I once wrote a paper for a professor whose work on the anthropology of the imagination I found both inspiring but also compromised by its uncritical use of the Cartesian subject. Although I hate having lost every paper I wrote in grad school to hard drive failure and indifference, this one is probably better off forgotten. For I’m sure that my insolent – no one can teach me a thing – attitude shone forth like a beacon of arrogant, post-bourgeois freedom. However, of all the papers I wrote back then, it is the one to which my mind most often returns. This is because it was on Deleuze’s “time-image” as a tool that can move us beyond the structure and functioning of bourgeois aesthetics, as well as the very ground of representational thought.
Time-image can be called a cinematic concept, in that it was developed to explain how thought might become estranged from historical (chronological) time through exposure to non-narratively-based cinematic images and the cuts that link them. Deleuze understood that these images could force a recollection of the normally unthought links between image, sign, and narrative. When combined with both the Deleuzian “subject as constitution of heterogeneous elements/folds/processes of subjectification” and the Deleuzian/Nietzschean insistence upon the value of falsehood as corrective to the affects of truth (stupidity, as Deleuze would say; comfort, as Nietzsche said), the time-image is a good way to begin thinking about how modernity conditions our expectations.
I’m sure my professor loved getting a 20-page paper on a subject and author that had nothing to do with the topic of the seminar he taught and that used a concept created for visual artistic affects seemingly far removed from the literary approach he took to imagination. But here’s the kicker:
I did it all in the context of a paper about one song by Venetian Snares. I was kind, I included the song on a CD, and for that alone he gave me an A (the grad school equivalent to a C+ in undergrad courses). But the paper was indicative of the radical insubordination I always felt towards any attempts to discipline my critiques of modernity.
The song I used to demonstrate time-image was “This Jar is the Baby Man,” which, alas, I cannot upload, but that one may enjoy here. I would have only done so, anyhow, to show how its destruction of time, movement, flow, and expectation of narrative has been surpassed by another Venetian Snares song:
Venetian Snares: Integraation (from My Downfall – Original Soundtrack)
Today I’d probably write about Integraation as it relates to transvaluation and the destructive beauty inherent in the final negation of negation. If you choose to give it a listen, allow yourself to be affected and moved. Only then should you try to think/make sense of the song: pure affect, aggression, violence, destruction, beauty, pathos of distance, texture, variance, disjunction, war machine. If you like what you hear (sweet sweet aesthetics, how lazily even I return to your comforting embrace) do your instincts a favor and get My Downfall, either by supporting a radical artist with cash flow or by validating my appreciation of Venetian Snares by asking for a free download. The latter option will at least be a big F You to capitalism, which cares not for what you buy, as long as you buy.
Because I have no time write further about the song, I have presented it above as a tool that others might use to explain Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari to their curious, oh so curious, friends and family.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
