ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 15 number 1 april 2010

The artist is not only the patient and doctor of civilization, but is also its pervert. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense1

ne of the key insights of Gilles Deleuzes Coldness and Cruelty is that the conceptualization of the body best proceeds not through psychoanalytic abstractions but rather through a simultaneously critical and clinical approach. The commonplace assumption, characteristic of both public and specialized discourses, that sadism and masochism form complementary components of a syndrome (sadomasochism), mediated by a pleasure/pain dynamic, must be rejected: In place of a dialectic which all too readily perceives the link between opposites, we should aim for a critical and clinical appraisal able to reveal the truly differential mechanisms as well as the artistic originalities at work in sadism and masochism.2 By focusing on Sades and Masochs works, Deleuze teases out the differential mechanisms that define their respective novels and that betray a symptomatology vastly different from that set forth in psychoanalytic and scientific literature. For Deleuze, literary symptomatology must replace scientific etiology to define adequately the heterogeneous traits of a properly Sadist and Masochist literary economy. In doing so, a reversal takes place: sadomasochism, a semiological howler, explains little of sadism and masochism. Rather, Sade and Masoch reveal the limits and inadequacies of scientific and psychoanalytic understanding based in etiology; they invent bodily states and dispositions that forcefully test the feeble semiological abstractions and reductions thoroughly critiqued by Deleuze. If Deleuzes symptomatology in Coldness and Cruelty underscores how semiological abstraction completely misunderstands masochism, it

thomas odde FLIRTING WITH MASOCHISM sergei eisensteins three -ring circus of body and time
also galvanizes a productive reconsideration of thought, body, and art-making that resonates across Deleuzes work, most notably in The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus, and Essays Critical and Clinical. In Essays, published shortly before his suicide, Deleuze focuses on vital practices that critically engage with the present condition: The writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health.3 Literary invention crafts bodily attitudes and states into corporeal figures of what Nietzsche termed the great health.4 To conventional wisdom, the symptoms of the great health often appear as maladies, manifestations of

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/10/010123^16 2010 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2010.496175

123

flirting with masochism

physical and mental breakdowns that putatively obstruct the mind and bodys normal functioning. Yet when bodies find their orifices sewn up, their voices stammering, their heads spinning, their feet stumbling, their knees buckling, their veins exploding, their faces contorting, for Deleuze a critical and clinical commitment to thinking and to the world is at stake. The body and its dispositions forces productive encounters with thought. Writers, including Masoch, inspired by the great health, fashion a catalogue of such symptoms that reveal less of a physical or psychological dysfunction than a profound literary enterprise, in which bodily figures connect directly to thought. In this way, masochism withdraws from the realm of psychology and instead becomes a truly philosophical muse, entering into world history as a radical practice. The clinical body forms a crucial component of a novel thought-image, one that invigorates our relationship to the world, to history, and to ourselves.5 To borrow Deleuzes terminology, the clinical body acts as a contestatory site that counteracts the weary symptoms discerned in reactive thought, molar unities, and stratified spaces; it constitutes a dynamic body that incisively challenges the meaningful, Oedipalized subject united body and soul; it becomes a world-historical force that engages in critical practice, with the hope of altering the current state of affairs and the tools used to think it. By inventing practices and procedures that make a clinical body whether in art, lifestyle, or radical struggle experimentation offers a creative and political engagement with the world we live in. In other words, the clinical body poses two fundamental questions for philosophy: what can a body do and what could be (otherwise)?6 Even though Deleuze spoke exclusively of literature as a health, one wonders whether the other arts, particularly cinema, may indeed draw upon their own resources to create such a clinical enterprise. This essay shall argue that Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, a crucial figure in media history and theory, fabricated a great health worthy of his literary counterparts. By placing emphasis upon unusual bodily dispositions and states, Eisensteins films and writings recurrently mark the bodys profound capacity to spur radical struggle and reveal dialectical movement. Suffering tremendous torsions and conversions, mutations and metamorphoses, the body distills, in spite of the inflictions it undergoes, a critical and clinical practice informed by revolutionary commitment. Forged from cinematic shadow and light, the Eisensteinian body in turn often adopts a masochistic posture that invites alert study of the differential mechanisms, elaborated by Deleuze, that comprise its articulation. An examination of Eisensteins work through the lens of masochism and health therefore will prove rewarding on three fronts: (1) it provides further understanding of a central figure in media history and theory; (2) it develops and broadens one of Deleuzes most compelling but under-appreciated notions; and (3) through Deleuze it opens new avenues for reassessing the cinematic body as figure of health. The initial tack of this paper will contour the shape of Deleuzes theorization of masochism and temporality, which will in turn provide a framework for discussing Eisenstein. In Coldness and Cruelty Deleuze focuses primarily on Masochs unique symptomatology and the literary health it engenders. I wish to retain the connection between art-making, masochism, and health developed by Deleuze in relation to Masoch. However, my analysis will also discuss more general considerations of the masochistic body that occur elsewhere in Deleuzes work, most notably in A Thousand Plateaus.7 There, Deleuze expands his reading of masochism to include the Body without Organs (BwO), a notion that I will deploy to examine Eisensteins theories and filmic practice. Co-authored with the psycho analyst Felix Guattari, that work situates masochism within a broader context of experimentation as critical and clinical enterprise. The plateau or chapter How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs? focuses on productive forms of experimentation, including masochism, that deterritorialize the body as organic unity, as desiring lack, as representative of a coherent self. The BwO liberates the body from the territorialized, stratified organism by constructing a plane of consistency that allows

