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Films Aesthetic Turn:A Contribution from Jacques Rancire

Michle Garneau

On the infinite contradiction, thecondition of aesthetic production.

F.W.J. Schelling

The closer we look at the state of film theory in this post-semiological eraand the greater our efforts to trace its cartography, the more we recognize itsobjects extraordinary force. Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillets La mortdEmpdocle (1986), P.P. Pasolinis Oedipus Rex (1967), and Orson Welless TheTrial(1962) confound theory, at least the kind of theory that has reignedsupreme in the field of film studies until recently. Efforts to master such works,from the first film grammar to the first film semiotics, from the code topsychoanalysis, passing through semio-pragmatics, generative semiology,cognitive psychology and, most recently, narratology and textual analysis allsuch attempts to organize a cinematic system have been powerless to graspthe film object in all its complexity.

Although Jacques Rancire does not specifically focus on these films, wherethe cameras peculiar visual and audible distribution counters and frustratesdramatic rationality, his mode of reading nevertheless allows us to grasp them inhis manner. He does not present a theory of cinema, but a way of reading whosekeyword is contradiction. Isnt the prologuetoLa fable cinmatographiqueentitledUne fable contrarie, a countered fable? And couldnt we adapt the subtitleof La parole muetteto La fable cinmatographique,giving us an essay on thecontradictions of film? But mute speech is not only the title of Ranciresfocus on the conflict of nineteenth-century conceptions of literature, but alsosums up a new idea of the science of history that he first develops in a reading ofMichelet,Les noms de lhistoire. The mute witness surfaces everywhere inRancires texts, whether its object is history, literature, or film, and could be readas the founding theory of thought that remains indifferent to disciplinary

boundaries. From one book to another, his thought consistently re-deploys itself

within different distributions and nodes of established knowledge and practice,ever taking as its point of departure the foundational event of romanticism. Thissilent revolution1offers Rancire a forum from which to speak of the advent ofa conception of literature that revokes the Belles Lettressystem, of the nouvelle

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histoire, no longer bound to great events or personages, and of the invention offilm, the medium that perhaps best exemplifies this revolutions artistic ideal.

Two Contradictory Poetics

A strong conflict between two fundamental poetic powers, one ofrepresentation and another of expression, runs through SophoclessOedipus Rex,Victor Hugos Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and Sergei Eisensteins The General Line.According to Rancire, what opposes these two poetics is a different idea of thethought-matter relation constituting the poem, and of the language that is theplace of that relation (La parole muette, 19). In past centuries, however, therepresentational power first expounded in Aristotles Poeticshas garnered

considerably more theoretical interest than the expressive power, whoseelaboration begins in a handful of pivotal romantic texts. Around 1800, arevolution produces a new vision of art. Rancire gives it the name of theaesthetic regime of art, and asserts that it begins not with decisions of artisticrupture but with decisions of reinterpretation concerning what art makes andwho makes art: so Vico rereads Homer, Hegel reviews Dutch painting, andHlderlin translates Greek tragedy. It does not replace the norms of therepresentational regime with other norms, but offers another interpretation of

the poetic phenomenon [fait potique] (ibid.,13). This is how Hlderlins Oedipusdiffers from that of Aristotle, Corneille or Voltaire. A new idea of tragedy isimposed, one that unquestionably finds a cinematographic equivalent in PasolinisOedipus Rexor Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillets La mort dEmpdocle.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris reinterpretation of Kafkas oeuvre asminor literature could also be said to belong to this new vision of art, as couldDeleuzes reading of Orson Welless The Trial, where the shadow projects itsown truth. Minor literatures machineofexpression opposes a purely intensive

usage of language to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifyingusages of it (Kafka,35; 19). If the truth of the Wellesian shadow is expressiveand not representational, this derives from a whole neo-expressionism whichhas rid itself both of its moral assumptions and the ideal of the true (ibid., 188;144). Deleuzes philosophy of expression impugns the subject, passing insteadthrough a semiotic reform that accounts for the non-signifyingor the a-signifying.

Jacques Rancire has shown that Deleuzes thought is close to the aesthetic regimeof art.2Collating Kafkas What is a Minor Literature with La parole muettes

From representation to expression would also show the proximity of Deleuzeand Guattaris style mineur to the expressive poetics that are proper to theaesthetic regime of art. The same argumentation runs through both chapters,each of which analyzes the constitutive parts of classical Aristotelian rhetoric to

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show how their reversal inaugurates, with Rancire, an expressive poetics andillustrates, for Deleuze and Guattari, a minor style. Giving priority to elocutio(expression) over inventioand dispositio (content and form), both expressive

poetics and the minor style belong to the aesthetic regime of art. For Rancire,this priority of elocutioor expression implies that, henceforth, languages materialpartwords, with their resonant and imaged powerwill take the place of itsintellectual part, the syntax subordinating words to thought and the logicalorder of an action. Visible parlance of bodies, objects, houses, roads, trees,fields, Bresson writes in Notes sur le cinmatographe (21; 14), where he alsoadvises filmmakers to be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated

by immobility and silence (28; 20). Rancire tells us that the new poetry,

expressive poetry, is made of phrases and images, of phrase-images whose valuederives from their own status as manifestations of poeticity, and that lay claim toan immediate relation of poetic expression (La parole muette, 28).

