Architecture As An Image of Thought1

Copyright 2010
Todd Satter
Architecture as an Image of Thought:

Deleuze, Cinematic Movement and Time
Todd Satter
A thesis submitted in
partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Science
University of Washington
2010
Program Authorized to Offer Degree:

Department of Architecture
Graduate School
This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a masters thesis by
Todd Satter
and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects,

and that any and all revisions required by the final
examining committee have been made.
Committee Members:
______________________________________________
Brian L. McLaren
______________________________________________
Robert Mugerauer
Date:_______________________
In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the masters degree at
the University of Washington, I agree that the Library shall make its copies freely available
for inspection. I further agree that extensive copying of this thesis is allowable only for
scholarly purposes, consistent with fair use as prescribed in the U.S. Copyright Law. Any
other reproduction for any purposes or by any means shall not be allowed without my
written permission.
Signature____________________________
Date________________________________
Abstract
Architecture as an Image of Thought:
Deleuze, Cinematic Movement and Time
Todd Satter
Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Prof. Brian L. McLaren
Department of Architecture
This project explores the concept of movement as a misunderstood element of architectural
modernism. Following Gilles Deleuze, movement is posited as a vital component of a
significant paradigm shift shaping philosophy, science and the arts, as well as the cultural
experience of modernism. A more comprehensive understanding of movement provides
a means for articulating its associated issues, as well as strategies for incorporating it into
architectural theory, historiography and practice.

Deleuzes cinema diptych acts as an organizational and pedagogical tool to consider
the implications of (re)defining movement, which no longer constitutes a simple quantitative
displacement. In these texts, movement is treated instead as a means for considering ongoing,
qualitative change that occurs through perception, affect, action and the intervals linking
them. That is, cinema becomes an interface negotiating creative, formal and experiential
inputs.

For Deleuze, cinema most clearly evinces the mechanisms of thought as movement
and has a privileged relation to the spatial and temporal practices defining us and our visual
and built environments. While the cinematic event is distinct from the architectural event,
Deleuzes ability to posit cinema as a mode of thought can inform our capacity to treat
architecture and its constitutive theories as images of thought and philosophical encounters.
Conversely, architecture can inform Deleuzes enterprise, extending his concepts from
philosophy into critical design practices to focus on the spatial implications of creatively
constructing and reforming our built environment according to the dynamics of thought as
images of movement and time.

As such, the trajectory from ancient notions of movement to the movement-image
and the time-image suggests strategies for perceiving and comprehending architecture not
as immobile or static sections, but as mobile sections of duration and as direct images of
time, uniting the living present to critical histories of the past and productive visions of the
future. These concepts are extended to (re)interpret architectural works by key figures within
modernism, including Le Corbusier, James Stirling and Peter Eisenman, with particular
focus on the creative genesis of their processes, the production of the new and the Outside of
thought.
Table of Contents
Page
List of Figures
ii
Introduction:
Towards a New Image of Thought
Section 1:
The Movement-Image and the Production of the New
22
Section 2:
Cinema and Any-Space-Whatever
62
Section 3:
Movement in Crisis
90
Section 4:
The Time-Image and the Outside of Thought
120
Conclusion:
On the Spiritual Automaton
156
Bibliography
164
List of Figures
Figure Number
Page
Introduction
0.01 Casa Batll, Antoni Gaud and Josep Maria Jujol (19041906)
0.02 The Rietveld Schrder House, Gerrit Rietveld (1904)
0.03 Einstein Tower, Erich Mendelsohn (1924)
0.04 La Citta Nuova, Antonio SantElia (1914)
0.05 Human Motion Study, Etienne Jules Marey (1883)
0.06 Human Motion Study, Eadweard Muybridge (1887)
0.07 Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Marcel Duchamp (1912)
0.08 Bergsons Circuit of Memory
0.09 The Movement-Image
0.10 Bergsons Inverted Cone of Memory
0.11 The Time-Image
2
2
2
2
6
6
6
9
13
17
19
Section One
1.01 Still from Lost Highway (1997)
1.02 Nicolas Oresme, Diagram of Movement (14th C.)
1.03 Etienne Jules Marey, Human Motion Study (1883)
1.04 Etienne Jules Marey, Seagull Motion Study (1883)
1.05 Etienne Jules Marey, Smoke Motion Study (1878)
1.06 Etienne Jules Marey, Smoke Motion Study (1901)
1.07 Eadweard Muybridge, Equine Motion Study (1878)
1.08 Eadweard Muybridge, Human Motion Study (1887)
1.09 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912)
1.10 Giacomo Balla, Speed of a Motorcycle (1913)
1.11 Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-ino (1914-1915)
1.12 Le Corbusier, Contemporary City (1922)
1.13 Le Corbusier, The Modulor
1.14 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye (1928-1933)
1.18 Le Corbusier, Abattoir at Challuy (1917)
1.21 Le Corbusier, Abattoir at Garchizy (1917)
1.24 Le Corbusier, Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1954)
1.28 Le Corbusier, Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh (1955)
1.28 Le Corbusier, Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh (1955)
22
29
30
30
30
30
31
31
31
31
53
53
53
55
55
55
56
57
57
57
58
58
58
59
59
60
60
61
61
ii
Section Two
2.02 Edward Burtynsky, Chittagong Shipbreaking Beach (2006)
2.03 Edward Burtynsky, Chittagong Shipbreaking Beach (2006)
2.04 Edward Burtynsky, Interstate Highway Interchange System (2006)
2.05 Edward Burtynsky, Three Gorges Dam (2006)
62
86
86
87
88
Section Three
3.02 Archigram, Plug-In City (1964)
3.03 Archigram, The Walking City (1964)
3.04 Archigram, Instant City (1968)
3.05 Archigram, The Tuned Suburb (1964)
3.06 James Stirling, Dom-ino Apartments (1951)
3.07 James Stirling, Woolton House (1954)
3.08 James Stirling, Woolton House (1954)
3.09 James Stirling, Ham Commons Flats (1955-1958)
3.10 James Stirling, Engineering Building (1959-1963)
3.13 James Stirling, History Faculty Building (1964-1967)
3.14 James Stirling, History Faculty Building (1964-1967)
3.15 James Stirling, Dorman Long Headquarters (1965)
3.16 James Stirling, Queens College (1966-1971)
3.17 James Stirling, Siemens AG (1969)
3.18 James Stirling, Derby Town Center (1971)
3.19 James Stirling, Milton Keynes Project (1971)
3.20 James Stirling, Nordrhein-Westfalen (1975)
3.21 James Stirling, Wallraf-Richartz (1975)
3.22 James Stirling, Staatsgalerie (1977-1983)
3.26 James Stirling, Wissenschaftszentrum (1979)
3.27 James Stirling, Bibliotheque de France (1989)
3.28 James Stirling, Bibliotheque de France (1989)
90
102
102
102
102
107
108
108
109
110
110
110
111
111
111
112
112
113
113
113
113
114
114
114
114
116
117
117
Section Four
4.02 Bernard Tschumi, Parc de la Villette (1984-1987)
4.03 Peter Eisenman, House II (1970)
4.04 Peter Eisenman, Cannaregio (1978)
4.05 Peter Eisenman, Checkpoint Charlie (1981-1985)
4.06 Peter Eisenman, Wexner Center (1983-1989)
4.07 Peter Eisenman, Romeo and Juliet (1985)
4.08 Peter Eisenman, Biocentrum (1987)
119
137
140
142
142
143
143
143
iii
4.09 Peter Eisenman, Casa Guardiola (1988)

4.12 Peter Eisenman, Holocaust Memorial (2005)
144
144
144
146
148
150
151
151
153
153
Conclusion
156
iv
Satter | Introduction
Introduction:
Towards a New Image of Thought
Movement as a concept related to space and time has had a significant influence on
modernism in general and modernist architecture in particular. However, movement remains
a misunderstood concept and basis for theory, historiography and practice. To counter the
neglect of movement, as well as much of the accepted wisdom surrounding the topic, within
architectural modernism, this project returns to the philosopical explorations of the subject
by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze to posit movement as a vital component of a significant
paradigm shift shaping philosophy, science and the arts, as well as the cultural experience
of modernism. A more comprehensive understanding of movement provides a means for
articulating its associated issues, as well as strategies for incorporating it into architectural
thought, discourse and creation.
In 1948, Siegfried Giedion accurately associates movement with change when he
writes, Movement, the ceaselessly changing, proves itself ever more strongly the key to our
thought [...] the essence of the phenomenal world has been increasingly regarded as motionprocess.1 Giedion goes on to connect movement to significant advances in disparate fields,
including mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology and literature, as well as modern
architecture and the emergence of cinema. However, in positing movement as an influential
motif, he follows the tendency, common among early modern (and many contemporary)
thinkers, to conflate movement with mechanization, to limit movement to quotidian,
analyzable and representable phenomena and ignore movement as it is tied to issues of time,
affect, sensation and duration. That is, he mistakes objects that move for movement itself.
The change he examines is purely quantitative and rarely qualitative.
In early modernist architecture there is, similarly, an increasing concern with
movement, which is too often reduced to that which is readily reifiable, as in the fluid forms
that comprise the sculptural creations of the art nouveau (Fig. 0.01) or the focus on the
1
Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co. 1969) 28.
Fig 0.01 Casa Batll, Antoni Gaud

and Josep Maria Jujol 19041906
Fig 0.03 Einstein Tower,

Erich Mendelsohn (1924)
Fig 0.02 The Rietveld Schrder House,

Gerrit Rietveld (1904)
Fig 0.04 La Citta Nuova,

Antonio SantElia (1914)
literal transformation of space as with some De Stijl architecture (Fig. 0.02). Even when
movement is tied to deeper levels of philosophical thought, early modern architects tended to
follow one of two extremes, positing movement as either a subjective experience arising from
the individual mind, as in expressionism (Fig. 0.03) or as contained solely within the objects
that move themselves, as with the Futurists (Fig. 0.04) and their aggrandizing of machinery,
weaponry and new technology. In either case, we find a privileging of space to which time is
subordinated, from which movement is subtracted or to which movement is added.
In order to properly understand movement, it is important to resist the need for

immediate reification and to more critically navigate the two extremes of realism and
idealism. As Henri Bergson demonstrates, movement is better situated as a middle ground,
or more properly, as Deleuze later shows, movement allows us to collapse these two orders.
The benefit of installing Bergsonian or Deleuzian thought as vital to meaningful architectural
discourse is its capacity to posit movement as a means for pursuing qualitative change as
seen in the historical development of modernist practice, the working processes of individual
architects shaping modernism and the experience of modernist spaces. Movement flows from
Bergsons and Deleuzes works to offer a theory of space and time that eschews represenation,
reification and reductive applications in order to facilitate an experience of architecture as an
ongoing creative enterprise or force.

Extending Deleuzes philosophy into architecture in this manner attempts to rescue
his theory from certain reductivist tendencies that dominate the use of his work within
architectural discourse. While the past two decades has provided a proliferation of literature
that employs his work in service of theorizing or justifying various strategies, they often fall
into one of two extremes. On the one hand, there is the most common form of Deleuzianism
that (unintentionally or not) focuses on the formal translation of his philosophical concepts.
His complex folds of the soul and pleats of matter are interpreted as little more than formal
maneuvers to be directly reified and his rhizomatic processes little more than diagrams to be
extruded.2 On the other hand, there are those works that take Deleuzes philosophy seriously,
focusing on the his capacity to coin neologisms and develop new concepts, but often without
reconnecting his thought, as he was continually at pains to do himself, back to this world of
2 Folding in Architecture (West Sussex: Academy Press, 2004), a special issue of Architectural Design
edited by Greg Lynn and devoted to the fold. Originally published in 1994 and reprinted as a book in 2004,
the issue is among the most ubiquitous sources for Deleuzian scholarship. While neither Lynn nor any of the
other authors and architects represented in the issue can be blamed for subsequent uses and misuses of their
material, and while the essays contained within offer some potent strategies for extending Deleuzes work
into architecture, the effect of the issue has been a tendency to equate folding with Baroque forms and new
strategies of digital architecture and amorphous forms of space. While a valid connection between Deleuze and
these strategies can be developed, it cannot be accomplished without an ongoing engagement with his entire
philosophy, as well as the ever-growing body of secondary sources. That is, Folding in Architecture and similar
essays serve as interesting starting points, never as apodictic design strategies.
lived experiences and practices. For Deleuze, the task of any art is to produce signs that will
3
push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of creation. Following Deleuze,
we are after an artwork that produces an effect as much (if not more) on the nervous system
as on the brain.

The organization of this project closely follows the development of Deleuzes cinema
project, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: the Time-Image (1985),
extracting key concepts, condensing and extending them. Deleuzes cinema diptych, inspired
by Bergsonian concepts of movement, space and time, as well as the aesthetic and cultural
development of cinema itself, is used as an organizational and pedagogical tool to consider
the implications of (re)defining movement, which no longer constitutes a simple quantitative
displacement. Movement is treated instead as a means for considering ongoing, qualitative
change that occurs through perception, affect, action and the intervals linking them. That is,
cinema becomes an interface negotiating creative, formal and spectatorial inputs.

For Deleuze, cinema most clearly evinces the mechanisms of thought as movement
and has a privileged relation to the spatial and temporal practices defining us, and our visual
and built environments. The cinema project is significant because, unlike architecture, film
arrives concurrently with the rise of modernism and the advent of new theories of movement
and motion. In addition, without the baggage of classical and ancient thought, cinema was
free to develop its own dynamics of movement in relation to both space and time.
While the cinematic event is distinct from the architectural event, Deleuzes ability
to posit cinema as a mode of thought can inform our capacity to similarly treat architecture
and its constitutive theories as images of thought and philosophical encounters. Conversely,
however, architecture can inform Deleuzes enterprise, extending his concepts from
3 Works like John Rachjmans Constructions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) is a particular case in point.
Rachjmans understanding of, and ability to elucidate, Deleuzes work is potent and informative. However,
he falls prey to the trap of reversing thought and practice, merely applying Deleuzes thought to, for instance,
Peter Eisenmans Rebstock project, without affording equal attention to the ways in which Deleuzes thought
can arise from such works of architetcture. In the end, many thinkers like Rajchman depend too heavily on the
word of the architect without pursuing the complex relationship between Deleuzian thought and practice. The
connection between thought and practice is never so simple or direct, and architecture discourse is best served
when we question those who purport to extend Deleuze and to understand that, on the other hand, many
works of architects with no overt interest in Deleuze can be used to elucidate his philosophy.
philosophy into critical design practices to focus on the spatial implications of creatively
constructing and reforming our built environment according to the dynamics of thought.
In addition to examples of architects and architectural works that are used to
elucidate Deleuzes thinking on time and to extend his project into the built environment,
David Lynchs Lost Highway (1997) is used throughout to introduce and elucidate key
concepts and strategies and to take us through the vicissitudes of the movement- and timeimages. In a way, the film unfolds as a microcosm of the Deleuzes history of film.
As part of the organic regime of movement-images, Lost Highway ostensibly
follows certain genre conventions, film clichs and presents a unified and continuous cast
of characters and settings. Framing, development of shots and montage, the varieties of
movement-images, all the elements of movement Deleuze identifies in early cinema, are
present and tied together through a logical sensory-motor schema.4
However, as the film unfolds we experience a crisis of movement (or interpretation)
in which time as linear, chronological, teleological falls apart, identities as whole and
knowable dissipate as well. The sensory-motor apparatus that allows for logical sequences
and rational continuity gives way to illogical series of space and time, and discontinuities in
which the intervals linking images carry more meaning than do individual shots and scenes.
Perception and action as incommensurable and irrational express the sensation and force of
time. In the end, the capacity to understand or interpret the film hinges on our capacity to
forego habitual thought, perception and action and to embrace duration or what Deleuze
calls the Outside of thought.
Section One, The Movement Image and the Production of the New, focuses on
Deleuzes reconceptualization of movement. Deleuze, following Bergson, begins developing
his philosophy of movement by distinguishing between three types of movement at work in
consciousness, as well as in cinema. First there is abstract movement added to or subtracted
4 The sensory-motor schema is a concept developed by Bergson to address the relationship between
perception and actualization or between images and action. It describes a causal and spatial link between the
act of selecting from the flow of matter and images in our environment that which interests us and our ensuing
actions. Deleuze extends this concept to elucidate a causal logic operative within the movement image of
cinema.
from space, which actually amounts to a false movement or non-movement. This type of
movement is representational and can be clearly seen in the work of figures like Etienne
Jules Maret (Fig. 0.05) and Eadweard Muybridge (Fig. 0.06), as well as many early modern
artists (Fig. 0.07). The appeal of their work, especially within early modernism is clear their
studies improve on human vision, and in the hands of their follows like Frank Gilbreth
and Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, are used to ostensibly facilitate efficiency. However,
in the end they mistake the object or body that moves for movement itself. That is, by
disconnecting movement from time, they are merely representing it.
To exemplify this point, Bergson uses the color orange, which can be separated from
the color spectrum, quantified and assigned definitive properties or measurements. However,
Fig. 0.05 Human Motion Study,

Etienne Jules Marey (1883)
Fig. 0.06 Human Motion Study,

Eadweard Muybridge (1887)
Fig. 0.07 Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2,

Marcel Duchamp, (1912)
as we progress along the spectrum, orange is revealed as part of a gradient that eventually
gives way to either red or yellow, beyond which lie even more colors. In this sense, Bergson
shows that orange is only a partial expression beyond which lies a continuity of color fields.
Movement, similarly is only effective as long as it remains within the continuum of time,
never separated from it.5
Following Henri Bergson, whose influence constitutes the philosophical center
to the cinema project, Deleuze redefines the concepts of movement and image to resist
representational modes of thought brought about by the separation of matter and form or
(in more recent thought) signifier and signified. An image for Bergson and Deleuze is neither
an idealist representation nor a realist thing. Cinema, as read by Deleuze, demonstrates how
the two orders are collapsed to allow the image to express and affect. As such, we no longer
experience images of matter or bodies that move. Instead we can posit matter, bodies and
movement as images in themselves, or in Bergsons terminology, a universal flow of matterimages. Objects (cinematic, architectural or otherwise) are lines of flight that can take on any
form or facilitate any relationship imaginable, which, in the hands of filmmakers, architects
and theorists, is not as much an issue of reifying movement as extracting it from the flowing
state of matter. To do otherwise is to conflate representations of movement with real
movement.
To counter representational modes of thought, Deleuze develops his concept of an
image of thought. Where the traditional image of thought posits pre-existing structures from
which or pre-determined ends toward which to work in order to represent ultimate truths,
Deleuzes new image of thought focuses on individuation, emergence and the creative genesis
that gives rise to thought.6 The concept of an image is taken from Bergson, who used it to
oppose his philosophy to both realism and idealism. All matter, organic and inorganic, for
5 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, Trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New
York: Citadel Press, 2002) 25, 287-288.
6 The traditional image of thought is a concept that, according to Deleuze has dominated the history
of philosophy, especially in relation to representational thought and dualistic thinking. His monographs on
philosophers, as well as Difference and Repetition emerge as extended arguments against this image of thought
in favor of a more constructivist approach. Section One of this project further elucidates this important facet of
Deleuzes work.
Bergson, is composed of images, so the images we perceive are neither things in themselves
nor representations of them. While Bergson posits the image as a middle ground between
the two extreme orders, Deleuze collapses the two orders to make the image expressive and
affective, which allows him to account for the nature of change and flux through duration.
Consciousness is then immanent within matter, an amalgam of virtual images that comprise
memory. That is, matter remains indeterminate until an encounter at a contingent moment
obliges it to make a difference. As Deleuze writes, Movement, as physical reality in the
external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be
opposed.7
Thought, for Deleuze, becomes this encounter. Traditional images of thought
that aim for truth only allow for the same and the similar, which makes them symptoms
of repression. Deleuzes new image of thought, on the other hand, constitutes a violent
confrontation, forces us to think differently or shows us when we are not thinking. As
Deleuze writes, Something in the world forces us to think.8 Thought in this sense is no
longer mere contemplation but linked instead to both thinking and acting.
Contrary to false movement, there is real movement tied to this virtual realm of
duration, memory and time, which Bergson associates with a qualitative multiplicity. Bergson
diagrams this movement by developing a billowing circuit of memory (Fig. 0.08) in which
O as acts as an object to be understood, experienced or sensed. Memory-images B,C and D
form increasingly larger circuits of a virtual past . Objects B, C and D show the same object
understood in different presents as affected by different elements of memory and time.9
There is no A because the smallest unit of automatic recognition (between A and O)
is inseparable from the object itself. Automatic recognition, like quantitative multiplicities, is
inextricably linked to utility and function. When one sees a red light she steps on the break.
Within this act, the memory of previous experiences of stepping on breaks at red lights
7
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbera Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) xiv.
8 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Colubmia UP, 2004) 139.
9 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books,
1988) 127-128. Reprinted in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 289.
comes flooding back but in such a way that the singularities of each of these instances is
converted automatically into a generality so that thinking can be bypassed in favor of action.
If one walks a familiar route, the same thing happens. One does not have to think about
what she is doing or where she is going.
However, the more attentive our
Memory-Image
memory gets, the wider the circuits of virtual

Memory-Image
pasts must get to understand it as a more

conscious interplay of memory-images from
Memory-Image
broader and more distant or disparate pasts.
Memory-Image
The process of attentive memory is thus a

process of creation, the production of the new
because we are increasingly unable to focus
Sensation
Virtual
Past
Virtual
Presents
solely on what interests us and must call other
Object-Image
Object-Image
strategies of memory and duration into play.

This attentive recognition gives us the second
type of movement tied to memory, duration
Obect
Object-Image
Fig. 0.08 Henri Bergsons Circuit of Memory
and time.

The perennial issue of diagramming these complex notions of memory and time can
be seen as the static nature of the diagram continually reverts to dualisms. However, what
Bergson struggled to demonstrate through graphics and examples, Deleuze turns to cinema
to show. Cinema becomes for Deleuze a dynamic version of Bergsons diagram that reveals
how images of thought emerge from movement, or how the process of perception, affect and
action are at play. Deleuze writes, The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in
our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They
think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts.10
Extended into architecture, movement places an emphasis on the creative emergence
and individuation of built forms, spaces and experiences, reminding us that anything that
10 Gilles Deleuze Cinema 1 xiv.
10
endures changes. The image of the whole is not extensiveness in space but an intensive
becoming. In addition, the distinction between set and whole provides criteria for developing
a capacity to design simultaneously for two systems: the provisionally closed set and the
open whole of duration, the striated and the smooth, the empirical and the transcendental,
the actual and the virtual. In this sense, movement connects spatial practice and theory,
makes architecture critical, performative and transformative, as well as responsive to both its
quotidian role and it larger historical and contextual significance.
These concepts of movement can be extended to begin to understand or reinterpret
early modernism as it relates to architecture theory, historiography and practice. Le Corbusier
is a central figure because his career was long enough to reveal a trajectory of thought (both
in his writings and his built and unbuilt work), but also because his influence is so strong
that how we interpret, understand or experience his work determines to a large extent how
architecture in his wake is comprehended. Much of his oeuvre is concerned with movement,
but his continual focus on prototyping emphasizes the general at the expense of the singular,
emphasizes the recursive capacity of design to produce the eternal return of the same and the
similar at the scale of the human, the house and the city.
The Villa Savoye as a machine for living can similarly be interpreted as a literal
reification of the machine and be reduced to the apodictic and universally expandable five
points of architecture. However, it can also be seen as a production- or desiring-machine that
returns to the genesis of thought, not to reproduce a Renaissance villa or an ideal form, but
to produce the new, to create a building that stages encounters. As such, the pronounced
architectural promenade is less a means for adding bodily movement to otherwise static
spaces or for staging perspectives to be collected to recompose or synthesize an overall
impression of space than it is a means for unifying the singular experiences or encounters
within the building and revealing the whole as never fully given or givable. The design never
gives us an ideal pose but instead offers any-instants-whatever, any one of which can be made
singular.11
11 The any-instant-whatever is a concept that emphasizes the capacity to make any instant, as opposed to
11
His later works further undermine any perceived dogma to his approach. Instead he
continually returns to the generative capacity of modernist thought and practice to install
difference, especially in relation to site, form, affect and sensation. In much of his later work
we find an increased emphasis on expression, but for Le Corbusier this expression is not so
much a solipsistic turn away from the world and into a realm of contemplation as it is an
expression of the singular, the unique. This is all to say that Le Corbusiers usefulness to us
today is less in his capacity to develop architecture as a literal or abstract machine for living,
recursive and universal, than in his capacity to create architecture as a desiring-machine that
enables modernism to pursue lines of flight and continually create anew.