124

odde
intensities and affects, speeds and slownesses to pass across it. The masochist fabricates a unique BwO: What is certain is that the masochist has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO can no longer be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves.8 When the masochist has constructed a BwO conducive to pain, intensive waves travel over the body rather than being channeled toward pleasure. The BwO makes a purely positive desiring-machine rather than installing a place for pleasure underpinned by the Oedipalized body as molar and organic unity signifying lack. With the BwO intensities and affects replace emotions as coordinates for mapping the body; becomings and differential speeds operate between determinate subject positions that would reterritorialize the body as organic unity; experimentation and invention destratify the worn-out ways that organize, regulate, and make transcendent the body: all of these elements (intensity, affect, betweenness, destratification) are indicative of the great health and point to what an experimental body can do. Yet the fabrication of a BwO as desiringmachine is continually plagued by stratifications that reinstall a stable subject as organic unity mediated by the signifier, so that the BwO constitutes a space in which a perpetual and violent combat [occurs] between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.9 The BwO finds itself subject to an incessant movement between deterritorializations of the body through the creation of critical and clinical practices, and reterritorializations through blockages that forestall the great health. The intensities, affects, and pain waves that travel over the masochists body become funneled toward Artauds judgment of God, which robs the body of its capacity to experiment radically. The BwO as initiator of the great health calcifies into stable forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers.10 Strata resuscitate the body as organic unity and harden its masochistic suppleness, perniciously placing the question what can a body do? under the purview of psychoanalysts and clinicians. Equally dubious, stratification rationalizes what a body can do through what Michel Foucault termed disciplinary dispositifs, or articulations of power that hierarchize bodies in order to train, surveil, organize, or dominate them.11 Within the organized strata of the penal colony, the military base, the school, and the factory, the BwO is nowhere to be found. The tension between the BwO as constitutive of a plane of consistency and as subject to the organic stratifications that loom there pertains to temporality as well. The destratified and stratified planes involve two distinctive temporal modes that complement each type of body:
Aeon: the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time notyet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened. Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject.12

Aeon characterizes the time of becoming and of the masochistic BwO: It is as though an immense plane of consistency of variable speed were forever sweeping up forms and functions, forms and subjects, extracting from them particles and affects. A clock keeping a whole assortment of times.13 On the plane of consistency, the body loses time and loses the self as unified subject by gravitating toward the aberrant tock and not the measured tick of time; it gives presence the slip to conduct, and be conducive to, unruly times that simultaneously know no measure and amplify the bodys power. Confounding distinctions of actual and virtual by always becoming dissimilar and moving between measurable units of time, the bodys constant state of betweenness breaks open any firm relation of time to its representability. The body occupies no position by which one could measure it: how can one judge what a BwO is or when it is, given that it is perpetually becoming something different? To construct a revolutionary masochistic BwO means to invoke the untimely as historical force

125

flirting with masochism

that infuses and nourishes our times and hopefully for a time to come. It also means to open threshold and passages for pain waves that occur between definite times and determinable states. Forged from assorted particles of time, the BwO becomes a critical and clinical endeavor by directly opposing history as Chronos. Deleuze and Guattari assert: History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it), so that there is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by a liberated line.14 A transhistorical and untimely figure whether in matters of art-making, politics, philosophy, or lifestyle the BwO fashions a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in punctual systems.15 This new type of reality sidesteps and shadows history and memory as organized transcendences, showing that the masochistic body contains a tremendous potential force. Historical agency, in this sense, means the development of the great health by simultaneously un-working the organic body as subject and conducting varying differential temporalities measured by an assortment of clocks. Becomings, intensities, affects, and destratifications form particles of time that sneak behind history as Chronos, showing the vital power of what a body can do and what could be a new type of reality. As a critical and clinical figure, the BwO operates between actualized states and times, yet it runs the risk of falling into the mastered time of Chronos that strips it of its liberatory, untimely capacity. Much as the bonds imposed by strata perpetually hound the BwO, giving the body organic form and function, so too Chronos turns time into the chronic that stabilizes and organizes the body and subject. The chronic reduces critical and clinical experimentation to rationalized, calculable endeavors undertaken by the self as organic unity and shaper of history. Standing over the plane of consistency fabricated by the BwO, Chronos times speeds and slowness, becomings, and pain waves with the precision of a stopwatch. It perniciously seeks to turn the imperceptible movement of becoming into a series of determinable poses, as if the BwO were the subject of Eadweard Muybridges photographic experiments, precursors to cinema, which plotted both human and animal kinetic movement into discrete sections of a spatiotemporal continuum. The assortment of clocks that paradoxically measure the BwOs varying speeds and temporal flows falls under the purview of the Taylorist scientists disciplinary and watchful eye. As such, punctual systems continually threaten to undermine untimely, transhistorical engagements with the world by reducing them to calculable slices of Chronos. A series of oppositions would thus seem to orient Deleuzes alert study of the interconnectedness of time and body in masochism:
Clinical BwO Untimely Aeon Becoming Destratification Chronic Organic body History Chronos Being Stratification

Those terms listed under clinical attest to how masochistic experimentation liberates thought, history, and art from the stultifying effects of the chronic, which threatens to subsume all difference within homogeneity. Clinical bodies resist commonsensical notions of the corporal and temporal, as well as the psychoanalytic abstractions Deleuze discerned in the notion of sadomasochism; they strike a blow to artworks, especially movies, that capitalize upon bodies and times insidiously riveted to presence; transhistorical in nature, clinical bodies install the untimely act as generative of historical change; they set forth a program for living that sidesteps organic bodies and homogeneous times in order to invent a new type of reality. And this reality is revolutionary. As part of his avant-garde theory and practice, Eisenstein sought to harness the radical potential of the clinical by creating a chronotrope or time figure that alloys the BwO with Hegelian dialectical time. At first blush, aligning Hegel with the clinical, read through the traits inventoried above, might seem a somewhat dubious endeavor. Hegelian dialectical thought continually passes through yet ultimately recovers any invention of the BwO, becoming, and the

126

odde
untimely through sublation and Absolute Knowledge. The work of sublation demands a particular body and temporality. In a quite different context from that of Deleuze, yet in keeping with the spirit of the BwO, Catherine Clement provides one clue:
Hegelian dialectic is caused by a depressive spasm: logical movement goes forward by jolts, haunted by the syncopes that are always possible and that would perhaps halt the logic of history. Suddenly, the outcome of the battle between master and slave is held in suspense for a dangerous eternity.16

Hegelian dialectic is shot through with such spasms, fainting spells, and suspensions dispositions that also characterize the (masochistic) BwO that test its authority to sublate the body and unravel the (dialectical) logic of history. An eclipse of time and being, the BwO ostensibly confounds dialectical articulation by arresting its incessant relieving movement. The question of who will become master or slave, a chronic subject of and for dialectical thought, is deferred for a dangerous eternity by a radical becoming. Dialectics patiently waits for the eventual winner (Chronos as history), yet becomings and metamorphoses operate experimentally beneath Hegelianisms radar, showing what is unthinkable in its totalizing, panoptic, and chronic system. Even though untimely metamorphoses tend to shadow Hegels dialectic and pervert its sublating power, dialectical time skillfully accounts for any deviations: There is no doubt about it: mastering time is the goal of the dialectic.17 Hegelian dialectics allows for Aeon, if only to outlast the suspended time of becoming and convert it to Chronos. By the same token, it permits an eclipse of self by corporal experimentation, if only to recuperate the subject and convert it to a fixed and rationalized body. With great ease and facility, dialectical movement therefore ambles between the clinical and the chronic states, perpetually converting the clinical through the effort of sublation. Like a vampire of thought, body, and time, the dialectic savors any challenge to its totalizing system by sucking the life out of what perturbs its regulative functioning.