Jacques Rancire does not favor a given poeticsunlike Deleuze andGuattari, who affirm the power of artistic presentation over representationsdoxa

but gives equal critical attention to the old representative power that persists ineach work [uvre]. In the history of artistic thought and criticism, the two poeticshave largely ignored each other. Choosing one has invariably meant excluding

the other in a gesture of analytic and theoretic chauvinism whose first consequencehas been to reduce the filmthe play, the novel, the paintingto the singledimension pertaining to either the representational regime or the aesthetic regimeof art. Rancires thought takes from both, and we would amputate his mode ofreading if we overlooked the logic of representation that he uses to seize andapprehend a film.

But lets return to the contradiction. The prologue to La fablecinmatographique proposes that the beauty of those sequences comes from the

contradiction that the visible brings to narrative signification (22). In La fable,Rancire reinterprets the great film classics of Murnau, Eisenstein, Lang, Mann,Godard, Ray, Marker, and others according to a mode of contradiction, of tension

between the two poetics powers. The experience of visibility so pivotal to filmdoes not develop in opposition to its discursive and narrative structure, but becauseof it, in contradiction with it, by countering it. The two powers share theirpotentials within a relationship that is both collaborative and conflictual. Onlywhen considered conjointly, Rancire maintains, can we grasp the conflict

now latent, now exploding with violencethat gives the cinema its force. Thisforce of contradiction derives from the contrast between the closure of meaningand the openness to the visible. It plays itself out within a single image and not,as with Deleuze, between one image and another.3In other words, the two powers

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do not produce two kinds of images, but two contradictory aspects of a selfsameimage. Two films are threaded and intertwined, one telling the story, the otherexalting the visual experience. Rancire organizes his analyses around this

constant tug within a given film, shot through by a double movement, by thenon-adjustment of two regimes of visibility, from which the reading mustproceed.

Numerous oppositions determine the two powers, including the followingnotional dyads that have been gleaned here and there from the authors texts:

Expression Form and contentAesthesis MimesisOpsis(the spectacles sensible effect) Muthos(the plots rationality)

Lyrical power Dramatic powerWorld materiality Conscious, acting subjects (Aristotle / Hegel)The texture of things Conventions of dramatic actionOverture to the visible Closure of representationThe iconic aspect The diegetic aspectAn images a-signifying singularity The imperative of sense, significationVisual instance Signifying instancePrimacy of language Primacy of history

The time-image The movement-imageDionysian element Appolonian element

Representational Mastery and Aesthetic Equality

Why have conceptual efforts favored dramatic power over expressive power,and how can we explain such blindnessor resistanceto a works aestheticforce? Perhaps it implies an idea of thought too disconcerting, too scandalous,too difficult for man, master of the world, to assimilate. If we begin with the

idea particular to the representational regime, we find that its valorization derivesfrom its inherent positivity and its postulated corollary of mans mastery overhimself, his thought, and the world. This is the sensory-motor and signifyingdivision of the perceptive world as the human animal organizes it upon placingitself at the worlds center, upon transforming its position of image among imagesinto cogito, into a center from which it divides the worlds images (La chair desmots, 185). Rancires observation finds confirmation in Hegels pages on thesuitable dramaturgy for this regime of artistic truth. If the dramatic individuals

interior is defined by his will, the exterior is determined by his action, a categorythat Hegel defines with care: Action is realized will (277) man bends theworld to his volition and designs. In Le partage du sensible,4Rancire stresses thatthis poetics holds an imitative relation to society, meaning that the representational

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logic establishes a globally analogous relation to an integrated hierarchy ofpolitical and social occupations. It corresponds to a distribution of roles, situations,and forms of social behavior.

The idea in keeping with the aesthetic regime of art, meanwhile, holds thatthought has a peculiar mode of presence in the worlds sensible materiality, thatit is always already present to and inscribed within the very texture of worldlythings. Now, such an idea of thought, which places alongside the thought ofman, of thinking-man, a thought that does not think rationally, a thought-matterthat somehow discredits logos, is hardly self-evident. For it is not merely a questionof explaining a thought we intuit in nature, but of accounting for a thought thatwe intuit asnature. This suggests a point that Schelling makes in The System of

Transcendental Idealism (a key reference for Rancire), where he writes that everyplant is, as it were, a confused feature of the soul (xxiii). Hence art can becomethe place where thought can discover that its own power is identical to that ofmatter. The relation of mastery over the world presupposed by therepresentational logic that endows it with form and meaning thus cedes to arelation of equality. In the aesthetic regime, Rancire tells us, the power of reasonequalsits other: Nature, the activity of unconscious thought, mutism, the sensibleexterior world, the breath of a society, languages own life. Since then, mans

thought can acknowledge an outsidethat resists it, an outside that it must confrontand in which it sometimes goes astray. Thought loses itself in stone, color, orlanguage and equals its own manifestation to the chaos of things (La fablecinmatographique, 157). This is a modern conception of thought (and art) that,from Nietzsche to Deleuze, encounters an outside it can no longer transcend.