Section Two, Cinema and Any-Space-Whatever, focuses on the connection
between cinema and spatial practices. Amid the intricate minutiae of Deleuzes encyclopedic
consideration of film terminology and history, this project extracts key concepts essential to
extending his ideas into the architectural realm. Cinema is established as a mode of thought
by the relationship between frame, set and montage. The frame as a mobile cut of duration
refers indirectly to the open whole of movement. The shot, which mediates between the
frame and montage, reinforces the limited set of visual elements in the frame but alludes to
relations set up by montage, which refers, either directly or indirectly, to the open whole.
The frame acts as a tool for selection and composes the parts of the image. It is a
delimiting act that reveals the artificially closed nature of the set. However, even at this level
we see disjunction as elements from all scales, such as an envelope, people and buildings,
occupy the same space, which serves to disorient as much as unite the frame. The cinematic
image also constantly refers to an out-of-frame, reminding us of what is excluded from
immediate perception. That is, it can never be completely closed.
The shot reveals the movement of the camera, its own consciousness, sometimes
human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman. The shot acts like a consciousness
in its capacity to form unities or assemblages out of many aggregates. If the frame
ideal or transcendentally privileged ones, singular or remarkable. It is important to Deleuze reconceptualization
of movement and is further elucidated in Section One.
12
introduces parts that move and the shot relates these moving parts, montage refers these
parts to the open whole of duration. If the frame is the color orange and the shot a
movement along the gradient of colors, montage is the color spectrum. That is, it reminds us
there is always something more than what is readily perceivable.
Deleuze also posits three varieties of movement images that further elucidate the
mechanisms of mental activity. While the perception-image, tied to perception as such,
delineates bodies, and the action-image performs, uniting actions and reactions and giving
rise to situation, the affection-image, most often seen in close-ups, expresses qualities of lived
states, defines how the subject perceives or experiences, and occupies the interval between
perception and action. C.S. Peirce provides a semiotic taxonomy that allows Deleuze to
further divide these images into their constitutive signs to elucidate their creative genesis, their
composition with respect to the part, and composition as it relates to the whole of duration.
The movement-image then forms a dynamic version of Bergsons circuit diagram that shows
the interplay between an incoming perception, outgoing action and the qualitative intervals,
or affects, linking them.
Ronald Bogue develops a chart to sum up the dynamics of the movement image (Fig.
0.09). Vertically, we have a move from quantitative multiplicities or movement as perceived,
immobile and representable at the bottom, the mobile section of movement signified by
the arrows and the open whole of duration at the top. Horizontally, we have the varieties of
movement images and the rational linkages or intervals linking them.12
Thus the early cinema is characterized for Deleuze by the reign of what he calls
the sensory-motor schema. This schema is the unity of the viewed and the eye that views
in dynamic movement. This model of the movement-image is precisely the nature of
cinema, for Deleuze. It does not falsify movement by extracting segments and stringing
them together in a representative fashion, but creates a wide range of expressive images that
provide constant qualitative and temporal change. There is, however, still an element of
12 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003) 12.
13
Classic Cinema
Differentiation
Image
Open Whole
Image
Image
Image
Integration
Image
Image
Horizontal Linkages of an Extendable World
Fig 0.09 The Movement-Image
teleology that creeps in. The rational and logical continuity of the linkages and the sensorymotor apparatus still assumes that mastery of the environment is possible.
Nevertheless, following Deleuzes interpretation of Bergsons philosophy, Now we
are equipped to understand the profound thesis of the first chapter of [Bergsons] Matter and
Memory: 1) there are not only instantaneous images, that is, immobile sections of movement;
2) there are movement-images which are mobile sections of duration; 3) there are, finally,
time-images, that is, duration-images, change-images...which are beyond movement
itself.13 In other words, while we can represent movement as immobile sections, this is
not real movement, which is always temporal rather than spatial and expresses qualitative,
not quantitative, change. As such there can be no immobile sections of time. Uniqueness,
singularity and difference are ultimately ineffable and unrepresentable, so they can only be
grasped by placing oneself in duration.
Section Three, Movement in Crisis, focuses on the cinematic transformation of the
movement-image into the time-image. The transition between the two volumes centers on
the crisis Deleuze identifies in mid-century cinema in which the movement image reaches its
maturation. That is, vestiges of a tendency to work in relation to truth and of the sensory13 Deleuze Cinema 1 11.
14
motor schema to continually install logic and continuity prevented the movement-image
from being developed further. More broadly or culturally and historically speaking, Deleuze
identifies the destruction and psychic terror of World War II as the cause of this crisis of
faith in which the great truths, foundations and teleology of Western Culture are called into
question. He writes, We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an
action which is capable of modifying it no more than we believe that an action can force a
situation to disclose itself, even partially.14 In other words, the trauma of the Second World
War introduces an interval between perception and action that cannot be filled.

Within cinema, he attributes this impasse to the tendency within the classic regime
of the movement-image to cling to the teleological conviction that the image of film is
one moving toward or reflecting truth. Following this crisis, however, the habituation of
movement and thought (repetition without difference) forces cinema to question its own
presuppositions. We witness the breakdown of the sensory-motor apparatus whereby natural
or rational links and continuity lose their efficacy. In questioning its own presuppositions,
Deleuze argues, cinema moved towards a new, different way of understanding movement
itself as subordinate to time.
The now lacunary, dispersive and aleatory nature of reality, action and movement
is characterized by spaces that become disconnected and empty, subjects who eschew
action in favor of percept and affect, and a radical questioning of the supposed unity of the
sensory-motor schema, which connects the viewed and the viewing eye. The breakdown of
the sensory-motor schema, whereby the logical relations between movement and space are
replaced by illogical associations and linkages, is negotiated through the concept of any-spacewhatever, in which space becomes a center of indetermination, a multiplicity, as well as a
condition for the emergence of the new.
Initially the crisis of action or movement gives way to dispersive situations and a
consciousness of clichs, deliberately weak links, the balade-form of aimless wandering and
the denunciation of conspiracy. While films that focus on these issues undermine any direct
14 Deleuze Cinema 1 206.
15
link between perception and action, they essentially introduce a parodying or critique of the
Hollywood standard film and the recursive system that produces them. That is, they fail to
provide a productive creation of something new to replace the movement-image and provide
anything more than a deeper understanding of the crisis.
The mid-century crisis in movement that Deleuze finds in film also reflects larger
crises running concurrently in post-modernist thought and the arts in general, as well as
crises of creating, interpreting and inhabiting modernist and late-modernist space. The same
crisis and ontological questioning is reflected in much of the architecture and spatial theory
developed following the War. Designers like Archigram, Venturi and Scott-Brown, Team
X and the Situationists grow more concerned with the increasingly aleatory and transient
nature of movement, and they focus more on new means of linkage and transformation than
with discovering new universal truths. In spatial theory figures like Michel Foucault, Michel
de Certeau, Guy Debord and Fredric Jameson also turn to interstitial, incidental, subversive
and quotidian forms of space for analysis rather than focusing on intentionally designed
space, as if institutionalized architecture no longer mattered. Historians like Manfredo
Tafuri and Colin Rowe lament the death of modernist ideals or the failure of modernism to
transform society.
However, just as cinema embraces and incorporates these tendencies to break with
the logic of the movement-image, a similar strategy gradually emerges in architecture. James
Stirlings work emerges as an attempt to stave off what he saw as the banality of functional
modernism. That is, he is among the first to understand the crisis of movement as it appears
in design and to begin working beyond it. Stirlings first overt critique of modernism comes
with the Woolton House (1954), inspired by rural and vernacular, not as an alternative
ideology or telos, but as a means for recovering the singular and specific that was lost in
modernisms focus on universal construction and normative strategies. It instead returns to
the genesis of thought without positing procedures to be copied or represented, and in so
doing strategically undermines the dichotomy between building and place.
16
Stirlings mature phase begins roughly with the Engineering Building at the
University of Leicester (1959-1963), where the autonomy of the parts reflects an acute
awareness of the whole. A variety of episodes give way to a unitary idea. Functional details
become occasions for critical reflections. The open section serves not as an abstract tool but
as a tool for experimenting with relations, connections and sensations. It imposes a unity
without sacrificing difference.
Similarly, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1977-1983), which stages a series of events
by incorporating disparate elements, engages in a critical discourse with the surrounding
landscape, the existing historical fabric and the more modern elements. Even the historical
references manage to evade clich or pastiche. His capacity to create, fuse together and
obfuscate the boundaries between archaeological layers is a prelude to or example of the time
image. The architectural promenade, the most dominant feature, serves to stage accidental
encounters and provides a variety of sensations rather than definitive perspectives. Movement
affords a lack of repose or closure to the elements in the design, always instead referring to
something yet to come.

Section Four, The Time-Image and the Outside of Thought, elucidates the time-
image and develops its implications for architectural theory and practice. Deleuzes response
to the crisis is to poist the time-image as a new regime that unites the actual and virtual.
Unlike the movement-image, which gives an indirect image of the open whole, the timeimage undermines the sensory-motor schema and provides a direct image of time. Within the
time-image, movement is no longer subordinated to space, thus allowing direct experiences
of duration, its intensities and the Outside of thought. This does not mean, however, that the
(few) films and architectural works that address time in this manner are random, arbitrary or
capricious. They still operate as artistic compositions, but perceived teleological determinism
and predictable habituation are replaced with autonomous intervals connecting shots that
elicit a productive uncertainty and compel an increased sensitivity to time and its vicissitudes.
17
Freeing the image from the sensory-motor schema allows it to become a force of
the Outside, inaccessible to the movement-image. Any-space-whatevers reappear under the
time-image, but relations among images (and between images and spectator) are no longer
given so must be constructed. This process also creates a new subject as other not a subject
striving to reinforce identity, but a subject creating the foundation for further individuation.
Most important, the change in image regimes introduces the direct representations of time
and the capacity to experience the movement of time itself. While the movement-image
assumes thought can be represented directly, the time-image distinguishes thought from the
signs that express it to show we are not yet thinking (at least the unthought).

Deleuzes initial influence here is Immanuel Kant, who was the first to reverse the
space-time relationship and resist cyclical, linear or habitual temporal notions in order to
posit time as a measure of movement not vice-versa, as had previously been the case. More
important than Kant, however, is Freidrich Nietzsche, Deleuzes perennial influence, who
presages and supports Deleuzes ontology of force, which is further developed throughout the
second volume.
Deleuze breaks the timeOutside
image down into its constitutive signs,

but what they all share is a circuit
of exchange (not a simple linear or
chronological progression) between
Memory
Sheets of the
Virtual Past
past, present and future, between

the virtual and the actual. Bergsons
diagram of time as an inverted cone
helps elucidate this process (Fig. 0.10).
The summit, S, is the perceiving,
Peaks of the
Present
Subject in the world
acting subject in the present world.

The cone SAB is virtual memory,
Fig. 0.10 Bergsons Inverted Cone of Memory
18
qualitative multiplicities, with the horizontal lines showing sheets of the past. The cone
should be dynamic, like a telescope, rotating to bring different elements of the past into and
out of focus, dilated and contracting to allow different elements of the past to collapse on the
present.15
Again, Deleuze, finds the dynamism of Bergsons concepts, which are lacking in
his diagrams, in film. The encounters imposed by the time-image are, unlike those of
the movement-image, ones of irrational linkages in which one or more sheets of the past
collapses into the present such that the distinction between past present and future becomes
indiscernible and the distinction between true and false becomes undecidable. The timeimage conflates in various ways all these temporal aspects: the past as preserved, the present
as becoming and future as indeterminate. Deleuze develops three paradoxes of the timeimage as non-chronological time: the pre-existence of a past (the cone as a whole), the coexistence of all sheets of the past (the amalgam of cross sections), and the existence of a most
contracted degree (apex).
When we are perpetually uncertain as to the truth of several alternate interpretations
of the present, we are directly confronting time. The characteristics of time reveal themselves
because indiscernibility among the truths of presents shows that there can be multiple
possible presents informed by various pasts. This indiscernibility or undecibability reveals
time to be continuously manifest and shifting rather than a succession. This of course works
only when the feeling of indecisiveness remains, because to resolve the issue definitively
would be to fall back into traditional understandings of time as a linear progression.
By the end of Lost Highway these strategies are all at play: what has happened,
is happening or is imagined as a future happening is unclear. Much the same identity as
whole and givable are revealed as impossible. Bogues graph of the time-image (Fig. 0.11) is
similar to that of the movement-image but with some key distinctions. Instead of rational
intervals connecting images we have gaps or irrational interstices forming a series (not a
15 Bergson, Matter and Memory 211. Reprinted in Deleuze, Cinema 2 294.
19
Modern Cinema
Force of Spacing/
Disparation
Outside
Image [AND] Image [AND] Image [AND] Image [AND] Image [AND] Image
Gap
Gap
Gap
Gap
Gap
Irrational Cut Irrational Cut Irrational Cut Irrational Cut Irrational Cut
Horizontal Re-Linkages of Images through Gaps/Irrational Cuts
Fig. 0.11 The Time-Image
sequence) into which the outside enters thinking as a violent and disjunctive encounter.
Finally, as opposed to differentiation that is brought into unity, we have disparation without
a clear resolution.
The time-image and its implications for spatial practices emerge as the crux of this
project. Time has historically been subordinated to movement, and with a few notable
exceptions has not been fully incorporated into architectural thought or practice. Images
that were limited to indirect representations of time in the classic regime are now liberated
to express shocks of force, as opposed to representations of preconceived ideas. What
remains? asks Deleuze. There remain bodies, which are forces, nothing but forces.16 As
such, the trajectory from ancient notions of movement to the movement-image to the timeimage affords strategies for perceiving and comprehending architecture not as immobile or
static sections, but as mobile sections of duration and as direct images of time, uniting the
present of movement to critical histories of the past and productive visions of the future.
If the time-image is elusive in cinema, it is even more so in architecture. However,
Eisenmans career can clearly be interpreted as a continuous attempt to work through the
20
issues of the time-image. Eisenmans early career, like Sterlings, focuses on the generative
capacity of design. As such, process, as a revealing of time, as experimentation, as continual
return to the genesis of thought, is more important than the design as object. In this sense,
architecture is invented more than received or discovered. That is, he begins without a predetermined end, and the result is more a provisional conclusion to a process than a formal
telos. He abandons any representation or symbolism in favor of an abstract, Cartesian grid
over which process and time is traced. Even the ideal form of the cube is revealed as having
immanent, not transcendent power. The arbitrariness serves to make the real and imaginary
indiscernible. The focus is instead on a continual shifting that gives rise to episodes and
encounters.
Beginning in the late 1970s, partly as a reaction to the realization that architecture
had lost much of its relevance to lived experience (and partly as a reaction against
historicism and pastiche), Eisenman considers issues of site and context, but instead of
incorporating these elements as given, he invents them. The Cities of Artificial Excavation
obfuscate the boundary between true and false by incorporating disparate historical elements
and creating new ones. His project for Canneregio incorporates fabulation by creating a
story, so to speak, that combines a previous scheme for the site by Le Corbusier, the existing
and historical dynamics of Venice and his own previous design for House Xia. This act of
fabulation is less of a historical dialectic to be resolved than a series of temporal and spatial
events that can only be synthesized disjunctively.

Similarly with his Checkpoint Charlie social housing project for the IBA in Berlin
(1981-1985), he juxtaposes the strata of the city: contemporary Berlin is superimposed on

the Berlin of the eighteenth century through a recovery of that urban scheme, which in turn
is superimposed on the Mercator scheme to reveal Berlins relation to the globe. Again we
see both peaks of the present and sheets of the past created and superimposed to reveal time
as one of disjunction. As Raphael Moneo writes, The architecture [of the Cities of Artifical
21
Excavation] asserts its autonomy and finds its place in a context that keeps it suspended
between a future that wasnt and a present that is destroyed in its very act of becoming.17
Finally, with his later works, The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in particular,
Eisenman is able to abandon representation all together moving beyond even the diagram.
The formal break with the city forms a spatial fissure, a block of sensation that takes us out
of the everyday, but more important, it marks a fissure in meaning and time by making
indiscernible the distinction between, past present and future and reminds us that the
catastrophe more profound than forgetting the past is forgetting the relation between present
and past that relinquishes hope for the future.
Inverting the traditional preference for a unitary subject, a single true
present, and a linear progression of time and an overemphasis on space, science, and
determinate concepts, can thus have profound implications for our understanding of
ourselves, our world, and of our theoretical, cultural and political thinking.Following
Bergson and Deleuze, we find ourselves eschewing that which grounds our practical
needs in favor of reorienting ourselves toward a future from which we are always
estranged and foreign, yet nevertheless provides strategies and criteria for embracing
anticipation and hope in service of creating an identity and a world yet to come.
Deleuze writes, Cinema...brings to light an intelligible content...[That] consists
of movements and thought processes (pre-linguistic images), and of points of view on
these movements and processes (pre-signifying signs)...Cinema itself is a new practice of
images and signs, whose theory philosophy [and architecture] must produce as conceptual
practice.18 Deleuzes goal in writing a cinematic philosophy, which can be extended
to posit architecture also as an image of thought, is to take modernisms strategies for
thinking through, experienced in the nature of its images and signs, and philosophically or
conceptually develop them, but also for philosophy to understand how the possibilities of
thought are renewed through aesthetic practices.
17 Raphael Moneo Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary
Designers. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004) 176.
18 Deleuze Cinema 2 262, 280.
Satter | The Movement-Image
Fig 1.01 Still from Lost Highway (1997)
22
Section One:
The Movement-Image and
the Production of the New
A 21st Century Noir Horror Film.

A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises.
A world where time is dangerously out of control.
A terrifying ride down the lost highway.

David Lynch (21 June 1995)
AS CREDITS ROLL
EXT. TWO-LANE HIGHWAY - NIGHT
We see a clean moving POV illuminated by headlights. Were floating down an old two-lane
highway through a desolate, desert landscape. This gliding, eerie POV continues as credits roll.
When the credits end, the headlights seem to dim and soon were moving through BLACKNESS.1

In his opening notes to the screenplay for Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch presents the
key concept of movement as not only a spatial phenomenon, but one tied equally to time
and identity. This complex notion of movement drives the films unfolding and reveals the
same fundamental concepts Deleuze develops in his two volumes on cinema, The MovementImage and The Time-Image. The identification of the movie as a contemporary film noir
invokes linear and well-worn images of movement obtained from cinematic history and
1 David Lynch and Barry Gifford, Lost Highway The Screenplay, Feb. 5 2010, <http://www.
lynchnet.com/lh/lhscript.htmlLynch>.
23
criticism. The narrative structure, as well as genre-related tone, setting, characters and
atmosphere, provide an ostensibly familiar and deductive logic. While the presence of noirrelated elements (an estranged couple, a murder mystery, a love triangle, nefarious criminal
activity lurking underneath a suburban setting, the femme fatale, voyeurism, nighttime
undertakings, chiaroscuro lighting) reinforces this linear logic, these elements, in the end, are
not enough to explain the films methods and intentions. The real power of the movie rests in
its capacity to subvert habitual logic, perception and thought in order to present movement
as a force of desire and invention. The crisis of identity and the uncontrollable nature of
time that Lynch identifies are what underlie real movement as the virtuality of memory
and individuation. By developing these concepts cinematically, Lost Highway implicates the
spectator in a seemingly irrational but productive process of movement that inextricably links
action to thinking and aesthetic practice to philosophy.

The lost highway, then, is not a metaphorical representation of movement in
any reductive sense. It is instead an image comprised of myriad signs related to perception,
action and affect, as well composition and creation, which reveal the mechanisms of thought.
Within the opening credits, the point of view shot connects the perceiving spectator to
physical, mechanized displacement through space and the presence of light on an otherwise
barren landscape offers an aesthetic sensation of space tied to affect. However, the blackness
at the end of the opening credits foreshadows the ways in which movement in its quotidian
variety that reinforces habitual notions of percept, affect and action will be gradually replaced
by a more complex notion of movement that delves into the nature of identity and subject
formation as linked to temporal movement or time as a complex process of individuation
and duration. Lynchs irrepressible time reveals a temporal dimension to thinking that
conforms neither to the quotidian of the present, an antiquarian sense of the past nor a
utopian plan for the future. The three realms are conflated, or rather dismantled, to allow
for the production of the new in order to replace rote and repetitive forms of creation with
different and more meaningful ones.
24
IMAGE OF THOUGHT
Movement forms an image of thought tied to complex temporal practices based on
philosophies of life, creation and difference. As such, it is important to understand the
intricate means by which Deleuze develops his noology, the study of the concept of an
image of thought, throughout his career. The creation of this concept also allows Deleuze
to continually ask what it is in a work that makes meaning, as opposed to the conventional
question of what a work means. This reversal situates Deleuzes philosophy as a critical
practice concerned more with the emergence of thought than with establishing universal
foundations for judging the validity of thought. As such the ontogenetic approach becomes
well suited to addressing our distinctly late modern condition in a constructive manner.
In some ways, all his monographs can be interpreted as attempts to identify and
replace notions of transcendence and universality with the genesis of thought as developed
by each of his subjects, whether philosopher (Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Foucault,
Leibniz) or artist (Proust, Sacher-Masoch, Bacon). For Deleuze, the perceived structures of
thought, the origins from which it arises or the teleology at which it aims is less important to
each of these figures than the means by which they reveal thought as continually emerging
anew. The immanent tendency of thought to produce differently or difference itself allows
us to creatively pursue the question as to why there is something rather than something else,
rather than the ineffectual question of why there is something rather than nothing.
Deleuze first directly addresses the image of thought within sections bearing that
title in both Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962),2 in which Friedrich Nietzsche emerges as a
counterpoint to the primary tradition of Western thought as a search for eternal truths,
as well as Proust and Signs (1964)3 in which Deleuze describes Marcel Proust as a literary
artist who critiques reductive philosophy by vigorously evading mere representations of
memory. Proust emerges as a creative thinker opposed to philosophy in the reductive sense of
discovering characters, settings and narratives that correspond to an already existing reality.
2
3
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP) 103-110.
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George Braziller, 1972). 94-102.
25
Deleuze privileges art as that which produces difference over this conventional mode of
philosophical thought when he writes, Philosophy, with all its method and its good will, is
nothing compared with the secret pressures of the work of art.4
The Image of Thought also serves as the title to the third chapter of Difference and
Repetition (1968), in which the concept is developed at length. The tradition of Western thought
against which Deleuze argues threatens to crush thought under an image which is that of the
Same and the Similar in representation, but profoundly betrays what it means to think and
alienates the two powers of difference and repetition, of philosophical commencement and
recommencement.5 In contradistinction to the image as representational, Deleuze favors in its
stead a thought without image6 in which I make, remake, and unmake my concepts along a
moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery, which
repeats and differenciates [sic] them.7 What is significant here is that the aim of philosophy,
like artistic practice is not to represent our world as a static entity, but to lead us toward another
world, a world to come that is also this world, or a plane of immanence, to borrow David
Rodowicks phrase.8
The image of thought then is a particularly constructive concept that allows
philosophy and artistic expression to work as complements or extensions of each other.
Philosophy, through the creation of concepts, and the arts, through the creation of affect and
4 Deleuze Proust and Signs 98. Deleuze continues, It may be that Prousts critique of philosophy is
eminently philosophical, suggesting an important link between thought and aesthetic practice in which both
are equally active and creative.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 167.
6 Deleuze Difference and Repetition 132. For our immediate purposes, the distinction between a new
image of thought that seeks to overturn old images and thought without image can be read as merely
semantic. However, within the time-image, a thought without image has an intimate link to the outside
of thought, revealing the limitations of cinema, movement and time and giving rise to what in A Thousand
Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari call a force that destroys both the image and its copies, the model and its
reproduction, every possibility of subordinating through to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (377,
see full citation below.)
7 Deleuze Difference and Repetition xix. Deleuze continues, The task of modern philosophy is to
overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal. Following
Nietzsche we discover, as more profound than time and eternity, the untimely: philosophy is neither a
philosophy of history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely, always and only untimely that is to say,
acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.
8 D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (Durham: Duke UP) xvii.
26
sensation, posit images of thought that reveal the intricate workings of a periods intellectual
and creative processes.9 For Deleuze, philosophy, cinema and architecture all emerge as forces
or modes of thought. Thinking, however, in this sense is not opposed to practice, nor is it
a precursor to it. Instead they are part of the same endeavor to produce the new, to stage
encounters with the Outside, to allow us to evade clich and realize those moments when we
are not yet thinking.
In the fullest and most productive means of both creation and critique (which
amount to the same thing for Deleuze), an image of thought is a system of coordinates,
dynamics, orientations10 that define the trajectory of thought or how meaning is created
by a process of thinking through at any time. This image can be productive, as when it
confronts us with the new or the notion that we are not thinking, or it can be stifling when it
prevents further thought. Rodowick writes, For Deleuze this is the most compelling gambit
of writing a history of cinematic philosophy: to take an eras strategies of thinking-through,
represented aesthetically in the nature of its images and signs, and render them in the form
of philosophical concepts. But also for philosophy to understand how the possibilities of
thought are renewed in aesthetic practices.11
Within artistic practices, including cinema and architecture, the idea of an image of
thought connects these creative enterprises to their larger cultural and historical significance.
Within philosophy, the image of thought allows thinking to emerge as a creative endeavor.
That is, an image of thought operates as neither a theory that explains or interprets works
from a privileged vantage point, nor as a pure archival strategy of historicism. Instead the
image of thought emerges as an ongoing attempt to develop the means for qualitative
change. The image of thought serves to stage philosophical encounters with art rather than
mere reflections on, or interpretations of, individual works or figures.
9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia UP, 1994). In this text, Deleuze and Guattari address the nature of philosophy, especially
as pertains to process and the ontogenetic strand of continental thought they have developed, as well as the arts
and the sciences. According to them, philosophy develops concepts, the arts affects and the sciences percepts.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1997) 148.
11 Rodowick 7.
27
It is in this sense that cinema and architecture, like all artistic enterprises, can be
reconfigured as attempts to create, develop and evince an image of thought, connecting
these expressive media to their larger cultural, social and political milieus. Film for
Deleuze aesthetically produces the spatial and temporal mechanisms of mental activity.
However, architecture can accomplish the same, and following Deleuze we can posit within
architecture an ethical, aesthetic and ontological imperative to creatively construct and
reshape the environment according to the laws of thought rather than focusing on issues of
representation or correspondence to a reality not of this world of lived experience.
MOVEMENT
Movement as connected to emergent thought throughout modernism, provides a clearer
view of what is at stake in how we conceptualize thought and how we think. Attempts
to represent, codify, capture and disperse movement have a profound effect on artistic
practices. Without question, movement (in one form or another) has influenced all modes
of thought and practice throughout modernism. Movement and modernism have an
intimate relationship, and for Seigfried Giedion, movement becomes a central concept of
our epoch.12 For Giedion movement is key to understanding and perceiving the emerging
modern environment. He finds the search to better understand movement underlying the
most progressive strands of all creative and practical disciplines of the twentieth century, and
of this confluence of events in the arts, humanities and sciences he writes:
Movement, the ceaselessly changing, proves itself ever more strongly the
key to our thought. It underlies the concept of function and of variables
in higher mathematics. And in physics, the essence of the phenomenal
world has been increasingly regarded as motion-process: sound, light,
heat, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics; until, in this century, matter too
dissolves into motion, and physicists recognize that their atoms consist
of a kernel, a nucleus, around which negatively charged electrons
circle in orbits a with a speed exceeding that of the planets. A parallel
phenomenon occurs in philosophy and literature. Almost simultaneously
with Lumieres cinematograph (1895-6), Henri Bergson was lecturing to
12 Siegfried Giedion. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1969) 19.
28
the College de France on the Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought

(1900). And later James Joyce split words open like oysters, showing them
in motion.13
Movement here is clearly the image of thought Giedion finds effective for considering early
modernism. In other words, thinking through movement, putting thought in motion allows
us to understand the early modern strategies of thinking through issues in myriad fields of
study. However, the idea of movement he goes on to develop is reductive, quotidian and
overly simplistic, which is to say, he maintains strong vestiges of the traditional image of
thought that continually returns to representation and reification. It is worth looking at
Giedions approach in more detail in order to contrast it with the new image of thought with
which Deleuze will replace it later.