For every experiment that may temporarily unhinge time and the subject, dialectical thought in due course sublates the experiments transformative energy to fashion a chronic time and body. In other words, the critical as BwO and Aeon is always in danger of becoming transformed into the chronic as organic body and Chronos, of feeding its radical energy into a movement that ultimately harnesses that energy for its own gain. The outcome is always the same with the chronic: the masochists pain waves traveling over his or her body funnel into the ressentiment of the slave; the differential assortment of times on the plane of consistency become subsumed and mastered by dialectical Time. Eisensteins trapeze artist effortlessly glides and somersaults between the critical and the chronic, carving out a figurative space positioned between each of the terms catalogued above. This movement is no doubt paradoxical, as it seeks the best of both worlds by occupying neither. As a chronotrope, or bodily figure of time, the trapeze as revolutionary force, its ability to forge the great health, resides precisely in its constant to-ing and fro-ing between Aeon and Chronos, the untimely and history, the BwO and the organic body. One can thus diagram the plane of consistency fabricated by Eisenstein as shown in Figure 1. As a trope for thought and revolutionary change, the trapeze tumbles between becoming a BwO traversed by pain waves, intensities, speeds and slownesses and harnessing those elements into a rationalized organic body. In a concomitant movement, dialectical temporal articulation oscillates between Aeon and Chronos. On one hand, Eisensteinian time moves in fits and starts, in suspensions and eclipses that contest a homogeneous temporality. On the other, these unruly times ultimately become subject to a dialectical

Trapeze BwO Aeon Dialectical time

Fig.1.

Organic body Chronos

127

flirting with masochism

Time that anticipates and masters them. In order to tease out separately each part of the diagram, focus will be initially lent to Eisensteins understanding of Hegel, especially of the German philosophers conceptualization of dialectical time. By laying the groundwork in this manner, one can then appreciate how truly imbricated the body and time are in Eisensteins thought. In both its critical and chronic articulations, the Hegelian tenor of Eisensteins theorization of filmic time and body cannot be underestimated. For Hegel, dialectical movement, the dialectic itself, is never present for consciousness, and instead operates behind its back. Hegel writes: But it is just this necessity itself, or the origination of the new object, that presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens, which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness.18 Even though it often gives consciousness the slip, this movement can be known or present to knowledge, so that one can consider the Phenomenology of Spirit as charting:
The path of the soul traversing the series of its own formations as the way stations prescribed to it by its own nature; the soul moves through these way-stations, purifies itself, and thereby raises itself to the level of spirit when, through the complete experience of itself, it reaches the knowledge of what it is within itself.19

The way stations can never be present without a little bit of the past throwing that present moment askew. The soul knows itself and its movement only in an image containing both past and present, and not simply in the apprehension of presents passing. The dialectical realization of the soul develops through perception of the difference between what it once was and what it is now. This temporal structure presupposes dialectical way stations, pauses that recognize difference within the steady and uninterrupted flow of nows. This model is therefore underpinned significantly by Chronos as punctual system that regulates time. In turn, the hiatuses or breaks within the continuum of time will prime the Aufhebung, the dialectical sublation that determines history and thought.

Eisensteins rather odd application of Hegelian principles resides in positing that one cannot discern dialectical movement in any one present image (how could it be represented, and thus known?), nor even in the opposition between two images (juxtaposition merely manifests effects of the dialectical process). Rather, the film takes on truly dialectical proportions only in the interval between images, or what Eisenstein calls the pathetic or ecstatic.20 The ecstatic jump does not occur in the represented filmic present, in any given shot, but in the between-two located in spatio-temporal articulations. It is as if the acrobat or trapeze bounds over consciousness and suddenly appears before it, thus always slipping behind our back. Dialectical time, as Eisenstein conceptualizes it, necessarily passes through aeonic time, or the time situated between ordered segments that compose punctual systems. An aberrant or unruly time surfaces between the dialectical way stations that give shape to history and thought, and this untimely or transhistorical dimension cannot be represented directly. From the perspective of punctual systems or Chronos, aeonic time always threatens to throw off kilter dialectical timing, yet such aberrant temporalities produce the shock or ecstasy that spurs dialectical thinking. The movement of images, thought, and time congeal in temporal intervals and wait for each other to raise the banner of Revolution. Yet montage assures that the leap works properly by sequencing (or perhaps narrativizing) dialectical effects. As if we were always reading Eisenstein through a rear-view mirror, our chance to grasp the dialectic falls to montage, which makes us mistakenly perceive dialectical effects as dialectical causes. Eisensteins dialectical filmic timing does not result from edited conflicts, but the oppositions montage imposes make it appear so by manifesting transmutations of forms. Applying a helpful distinction employed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks reading of Hegel, in which she opposes the narrative timing of das Aufheben the effort of sublation to the graphic Time of Aufhebung, the accomplished sublation, I argue that interval and editing accomplish this double task.21 In the terms utilized here, the interval performs a timing of

128

odde
relief mediated by dialectical law. By dint of this timing, montage ensures that the Aufhebung is grasped as determining Time or Chronos. In other words, montage converts a potentially aberrant timing into a controlled dialectical Time by acting as a relay between interval and Time, between effort and accomplishment, between pathos and concept. In The Structure of the Film Form Eisenstein applies his Hegelianism to the film form, arguing: We can say that a pathetic structure is one that compels us, echoing its movement, to re-live the moments of culmination and substantiation that are the canon of all dialectical processes.22 If we re-live such moments, it is not by witnessing their representation, which would simply portray the effects of dialectical movement. Instead, the pathetic structure fulminates a profoundly temporal shock that stimulates dialectical thinking. Despite his avowed interest in Pavlov, a strange Freudianism galvanizes Eisensteins understanding of cinematic time here. Freud realized that psychoanalytic treatment must proceed not in accurately re-creating the conditions and circumstances surrounding a repressed event, whether imaginary or real, but in resuscitating the affect produced by the event. Similarly, the re-living of dialectical time does not occur in the faithful and precise representation of historical events attained through costuming, speech, etc.; rather, it resides in the cinematic restaging of the pathetic as means of gaining access to mediation. The pathos-inspired film, when regulated properly, sets timing in motion, and the viewer becomes animated as if a marionette.23 Here, the consonant stride means re-living the affect in order to experience Hegelian relieving as animated by dialectical timing. The filmic re-creation, Eisenstein hopes, will retroactively galvanize the viewer into reading timing as produced by Time, and thus into gaining, figuratively, an ambulation in accordance with dialectic movement. To help understand this aporetic logic at work in Eisensteins timing, and its relationship to the masochistic body, a trip to the circus proves useful. With Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man (1923), Eisensteins film career began at the circus. By staging the play as a three-ring performance and including in it a short film, his first, titled Glubovs Diary, Eisenstein mapped a dialectical theater. On the one hand, and speaking figuratively, the three-ringed cycle of the dialectic informed and determined Eisensteins overall avant-garde project. On the other, Glubovs Diary employed metamorphic forms to satirize bourgeois life, and hopefully to change the spectator, who is altered by emotional and even physiological shocks achieved through editing, as Ann Nesbet has argued.24 These two tendencies appear to be at odds a highly regulated and systematized dialectical timing (Chronos) must pass through potentially abrupt and aberrant movements that create the shock (Aeon). Eisenstein envisions a dialectical economy of time that works best when timed perfectly with the Taylorist scientists watch. Yet something about this ordered timeliness bestows an irrational gait to Eisensteins thought. His writings, teachings and films mark an unsteady pace caught between dialectically ordered movements and timed performances, and a between-time whose power Eisenstein must paradoxically conjure and dispel in the same instant. By setting acrobatic and trapeze movement in motion, Eisenstein draws from his predecessors and contemporaries, yet he turns their gestures head-over-heels toward revolutionary goals. The backward tumbles by characters in Trip to the ` Moon (1902) by Georges Melies accentuate the special effects and abrupt shifts inspired by magical transformation. Years later the burlesque of Charlie Chaplin evinces the encounter of resistant bodies with the inevitable forces of mechanization and industrial capitalism. Chaplins tramp in Modern Times (1936) experiences the rationalized routine of assembly-line labor, which bullies the body into performing predictably timed movements. Compelled to resist the machinic calculation and standardization of gesture, hallmarks of the chronic body, Chaplins burlesque passes through series of acrobatic postures. In such moments, Chaplins humanism couples with the comedic to engage politically with the stultifying effects of Taylorist scientific management and Fordist capitalism.25

129

flirting with masochism

The acrobat predominates as trope in Eisensteins own poetics and gives shape to his ` politics of art. From Melies, Eisenstein borrows the acrobatic expression of shock as crucial component of montage. In the cinema of ` Melies, time is above all extraordinary, elastic, producing unpredictable effects, and Eisenstein sensed that acrobatic movement could translate unpredictability, which would nevertheless remain within a dialectical framework.26 Akin to his contemporary Chaplin, he connects gesture to the forces of rationalized movement and channels this relationship toward a politics, albeit with quite different aims.27 Committed to a revolutionary project, Eisenstein invokes an aberrant or perverse filmic time that challenges an image of rationalized temporality, yet he also relies upon rationalized gestures to accomplish his dialectical goal. As Figure 1 shows, the acrobat therefore performs a contortionist act as he or she leaps to synthesize a rationalized dialectical time (Chronos), while he or she also occupies aberrant between-times from which the dialectic draws its strength (Aeon); the acrobats body nails the landing to reinstall the organic as rationalized body, yet the body loses all sense of bearings between leap and landing, between calculable times, and thus it steps outside of chronic articulation. One sees the after-effects of dialectical movement and history in series of efficiently timed poses or gestures, which assure that viewers retroactively understand Time as timing. Such poses stress how the body can best be deployed as organic unity, and thus they gravitate toward the chronic as temporally stable. Inspired by Lenins slogan Let us take the storm of the Revolution in Soviet Russia, unite it to the pulse of American life and do our work like a chronometer!28 Eisenstein highly regarded efficient means of signification and movement. Good timing informs his reading of revolutionary art-making, and he recommends a pragmatic, if somewhat sadistic, teaching style:
The instructors task is only, by a well-timed dexterous shove, to push the collective in the direction of normal and fruitful difficulties [. . .] That is how they teach you to fly in the circus. The trapeze is mercilessly held back, or the pupil finds a fist instead of a helping hand if his timing is false. No great harm if he falls once or twice outside the safety net onto the chairs around the arena. Next time he wont make that mistake.29

Eisenstein knows the art of proper timing, whereas the student/trapeze must learn it. He or she must perfect, down to a micro-level, the movements necessary to present the given subject economically. Even activities like flying, which would seem to free one from the gravitational constraints of coordinated movement and the organic body, appear caught in the grip, the revolutionary clenched fist, of Eisensteins rigorous pedagogical and art-making methods.30 As Peter Wollen notes, Russian avant-gardes shared a proclivity for contemporary movements like Frederick Taylors scientific management and Italian Futurism. With the former, scientifically measured movement allowed for an enormous saving of time by eliminating unnecessary motions performed by the worker.31 With the latter, physical movement replaced a verism of psychological interiority. In the figure of Meyerhold, Wollen asserts, Eisenstein would gravitate toward thinking theater and film through the body. Attacking Stanislavskys acting methods, Meyerhold felt, The key to success as an actor lay in rigorous physical training and that in Futurism he found a weapon, rooted in the circus and its two trends, towards pantomime and towards acrobatics.32 Wollens historical and theoretical take focuses on the development of Eisensteins aesthetics. His interest in acrobatic training exemplifies the directors borrowings from contemporary avant-gardes, so that Eisenstein failed to develop an adequately original Marxist aesthetic. For Wollen, in Eisenstein there was a purely formal and abstract concept of the Hegelian dialectic, mechanically applied and eventually degenerating into an empty stereotype.33 Though taking a cue from Wollen, my analysis repositions the acrobatic gesture within a vibrant and paradoxical dialectical timing. I do not see Eisensteins dialectical thinking as having come up short, but rather as necessarily incorporating the timed acrobatic dynamic pose within a greater temporal logic.

