Copyright © 2012
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 2:
The Unconscious
Jason Wakefield
Review: Deleuze, Altered States and Film (2007) Anna Powell. Edinburgh University Press. 2012.
My only regrets of the past year are not capitalising on an offer of V.I.P hospitality at the
Expendables II film première in Leicester Square, London a few weeks ago and an unrelated
invitation to Manchester to potentially film a lecture of mine for Anna Powell's Actual / Virtual
academic research journal. The first opportunity was missed because one did not contact Herbie
Hutchinson quickly enough, as he caught a flight to Thailand as soon as the Olympic games ceased.
The second opportunity was missed because one was preparing this present issue of Avello in
Churchill College library, Cambridge University. More than twenty of Churchill College's members
have won the Nobel Prize. Sir Winston also won the Nobel prize for literature himself in 1953.
No doubt my path will cross in the future those who attended the Empire film première, either
in one of the hotel casinos around Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas or at club Bâoli, Cannes - perhaps
eating foie gras at the bar with friends of Monaco's Monegasque family, whilst listening to djs from
St. Tropez's Caves du Roy. As for my long over due lecture for Manchester Metropolitan University,
it is perhaps imperative that one of my Deleuzian papers are presented as they were meant to be
seen, filmed and presented as a streamed movie on Anna Powell's website. Several of our key
editorial members such as Claire Colebrook and Ian Buchanan have videos on this website from
their previous positions at Edinburgh University and Cardiff University respectively. Buchanan has
now left Wales for a professorship in Australia, whilst Colebrook has left Scotland for a
professorship in America.
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Deleuze, Altered States and Film emerges as a distinct book in the vast amount of literature that has
been published about Deleuze in the past half a decade. This, combined with her chapter in Deleuze
and Film (2012) edited by David Martin - Jones and William Brown, are shining examples of
Deleuzian scholarship in a saturated market of film theory. Melanie Klein and Gilles Deleuze are
two of the most grossly misread thinkers in psychological scholarship today. Deleuze, Altered States
and Film clears up several of these misconceptions. Even friends of Klein and Deleuze
misunderstood their work, however Powell dispels some of the inaccurate fallacies in circulation
today. We should reject those lecturers who try to force parallels between Klein's Object relations
with Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateuxs that are incompatible. Also, many of these same
lecturers are incorrectly teaching in seminars that schizoanalysis has a 'distinct schizophrenic effect
signalling the onset of psychoanalysis', stressing the superficially obvious, pathological, Freudo –
Lacanian nature of Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateuxs; rather than the literary, artistic,
creative, emancipation that the Artaud – esque schizoanalysis has on the OwB. There needs to be
clarity and precision with regards to the OwB conceptualizations that are taught in university
seminars across the world. Powell, drawing from her notes taken at several events and conferences,
does not make these mistakes from jargon – riddled, in correct, pre – formed hypothesis. Her
theorizing of the Altered States film, featuring the actor William Hurt playing a neurologist in a
laboratory experiment, is done lucidly and accurately. 'Deleuze, after Baruch Spinoza,
problematises “consciousness”. For both philosophers, conventional consciousness is the locus of a
“psychological illusion of freedom” (Powell 2012: 4). Her methodology is clearly defined 'by
interfering with philosophy from a Film Studies background, I am reversing Deleuze's own process'
(Powell 2012: 4). This is clarified automatically by her transparency, rather than the wilful
obscurantism that is employed by several pseudo – Deleuzo – Guattarian's with a penchant for
Heidegger.
2
I extend Deleuze's work in deploying art as a tool to investigate the nature of cinematic
perception. In doing this, I mobilise a productive assemblage with the work of other
practitioners from the fields of both art and philosophy'[…] there is, of course, a plethora of
material analysing the psychology of altered consciousness, ranging from depth psychology
to neurology. Unlike the scientists of Russell's film, I am not a specialist in fields that collect
data and seek to chart the pathologies of altered states (Powell 2012: 6).