Giedion begins with a historical treatment of movement that examines its conceptual
and practical vicissitudes. How, in other words, has [mans] feeling for space changed?14 he
asks. The modern world is unlike its ancient predecessor in its conception of movement and
interest in ideas surrounding change. Unlike the Greeks who lived in a world of eternal ideas,
a world of constants,15 the modern world allows for change and considers movement in its
many incarnations vital to existence and progress. In a realization that presaged Thomas Kuhns
work concerning the relationship between philosophical thought and the natural sciences,
Giedion points out that mechanization was a result not just of scientific breakthroughs but
also of a changed theoretical and perceptual outlook. Whereas the ancients saw invention as
the result of miracles and divine intervention, the eighteenth century came to see invention
as the capacity to mechanize human activity. Romans had all the raw materials to form an
assembly line, but it was not until the eighteenth century that the Western world was in the
right mindset to envisage such an apparatus.

According to Giedion, Nicolas Oresme in the fourteenth century was the first to
graphically represent movement (Fig. 1.02), and the first to discover the most important
13 Giedion 28.
14 Giedion 7.
15 Giedion 14.
29
principle of its representation: movement can

be represented only by movement, the changing
only by the changing.16 Oresme delineated
movement through a sequence of shapes
shortened, lengthened, widened and otherwise
altered to suggest its transformation. However,
for Giedion the hero of movement and its
graphic representation is Etienne Jules Marey,
whose novel inventions and graphic methods in
the nineteenth century revolutionized the way
we visualize and think about organic movement
(Figs. 1.03-1.06). He writes, Movement,
movement in all its formin the blood stream,
in the stimulated muscle, in the gait of the
Fig. 1.02 Nicolas Oresme, Diagram of Movement

(14th C.)
horse, in aquatic animals and mollusks, in

the flight of insects and birds, was the everreturning burden of Mareys research.17

Marey, a French doctor and physiologist became involved in aesthetics when he
invented photographic techniques to graphically study and represent human and animal
movement. These studies surveyed human locomotion, the movement of animals and the
flight of birds, as well as the trajectories of solid and liquid objects. Marey was also interested
in the narrative capacity of the graphic representation of movement as shown in his charts,
which concisely and clearly convey a wealth of information. Most important for Giedion,
Marey was successful in representing abstract motion and its relations to space. Finally
Marey comes to the domain that is of particular concern to us: rendering the true form of
a movement as it is described in space,18 writes Giedion, finding particularly significant
16 Giedion 18.
17 Giedion 18.
18 Giedion 21.
30
Fig. 1.04 Etienne Jules Marey, Human Motion Study

(1883)
Fig. 1.03 Etienne Jules Marey, Human Motion Study

(1883)
Fig. 1.05 Etienne Jules Marey, Seagull Motion Study Fig. 1.06 Etienne Jules Marey, Smoke Motion Study
(1901)
(1878)
Mareys earlier experiments with the portrayal of movement in its own right, movement
detached from the performer.19

Giedion also addresses the ideas and achievements of Mareys followers, such as Frank
B. Gilbreth (1868-1924) and Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), who experimented with

the task of representing movement as a body in space. While Muybridges representation of
movement, using multiple cameras to convey motion on multiple plates (Figs. 1.07-1.08), is
less efficient than Mareys, which utilized one camera, it suggests a different notion of time
and introduces a subjective component into the observation of movement. While the object
is moving, the viewing subject may also be in movement or be able to alter his or her viewing
angle.
19 Giedion 24.
Fig. 1.07 Eadweard Muybridge, Equine Motion

Study (1878)
31
Fig. 1.08 Eadweard Muybridge, Human Motion

Study (1887)
Giedion also considers the trajectory of modern artists who drew on the work of
these photographers to treat movement aesthetically and conceptually (Figs. 1.09-1.10).

In less than two decades, he writes, art learned to use motion forms to represent psychic
processes with lapidary cast and dynamic color. This may be the beginning of a third
step, leading toward mastery of symbolic language free of atavistic reference.20 He sees
this trajectory from Klee and Kandinsky to the Futurists and Duchamp as representing
movement in its relation to naturalistic animal and machine motion, as well as the
development of an abstract visual language to show pure movement.
Fig. 1.09 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Fig. 1.10 Giacomo Balla, Speed of a Motorcycle (1913)
Descending a Staircase No. 2
(1912)
20 Giedion 108-109.
32
While Giedion identifies the importance of thinking in terms of movement, in the

end he is more concerned with representations of movement instead of actual movement.
The appeal of this approach lies primarily in the notion that these representational strategies
improve upon human vision. However, any photographic image or artistic representation
that aims to reveal movement in such a manner ends up only arresting movement instead
of extracting it. By conflating movement with mechanization, reducing the concept to
quantitative displacement, Giedion emerges as a figure fascinated by movement, possessing
an encyclopedic knowledge of the myriad ways movement affects the modern subject and
is represented in the spheres of both art and the everyday, but who nevertheless fails to
understand the subtle and complex ways in which movement is tied to duration in terms of
thought, memory, time, sensation, affect, perception and difference.
Deleuze provides another theory of movement that replaces photographic perception
with cinematic consciousness and offers another way of situating artistic works historically,
aesthetically and culturally. This project was the result of years of considering movement in
a variety of contexts all aimed at avoiding previous attempts to replace one transcendent,
teleological structure with another. For Deleuze, real movement as the perpetual flux of
duration must be distinguished from the readily perceivable, mechanistic version that
dominates much of twentieth-century thought. This development of a more complex and
nuanced definition of movement begins early in his career, first appearing in Bergsonism.
Deleuze was drawn to Bergson principally for his ability to challenge, demystify
and move beyond traditional dualisms and dialectical tendencies in philosophy. According
to Deleuze, all philosophical divisions and dualisms derive from or result in the principal
Bergsonian division: that between duration and space.21 This is significant for architecture,
because unlike traditional approaches to modernist theory and history that privilege space
as volume, the focus now shifts to a temporal dimension. Duration, which posits movement
as time, becomes a central element of design. Bergson viewed the world as in flux, our
21 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books,
1991) 31.
33
experience of it constantly changing. This is partly because of his appreciation of concurrent

developments in other fields, especially thermodynamics and theoretical physics, both of
which (re)incorporate time into science and studies of the physical world. As Rodowick
notes, This is an image of irreversible Becoming in contrast with the static and eternal image
of Being depicted by Newtons universal laws of motion. At about the same time, Henry
Bergson produces his image of thought as internal movement and of memory as complex
duration.22 That is, Deleuze uses Bergson to tie movement to time, to make thought and
practice generative and creative, opposed to positivist science.
The distinction between these two types of movement, representational and
perceptible, spatial and temporal, between Giedions focus and Bergsons more complex
focus, is brought to bear even more clearly in Deleuzes later collaborations with Guattari.
The second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, offers a more
idiosyncratic and sporadic, yet concisely condensed, consideration of movement, its modern
dynamics, and its extended implications, especially as it pertains to thought. Giedions
assertion that For a work process to be understandable it must be made visible; for he who
performs it does not know his own movement,23 reduces movement to physiological studies
and artistic representation. However, Deleuze and Guattari take a more thorough view of
space, relating it to time and resisting its reduction to immediate perception when they write:
Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature
imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement
of a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings,
in other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are
below and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, threshold of
perception are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping
what eludes another: the eagles eye.24
While this seemingly insuperable conundrum is a key element in understanding
movement, it is only insuperable if movement is conventionally understood as an observable
and measurable concept readily accessible to quotidian perception. Deleuze and Guattari
paradoxically continue:
22 Rodowick 6.
23 Giedion 108.
24 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus 280-281.
34
However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement

also must be perceived, it cannot but be perceived, the imperceptible is
also the percipiendum. There is no contradiction in this. If movement is
imperceptible by nature, it is so always in relation to a given threshold
of perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the role of a
mediation on the plane that effects the distribution of thresholds and
percepts and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects.25
In other words, real movement is fluid and dynamic. It is always capable of being perceived
if one understands where to look. Because movement is interesting for Deleuze as a concept
in itself (not as a concept added to static objects), one must continually engage in productive
encounters with the new and the outside of thought to perceive movement. The eagles
eye that can spot, comprehend and use real movement is accessible to human perception
but only by returning to the intensity of pre-subjective, pre-individuated thought. They
continue, Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an object,
but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with
subject and object. Perception will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things,
throughout its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity in another, the prehension of
one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look only at the movement.26
In other words, movement for Deleuze is not a quantifiable concept. While this
makes real movement much more elusive and problematic (especially within architecture
theory and practice) than abstract movement, it also makes the term more complex and
useful for moving beyond modes of representation and embracing creative encounters. Most
important, it offers movement as a strategy not just for formal and functional consideration,
but also for reconfiguring relations and linkages through assemblage, for creating and
recreating thought and art and for treating everything within the purview of human
consciousness rhizomatically.
That in fact is Deleuze and Guattaris central axiom: Make a rhizome. But you
dont know what you can make a rhizome with, you dont know which subterranean
25 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus 281.
35
stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert.
So experiment.27 However, once again, understanding the paradoxical nature of this
proposition, they continue, Thats easy to say? Although there is no preformed logical order
to becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that they not be
used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of event, that they be sufficient to guide
us through the dangers.28

So far, Deleuzes (and Guattaris) concept of movement suggests a means for
moving beyond classical notions of quantitative displacement, which in turn allows us to

tie movement to progressive notions of thinking and thinking through. However, Bergsons
concept of duration and Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the rhizome, while useful in many
ways, still remain elusive. In many ways, Deleuzes two-volume study of cinema, an in-depth
and overt consideration of movement and its concrete elucidation within the medium of
expression and thought that most concisely evinces the wholeness of movement, can be read
as an attempt to address this impasse.
It is not a coincidence that at the point in his oeuvre, following A Thousand Plateaus,
when the image of thought as a concept is most fully developed,29 Deleuze turns to cinema
to reveal the internal workings of thought, because this medium allows us, as he argues, to
bring the unconscious mechanism of thought to consciousness.30 Cinema is the medium
that most effectively employs movement in a manner that connects thought and practice.
In this sense, cinema accomplishes two feats. First, it reveals movement as temporal, as well
as spatial, connecting these spatial and temporal practices to the world of thought. Second,
29 Deleuzes career can be broken down into three or four phases. His early publications through 1968
focus exclusively on monographs of individual thinkers and artists. However, even in these works, he is clearly
reading these figures against the grain to develop his own ontology and his unique history of philosophy.
Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense constitute the end of this period. However, as the two volumes
in which Deleuzes own contribution to philosophy, namely the concepts of difference and sense, is most clearly
articulated, they stand alone. The 1970s mark a turn toward overt cultural critique, which again, influenced
by the events of 1968 and his collaboration with Guattari, form a unique blending of social criticism and
philosophy. Finally, the 1980s until his death brought a reevaluation of his earlier work.
30 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989)160.
36
as read by Deleuze, cinema connects movement to cultural theory and philosophy. As

Rodowick notes, For Deleuzes larger objective is not to produce another theory of film, but
to understand how aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific modes of understanding converge
in producing cultural strategies for imagining and imaging the world.31 This approach can
also allow cinema to inform architecture by connecting it to a more complex and progressive
theory of space that privileges time and movement.
Rodowick continues, Among aesthetic practices, Deleuze argues, cinema concretely
produces a corresponding image of thought, a visual and acoustic rendering of thought in
relation to time and movement. At the outset, time is the focus of both of Deleuzes cinema
books.32 That is, cinema gives us an image of thought as movement. As such, the content of
films, their narratives and characters are less important to Deleuzes enterprise than the way
individual frames, shots and montage are linked and connected. However, his interest here
does not reduce film to a formal enterprise. Rodowick writes, A film semiotic requires a
pragmatic approach where the logic of signs is deduced from images as they appear in and for
themselves.33 To refer to a movement-image or a time-image is not to fall back on immediate
perception. The ordering and unfolding of images, sometimes logical and rational, sometimes
illogical and irrational, reveals elements of affect, sensation and duration immanent to
images.
Both architecture and cinema as milieus operate as productive machines only insofar
as they reveal the capacity of thought to produce differently or to manifest difference itself.
Architecture if reinterpreted and reconceived along these lines becomes more than a static
image, more cinematic. It does not need to literally move, but it does need to conjure ideas
of process and qualitative change. Understanding movement as duration is important in
cinema, as well as architecture, because according to Deleuze, while we perceive spatially, we
think temporally.
31 Rodowick 5.
32 Rodowick 6.
33 Rodowick 41.
37
Mental and active life is a continuous flow of images, and duration is the immediate
awareness of this flow. For Deleuze, cinema reveals this process and is thus useful to
architecture theory and scholarship. While the differences between the two media are
as pronounced and profound as their similarities, films capacity to provide an image of
thought tied directly to time and movement affords a means to reconceive conceptually (and
physically) of architecture, its design process and experience. While the relation between film
and architecture is not one of direct metaphor and can easily be overstated, film does serve as
a pedagogical tool or heuristic device that makes thought, its strategies for thinking through
and its techniques visible. In this sense, architecture as thinking, strategizing made concrete
through design and construction techniques, has a lot to learn from cinema.
CINEMATIC MOVEMENT
To develop the concepts underlying his cinematic philosophy, Deleuze turns to other
philosophers. He uses C.S. Peirces work to provide a semiotic taxonomy and Nietzsche to
provide the basis for a productive philosophy of time that dominates the second volume.
However, the most important figure in Deleuzes treatment of cinema is Henri Bergson,
especially as concerns movement and image. Deleuze writes:
The historical crisis of psychology coincided with the moment at which it
was no longer possible to hold a certain position. This position involved
placing images in consciousness and movement in space. In consciousness
there would only be images these were qualitative and without
extension. In space there would only be movement these were extended
and quantitative. But how is it possible to pass from one order the other?
How is it possible to explain that movements, all of a sudden, produce
an image as in perception or that the image produces a movement
as in voluntary action? [] It was necessary, at any cost, to overcome
this duality of images and movement, of consciousness and thing []
How therefore was it possible not to take account of the cinema, which a
being developed at that very moment, and which would produce its own
evidence of a movement-image?34
38
To delve into these questions, it is necessary to look at movement and image

separately in order to understand how they come together to form a new image of thought.
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image includes two commentaries on Bergson. The first addresses
movement and the second the image. The first commentary elaborates movement as the
basis for an image of thought or movement-image by positing three theses on movement to
establish that 1) there can be no immobile sections of time, 2) movement always expresses
qualitative change and 3) real movement is temporal rather than spatial.
Deleuzes first thesis on movement asserts that movement is distinct from the space
covered.35 That is to say, movement is not a divisible or quantifiable concept to be conflated
with space. Following Bergson, Deleuze distinguishes between false and real movement.
He draws a distinction between abstract movement, which is artificial and provisional,
measurable and divisible, and real movement, which is an ongoing act of temporal traversal.
The former is quantitative, the latter qualitative. The former occurs when movement is
added to immobile sections removed from the flow of time. Movement in this sense can be
represented as in the work of photography and of figures like Maret and Muybridge, but
these representations are not to be conflated with real movement. The first thesis, on the
other hand, tells us that real movement cannot be quantitatively reduced to space traversed.
The second thesis distinguishes between the two ways movement has been studied
and conceived historically. The ancient conception of movement favors universal constants,
whereas the modern notion of movement allows for qualitative change. The ancients
emphasized ideal poses and successions of ideal stages. Deleuze doesnt mention examples,
but a quick survey of architectural and art history confirms the validity and insidiousness
of this approach. Ancient architecture takes continual recourse to ideal forms, such as the
golden section and pure geometries, such as the cube, sphere and pyramid, as do other
visual arts. Classic philosophy posited movement as a transition between privileged instants,
Platonic Forms or Ideals that are timeless and immobile. The ultimate aim was an ideal
synthesis of form with Form as exemplified in the Greek contra posto in sculpture. Even
39
memory according to Cicero was reductively spatial in this sense. Later styles, despite
their different approaches or ideations, are continually defined by unchanging universal
attempts to find idealized forms either through recourse to referents, such as God and sacred
numerology, as during the Middle Ages, or the body and ideal proportions and forms during
the Renaissance or historical typologies during neo-classicism.
Opposed to a world of ideal poses, Deleuze posits the more modern notion of
movement as instants quelconques (any-instants-whatever). Galileos study of motion that
privileges trajectories, speeds and forces over individual moments are prime example as are
the photographic and representational studies Giedion employed to elucidate mechanization.
Nevertheless, this distinctly modern approach still fails to consider duration and time,
assuming instead that the whole is already constructed and given. Despite this difference
in approach, science, technology and philosophy all returned to the illusion of ancient
philosophy, taking a teleological position that assumed movement was part of a whole or
totality that could be known and understood.
Any impression of continuity, linear progression or teleology is merely an illusion, or
as Deleuze writes:
[To] recompose movement with eternal poses or with immobile sections
comes to the same thing: in both cases, one misses the movement because
one constructs a Whole, one assumes that all is given, whilst movement
only occurs if the whole is neither given nor givable. As soon as a whole
is given to one in the eternal order of forms or poses, or in the set of
any-instant-whatevers, then either time is no more than the image of
eternity, or it is the consequence of the set; there is no longer room for
real movement.36
Any-instants-whatever do not form linear or chronological successions and are productive
cinematically only insofar as they constitute points at which the whole can be reimagined,
part of an indeterminate future that derives from an aleatory present deriving in turn from a
past that belongs as much to memory and perception as any historical teleology. This sets up
a transition into qualitative change, which cinema embraces.
40
Cinema undermines ancient notions of movement and demonstrates that any instant
of movement can only be illusorily separated from an open whole in a state of constant flux
and transformation. Deleuze continues, The privileged instants of Eisenstein, or of any
other director, are still any-instants-whatevers: to put it simply, the any-instant-whatever
can be regular or singular, ordinary or remarkable.37 What is important is that all of these
instants are immanent to movement understood as duration and to single out one is the
creation of something new, not the reinforcement of something already existing. Deleuze
uses cinema to address Bergsons concern with figuring out how something new is created.
He writes, When one relates movement to any-moment-whatevers, one must be capable of
thinking the production of the new, that is, of the remarkable and the singular, at any one
of these moments: this is complete conversion of philosophy,38 which is to say the new no
longer has recourse to an idealized, representational notion, but is the ongoing change of
differentiation and reconfiguration. The second thesis, in short, replaces correspondence with
creation.
The third thesis, that real movement is temporal rather than spatial, provides the
most concise definition of movement. It states that If we tried to reduce it to a bare formula,
it would be this: not only is the instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is
a mobile section of duration, that is, of the Whole, or of a whole.39 Zenos mistake and the
mistake of many philosophers are to consider movement only as displacement or translation
through space. Movement is instead transformation within and through time. Deleuze
reminds us of Bergsons analogy of a sugar cube melting in a glass of water in which case the
water undergoes a qualitative change which is partly obvious but also more subtle in that the
water and sugar are not added to each other but form something new. Equally important, the
glass and observer also change qualitatively. While each object or part undergoes a change, so
does the whole. The relationship between sugar, water, glass and observer forms a new set of
dynamics.
Deleuze ties the implications of these three theses together when he writes:
The upshot of this third thesis [movement as change] is that we find
ourselves on three levels: (1) the sets or closed systems, which are
defined by discernible objects or distinct parts; (2) the movement of
translation which is established between these objects and modifies their
respective positions; (3) the duration of the whole, a spiritual reality
which constantly changes according to its own relationsThus in a sense
movement has two aspects. On one hand, that which happens between
objects or parts; on the other hand, that which expresses the duration
or the whole. The result is that duration, by changing qualitatively, is
divided up in objects, and objects, by gaining depth, by losing their
contours, are united in duration. We can therefore say that movement
relates the objects of a closed system to open duration, and duration to
the objects of the system which it forces to open up.40
That is, movement and change occur on three interrelated levels: the sets or ensembles
as distinct parts or groups spatially demarcated; movement as translation among parts
continually changing in relation to other parts; and duration, the temporal whole of
duration.
This division of movement into the set and whole becomes useful, because like
Bergsons concept of memory as alternatively automatic or attentive, the set allows us to
operate within an analyze the quotidian world of immediate perception, while the whole
reminds us that any object of study is part of a larger whole that constitutes relationships
and time. The set, as the individual parts that move, operates according to the rules of
false movement, but its provisional closure is useful insofar as it allows us to examine static
space, its immobile sections and representations in a utilitarian manner. The set is part of
our everyday, readily discernible world and as such offers itself to our use. However, systems
can be isolated in this manner only provisionally. For example, for the sake of study one
can consider ours a closed solar system or the body a closed unit, but it still operates as part
of a larger, open whole. The provisional closure is an illusion, but a productive one for the
sake of analysis, and especially if one keeps in mind the open whole from which the set is
provisionally closed.
41
42
This distinction between set and whole, closed and open then poses two related but
distinct views on movement. Deleuze writes:
It is rather that which prevents each set, however big it is, from closing
in on itself, that which forces it to extend itself into a larger set. The
whole is therefore like thread which traverses sets and gives each one the
possibility, which is necessarily realized, or communicating with another,
to infinity. Thus the whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even
to spirit rather than to content and to space. Whatever their relationship,
one should therefore not confuse the extension of sets into each other
with the opening of the whole which passes into each one, A closed
system is never absolutely closed; but on the one hand it is connected in
space to other systems by a more or less fine thread, and on the other
hand it is integrated or reintegrated into a whole which transmits a
duration to it along this thread.41
The set allows us to deal with movement in a quotidian or pragmatic fashion, but the
whole allows us to intuit movement as creation and recreation of the new, not as discovery
of what already is. At the level of the set or ensemble, thought works via association, linking
images according to similarity and contiguity, contrast and opposition. However, thought
also works to take these associated images and continually expand them outward via process
of differentiation and integration. The whole is ultimately temporal, belonging to time,
and as such connects all sets and ensures that the whole never closes. While space can be
artificially closed, time is always open, and this relationship between the set and whole
constitutes the movement image of classical cinema. Any action in the present always changes
duration, adding new circuits of memory or new layers of the past, to return to Bergsons
diagrams.
The benefits of Deleuzes treatment of movement in Cinema 1 in relation to
architecture are multiple. Broadly speaking, the focus on functionalism that dominates
much of modernist thought and practice can be resituated as a necessary impoverishment.
Necessary, because utility is an important part of the set, or quotidian perception that allows
us to address immediate needs. Impoverishment, because utility is never simply an issue
of discovering what is needed or developing designs that correspond to a pre-determined
41 Deleuze Cinema 1 16-17.
43
end. Function is always a matter of selection and is thus part of creation. From all the anyinstants-whatever that comprise the realm of the virtual and duration, to focus on one is
always to produce something new, as opposed to simply reinforcing what is already present.
A philosophy of movement that allows us to resist the hegemony of science,
positivism and functionalism allows us to reconnect artistic practices and philosophical
practices with time. Duration serves to unite space and time, incorporating every possible
fluctuation or vibration into a single flow from which individual frames or immobile cuts
cannot be subtracted or separated. As such, each individual slice of time or space contains
within it the temporal flux of the open whole. Each moment of duration produces something
genuinely new, which cannot be known or predicted until the event has passed.
Within the realm of architecture, considering the future as always indeterminate, we
no longer search for stable systems or structures within which to design but instead embrace
the multiplicities and contingencies of the built environment and our responses to it. Duree
combines duration and succession, but in a way that signifies invention, creation of forms,
continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.42
Change then is continuous and tied not just to physical or cultural transformations,
but the fluidity of memory, perception, affect and sensation, as well. Bogue writes, Put
simply, memory is the coexisting virtual past, duree the flow of time whereby that virtual past
presses forward into the actual present toward an open future, and lan vital is duree as it
unfolds itself into the future in the various forms of the created and ever-creating universe.43
Pure perception that is, perception without memory is nevertheless impossible. Duree
always carries memory with it. Considering space and time as unrelated and divisible is a
fruitless illusion that neglects the qualitative transformations that occur through space and
time.
Through duration, the affective and expressive nature of space and time challenges
any quantifiable notion of movement. If duree is a dynamic continuation of past into
42 Bergson Creative Evolution 11.
43 Bogue 16.
44
present and toward a future, then there is a latent idea of utopia or a critical stance built
44
into all movement and modes of thinking space and time. Habit and illusion may mask
this, and utopia here is not a radical rebuilding of social structures or environments, but
instead an incremental notion of differentiation. For Deleuze, this whole is directly related to
movement as becoming and is neither given nor givable.45
Habitual recognition and quotidian perception are easily attainable. However,
an apprehension of duration entails a move beyond natural perception into the realm of
attentive recognition, what Bergson called intuition. Intuition of reality can never be reduced
to what the eye can readily see and is thus distinct from quotidian perception. By conflating
movement with physical displacement, we reduce the concept to what is readily perceivable
or experienced. Movement in the Bergsonian and Deleuzian sense, on the other hand,
makes apparent the unrepresentable and shows that movement is never limited to what is
happening in the present. For Deleuze, cinema is the twentieth centurys response to these
issues of movement, and the filmic medium allows us (rather forces us) to shift our thinking
to make the seemingly imperceptible perceptible. To understand this further, it is necessary
to consider the ways in which Bergson and Deleuze reformulate the concept of an image.
IMAGE
As reformulated by Bergson and Deleuze, movement reveals the illusory nature of any
separation of movement from the object that moves. Each element of space (like each note of
a musical score) can be separated and studied, but its relation to duration marks it as part of a
whole (like a musical melody). In this sense, there are no objects that move, only movement.
There are no things in motion, only motion. The goal of philosophy and the arts then is not
to represent movement but to extract it from a continuous flow of matter.
For Deleuze, the downfall of philosophy and any artistic enterprise is to make
creation or interpretation manageable by subtracting movement from the object of study
44 Bogue 13-14.
45
or reducing movement down to its constituent parts thereby missing the totality from
which it is inseparable and from which it derives its meaning. Movement as such is not
representational, corresponding to a transcendent view of the world. Instead movement
is revealed as immanent, always already present in the objects and images surrounding us,
capable of taking any direction or form imaginable. Following this modern shift in thinking
Deleuze writes, Movement, as physical reality in the external world, and the image, as
psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be opposed.46
Deleuzes second commentary on Bergson develops the implications of reformulating
movement, focusing on another key Bergsonian concept, that of the image. The image, for
Bergson, is indistinguishable from matter. Bergson in fact contends that the world is made
up of images, which include all organic and inorganic matter. Bergson uses this idea of life as
images to counter the excesses of both realism and idealism. The image is neither an idealist
representation nor a realist thing.47 Rodowick sums up Bergsons approach to the image when
he writes:
Comprehending Bergson means understanding that all matter is Image,
and that the universe is defined as the whole aggregate of images acting
and reacting to one another on all their surfaces and in all of their parts.
In this holistic picture, interiority and exteriority are only relations
among images. It makes no sense in Bergsons view to say that images
are inside or outside of us, and even less to say that they are produced in
consciousness as the internal specular reflection of external perceptions,
or that the world is viewed from behind a solipsistic interior cut off from
the objective world.48
To dismantle traditional dualisms, Deleuze conceives of the brain as a screen that
delimits. The two philosophical extremes, realism and idealism, both connect perception
to knowledge. While one links knowledge to laws of nature, the other links knowledge to
laws of thought or mind. However, Deleuze argues that both divorce thought from matter
46 Deleuze Cinema 1 xiv.
47 Bergson prefigures phenomenology in that, like Husserl for example, he posits a relational linkage
or unit between subject and object, perceiver and perceived that cannot be divided. However, whereas
phenomenologists assume consciousness, Bergson assumes movement as a universal flow of matter-images, and
then arrives at consciousness through philosophical deduction.
48 Rodowick 29.
46
and time. Images are not subjective or relative. Perception and the images that comprise
perception must respond to human subsistence and need, as well as the constancy of change
and liberation. The brain screens through selection, so it becomes vital to explore means
for moving beyond quotidian recognition and perception in order to understand when our
capacity for selection is blinding us to the open whole of duration, the virtual pasts and
futures that we are not yet exploring.
To elucidate the concept of an image, Deleuze refers to Bergsons use of light as
an analogy for consciousness.49 This analogy is significant because, while it has been used
continually throughout the history of philosophy, Bergson reverses the conventional
treatment of light in philosophy. Contrary to the common image of the mind as shedding
light on a subject or object or the light of truth represented as a beam coming from
consciousness, perception or mind and illuminating objects, Bergson shows that objects are
always already illuminated. As Deleuze summarizes, In short it is not consciousness which is
light, it is the set of images, or the light, which is consciousness, immanent to matter.50
Bergson contends that there is a luminosity always already in things, which floods
the subject, not vice-versa. Here representation takes on a new meaning and achieves a
new dynamic. If matter is image, then representations are already happening if only in a
virtual plane. As Bergson notes, to make representation actual, it would be necessary not
to throw more light on the object, but, on the contrary to obscure some of its aspects, to
diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in
its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture [tableau].51 In other
words, the brain must screen or filter the environment in order to turn the virtual realm of
possibilities into a reality.
Unlike phenomenology, which explored natural perception in order to find a
theory of correspondence between perceiver and perceived, the act of perception and
49 Bergsons work, including Matter and Memory, drew more from science, especially physics, than
Deleuzes cinema books do. As such, Bergsons use of light has an added layer of complexity. For our purposes
here, light can be treated as one among many of Bergsons helpful analogies.
51 Bergson Matter and Memory 36.
47
the world being perceived, Bergson explored a state of things which would constantly
change, a flowing-matter in which no point of anchorage nor centre of reference would be
assignable.52 As such, the image is never representational, merely recording or presenting to
mind what is perceived. Instead the image highlights the inefficacies of human perception
and seeks unnatural means of non-human perception to rescue us from habitual recognition
and allow us to think and produce anew. Therefore, if images as intensive consciousness
of something and movement as extensiveness in space cannot be separated or opposed, as
Deleuze concludes, We find ourselves in fact faced with the exposition of a world where
IMAGE = MOVEMENT.53
In The Time-Image Deleuze elaborates the concept of an image when he writes:
The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements,
that is, a set of relationships of time from which the variable present
only flows. [...] What is specific to the image [...] is to make perceptible,
to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the
represented object and do not allow themselves to reduced to the
present.54
What is significant is that for Deleuze matter is not a finite, measurable object created by
and reduced to the physical laws of the universe. Instead objects and matter are lines of light
and lines of flight that can and will take on any form or facilitate any relationship imaginable
or necessary. That is, the image serves to render visible temporal relations that are otherwise
invisible or imperceptible to quotidian perception.
To further develop this notion, Deleuze creates the concept of a special image
in relation to the body. Again, all living organisms also constitute images, and all living
images can be defined in relation to movement. As Bogue writes, From the amoeba to the
neurologically most sophisticated of animals, the living image may be viewed as a system
for relaying movements for receiving movements from outside and generating its own
movements from within.55 Moreover, all living images (including humans) are organized by
52
53
54
55
Deleuze Cinema 1 57.

