The televisual machine offers us a multiplicity of ways in which to experience time, territory and subjectivity beyond the confines of our bodies, cultures and realities. But, as with any culture-producing machine, television simultaneously works to encompass all, to bring everything within the scope of its capitalist logic. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about territory and time I aim to investigate the deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations enacted by the televisual machine. I will investigate how the increasingly common practice of viewing serialised narrative shows, like HBO’s The Sopranos, in extended ‘marathon’ sessions might alter and challenge the way time is commodified by the more traditional week-by-week routine of watching a terrestrially broadcast show, and consider how the television machine responds to such a challenge. I will attempt to identify the different types of time which are present within the broad category of televisual time, and how DVD and internet download viewing of a series, which this blogger refers to as ‘TVD’, engages with different types of time. I will look at how The Sopranos, and televisual products generally, are both deterritorialised and deterritorialising products, how they are both co-opted and co-opting into the capitalist televisual machine.

Television commodifies time; it is a machine which exchanges our ‘lived’ time for televisual time whilst perpetuating the capitalist logic that everything can be abstracted and exchanged. By ‘lived’ time I mean chronological time what we, however inaccurately, regard as ‘real’ time. Televisual time refers to the types of time within a televisual text. For example, one episode of The Sopranos is 58 minutes of lived time, but could potentially be any amount of televisual time, depending on the scope of that episode. Traditional terrestrial viewing involves dedicated daily or weekly routines in order to follow the narrative, which means story lines develop more slowly and characters age and progress in parallel to our lived experience of time. In this type of viewing the narrative is confined to its schedule, viewers can watch only as often and as much as the networks allow. The viewer is required to stick with the show, and hence the network and its commercials, for years, even decades in order to receive narrative closure. Although, as we have seen with The Sopranos there is no guarantee of what this final resolution will entail. This deferment of satisfaction is far removed from the kind of immersion that takes place during extended periods of TVD viewing. Terrestrial viewing refuses to allow us enter too deeply into televisual time, it continually returns us to the conditions of our ‘real’ lives within the capitalist machine, disrupting the narrative with ads, the gaps between episodes and the gaps between series. TVD viewing is an attempt to disengage with these capitalist modes of time by taking only what is desired from the televisual machine, that is the narrative, and leaving behind the demands and constrictions of terrestrial viewing.

Televisual time is broad category which encompasses several types of time, all of which aid the consumption of the text. Within a 58 minute episode of The Sopranos There is the diegetic time within each shot of the show; Carmella pours a glass of orange juice at breakfast and we judge her time it to be the same as our lived time. But as soon as a cut is made, episodic time comes into play. Time is elided between cuts, it slips away into nothingness. Carmella unwittingly gets into a car with Tony’s mistress and the next shot jumps to the pair driving down a leafy suburban road. The scene continues, the dialogue picks up from the last shot and the extra-diegetic time melts away unmissed. Time is collapsed so that the televisual event can be fore grounded. Yet this elided time is constantly making itself conspicuous by its absence, not only between shots but between scenes, episodes and even whole series. When we watch the Sopranos we are seeing years of the characters ‘lives’ pass before us, years which pass on the actors bodies, even if not on our own, reminding us of the this elided time. Between two series of The Sopranos actors age and aesthetic tastes move on, something which, under the conditions of terrestrial viewing is far less likely to be noticed than during TVD viewing. TVD viewing can become incongruous, jarring even.

The Sopranos family in the first season, 1999 … and during the final season 2007

The actors’ bodies are testament to the manipulation of time inherent to these viewing practices. With every cut between scenes, indeed every cut between shots, the promise of ‘real’ time is revoked. We do not require points of congruence between story lines. What is Tony doing while Carmella flirts with her interior decorator? How does meadow spend her days at College? We do not ask, we assume that televisual events have been constructed for our benefit and accept that all types of televisual time are malleable and inconstant, only to be understood after they have passed. As viewers we are content to defer satisfaction in the present for the promise of satisfaction the future, a model familiar to us from every machinic process of our capitalist ideology. We know that we will only gather meaning retrospectively, just as time can only be understood as a chronological progression once we place it into sequence through memory.