130

odde
One can see a direct lineage starting with these theatrical influences motivated by the actors constrained, trained and timed poses and ending with Eisensteins films, to the point where in Ivan the Terrible (1944) actors complained that, because he required them to turn themselves into the exact shapes he held in his own mind, Eisensteins approach to directing caused them not just mental, but physical agony.34 Timing of the gesture motivates both facets, so that closely controlled movements in space occasion a temporal uniformity. The well-timed and well-posed gesture stands at a dialectically rational limit. The bodys trained posture embodies a regulated image of thought (a fruitful difficulty), one that directly systematizes its movements. Although placed within an experimental avantgarde aesthetic, disciplined movements translate aeonic time into chronic time and harness the energies produced by a cinematic BwO and funnel them toward an organic body. Despite the significance Eisenstein accords to the timed and controlled gesture, he also emphasizes its place within a larger dialectical ` scheme. Editing, music, mise-en-scene and differing camera set-ups must work in concert with gesture. To render pathos, it is not enough for characters merely to adopt ecstatic poses: The simplest prototype of similar imitative behavior will be, of course, a figure behaving ecstatically on the screen, that is, a character seized by pathos, a character who in one sense or other is beside himself.35 The filmmaker must move beyond this simple prototype by rendering the pathetic in camera angles and decoupage. For instance, on the interplay between the camera and Ivans gestures, Eisenstein underscores what happens when this interaction departs from a coordinated framework of positions:
Mentally fixing, as it were, a card index of the suitable angles for Ivan, the shooting must pass strictly through these camera setups, quickly slipping by and not falling into those danger zones where the figure departs from the plastic canon once established for the film.36

this control, the film runs the risk of falling into those danger zones populated by ephemeral and accidental moments, by unintended physical slipups and ungainly movements, and most importantly by becomings that destratify filmic space.37 Such moments occurring in the danger zones may deflate the ecstatic force of coordinated movements by digressing from the overall dialectical scheme. Having finished shooting, Eisenstein then edited image and sound according to the scenes rhythm. This rhythm affected Eisensteins own disposition toward the image, and his behavior and mood became animated by the tenor of the sequence. Writing about audiovisual editing in Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein confesses:
For no montage can be constructed if there is no inner melody according to which it is composed! This melody is often so strong that sometimes the whole rhythm of ones behavior is predetermined on days when one is editing scenes according to the sound. For example, I remember very clearly the wilting rhythm in which I carried out all my everyday activities on the days when editing Mist and Mourning for Vakulinchuk: in contrast to the days when The Odessa Steps was being edited: Then everything flew head over heels, my gait was precise, relations with my domestics stern, and conversation sharp and abrupt.38

All filmic elements congeal around an idee fixe, carefully constructed to render ecstasy. Without

No doubt, Eisenstein hoped viewers would imitate his own deportment, passing from the wilting rhythm and affect characteristic of the Mourning for Vakulinchuk sequence to the explosive, acrobatic head-over-heels posture elicited by The Odessa Steps. To accomplish this effect on the viewer, Eisenstein emphasizes the necessity of a regulated gait, whether wilting, precise or ecstatic. In this regard, Jacques Aumonts analysis of Eisensteins montage notes the importance of controlled pacing. Aumont writes: Eisenstein is the one who knows who knows how, when, and at what pace to make it known to the spectator. He is one step ahead of the spectator, just far enough to ensure that he is calling the shots.39 Here, a game of follow the leader or Simon says interpolates the viewers relationship to the film. To make dialectical movement

131

flirting with masochism

accessible and comprehensible to viewers, the avant-garde director must take the lead and scout ahead. As components of rendering pathos, the physical agony felt by actors during the shooting of Ivan the Terrible, Eisensteins demeanor while editing constitutes the necessary price to be paid for dialectical timing. Efficiently figuring the concept, the perhaps painful hieratic pose develops a picture-thinking in synchrony with Revolutionary aims and timing. As embodiments of the overall Idea, static shapes constitute way stations along the road of thought and political action. We are not yet at the ec-static moment in Eisensteinian thinking, its fundamentally masochistic character that harnesses the acrobatic body as BwO. Nonetheless, the breaking down of acrobatics into coordinated movement and timed postures plays a significant part. As renderings of dialectical thought, acrobatics visually displays oppositional effects through physical control to ensure that the dialectic will arrive in a timely fashion. This movement ultimately stages a headover-heels tumble toward the chronic as rationalized, organic body and as calculated temporality or Chronos. Even though trained acrobatic movement appears to orient the body as organic entity, as a figure of Chronos, its ease in sliding toward becoming a BwO catalyzes Eisensteins understanding of the cinematic body. An unruliness of the body refuses to congeal into an organic unity and instead gravitates toward the BwO as liberatory entity. For Eisenstein, movement possesses the ability to transmute figures in ecstatic and explosive arrangements. Here, Eisenstein establishes a fundamentally hieroglyphic quality to these transformative moments, so that he once dreamed of a theater of such emotional saturation that the wrath of a man would be expressed in a backward somersault of a trapeze.40 Rather than verbally suggesting meaning, backward flips acrobatically and efficiently translate the feeling of wrath. As a rebus, the head-over-heels tumble evokes the metamorphic power not only of physical gesture to translate the verbal but also of editing, where the static pose suddenly, and as if instantaneously, gives way to inversions and reversions. Eisenstein often underscores how bodies struck by pathos tend to lose their bearings, their senses of self by becoming formless figures shot through with ecstasy:
In the process of ecstasy, as we have said, the ecstatic person ascends to the earliest phases therefore he also inevitably must find himself experiencing Essence and Etre (being) becoming and the principle of becoming, and the image of the personified god also appears in him afterwards, when he returns, enriched by the objectless and formless experience of ecstasy, to the stage of a normal state.41

A strange contortionist act of thought on Eisensteins part appears here. On the one hand, he adopts dialectical language to describe bodily movement, noting how ecstasy entails the bodys ascension as it ostensibly vaults toward Spirit and the evacuation of the corporeal. Yet one must take the word ascends ironically, as he intended. In its spiritual conversion, the body regresses backward and downward toward earlier phases of dialectical articulation and psychological development. A becoming-formless and becoming-objectless turns the ascending ecstatic body into a BwO, lending it a simultaneous organic heaviness (as the body tumbles toward the earliest phases) and inorganic lightness (as it becomes-other by experiencing pleasure, and perhaps pain). On the other hand, the trapeze body that teeters precariously between dialectical sublation as ascension and becoming-formless as decline would seem to be stuck in mid-flight, occupying the Hegelian way station between becoming and the principle of becoming. In this hiatus the ecstatic person pauses at every dialectical way station, recalling earlier states of being and earlier phases of essence, as if he or she were surveying the movement of thought and history from a birds-eye perspective. Yet in order to do so, one must lose oneself as organic unity and instead become-other; one must lose oneself in the dizzying heights of simultaneous ascent and descent, with the guarantee that the normal state will miraculously reappear. Having entered the clinical state by becoming-other and giving Chronos the slip, he or she will then, and only

132

odde
then, recognize afterwards or aft-wards his or her flight as one of ascension to a personified god. Such paradoxes characterize Eisensteins conceptualization of cinema as a dialectical process, in which becoming-formless and being a god, formless experience and the normal state, the clinical and the chronic intertwine uneasily. The danger that shadows Eisensteins theories and films is that the ecstatic person may not return to normal, and thus derail dialectical ascension and declension as a coherent movement of thought. By experiencing the affect and shock created by acrobatic movement, the viewer thus becomes transformed into an acrobat through Eisensteinian montage and movement, which turns technique into viewer perception. In this sense the acrobat or trapeze functions more than simply a theoretical and filmic figure of time. Because Eisenstein charges his images and movements with shock, the viewer experiences a jolt to the extent that pathos is what forces the viewer to jump out of his seat.42 This disposition, a tumbling viewer thrust beside himself or herself, marks an aberrant, ecstatic time flush with Aeon and the untimely. Viewers temporarily lose their senses in metamorphoses that alter fixed states and mastered time. They come to in another, initially indeterminate or unruly time that must be converted into a meaningful dialectical Time. To accomplish this conversion, it is crucial to maintain control of the body by directing pathos toward an ultimate, regulated goal, the personified god that comes afterwards. How does this conversion take place? Gesture possesses the possibility of transforming the viewers senses in synaesthetic arrangements, and thus it opens the possibility of becoming-other in a dizzying loss of the organic unity of the subject. Eisensteins fascination with Japanese culture, especially Kabuki theater and hieroglyphic writing, underscores how synaesthesia strikes directly upon the spectators brain, making him or her experience shock as a pain wave:
Occasionally (and usually at the moment when the nerves seem about to burst from tension) the Japanese double their effects. With their mastery of the equivalents of visual and aural images, they suddenly give both, squaring them, and brilliantly calculating the blow of their sensual billiard-cue on the spectators cerebral target.43

The finite distance separating the spectators brain and synaesthetic performance unexpectedly collapses the boundaries between mind and body, event and witness. Striking a high blow to the organic body by squaring image and sound, the doubled gesture produces a state of ecstasy beyond thought and image. In such moments gesture transforms the body into a BwO, a site of affects and intensities that constitute the clinical body:
Ecstasy is exactly like this in its final peaks: a transport out of understanding a transport out of conceptualization a transport out of imagery a transport out of the sphere of any rudiments of consciousness whatever into the sphere of pure effect, feeling, sensation, state.44

Ecstasy directly targets the brain to un-work the organic body and thus to make it more receptive to intensities, pain waves, and affects that travel through and across the body. It frees the body from the limits of rationalized and figurative thought that would re-establish the chronic as organic unity and Chronos. Gesture in Japanese art-making also figures as one component in a greater scheme of edited conversions. These verbal/visual interplays or conjunctions form the early basis for Eisensteins understanding of editing and the filmic. For him, film as art begins with editing, which other hieroglyphic art forms legitimate in his argument. Tracing a genealogy of edited forms in art history, Eisenstein returns to the hieroglyph in Japanese poetry and finds a precursor to cinema:
The point is that the copulation (perhaps we better say combination) of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused the ideogram. By the combination of

133

flirting with masochism

the two depictables is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable.45 maps out the contours of the human in that zone where concrete and abstract (figural and non-figural, meat and machine) intersect: the edge of the human form. It is this edge, Eisenstein discovers here, that describes also the intersection of beauty and pain.49

Each hieroglyph represents a fact, neutral in meaning and affective force. Yet when coupled with another equipollent neutral fact, a process of multiplication or squaring, instead of addition, pushes their combination toward a whole. That is, from combination the dialectical whole emerges as totality irreducible to the combined sum. Despite this basic and reasoned dialectical reading set forth by Eisenstein, one immediately detects a fear. Why does Eisenstein replace copulation with combination, thus avoiding the attendant sexual connotations? Without discussing this passage directly, Nesbet discerns in Eisenstein a general playfulness, a flirtation with scandal, that affirms the monstrous. Obeying the logic of a phrase on the order of it goes without saying, the director, by swerving away from copulation, posits at the heart of intellectual thought, a scandalous, blasphemous, or perhaps pornographic image: this was the basic rule of Eisensteins essays, films, and lectures.46 Working in this rich vein, Nesbet discovers a deep-seated perversity in Eisensteins own fascinations. On his trip to Mexico, he becomes interested in bullfighting: The matador and the bull meet, pierce each other, transform themselves into a complex package where actor and object, life and death, can no longer be extricated neatly one from the other.47 For Nesbet, one can find such complex packages in biographical his sketches, fetishes, etc. and filmic material. They contest any reading of Eisenstein as a filmmaker lacking ambiguity. They also tend to scandalize any attempt to see Eisenstein as totalizing all movements under a unifying logic.48 Of Eisensteins first feature, Strike (1925), Nesbet takes up the filmmakers rather perverse rending or rendering of the body. The films famous ending, which cross-cuts between the slaughtering of bulls and the crushing of the workers insurrection, scandalously dissolves several putatively tidy dichotomies:
When the fire hoses are turned on the workers, the water playing off the struggling bodies

Although the logic of the scene fashions an allegory through juxtaposition, with Remember, Proletariat as the ostensible message, affects and pain waves traverse the represented bodies on screen. Bodies enter into zones of proximity, or the in-between space of masochism, which clouds the clear-cut boundaries between animal and human, concrete and particular, pain and beauty.50 To invoke the terms used here, bodies enter the clinical state by resisting any organic form, whether as human or as transcendent figure of thought. Pain waves jolt the human form into an encounter with animality, and thus occasion a becoming-animal that perversely undoes the labor of the dialectic. According to this logic, beauty and pain mesh together to fashion a cinematic BwO. Nesbets cogent study of Eisensteins theories and practices underscores how figural and philosophical dimensions in Eisenstein tend to intermingle in scandalous and provocative ways. The title of the book, Savage Junctures, is quite apt in stressing the often shocking and multivalent paths opened by Eisenstein. One might add that the clinical and chronic aspects of Eisensteins works may indeed enter into such savage junctures, as I tried to illustrate in Figure 1. Nesbet grasps the transformative, perverse side to Eisensteins films, writings, and personal history. Yet it needs to be stressed that Eisensteinian montage, in theory and in practice, exploits potentially subversive figures toward a non-bodily image or Idea rather than combining scandalous images without subordination to dialectical thought. Amidst complex knots of intermingled forms, the extricated Idea asserts a greater identity in the end. In other words, the body as clinical, as BwO, erupts to perturb dialectical thought and unity, if only to be recuperated later as a chronic investment that falls due at the appointed Time. Masochistic pain waves unleash currents of tremendous clinical force, yet the affects and intensities they produce

134

odde
recoil toward the chronic as dialectical movement. Becoming-animal and becoming-formless galvanize experimentation in Eisenstein, yet the formless falls back upon the organic body and congeals there. Rather than subverting dialectical thought and its totalizing character, the forms associated with ecstasy perform a dialectical conversion, with rationalized and disciplined gesture as its guarantor. As a point of comparison, one can look at Eisensteins contemporary, Antonin Artaud, who conjured a seemingly similar materiality of bodies also characterized by postures, shapes and so on for hieroglyphic inscription. Yet in Artauds work, materiality glides into the uncanny, unleashing a figurability beyond the control of montage. Of a bodys glyphic theatrics, Artaud writes to Gide: The movements, the attitudes, the bodies of the characters will be composed or decomposed like hieroglyphics. This language will pass from one sense organ to another, establishing analogies and unforeseen associations among series of objects, series of sounds, series of intonations.51 At once hieratic and mutable, the body for Artaud can transform itself into other modes of writing and produce other legibilities, and his theater of cruelty fashioned some of the most compelling BwOs rather than organic unities in the early twentieth century. Endlessly fluctuating between states (solid object, verbal and pre-verbal glyph), the formless Artaudian BwO and its parts get lost in metamorphoses of forms and writing.52 Eisensteins interest in a hieroglyphic synaesthetic production certainly mirrors Artauds, but with some key distinctions. Whereas Artaud hopes to explore unforeseen associations of language and thought through hieroglyphic compositions, Eisenstein closely regulates and determines his filmic constructions. For Artaud, the (sexualized) combinatorial process creates an intermingling of bodies and parts that tend to metamorphose into other forms. Eisensteins erotics, mediated by ecstatic moments, ultimately fit within a controlled, dialectical framework. Playing strange games of dialectical twister, his films must guarantee that altered shapes congeal in meaningful and stable positions that characterize the chronic. For this reason, dialectical montage disentangles figures and maintains their chronic propriety under a dialectical thinking, however eroticized it may be; it shields the body from other possible relations that fashion potentially unforeseen or unruly meanings; it scandalously flirts with the BwO to reconvert and reinvest the masochistic bodys volatile energy into stable forms. Through the juxtaposition of shots and bodily postures, montage creates ideograms that relieve the hieroglyph of its physical components. At the expense of graphic elements (or depictables), the conceptual order subsumes its material, if only to repeat the central motif in Eisenstein the Russian Revolution. Material parts must ostensibly assume their proper form only at the level of the concept; their value lies in another (conceptual) dimension that stands above their status as material objects. The ecstatic moment entails sudden shifts in qualities as in the becoming-animal and becoming-formless bodies in Strike and abrupt surges of difference. Yet within such transformations, one senses ultimately that all that is solid melts into air, and the ecstatic leap will gravitate upward toward the graphic Time of Aufhebung, which functions as a spirit in the sky, so to speak. Although Eisenstein spoke of bodily ascension ironically, or perhaps flirtatiously, in the end the joke is on us, because he was serious! Above, Figure 1 showed how Eisensteins dialectical trapeze artist or acrobat nimbly maneuvers between becoming a BwO and stabilizing as an organic body, between invoking a heterogeneous Aeon and taking meaningful shape under Chronos. He or she gracefully glides through a theoretical space in which Eisensteins scandalous dialectical thought endlessly flirts with bodies that resist sublation and temporalities that prove unruly. Such bodies, much like the workers in Strike, experience pain waves and intensities measurable only by a vast assortment of clocks. Becoming-formless or becoming animal in a temporal interval, the Eisensteinian body offers one of the most compelling avatars of a cinematic health and of what a body can do. The revolutionary potential of this body is nourished significantly by the untimely energies it produces and the becomings it undergoes.

135

flirting with masochism

Despite this flirtation with the BwO and Aeon, Eisenstein imposes limits on the body through rigorous physical discipline to promise that timing passes into dialectical Time. A personified god, the acrobat or trapeze may take pause in mid-flight to survey history from a privileged vantage point. He or she must never fall into those danger zones in which ecstasy would know no limits and time would come off its hinges. Hence, the trained trapeze skillfully floats in the air, always certain to grab hold of the swing to re-steady himself or herself. Calibrating his or her body in this manner, the trapeze transforms intensities and affects into a properly dialectical sacrifice of the BwO. Ultimately, to tumble head over heels in mid-air means to repeat the movement of ascension that charmed Eisenstein, and thus to consume endlessly the clinical body for the sake of Absolute Spirit. And perhaps what makes Eisenstein so charming to us is his savage juncture of the clinical and the chronic. As much might be said of Eisensteins own philosophical muse or flirt, Hegel.
I utilize clinical to foreground the productive and positive aspects of health, as opposed to the chronic, which is meant to signify an ossified and debilitated state of literary and cinematic health. 6 This question haunts Deleuzes entire corpus, but perhaps focuses most intensely in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights,1988) 17^18. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1987). 8 Ibid.152. 9 Ibid.159. 10 Ibid. 11 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New Y ork: Vintage,1995). Deleuze transposes Foucaults term into his own system of thought in Desire and Pleasure in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997) 183^92. 12 Deleuze and Guattari 262. 13 Ibid. 271. 14 Ibid. 296. 15 Ibid. 16 Catherine Clement, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Deidre M. Mahoney and Sally ODriscoll (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 62. 17 Ibid. 80. 18 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP,1977) 56. 19 Hegel quoted from Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit [1974], trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,1997) 11. 20 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The MovementImage, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 32^ 40, for a cogent discussion of Eisenstein montage, the pathetic, and dialectical thought. 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,Time and Timing: Law and History in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, eds. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford UP,1991) 99^117 (112).