Deleuze Cinema 2 xii.
Bogue 30.
48
a sensory-motor schema that coordinates perceptions, affects and actions. This schema and
its operative structure will become Deleuzes point of departure for the three primary varieties
of movement-images in film. The perception-image allows us to sense the outside world,
the action-image allows us to physically address these conditions and structure the space
surrounding us, and the affection-image constitutes a connecting gap between perceptions
and actions, or between images, including other humans, as well as all living and non-living
matter.
For Bergson the analogy of billiard balls being hit, reacting to an action, serves to
metaphorically represent the movement of non-living images. However, living-images,
on the other hand, are like billiard balls that hesitate and think, constituting a center of
indeterminacy. In order for this center to appear, a gap must be created or opened up in the
interval between images, the flow of time and spatial framing. The interval produces a gap
that forestalls movement and complicates the process by which we subtract from perception
that which does not interest us. What happens on one side of the interval that is opened up
to indeterminacy does not logically follow from what occurred on the other side. The interval
produces a provisional center in the acentered universe of movement-images that allows
something new to be produced.
The interval is comprised of a complex set of events that creates a center of
indetermination. As Rodowick writes, Indetermination has a specific sense here: it is the
range of responses available for selection as the appropriate response or action with respect
to an analyzed stimulus or perception.56 The interval for Deleuze is a cinematic concept that
serves to spatially organize time. The interval in the movement-image is inseparable from the
images it links. It is neither part of those images nor an integral link among them.
If perception allows us to select from the continual flow of matter-images that which
interests us and action allows us to respond, affect is what forestalls movement. In its absence,
there is no lag between percept and action. However, the more pronounced the affect, the
56 Rodowick 87.
49
more it takes us out of our habitual mode of thought, the larger the interval between percept
and action becomes. That is, consciousness is immanent to matter, which contains an entire
virtual realm of possible actions. What actualizes a virtual movement-image is the interval
or in the interaction of the continuous flow of matter. Bergson calls this interval a center of
indetermination of a living image.
Perception, action and affect are all part of the sensory-motor schema, perception
being part of action. In this sense we already see a tearing down of the dichotomy between
perception as passive (responding to already existing entities) and action as active. Perception
is part of controlling ones environment by selecting those entities worthy of ones attention
in relation to possible future actions. Bogue writes, Bergsons point is that perception is not
representation at all, but a constituent part of action. There is no divide between an external,
extended material world and an internal, unextended mental reality, no split between being
and being perceived.57
That is, the interval here is not a destructive or deconstructive concept, installing
an insuperable fragmentation. The interval instead allows for a creative sense of becoming
by allowing or forcing the new to enter thinking. It is through the interval that affect and
sensation allow us to think differently, to resist habit and clich and return to the genesis of
thought. The interval opens time so that the unpredictable and unforeseen can occur instead
of logically closing it off to artificially reinforce preconceived concepts, affects and percepts.
That is, the body has the capacity to experience itself through movement as more than itself
and to deploy its sensory-motor power to create the unpredictable. Creativity exists between
perception and action, between the real and virtual.
This complexity of resituating the image as part of this world, as opposed to a
representation of it, tied bodily to our daily functioning, acting, perceiving and feeling,
as well as immanently to a virtual world of possibilities, means that movement, image,
movement-images and images of thought all take on added complexity. The image of
57 Bogue 32.
50
thought Deleuze created is one that evades representation and prescriptive moralizing, opting
instead for a theory that incorporates the flux of existence. Movement and image, movement
as image, image as movement or movement-images allow us to take on this onus of continual
creation. Cinema expresses this distinctly modern, Bergsonian and Deleuzian conception
of movement and image, and we are now equipped to look at the cinematic apparatus in
more detail as well as its influence on architecture. However, before doing so, it is worth
considering what is at stake for architecture in such a discourse.
ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENT
This image of thought in which movement elicits our attention and influences our work
has marked the history of modernist architecture design, theory and historiography. While
movement as conventionally understood abstract demarcations of displacement through
space lends itself more readily to study and application, it does not obviate the need to
understand movement in a more complex manner and to understand how real movement
influences (or should influence) the study of architecture. Real movement, understood
in its connection to duration, exchanges formal prescriptions, teleological history, and
cultural critiques that favor rapid and revolutionary change for an increased understanding
of how the new is created and how process works at those encounters with limitations, the
virtual dynamics of history and ongoing qualitative change. The agenda Deleuze outlines
in considering movement then is not so much aggrandizing or reifying the topic, but a
subordination of it to time.
From the start, modernism had an intimate relationship with movement. There
is an increasingly complex view of history or the movement of time. Sometimes this was
evidenced in an outright eschewal of history as oppressive and obsolete. Reviling a superficial
or arbitrary use of the past allowed the pioneers of early modern architecture to resist certain
representational tendencies that posited ideal origins or Ur-architectures as concepts to be
recovered or created. However, it also prevented artists from conceptualizing a relationship
51
with the past. This was addressed at times by an increasing awareness of history as a critical
act of movement between past, present and future.
More broadly speaking, early modernists were fascinated by movement as a means
of capturing the energies and significance of modern life. This is seen most clearly in the
adulation of machinery and mechanization, most marked with the Deutscher Werkbund and
especially Futurism. Futurism sought revolutionary change through speed and dynamism
and new technologies. While the Futurists held Bergson in high esteem, they endeavored
to create symbolic equivalents to his philosophy, as well as their own excited states of
mind, through the incorporation and reification of external stimuli, such as speed, light,
mechanized movement and new materials. Movement is aesthetically represented in dynamic
lines, as well as in programming that emphasized spaces to aggrandize technology, such as
power stations, airports and airship hangars.
Like the Futurists, the Russian constructivists sought revolutionary change. However,
unlike Bergson and later Deleuze, their vision of a new society was not so much an issue
of extracting the immanent potential in this world as much as creating a new one, which
meant a teleological enterprise that would aim toward the end of history. The Expressionists
similarly endeavored to create an ideal world that would employ architecture in service of
creating a center of form and meaning to ground humankind in an otherwise fragmented
and acentered universe. That is, their works purport to make a spiritual order visible and
reveal the inner processes of an idealized state of nature.
However, in all these elements of movement, whether historical and temporal,
mechanized and spatial, or cultural and utopian, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
modernism still fell back on traditional dualisms or dialectical tendencies. Despite their vast
differences, traditionalists and the avant-garde both split the eye that sees from the objects
it sees, the former emphasizing perception, the latter the object itself. Vernacular styles and
standardized systems both reinforce dichotomies between mind and body and between man
and nature.
52
Despite the disparate approaches and ideals of the myriad movements comprising
early modern architecture, they all facilitate an ongoing dialectical tendency in design. The
concentration on handicraft as the only means of creating quality space gives way to a feeling
that authentic forms could only arise from the imprint of an expressive temperament, which
in turns leads to the conviction that the early modern zeitgeist could only be represented
through emergent forms arising from the logical and direct use of new materials to solve
building problems. These contrasting tendencies are then synthesized in building types and
forms that posit the architect as a mediator between formal invention and standardization or
between personal style and appropriate form.
Le Corbusier emerges as an important figure in architectures attempt to incorporate
movement. During the 1910s, his early inspiration from both nature and emergent
technology operates as a mode of experimentation that considers movement as a key to
grasping the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernist practice and thought. On the
other hand, we see, especially in his writing, as well as the influence and outright copying of
his work, a tendency to abandon experimentation in the search for new universal principles
or a return to teleology.
The experimentation into the nature of forms, materials, space and movement is
inspired by a realization that the different stylistic approaches developed in Europe in the
generations immediately prior to his, despite allowing architecture to emerge as diverse and
lively, all ran into problems when they were reduced to a set of rules or guidelines to be
followed. In late nineteenth-century Art Nouveau and early twentieth-century Art Deco,
for instance, the early emphasis on movement struggled to move beyond representational
strategies. The work of figures like Antoni Gaudi, which explored movement both practically,
historically and theoretically quickly burned out in a series of attempts to posit Art Nouveau
as a set of procedures that did nothing more than represent images of movement. The late
nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, while a primary influence or inspiration, also
suffered because it failed to properly represent the processes and dynamics of a contemporary,
industrial era.
53
Le Corbusiers interest in movement allows him to create architecture anew and

differently from his contemporaries. His works are powerful insofar as they posit modernism
as a mode of experimentation and thinking-through that evades normative strategies for
design or a devotion to stylistic tendencies, positing instead a process for creating differently.
But they become problematic to the extent that they replace earlier universal guidelines with
new ones or return to a teleological approach in which his techniques are posited as definitive
rules to be followed.
Early in his career his productive treatment of movement is evinced by both his villa
designs, as well as his early industrial designs. While Le Corbusiers Dom-ino scheme (1914)
(Fig. 1.11) ostensibly allows for flexibility with its open plan and potentially capacity to
partition space at will, its chief advantage was rapid prototyping and construction. Maison
Fig. 1.11 Maison Dom-ino [1914-1915]
Fig. 1.13 The Modulor
Fig. 1.12 Contemporary City [1922]
54
Dom-ino suggests a means for experimentation and proliferation. However, the appeal of
such an approach is limited to the degree to which it allows for difference within later villa
designs. The danger in such an approach, as well as that of his later foray into urban design, is
that by focusing on prototyping, he risks the eternal return of the same and threatens to cut
off experimentation. His ideal city plans achieve the same reduction at an urban scale (Fig.
1.12), and his Modulor (Fig. 1.13), which combined the golden section, ideal human and
harmonic proportions in an attempt to reconcile the natural and mechanistic universes. This
return to idealized forms resists and threatens to overwhelm any other attempt to incorporate
movement into his design process.
One common master narrative for early modernism seems to develop from a shortlived consensus in the late 1920s, during which time modern architecture is equated with
historical and tectonic rationalism, a philosophical and aesthetic use of mechanization, the
elimination of all but the most essential elements of tradition, and a moral imperative to
incorporate honesty, integrity and simplicity into design in order to move toward aspirations
of universality and internationalism.

The Villa Savoye at Poissy (1928-1933) (Figs. 1.14-1.17 ) as a machine for
living can be seen as symbolic of this influential moment in modernism. However, while
this building is among the most studied works of architectural modernism, it holds up
to increased scrutiny because it takes all the concerns of movement as related to early
modernism seriously without providing any element of closure. There is no clear dialectic
between mind and body, nature and man. Instead it emerges as an ongoing dialogue with
spatial movement that also manages to indirectly reveal time as a fourth dimension.
The experience of the building cannot be discussed without recourse to the
architecture promenade, the interpretation of which is crucial to understanding movement.
A common reading is that this feature provides an episodic experience that forces visitors to
continually alter their perspectives. The whole of the experience then is one of accumulated
episodes and spatial experiences. That is, there remains a tendency to view the building
Fig. 1.14 Villa Savoye (1928-1933)
55
dialectically. The formal symmetry of the armature, plan and ramp in tension with the
asymmetrical curves or the idealism of perfect forms (the square of the plan and the cylinder
of the pilotis) in tension with the rationalist use of concrete and lack of ornamentation are
resolved through the rotational elements of the circulation or the unifying color scheme.
The circulation itself is often read as teleological, with nature framing the building
upon approach, a developing dialectic through the building, which is resolved or takes on a
complete reversal as nature becomes framed by the building once one ascends to and emerges
into the roof garden. Vers une Architecture further reinforces this reading as Le Corbusier
theorizes that the proper process of design is to set standards, then to refine and perfect them
by eliminating all but the most essential characteristics. He contends this is what occurred
through the evolution of Greek temples from Paestum to the Parthenon. His theory here
marks a return to the ancient world of ideal poses or successive stages of development,
punctuated by a teleological and ideal reification of his five points of architecture.
56
His theoretical work, which posits this villa as a standardized model with rote rules
to be followed, cuts off movement in relation to the whole of duration. Instead of promoting
a continual return to the genesis of thought, Le Corbusier posits the defining features of
the villa as elements to be copied. In this sense his
theoretical works act more as instruction manuals
containing recipes for design (raise the building on
pilotis, separate partitions from structure, incorporate
an open plan, ribbon windows and a roof garden).
However, what is missed in positing these propositions
as universal is the genesis of thought or the creative
search for difference that allowed for their success in the
first place.

What such an interpretation or use of theory
misses is the extent to which an overwhelming sense

of ambiguity remains throughout the experience of
the building. The different elements of the design:
the architecture promenade, the rationalist and
idealist tendencies, the formal and episodic layers,
are more convincingly read as an act of simultaneity
that introduces intervals into the experience. Unlike
the arresting of time found in cubist paintings that
influenced his work, the simultaneity here allows the
body to emerge as a center of indetermination with
the layering of perspectives and events introducing a

forestalling between perception and action that imbues the work with a generative capacity
to introduce new thoughts, to reveal layers and tensions within consciousness and to connect
movement to thought through time.
57
It is significant to note that whereas Maison La Roche is often posited as the first
use of a ramp and the precursor to Villa Savoye, it was only the first use of a ramp in one of
Le Corbusiers villas. The first use of ramps in his career was within two abattoirs designed
for the military at Challuy (1917) (Figs. 1.18-1.20) and Garchizy (1917) (1.21-1.23).
The former emphasized horizontal movement, keeping the complex system of ramps and
conveyors relatively close to the ground, while the latter evinces a more adept of sectional
planning, extending the system of movement vertically. In the second design, the animals
are led sectionally via ramps upward where they are slaughtered before being conveyed back
down via belts and chutes in pieces to various parts of the complex.
Like the cinematic point of view, which resists reduction to human perspectives, in
these abattoir designs, Le Corbusier encountered an element of excess in which the control
and containment of cattle, their slaughter and the refrigeration of meat necessitated formal
considerations without much historical precedent. While the designs called for functionality,
utility in this case could not be reduced to the human scale or to a simple matter of selecting
what interested either him as a designer or his clients. He was thus forced to focus on the
Fig. 1.18 Abattoir at Challuy (1917)
58
Fig. 1.22 Abattoir at Garchizy (1917)
process of turning living organisms into food, which entails identification with cattle and
with machinery of a sublime scalethat is to say, a non-human, pre-subjective vantage point
from which to design.

Through Le Corbusiers inspiration from his earlier industrial works, movement
within the Villa Savoye takes on a similarly pre-human or pre-individuated facet and allows
the single-family residence to take on new meaning. The architecture promenade and the
movement it elicits in the Villa Savoye then cannot be read as a simple matter of utility.
It instead installs movement as an element of excess that resists codification or reduction.
Physical movement does not provide unity as much as refer to additional forms of movement
related to perception, affect and duration by interrupting sectional and planar elements that
subvert the otherwise ideal forms and prevent them from achieving resolution. As such, other
elements within the design, including a floor plan that accommodates changing functions
and a faade treatment that resists formal symmetry can be interpreted as attempts to subvert
59
the classical tendency to situate living within predefined forms and carefully demarcated
spaces. Living is an act of continuous becoming rather than static being.
Le Corbusiers later works present an increased emphasis on experimentation and
difference, as well as expression. However, unlike his expressionist forebearers, there is a rarely
either an inward turning away from the world or an idealist turn toward a pre-determined
future. In fact, his later works suggest an interest in this world in which neither man and
nature nor mind and matter can be distinguished. His later works also indicate a conceptual
approach that moves beyond a mechanistic view of the universe equating buildings with
machines and humans as passively predefined subjects. His forms, even when inspired by
technology and industry become more sculptural, allowing him to create new means of
expression and tectonic experimentation, as well as a capacity to posit modernism as a mode
of experimentation never complete, never fully defined. The formal expression is expression
of a world in a constant state of creation.
His design for the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1950-1954) (Figs.
1.24-1.27) in particular suggests a much more meaning use of movement as tension. The
tension is one between space and time, as well as between the elements of the senory-motor
schema, namely perception, affect and action. Formally, the tension is obvious as complex
convexities and concavities sit restlessly on a hilltop covered by a roof that overwhelms the
walls below and punctuated by idiosyncratic towers facing different directions and irregular
punctures in the wall to modulate light. These elements as a whole are unified less by their
Fig. 1.24 Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1954) Fig. 1.25 Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1954)
60
Fig. 1.26 Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1954) Fig. 1.27 Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp (1954)
formal composition than by their apparent response to the environment. Here the response
is not an attempt to discover ideal forms that would achieve a logical synthesis with the
environment but instead to create a violent conflict in which the pressures of the surrounding
landscape and environment seem to force the buildings undulations. The sructure works to
filter the environment more than provide simple shelter from it.
Movement here is of a temporal nature than acknowledges the uneasy relationship
between present needs, the long duration of past histories of the site and of sacred
architecture and a future that is yet to come. While there are ritualistic elements to the
approach and movement through the site and spaces, this experience is less in keeping with
traditional church design or pilgrimages than in introducing a strong element of ambiguity
that, unlike much of his earlier work, resists the normative. He utilizes his earlier works
(sketches of boats, the landscape sculptures from his plans for Algiers and the curved rubble
walls of his Pavilion Suisse) in an attempt to reveal the genesis of thought and modernism as
a means for continual experimentation, that which allows for the continual creation of the
new and different without the burden of discovery of ideal forms and pure rationality.
His plan for Chandigarh (1952-1959) is even more complex, combining seven
hierarchies of movement with elements of his idealized aspirations for city planning. While
the tensions created here do as much to revert to idealized and utopian visions, individual
elements in the scheme reflect his ongoing focus on the creative genesis of thought, form
and space. The Assembly chamber (1955) (Figs. 1.28-1.29) in particular achieves a sublime
Fig. 1.28 Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh (1955)
61
Fig. 1.29 Palace of Assembly at Chandigarh (1955)
drama by installing a tension between program as a place for democratic political debate
and the form as mannered and seemingly irrational. Here Le Corbusier installs another
element of excess and the sublime by taking inspiration from industrial power stations, as
well as the possibility of staging nocturnal and solar festivals or celebrations. While none of
these strategies has an ostensible connection to the process of democracy, Le Corbusier was
moving beyond utility to introduce an interval between perception and action. That is by
taking recourse to non-human perception, the long duration of the solar and lunar calendars,
as well as spaces designed for industrial purposes, he allows the new to enter thinking. That
is democracy, for Le Corbusier, was not a normative set of rules, guidelines or images to be
represented, as much as an ongoing struggle for creation.
In short, architecture as a machine for living works well if living is seen as grounded
in this world with an eye toward the perpetual creation of the new or a world to come
that resists teleology or reductively utopian overtones, recognizing instead the need for the
eternal return of difference. As such, the machine is not to be conflated with automobiles,
ocean liners and planes. The machine for living as a metaphor or direct reification of
technology acts as nothing more than another theory of representation, the basis for which
measures architectural space according to how functionally or aesthetically it corresponds
to the efficiency of other machines. However, as a producing-machine, desiring-machine,
architecture aids thinking, returns us to the genesis of thought, reveals a pre-individuated
state and allows for the unthought to emerge.
Satter | Any-Space-Whatever
62
Section Two:
Cinema and
Any-Space-Whatever
A MYSTERY MAN, tall, well-dressed and groomed, older than Fred, approaches him.
MYSTERY MAN: Weve met before, havent we?
FRED: I dont think so. Where was it that you think weve met?
MYSTERY MAN: At your house. Dont you remember?
FRED (surprised): No, no I dont. Are you sure?
MYSTERY MAN: Of course. In fact, Im there right now.
FRED (incredulous): What do you mean? Youre where right now?
MYSTERY MAN: At your house.
FRED: Thats absurd.
The Mystery Man reaches into his coat pocket, takes out a cellular phone and holds it out to Fred.
MYSTERY MAN: Call me.
Fred snickers, like this is a bad joke. The Mystery Man puts the phone into Freds hand.
MYSTERY MAN (CON-T): Dial your number.
Fred hesitates, puzzled.
MYSTERY MAN (CON-T): Go ahead.
Fred shrugs, laughs, dials his number. We HEAR a pick up as we stay on FREDS FACE.
PHONE VOICE OF MYSTERY MAN: I told you I was here.
Fred, still holding the phone, stares at the man standing in front of him.
FRED: How did you do that?
The Mystery Man points to the phone.
MYSTERY MAN: Ask me.
Fred, mirthful at first, as if it is a party trick of some kind, suddenly turns serious -its obvious hes
thinking now of the videotapes. He speaks into the phone.
FRED (angrily): How did you get into my house?
PHONE VOICE OF MYSTERY MAN: You invited me. Its not my habit to go where Im not
wanted.
Fred looks at the man in front of him, but speaks again into the phone.
63
FRED: Who are you?