At this point we can turn to the Deleuzian concept of ‘sheets’ or ‘aspects’ of past, which offers us insight into these contemporary viewing practices. Deleuze borrows from Bergson’s model of time as an inverted cone …

… in order to illustrate how time is experienced by humans (Deleuze 1989, 98). Deleuze and Bergson are both interested in creating a model of time that explains the human experience of time, rather than a strictly scientific explanation (Muldoon 2006, 67). Bergson offers us the image of the ‘inverted cone’ of time, the most contracted circle of which is the present, which then spreads outwards to encompass all past. The past is conceptualised as ‘sheets’ or ‘regions’ of past. They appear to us in sequential order but only because we view them from the continuous vantage point of successive presents (Deleuze 1989, 99). Deleuze points out that the past is something only understood from the perspective of the present, just as in language, meaning is only discerned retrospectively from the words and phonemes we hear (Deleuze 1989, 99) and in a television show narrative is only created retrospectively by the viewer through the context of memory. The idea that there is a chronological ‘past’ is not what Deleuze is postulating, rather that all past coexists together from the perspective of the present, and when we access the past we are in fact alighting on a particular sheet of past with its own ‘tones’ and ‘aspects’. Consider the DVD menu of The Sopranos, or almost DVD for that matter. The menu screen could be seen as the present, from which point, every instance of the past is accessible. We can go to any moment in any episode by selecting a scene. The scene we select is like the sheet of past that encompasses certain interlinked events, events of the same tone, with the same themes. Or we can ‘play all’ (everyone’s favourite option) and allow the story to play out in a linear form, while we sink into our machinic addiction to The Sopranos, only to emerge hours later, our sense of ‘lived’ time totally superseded by the types of televisual time layered within.

Anyone who has had this experience emerging from televisual time and space after watching an entire season of their favourite show will be familiar with the deterritorialisation and machinic addiction that TVD viewing engenders. If we accept that TVD is a subset of the televisual machine, then the hours we eagerly dedicate to TVD viewing must surely be viewed as an addiction to the televisual machine, its narrative and its deterritorialising effect. Deterritorialisation is the demarcation of the territory, its subdivision and delineation (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 1945). When something is annexed from its ties to physical, social, historical and cultural territory it is deterritorialised. Guattari and Deleuze speak of the earth as the undivided whole, the “unique indivisible entity” and “The element superior to production” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 140) which then falls victim to the deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations of machines. Capitalist machines are expert at de/reterritorialisation, although, as Guattari point out, an ideology is not itself a territory but rather, territories do the work of an ideology by inscribing the permissible cultural identities, artefacts and practices specific to a particular territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 508). Television is particularly adept at deterritorialisation; in fact it is television’s central purpose to enact de/reterritorialisation on the viewer. Guattari talks about the ‘polyphonic subjectivities’ which television produces, drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of the polyphony of voices:

When I watch television I exist at the intersection: 1. of a perceptual fascination provoked by the screen’s luminous animation which borders on the hypnotic, 2. of a captive relation with the narrative content of the program, associated with a lateral awareness of surrounding events (water boiling on the stove, a child’s cry, the telephone…), 3. of a world of fantasms occupying my day-dreams”. (Guattari 1995, 16)

Guattari says that to counter this pulling apart of subjectivity he, the subject, becomes the person who speaks from the television. In other words, other identities are relinquished in favour of the central narrative of the text. Television is not just a televisual machine, as Guattari says; it is a ‘machine of subjectivity’ (Guattari 1995, 17). In the intensified circumstance of TVD viewing, the televisual subjectivity machine, which is a de/reterritorialising machine, is faced with fewer competing subjectivity machines (like Guattari’s crying baby) allowing it to function ever more effectively to deterritorialise and subjectify the viewer. This ‘subjectification’ is closely linked to the reterritorialisations enacted by the televisual machine.

TVD viewing enacts a line of flight away from the more usual territories of our existence and reterritorialises the viewer on complex new territories specific to the televisual text involved. Perhaps we’ve reterritorialised upon the territory of a ship in Space or the White House, the old West, suburban Melbourne, a funeral parlour or any number of possibilities. Of course these territories are not just physical or geographical, despite Deleuze and Guattari’s penchant for geological terminology. Reterritorialisations “stand for the lost territory” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 508), they are multiple and faceted, they can ‘land’ on political territories, territories of sensation and tone, territories of cultural identity. So when we reterritorialise on The Sopranos, it is not only the territory of North Jersey we land upon, it is the territory of the late 1990s, early 2000s, American, Noveau-riche, capitalist, mafia, family, gender, suburbia, psychoanalysis, etc.