It explains why Pasolinis Oedipus barely speaks. Instead, he walks, staggers,and wanders in circles, blinded by the cruelty of the sun. The same unforgivinglight pierces Straub and Huillets films, where the tragic poems logosand Natures

pathos are given shape by an identical swoon that conjoins presence and absence,irruption and avoidance. The spectator undergoes a vertiginous aestheticexperience, something along the lines of a pain felt in the listen and the gaze. InDeleuzean terms, this is the setting up of visual and sound situations fromwhich the tragic unfolds, a knock made for the eyes, drawn out, if we may putit this way, in the very substance of the gaze.5This is how the images naturecounters the plot of the sensory-motor situation.

The transition from a causal poetics to an expressive poetics, from narration

to language, could be summarized as a move from a configuring act based onfigurative givens to an operation of dis-figuration. Rancire writes that therelation between such givens is a sectioning of the visible, of the signifying, ofthe credible as organized by empires, insofar as these are collective actualizations

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of the subjects imperialism (La chair des mots, 193). Now, the act of configurationis a main concept of Paul Ricoeurs Temps et Rcit. A modern theorist of classicalform, Ricoeur defines narrative identity according to the Aristotelian canon, using

the logical and chronological components already articulated in the Poetics: Forthere is a great difference between saying that this takes place because of that,and saying that this takes place after that (1990: 19). Action, the first criterionof any narrative, should be successive, and finished according to a sequence(this comes after that) and a configuration (this takes place because of that).Ricoeur writes that Emplotment is the operation that draws a configurationfrom a simple succession (102). Classicisms dominant epistemological model isorganic, the work conceived as an organism with the attributes of totality, closure,

completion, and self-formation. This conception can be found in all the arts. Inthe field of cinema, the images organic regime finds a detailed definition inGilles Deleuzes analysis of the movement-image. The classical image, he tellsus, should be understood according to the causal chain and the encompassingwhole of the film. The great organic composition maintains what Paul Ricoeurcalls a narrative identity. Classical films two defining axes partake of theunifying power deployed by the configuring act and relate to the poeticconditions and modalities that allow for the realization of a finished structure.

Whether understood in terms of Deleuzes movement-image or Ranciresrepresentational poetic logic, the organic image sets into place adramatic realitythat is narrowly determined by the demands of the sensory-motor situation.Conversely, what is described in the time-image acquires an autonomous materialreality.6

Film in F.W.J. Schellings The System of Transcendental Idealism

For Rancire, film is the art form whose basic principle, the unification of

conscious thought and unconscious perception, had been thought through, someone hundred years before the first public screenings, in the closing chapter ofSchellings The System of Transcendental Idealism (La fable, 211). The uniquecinematographic cogito bound to the machines neutrality (the recordingmoment) and the human minds activity (the editing moment) is the exemplaryrealization of an idea of art proposed two centuries ago. The unexpected andcounterintuitive reference to Schelling and film that Rancire makes in passing

begs the question of what a classic text of German romanticism could possibly

have to do with the cinema. In a final sub-chapter entitled The Character of theArt Product, Schelling writes that the work of art reflects the identity ofconscious and unconscious activity (252). For if the absolute identity of thesubjective (consciousness) and the objective (the unconscious) remains

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inaccessible, it may nevertheless somehow shine forth wherever conscious activityand unconscious activity reach a sort of point of indifference where one changesinto the other (xlix). Only with the invention of film, Rancire claims, would a

medium be able to give substance to this idea or image of thought. Films affinitywith romantic poetics can be explained by the cinematographic images dualorigin, being produced from two points of view. In La fable and his other texts onfilm, Rancire consistently underlines two gazes inherent to the cinema: theinhuman-machine gaze that informs the mediums automatic recording, andthe human-artist gaze that orders the recording to its fancy with editingtechniques. A mechanical eye and an unintentional gaze on the one hand, anorganic eye and an intentional gaze on the other; here, images suffered, there,

images structured. If the first gaze is bound to visions mechanical recording, thesecond is constructed by montage.

The mechanical gaze. Here we enter the domain of cingnie,7still unexploredand opaque, whose guiding question asks how the cinematographic machinecan establish a neutral gaze that belongs to no one, and that will become thespectators own gaze and consciousness, without, however, having been actedupon by anyone in particular. For Rancire, this gaze equalizes, even if it revealsthe worlds inequalities where a partition of the sensible makes itself discernible.

For the machine makes no distinction. It does not make men equal by virtue ofsome scientific or technological vocation to ensure a democratic conciliation ofnoble and base conditions. It simply makes them prone to sharing the sameimage, an image of the same ontological tenor (Linoubliable, 51).Experimental cinema has made attempts to approximate the films gaze to thisunconscious mechanical gaze, to confuse the two as much as possible. I have inmind such film-machines or film-landscapes as Michael Snows WavelengthandLa rgion centrale. The second, where Snow explores a fragment of brute and

savage nature devoid of any human presence, elevates the gaze to a sort of pureoptic perception free of any human reference and any anthropocentric orientation:an empty and bodiless machine-eye.

Yet this was not Schellings wish, which was rather for an art form wherethought activity and sensible receptivity would become a single reality andconstitute a new zone of being. While Rancire unfortunately leaves largelyundeveloped (in regard to film) the theses he culls from Schellings The System ofTranscendental Idealism, one could continue this line of inquiry to study the

trajectory of Straub and Huillets camera, for example, from the dual conceptualperspective of transcendental philosophy and Naturphilosophie. Does the cameratrace a path from spirit to nature or from nature to spirit? Does it extract naturefrom intelligence or intelligence from nature? Schellings transcendental

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philosophy takes us from spirit to nature, starting with subjective self-consciousness in actuality and then seeking out its material genesis. Rancirewould speak of this as the immanence of logosto pathos (Linconscient esthtique,

31). Naturphilosophiegoes the opposite way, moving from the unconscious toconsciousness, from the objective pole to the subjective pole. Here, pathos isimmanent to logos. If Naturphilosophieshows the becoming of spirit in nature,transcendental philosophy derives nature from intelligence. Straub and Huilletsnew fictionality and aesthetic unfolds amidst the two poles, shuttling betweenthe power of signification inherent to all mute things (recording asNaturphilosophie) and the reduction of modes of speech and levels of signification(editing as transcendental philosophy).

On the one hand we have mechanical recording and naturethe real, andthe pathos it produceswhile on the other we have self-consciousness and thesubjective produced by montage. The two operations, made possible by theearliest film technologies, relate dialectically to produce a veritably Spinozistvision of the world, where the sensible and the intelligible are equal in measure.Rancire: Cinema is the open access to an inner truth of the sensible that settlesthe quarrels of priority between the arts and between meanings because it firstof all settles the great quarrel between thought and the sensible (La fable, 9). Or

again: It is simply the mode that abolishes the opposition of an inner world andan outer world, a world of spirit and a world of bodies, that abolishes theoppositions of subject and object, of scientifically known nature and experiencedemotion. It is the mystical art, because it abolishes all these oppositions(Lhistoricit du cinma, 51). This recalls Deleuze, who organizes a Bergson-Peirceassemblage [agencement] against a Nietzschean and Spinozist backdrop. YetRancires assemblage is in its preliminary stages: references to Germanromanticism are evoked without ever becoming the object of an analytics of the

image like the one presented in Limage temps andLimage mouvement. Muchremains to be done here, and we can perhaps expect further development of thisnew assemblage by either Jacques Rancire or those who follow him.

De Certeau and the Theory of the Mute Witness; Musil and the

Silence of the Image

Like the long quotation from Jean Epstein that Jacques Rancire uses toopen La fable cinmatographique, the following citation also lays bare the problem

posed by the very notion of cinematographic fable (La fable, 7). The remarkscome from historian Michel de Certeau, who discusses a militant film madeshortly before the events of May1968, Chris Markers bientt jespre, in aninterview with Jacques Revel.

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The film has an aspect that is reminiscent of Michelet: to make historysunderside, which is also its truth, speak Its framing, encompassing,punctuating, and dogmatic discourse tells us what to see and think, andcontrasts strangely with images of faces that are truly haunting, as though

one could see the very resurrection of which the old Michelet once spoke.More fascinating than the doctrinal discourse, the unknown faces we seecoming out of their night are perhaps the counterpoint to filmic truth,despite the presentations intention. Force of the image. I was also struck

by a sequence where we see an extremely beautiful woman in her vaporouswhiteness. A Beatrice of that hell, the Blessed Virgin of that neighborhood,iconographic, she creates an emptiness within the full discourse, somethingother that stands back. In relation to the political protest and the virilediscourse of militancy, this image suddenly introduces an effect of bas-relief, a hollow that the other womens faces redouble with much lessforce. The withdrawal of the feminine voice, presented in a mode of rarity,gives the film a certain depth. We are no longer in the order of the dialecticaldiscourse, the Benvenistean story, the history one must hear. Images arearranged like breaks thanks to which the film stratifies itself and takes ondensity on this side of meaning.

Michel de Certeau lays bare the problem that Rancire mentions in his prologueby underscoring the strange contrast of logos(the logic of verbal discourse) andpathos (a corporal logic of faces and voices). The story derives from therepresentational logic: a linear, finished narrative of a collective group (theworkers) whose adventures (struggles) lead them towards progress. De Certeaudescribes this as a full discourselinear, framing, encompassing, punctuating,dogmaticthat tells us what to see and think. The aesthetic logic, meanwhile,presents what we might call the Michelet effect, an aim to analyze historysunderside, its truth, and make it speak. This is Michelets romantic side, fortruth, de Certeau seems to imply, is an aesthetic truth. But what might Michelethave considered an aesthetic truth?

The truth, Michelet tells us, is better read in cries than in spoken words,

better in the disposition of things than in the ordering of discourse (Les noms delhistoire, 118; 57). Rancire offers this answer in the chapter of Les noms delhistoireentitled The Founding Narrative, where he distills his theory of themute witness from Michelets writing of history. A few of the great historiansphrases provide the point of departure: What were the mothers griefs? Theyalone could say. The stones wept over it (ibid., 113; 54). According to Rancire,these lines encapsulate two operations that define a revolution in the discourse ofhistorical study. The first places speech in reserveThey alone could say

and the second displaces the body of speech into the very body of things: Thestones wept. The theory of the mute witness valorizes a discourse of the placeand things, of what is not in the habit of speaking (ibid., 115; 55). Thehistorian must make the mute witnesses speak, and declare their meaning in