Thus we have no data charts, diagrams or statistics divided in to cellular / molecular, development /
plasticity and behavioral / cognitive sections. Instead we have another familiar literary study, which
is popular among lecturers in Humanities departments engaging with French theorists such as
Kristeva or Derrida. Powell's unique approach to these familiar studies is through including sex,
drugs and a critique of 'the supposed universality of unconscious scenarios' (Powell 2012: 10). This
helps dispel erroneous misreadings as 'sensations of sound and vision impact in the body – without
– organs (BWO) of the film / viewer assemblage' (Powell 2012: 11). She is careful to outline the
limitations of her project, reminding us that 'critical writing on film can only ever produce an
approximation to the cinematic experience as the viewer as writer replays them on a different plane'
(Powell 2012: 13).
This was evidently clear to me after a conversation one had this afternoon in St. Catherine's
College. The topic of the conversation was about Terence Young, a former student of St.
Catherine's, who after graduating, went on to direct the James Bond films Dr. No, From Russia With
Love and Thunderball starring Sean Connery. Connery grew up in a working class neighbourhood
in Edinburgh, near where our editorial board member Colebrook used to hold a professorial chair at
Edinburgh University. Powell mentions Colebrook's Gilles Deleuze on page forty of Deleuze,
Altered States and Film. After leaving St. Catherine's College, my next port of call this afternoon
was Downing College1 (also part of Cambridge University) whose former students include the film
director Micheal Apted (The World Is Not Enough starring Pierce Brosnan), the actress Thandie
Newton (RocknRolla directed by Guy Ritchie / Mission Impossible II directed by John Woo) and the
1 The college was founded by the will of George Downing, who served both Cromwell and Charles II. He had
previously built 10 Downing Street in London.
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comedian John Cleese who also appeared in The World Is Not Enough.
Chapter 1 embraces Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, setting it up as a theatre of the unconscious,
with characters in thrall to Oedipal guilt complexes where 'analytical voices face as the inner
narrative unfolds a vast Dali dreamscape. Hitchcock, rejecting traditionally 'blurred and hazy' film
dreams style chose Dali's artwork for its 'great visual sharpness and clarity – sharper than the film
itself' (Powell 2012: 17). This is a fascinating, but perhaps a little predictable, analysis of Hitchcock
situated between Freudian and Deleuzian oneirics, extracted from proponents of surrealism. This is
done by mapping Oedipal situations onto filmic dreams with abstract psychoanalysis that might
have an alternative schizoanalytic reading where 'Guattari's experimental group with schizophrenics
at La Borde replaced Freud's hierarchical model of the unconscious with a dynamic, interactive
mobilisation of a “desiring machine, independently of any interpretation”' (Powell 2012: 20). If one
may partially paraphrase Powell; rejecting Freud, Deleuze and Guattari operate clinical
schizophrenia outside of psychoanalysis, reversing its analytical categories. 'Their “schizos” are
experimental artists such as Artaud, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, whose creative “schizzs”
both deploy and motivate becomings' (Powell 2012: 21). Several idiots have misread this as the
stroll of the schizo involving an individual having a diseased, split personality and / or hearing
voices. This is incorrect. Deleuze and Guattari are stressing that one can have the freedom to have a
chameleon like approach to our artistic and creative outputs, rather than living a one dimensional
life like those deluded in to pursuing a singular career path or a singular life style. The dissolution
of binary oppositions are not confined to Derridean thought, it is also encapsulated by
schizoanalysis.
Schizoanalytic clarifications aside, Powell also superbly distinguishes between Bergson and
Freud's different perspectives on time and the psyche. This is extended elsewhere in to the realm of
dreams where Deren partially endorsed Matta's2 rejection of Freud: 'although Oedipus is notably
2 Encharito Matta is a Chilean artist.
4
absent, Deren's work from the mid – 1940s presents dreams as formations of desire' (Powell 2012:
26). These ideas are continued later, however in perhaps a semi – contradictory fashion, in support
of Freud, leaving behind flirtations with structuralist, meta – textual, sensory readings3 for 'the
Oedipal displacements originating from phantasy as a psychic activity. We must not forget however
that these are fictitious films, thus we can not psychoanalyse fictional, artificially staged constructs
in realistic, scientific or mathematically precise terms. Engineering Oedipal trauma on the big
screen is very different from Oedipal trauma that arises out of itself naturally in real life.
