Deleuze and Ethology by Jason Cullen;

Author:Jason Cullen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350133815
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The movement-image and its avatars

I argued in Chapter 3 that Deleuze invokes the geometry of Bernhard Riemann and his concept of a continuous multiplicity – a space determined by the events that occur across it – as a way of articulating Bergson’s formulation of durée. The reciprocal determination of a space and the events that populate it is, both for Deleuze and Bergson, a way to conceive the one and the many such that they are no longer opposed to each other. For Bergson this means understanding the two terms (one and many, part and whole) as points of view on the folding of continuous processes into the actions characteristic of bodies. Deleuze takes up this theme in Cinema 1 when he describes movement in terms of the relationship between Bergson’s bodies – now renamed ‘relatively closed system[s]’40 – and the plane of immanence – the set of what appears, the manifol d of relations, or, the mise en scène of perception – that animates them. If we return to a passage from Cinema 1, we can see that what interests Deleuze is how Bergson’s extension of the discussion of images makes possible an ontology wherein the movement of an object is inseparable from the constitution and transformation of the object itself:

We find ourselves in fact faced with the exposition of a world where IMAGE = MOVEMENT. Let us call the set of what appears ‘Image’. We cannot even say that one image acts on another or reacts to another. There is no moving body which is distinct from executed movement. There is nothing moved which is distinct from the received movement. Every thing, that is to say every image, is indistinguishable from its actions and reactions: this is universal variation. Every image is merely a road by which pass, in every direction, the modifications propagated throughout the immensity of the universe. Every image acts on others and reacts to others, on all their facets at once and by all their elements.41

In this sense, then, Deleuze takes up Bergson’s ontology of images in order to critically reformulate the relation between objects and movement. The type of image around which Deleuze formulates his affective ontology is the movement-image. Insofar as the objects that fill out the universe are sections cut from a continuum, Deleuze, like Bergson before him, wants a way to refer to these objects that recognizes the fact that they were always already in motion. It is the concept of a movement-image that makes this possible: ‘Cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image. It does give us a section, but a section which is mobile, not an immobile section + abstract movement.’42

In Matter and Memory, Bergson suggests ‘that the movements of matter are very clear, regarded as images, and [so] there is no need to look in movement for anything more than what we see in it’.43 Deleuze cites this remark in his discussion of Bergson’s critique of the traditional distinction between objects and the movements they execute.

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