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the language of words (Linoubliable, 55). If film is theromantic artparexcellence, as Rancire states repeatedly, this is because film is indisputably theart that can best enumerate all the mute signs by which man has recounted

himself (Michelet in Rancire: Les noms, 119; 57) or because it can hear meaningin a state of in-fancy, the non-talkative meaning, inscribed in the texture of things(ibid., 124; 60). It can, for example, inscribe speech into a landscapes self-resemblance to greater effect than literature, a medium with a weak power ofsensibility,8and better reveal the great hieroglyphic poem inscribed on the veryflesh of things (La parole muette, 174). We can follow up on Rancires initialreflection on films manner of revealing the world, or more precisely, on whatfilm, given its own means, can reveal of the world. Indeed, if the arts have

everything in the world at their disposal, it is the art of film that can best revealeach objects double potential as a hieroglyph that ciphers a world epoch, a society,or a history, and as pure presence, as naked reality adorned with the new splendorof the insignificant.9That de Certeau should offer a reading akin to Rancires isperhaps not surprising, since they share a heritage that the latter briefly describesas follows: The transition from Michelets lyricism to theAnnaleshistorianssober science establishes a new idea of historical discourse, one founded on thedeciphering of the mute witnesses (ibid., 41).

Now, films affinity with romantic poetics, and more fundamentally withthe theory of the mute witness, finds a precedent in Robert Musils 1925 essayToward a New Aesthetic. Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film. The essaysmain thrust is very close to Rancires claim that Film exists as an artistic idea

before it does as a technical means and a distinctive art (La fable, 13). LikeRancire, Musil refers to the theses of film theorist Bla Balazs, who describestwo audio-visual sensorial experiences unknown before the invention of cinema:the strange life that inanimate things gain in visual isolation, and the experience

that the worlds muteness extends itself to man (192; 197). Musil summarizesthem as the new symbolic face of things and their awakening in the stillness ofthe image (195; 199). Even more interesting is Musils suggestion that onecould in fact call this symbolic face of things the mysticism of film, or at least itsromanticism, if it played more than an episodic role in the shadowy realm ofliving photography (193; 198).

But Rancire and Musils shared lineage ascends further. Indeed, Musilspeaks of two worlds whose logic corresponds to and could be mistaken for

the two ideas of thought inherent to the representational and aesthetic regimesoutlined by Rancire. Following the comment on the romanticism of film, Musilcontinues his reading of Balazs: What is extraordinary is that a book on thepractice of film reaches this point at all, and touches quite consciously on the

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border between these two worlds (193; 198). The two worlds to which Musilrefers are, first, the world of representation, the normal condition of ourrelationship to the world, to people, and to ourselves and a positive, causal,

mechanical way of thinking and, second, the sensible world: in the image ofthis world there is neither measure nor precision, neither purpose nor cause:good and evil simply fall away, without any pretense of superiority, and in placeof all these relations enters a secret rising and ebbing of our being with that ofthings and other people. It is in this condition that the image of each object

becomes not a practical goal, but a wordless experience (195; 199).Films most fundamental revealing power derives from its muteness. It is

striking how many film theorists have recently returned to this power, each

claiming it, more or less explicitly, for an aesthetic logic of film. In an essay onthe icon and the image, Dominique Chteau claims that the images eloquenceis an expressive capacity it owes to its muteness (Linoubliable, 21). De Certeauidentifies something other that stands back, an effect of bas-relief, a hollowthat gives the film depth, and the breaks thanks to which the film stratifiesitself and takes on density on this side of meaning. His suggestion that theseeffects are involuntary or unconscious, occurring despite the presentationsintentions, conjures up the mechanical eyes revealing dimension what Jean-

Louis Comolli has correctly christened the mechanical gazes accursed part.The mise-en-scene mechanismand, in the last instance, the machinealwaysproduce something other than what the subjects using them would havewanted Cinematographys accursed part is what has been willed by no one,except the camera, which has no will of its own (22). Film theory has largelyneglected the accursed part, so creative and revealing, despite having beenintegrated into many directors filmmaking methods (such as Pierre Perrault,and many others practicing direct cinema) and despite having been produced

by the machines intelligence.De Certeau speaks of counterpoint and contrast, Rancire of counteringand counter-effect. Each presents a good description of the aesthetic operation: acounterpoint or counter-effect that makes the underside of history speak, theunderside which, whether empirical or fictive, is also its truth. Indeed, if wethink the image in terms of the modalities of power issuing from two poetics, wefind that the powers of the representational poetics and the aesthetic poetics areequally present within a given work, be it literary, pictorial, theatrical, or

cinematic. But the aesthetic logic seems more difficult to delineate. In the prologueto La fable, Rancire writes that one must make the aesthetic logic appear underthe representational logic. The first is an indiscernible operation that hides

beneath the second, from which it draws itself out: The fable by which cinema

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speaks its truth draws itself out from the stories its screens tell (2001b: 13). It isa negative logic, suspenseful and subtractive.

A cinematographic fiction is a specific linking of two kinds of sequences:those resolved according to an Aristotelian representational logic ofassembled actions, and those left unresolved, lyrical sequences thatsuspend action, subtract themselves from the imperative of meaning, andoffer a simple view of life in all its idiocy and all its brute existence,without reason. (Lhistoricit du cinma, 49)

Pasolonisfree indirect point-of-view shot, Deleuzes time-image,

Althussers time of the people

Others who are attentive to the aesthetic logic within the work have, likeRancire, proposed elements for a theorization that foregrounds the film imagesdual quality. Rancires logic of contradiction comes close to the free indirectpoint-of-view shotor free indirect subjectiveshotthat Pier Paolo Pasoliniuses to theorize a trend in modern film. The recourse to the free indirect point-of-view shot has the quality of producing films with a double nature thefilmmaker makes use of the dominant psychological state of mind in the filmto structure a continuous mimesiswhich allows him great, anomalous, and

provocative stylistic freedom (31; 182). This anomalous and provocative stylisticfreedomthe omnipresent red in Antonionis Red Desert, for instanceproceedsfrom the aesthetic logic. With Pasolini, the aesthetic logic also draws itself out,supporting itself on the protagonists psychology. This process is constituted

by two moments of consciousness and two temporalities that correspond to twoperspectives, one belonging to the protagonist and the other to the filmmaker.When the filmmaker detaches himself from the protagonist, we see a gaze thatis half-objective and half-subjective a buoyant, unfocused, and documentinggaze. This duality occasions a free indirect point-of-view shot because the filmssubjective moorings are no longer subordinated solely to the heros self-consciousness. As with Rancire, Pasolini describes the film images duality witha logic of the underneath: Beneath this film runs another film, the one thefilmmaker would have made even without the pretext of the visual mimesis ofhis protagonista film whose character is completely and freely expressive/expressionist (31; 182). Where Rancire speaks of lyrical power, Pasolini speaksof the creation of a language of film poetry [that] implies the possibility ofmaking pseudo-stories written with the language of poetry (34; 184). And likeRancire, who insists that the two regimes are intertwined, Pasolini theorizes thismodern cinematic tendency without eliminating narration: speaking of a cinemaof poetry, I always meant to speak of narrative poetry. Naturally it would be

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senseless to search for precise and codifiable limits between a given cinema ofprose and a given cinema of poetry (108: 251). The same can be said for theDeleuzean time-image. Incorporating Pasolinis free indirect point-of-view shot

as one of its pivotal theoretical components, this image signifies the presence ofanother time besides that of the heros consciousness.

One of Deleuzes most important theoretical gestures in his conceptualizationof film is the proper evaluation of description as a determinant of all time-images.Poetics theorist Philippe Hamon demonstrates that in literary studies, descriptionhas been considered exclusively in relation to narrative and divested of allepistemological autonomy, confirming, it seems, our observation on thetheoretical and conceptual resistance to a works aesthetic logic. Ever tagging

behind literary theory, film studies also make description the storys handmaiden,favoring the images narrative status over its descriptive potential. Hamon writesthat descriptions are always the first textual components to be eliminated in thesuccessive operations to construct a normalized semantic model (92) andsuggests that we rethink description outside its long subordinated position relativeto narrative. With Ricoeur, for instance, excessive description imperils orsabotages narrative identity. Deleuze calls this sabotage the break of sensory-motor connections. Unlike Ricoeur, whose thought develops within the limits

of classical poetics, Deleuze sees a change of regime: not danger, but rupture.It is not a question of showing how order is undone by disorderwhich, asdisorder, can only be conceptualized as sabotagebut a matter of showing howone logic of thought is effaced by another. He enumerates several componentsof the emergent time-images logic and modalities: the advent of an outsideand the disappearance of a whole of the film which encompassed the author,the world and the characters (Cinma II, 237; 182); the disappearance of theinterior monologue, replaced by free indirect vision.

Tracing the works contradictory logic also leads us to Louis Althusser, whoin Notes for a materialist theater identifies two interdependent yet specifictemporal regimes: the peoples time and the time of the drama. To definethe time of the drama, Althusser refers his readers to the section of Hegels

Aestheticson the genre of dramatic poetry, characterized by the presence of aconscious and acting individual subject. Self-consciousness and individualaction are the two principal features of the classical dramatic form that continuesto regulate the structure of most cinematographic narratives. In the time of the

drama, as in the image-movement or the representational logic, mimesisessentially refers to a mimesis of action or, better, of acting men (Aristotle).Action lies at the heart of the story. Althusser argues that the dramas dialecticaltime is a time induced by its internal contradiction to produce its development

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and result (138; 138). Opposite this times fullness, the peoples time is a long,slow-passing, empty time. It is a non-dialectical time in which nothing happens,a time with no internal necessity forcing it into action (138; 137). External forces

mutate the time of the people, while the time of the drama, refracted throughconsciousness, is a time that mutates from within, an interior time. Althussernotes that these two temporalities do not always coexistent harmoniously thetwo forms may fail to fully integrate, and may even remain wholly disconnected.Elsewhere, I show how the temporal distinction and imbalance discerned byAlthusser characterizes Quebecois films of the sixties and seventies, a cinematiccorpus that is truly of the peoples time.10

Aesthetic Effect and ResistanceBy way of conclusion, I would like to propose another hypothesis on the

critical resistance to the aesthetic poetics operating within the work: the difficultyof codifying its effects and formalizing its logic. Dominique Chteau and JacintoLageira, editors ofAprs Deleuze. Philosophie et esthtique du cinma, express adesire for a film aesthetics: Now that film theories have acquired their linguisticturn, as it were, they should bring about their aesthetic turn (25). But thiscurve seems too tight to take at high speeds, and questions concerning the

pairing of film to aesthetics remain prudent. While the legitimacy of such anapproach has finally been acknowledged, the following question by Chteaushows that the corresponding methodology continues to perplex: Is filmaesthetics the development of the aesthetic problem as applied to cinema or thedevelopment of a theory of film specificity as directed towards aesthetics? (72).Pierre Sorlin, with a similar disposition, writes in Esthtique de laudiovisuel: Asopposed to most disciplines dedicated to audiovisual productions, aesthetics is solacking in method that we will not propose rules or analytic models, but will

instead attempt to outline a state of mind, an attitude of openness to the force ofexpression (Les noms, 13). And Sandro Bernardi, in Le regard esthtique ou lavisibilit selon Kubrick, opposes aesthetics as experience to film semioticsanalytical models. In several recent publications, aesthetics as experience hastaken on increasing importance relative to semiology as science, now consideredan insufficient measure of the film objects extraordinary force.

