement” and “provocation.” As he points out, “An exercise of power shows up as an affect, since force defines itself by its very power to affect other forces.”²⁰ In this sense, “power is not essentially repressive (since it ‘incites, it induces, it seduces’).”²¹ While Foucault certainly emph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• How to Use this Book
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film
• Part One Power and the Outside
• I Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze
• II From Menace to Passion in Blanchot and Deleuze: “The Sovereignty of the Void” and Experience of the Imaginary
• III Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day and its Incessant Return
• Part Two Art, Literature, and Ideas
• IV The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos and the Outside
• V Literature’s Radical Reversal: From Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future
• VI Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study—Conceptual Inexistence and Obscure Value
• Part Three Cinema
• VII Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement-Image via Foucault
• VIII Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image
• IX “Is Anyone Seeing This?”
• Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Return
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright