Woolf plus Deleuze: Cinema, Literature and Time Travel
Jason Skeet
[1] In his books on cinema [1] Deleuze examines how film can create an image of time outside of the lived time of human experience. An inhuman time, accessed through the technology of film and, specifically, post-Second World War cinematic expression – a cinema that was, according to Deleuze, symptomatic of a paradigm shift in Western culture. So it is that Virginia Woolf's 1926 essay The Cinema [2] was a portent of the cultural developments that Deleuze was later to explore. This connection – Woolf plus Deleuze – also raises the question as to why does a philosopher who is always allotted a place in the canon of post-structuralism make frequent selections from Modernism to illustrate his ideas? In what follows, and by way of responding to this question, I shall link Deleuze's concept of the outside to what is, I argue, a consonance between Woolf's and Deleuze's ideas on cinema. A cluster of Deleuzian ideas related to his cinema work – the brain as a screen or interval, the time-image and becoming – will be discussed alongside a reading of Woolf's novel The Waves, [3] showing how this work built on Woolf's own uses of cinema and how Deleuze's use of cinema may be transposed to the study of a text. I will suggest that what is at stake in this attraction between Woolf and Deleuze via the cinema – and by extension, the philosopher's references to other writers – is an engagement with two other questions: what is experimental and what is vitalism?
[2] Surveying the "various faces of the outside" in Deleuze's philosophy, Stephane Symons observes that this concept is used by Deleuze to effect "an intuition of the absolute speed of a non-organised entity." [4] It is put to use by Deleuze in different ways. Reading Spinoza, he discovers the outside of Being in a philosophy of immanence, expressed through how "the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness we have of it." [5] From reading Foucault's work, Deleuze takes an awareness of how society can be understood in terms of forces forming its outside. In A Thousand Plateaus, a State apparatus is conceived in opposition to nomadic war machines, a formulation of how "the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that relationship." [6] From Bergson, Deleuze adapts a theory of intuiting inhuman durations outside of human experience of time, or as Claire Colebrook describes it, of "thinking duration as such, the one life that gives itself in speeds and slownesses." [7] There is more to say about Deleuze's uses of the outside, but what interests him in these various formulations is the dynamic relationship between two terms. In the interval between the two sides of the formulation, a process of transformation takes place and which is irreducible to either term. Outside and inside are a folding field of interaction, and in the fold is becoming.
[3] Connecting Woolf to Deleuze provides another perspective on the concept of the outside, with both utilising cinema as a force from outside their own practices in order to make available new possibilities for their creativity. For Woolf, this will enable (in Deleuzean terms) the invention in her writing of new percepts and affects. That is, sensations that exist in themselves: "Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them." [8] For Deleuze, it enables the construction of concepts: "A theory of cinema is not 'about' cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which themselves are related to other concepts corresponding to other practices" (C2 280). An encounter is engineered with the medium of cinema as a resource on which to draw in the formulation of to feed back into their work. By seeking to identify the specific materials and concerns of cinema – or how, as Woolf puts it, "[i]f it ceased to be a parasite, how could it walk erect?" (C 270) – this specificity then enables a re-thinking of something else. It is significant that The Cinema was published when Woolf was beginning to identify the concerns that would preoccupy her in writing The Waves, and this connection, together with concepts drawn from Deleuze's philosophy of cinema, can be used to make a reading of the novel that emphasises a concern with the depiction of multiple dimensions and levels in time.
[4] Writing in January 1933 to Virginia Isham, an actress and distant relation who had proposed producing a version of The Waves for radio, Woolf discloses that, "[o]ddly enough, I met somebody who wants to film it the other night." [9] Woolf's willingness to consider translating her novel into film indicates her interest in visual perception and the ongoing fascination with "what the eye can do for us." [10] In Woolf's essay The Cinema, this regard for the visible is raised alongside a concern with the temporal, marking her continuing exploration of time as both impersonal force and personal memory. The Cinema was originally published in 1926 in three separate publications – Arts in America, and the Nation and Athenaeum in Britain – addressing the wide audience that these journals appealed to. [11] At this time, theoretical ideas about the medium of film were part of an emerging field and this allowed Woolf to be highly speculative. Her ideas are based on what Maggie Humm describes as a "clear and repeated premise that film is a new, dynamic, psychic and cognitive process," [12] or as Woolf states, cinema is "more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?" (C 269). Importantly, Woolf identifies cinema as non-mimetic and considers in relation to it whether there is "some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye?" (C 271). Humm notes that the essay presages Eisenstein's influential theorisation of film published in Britain three years later.