The man laughs - identical laughs - both over the phone and in person.
PHONE VOICE OF MYSTERY MAN: Give me my phone back.
The man in front of Fred reaches out his hand for the phone. Fred hears the line go dead, and he
slowly passes the phone back to the Mystery Man who takes it, folds it, and puts it in his pocket.
MYSTERY MAN: Its been a pleasure talking to you.1
While Lost Highway expresses movement as related to space, time and identity, it never does
so through recourse to conventional narrative devices or linearity. Instead framing reveals a
process of selection from the virtual environment in which we are engulfed, shots provide
an order to these moving parts of consciousness, and montage relates the movement of
consciousness to duration. The themes of voyeurism and surveillance reinforce the nature of
perception, the ever-changing relational dynamics reveal causal links between actions and
reactions, while a mysterious element of excess reveals an expressive and affective component
of the film.

However, irrational linkages are gradually introduced in the intervals between
perception and action, to which there can be no logical reaction. The time and space of the
film becomes contingent any-space-whatevers in which relationships, connections between
space and time take lines of flight that undermine habitual recognition. Spaces overlap, time
becomes indiscernible and identities are conflated to show that we as spectators are not yet
thinking or that any attempt to fall back on clichs or habitual action will prevent meaning
from emerging.
The most obvious interval arises as we (and Fred) are introduced to the Mystery Man.
As he approaches Fred, the background image is blurred and its sound muted, introducing a
nonhuman capacity of thought to frame our perception differently and reform consciousness
to elicit unease. The Mystery Man reveals himself to coexist in different realms of space and
time. Moreover, he informs his interlocutor that Freds own actions and words allowed this
spatial and temporal simultaneity.
1
Lynch and Gifford Lost Highway The Screenplay.
64
While representational modes of thought prevent this breach in logic, cinema reveals
a nonhuman dimension of consciousness linked to the virtual realm of possibilities always
already waiting to be utilized when thought is conceived anew. That is, the films structure
and methods simultaneously connects and disconnects elements of the film, providing lines
of flight that allow thought to continually emerge anew, and creates intensities that refer to
the open whole of duration. Lost Highway shows us the paradoxical nature of movement that
is simultaneously unitary and multiple. But what makes for meaning in the end is duration
as a single entity of consciousness itself that is simultaneously unitary and multiple.
FRAME, SHOT AND MONTAGE

Beyond the Bergsonian philosophy of movement that provides the theoretical underpinning
of Deleuzes cinema project, the bulk of the two volumes is comprised of an in-depth look at
cinematic concepts. While Bergson provides the concept of image and thought as movement
and Peirce the semiotic taxonomy of signs necessary to organize these ideas, cinema itself, its
strategies and techniques provide Deleuze with the empirical and aesthetic tools to explore
movement. As such, film emerges as an invaluable pedagogical tool. While movies do not
have a monopoly on movement and time, they most clearly and concisely provide the
theoretical basis for movement- and time-images that are seen to be operative in this world.
Deleuze suggests that the universe is in effect a metacinema when he writes, The material
universe, the plane of immanence, is the machine assemblage of movement-images.2 If cinema
gives us a moving image of thought that evades representation, it is through its framing, shots
and montage, as well as the connection between perception, affect, action and the intervals
linking them, that we can ground and understand this image.
Deleuze eschews any interest in cinematic concepts as either pure abstraction or as
directly reified ideas belonging solely to the realm of film. Deleuzes encyclopedic analysis of
films, their complex history, aesthetic and formal strategies eschews traditional film criticism
2
65
or analysis in order to maintain his focus on the relationship between matter and images,
movement and time. Deleuze uses movies to create and develop philosophical concepts
that clearly emerge through film but are not unique to the medium. Here there is a key
distinction between concepts and ideas. Whereas the latter are genre- or medium-dependent,
the former are not, allowing his writings on film to create new modes of thinking across a
wide spectrum of media and disciplines. Deleuze sums up his enterprise, as well as what
it negates, when he writes, This study is not a history of the cinema. It is a taxonomy, an
attempt at the classification of images and signs.3
There is a reciprocal (but never linear) relationship between philosophy and film.
Deleuze is interested in showing how the concepts Bergson and he develop through
philosophical investigations are already operative within cinema. The value of cinema, those
who create it and those viewers it influences is in demonstrating how these figures think
with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts.4 Film for Deleuze is relational
before it is aesthetic or narrative. His approach is contextual and critical, never promoting
one theory or style but instead demonstrating how myriad and seemingly disparate
approaches can accomplish the same effects to think and express in terms of movement and
time.
Deleuze writes, The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs,
that is, a pre-verbal intelligible content (pure semiotics).5 That is, cinema serves as a thought
machine revealing the virtual potential of movement and time, which allow thought and
action to take any line of flight imaginable, never limited to what is immediately perceptible
or possible. The cameras eye presents an alternative mode of perception that evades clich,
habitual thought and action in order to produce the new and reveal duration. Deleuzes goal
is to deduce the process of thought, creation and meaning from the images and signs as they
appear for themselves without any formal, aesthetic or ideological influences, absent a predetermined end or pre-existing foundation from which to judge works.
3
4
5
Deleuze Cinema 1 xiv.

Deleuze Cinema 1 xiv.
Deleuze Cinema 1 ix.
66
Deleuze begins his analysis of film by considering frame, shot and montage, the
smallest units of meaning found within cinema. In short, the frame is a mobile cut of duree
but refers indirectly to the open whole of movement. The shot mediates between the frame
and montage, reinforcing the limited set of visual elements in the frame but suggesting or
alluding to relations set up by montage, in which the open whole of duration is revealed. In
other words, the frame organizes the parts, the shot relates parts to each other and montage
relates parts to the moving whole of the film.
These concepts also allow the types of Bergsonian movement to materialize and
become imaged. The frame operates as the artificially closed set, organizing and composing
bodies, gestures and actions as part of an ensemble. In the mystery man scene from Lost
Highway, framing gives us the most immediate relation of elements in the scene, the
characters relation to the space of the party, their relation to each other and to objects
within the frame. However, the frame also opens the shot to the moving whole of the film.
Switching between long, medium and close-up shots, the frame incorporates objects, figures
and faces of all sizes and shapes into a space artificially unified by the space of cinema. This
is important because the use of close-ups within the actual conversation between Fred and
Mystery Man provisionally distances their conversation from the rest of the space. However,
the return to medium and long shots, reminds us of the whole of movement of which the
telephone call was but a small part. There is always an offscreen space that reveals the framed
elements as an artificial set of the whole.
The shot can be defined abstractly as the intermediary between the framing of the
set and the montage of the whole,6 defining a relatively open space and mediates between
relative and absolute movement.7 Montage then reveals this whole, this absolute movement
of duration.8 That is, montage organizes the parts or sets into a unified whole. Through
7 Deleuzes terminology lacks the precision necessary to determine where exactly the shot begins and
ends. It is not clear if a moving camera, for example, belongs to the frame or the shot, and neither is it clear
where the movement of montage becomes distinct from that of the shot. However, this ambiguity, in the end,
merely serves to reinforce the continuity and fluidity of movement in cinema.
8 This whole of movement as duration and time is given indirectly in the movement-image but directly
67
montage the relationships between the parts and are revealed as part of larger ensembles,
which in turn reveal more ensembles. As Rodowick writes:
Through montage this schema replicates and extend itself by levels,
determining the movement or movements that distribute these elements
into larger ensembles. The continuity system of editing established one
set of norms for the linkage of shots through rational divisions. Just as
the continuous movement of the film strip is integrated into the shot,
the shot into sequences, the sequences into parts, and so forth, every
ensemble is part of another, more extensive one.9
That is, at each level of the frame, shot and montage, we can understand Bergsonian
movement between set and ensemble, part and whole as at play, but the power and aim of
each level of expression is to provide a view of time as duration.
Deleuze further characterizes each of these levels of movement. Framing is a
provisional and artificial method of enclosure that defines the screen as a working area and
reveals perceptual strategies of selection or the basic act of choosing parts to form the set.
There are, according to Deleuze, five characteristics of the framed image, which posit it as a
strategic and productive act of delimiting. The first characteristic of the frame is its degree
of saturation (filling the screen with lots of information) or rarefaction (containment of
little information or complete emptiness). Freds conversation with Mystery Man is rarefied,
containing two talking heads and a telephone. All other background elements and sounds are
removed from the scene. However, the conversation is bookended by saturated images rich in
detail and background elements.
The second trait is the geometry and/or dynamism of the frame itself. That is the
frame is either static or in motion, utilizing wipes, pans, tracking shots and so on. Again,
the shots leading into and out of the mysterious telephone conversation are dynamic, the
camera following Fred through the party. Elsewhere dissolves are strategically used to reveal
within the time-image. That is, the movement-image, through continuity and rational cuts, reveals the existence
of a larger whole to which the parts belong. However, within the time-image, discontinuities and irrational cuts
reveal time directly.
9 Rodowick 11.
68
the passage of time. In both cases dynamism reveals or creates relationships within space
and time. The conversation itself is geometric or static, as are many other scenes in the film,
which serve to emphasize claustrophobia and introspection.
The third attribute is the frames capacity to separate the objects in it while
simultaneously uniting them as a single composition. As such, Deleuze writes, The
cinematographic image is always dividual [neither divisible nor indivisible].10 The framing
of the telephone conversation, for instance separates the two figures, moving between
two matched shots of their individual figures, while simultaneously uniting them as part
of a larger composition. This dividual character of the frame is further used by Lynch to
emphasize the dynamics of various relationships between characters, as well as between
characters and their settings while simultaneously evincing the degree to which these
characters are alienated or estranged from each other, space and time.
Fourth, the angle of framing and deframing acts as a perspective, which is either
pragmatic as when it reveals a subjectively defined point of view or lays claim to a higher
justification,11 as when the frame reveals images from non-human perspectives. Sometimes
these perspectives are eventually justified or explained to avoid an empty aestheticism.
However, sometimes these bizarre angles remain to reveal an opening of the otherwise
closed system. Deleuze writes, Deframings [decadrages] which are not pragmatically justified
refer to precisely this second aspect as their raison detre,12 which would suggest that unjustified
points of view provide an indirect glimpse of the open whole. In Lost Highway, the opening
scene of headlights moving down the highway and the videos that Fred and Renee receive
reveal point of view shots. Of whose point of view we are never sure, but they are pragmatic.
Most of the film, however, is deframed by an objective or nonhuman consciousness that
reveals the cameras unique perspective, a becoming-machinic, which, irrespective of
subjectivity, develops and facilitates relationships. In this sense, the camera does not improve
human vision as much as provide a nonhuman or pre-human alternative to it.
69
Finally the frame includes, excludes and determines an out-of-field (hors-champ),

which serves to tie images on screen to images off the screen or outside of its direct
purview. The closer the relationship between what is on and off screen, the more space
seems normative and quotidian. The larger the discrepancy between these two, the more
disjunction is suggested in space. As with acts of deframing, the out-of-field ties the set to
duration and shows that even within each frame, the relation between the set and whole,
the relative and absolute is significant. As Deleuze writes, the out-of-field has two facets:
the actualisable relation with other sets, and the virtual relation with the whole.13 Relative
movement is spatial and actual, while the absolute is temporal and virtual, constituting
change, duration and becoming. The out-of-field allows for the creation of the new by
referencing these virtual spaces. The presence of the Mystery Man reveals an out-of-frame,
an irrational and inexplicable relation to space and time that reveals the virtual potential of
movement.
However, if the act of selecting is to be understood as one of creation, the screen
as frame serves to disorient as much as to unite. The screen onto which films are projected
forces entities of all sizes and shapes, from cosmic landscapes of the universe to the
microscopic worlds of atoms, to occupy the same frame. Far from a deceptive practice,
however, Deleuze finds in this destabilizing practice of framing a means to ensure a constant
deterritorialisation of the image.14 That is, deframings and out-of-fields ensure that the
image can never be absolutely codified, assigned to a particular section of space or time.
Images are always revealed as moving parts of a whole that also moves. As Rodowick notes,
framing encompasses the fundamental articulations of the movement-image: differentiation
and specification.15
If framing is an issue of selection, related to perception, the shot for Deleuze
resembles consciousness in its capacity to form unity or assemblage out of many aggregates.
15 Rodowick 43.
70
If perception focuses on specific objects for the sake of utility, consciousness restores them
to their unified positions. If framings single out objects, the shot reunites them into a
continuous part of an open whole. Objects then are both separated via differentiation and
reunited as part of duration. The shot, an extended sequence that suggests potential beyond
itself, can then be conceived as continual spatial and temporal modulation, suggesting
movement as an indivisible, qualitative multiplicity.16 Because movement, transformation
and change are Deleuzes concern, the shot ultimately emerges as a guide for the ongoing
repositioning of elements, as well as an expression of movement as duration. The movement
of the camera and the movement between shots allow us to see movement distinct from a
human point of view. This pure movement is independent of any figure or perspective. In
this sense the shot acts like a consciousness, which is not us, the spectator, nor the hero; it
is the camera sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or superhuman.17
If the frame introduces parts that move and the shot relates these moving parts,
montage then refers these parts to an absolute and open whole. If the cut and shot determine
the set, the assemblage of sets constitutes montage. More important, whereas the shot is
movement of a closed system and framing is movement between the parts and the open
whole, montage is movement at the level of the open whole. Montage is not so much
a matter of style for Deleuze as much as a means or strategy of expressing change and
showing the myriad ways in which the whole remains open. For Deleuze Montage is the
determination of the whole (the third Bergsonian level) by means of continuities, cutting and
false continuities [...] Montage is composition, the assemblage [agencement] of movementimages as constituting an indirect image of time.18 That is, montage draws attention to the
ways in which the universe as a flow of matter unfolds.
16 The concept of multiplicity is arguably Deleuzes most important and complex. For our present
discussion, a multiplicity can be understood as a complex structure without a prior unity. A multiplicity is
intensive because it cannot be divided without qualitatively changing in nature. The shot in this sense is an
encounter that qualitatively changes the whole of the moving film. To change a shot or substitute one for
another is not just a change in one part of the film, it marks a qualitative change in the entire film.
71
For Deleuze, as for Bergson, consciousness is not one continuous thought that
operates linearly. It is instead a panoply of different mental states flowing into and out of
each other. Difference is what allows us to identify and mark these different mental states
without preventing us from merging them into a continuous flow of consciousness. Montage
reveals this process. The revelation of time is indirect because the movement-image organizes
its elements and the gaps between them logically and rationally in accordance with the
sensory-motor schema. Nevertheless the capacity of montage to take myriad and disparate
shots and organize them into a flowing continuity makes us aware the open whole of
duration.
What is most important here is that montage as movement determines the narrative,
not the other way around, so that the relations of the parts among themselves and to the
continually changing duration is more important than plot, setting or other story-telling
devices. This is one of the primary ways in which film allows us to move beyond stable
content in order to look at the processes of movement that allow for the creation of the new.
As Rodowick writes, montage expresses a logic of composition a concept or a regulating
Idea in the philosophical sense that informs the system of the film both globally and in
each of its parts.19 Montage does not reflect or reconstruct a pre-existing order. It constructs
one anew from the virtual potential latent with cinematic images. Deleuze sums up the
relation between frame, shot and montage, and the creative potential of the latter when he
writes:
The movement-image has two sides, one in relation to objects whose
relative position it varies, the other in relation to a whole of which it
expresses an absolute change. The positions are in space, but the whole
that changes is in time. If the movement-image is assimilated to the shot,
we call framing the first facet of the shot turned towards objects, and
montage the other facet turned towards the whole. Hence a first thesis: it
is montage itself which constitutes the whole, and thus gives us the image
of time. It is therefore the principal act of cinema. Time is necessarily an
indirect representation, because it flows from the montage which links
one movement-image to another.20
19 Rodowick 51.
72
As Rodowick notes, Eisenstein, as exemplar of the movement-image, uses the cinema

automaton to create a relationship with the whole that throws thought into a higher
awareness, posit images as part of pre-linguistic inner-speech, and create a sensorimotor
unity between world and man, nature and thought.21 This process moves the spectator
from image to thought. Similarly, within Lost Highway, montage is particularly significant.
The assemblages Lynch creates reveal, or rather force spectators into, a process of thought in
which each frame, each shot is provisional, taking on new meaning as they are continually
reorganized through editing. The personal relationships, the objects of desire, take on
new meaning throughout the film. There is never a dialectic to be resolved, but there is an
ongoing flow of images and sounds that reveal the continual creation of new meanings.
That is, Lynch extracts movement from objects, to show movement in its pure state,
separating it from the figurative without abandoning empirical grounding, which is also
Deleuzes philosophical concern. Deleuze writes, One goes beyond the moving bodies to
extract a maximum of movement.22 This is particularly apparent in Lynchs use of light.
Like the pre-war French school that Deleuze analyzes, Lynchs use of light is a function
of movement that ceaselessly circulates in a homogeneous space and creates luminous
forms through its own mobility rather than through its encounter with moving objects,23
becoming pure mobility that creates its luminous forms as it is formed in space.24
And like German expressionism, also explored by Deleuze, Lynch treats light as a potent
movement of intensity, intensive movement par excellence.25
However, within the first act of Lost Highway, the sensory-motor schema still
maintains some unity between image and thought. As Bogue writes, In the classic cinema,
the image and thought are in mutual accord, the sensori-motor schema common to film and
viewer allowing a ready passage between the screen world and the world of the spectator.
21
22
23
24
25
Rodowick 182.
Deleuze Cinema 1 224n24.
73
In other words, the movement-image still maintains a behaviorist relationship between

interval and whole, which derives from [] a belief that the mastery of environments
and opponents is inevitable and infinitely extendable.26 There still remains within the
movement-image vestiges of teleology.
THE VARIETIES OF MOVEMENT-IMAGES

The development and maintenance of this sensory-motor apparatus can be further
understood by considering the varieties of movement-images and their signs. Deleuze
conceives of three primary varieties of the movement-image the perception-image,
the action-images and affection-images, as well as a fourth important variation, the
relation-image.27 These varieties do not outline an evolution of cinema or a hierarchy of
representational or narrative strategies. Instead Deleuze organizes classic cinema with these
images and the signs that comprise them in order to explore difference along with the
fundamental productive forces that give rise to the continual creation and recreation of
movement and time within cinema. More important, however, he uses these varieties of
images to consider the variety of relations between perception, affect and action vis--vis the
sensory-motor schema and the interval.
The perception-image belongs to space, a section or part of the world that we as
living images select and frame according to immediate interests and functional demands. The
action-image is an extended environment enwrapping living images and presenting potential
encounters and possible reactions. The affection-image is an intensive absorbing of external
movement expressed as a pure quality. In short, the perception-image allows us to sense the
outside world, the action-image allows us to physically address these conditions and structure
26 Rodowick 12.
27 For our purposes, the three primary varieties of movement-images plus the relation-image suffice to
provide a useful picture of the cinematic consciousness. However, there are actually six varieties of movementimages and, according to Bogue, somewhere between fourteen and twenty-three signs of movement-images.
Deleuzes prose and taxonomy is characteristically fluid, lacking the organizational rigor or continuity necessary
to pinpoint a precise quantity or lend itself to easy summary, but for an attempt to meticulously organize
Deleuzes cinema see Bogues Deleuze on Cinema.
74
the space surrounding us, and the affection-image connects perceptions and actions to other
images by introducing gaps, a forestalling of external movement, in which images of thought
can develop.
Movement and movement-images are the result of negotiations between external
perception, internal affection and the corporeal, embodied experience of action. Movementimages are formed as a result of an ongoing qualitative extension of this relationship. Deleuze
resorts to more metaphors when he writes that perception is space, action is time and
affection is the interval, where movement ceases to be that of translation in order to become
movement of expression.28 He also conceives of the movement-images grammatically. The
perception-image is like a noun with our selective framing serving to delineate objects, the
action-image is like a verb, and affection-images are like adjectives.
Perception, affect and action are all vital parts of the sensory-motor schema.
However, they are not opposed to one another. Instead they constitute different means for
responding to the interval that arises between perception, action and affect. Bogue writes,
Bergsons point is that perception is not representation at all, but a constituent part of
action. There is no divide between an external, extended material world and an internal,
unextended mental reality, no split between being and being perceived.29 In this sense, we
already see a dismantling of the dichotomy between perception as passive (responding to
already existing entities) and action as active (creating new ones). Perception constitutes
an active part of controlling ones environment by selecting those entities worthy of ones
attention in relation to possible future actions, mediated by affect and the sensations and
expressions to which it gives rise.
Deleuze employs C.S. Peirces taxonomy of signs to develop these varieties of images,
to maintain their autonomy, to ensure that movement-images resist linguistic reduction and
remain visual. In Deleuzes scheme, Peirce acts as a productive complement to Bergson in
that both dismantle any distinction between matter and mind and posit thought as in us, not
29 Bogue 32.
75
vice-versa. Deleuze also borrows Peirces concepts of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness to
develop the signs under the affection-image, action-image and relation-image respectively.
Deleuze adds his own concept of Zeroness to this schema in order to account for the
perception-image.
Firstness, as defining the affection-image, is something that refers to nothing but
itself, quality or potential, pure possibility. Secondness is something that refers to itself only
through something else, existence, action-reaction, effort-resistance. Thirdness is something
that refers to itself only in relating one thing to another thing, relation, law, necessity.30 In
short, Firstness refers to qualities and experience, Secondness to oppositions and existence,
and Thirdness to inference and defines. Deleuze posits a temporal dimension to this Peircean
scheme, as well. Firstness as affect becomes part of the immediate present, Secondness as
action becomes an enduring present, and Thirdness forms relations as part of the future or
prediction of actions.
Beyond the addition of Zeroness as outside the Peircean scheme, Deleuze takes
other liberties with Peirces taxonomy of signs. Deleuze further develops each variety of
movement-image by separating them into their constitutive signs, which refer, respectively
to the images capacity to give rise to signs of genesis as a creative act, signs of composition
among the parts as the minimal interval of movement, and signs of composition as it relates
the parts to the maximum movement of the whole. Deleuze writes, We thus take the term
sign in an entirely different sense than does Peirce: it is a particular image that refers to a
type of image, either from the point of view of its bipolar composition, or from the point of
view of its genesis.31 It is also important to note that this taxonomy is a fluid, generative and
compositional device not a formal or permanent structure.
As a generative and compositional device, Deleuze demonstrates how we can see
anew, that through cinema we have been seeing anew, and that directors and spectators have
been inventing and reinventing ways of seeing all along. Art is important to Deleuze because,
76
unlike natural perception, it evinces and materializes the complex dynamics of movement.
Real movement is best seen through art, not natural perception and Deleuze employs
hundreds of cinematic examples to develop his system of signs and images.32
The perception-image as Zeroness constitutes the ground from which all other images
and signs emerge. The perception-image can reveal particular vantage points tied to human
perception as in point-of-view shots, which connect the parts through various subjective
perspectives. Within Lost Highway, the opening shot of headlights traversing the desert
landscape and the continual use of handheld videos reveal this level of perception. However,
the perception-image can also connect the parts to the whole through floating or flowing
perspectives that still remain assimilable within quotidian coordinates of space and time. This
occurs in the dream sequences within Lost Highway where perception wanders and parts from
quotidian space and time but is still explicable through recourse to dream states.
The genesis of the perception-image, however, is a nonhuman seeing, disconnected
from privileged points of the body or human vision. Perception here connects space and
time in any way imaginable despite being incommensurate from human perspectives. The
perception-image here is tied to the cameras own vantage point and contains no objective
reference, and the experience of space and time through it is neither objective nor subjective
but instead emerges as a conceptual framing. Deleuze writes, if the cinema goes beyond
perception, it is in the sense that it reaches to the genetic element of all possible perception,
that is, the point which changes, and which makes perception change, the differential of
perception itself.33 This level of nonhuman perception then is primary means for discovering
perception in things and in their assemblages or connections.
The affection image as Firstness individuates, socializes, relates and communicates,
and within cinema is most apparent in the use of close-ups. If the perception-image
32 Capturing this complex taxonomy in detail is beyond the scope of this section. However, chapters
four through seven (pp. 56-110) in Deleuzes Cinema 1 provide a meticulous elucidation of the three primary
varieties of movement-images and their signs. Chapter three (pp. 65-105) in Bogues Deleuze on Cinema and
chapter three (pp. 38-78) in Rodowicks Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine provide relatively accessible summaries
and interpretations of the topic.
77
provides the perceptual foundation for movement-images, the signs of the affection-image
express relations between movement and affect. Movement here becomes intensive and
expressive rather than extensive and spatial. It is important to note that for Deleuze affect
is not emotion but intensity, a combination of the expressed and its expression. Within
Lost Highway, close-ups are strategically used during moments of intimacy, either sexual as
between Fred and Renee or between Pete and Alice, as well as moments of confounding or
Lynchian moments as when the Mystery Man phones Pete. Here affection has not been
transformed into an action or image and thus remains as quality or state that lingers and
persists. The affection-image is expressed without being actualized, that is an any-spacewhatever abstracted from spatial and temporal coordinates of a real setting or environment.
The action-image as Secondness gives rise to any-space-whatevers that are, unlike
those created through affect, situational, real, determined and actualized. That is, they give
rise to extensive and embodied behavior rather than intensive expression. The action-images
relate via duality. Actions give rise to reactions, events give rise to responses, efforts are met
with resistance, oppositions are presented for comparison and contrast. Within Lost Highway,
invasive videotapes merit a police investigation, murder begets capital punishment, tailgating
Mr. Eddy elicits a beating, theft leads to an escape. In all cases we either encounter a situation
that gives rise to an action that gives rise to a new situation or, conversely, experience an
action that gives rise to a situation that compels another action. However, even the actions
in Lynchs film, through cutting and dissolves, tend to dissolve into one another or into a
vacuous space that prevents the image from being definitively territorialized and connected
to a clearly defined space or time. The images can be fitted together in an infinite number
of ways and because they are not oriented in relation to each other, constitute the set of
singularities which are combined in the any-space-whatever.34
The duality of the action-image cannot, however, be read as a dialectic to be
resolved or a set of defining laws. Any meaning in these relationships can only be inferred
or determined through recourse to Thirdness, a concept Peirce uses to explore assemblages
78
between other parts and with which Deleuze associates the relation-image (sometimes
referred to as the mental-image). Bogue uses a mathematical analogy to succinctly
demonstrate what Thirdness and facilitating linkages or relationships mean here. If the
numbers two and four stand in for Firstness and Secondness respectively, it is only through
a third number, six or eight for example as Thirdness that we see the relations between the
parts and can begin to construct future scenarios. Two, four and six would be followed
by an eight, but two, four and eight would be followed by sixteen. The relations between
the first two numbers in the sequence are impossible to determine without the third term.
Thirdness or relations give rise to interpretations and intellectual intuition. As Bogue notes,
The mental image is not simply added to the other three; it frames and transforms them,
reflecting the whole of their relations as an object of interpretation or intellection.35
While Deleuze considers Hitchcock the director of relations par excellence because
everything within his films is a matter for interpretation, Lynch also transcends the director/
film dyad and posits instead a director/film/audience triad. The relation-image, that is,
calls into question the images that have preceded it. The Mystery Man as a spectator serves
as a potential relational figure orienting the actions and not so much explaining them
as suggesting there might be an explanation to come. He serves as a typical Lynchian
figure through whom the bizarre coordinates of space, time and identity unravel and offer
themselves to interpretation.
In this sense, incorporating an audience that interprets into the cinematic experience
completes the evolution or development of the movement-image and sets the stage for the
time-image. That is, the action- and relation-images introduce a tension by suggesting that
totality is possible and that a universal image will emerge to constrain movement, while
movement itself fails to elide the temporal and transformative force of time. The time-image
will give rise to means of addressing this tension, but for now, at the end of the movementimage, we are left with any-space-whatevers, which more than any Deleuzian cinematic
35 Bogue 72.
79
concept explicitly connects filmic space and time to that of architecture and its capacity
to move beyond mere utility in order to create excess. In the movement-image, any-spacewhatevers are indefinite, exploiting the potential for interpretation and multiple meanings by
resisting one strict function or purpose instead offering sensations. The peculiarly abstract
quality of any-space-whatevers returns us not to objects or things themselves, but to specific
visual impressions.36
ANY-SPACE-WHATEVER AND THE INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME

However, more than sites that confound, any-space-whatevers also create by revealing the
infinite potential of virtual connections through space and time. Deleuzes most concise
definition asserts, Space is no longer a particular determined space, it has become any-spacewhatever [espace quelconque], [] Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all
times, in all places. it is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that
is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts so that the linkages
can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as
pure locus of the possible.37
There are for Deleuze three ways of constructing any-space-whatevers within cinema:
1) the strategic use of shadows, 2) lyrical abstraction 3) color. Throughout Lost Highway,
Lynch uses shadows, into and out of which characters recede and emerge. Formally and
aesthetically, shadows obscure contours and prevent form from fully developing. Shadow,
that is, endows things with a non-organic life in which they lose their individuality, and
which potentialises space, whilst making it something unlimited.38 Darkness is usually
associated with a struggle of the spirit.
Lyrical abstraction, on the other hand, addresses the alternatives of the spirit, its
capacity to choose. In offering gradients of grey in between white and black, it resists the
dualistic conflict set up by shadow reflects stages of uncertainty in between pure evil and
80
good. In Lost Highway, while the chiaroscuro never disappears, it is most prevalent within
the first and third acts, while the second act of the film in which Pete and Alice appear
introduces variations of light and color in between lightness and darkness. This is also,
not coincidentally, the point in film during which ambiguity, the circuits of interpretation
and choice become most apparent. Finally, color can create any-space-whatevers through
absorption, by decontextualizing bodies and landscapes. Throughout Lost Highway, except
in rare instances of close-ups when the characters stand in stark contrast to a blurred
background, characters tend to meld with their settings, becoming imperceptible.
Traditional notions of the sublime in architecture reflect this process of becoming
imperceptible. Etienne-Louis Boulees architecture of shadows, directly inspired by Edmund
Burkes notion of the sublime, Giovanni Battista Piranesis Carceri etchings and the industrial
buildings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become sublime by employing light and
especially scale to overwhelm the human subject. Following Diana Agrest, Kate Nesbitt has
argued that the beautiful has become the normative discourse of aesthetics and the sublime
an analytical and exploratory one, process-oriented and self-transforming and tied to the
construction of the modern subject.39
Nesbitt considers Edmund Burke, who eschewed clarity as the enemy of enthusiasm
and posited obscurity as a means for inciting imagination, as well as Jean-Francois Lyotard,
who has read this emphasis on poetic obscurity as a critique of the limitations of figurative
representation in mimetic painting. The rejection of figuration in favor of obfuscation
suggests that obscurity will be fundamental to Lyotards modern aesthetic of the sublime. For
Lyotard, like Deleuze, the dismantling of time, as opposed to unifying or master narratives
that placate the public, is part of the role of the modern sublime.40
Nesbitt further suggests that discourse on the sublime was submerged throughout
the twentieth century by a desire to eschew the recent past and to affect a radical break
with history for which new or different aesthetic terms had to be introduced. Positivism,
39 Kate Nesbitt, The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking (An Aesthetic of )
Abstraction, New Literary History [Vol. 26 No. 1 (Winter 1995)] 99.
40 Nesbitt 105.
81
rationalism, functionality all emphasized the application of scientific principles to the design
process and marginalized traditional aesthetic considerations. Finally, Nesbitt resituates
architectural discourse by focusing on the submerged elements of the sublime latent in
modern design and promotes a Lyotardian approach to architecture theory and criticism.
Nesbitt writes, The application of Lyotards ideas to architecture would result in a
reflective attitude toward the architectural canon, which might never manifest itself directly
in the work. Instead, the content of the work would be the asking of fundamental questions
and eventually, definitions of a new societal role for architecture.41 However, her argument
too often falls back on a direct application or reification of the ideas Lyotard appreciates in
painting to architecture. That is, any resurgence of the sublime for Nesbitt still acts as an
equivalent to pictorial representation or abstraction.
Any-space-whatever, however, becomes a new, more productive means of exploring
the concept of the sublime within architecture. When cinematic or architectural space
becomes sublime it resists any reduction to immediate needs or functions, showing instead
the immensity of future and past.42 The sublime, like Deleuzes any-space-whatevers,
presents the difficulty in representing the unrepresentable, in making visible the invisible,
in reveling in indeterminacy and ineffable singularities. Deleuze references a new sublime as
continuous with but distinct from Kants two sublimes, the mathematical and the dynamic,
the immense and powerful, the measureless and the formless.43 However, unlike Kant, who
saw the sublime as a means of expressing absolutes (infinity, the divine, the end of history),
Deleuzes any-space-whatever expresses and gives rise to affect as centers of indetermination,
eschewing absolutes.

Elizabeth Grosz, like Nesbitt, is concerned with the excess to which art gives rise.
However, unlike Nesbitt, Grosz works within a Deleuzian context to avoid conventional
dichotomies between the beautiful and sublime, interestedness and disinterestedness in order
41 Nesbitt 105.
82
to return to the genesis of thought, that which gives rise to, or allows for the emergence of,
excess. Groszs approach is informative because like the sublime and Deleuzes work as a
whole, she is interested in capturing the nature of excess and does so by recourse to a preindividuated or subjective state in which sensation and affect most clearly emerge. Like
Deleuze, she partners philosophy and artistic expression stemming from the same impulse to
create cohesion out of chaos. Chaos is not disorder as much as a Bergsonian flow of matterimages, or those forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other,44
and from which order as the excesses of spatial and temporal movement must be extracted in
order to comprehend the forces motivating, enacting and transforming cultural production.
She writes:
Art engenders becomings, not imaginative becomingsthe elaboration
of images and narratives in which a subject might recognize itself, not
self-representations, narratives, confessions, testimonies of what is and has
beenbut material becomings, in which these imponderable universal
forces touch and become enveloped in life, in which life folds over itself
to embrace its contact with materiality, in which each exchanges some
elements or particles with the other to become more and otherArt is
the opening up of the universe to becoming-other.45
Sensations, inextricably linked to territories, are architectural and tie the built
and natural environments to movement. Sensation is in fact another way of conceiving of
the interval that forestalls movement and makes us think, the interstitial space and time
separating perception, action and affect, or as Grosz, echoing Bergson calls it, the zone
of indeterminacy between subject and object,46 that is neither a subjective experience
as phenomenology has it, nor a radically empirical or positivistically quantifiable idea.
Sensation, like images and matter are neither in us nor outside of us, but instead constitutes a
material intensity.

The goal of art, including cinema and architecture, is not to represent or reify the
concepts that philosophy develops but to generate new sensations and excess or create new
44 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia UP,
2008) 5.
45 Grosz Chaos, Territory, Art 23.
83
orders for them following the perceptual, active and affective modes of thought outlined
by Deleuze. This is another way of viewing cinema. What Deleuze finds inspiring in the
medium is the degree to which it accomplishes this readily and visibly. In fact, for Deleuze,
this is cinemas raison detre. However, any-space-whatevers extended into the realm of
the three-dimensional built world provide another, perhaps less direct, avenue to discover
sensations, recover lost elements of the sublime experience and resist attempts to reduce
architecture to function.
Like cinema, architecture begins with the frame. Grosz writes, Framing and
deframing become arts modes of territorialization and deterritorialization through sensation;
framing becomes the means by which the plane of composition composes, deframing
its modes of upheaval and transformation.47 Framing in architecture, however, is not to
be conflated with the structural frame or building envelope, though those elements may
participate in the act of framing. Instead framing is best conceived as a means for connecting,
containing and extending relationships.48
However, the frame also separates, cutting into milieus and spaces. Like Le
Corbusiers work considered in Section One, framing allows architecture to filter the
environment rather than protect inhabitants from it. As Grosz writes, While its most direct
and perceptible function is to separate or divide, the wall equally functions to select and
bring in.49 There is a process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization
in which the body as a living image becomes intimately connected to and informed by
movement as a universal flow of matter. Architecture draws attention to both the provisional
character of selection, demarcation and containment, a process that elicits sensation and
allows qualities to emerge from this flow. Grosz writes, Architecture is the most elementary
binding or containment of forces, the conditions under which qualities can live their own life
47 Grosz Chaos , Territory, Art 13.
48 For an in-depth consideration of framing, see Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of
Territories, trans. Anne Boyman, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). This book forms the conceptual basis for
much of Groszs work, as well as significant portions of Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans.
Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
84
through the constitution of territory. Territory frames chaos provisionally and in the process
produces extractable qualities, which become the materials and formal structures of art.50
This is the most crucial facet of Groszs work in relation to Deleuzes cinema project.
The key elements of cinematic movement are always already, virtually embedded within the
work of architecture. Architecture, by selecting and framing, extracts qualities (movement,
sensations, affects, etc.). Like the cinematic frame, architecture selects parts and relations
in order to sublimate sensation and affect and to bring us in touch with the non-human. If
framing brings attention to the closed set and sets its stage, it also entails an out-of-frame,
which brings attention to the virtual or open whole, what is outside thought.
While the canon of modernism can be (as we saw with Le Corbusier) reinterpreted
to bring out the latent sublime and excessive characteristics of space and time within
architecture, the industrial sublime, designed without any clear reference to human scale,
offers a clearer strategy for revealing any-space-whatevers. The quantifiable facets of the
industrial sublime echo Kant and Burke, their focus on magnitude, as well as Deleuzes
non-human becomings. As Deleuze and Guattari write, Affects are precisely these nonhuman
becomings of man, just as percepts including the town are nonhuman landscapes of
nature.51 Affect and sensation, in other words, makes art more than function or mere
survival. There is always an aesthetic, performative and intensified element of excess in
meaningful design.
Grosz asserts something similar when she writes, Art and nature, art in nature, share
a common structure: that of excessive and useless production production for its own sake,
production for the sake of profusion and differentiation [] Art, like nature itself, is always
a strange coupling, the coming together of two orders, one chaotic, the other ordered, one
folding and the other unfolding, one contraction and the other dilation.52 This is another
means of conceptualizing the provisional and accessible order of the closed set and the elusive
multiplicities of the open whole.
51 Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy 169.
85
Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwals 2006 documentary on Edward

Burtynskys photographs of the industrial sublime provides an appropriate case study.53
Burtynskys reflections on his photographs take continual recourse to dichotomies between
the natural and built environments, nature and man, in which the latter is viewed as
encroaching upon and destroying the former. As a result, there is also a moral dichotomy
between good (leaving nature untouched) and bad (exploiting natures resources). These
sublime landscapes are for Burtynsky industrial incursions.
However, following Deleuze, these landscapes can be interpreted as any-spacewhatevers in which the magnitude, scale, intensity of these spaces give rise to an element of
excess that prevents them from being reduced to function or conventional moral arguments.
Like the shadow of any-space-whatevers, these landscapes introduce a spiritual element,
less of a religious nature than in the awareness that duration and non-human becomings
introduce intervals and points of indetermination that entail new images of thought.
These landscapes, that is, are not reducible to utility, which is not always clear. Like lyrical
abstraction, the sense of morality is not right versus wrong as much as choice. They reveal
the contingencies of design and development, creating a new relationship with the natural
landscape and duration. Like color in any-space-whatevers, the scale of these landscapes
overwhelms their human occupants, making them imperceptible. In other words, these are
spaces that do not facilitate ready incorporation into conventional images of thought. They
necessitate interpretation.
The aesthetic fascination with the technological sublime can be attributed to its
capacity to invest the built environment with a form of transcendence to counter the
fragmentation and alienation of an increasingly secularized world without absolutes. Morally,
the industrial sublime is conventionally conceived as either an enormous force for good
as when it accommodates machinery, functions and aids the human body in repetitive or
53 Manufactured Landscapes, Dir. Jennifer Baichwal. Perf. Edward Burtynsky. Zeitgeist Films, 2006.
86
complex tasks, or as a force for evil as when it overwhelms and defies human productivity,
becoming spaces of oppression as evinced in the dehumanizing scale of the factories
Burtynsky photographs.
However, for Deleuze, these spaces become singular, not individuating meaning
through recourse to symbolism or iconography, nor by reaffirming or disaffirming an image
of self we might hold, but instead by connecting us to a pre-individual state of becoming.
Unlike buildings designed to the human scale and for specific, recognizable purpose, the
industrial sublime works in part by resisting a specific function thus opening a flux of
possibilities. The industrial sublime also resists attempts to confine it to preconceived forms.
Three examples, the Chittagong Shipbreaking Beach in Bangladesh, the Three Gorges
Dam and one instance of a ubiquitous system of interstate roadways will serve to elucidate
the architectural expression of these concepts. In all cases, these structures act to frame the
environment and landscape, introducing a foreign element into the field of perception, and
gives rise to a forestalling of action, an ambivalence in the presence of the sublime magnitude
and absence of a clearly stated purpose or origin. Affect is introduced in the interval between
perception and action as the structures, like cinematic close-ups, become faces in the
landscape, which express excess.

The Chittagong Shipbreaking Beach (Figs. 2.02-2.03) operates to disorient through
framing and perception. Any pre-conceived image of the landscape must give way to new
Fig. 2.02 Chittagong Shipbreaking Beach

in Bangladesh
Fig. 2.03 Chittagong Shipbreaking Beach

in Bangladesh
87
images of thought as the introduction of these sublime forms separates the structure from
the environment rather than reinforcing any idealized notions of it. The frame, however,
remains permeable without a rigid demarcation. There is no predefined cause for subsequent
effects, not clear action and reaction, that can or will result from the introduction of this
industrial element into the environment. The sublime form and space operates as vectors and
contingencies arranging relationships and linkages rather than delimiting space.

Identity is lost in any-space-whatevers but serves advantageously to connect us to
pre-subjective modes of thought and to form new identities. Any-space-whatevers, like the
cultural, political and social milieus of which they are a part are powerful and valuable to the
extent that they continually territorialize, deterritorialize and reterritorialize. The virtual is
not so much a realm of the possible as much as the pre-possible, the distinction being that
Fig 2.04 Interstate Highway Interchange System
88
whereas the possible is delimited and predefined, the pre-possible is not. It is instead a point
at which there is no longer a distinction between man and nature or between the subject and
his surroundings.

A sublime structure, an any-space-whatever, is a machine in the same way that a
poem, painting, dance or film is a machine. They all work through perception, action and
affect, as well as the intervals linking them, to create blocs of sensations. The clover leafshaped road network (Fig. 2.04), despite serving a clear function to transport vehicles,
nevertheless resists reduction to this intended purpose. The function here is less significant
that its insistence on challenging habitual recognition. It escapes habitual thought and
undermines symbolism by allowing (or forcing) occupants to project new forms of identity
Fig. 2.05 Three Gorges Dam
89
into the spaces opened up by the autonomous force of its scale and its relation to duration.
Its incapacity to be fully grasped from any one perspective gives rise to a sublime expression
of excess.

Similarly, the Three Gorges Dam (Fig. 2.05), despite its utility, resists codification
acting as a face in the landscape, acting as an interval in which occupants become centers
of indetermination linking the perceptual framing of the sublime form with the aleatory
nature of the action to follow. Deleuze understood these relationships to be equally present
in architecture and cinema, as well as the other arts. The relation between cinema and
architecture, following Deleuze, cannot be conceived as a representational one but as an
understanding that both art forms can reveal the dynamics of thought to be expressible, but
never representable, in their works. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari concisely
reveal the symbiosis between cinema and architecture, and it is worth ending this chapter by
quoting them at length. They write:
Architecture positions its ensembles houses, town or cities, monument
or factories to function like faces in the landscape they transform.
Painting takes up the same movement but also reverses it, positioning a
landscape as a face, treating one like the other: treatise on the face and
landscape. The close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape;
that is the definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and
camera. But the same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting,
even the novel: close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations.
So, is your mother a landscape or a face? (Godard). All faces envelop
an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a
loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What
face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill;
what landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it,
providing an unexpected complement for its lines and traits?54
Satter | Movement in Crisis
90
Section Three:
Movement in Crisis
EXT. DESERT - TWO-LANE HIGHWAY - NIGHT

We see the clean moving POV illuminated by headlights. Were floating down an old two-lane
highway through a desolate, desert landscape.
CUT TO:
EXT. DESERT - NIGHT
Pete and Alice pull off the two-lane highway onto a barely discernible dirt road that cuts through
the dark desert.
CUT TO:
EXT. DESERT - NIGHT
Pete and Alice drive up to a ONE ROOM CABIN built on stilts next to a dry lakebed. They both
get out and go up the stairs to a porch where Alice knocks on the door. There is no answer. Alice
opens the door, but there is NOBODY INSIDE.
ALICE
Well have to wait.
The hot wind continues to blow. Alice and Pete walk back down to the car. The HEADLIGHTS
are on and Alice reaches in through the window and switches on the RADIO. She cant get
anything in but static, with bits and pieces of old tunes fading in and out. She hits the seek
button. The radio starts to search. Pete is standing in the glare of the headlights watching her. Alice
walks slowly to him. The camera captures this from a back seat perspective then drifts toward
them.
PETE
Why me, Alice? Why choose me?
The radio sticks on a particular tune - a tune filled with longing. Alice begins to dance. She takes
Petes hand and pulls him close to her.
91
ALICE
So we can be together... You still want to be with me, dont you Pete?
Alice gives Pete that wild smile.
ALICE (CONT)
More than ever?
She kisses Pete over and over. He begins to kiss her back. She starts to move him in a dance to the
music in the glare of the headlights, the hot wind caressing them. The scene is out of a dream. Alice
and Pete help each other undress as they dance in and out of the light, and the wind whips at their
bodies. They sink down on the soft ground and start making love. The lights from the headlights
combine with the starlight, bathing them in a pristine glow. The music fades and the radio begins
to seek through static for another station. The music it finds now is LOUD and
INTENSE.
Alice - her hunger appearing, now becomes carnivorous in her approach to love making with Pete.
She is the aggressor, highly-charged - she wants more and more - taking, not giving, insatiable. The
headlights flare their bodies in blinding light. They become amorphous, glowing shapes burning in
the light. Pete is trying desperately to please her - to have her. The driving music fills with cracks of
piercing static. The radio strains to hold the station. Petes white-hot body clings to Alice. He chokes
with emotion.
PETE
I want you... I want you...
With a burning smile, Alice rolls them out of the beams of light into the darkness. The wind
billows a black cloud of dust around them. Alice pulls away from Pete and brings her dark mouth
to his ear.
ALICE
Youll never have me.
Alice glides away from Pete and stands up looking down at him from above. She turns and walks,
naked, to the cabin where she disappears within it. Pete turns, face down on the ground in the
darkness. Hes holding his head and shaking. As he starts to stand - he turns into the glare of the
headlights and we see that it is NOT PETE - BUT FRED.1
Lost Highway reaches an impasse between the first and second acts and between the second
and third. The films dualisms marked by the use of doppelgangers and two distinct plot
strands, which throughout most of film suggest dialectic reasoning, are never synthesized.
Instead they merely unravel or dissolve into a fluid transformation of identity and time
lacking any conventional or quotidian logic. However, rather than a breakdown of cinematic
practices, this is a crisis of interpretation. Linkages become irrational with the centers of
indeterminacies between percept, action and affect growing larger and more pronounced.
1
Lynch and Gifford, Lost Highway The Screenplay.
92
That is, the sensory-motor schema on which the movement-image is structured

reveals a limitation of thought. The initial questions the film raises Are Fred and Pete the
same person, two elements of the same person, two different people? Are Renee and Alice
the same people? Are there two distinct stories being told? emerge as false starts that reveal
the limitations of conventional thought. Action, perception and affect are revealed as less
important than the forestalling of movement, an indeterminacy that gives rise to a radical
questioning of identity and time, as well as our capacity to think.
More specifically, dispersive situations replace global and synthetic experiences. In
the second and third acts of Lost Highway, the environment as a collective space disappears.
In turn, each of the characters inhabits their own space, their own world, which rarely
(or only irrationally) refers to the spaces inhabited by other characters. Similarly, the links
between plot threads, character arcs, spatial and temporal dimensions become weakened, the
connections between them unclear. The aimless wandering presaged by the opening shot of
the film takes on new meaning as it becomes actualized when Pete escapes the scene of his
crime into the desert, an environmental any-space-whatever.
This any-space-whatever further perpetuates the ambiguities between space, time
and subjectivity. The series of actions that take place in any-space-whatever resist logical
resolution in favor of drawing attention to relationships. The Mystery Man ostensibly makes
his home in the desert, where Pete loses Alice (Youll never have me, she says), before
turning back into Fred, who completes the cinematic moebius strip by returning to his own
residence in order to utter into the intercom, Dick Laurent is dead, of which he was on the
receiving end in the opening scene.
The consciousness of clichs further prevents any distinction between physical and
psychic realities. Any clear resolution of the film depends on forcing it into clichd genre
conventions, which have become unsatisfactory and in the end unbearable as a means of
expression. The Mystery Man, who throughout has seemingly signified the only logical
answer to the films willful obfuscation, returns at the end with his video camera to conduct
93
the climax of the film. However, in revealing a potential conspiracy, Lynch simultaneously
denounces it. These traits the dispersive situation, weak connections, aimless wandering,
consciousness of clichs and the denunciation of conspiracy will define the crisis of
movement and the transition into the time-image.
CRISIS IN CINEMA
The crisis of action and interpretation strategically introduced into Lost Highway
reflects a crisis of movement Deleuze develops at the end of Cinema 1 and the beginning of
Cinema 2. Deleuze, like most great thinkers, works best at such points of significant impasse,
which become key transitional points from which to consider new images of thought that
appear through cinema and afford a productive means for reconceptualizing the crisis of
mid-century thought and modernism. The crisis forces movement, consciousness and reality
to take on increasingly lacunary tendencies. Cinema most clearly reveals the genesis, nature
and result of this crisis, which is nevertheless part of a larger architectural and cultural
phenomenon.
Through framing, shots and montage, cinema explores strategies of perception,
consciousness and relation to duration. Through the varieties of movement-images, cinema
explores the dynamics of the complex sensory-motor apparatus linking perception to action
through the affective intervals that allow excess to arise. Spatially, these dynamics create anyspace-whatevers. Temporally, they elicit indirect revelations of time as memory and duration.
However, the sensory-motor schema has a rigorous logic on which it depends in order to
create rational continuities between images and signs as they appear. The movement-image,
that is, still maintains vestiges of teleology that in turn continually return to habitual modes
of recognition. Rodowick writes, But whereas the action- and relation-images imply that
totality is possible indeed that movement can be stopped or constrained by a universal
image the movement-image in itself shows otherwise. For movement in the physical sense
cannot elide or subsume the force of time as change.2
2
Rodowick 73.
94
As a result, the virtual relations of film and the spectator who interprets, who
deduces, induces and creates relationships confront limitations. Within the regime of the
movement-image, any-space-whatevers always emerge as situations that require action.
Action, perceptions and affections must all either take place within space or be translated into
spatial terms. The possible must become actual, so time remains subordinated to space. That
is, the movement-image reached an impasse that prevented duration as the contingencies,
latencies and flux of memory and time from being fully explored and expressed.
In order to address the incapacity of a logical sensory-motor schema to tell stories
and reveal thought, cinema had to question its own presuppositions. The intervals linking
percept and action remained rational linkages that revealed the dynamics of thought only
to be resituated within a new logic or a new ordering of images. However, the full potential
of these intervals to give rise to new thoughts and permanently evade habitual recognition
required perception and action to become detached and their linkage reattached to the
openness of thought. Within the movement-image this is impossible. Deleuze writes,
The characters can act, perceive, experience, but they cannot testify to the relations which
determine them.3
According to Deleuze, interpretation should be focused on discovering the forces
that created or gave rise to an event. The relationship between forces and events is significant
because it is tied to the emergence, as opposed to the perpetuation, of thought. Rodowick
writes, The idea of force should be understood neither as originating cause nor as agency
in the sense of self-conscious will. Rather, it refers to an event, or more precisely, a set of
relationships organizing events, phenomena, or propositions, as well as their genesis.4
Criticality for Deleuze resists the codification of thought by continually returning to this
creative uprising, the presubjective individuation of matter, in order to produce the eternal
return of difference. Deleuze writes, The essential point, in any event, is that action, and also
perception and affection, are framed in a fabric of relations.5
3
4
5