(Carmella’s territories, commodified.)

And then again The Sopranos is the territory of HBO, high-production values, subscription service television with its own cultural and social connotations. Television shows are always deterritorialised because they are, by their very nature, removed from the conditions of their production and consumed and appropriated in new territories. TVD viewing is no different. Consider the region classifications of DVDs. The Sopranos is produced in New York and then distributed on DVD around the world. The show can then be bought in Moscow, Mexico City or Melbourne. But that DVD cannot then be returned to New Jersey to be watched by David Chase, at least it is not supposed to be. These region classifications act to deterritorialise and reterritorialise The Sopranos so that it can be commodified, consumed and contained according to capitalist logic.

Watching TV shows on DVD or internet downloads certainly changes the way we engage with the televisual machine but this does not necessarily indicate an ability to escape its capitalist logic. Amongst technology and television-literate (people like us!) it can seem that no-one watches terrestrial TV anymore. While that is something of an overstatement, fewer people are watching terrestrial television, sitting down week after week at a time carefully scheduled by the television network to garner the most advertising revenue. Discussion of this has tended to focus on the idea that viewers will no longer ‘put up’ with commercials and scheduling decisions made by TV executives. The assumption seems to be that audiences are independently minded now; technology is outstripping the old-fashioned capitalist mode of television viewing. But even the most cursory assessment will reveal that when we watch TVD, we are always and unavoidably engaging with the capitalist machine. There is no outside of the system, everything is co-opted back in. We might buy the collectable DVD boxed set of The Sopranos so that we can appreciate the show without commercials or the need to ration our consumption, but in return we sit through increasingly hysterical warnings about DVD piracy (which, unlike anything else on the DVD we cannot scroll or skip past), we pay for slickly designed packaging and collectable souvenir editions and related merchandise.

The Sopranos cigars – smoke what Tony smokes!

Even if we download shows illegally, we must own a computer, pay for internet usage and be subjected to internet ads at least as plentiful and pervasive as any seen on TV. TVD viewing intensifies the de/reterritorialisations which are intrinsic to capitalist processes of commodification (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 244). A DVD, and even more so, a downloaded torrent, is consumed without the reterritorialisation, the entry into the territory, which terrestrial television enacts to some degree by means of its context. The Sopranos viewed terrestrially on Channel Ten might be preceded by an episode of Thank God You’re Here and followed by Big Brother. Seven episodes of The Sopranos downloaded from uTorrent and watched on your lap top in bed will have no such context. It will remain a commodity divorced from its means of production and be far less susceptible to reterritorialisation.

The implications of TVD as opposed to terrestrial television consumption are many and complex, and it is surely impossible and fruitless to try and conclusively evaluate their relative merits. By viewing a television show on TVD we attempt to disengage with terrestrial televisual time, which structures our televisual machinic addictions so that we may partake of the drug to a degree, whilst remaining firmly within the our local territories of the home and family (recall Guattari’s water boiling on the stove and the crying baby, distractions which pulled his televisual subjectivity in opposing directions). Terrestrial viewing succumbs to capitalist commodity culture through its commercials, product placements and ideological practices within the narratives of the texts themselves. When viewing TVD some of these processes are altered and some even largely avoided, yet other processes of commodification arise to take their place. We are freed from commercials and are no longer at the mercy of network programmers. We can have as much of our televisual drug as we want, we can speed up or slow down televisual time, we can access any televisual event as often as we like or by-pass it completely. But the fact remains that we are consuming a massively commodified product, and this ‘freedom’ to consume perhaps results in even greater susceptibility to the addictive quality of the televisual machine. Yet, as Guattari makes clear in his discussion of machinic junkies, a machinic addiction can be a doping or a revolution; “It’s either miserable prostration or the creation of an unprecedented universe” (Guattari 1996, 104). Perhaps a TVD addiction will result in unexpected and unpredictable flows of energy and creativity. Perhaps we watch the episode of The Sopranos ‘Pine Barrens’, in which Paulie and Christopher become lost in a snowy wood overnight, and then explore our own environment armed with a new set of associations. TVD viewing enacts a deterritorialisation on the viewer which opens the territory to incursion by new states of being, sensations, ideas and practices. At every instant there is the possibility of a change in direction, the expansion and mutation of an idea. Energies might flow and combine in unpredictable ways allowing a repressive machine to become, even if only briefly, a machine for creation, expression and elation.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During. London And New York: Routledge, 1993, 29-43.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1989, 99-124.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “Deterritorialization.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London And New York: Continuum, 1987. 508-510

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: The Viking press, 1977.