[5] In The Cinema, Woolf refers to the rupturing effects of war. Describing scenes from a First World War newsreel, she comments that "... all this happened ten years ago ... We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves" (C 269). She presents the war as a "chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance" (C 269). Deleuze, too, divided his two cinema books according to pre- and post-Second World War periods, with war identified as a crisis engendering new perceptions as well as innovative cinematic methods. For both Woolf and Deleuze, the two world wars signify an interval in history, a dislocation and hiatus at which everything – society, culture, and individual identity – are re-thought. The early cinematograph captured and shaped this disjunction in the historical process, which was not only caused by the 1914-18 War but by a whole series of momentous changes. "On or about December 1910 human character changed," [13] wrote Woolf. In that year, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded, endorsing Freud's theories of the conscious and unconscious mind. It was the year of Roger Fry's first Post-Impressionist exhibition, followed in 1913 by the Ballet Russe's performance in Paris of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring: a brutal statement of modernity in movement and in music. All of these events contributed towards Woolf's "shock of the moment" [14] that transforms individual consciousness.
[6] Several analyses of The Waves insist on emphasising its spatial elements over the temporal, postulating a narrative based on the "design/rhythm/sequence/recurrence theory" [15] that Roger Fry propounded as the necessary form of a work of art. Accordingly, the novel creates a "virtual spatiality," so that as the temporal "retracts" so "spatial form expands." [16] In comparison with these spatial readings that reflect a particular current within Modernist aesthetics, I argue that in The Waves Woolf approximates a depiction of non-linear conceptions of time, so that time becomes more important than space. Woolf's cinema essay indicates that her attention to Post-Impressionism and the influence of Fry's aesthetic concepts had been superseded by a new concern with time and movement, or how "[t]he past could be unrolled, distances annihilated" (C 272). No longer impeded by the presence of the visual artists amongst the Bloomsbury group and their ideas regarding painting and sculpture, Woolf theorises freely and explores the experimental possibilities of cinema. In a way comparable to how cinema might enable thought to be "rendered visible without the help of words" (C 271), Woolf would push The Waves into unexplored territory in order to consider how ideas can be apprehended outside language. In The Cinema, Woolf considers abstraction as a particular quality of film. She describes how as she watched a film, "a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen" (C 270). Although unintentional, "[f]or a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words" (C 270). In a manner comparable with Deleuze's notion of the affective power of cinema, Woolf states how in cinema we apprehend "[s]omething abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently" (C 271). Likewise, it is through narrative form that The Waves explores different states of time: the novel is shaped into a series of first-person soliloquies from six characters over the span of their lifetimes, interrupted by third-person descriptive interludes of time passing, through a day and different seasons. By reading The Cinema alongside The Waves, we see Woolf casting off the influence of Fry's spatial conceptions of form, so that what emerges is a new focus on temporal relations. [17]
[7] Significantly, Woolf opens her exploration of the possibilities of cinema with a description of "the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures" (C 268). Woolf here invokes what was a contemporary belief, as Michael Taussig puts it, in "the intimate relationship between primitivism and the new theories of the senses circulating with the new means of reproduction." [18] This equates with Walter Benjamin's persistent theme of the "shock and magic of modern technology." [19] Technology, for Woolf as for Benjamin, has a political significance, offering strategies for domination as well as emancipation. This potential of cinema for social control as well as individual liberation is also made by Deleuze when he comments that "[t]he screen, that is to say ourselves, can be the deficient brain of an idiot as easily as a creative brain." [20]
[8] In The Waves, savage modes of being are apprehended by Louis and Rhoda as they watch the others eat:
"Horns and trumpets," said Rhoda, "ring out. Leaves unfold; the stags blare in the thicket. There is a dancing and a drumming, like the dancing and drumming of naked men with assagais."