Is it possible to develop an aesthetic rationality in the same way as a poeticor semiologic rationality? For Rancire, aesthetic logic, like representational logic,

can be related to a general theory of creation, to apoiesis. The logic of counter-effect proper to the cinematographic fable is an effect that affects the image.Jean Louis Schfer might speak here of an affect by which an image, caught ina narrative, constitutes a bas-relief of that narrativethat is, something that

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exceeds its continuity or logic: these are the images motifs of passion(physiognomy, sets, effects of montage) that memory assimilates because thenarratives logic or the storys grammaticality carries them like anomic bodies

within its order (8). Rancires aesthetic exceeds the vague experience to whichit is often compared, being something of the order of a general theory of sensibility.And although he writes that aesthetics, as its name implies, swamps the workwith sensible thought and privileges affect, as well as an affect that belongs tothe receptor or spectator (Existe-il une esthtique deleuzienne? 532), he doesnot adhere to a conception of aesthetics that would be, strictly speaking, nothing

but an effect, as does Jean-Franois Lyotard. In Linconscient esthtiqueRancireturns to Lyotards thesis that the works power is bound to its effect of distress

(75). The subject is disarmed by the blowof the aistheton, the sensible thataffects the bare soul, confronted with the power of the Otherthe blow of thesublime that makes an irreducible pathos triumph over all logos (76). Novalis,another of Rancires romantic references, affirms that fundamental reality isaccessible only through a form of ecstasy that escapes rational discourse, ever

based on the presupposed duality of an enunciating subject and an object thatupholds the enunciation. Only poetic creation has access to an ecstaticcontemplation where the poet is at once subject and object, self and world. From

this perspective, aesthetics is an effect that divests spectators of their masteryover the object. Dominique Chteau (1997) has called this the iconic effect orthe image effect it is not an effect of meaning, but that which situates itselfuphill from all such effects of meaning, an effect of presence that lies before or

beyond signification proper. Chteau thus proposes two possible spectatorialattitudes, the mastery corresponding with the poetic (or semiological) logic, and

bewitchment, an effect aligned with aesthetics or with a theory of iconicity.Rancire spends little time on aesthetics conceived as an effect on the

spectator. Occasionally, he mentions the new man or the new historic humanityproposed by the utopian avant-garde film movements of the twenties: It is thecinematographic arts aesthetic mode that binds it to the advent of a new historichumanity, one delivered from the psychological subjects old falseness and oldweakness (Lhistoricit du cinma, 52). The mode of subjectivizationor de-subjectivizationthat Schfer claims for the cinematic medium approachesRancires de-psychologizing conception of film. For Schfer, a distinct historic

being generated the cinematic machine, a man less known and more inhuman.

His film spectator is a kind of mutating subject because the machine of cinematicastonishment [sidration] has the function of enhancing the unknown and theinhuman in the social being (20). That other historic being we allow to invade

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us, one with no specific determination (domestic, professional, etc.), one thatdisplaces itself differently (19).

Rancire, ever attentive to the two poetics intertwined within the work,

maintains that the affects tied to the representational logic and the affects tied tothe aesthetic logic are different regimes of emotion. He uses the facial close-up asan example of, first, the traditional expressive function pertaining to therepresentational power (sadness, fear, joy), second, the aesthetic power of in-differentiation that transforms the expressive visage into landscape or stone and,last, the enigmatic relation between the two. In the aesthetic regime, the affectproduced does not result from a fulfilled expectation. Rather, this is an operativecomponent in the representational regime, where a logic of coding necessarily

restricts the field of legitimate affects. When those codes explode, Rancire argues,standards of emotion give way to myriad novel emotions. A pathos of thought,we might say, that distresses (Lyotard), bewitches (Chteau), or astonishes(Schfer) a sensible mode of thought. Schfer asks whether the lightningwhose other name is the dazzling thought, that is, thought without anatomy,thought that cannot be analytically dissected, does not reside within the powerof astonishment? (23). Jacques Rancire would surely agree with this descriptionof an aesthetic logics film-effect. These affects, which are not exactly emotions

but forms of what Deleuze calls becoming, overflow those who pass throughthem, who become other. In closing, one could ask whether it is not precisely thisalterity that so alarms film theorists, perhaps because it is the truth of an objectstill unknown, one still deaf to the theoretical efforts of a critical meta-languagethat, with only a few exceptions, has found the means to make it speak.