Flaxman, Gregory. “Introduction.” In The Brain Is The Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, edited by Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 1-57.

Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney, Australia: Power Publications, 1992.

Guattari, Felix. “Machinic Junkies.” In Soft Subversions, edited by S Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. 101-105

Lavery, David, and Robert J. Thompson. “David Chase, The Sopranos, and Television Creativity.” In This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos, edited by David Lavery. London: Wallflower, 2002, 18-25.

Muldoon, Mark S. Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self and Meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006.

I highly recommend the history page, where the project’s Genesis and aims are discussed, of particular interest is this quote from the project’s creator:

“Mapping the Internet weekly will allow us to see major disasters in different parts of the world. The Internet is a huge disasters sensor. If I had maps of pre-war Iraq and then compared them to today, one could see how badly Iraq was destroyed. The idea of a metaphysical representation of the real world is very interesting to me.”

Think about it! The notion of the internet as something that reacts to the world, that shows where disasters are happening as it contracts around physical locations, headless of specific human intervention. It’s pretty exciting… or do I mean frightening?

What is an event? Deleuze poses this question and (despite what you may think) answers it, albeit in a very ‘Deleuzian’ way. The event is an amorphous idea, but it’s also a useful one. The event offers us a framework, though even that is probably too specific a term, with which to view and contemplate the televisual event. Perhaps a useful approach is to start out with Deleuze’s initial question; What is an event? After which we can ask what is a televisual event? How is a televisual event constructed? And by whom?

An event you say?

In order to talk about the televisual event we must first address Deleuze directly. It is important to remember that the concept of the event is not just a filmic or televisual one, what Deleuze is articulating (however obliquely) is a notion, a method, a model of how things and people actually exist in space and time. In his discussion of the event Deleuze is providing us with a way to understand difference; why is one thing not another? How do we experience ourselves and the world as a continuity; changing, flowing, dare I say it ‘becoming’ while still delineating between things? Heady stuff!

First of all Deleuze takes us into chaos. Except that he doesn’t because chaos doesn’t exist. Well, actually it does exist, but it cannot be perceived, so it also does not exist. It exists and it doesn’t exist. Easy! Chaos would, according to Deleuze, be a ‘universal giddiness’ (Deleuze 1988, par. 3), an infinite effusion of all possibilities, all just generally milling about in unordered timelessness. Sounds pretty fun.

But, unlike the rather rudimentary metaphor of a magic eye puzzle, chaos cannot actually be perceived, it is always filtered and shaped by ‘the great screen’  into ‘elements’ which form ‘series’(Deleuze 1988). This can all tend to sound hopelessly obtuse, but that’s because what Deleuze is describing here is, in fact, the nature of everything, which makes specifics a little difficult. The screen ‘refines’ the chaos and creates something from the everything (Deleuze 1988, par. 2) and the ‘something’ or ‘One’ which the great screen delineates is the first component of the event.

So we have a ‘One’ rather than a ‘Many’, thanks to our great screen filtering the chaos. It is a nice first step, but perhaps a little unsatisfying. Next Deleuze introduces us to Leibniz’s and Whitehead’s notion of ‘extension’ (Deleuze 1988, par. 3). When our One stretches or encroaches into/onto a subsequent One, now we’ve got a series going. We can think of this a little like chain mail, or maybe snakeskin, where each scale rests upon another scale and, importantly, each scale relies on the ones that come before it and presupposes the ones after it.