"Like the dance of savages," said Louis, "round the campfire. They are savage; they are ruthless. They dance in a circle, flapping bladders. The flames leap over their painted faces, over the leopard skins and the bleeding limbs which they have torn from the living body." (W 114-115)
Placed in brackets and therefore signalled as occurring outside the flow of internal vocalisation, this is the only moment in the novel when characters externalise thought in dialogue. Both are outsiders: Louis because, as he says, "[m]y father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent" (W 14), and Rhoda because of her anxiety over social communication. In Deleuzian terms, this encounter with an outside reality creates "savage singularities which rest suspended outside, without entering into relations or letting themselves be integrated (only here does the 'savage' take its meaning, not as an experience, but as what has not yet entered experience)." [21] This move outside is a deterritorialisation exposing the fictional convention of linear time – that structural element of conventional narrative that in The Waves is dismantled and dissolved. It is significant that as outsiders both Rhoda and Louis provide moments of becoming that transform their relation to time and space. Rhoda fears "being blown for ever outside the loop of time" (W 14) and compensates with psychic space travel to regions "beyond our reach...There I go to replenish my emptiness" (W 114). Louis feels excluded from "the central rhythm" (W 76) and journeys in time back to when he had seen "women carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile" (W 77). Deleuze's use of the outside is a mobilisation of the power of thought that is linked to his concept of the time-image. For Deleuze, this outside is not a spatial concept but rather an energy generated by contact between two forces that creates an interval, a screen which Deleuze also refers to as "images." Rodowick explains that these "irrational intervals are not spatial, nor are they images in the usual sense. They open onto what is outside of space yet immanent to it: the anteriority of time to space, or virtuality, becoming, the fact of returning for that which differs." [22] Rhoda and Louis, by encountering the outside, disrupt the flow of linear time and enter an interval, a break that makes possible the virtual, that "vast territory of potentialities in every present that passes." [23] The result is a virtual reality, a screen on the infinite possibilities beyond the self that accesses the atavistic past and the speculative future, but could also merely reinforce limitations and prejudices.
[9] Woolf, in her biography of Roger Fry, refers to the idea of an encounter between different domains of knowledge and his "raids across the borders' of other art forms." [24] With regard to cinema, such border crossing is engendered by technology. Taussig cites Benjamin's view that the "memetic faculty" is extended by technology into an interest with alterity and that the "gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else." [25] Technology is "both an incentive to and a medium for border crossing in this special sense." [26] As with Deleuze, Woolf's interest in cinema is not that of discerning the resemblance between cinema and writing, but a confrontation with an outside that makes it possible to think differently. Woolf wanted to push writing to its limit, and one way she did this was by grafting ideas from her encounter with cinema onto her writing – developing a narrative form that investigates time and, in contrast to Benjamin, presaging a politics of difference. Rather than reduce the distance between objects and subjects by destroying the artwork's "aura," as Benjamin wanted, Woolf turns to perception as infinitely varied and fragmented. Instead of attempting to destroy class by reducing society to a single mass, she seeks to increase the differences between and within individuals so as "to allow all the varied forms of social existence to stand apart from each other as mutual outsiders." [27] In this context, approaches to time are developed in The Waves that are consonant with Deleuze's philosophy: the notion of deriving movement from time, and the conception of different states of time.
[10] Deleuze relates what he terms the movement-image to the period of early cinema and the development of techniques such as montage that explore multiple and mobile viewpoints. Following Bergson in rejecting the idea of perception as either a mental representation of objective reality or the representation of higher transcendent forms ordering the universe, since both conceptions situate the perceiving subject as the point of origin of visual cognition, Deleuze locates the viewer within the movement of matter, with visual images as one manifestation of this movement. Perception is "one point of action and reaction in a long chain of acting and reacting matter." [28] As Deleuze posits, "[h]ow could my brain contain images since it is one image among others" (C1 58). We ourselves are images, that is, movement (and becoming). For Deleuze, cinema, like the human brain, has no centre or anchoring point, and he adapts Bergson's thesis on duration whereby movement is derived from time to theorise cinema's "any-instant-whatevers" (C1 3) so liberating the sequencing of images from a single, fixed point of view. This is illustrated in The Waves when the same event, such as a train journey, is viewed from different perspectives: Louis watches the landscape "disembodied, passing over fields without lodgement" (W 52) whilst Bernard focuses on a fellow traveller and how, "[t]he human voice has a disarming quality – (we are not single, we are one)" (W 53).
