The Image Machine - Notes - e-flux

This week, Film Notes is pleased to publish Félix Guattari’s “The Image Machine,” appearing here in English for the first time translated from French by Ethan Spigland. Written at the threshold of the 1990s, and originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma, the essay reads today as a concise comment on cinema and the coming post-media condition. Moving from the cinema of John Cassavetes, David Lynch, Ridley Scott, and Raymond Depardon to the televised images of the Gulf crisis, Guattari describes a moment when television, computing, and databases were beginning to converge—a moment in which images emerge not merely as representations but as active elements in the production of subjectivity.1

The filmic form has taken on an important place in the production of individual and collective subjectivity, largely through the intermediary of television. There is an entire field of interaction between television and cinema. Cinema tends to be absorbed by a television temporality—what I call music-video temporality. There is a temporal refrain, a slice of time, that seems to me deeply influenced by televisual consumption. There is something mysterious in this temporal formula of cinema, which, on the one hand, derives from television, but which, on the other, has also influenced televisual consumption.

This type of narration, which in the US is segmented to accommodate the intrusion of commercial breaks, possesses in a certain sense a holographic structure, insofar as one must be able to pick it up at any moment. You should be able to look away, take something off the stove, and then return to it. It is a narrative structure produced by an evolution that also applies to the construction of screenplays. The idea of suspense as a crowning finale toward which all the elements of the film converge—the Hitchcockian paradigm—has to give way to a flatter mode of consumption.

This production of subjectivity does not so much affect narrative content itself as it does the structure of the time-image, to use Deleuze’s expression, at a perceptual, existential, and suggestive level. Cinema drives part of the complex phenomenon of televisual viewing. It must play an important role in a constellation, but without occupying a dominant function, since many things intervene in that constellation: news broadcasts, weather, sports, games, and the familiarity of the newscasters. Film narrative and television series act as poles of disconnection, which undoubtedly reinforce the somewhat hypnotic nature of television viewing and trigger a transferential disposition.

But here again there is an evolution at the heart of the process, one that tends increasingly toward an almost psychotic, infantilizing, regressive relationship. Unfortunately, my professional obligations leave me little time to go to the cinema; otherwise, of course, I prefer to see films in theaters. I have the impression that there is a devaluation of film viewing on television. There is an overly familiar context that distorts the effect. On television, we are used to seeing just about anything. Something good is contaminated by this general mediocrity.

I really like Cassavetes, David Lynch, Ridley Scott ... In Cassavetes’s work, there is a kind of virtuosity in the relation to the other, without any hesitation about technical means. It is a bit like in Henry Miller’s work: there is a kind of full-frontal grappling with the relation to the other—a confrontation, a shattering presence that reveals something lying within cinema’s immediate reach, yet which we tend to forget, so pervasive has an obsessive, cautious, and overtechnicalized approach become. David Lynch, particularly in Eraserhead, is also someone who has had a truly extraordinary approach to psychosis. I consider Eraserhead the greatest film about psychosis, along with Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket. These are two references that I find overwhelming.

I do not know why I associate this with Blade Runner. I have seen it countless times. I was in a hotel in Japan, and it was playing on the in-room television channel, so every time I returned to my room, I watched part of it. I know it by heart. It is actually a kind of test to be able to watch the same film all the time. It resists. I have the feeling that this film, too, has something to do with psychosis.

Depardon is very gifted at staying close to, and infiltrating, this whole dimension of psychiatric misery. What really struck me about Urgences was the cunning of the interlocutors: this sort of good conscience, this feeling of doing exactly what was necessary, which leads to completely extravagant situations, such as conducting psychotherapeutic sessions with people strapped to a chair. And yet Depardon seems to have been very selective. He used only footage for which he had the protagonists’ consent. He had plenty of other material he could have shown.

When Saddam Hussein broadcast seven minutes of Bush on Iraqi television, it was a way of showing that he did not give a damn about the impact it might have on Iraqi public opinion. He was convinced it would have none. It is a very ambiguous statement. On the one hand, it was obligatory: he felt compelled, or at least considered it sly, to present Bush on television. I think he did it primarily with American public opinion in mind. At the same time, he demonstrated that it made no difference. I attribute this to the beginnings of a post-media era.

I think there will be an implosion of the captivating, dominating nature of television consumption. This is due, first, to the evolution of equipment, the proliferation of channels, the interaction between television, computers, and telematics, and the fact that with digital screens we will have the same device for both computers and televisions. We will therefore move beyond channel surfing into a generalized programming environment, and thus into a potential reappropriation of programming. We could just as easily be on a channel, a cable television station, a database, working on a personal project, or working on an interactive project.

This dominant dimension of television is, for me, entirely transitional. It is not only this technological evolution that is at play, but also the fact that consumers’ palates are becoming dulled. We are ready for all kinds of excesses and all kinds of manipulation. I believe they have less impact than they perhaps did in other eras. Le Bébête Show is an expression of this entry into a post-media sensibility.2

All of this is somewhat derisory. Images are becoming dulled. It seems to me that we are moving toward an image that is less and less representative and more and more manipulated, though not in a pejorative sense. Manipulation appears today as trickery, as détournement. But think of the photographic image processed by computer: it has completely transformed our relationship to the referent. Reversing the positions of figures, changing perspective, colorizing ... I am taking the example of digital photography, but the event itself also becomes digitized. A stunt is orchestrated. There are communication consultants and advisors of all kinds. Should President Bush interrupt his vacation or not? It is all a calculated event. I do not believe we should adopt a sentimental attitude in this regard. That is simply where we are. Ultimately, it is by going even further in that direction that we can overcome the problem, rather than by dreaming of a purity of the image or of the event.

From now on, everything converges toward the sophistication of performance, in the sense of contemporary poetic performance. Why not? Except that the actors, especially politicians, still have a long way to go, a lot of work to do. They are not very good performers.

In my opinion, we belong to a sacrificed generation. These are the last generations of television-induced stupefaction. There will be a whole reappropriation of the image, of machinic data. All of this may happen much faster than we think. Do you realize what it will mean for children to encode everything they read, everything they think; to have access to databases; to compose their programs by accessing image banks; to engage in international communication within a new type of sociality? There is a prodigious computational horizon there. But we remain in an archaeological situation, with equipment that is not yet adapted to the changes, to the potentialities of this situation.

There is a decentering of the image outside the subject; the image finds itself embodied in a symbolic field. This decentering exists not only in these apparatuses, which are identifiable in time and space, but also in the order of knowledge and perception. Images are present in contemporary cognition. New schemas are generated by computational thinking and computer assistance. It seems to me that Godard sensed something in this respect and marked this shift in perspective. He showed that the image was not only a matter of telling tall tales, but that it could be at the root of modeling systems, at the root of affects, sensibilities, and modes of thought and cognitive perception.

So this is surely the end of an era in cinema, but other directions will emerge. There is, of course, the weight of the film industry, but who knows whether these mastodons will not be wiped out like the dinosaurs in other eras? We have seen others—industrial complexes, coal mines, steel mills—dismantled. All these scarecrows are perhaps much more fragile than we think.

1990

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