Though rather than ‘before’ and ‘after’ (which aren’t really appropriate to describe snakeskin either, no scale is really ‘before’ or ‘after’ any other scale) we have Deleuze’s next buzzword; prehension. Prehension describes the relationship between elements, the way that every element of an event contains the potential, or perhaps the knowledge or energy, of every other element (Deleuze 1988, par. 5). As Deleuze says: “Everything prehends its antecedents and its concomitants and, by degrees, prehends a world” (Deleuze 1988, par. 5). So the Great Pyramid prehends Napoleon’s soldiers…it even prehends Sony’s rather surreal ad campaigns:

These prehensions collide in what Deleuze describes as a “nexus of prehension” (1988, par. 5), merging and expanding like waves, or to use one of Deleuze’s favourite metaphors, like harmonics, sound energy which reverberates eternally, continually begetting more prehensions in an ever expanding cloud of intersecting prehensions. These intersections between, or ‘concrescence’ of, elements are for Deleuze the individual (1988, par. 5). The individual doesn’t have to be a human, it is merely the place and time whence prehensions converge, or as Deleuze might have put it; ‘concrece’. The individual may be a monad, a discrete entity which is the expression, method and perception of the event (Deleuze 1988, par. 6) but it doesn’t have to be. The individual or subject expresses the datum of the event by perceiving it, whether it’s an emotion, a sense, a sound, an anything. But of course the individual is itself entirely constituted by prehended data. When “prehension is filled with its own data”(Deleuze 1988, par.6), when the concrescence of elements revel in their own existence under the unifying umbrella of the individual, then the individual experiences self-enjoyment, satisfaction, a realisation of ‘selfness’, the enjoyment of becoming (Deleuze1988, par. 7). It is a sense of self renewal from which spring creative forces and energies…the sort of forces and energies needed to create a TV show like the Sopranos, or indeed to think up an ingenious segue…

Televisually Speaking

(And yes, there will be spoilers)

In the pilot episode of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, our magnanimous mobster, has a panic attack because a family of ducks fly away from his pool.  (Watch from 2:21 if you’re in a hurry)

Ok, just kidding. Obviously there are more complex factors at play than a simple cause-and-effect relationship between Tony’s ducks and his panic attack. You don’t need Deleuze to tell you that. But the usefulness of Deleuze’s event is not simply to say ‘everything’s connected’ but to radically rethink our experience of the world beyond cause-and-effect binaries, which were never very helpful anyway. Nothing is merely a cause, nothing merely an effect. No effect has a single cause and no cause has a single effect. The event is a cloudy explosion of elements, not a neat timeline.

Just for fun, we might attempt to map the consequences, the ripples, the vibrations of Tony’s ducks. If we follow one particular strand of the duck event it might look like this: the ducks- the pool- Tony’s house – Tony’s wealth- Tony’s criminality- murder- guilt- stress- panic attacks- etc.

But then again it could go: the ducks- Tony’s panic attack- Tony’s psychiatrist- Tony’s Oedipal complex- Tony’s mother- attempt on Tony’s life- etc.

Or even something like: The ducks- ducklings- breeding- migratory patterns- the Arctic- ice caps- global warming- pollution- cars- freeways- New Jersey Turnpike- Sopranos opening sequence- Tony- Tony’s panic attacks- etc.

If anything this simplistic mapping shows just how arbitrary any delineation between events is. Why start with the ducks? Why not start with the eggs the ducks hatched from? Why not start with the big bang itself? Why even circle back to Tony? Why stay within the world of the show at all? How can we even define the ‘world of the show’ when the boundary between what is sanctioned ‘canonical’ (McKee 2004, 175) Sopranos product and what is extra-canonical fan-produced product, is so consistently blurred?  The Sopranos of course has fans, and inevitably these fans create their own textual products, which both expound and extend the world of the Sopranos (some more skillfully than others perhaps):

The fans are still vibrating to the key of Tony’s Ducks, the event wave of The Sopranos never dies away, it spreads and influences, and perhaps lessens in intensity, but it will always be there.

Or are they David’s Ducks?

If we go further back than Tony’s Ducks we might fix upon David Chase himself as the centre of the ‘nexus of prehensions’ that The Sopranos has spawned. Though even he is, of course, an arbitrary starting point. What started The Sopranos in Chase? Frustration born of his years spent in the limbo of American TV writing? The gangster films he watched as a kid? His own Italian-American heritage? The list literally stretches into eternity.