[11] According to Deleuze, "[m]ovement in space expresses a whole which changes, rather as the migration of birds expresses a seasonal variation" (C2 237). This makes possible the awareness of images in "universal variation" and how: "Every thing, that is to say every image, is indistinguishable from its actions and reactions" (C1 58). In The Waves, the train journey provides an example of Woolf exploring the relation between time and movement. This recalls Einstein's use of a train journey to explain relativity for Woolf, alongside other Modernists, used the ideas of contemporary physics to move away from the limitations of realism. [29] Louis observes: "We are passing through England in a train. England slips by the window, always changing from hill to wood, from rivers and willows to town again" (W 51). Movement in space is then translated into an awareness of duration as Louis states, "[t]his is the first day of a new life, another spoke of the rising wheel" (W 52), with the wheel here associated with both time and movement. Past and future times seem to happen concurrently, so that as Louis considers his future self when he will "consort with cockneys and clerks" (W 52), he also thinks about how, "I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood" (W 53). Likewise, Deleuze quotes Fellini: "We are constructed in memory; we are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity" (C2 99).
[12] "Movement is a translation in space" (C1 8) and is the effect of different types of duration. Neville observes that "[t]he train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation" (W 56), so that perception of movement transforms alongside a qualitative shift in emotion. Different senses of time engender different forms of movement for Neville, from sitting "still one moment" to emerging "into that chaos, that tumult" (W 56). Action and emotion, memory and the future interact and this constantly changing, kaleidoscopic arrangement of moments shows that "what makes consciousness possible is precisely the gap between the action of one image and the reaction of another." [30] This space-between, the conception of life as "a moment's delay or cut introduced into the image-flux" with the human brain constituting "the largest of these gaps" [31] as Deleuze suggests, makes possible the awareness of time as being composed of distinct durations that give rise to different experiences (different movements and becomings). Here then we acknowledge that both Woolf and Deleuze break perception and experience down into singularities existing outside the mind that are then formed by the mind into synthesised wholes. By emphasizing and exploring the singular, Woolf and Deleuze show that the brain does not impose this chain of acting and reacting matter; it is a part of it, so that the action of something cannot be separated from the fact of its perception. In the same way, we exist within time and duration cannot be separated from its experience. Deleuze states that "[o]nly a theory of the singular point is capable of transcending the synthesis of the person and the analysis of the individual as these are (or are made) in consciousness," [32] so that breaking experience and perception down into parts gives the possibility for new arrangements (a becoming-other).
[13] For Deleuze, the trauma of the Second World War established a psychological numbness in which "people no longer really believed it was possible to react to situations." [33] In response, cinema developed the time-image as a way to disturb thought and memory and investigate a "temporal 'panorama'" (C2 55). The Waves, with its organisation into sections of interludes followed by internal monologue, becomes a stimulus, a means of experiencing different states of time – from the organic time of nature to the crystalline time in which human beings live and think. Deleuze shows how the time-image is structured by an arrangement of irrational cuts or intervals, and from this perspective, the narrative form of The Waves should be investigated. The structure of the novel draws attention to temporal relations, a cutting between italicised descriptions of visual and sonic moments that show the daily and seasonal transformations of the sea and a garden – beginning with the sunrise as the novel's opening – and soliloquies that move through different stages in the characters' life-times. The function of the interludes is to present "purely optical and sound situations" (C2 28) such as solar light effects: "The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out" (W 3), combined with syntactical sound effects: "One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down" (W 4). This is organic time, indicated by the difference in register and use of the third-person viewpoint compared with the soliloquies. The interludes record the movement from light to dark and the rise and fall of waves – crucially, a motion dependent on time. In contrast, the soliloquies are inside time, a subjectivity that is "fractured in the labyrinth of time." [34] Bernard's summing up at the end of the novel adopts the image of a crystal to convey this:
The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers. Faces recur, faces and faces – Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole – again, like music. (W 214)
Deleuze also mobilises a crystalline conception of time so that the past is constituted at the same time as the present, with memory existing virtually alongside this present. Singular moments (or haecceities) in the past may continue into the present, growing and accumulating new layers of possibility and meaning. This crystal is, for Woolf and Deleuze, a time machine enjoining the coalescence of actual time – the production of ordered sequences – with virtual openings into the past and future. As a result, "[i]nstead of a linear development, we get a circuit in which the two images are constantly chasing one another around a point where real and imaginary become indistinguishable. The actual and its virtual image crystallize, so to speak." [35] As Felicity J. Colman observes, the crystal is a "geological and mathematical term that Deleuze employs for its structural habits of forming through aggregates open (prism) and/or closed (cube) crystallographic forms, some of which require other forms to complete them, some of which can be complete in themselves." [36] This crystalline conception of time is not comparable to montage and the movement-image. In the crystal there is a "coexistence of nonchronological layers and incommensurable points," [37] that is, the nomadic and rhizomatic image of thought.