Universit de MontralTranslated by James Cisneros

Works CitedAlthusser, Louis. Pour Marx. Paris: ditions de la Dcouverte, 1986.. For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon Books: 1969.Aristotle. La potique. Paris: Livre de poche, 1990.Bernardi, Sandro. Le regard esthtique ou la visibilit selon Kubrick. Saint-Denis: Presses

universitaires de Vincennes, 1994.Bresson, Robert. Notes sur le cinmatographe. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.. Notes on the Cinematographer, translated by Jonathan Griffin. London and New York:

Quartet Encounters, 1986.Certeau, Michel de, and Jacques Revel. Cinma et Histoire in a cinma, no. 10/11, 1970, pp.

27-44.Chteau, Dominique. Le bouclier dAchille, thorie de liconicit. Paris: LHarmattan, 1997.. pistmologie de lesthtique. Paris: LHarmattan, 2000.Chteau, Dominiqueand Jacinto Lageira (eds.).Aprs Deleuze. Philosophie et esthtique du cinma.

Paris: Place publique ditions and ditions Dis Voir, 1996.

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Comolli, Jean Louis. Comment sen dbarrasser, Trafic, no. 10, 1994.Deleuze, Gilles et Flix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littrature mineure. Paris: ditions de minuit,

1975.. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis and London:

University of Minnesota Press, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles. Cinma I. Limage-mouvement. Paris: ditions de minuit, 1983.. Cinma II. Limage-temps. Paris: ditions de minuit, 1985.. Cinema 2. The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London:

The Athlone Press, 1989.Epstein, Jean. crits sur le cinma, volume 1. Paris: Seghers, 1923.Garneau, Michle. Le paysage dans la tradition documentaire qubcoise: un regard off

sur la parole, Cinmas, automne 2001, pp. 127-143.Gnoun, Solange. Cinematographic Image, Democracy, and the Splendor of the

Insignificant, Sites, Fall 2000.Gnoun, Solange and James Kavanagh. Jacques Rancire: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics:

Approaches to Democratic Disagreement. Substance, no. 92, 2000.Hamon, Philippe. Introduction lanalyse du descriptif. Paris: Hachette-Suprieur, 1981.Hegel, G.W.F. Les genre potiques in Esthtique, volume 4, traduit par S. Janklvitch.

Paris: Flammarion, 1979.Musil, Robert. Essais, traduit par Pierre Jaccottet. Paris: Seuil, 1984.. Precision and Soul. Essays and Addresses, edited and translated by Burton Pike and David

S. Luft. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Lexprience hrtique. Paris: Payot, 1976..Heretical Empiricism, edited by Louise K. Barnett and translated by Ben Lawton and

Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988.Rancire, Jacques. La chair des mots. Politique de lcriture. Paris: Galile, 1998.. Entretien avec Jacques Rancire. Le cinma, art contrari, Cahiers du cinma, no. 567,

Avril, 2002, pp. 56-63.. Existe-t-il une esthtique deleuzienne? in Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique(ric

Alliez, ed.). Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthlabo pour le progrs de la connaissance,1998, pp. 525-536.

. La fable cinmatographique. Paris: Seuil, 2001.. Lhistoricit du cinma in De lhistoire au cinma(A. de Baeque and C. Delage, eds.).

Paris: ditions Complxe, 1998, pp. 45-60.. Linconscient esthtique. Paris: Galile, 2001.. Linoubliable inArrt sur histoire. Paris: ditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997,

pp. 47-70.. Les noms de lhistoire. Essai de potique du savoir. Paris: Seuil, 1992. (The Names of History. Onthe Poetics of Knowledge, translated by Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis and London:University of Minnesota Press, 1994.)

. La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littrature. Paris: Hachette Littratures,1998.

. Le partage du sensible. Esthtique et politique. Paris: La fabrique ditions, 2000.Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et rcit III. Le temps racont. Paris: Seuil, 1985.Schelling, F.W.J. Le systme de lidalisme transcendental. Louvain: ditions Peeters, 1978.Schfer, Jean Louis. Images mobiles. Rcits, visages, flocons. Paris: POL, 1999.Sorlin, Pierre. Esthtique de laudiovisuel. Paris: Nathan Universit, 1992.

Notes1. Rancire uses this expression in Linconscient esthtique (33). [All further references will be

included in parentheses in the text. When following existing translations, I have listedthe page of the source material cited in the original French manuscript, followed by the

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English page reference. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Translationsmay have been modified. Trans.]

2. See Existe-t-il une esthtique deleuzienne?3. See Dune image lautre? Deleuze et les ges du cinma in La fable cinmatographique.

4. [Throughout the text, I have used the sensible for le sensible, which denotes beingscapable of sensation and perception and beings capable of sentiment and affect, as wellas that which can be perceived by the senses, the perceptible. In Le partage du sensible,Rancire defines the partition of the sensible as that system of sensible evidencesthat reveals both the existence of a communality and the divisions that define in itrespectively assigned places and parts (see Gunoun; Gunoun and Kavanagh). Allthese meanings should also be read into subsequent references to sensibility (sensibilit). Trans.]

5. Deleuze is here quoting Artaud (1985: 220; 169).6. For references to Deleuze see the chapter Pense et cinma in Limage-temps.7. The term belongs to Jean Epstein, who uses it in De quelques conditions de la photognie.8. See Michle Garneau: Le paysage dans la tradition documentaire qubcoise: un regard

off sur la parole.9. See Les deux formes de la parole muette, in Linconscient esthtique.10. I develop this in my doctoral dissertation, Pour une ethtique du cinma qubecois.

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