notes
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas; trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New Y ork: Columbia UP,1990) 238. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New Y ork: Zone,1989) 14. 3 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997) 3. 4 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,1974) 346. 5 It should be noted that Deleuze employs the term clinical quite differently in Essays Critical and Clinical than he does in the earlier Coldness and Cruelty. In Essays Deleuze refers to the clinical state, in which new possibilities for thought and art-making occasioned by delirium become foreclosed: Words no longer open out onto anything, we no longer hear or see anything through them except a night whose history, colors, and songs have been lost (Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical lv). In keeping with Coldness and Cruelty,

136

odde
22 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Form [1957], trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian,1965) 173. 23 As Dana Polan aptly remarks: Affect was the key to the unity of reality and industry; affect, if properly used, could bring the spectator into consonance with the beat of reality (Polan, The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,1985) 45). 24 Ann Nesbet,SavageThinking: Metamorphosis in the Cinema of S.M. Eisenstein in Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism, ed. Peter I. Barta (Budapest: Central European UP, 2000) 149^79 (156). 25 Astutely drawing from Deleuzes Logic of Sense, particularly the tension between Aeon and Chronos, Layleen Jayamanne notes how Chaplins burlesque resists the reduction of time to the present: Chaplins mimetic performance at its peak takes the linguistic form of the infinitive ^ to delay, to spin, to groom, to eat, to slide, to roll, to run, etc. In such instances, the comedian perverts the present by always arriving too late or too soon, in the time of Aeon, so that a performative act can draw out this kind of temporality from the relentless pressure of Chronos ( Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 195). A foil to Chronos, and the calculated mastery it implies in Fordism and Taylorism,Chaplin the acrobatic performer invents a BwO that tactically perverts time. 26 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity Contingency the Archive , , (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) 136. 27 When recalling his childhood interest in the circus and music hall entertainments, Eisenstein placed Chaplin and French comedians within this tradition that developed the basic principles of montage. See Film Form 12. 28 Quoted from Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP,1972) 27 . 29 Eisenstein, Film Form 91; emphasis added. 30 Nesbet emphasizes the disciplinary aspects in Russian Modernism: The chopping up of the actor into component axes was a project with a theatrical past; Meierkhold and other avant-garde directors (including Eisenstein in his Proletkult Theater days) were committed to disciplining the bodies of their actors, a discipline which included the control over each distinct part of the body. (Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (New Y ork: Tauris, 2003) 221) 31 Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management [1911] (New York: Norton,1967) 24. 32 Wollen 27 . 33 Ibid. 70. 34 Nesbet,SavageThinking 174. 35 Eisenstein, Non-Indifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 28. 36 Ibid. 281. 37 In TheThird Meaning Roland Barthes provocatively explores such danger zones, in which the obtuse meaning flouts logical time by undermining narrative and signifying registers, or first and second meanings. Barthes, The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Several Eisenstein Stills inThe Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: U of California P,1985) 41^ 62. Speaking figuratively, Barthes focuses on unanticipated moments when the acrobat falls and cannot be recuperated within a meaningful visual discourse, dialectical or otherwise. By arresting the flow of what he sees as over-determined meaning and temporality in Eisenstein, Barthes discerns in film stills details, or signifiers without signifieds, that carry affective force. Barthes playfully freezes dialectical movement to unleash indeterminate future figures that cannot be determined by its totalizing logic.Yet as I have tried to demonstrate, dialectical time produces meaning through the interval rather than in images themselves or in montage. Affect arises between images and behind our backs, so that by arresting movement, one still misses the essentially perverse dialectical character of Eisensteins timing. 38 Eisenstein, Non-Indifferent Nature 333. 39 Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (London: British Film Institute,1987) 141. 40 Eisenstein, Film Form 174. 41 Idem, Non-Indifferent Nature 173. 42 Ibid. 27 .

137

flirting with masochism

43 Eisenstein, Film Form 23. 44 Idem, Non-Indifferent Nature 178 ^79. 45 Idem, Film Form 29^30. 46 Nesbet,SavageThinking 151. 47 Ibid.172. 48 In the English literature on Eisenstein, Ian Christie, along with Nesbet, emphasizes the 1930s as a means of re-evaluating Eisensteins career: Western scholarly opinion has largely adopted a consensus on the radical early and mystical late periods, corresponding roughly to the 1920s and the 1940s, separated by little more than a traumatic chasm occupying the 1930s (Christie, Eisenstein at 90, Sight and Sound 57 (1988): .3 181^ 88 (184)). Christie and Nesbet seek to fill in the traumatic chasm by noting Eisensteins productivity in writing, sketching and traveling in the 1930s. 49 Nesbet, Savage Junctures 41. 50 Patricia Pisters alertly explores the relationship between becoming-animal and zones of proximity within the context of film. She argues: Becoming is never an imitation but always an entering into a zone of proximity, an in-between status on a microlevel. Therefore, the pain and humiliation of the masochist are driven by a becoming-animal; they do not ^ metaphorically ^ lead to becoming an animal (Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003) 69). 51 Quoted from Jacques Derrida and Paule Thevenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT P,1998) 85. 52 Peggy Phalen concentrates on the unified, yet formless and mutating, body in Artauds theater. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, she suggests that the Artaudian Body without Organs invites a different way to think about both the present tense and theaters faith in presence (Phelan, Performing Talking Cures: Artauds Voice in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, eds. Jeffrey Master, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers (New Y ork: Routledge, 1997) 233^51 (234)). One can conjecture that Artaudian time erodes presence through unstable chronotropes that resist recovery or sublation in a rationalized temporality or Chronos.

Thomas Odde 5560 Shoreview Ave. Minneapolis, MN 55417 USA E-mail: labrujita23@yahoo.com

Copyright of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.