Rodowick 131.
95
Deleuze transitions between the two volumes by considering this nascent crisis of the
movement-image at the end of classic cinema and beginning of modern cinema by looking
at a new image that marks the end of the movement-image and presages the time-image to
come.6 Opsigns and sonsigns are those visual and auditory signs that break sensory-motor
linkages and refuse extension into action. Deleuze further defines this new image by writing,
These are the five apparent characteristics of the new image: the dispersive situation, the
deliberately weak links, the voyage from, the consciousness of clichs, and the condemnation of the
plot.7
Opsigns demonstrate a collapse of the sensory-motor schema as they undermine any
direct link between perception and action. Deleuze writes:
characters were found less and less in sensorimotor motivating situations,
but rather in a state of strolling, rambling or wandering aimlessly which
defined pure optical and sound situations. The action-image then tended to
shatter, whilst the determinate locations were blurred, letting any-spacewhatevers rise up where the modern affects of fear, detachment, but also
freshness, extreme speed and interminable waiting were developing.8
These tendencies, however, create the means to parody or critique the Hollywood standard
film and the recursive system that produces them but fail to provide a productive creation of
something new to replace the movement-image. The time-image will provide the immense
force needed to accompany the pure opsigns. But for now, the crisis in cinema provides a
productive means of considering a similar crisis outside of film.
The crisis of action, thought and movement that Deleuze finds in mid-century
cinema reflects the interpretive conundrums facing all creative disciplines throughout the
6 The nominal date for this transition is 1945. However, Deleuzes cinematic examples do not always
adhere to this temporal framework. For example, Orson Welles first films from the early 1940s are associated
with the time-image, and Alfred Hitchocks later works from the 1950s to the 1970s are part of the movementimage. Most important, the movement-image still remains the dominant image of cinema seen in most
Hollywood standards and genre films. Conversely, elements of the time-image are present in some films from
the first half of the twentieth century.
7 Deleuze Cinema 1 210. Deleuze considers entire films (most from the 1970s) and bodies of works
by certain directors to develop these tendencies. The dispersive situations of Nashville, the deliberately weak
links of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the voyage form of Taxi Driver, the consciousness of clichs in King of
Comedy, and the condemnation of plot in The Anderson Tapes are representative.
96
modern era but which is particularly acute in the decades immediately following World
War II, the horrors of which gave rise to a radical questioning of truth. Post-modernism or
late-modernism arises as the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, fine arts, as well as
architecture, experience a similar crisis in which the goals of modernism, its strategies and
products, are radically questioned.
Like opsigns in cinema, this crisis within the academy and creative practice, as
well as culture more broadly speaking, generates pastiche and irony, an interest in anyspace-whatevers, an emphasis on relationships, connections and linkages rather than the
universal. However, unlike postmodern tendencies that posited pastiche, irony and a
radical questioning, undermining or abandonment of modernist principles, as relativist
tenets in themselves, Deleuze posits modernism as a tendency or mode of thought
influenced by movement. In doing so, he develops ways for drawing connections and
relationships, for opening the flows of thought and action in such a way that resists any
telos or pre-determined foundation from which to act and judge. Opsigns that mark the
crisis of movement constitute a significant means for going beyond the movement-image,
but Deleuzes ultimate goal is to create the necessary means to explore how the crisis in
movement gives rise to images of time so that modernism can be restored as a critical and
exploratory form of experimentation, a mode of thought opposed to dogmatic tenets, static
motifs or ideologies to be followed.
CRISIS IN ARCHITECTURE
Architecture and spatial studies have a close relationship with this crisis. The films that
define and mark the crisis of the movement-image are dominated by spaces devastated by the
Second World War. That is, the crisis and the nascent time-image, as well as new potentials
for any-space-whatevers are tied from the start to the built and natural environments, as well
as our experience of them. The crisis is perhaps even more obvious in spatial theory than in
film theory. Disparate philosophical and architectural figures address the crisis of action in
some manner.
97
The dynamics of modernism challenge the process of making space habitable when
the foundations of tradition and habit are increasingly challenged and revealed as limitations.
As physical infrastructure becomes aleatory and fragmented, the subjects affective disposition
requires a complementary flexibility to productively navigate this new terrain. Initially new
strategies for mapping movement and its intensities were left largely undeveloped as spatial
theorists focused more on the damaging effect space could have on the modern subject.
Georg Simmel was among the first modern thinkers to connect changing urban
dynamics and spaces to transformations in thinking. The constantly changing dynamics of
physical and mental movement in the urban environment, according to Simmel, requires
protection, buffering, what he terms a protective organ. This blas outlook leads to
hesitation and reluctance, as well as continued attempts by urban inhabitants to rationalize
and reduce the lines of flight possible in the modern world. That is, for Simmel, the modern
subject, while undergoing permanent changes that entail new modes of thought still falls
back on dichotomous thinking that separates individuals and society, man and nature. He
writes:
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to
maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign
powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture
and technique of life. The antagonism represents the most modern form of the
conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence.
The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up
historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit
the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without
inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to mans
freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labor) and his
achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time
make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others;
Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite
for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression
of all competition - but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work,
namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the socialtechnological mechanism.9
9 Georg Simmel, The Metropolis of Modern Lifein Donald Levine, ed. Simmel: On Individuality and
Social Forms (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971) 324.
98
Simmel himself still clung to vestiges of the traditional image of thought, separating
objective causes and forces from subjective experiences and affects. His concept of the
stranger, for instance, is developed in moral and dichotomous terms, a method of thinking
that reveals the tension between what Deleuze views as traditional images of thought, which,
despite any attempt at embracing modern changes, still cling to old abstractions, and new
images of thought that embrace the flux of time, memory and duration. Simmel writes,
The Stranger is close to us, insofar as we feel between him and ourselves common features
of a national, social, occupational, or generally human, nature. He is far from us, insofar as
these common features extend beyond him or us, and connect us only because they connect
a great many people.10 While the stranger as an outsider is capable of introducing new
phenomenon, ideas and dynamics into social relations, he does so, according to Simmel by
possessing ambivalent traits that position him on both sides of a continuing divide between
inside and outside, connections and disconnections, objectivity and subjectivity.
Similarly, Siegfried Kracauer sees in modern phenomena, such as urban gatherings,
line dances and the hotel lobby, a world in transformation to which he is unable to ascribe
definitive meaning. That is, there is no rational linkage between the perception of the spaces
and the actions to which these spaces give rise. Activities and events are parts that do not
belong to a whole. He writes, the togetherness in the hotel lobby has no meaning. While
here, too, people certainly do become detached from everyday life, the detachment does
not lead the community to assure itself of its existence as a congregation. Instead it merely
displaces people from the unreality of the daily hustle and bustle to a place where they would
encounter the void only if they were more than just reference points.11 He sees the lobby as
a gap without purpose, not unlike Deleuzes any-space-whatever. However, unlike Deleuze,
who found meaning or the potential creation of meaning in these spaces, Kracauer sees
meaninglessness or at least meaning without a referent.
10 Georg Simmel, The Stranger in Donald Levine, ed. Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971) 143.
11 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 2005) 176.
99
Walter Benjamin, however, was among the first to understand the urban trajectories
of physical and psychic movement as potential flows of meaning and exchange in and of
themselves absent any foundational referent or signified. His Arcades Project reveals new
strategies for mapping movement and tracing points of intensity rather than reformulating
staid dualisms. The fin-de-sicle arcades were for Benjamin a means of organizing the
activities, events and culture of the urban flaneur.12 The Arcades Projectcan be read as a
critique of bourgeois commodification of society, an attempt to uncover the true history
underneath ideology. However, it is also an attempt to look beyond superficial movement in
order to consider new strategies of perception and to develop new theories of history that are
less linear than virtually embedded in the spaces of interaction.
Benjamins work marks a significant example of a long line of Marxist-influenced
studies of modern space and movement. While many of these thinkers detach space
from action and reattach it to social structuration, which marks another iteration of the
conventional image of thought that cannot adequately address the nature of change, they
are important for our immediate purposes, because they recognize the crisis of action and
movement and begin developing important strategies for addressing the disconnect between
modern space, on the one hand, and thinking and acting in these spaces, on the other.13
What all these figures share is an inclination to critique modernism by capturing its
complexity and flux and offering deep, historical understandings of how we have reached the
crisis of movement and action. The subject theories of Simmel and Kracauer reveal, both in
their theoretical approach and in the characterization of their early modern characters, the
12 Walter Benjamin,The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 2002). See also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter
Benjamin and the Arcades Project(Boston: MIT Press, 1991), and Beatrice Hanssen, ed.,Walter Benjamin And
the Arcades Project(London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006).
13 Considering the role of capitalism in this crisis and the ongoing discourse on movement is beyond
the scope of our current concerns. However, it is worth noting that Deleuze (and Guattari) have a more
ambivalent and often positive view of capitalism, which for them signifies an open flow of exchanges. Unlike
Marxists who view the structure of capitalism as the underlying cause of social inequities, Deleuze and Guattari
see capitalisms tendency to be codified and territorialized as the problem. Understanding, developing and
practicing means for decoding, deterritorializing these flows and keeping them open to multiplicities becomes
their primary motive in developing nomadic thought.
100
root of the crisis of action spatially conceived. Despite momentous historical shifts in space
and thinking, early modern subjects did not change, or at the very least subjective theories
were incapable of incorporating a new modern subject who moves. New technologies, new
social orders, new modes of production and reception affected thinking but not acting. Our
quotidian existence changed but our constitution as subjects did not. Ian Buchanan contends
this is because mobility functions as an abstract machine, influencing thinking without
being itself thinkable.14 Buchanan draws a distinction between the neurotic, who works in
coded space, and the schizoid, who operates deliriously, to suggest the former is the model
most theorists use, while the latter is the model that is more productive.
The crisis of action in cinema and spatial studies then requires strategies to make
movement to become thinkable. Movement does not happen to us nor is it an objective force
working on us as subjects. Movement as duration collapses the object/subject distinction,
positing each of us as special images always already part of movement as an ongoing temporal
dimension of thought and action. If early modern spatial theory sought to explain how
space affected individuals, spatial theory during the second half of the twentieth century
transformed to address the ways in which individuals affect space. Like Hitchcock, who
within Deleuzes evolution of the movement-image introduced a thinking and acting subject
into the cinematic experience, figures like Henri Lefebvre and Martin Heidegger altered the
dynamics of spatial studies by incorporating the individual into thought.15
The incapacity of the movement-image, following its crisis, to connect perception
and action is not unlike the crisis of theorizing space throughout post-modernism. In
traditional modes of thought, man appears increasingly disconnected from his surroundings.
However, new images of thought can reveal strategies for staging reconnections. As Jameson
writes:
14 Ian Buchanan, Space in the Age of Non-Place, Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Gregg
Lambert (Edinburg: Edinburge UP, 2005) 26.
15 See for example Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:
Wiley-Blackwell, 1992) and Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 143-161.
101
there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any

equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual
equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because
our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have
called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore []
stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand
our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps
ultimately impossible, dimensions.16
While Jamesons consideration of post-modern, late-modern or hyperspace focuses on the the
populist tendency to eschew high modernist utopian strategies, which only serves to reinforce
standard dichotomies between lowbrow and highbrow culture through pastiche and irony,
other figures have offered alternative strategies for working through this crisis.
Guy Debord and the Situationists sought to create a modern subject that addresses
this crisis. They continued Benjamins focus on the flaneur by developing psychogeography,
the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals,17 which is a
polemically misleading definition as the Situationists were more concerned with the creation
of events and undermining these laws or creating new ones than in merely discovering
already existing ones. More aptly put, psychogeography is a strategy for exploring urban
spaces, for resisting habitual trajectories of motion and affording a new awareness of the
environment. Psychogeography and the derives that comprise them can be seen as attempts
to create any-space-whatevers. Unlike the spatial and temporal movement Benjamin explored
in the Parisian Arcades as part a new territorialization of space, the psychogeographical
derives among the Situationists sought to deterritorialize these trajectories and spaces.
Equally inspired by the increasingly disconnectedness of space and aleatory nature of
movement, Archigram sought to create structures that allowed for difference and flexibility,
such as the Plug-in-City (1964) (Fig. 3.02) and structures that were free themselves to roam
16 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1992)
38-39.
17 Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, April 10 2010. <http://library.
nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2 >.
102
their urban environs, as with The Walking

City (1964) (Fig. 3.03). Instant City
(1968) (Fig. 3.04) was designed to create
and stage events, employing provisional
structures for performances in service of
combating the monotony of modernism
and highlighting, rather than evading,
the ephemeral nature of urbanity. Tuned
Suburb (1968) (Fig. 3.05) marked their
Fig. 3.02 Plug-In City (1964)
attempt at preservation by attaching

their interventions to existing towns in
such a way that the historical strata of
development became a spatial palimpsest.
However, the creative (if largely
theoretical and pictorial) strategies that
Fig. 3.03 The Walking City (1964)
the Situationists and Archigram employed

to shake the modern subject out of
habitual slumber were already being
realized in other spatial practices. Spaces
of deterritorialization, any-space-whatevers
were already being created. The task of the
Fig. 3.04 Instant City (1968)
contemporary theorist was to recognize

and conceptualize meaning in these
practices. Deterritorialization as related to
any-space-whatever has been effectively
defined by Buchanan, who writes:
Fig. 3.05 The Tuned Suburb (1964)
103
Deterritorialisation names the process whereby the very basis of ones

identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is eroded, washed away
like the bank of the river swollen by floodwater immersion. Although
such transformations are often narrated as a discovery of oneself, it
would be more accurate to think of them in terms of loss, or, becomingimperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, by which they mean
ceasing to stand out, ceasing to be perceived as different, looking like
everybody else, merging with the landscape.18
Foucaults study of heterotopias, spaces of otherness, address aberrant action, the
conflation of mental and physical space.19 Heterotopias facilitate private encounters (motel
rooms), deviant behavior (asylums), rituals (saunas), and archival (museums).20 Foucault
promotes a society full of heterotopias that affirm difference and combat authoritarianism
and repression. Heterotopias far from homogenizing identity, facilitates its transformation.

Distinctly modern cities, such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas also act as any-space-
whatevers that originate as pure flows of movement, otherwise deserted pass-through spaces
for soldiers and tourists. However, out of this openness of flows in which deterritorialized
space allows identity and time to be repeatedly reconceived anew, arise cities with new
dynamics that cannot be reduced to traditional urban structures and environments. The
mobility of the subject (as opposed to the changing nature of space) becomes the focus for
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Scott Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas,21 as well
as Reyner Banham in his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.22 Movement becomes
a datum against which to measure the origins, development and relational dynamics of these
cities. Their relation to time is to be found in the long duration of the desert from which they
emerge rather than a deep memorial relationship with tradition histories.
18 Buchanan 23.
19 It is worth noting that Foucault has always had an intimate relationship with architecture. Even when
space is not his overt subject of study, it plays an important role in his work, as in the dynamics of asylums,
hospitals, schools and prisons in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and The
Archaeology of Knowledge, and Discipline and Punish, respectively (see Bibliography for full citations).
20 Deleuze has a close affinity to Foucault, devoting a complimentary book-length study to his colleague.
Nevertheless, Deleuzes focus is more ontological than social,
21 Robert Venturi, Scott Izenour and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1977).
22 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2009).
104
The lack of a pre-existing or clearly discernible identity in these any-space-whatevers

allows for an important transformation that Buchanan and Lambert find in the work of
Michel De Certeau, who using place to denote the restrictive and unhomely and space
(hitherto the designation for the uninhabited and uninhabitable) to theorise a tenuous new
form of freedom,23 recognizes a freedom of flows of spatial, temporal and identity-based
experimentation that arises in any-space-whatevers. While De Certeau never explicitly
uses the term any-space-whatever, his research is relevant because it provides tactics for
navigating this late modern terrain. In The Practice of Everyday Life, he draws an important
distinction between strategies, which he links to institutional or codified modes of thought
and practice, as well as structures of power, and tactics, which individual subjects develop
and utilize to create new dynamics of space within these environments otherwise defined by
codified strategies.24
The codified city for De Certeau is an amalgam of strategies put forth by
governments, corporations and other institutional interests who represent their space through
maps that posit the city as a unified and objective whole. The experience of the city, on
the other hand, especially by the urban pedestrian, are less determined by these utilitarian
and regular plans than created in spite of them with shortcuts and aimless meanderings.
Rules, procedures and products of the city are continually subverted, decodified and the city
deterritorialized to allow the subject to treat it as any-space-whatever.

Despite their differences (and they are decidedly pronounced), what all these theorists
and theories have in common is related to any-space-whatever in that they evade intentional
design in favor of linkages that occur incidentally and eschew a positive search for truth in
favor of a critique of the structures codifying the built environment. There emerges in a way
that intentionally designed space, like the movement-image in its search for truth, could
not, works with a milieu but no center. Sedentary and striated spaces give way to nomadic
23 Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, Introduction, Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Gregg
Lambert (Edinburg: Edinburge UP, 2005) 3.
24 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002).
105
and smooth varieties. Buchanan and Lambert write, The broken links of perception and
sensation produce distant and flat any-space-whatever accompanied by an affective sensation
(I feel) bereft of any possible subjective orientation between interior and exterior.25
Within architecture, the central historians of late modernism, including Colin Rowe,
Manfredo Tafuri, as well as Banham, while acutely aware of an ongoing crisis, have a more
difficult time in embracing the aleatory nature of spatial studies and practices following the
crisis.26 The modernism to which they respond is composed by the master narratives of
figures like Bruno Taut, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Curt Behrendt, Nikolaus Pevsner
and Siegfried Giedion, who despite their differences all maintain overt teleologies.27 However,
if architecture theory reconceives of modernism in terms of its creative genesis of spatial
practices, recognizing the value in interstitial, incidental any-space-whatevers, fluid images
of thought can replace representational modes of thought, compelling new strategies of
architectural history to emerge.
In Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, Anthony
Vidler implies a critical and creative role for the architectural historian, by emphasizing the
critical relations between architectural history and contemporary design.28 While Vidler
does not adequately address this latter issue, he does set the foundation for doing so by
looking at the ways in which histories of modernism themselves were constructed.29 He also
draws an important distinction between historians as authorities or dictators of correctness
and historians as philosophers of production who uncover the genesis of thought. In this
25 Buchanan and Lambert 6.
26 See, for example, Coline Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge:
MIT UP, 1992), Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara
Luigia La Penta (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1979), and Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
(Cambridge, MIT UP, 1980).
27 See, for example, Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture (London: The Studio, 1929), Walter Curt
Behrendt, Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems, and Forms (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1937), HenryRussell Hitchock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929),
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber and
Faber, 1936), and Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1941).
28 Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2008) xiii.
29 Vidler 1.
106
sense, the conventional master narratives of modernism point to potential origins and
developments in modernism, but fail to consider the creative flows from which these
dynamics emerge.
Despite any posturing to the contrary, these master narratives are determinative.
Vidler writes, But whatever their partialities, these pioneer works accomplished what
the modernist architects themselves feared the most: the historicizing of modernism []
Whether modern architecture was seen to begin with the baroque, classicism, neoclassicism,
nineteenth-century eclecticism, or Arts and Crafts revivalism, the floodgates were now
opened for a host of competing narratives, a variety of historically based modernisms, and
several versions of a possible unity of style characterizing the modern.30
What is essential to extract from each of these thinkers (Vidler considers Emil
Kaufman, as well as Rowe, Banham and Tafuri) is that their origins of modernism, despite
their differences all intentionally or unintentionally posit a foundation from which to judge
ensuing works, which misses the importance of the genesis of these origins in themselves. Far
from a post-structuralist Russian doll game, merely serving to reveal deeper and deeper layers
or structures always historically, socially or linguistically situated, the flux of origins and
genesis of thought reveals the flows that allow lines of flight to take place and these origins to
allow for the ongoing production of the new and qualitative change.
STIRLINGS RESPONSE
James Stirlings work as much as any figure of late modernism evinces the promise of (re)
installing time as a historical feature, as well as an aesthetic and functional one, within
architectural practice. It also reveals the crux of the crisis. While his work is experimental
in reconceiving of modernisms agenda and returning to origins of thought and practice to
reveal new relations, strategies and tendencies of space and time, it works productively only
insofar as Stirling maintains a focus on the production of the new or to the extent that he
30 Vidler 7.
107
allows for the outside to enter thought. Stirling is seminal in both conceiving of the crisis
in movement and for understanding its complexity, because his career unfolds alongside
the development of post- or late-modernism and his written and design works reveal an
awareness of the importance of thought in proceeding beyond movement.

For Raphael Moneo, the evolution of contemporary architecture begins with
[Stirling],31 because he is aware of the influence of the modernist avant-garde but also
presages and incorporates new notions of complexity, fashionable in mid-century theory.
Stirling is influenced by the academic tradition and Le Corbusier but also understands and
apprehends its myopia. He recognized early in his career that the popularization of the
aesthetic or functional avant-garde rendered it banal, as well as blind to its connection to the
development of cities and societies. He strategically evades banalization throughout his career
by continually returning to the genesis of form, structure, function and thought rather than
accepting its tenets as a dogmatic or historical certainty.
His first works overtly pay homage
to and depart from Le Corbusier in key
ways. His Dom-ino apartments (1951) (Fig.
3.06), like Le Corbusiers precedent, uses
prefabricated elements. However, unlike his
forebearer, Stirling focuses more on flux and
transformation than in developing a definitive
architectural episode for rote repetition.
Stirlings project allows for shifts in scale
and organization and avoids any apodictic
prescription of elements.
Fig. 3.06 Dom-ino Apartments (1951)
Stirlings first overt critique of modernism comes with the Woolton House (1954)
(Figs. 3.07-3.08). It is inspired by rural and vernacular buildings, though not as an
31 Moneo 3.
Fig. 3.07 Woolton House(1954)
108
Fig. 3.08 Woolton House(1954)
alternative ideology or telos, but as a means for recovering the singular and specific that was
lost in modernisms focus on universal construction and normative strategies. This project
is successful because it recovers historical strategies that return us to the genesis of thought
without positing an ideal model to be universally copied or represented, and in so doing
strategically undermines the dichotomy between building and place. Like Woolton, Stirlings
1955 rural village project recovers historical methods, this time in the form of medieval
towns that emphasize flexibility and continuity with place. However, this later project reads
more as the pastiche that would emerge in much late modern historicist and post-modern
architecture.
Ham Common flats (1955-1958) (Fig.3.09) show the influence of later Le Corbusier,
especially in projects like Ronchamp and the Madame Sarabhai house in India, which are
comprised of singular, autonomous architectural elements. This notion of autonomy is more
than a functional consideration. Autonomy here is a means of addressing form as a response
to specific situations and for facilitating internal and external relationships, and for eschewing
style as a pre-given totality to which individual works must correspond. Autonomy in this
sense also reflects Kaufmans use of the
term especially in his analysis of Claude
Ledouxs plans for the Saltworks at Chaux
and their evolution from unified form
to separate pavilions, which reflects the
emergence of an architecture of isolation
that paralleled the emergence of the
modern individual consciousness.32
32 Vidler 24.
Fig. 3.09 Ham Commons Flats (1955-1958)
109
Despite an attempt by Kaufman to tie architecture to developments in psychology

and perception, his analysis focuses solely on the formal qualities, articulating a social
language of forms, an architectural parlante that is still representational. While Kaufman
viewed autonomy as a denial of the past or at least a denial of its influence on the present
and partly as a matter of rationality, he ends up simply replacing one form of heteronomy
(history) with another (geometry). The search for a stable, eternal force from which to
take inspiration or to adequately represent never disappears; it only takes on a new form.
Revolution for Kaufman occurs between the part, which is malleable, and the whole, which
is not. According to this view, experiments always have recourse to a defining structure or
ideology, which for Deleuze is not experimentation at all.
For Deleuze, autonomy is not an escape from social institutions or obligations,
but an understanding of the way in which the flows of duration are liberating, enabling
expression and new modes of thought, perception and affect to originate. Stirling, like
Deleuze, posits autonomy as a means of returning to the origins of ideas and the ways
in which they relate to movement, as well as the ways in which they influence but never
determine history. For Stirling, autonomy is less a means of exploring individual expression
than it is a way of allowing for the singular to subvert the universal, which had become a
negatively defining trait of modernism.