Although we cannot consider the televisual text as a separate entity from the modes of its production within the capitalist televisual machine, of which even my beloved HBO is a part, that doesn’t mean David Chase is denied scope for creativity. Indeed for Deleuse, creativity; the drive for novelty and renewal is an intrinsic feature of the monad. The monad is filled with “a musical joy of contracting its vibrations, of calculating them without knowing their harmonics or of drawing force enough to go further and further ahead in order to produce something new” (Deleuze 1988, par. 7).

Deleuze is interested in creative forces, the innate and constant search for novelty. He says that ”the best of all worlds is not the one that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new new creations are produced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity” (Deleuze1988, par. 7). It is this creative force, the energy of the event as expressed by the individual that is perhaps the answer to deleuze’s question: “what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation?” (Deleuze 1988, par. 7)

David Chase constructs a televisual event, like Tony’s ducks, in the same way ripples spead from a pebble thrown into a pond. Chase cannot opt out of the televisual machine which ‘dopes’ the viewers(Guattari1996, 102) and commodofies Chase’s events, his creativity, his life. Nor can he control the ripples that spread from the televisual events he constructs. But he can always play around, he can always seek the novel, the creative, the new. He cannot stop the event, but he can alter it, manipulate it and send it in a new direction: 

Chase is more than aware of the implications his ending has for the entire series, indeed he almost sounds like he might have been reading a little Deleuze himself;

“Everything that pertains to that episode [the finale] was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on. There had been indications of what the end is like. Remember when Jerry Toricano was killed? Silvio was not aware that the gun had been fired until after Jerry was on his way down to the floor. That’s the way things happen: It’s already going on by the time you even notice it (from here).“

We might see that final scene as an attempt to halt the ‘Tony’s ducks event’ which kicked off an entire series, but surely it is more fruitful, and more accurate, to read the ending as a final, even definant, expression of Chase’s creative force. Chase is not trying to halt the event, rather he is stamping his personal creative drive onto the ‘Tony’s ducks event’ before he sends it out into the event matrix for the final time. Even he can’t control what will happen to it from there… 

 Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. What Is an Event? In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. London: The Athlone Press, 1993, 76-82. Reproduced at http://pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Deleuze.html (accessed May 20, 2008).

Guattari, Félix. 1996. Machinic Junkies. In Soft Subversions,ed. S. Lotringer, 101-105. New York: Semiotext(e).

McKee, Allan. 2004. How to tell the difference between production and consumption: A Case Study in Doctor Who Fandom. In Cult Television, eds. S. Gwenllian-Jones and R. E. Pearson, 167-185. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wowsers…

Now if that’s not commodification of the body than what is? All that skin and collagen living on after the body is gone, going to ‘beautify’ Western bodies…there’s just so much to discuss here, I think I’ll come back to it later.

(And just in case the banner ad is different for you, here’s a screen shot of what I saw when I opened the link. Note what the ad at the top is for. I don’t know whether to lol or cry.)

Chaos and the Screen

“Chaos does not exist”

Chaos is an undifferentiated ‘many’. It is everything and nothing. But it cannot be perceived, all we know is the “bottom side of the great screen”. What we call chaos is in fact that which is beyond the sophistication of our screens.

Consider (as a metaphor only) the magic eye puzzle!

How do you get a ‘One’ from the ‘Many’?

Extension: “one element is stretched over the following ones, such that it is a whole and the following elements are it’s parts”. Elements of an event form an extensive series which have intrinsic properties such as “height, intensity, a tint, a value, a saturation of colour”. Like a wave expanding and contracting, energy flowing, movement, force, stuff!

(From here)

Into this ‘event wave’ Deleuze introduces the individual, who he describes as a “concrescence of elements”. An element prehends other elements, it constituted by the ‘datum’ of past perhensions…maybe a little like this:

Except that it’s never static like the chain mail. Prehensions beget prehensions in constantly moving and shifting vibrations and harmonies.

These prehensions tend to be integrated in a pleasurable sense of satisfaction, of constantly renewing creative energy:” a Satisfaction with which the monad fills itself when it expresses the world, a musical Joy of contracting its vibrations, of calculating them without knowing their harmonics or of drawing force enough to go further and further ahead in order to produce something new”.