[14] In cinema this split between the actual and virtual is figured by what Deleuze terms the "irrational cut." As an example of this, Claire Colebrook refers to cinema's use of "incongruent voices played over disconnected visual images" that remove a reference point, thereby "breaking experience down into the irrational (or not yet unified or conceptualised) singularities." [38] In The Waves, reading cuts between the different temporal states of the interludes and soliloquies. Time is presented as both a non-human force (the interludes) and an interior time in which we live and think (the soliloquies). The interludes are not a gap in the soliloquies (or vice versa), but with this cutting between different states of time the interval is located in the mind of the reader. The brain is the screen, and the novel as time-image is projected onto this screen, requiring the reader to become aware of the routes by which they might re-arrange and re-compose this into an ordered whole. In this space-between there is no viewpoint (unlike the multiple viewpoints of the movement-image) so that the virtual power of the time-image – "an inhuman potential that is outside us as the pure form of time" [39] – reveals the connecting processes by which time is ordered. Spatial form is rejected in favour of the provisional arrangement of the time-image, and the novel constantly demands to be re-read. By being divided by time in this way, the novel resists resolution into a final unity. Instead, like the prism, it multiplies and differentiates itself continually.
[15] Bernard's summing-up at the end of the novel is memory used, not as force of habit, but as an interval, a space-between or "membrane joining two sides" [40] that is essential for renewal, a screen which is the means for "making the past active and present to the outside, in order, finally, for something new to happen." [41] This is a something new that is both what might be to come and a becoming of the past. A fold so that outside and inside, virtual and actual, future and past, are in contact with each other. In this topology of time, The Waves ends with a beginning, a moment of movement: Bernard's cry of going into battle against death, not an end but another beginning. Woolf constructs with words a time-image that confronts us with the constraints continually actualized in ourselves by a freezing of thought, a failure to move and be changed. As a challenge to thought, The Waves finishes like an unanswered question. It refuses to proffer an identity that its readers should strive for or a closed model affirming or endorsing prejudice. It is a textual event that in encountering the outside a reader might be thrown into becomings, and by a being in-between – in the interval – thinking happens again and reading is without finality.
[16] Deleuze's distinction between molar and molecular assemblage is also a distinction between spatial and temporal forms of organisation. His emphasis on machinic structure is a concern with how an assemblage operates over time, rather than with how it produces positions in space – a temporal focus that is Deleuze's understanding of movement derived from time. For Deleuze, cinema "puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind." [42] Indeed, Deleuze suggests that the molecular architecture of the brain offers a more suitable model for cinema than linguistics or psychoanalysis: "Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion, never stops tracing the circuits of the brain." [43] In this context, Woolf's diary entry for October 30, 1926 that, "[a]ll these things shoulder each other out across the screen of my brain" [44] resonates with Deleuze's maxim that the "[t]he brain is the screen." [45] As Gregory Flaxman puts it, "[t]his screen is a form of relation, of interchange, of mutual synthesis between the brain and the universe" [46] and by exploring this interval, we experiment with how the future can be composed in new ways. Woolf, as Michael Tratner states, wanted "novel reading to contribute to the fragmenting of public social reality so that a new assemblage can be made." [47] A reading of The Waves through Deleuze's philosophy of cinema opens the text up to its expression of a life that is no unified whole progressing in linear fashion through time, but rather "we see divergent becomings, movements or temporalities from which the whole could be derived." [48] According to Deleuze, "[t]ime has always put the notion of truth into crisis" (C2 130), or as Bernard puts it in The Waves, "[t]ime has given the arrangement another shake" (W 227). Thinking, for Deleuze, is a becoming, and in Cinema 2 he provides us with examples of post-war cinema in which he finds this understanding of a rhizomatic form of becoming: not a becoming that unfolds across a linear time-frame but becoming that happens though an encounter with the outside of thought. The time-image provides one way of conceptualising this encounter as the relation between the actual and the virtual, an interval and point of contact between what is and that which is yet to emerge. D. N. Rodowick puts it like this: "The time-image asks us to believe again in the world in which we live, in time and changing, and to believe again in the inventiveness of time where it is possible to think and to choose other modes of existence." [49]