To Powell's credit, her referential material is excellent, drawing upon the objet pitit a of opera
diva's voice functions in Pister's The Matrix of the Visible and the film theories of Bordwell. Her
filmography is also fascinating, including films like Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, James Cameron's
Terminator 2, Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix, Orson Welles'
Macbeth, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, Harry Lachmann's Dante's Inferno and Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey. These films are discussed through the Deleuzian variations of the actual,
aesthetics, affects, assemblages, becoming, forces, immanence, the movement – image, perception,
planes and time – images.
As well as powerful operatic sonsigns, Giulietta's tale, with its vibrant, clashing colours,
induces what Deleuze calls the affective 'colouring sensation' modulated by the dynamics of
tone and intensity. His study of Francis Bacon analyses the painter's 'colour – force'. Colours
on canvas create virtual movement and release energy within the framed space of the
painting. (Powell 2012: 46)
Here Powell is paraphrasing Deleuze's Francis Bacon. It is one of many examples of her use of
superb, psychoanalytically inflected, philosophical masterpieces. Other texts that Powell
masterfully cites are Deleuze & Guattari's Anti – Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and Žižek's
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Lacan. This prepares the way for Powell's
discussion of drug – induced altered states as outlined by the replacement of psychoanalysis by
'pharmacoanalysis'. She indicates her starting point as the Harvard scientist Timothy Leary's drug
3 See the American experimental film theories of David E. James.
5
experiments in the 1960's and 1970's. Powell warns against emulating these experiments because a
user who becomes psychologically reliant on drugs for deterritorialisations4 may never return to a
normal drug – free state from their addiction or narcotic sublimation of Oedipal relations. This is
not a universal warning from Powell however. 'Ecstatic with a drug rush, Tyrone dances to a Hip
Hop record. […] His euphoric dance only mimics the liberating possibilities of a BwO' (Powell
2012: 78). The character Tyrone may only mimic the liberating possibilities at first, however later,
this pure, ecstatic event in its actualisation, is productive artistically in the form of dance with no
self – destruction. This may not have have its sources in the Deleuzian, mathematical multiplicity of
Bernard Riemann but it does invoke a sublime void of liberation familiar to readers of the
mathematician Alain Badiou. Tyrone's dancing ecstasy can be linked to the supplementary
jouissance of orgasmic extensions of the eye by the camera. This might sound bizarre, however
Deleuze defends these sensational affects via the Brownian motion adopted by Einstein5 to prove
the existence of atoms and molecules. Thus one can read in A Thousand Plateaus that 'drugs in art
are one way to give the unconscious the affective “immanence and the plane that psychoanalysis
has continually botched” by Oedipal fixations.' (Powell 2012: 89). 6 Thus our haptic responses are
enhanced by film directors depicting drug use to free us from Oedipal constraints and symbolism.
Thus Deleuze and Guattari dismantle Klein's work on Freudian Oedipality as 'partial objects are the
molecular functions of the unconscious' (Powell 2012: 119).
In conclusion, the strongest part of Deleuze, Altered States and Film are not what Pister's has
embarked on in The Neuro – Image: A Deleuzian Film – Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture
(2012) in terms of micro – politics, neuro-science and the synthesis of time but rather an apolitical,
Nietzschean exercise in contemplating sublime Casper David Freidrich paintings or Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey to re - evaluate all our aesthetic values. These have been my thoughts when sitting
4 See Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateuxs for the distinctions between mechanical and machinic or
deterritorialisation and reterritorialialisation.
5 Bergson disagreed with Einstein on the notion of duration. Einstein had more support from thinkers such as Rosen.
6 Artaud's Peyote Dance also supports this argumentation.
6
in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. It has the largest fan vault ceiling in the world and some
beautiful medieval stained glass. Behind the chapel's altar Rubens' Adoration of Magi painting is
displayed. Rubens was knighted by both Philip IV, King of Spain, and Charles I, King of England.
Philip's patronage of the arts was also extended to artists such as Diego Velázquez. We can read
Powell's Deleuze, Altered States and Film through this patronage. Philip was King of Castille and
León as Philip IV and King of Aragon, the Two Sicilies, and Portugal as Philip III until his death in
1640.
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