Tony’s Ducks

Tony’s ducks trigger his panic attack right? What about:

His son’s birthday, his job, his wife, his daughter, his mother, the threat of imprisonment, the threat of betrayal, the barbecue, the pool being in the right place for the ducks, the journey of the ducks, the weather, the season, the entire universe is inseparable from Tony’s collapse!

Every thing has vibrations, Tony’s collapse consists of prehensions upon which the datum of yet more prehensions depend.

David Chase creates the world of the Sopranos, but does he control it? Remember what Deleuze said about the Monad’s satisfaction in it’s own becoming: “a musical Joy of contracting its vibrations, or calculating them without knowing their harmonics or of drawing force to go further and further in order to produce something new”?

The ‘event’ of Tony’s Ducks is constructed by Chase within the world that is ‘The Sopranos’, but it, like all events cannot be controlled or delineated except in the most arbitrary ways. The Duck’s ‘vibrations’ are felt throughout the entire series… Tony goes to therapy because of the Ducks. But without the complexity of the event matrix, the Ducks would be meaningless.

Tis, I think, helpful to have a little reminder of what the different terms refer to.

Spectatorship

John Belton: “Large-screen and widescreen processes [have] redefined traditional notions of spectatorship”

These ‘Traditional’ notions of spectatorship include Andre Bazin’s ‘screen as window’, Jean Mitry’s ‘screen as frame’ and especially Jean-Louis Baudry’s merger of these ideas with psychoanalytic thought into a notion of the screen as a ‘Lacanian mirror, in which the child…(mis)recognised its own image as an Imaginary, ideal, unified, and more perfect reflection of itself”

Baudry’s spectator resembles inhabitant of Plato’s cave, who watches immobile as shadows move upon to wall of the cave and takes this to be reality. For Baudry the screen is also a mirror-like apparatus which reflects the desire of the spectator, and so perpetuates “the ideology that had originally produced it”

Stephen Heath takes this idea further, claiming the ‘screen-as-mirror’ does not reflect desire, so much as ‘fix’ it. That is, the mechanical apparatus is also an ideological apparatus which “transforms spectators into subjects of a state-like institution”. Heath’s notions of spectatorship presume a uniformity and fixity of film framing which, according to Belton, does not exist, at least not after the 1950s. 

Belton argues that, in the past, theorists like Stephen Heath have focused too heavily on the metaphorical frame/screen theorising spectatorship as determined by the content of the film, while neglecting the important role which the size and shape of the actual screen has in determining spectatorship.

Technology redefining spectatorship

Wide-screen technologies including: Cinerama, Cinemascope, Todd-AO, Circlevision, VistaVision, Ultra Panavsion, Super Panavision etc.

These technologies constituted a distinctly new and different cinematic experience, whereby the “heightened physiological stimulation provided by wraparound widescreen image and stereo sound” redefined the spectator’s relationship with the screen.

No only did the screen now physically enter further into the spectator’s space but the screen became so large the edges could not be held in view, which, combined with marketing campaigns…

 …encouraged the spectator to experience the screen as borderless, the image not contained within a frame. This was specifically, if not actually literally, true of 3D films;

In this case the spectator’s space is ‘invaded’ by the cinematic image, rather than in other wide-screen formats where the spectator is felt to be ‘entering’ the cinematic space, but they both share the central position that is is possible for the spectator to ‘share’ the cinematic space, as in a theatrical production.

Parallels with the theatrical spectator were often drawn by critics and advertisers alike. The vastness of the screens meant that not only was the spectators entire field of vision taken up, but they were forced to shift their attention around the screen “as one would watch a play where actors are working from opposite ends of the stage”

However theatre is not the only parallel to be drawn:

 Consider the ancient tradition of the fresco, which requires the spectator to actively move and shift their gaze in order to comprehend the image.

The bottom half is the Cinerama 2.59:1 ratio, but the film was also entirely re-shot in the more standard 1.77:1 ratio because of concerns that many theatres would be unable to screen the new format. In the end the standard version was never even released!

 What, we might ask, is going on here? Why did old Karl have to get dragged in? How did ‘Redchango’ come to create this clip for our viewing pleasure?

Does it go something like: paparazzi -tabloids – Britney – Chris Crocker – You Tube – ‘Redchango’ – Karl Marx?

Though of course the Paparazzi are hardly the first link in the chain. And it probably requires a brainstorm formation rather than a flowchart.