[17] It is now time to return to a problem posed at the outset: that of Deleuze and Modernism. First, note that Deleuze places Woolf in his own personal canon of Anglo-American literature and argues that these writers construct fiction that "constantly shows these ruptures, characters who create their line of flight." [50] Writing, for Deleuze, is process, always in a state of becoming – a flight that is justified by its own trajectory to "lose one's face, to jump over or pierce through the wall." [51] However, this flight is not a retreat into the imaginary, an escape from life. On the contrary, Deleuze argues that it is a flight into the real, that the flight itself is life: "to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon." [52] Once The Waves is read as an experiential process, using the substance and rules of engagement of the text itself, the notion of the experimental applies to both writer and reader. It is in the space between that the experiment occurs and it is always a question of becoming. Those examples of artistic practice that Deleuze calls on are an important component of his philosophical system precisely because of the emphasis Deleuze places on becoming. In this way, Deleuze provides a counter conception of Modernism, one that – thinking alongside Lyotard's reversal of linear time in which, " [a] work can become modern only if it is first postmodern ... postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent" [53] – makes Modernism less an epoch and more a mode of creative action. Just as Lyotard disassembles the terminology – "[p]ostmodern would be understanding according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)" [54] – by breaking the term down into parts an interval emerges between the "post" and the "modern," and in this interval a re-thinking is possible regarding what comes after the "post" and what "Modernism" could become. A Deleuzean response to this possibility is to experiment with how to make "productive use of the literary machine ... that extracts from the text its revolutionary force" [55] – a pursuit that Deleuze extends to the cinematic, and thereby indicating, I suggest, a complicity between film and a certain current within Modernism that is indicated by the Woolf plus Deleuze connection.
[18] Becoming, for Deleuze, is an irreducible principle that is actualised in all forms of life. This expresses, to use Robin Mackay's recent formulation, an "abstract vitalism." [56] Yet, this vitalism of Deleuze's is no moralistic plea for the sanctity of life. As Mackay argues, "[t]he 'life' Deleuze speaks of is expressed in stranger, more hidden varieties ... Only once we understand the common thread that runs through these 'forms of life' will it be opportune to ask (but perhaps then the question will not seem so simple) whether this 'vitalism' can be salvaged from a philosophically fatal analogy with the biological animal." [57] With Deleuze, vitalism describes a life of conscious complexity, definite and indefinite, material and immaterial, organic and inorganic, so that we can talk of the life of a being, the life of a moment or, indeed, the life of a text and the life of a film. This further reflects the particular logic that operates in the selections that Deleuze makes from Modernism. It is a logic that seeks out that which is experimental, that which in its turn seeks out the new, and which can be used to demonstrate this abstract vitalism pervading Deleuze's project. Reading The Waves through Deleuze's philosophy of cinema and time opens up an understanding of how it is a novel of becoming-other – a prismatic and imperceptible becoming. And this is what Deleuze finds so useful in those writers he references – they provide illustrations of a mode of creative action in which an event of becoming is discovered: becoming an outsider to one's own culture or species, becoming a foreigner in one's own language, becoming an outsider to one's self. Not to know what you are, rather that you become something you don't already know.
Thanks to Dr. Barbara Morden at the Open University, who commented on an earlier version of this paper.
Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Further references will be to these editions and the page number after the abbreviations "C1" and "C2" respectively will be cited in brackets within the text.
[2] Virginia Woolf, "The Cinema" in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 Vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966, 1967), II, pp. 268-272. Further references will be to this edition and the page number after the abbreviation "C" will be cited in brackets within the text.
[3] Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Oxford World's Classics Edition, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Further references will be to this edition and the page number after the abbreviation "W" will be cited in brackets within the text.
[4] Stephane Symons, "Deleuze and the Various Faces of the Outside," Theory & Event, 9.3 (2006) «http://muse.jhe.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.3symons.html» [accessed 10th March 2008] (para. 2 of 13).
[5] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans.by Robery Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), p. 18.
[6] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p.360.
[7] Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 31.
[8] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill (London: Verso, 1994), p. 164.
[9] Virginia Woolf, The Sickle Side of the Moon. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V: 1932-1935, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 145. That person was Wogan Philipps, a political activist, artist, and husband of novelist Rosamond Lehmann.
[10] Collected Essays, IV, p. 278.
[11] Leslie Kathleen Hankins, "'Across the Screen of My Brain': Virginia Woolf's 'The Cinema' and Film Forums of the Twenties" in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 148-179 (p. 156).
[12] Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 186.
[13] Collected Essays, III, p. 421.
[14] Virginia Woolf, "Sketch of the Past" in Moments of Being, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind, introduced and revised by Hermione Lee (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 78-160 (p. 85).
[15] Marjorie H. Hellerstein, Virginia Woolf's Experiments with Consciousness, Time and Social Values (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 54.
[16] Jack F. Stewart, "Spatial Form and Color in The Waves," Twentieth Century Literature, 28. 1. (Spring, 1982), 86-107 (p. 87).
[17] However, I do not wish to present The Waves as a so-called cinematic novel or claim, as others have, that, "Cinema itself made possible The Waves" (Paul Douglass, "Bionic Eye: The Resources and Limits of the Cinematic Apparatus," Pacific Coast Philology, 33. 2. (1998), 103-108 (p. 103)). As Steven Kellman posits, "the term cinematic novel has become a rhetorical commonplace," and too often used with little understanding of what precisely it denotes (Steven G. Kellman, "The Cinematic Novel: Tracking a Concept," Modern Fiction Studies, 33:3 (Autumn, 1987), 467-477 (p. 468)).
[18] Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 201.
[19] Pamela L. Caughie, "Introduction" in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. by Pamela L. Caughie (New York and London: Garland, 2000), pp. xix-xxxvi (p. xxix).
[20] Gilles Deleuze, "The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze" in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. by Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 365-373 (p. 366).
[21] Deleuze cited in D. N. Rodowick, "The Memory of Resistance," South Atlantic Quarterly, 96. 3. (Summer, 1997), 417-437 (p. 427), emphasis original.
[22] Rodowick, p. 419.
[23] Rodowick, p. 427.
[24] Woolf cited in C. J. Mares, "Reading Proust: Woolf and the Painter's Perspective," Comparative Literature, 41. 4. (Autumn, 1989), 327-259 (p. 327).
[25] Benjamin cited in Taussig, p. 33.
[26] Caughie, p. xxix.
[27] Michael Tratner, "Why Isn't Between the Acts a Movie?" in Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. by Pamela L. Caughie (New York and London: Garland, 2000), pp. 115-134 (p. 131).
[28] Lydia Rainford, "How to Read the Image?: Beckett's Televisual Memory" in Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing After Cinema, ed. by Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 177-196 (p. 180).
[29] See: Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 295-318.
[30] John Johnston, "Machinic Vision," Critical Inquiry, 26. 1. (Autumn, 1999), 27-48 (p.36).
[31] Gregory Flaxman, "Introduction" in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. by Gregory Flaxman, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1-57 (p. 16).
[32] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 103.
[33] Deleuze cited in Felicity J. Colman, "Cinema: Movement-Image-Recognition-Time" in in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. by Charles J. Stivale, (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), pp. 141-156 (p. 153).
[34] John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 150.
[35] Deleuze cited in Marks, p. 148.
[36] Colman, p. 145.
[37] Rodowick, p. 424.
[38] Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 53.
[39] Rodowick, p. 434.
[40] Rodowick, p. 424.
[41] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. by Seán Hand (London: Athlone, 1999), p. 98.
[42] "The Brain is the Screen," p. 366.
[43] "The Brain is the Screen," p. 366.
[44] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III: 1925-1930, ed. by Anne Olivier-Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 114.
[45] "The Brain is the Screen," p. 366.
[46] Flaxman, p. 16.
[47] Tratner, p. 132.
[48] Colebrook, p. 40.
[49] Rodowick, p. 423.
[50] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 27.
[51] Dialogues, p. 34.
[52] Dialogues, p. 36.
[53] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children (London: Turnaround, 1992), p. 22.
[54] Lyotard, p. 24.
[55] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 106.
[56] Robin Mackay, "Editorial Introduction," Collapse, Vol. III (2007), p. 37.
[57] Mackay, pp. 35-36.