Vidlers study of Kaufman does recover two important elements of the latters
consideration of modernisms origins. First, he reminds us of Kaufmans emphasis on the

composition or relation of parts, which allows for flexibility, difference and anomalies of
process. There is within Kaufmans scheme a role for expression. Second, Vidler also argues
that Ledouxs architectural parlante pointed to a future more than a past. In this sense,
Kaufmans focus is on a qualitative, albeit limited, notion of time as change. It is qualitative
because change in architectural language and form is tied to change in modes of thought,
especially among an emergent bourgeoisie. It is, however, limited because architectural
language is still posited by Kaufman as linguistic, symbolic and representational. Deleuzes
taxonomy of signs, especially in cinema, is non-linguistic, expressive rather than signifying.
110
Stirlings mature phase can be similarly interpreted as replacing symbolism with signs.
This approach is most evident in the Engineering Building at the University of Leicester
(1959-1963) (Figs. 3.10-3.12), arguably the most important design of his career before
Staatsgalerie. Here, the autonomy of the parts reflects an acute awareness of an open whole
and creates a series of events, a critical reflection on the nature of difference. Stirling used
utility to his advantage, treating stairs, rails, windows, corners as opportunities to, as Moneo
writes, maintain a unitary idea while producing a wide variety of episodes,33 to superimpose
the one and the many. The section here is not an abstract tool as the plan had become for
Le Corbusier, but it is a tool for experimenting with relations, connections, autonomy and
sensations.
Fig. 3.10 Engineering Building (1959-1963)

33 Moneo 22.
111
Figs. 3.13 and 3.14 History Faculty Building(1964-1967)
In addition to Le Corbusier, the origins of modernism to which Stirling continually

returns include British functionalism, regional vernaculars, nineteenth century traditions and
Colin Rowe. The diversity of inspirations allowed Stirling to keep the whole of modernism
in flux and to treat it as a flow of inspirations and vitalities waiting to be explored. This
influence is manifest in his desire to manipulate typologies as with the History Faculty
building at Cambridge University (1964-1967) (Figs. 3.13-3.14), which deconstructs the
domed library to install a sense of continuity between different elements reconciled with
ground, surroundings and function.

This project also continues Stirlings
fascination with the section, which appears

repeatedly as with the Dorman Long headquarters
(1965) (Fig. 3.15). This project was designed in
section to study the vertical sequencing of space as
a means for reconfiguring relationships. The focus
on the section works to get away from the rigidity
of the plan, to explore new means of linkage and
movement, but fails when it becomes an ironic
Fig. 3.15 Dorman Long Headquarters (1965)
112
treatment of old typologies or when Stirling begins to repeat himself as with Queens
College, Oxford (1966-1971) (Fig. 3.16) and many other works from the late 1960s.
These project lost the singularity he developed in his earlier works without incorporating
new ways of exploring complexity. The Siemens AG (1969) (Fig. 3.17) in particular misses
the opportunities to explore utilitarian building typologies as any-space-whatevers and
to create new meaning in the sublime forms the design necessitated. The design instead
installs repetition at all scales without a critical approach or difference in any significant
sense. Within the Deleuzian paradigm, the critique of modernism is nothing without an
accompanying creation of the new.
Much of this repetition in Stirlings work can be attributed to the influence of Rowe,
whose approach was dialectical, always demanding a synthesis between abstraction and
realism, modern and classical. Moreover, for Rowe, formal and historical complexity still
needed a representative diagram or image. The Derby Town Centre (1970) (Fig. 3.18) marks
a change of strategy, influenced by Rowe, as well as Leon Krier, who increasingly came to
view architecture as a means of rejuvenating the pre-industrial city. Strong elements of irony
are present in Stirlings visualizations for this project, including figures dressed in Edwardian
garb, Victory emblem enlarged to create a work of pop art, and a demolished building used
Fig. 3.16 Queens College (1966-1971)
Fig. 3.17 Siemens AG (1969)
113
Fig. 3.18 Derby Town Center (1971)
Fig. 3.19 Milton Keynes Project (1971)
as illustration. In much the same manner, the Milton Keynes project for Olivetti (1971) (Fig.
3.19), while revealing a narrative approach to planar elements, falls back on early modern
ideas of utopian workplaces and an even older notion of the picturesque pleasant life.
The most critical and productive architecture for Stirling emerges through the
development of three museums, the first being the Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf
(1975) (Fig. 3.20), which incorporates complexity by juxtaposing disparate historical
elements and redefining the architectural promenade, less influenced by Le Corbusiers work
at Villa Savoye than the fluid movement he created at the Olivetti offices in Lyon. The second
project is the Wallraf-Richartz Museum (1975) (Fig. 3.21), which employs similar strategies
in Cologne to incorporate new elements into an urban fabric that prominently features the
cathedral. Both of these projects are preludes to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1977-1983)
(Fig. 3.22-3.25).
Fig. 3.20 Nordrhein-Westfalen (1975)

Fig. 3.21 Wallraf-Richartz (1975)
Fig. 3.22 Staatsgalerie (1977-1983)
114
Despite this urban complexity, Stirling continued to incorporate overt historical

references both forms and typologies into his design. These widely disparate elements,
however, are successful to the extent that they serve to stage episodes or events and engage in
a critical discourse or creation of the new in relation to the surrounding landscape both the
existing historical fabric and the more modern elements. While much of his work falls prey
to the pastiche and irony of post-modern historicism, his capacity to create, fuse together and
obfuscate the boundaries between archaeological layers is a compelling prelude to the time
image, a robust strategy for moving beyond the crisis of movement.
As Moneo writes, This is architecture where the accidental predominates, and
where the guiding thread is movement.34 However, movement in this sense is more than the
34 Moneo 41.
115
promenade architecturale. Movement is tied as much to the staging of sensation, instilling a

lack of repose or closure to the elements in the design by always referring to something yet to
come. Even the pronounced cylinder, which is itself a historical reference, connects Stirlings
insertion to the existing building and gives ways to a panoply of carefully constructed
references that avoid historical reduction.
While Rowe lamented the lack of facades in Stirlings project, this can be read as a
symptom of Rowes inability to move beyond historical precedent and overarching structures
for representational or symbolic design. Vidler writes, Without a face or faade, Rowe
believed a building lost any frontality, and thus any metaphorical plane of intersection
between the eyes of the observer and what one might dare to call the soul of the building
(its condition of internal animation).35 Rowes movement, unlike Sterlings, has continual
recourse to a picturesque or classical notion of it, while other more subtle forms of animation
and movement are excluded from the discourse.
Stirlings true accomplishment here is to install complexity through a density of signs
that reveal history, memory and time and resist a formal clarity that would lead incorporation
into pre-existing habits of thought. His accomplishment is perhaps best illustrated through
comparison to the interior where the drab and conventional offer few new sensations. The
precision Rowe sought returns but with little effect.
Vidler sums up the crisis that many modernist historians found when he writes:
Rowe viewed post-Corbusianism and post-Miesianism as moments of
formal crystallization bereft of the ideological content that had (falsely
but energetically) inspired modern architecture: the revolution had failed.
As he concluded his review of the 1959 exhibition of Le Corbusier at the
Building Center, The success of any revolution is also its failure.36
This implies that Rowe, like Eisenstein and Le Corbusier, valued modernism for its capacity
to represent an ideological or social consciousness. However, following Deleuze, if one views
the crisis as an inability to forego ideological certainty and overt social gestures in favor
35 Vidler 103.
36 Vidler 96.
116
on ongoing qualitative change, the modernist revolutions undoing can be blamed on its
continual recourse to a non-existent stable center, eternal principles or teleological notions of
history.
In this sense, no form of expression can avoid the repetition of the same, which
Deleuze eschews through his concepts of movement and difference. But whereas Rowe
writes, The difference is that between the universal, and the decorative or merely competent;
perhaps in both cases it is the adherence to rules which has lapsed,37 Deleuze would argue
that it is the adherence to rules that caused the collapse. Rowe, as a result, becomes more
pessimistic, and in his introduction to the Five Architects exhibit performs essentially an
autopsy of modernism.38 At this point in time, he had become in Vidlers words a critic who
believed that everything had already happened.39
Stirling too is subject to such doubts concerning the modernist agenda as evidenced
by the extreme irony that returns in force with the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin
(1979) (Fig. 3.26). However, while historical precedents remain a significant part of his
later projects, especially the Bibliotheque de France (1989) (Figs. 3.27-3.28), Stirling
hinted at a new direction by eliding
overt references and returning to the
autonomous forms of his earlier period.
Instead of a postmodern irony, Stirling
proposes an excess of sensation and
movement in which the attention to
details and precedents emerges not as a
representations of ideal origins but as the
continual genesis of the new.
Fig. 3.26 Wissenschaftszentrum (1979)
37 Colin Rowe, James Stirling: A Highly Personal and Highly disjointed Memoir, in Peter Arnell and
Ted Bickford, eds., James Stirling: Buildings and Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1984) 15.
38 Colin Rowe, Introduction, Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New
York: Oxford UP, 1972) 3-8.
39 Vidler 98.
117
Fig. 3.27 and 3.28 Bibliotheque de France (1989)
Vidler sums up the modernist conundrum when he writes:

the modern movement was a double-edged machine. On the one
hand, it was committed to a modernism of form, embracing all the
techniques of collage, montage, and formalism in general in the service
of the ideology of the avant-garde, whereby a formal strategy should
serve a new social order. On the other hand, such a modernism sought a
timeless relationship with society, based on an abstraction of traditional,
nonarchitectural construction; this was seen to go hand in hand with
a universalization of the inherited principles of classicism, minus their
representation in the classical orders.40
In other words, the modernist creation of the new cannot operate absent a distinctly
modernist notion of time that allows architecture to transcend movement as merely spatial.
Tafuris pessimism, much the same, can be blamed on a persistent tendency to search for
means of revolutionary critique in architecture rather than a gradual and repetitive return to
the new. Cultural critique and social commentary are not foreign to cinema. The movement
it gives is never overt, but is tied instead to subtle strategies of perception and action
that reveal the genesis of thought, the production of the new and time itself, rather than
timelessness.

What we find in Deleuzes genealogy of film and its extension into architecture
are potential strategies though never developed in a linear fashion for reuniting
architecture and the cultural forces of change in the modern world. These forces include
the aesthetic ideals of autonomy, the need to consider history as a force of time, the means
for considering changing formal strategies, and the continued need to unite architecture to
40 Vidler 104.
118
social critique. Deleuze provides the most coherent and productive means for engaging in
this reinterpretation of modernism and for conceiving of new relationships between subject,
object and the act of creation. Through Deleuze the modern subject and modern architecture
can be uncoded and navigated.
As a response to the crisis of movement, Deleuzes cinema books suggest that
revolution should be replaced with ongoing qualitative change. No longer is the critics aim
revolution, but neither is it a slavish obedience to the status quo or capitulation to fields
outside of architecture, especially the marketplace. The import of architecture and its works
lies not so much in any obedience to an overarching structure or ideology but to a capacity
for resistance and subversion if only in a modest way. Within the history of architectural
modernism, it is no longer a matter of opposing various strands to each other in favor of
one approach over another. It becomes an issue of exploring those works that offer a sense of
difference and change.
In The Space of Man: On the Specificity of Affect in Deleuze and Guattari, Claire
Colebrook connects Deleuzian thought on space to the social and political realm. She writes,
Absolute territorialisation is, then, the potential of sense, the potential of the brain to think
the genesis of spatiality from within a local space; not just this image as it is here for me,
folded around my body, but imaging as such.41 Deleuze understands that to think requires
a movement beyond conventional formations of knowledge into any-space-whatevers from
which images of movement, time and thought emerge.
Cinematic and architectural any-space-whatevers, as well as theoretical and creative
means for exploring the crisis of movement reveal an outside of thought, a temporal element
of existence for which the movement-image cannot fully account. This outside is not spatially
or temporally separated from world in which we live. It is in fact nothing more than the
relationships and connections through which and inside of which we operate. Thinking
41 Claire Colebrook, The Space of Man: On the Specificity of Affect in Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze
and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (Edinburg: Edinburge UP, 2005) 193.
spatiality then entails an understanding of space as it relates to the extended relations,

milieus, history and codes from which it arises. Most important, thinking spatiality entails
thinking the elusive issue of time.
119
Satter | The Time-Image
120
Section Four:
The Time-Image and
the Outside of Thought
Pete walks slowly inside - stares at the phone and picks it up.
PETE
Hello.
MR. EDDY
(phone voice)
Hey, Pete... How ya doin?
PETE
Who is this?
MR. EDDY
You know who it is.
Bill and Claire have stopped in the living room watching Pete. Pete is going crazy with Mr.
Eddy on one end, and his parents staring at him on the other. He waves his parents away, but they
leave slowly and reluctantly.
PETE
Mr. Eddy?
MR. EDDY
Yeah... How ya doin, Pete?
PETE
Okay.
MR. EDDY
Youre doin, okay? Thats good, Pete.
PETE
Look... Its late, Mr. Eddy... I ...
MR. EDDY
Im really glad youre doin okay, Pete.
Pete doesnt know what to say.
MR. EDDY
You sure youre doin okay? Everything all right?
121
PETE
Yeah.
MR. EDDY
Thats good, Pete. Hey... I want you to talk to a friend of mine.
Pete can hear the phone being handed over to someone. There is a long silence. Pete can hear
breathing.
VOICE
Weve met before, havent we?
Pete freezes. His mind is scrambling.
PETE
I dont think so. Where was it that you think weve met?
VOICE
At your house. Dont you remember?
PETE
No. No, I dont.
VOICE
We just killed a couple of people...
PETE
What?
Pete can hear Mr. Eddy laugh in the background.
VOICE
You heard me... We thought wed come over and tell you about it.
Pete is getting pale with fear.
PETE
Whats goin on?
VOICE
Great question!! In the east ... the far east... when a person is sentenced to death... theyre sent to a
place where they cant escape... never knowing when an executioner will step up behind them and
fire a bullet into the back of their head... it could be days... weeks... or even years after the death
sentence has been pronounced... This uncertainty adds an exquisite element of torture to the
situation, dont you think? Its been a pleasure talking to you.
Pete can hear the phone being passed again.
MR. EDDY
Pete... I just wanted to jump on and tell you Im really glad youre doin okay.
The phone goes dead and Pete sits - fearfully pondering his fate. He hears a NOISE and turns.1
If Lost Highway introduces a crisis of movement and interpretation that calls into question
perception, affect and action, as well as the intervals linking them, it is resolved only through
recourse to time. There emerges in Lynchs film a new logic that moves beyond quotidian
movement, opening the narrative to further states of becoming and revealing the limits
1
Lynch and Gifford, Lost Highway The Screenplay.
122
of a rational, continuous and linear sensory-motor apparatus. The film remains squarely
within the realm of the movement-image only to the extent that we view the film as a dream
sequence or fall back on rational coordinates of space and time to solve its mysteries. Despite
such attempts by the viewer to naturalize this experience, the film resists such readings and
makes itself discernible only to the extent that we submit to a new image of thought that
introduces a Deleuzian Outside of thought.
This element of indiscernibility, which is not to be conflated with willful obfuscation,
forces us to realize that we are not thinking and offers a window into the unthought. Lynch
critiques conventional film logic and creates an audiovisual mapping of memory, duration
and consciousness by returning to a pre-individuated state where identity, subjectivity, space
and time become open insofar as they suggest the unlimited potentials for linking images.
While this interpretative imperative, immanent within the nature of images and signs,
implicates the spectator, we are only confounded or edified to the extent that we refuse to
embrace the new logic.
As Pete and we as viewers realize, there is always an element of trauma within the
time-image, in which temporal fissures and gaps between images serve to permit and filter
the Outside of thought. The power of a film like Lost Highway is that the fracturing of
time becomes its constant theme. The pieces of Lost Highway, meticulously composed,
constantly hint at a resolution yet to come, but in the end remain open to interpretation,
providing contingent narrations that reveal the virtual potential immanent to matter and
thought. Forcing a conventional logic on the film may allow us to suture its cuts and provide
artificial closure, but only at the expense of meaning as an ongoing act of becoming. In
much the same manner, architecture as historiography, theory and critical practice operates
most profoundly when it creates images of time and thought dependent that in their
discontinuities create strategies for simultaneously revealing the past as open, the immediate
present as dynamic and the future as indeterminate.
123
THE TIME-IMAGE
Deleuzes capacity to transcend movement as abstract physical displacement, overt social
critique (as in Marxist thought) and internal thought (as with phenomenology and
psychoanalysis) is nothing less than a return to ontology, or more precisely an ontogenetic
line of thought that emphasizes becoming, duration and time. The key to this ontogenetic
approach is understanding the difference between the movement-image and the time-image.
If the former, despite its usefulness in conceiving of movement, maintains a relationship
between thought and image as one of identity and totality, the latter emphasizes nonidentity
and openness.
Eschewing pre-determined structures and pre-existing ends of thought and history,
the time-image provides strategies and criteria for delimiting truth through creation rather
than reflection. While the movement-image reveals the open whole of thought indirectly
and the crisis of movement reveals the limitations inherent in any attempt to install absolute
closure to systems of movement, the time-image restores the composition of the whole in
an entirely new manner. The composition of the time-image is still rigorous, never random,
arbitrary or capricious. However, whereas determinism and predictability characterized the
movement-image, probabilism defines the time-image.
With the time-image, certainty turns to uncertainty because the intervals connecting
images become autonomous, allowing spectators to embrace flux, contingencies, the
unknown and unknowable, become more sensitive to time and understand that change
can take any direction. Cinematic thought enables us to understand how we think in and
through the flux of time, or more precisely, how time passes through us and divides us from
ourselves. Film, in this sense returns to what Deleuze calls a pre-individualized state where it
is not an I who is thinking but a machinic arrangement of images that enables thought.
The strategy with which the time-image confronts us enables a new interpretation
of modernism in general, and its films and architecture in particular. Rodowick astutely
contends that a continuous though understated theme in the two cinema books is
124
that eras are defined philosophically by their images of thought. As we have seen, pre2
modern thought sought firm foundations and clearly defined ends from or toward which to
operate, and early modern thought, despite its capacity to appreciate movement as a motif,
still maintained some degree of teleology, and mid-century thought gave rise to a radical
questioning of these presuppositions. Late modern thought, however, provides a creative
means for resituating thought as a critical and creative practice that embraces the eternal
return of difference as a fusing of the real and imaginary. As Deleuze writes, thought has
no other reason to function than its own birth, always the repetition of its own birth, secret
and profound. [ The] image thus has as object the functioning of thought, and [] the
functioning of thought is also the real subject which brings us back to images.3
The classic cinema of the movement-image creates a relationship with the open whole
of duration that allows thought to function at a higher level of awareness, reveal images as
pre-linguistic, and creates a sensory-motor unity between man and nature, thought and
action. This triad of processes moves the spectator from image to thought. In other words
the image does not represent or symbolize as much as reveal the workings of thought as
movement connected as much to time as space.
Modern cinema in creating a new semiotic and image of thought, introduces a new
triad in which the whole as total and givable is obliterated to allow for an outside of thought
to be inserted between images, pre-linguistic nature of images turns to free indirect discourse4
in which subjectivity and identity are questioned and made indistinguishable, and the
2 Rodowick 172.
4 Free indirect discourse is a literary device combining aspects of first- and third-person narration. This
narrative approach obfuscates subjective distinctions between the author and the character, as well as between
temporal dimensions as past and present tense are juxtaposed. To use an oft-cited example, direct speech yields
a sentence such as, He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure have I
found, since I came into this world? he asked. Indirect speech would state the same thought with, He laid
down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came
into the world. Finally, free indirect speech would organize this thought with, He laid down his bundle and
thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world? Deleuze
develops this term within the cinema books to argue that while point of view shots are like direct discourse and
objective shots are like indirect discourse with the camera serving in the role of the author or third person, the
time-image is dominated by free indirect discourse in which the perspectives and thoughts of characters and the
camera become ambiguous and indistinguishable as does any distinction between past, present and future.
125
sensory-motor unity of man and nature is put under erasure in favor of a gaps or fissures that
prevent thought and action from operating rationally or linearly. Deleuze writes:
[There] is thus no longer association through metaphor or metonymy,
but relinkage on the literal image; there is no longer linkage of associated
images, but only relinkages of independent images. Instead of one image
after the other, there is one image plus another: and each shot is deframed
in relation to the framing of the following shot [This] time-image
puts thought into contact with the unthought, the unsummonable, the
inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable, the Outside or
obverse of the images has replaced the whole, at the same time as the
interval [interstice] or the cut has replaced association.5
The crisis of movement and action is addressed in the time-image by freeing the image from
the sensory-motor schema to become a pure visual and auditory image, by addressing the
image as readable and thinkable, and defining the image qualitatively. The image of the
whole is not a projection in space but an intuition or becoming in time through change and
creative evolution.
The dismantling of the sensory-motor schema gives rise to what Deleuze calls the
powers of the false in which the distinction between true and false is undetermined. This
concept is distinct from post-modernist notions of pluralism (multiple truths), nihilism
(truth as impossible) or relativism (truth as historically situated). Instead truth is created
positively rather than discovered or separated from the false. As Rodowick writes:
The primary question for Deleuze is how thought can be kept moving,
not toward a predetermined end, but toward the new and unforeseen in
terms of what Bergson calls the Open or creative evolution. Thus the
organic and crystalline regimes are qualitatively different with respect to
how they answer the question What is thinking? For the former it is the
discovery of concepts though negation, repetition, and identity toward
ever more self-identical Being; for the latter it is the creation of concepts
through difference and nonidentity in a continually open Becoming.6
Where the movement-image focuses on discovery, negation, repetition, identity,
being, a pre-existing future, extensiveness and exteriority, the time-image embraces creation,
difference, nonidentity, becoming, a created future yet to come, intensiveness and interiority.
5
6

Rodowick 85.
126
A direct image of time acts as a force, not as a representation of time. It provokes thought
and forces us to think. It creates the unthought of thought. The disjunction between layers of
time offers both an element of creation and critique. As Deleuze writes, The conditions of a
true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which
presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.7
This distinction between the two regimes has implications for redefining movement
and for creating or interpreting cinema and architecture. When movement is subordinated
to time, when an empirical succession of points in space is displaced by non-chronological
moments or events, Deleuze provides four possible interpretive strategies, criteria and means
for aesthetic consideration: duration, acts of memory, the passing present and the passive
syntheses of time.
Movement as duration replaces succession with new means of linkage and
transformation. False continuities and aberrant movement replace the logic of the sensorymotor schema, which becomes a standard of comparison rather than a primary force.
Movement as an act of memory makes movement a mental process of reflection. Acts of
memory posit mental movement as recollection, but only by dismantling any distinction
between subjectivity and objectivity. Recollection can be habitual or attentive. Habit
completes a chain of actions, whereas attention initiates a process of creation. Deleuze writes,
The virtual image (pure recollection) is not a psychological state or a consciousness: it exists
outside of consciousness, in time, and we should have no more difficulty in admitting the
virtual insistence of pure recollections in time than we do for the actual existence of nonperceived objects in space.8

The passing present or conceptualization of the passage of time reveals how images
are perceived in the present but preserved in the past and oriented toward a future yet to
come. Finally, the three passive syntheses of time, which are developed in complex detail
7
8
Deleuze Difference and Repetition 139.

127
in Difference and Repetition, show that duration is not psychological introspection but a
complex interplay of perception and memory, mind and body, mind and nature.9
These definitions of movement as time and the relationships between images
of thought to which they give rise are never arbitrary or capricious. They are instead
heautonomous, meaning sounds and images are differentiated and incommensurable yet
complement each other. As such, any-space-whatevers are reconfigured under the timeimage, becoming disconnected, autonomous and giving rise to new powers, which are
revealed in new modes of montage and narration. Relations between images and between
images and spectator are no longer given. Instead they must be constructed. As Buchanan
and Lambert write:
The broken links of perception and sensation produce distant and flat
any-space-whatever accompanied by an affective sensation (I feel) bereft
of any possible subjective orientation between interior and exterior [...]
Further away than any external world and deeper than any interiority
is a formula Deleuze derived from Foucault and Blanchot to evoke
the figure of an Outside that characterised by its formlessness has
impacted and transformed, in different respects, the modern subjects of
science, philosophy, and art.10
This process of making also creates a new subject as other rather than a subject striving to
identify or make himself commensurate with a specific identity. This new subject works to
create the means for further creation.
The time-image suggests a means for perceiving, understanding and comprehending
the contemporary world, as well as concepts of space, time and identity within it. In order
to develop this new image of thought, in which interstices as pure voids replace intervals,
9 Deleuze writes, It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the
unconscious [] The first synthesis expresses the foundation of time upon the basis of a living present, a
foundation which endows pleasure with its value as a general empirical principle to which is subject the content
of the psychic life in the Id. The second synthesis expresses the manner in which time is grounded in a pure
past, a ground which conditions the application of the pleasure principle to the Ego. The third synthesis,
however, refers to the absence of ground into which we are precipitated by the ground itself (Difference and
Repetition 140). Movement in this sense is not the pursuit for an objective truth or pleasure, but is instead
an exploration of the conditions for actual sensations. Experimentation and practice as the eliding of habit
are often anything but pleasurable, but are necessary for a productive consideration of the virtual realm of
possibilities from which the actual emerges.
10 Buchanan and Lambert 6.
128
in which radical Elsewheres replace any-spaces-whatever, in which accessing the Outside

replaces a production of the new, in which new images of thought give way to the realization
we are not yet thinking and in which direct images of time replace indirect ones, Deleuze
meticulously reconfigures his taxonomy. While Bergson is ever present, Nietzsche replaces
Peirce as the progenitor of signs, which increasingly depend less on a pre-constructed logic
than on temporal forces.
SIGNS OF THE TIME-IMAGE

As with Cinema 1 and the movement-image, in Cinema 2 Deleuze categorizes
the signs that constitute the time-image. This second volume repeats some of the first,
demonstrating how opsigns, the post-modern forms that give rise to and highlight the crisis
of movement, can be developed into chronosigns, which afford a direct image of time.
Within the history of cinema, Deleuze posits Italian neo-realism as the origins of the timeimage. However, within Lost Highway, the Mystery Man scenes serve as an introduction
to this new regime. These scenes interrupt without providing an ostensible relationship
to the surrounding action. When the Mystery Man appears, his interlocutors cease to be
active participants in the unfolding of their stories and become spectators. The mystery man
undermines their sense of identity, space and time as knowable and given. The function of
these images is not immediately clear but imbue the film with potential meaning deprived of
habitual strategies of perception.
In addition to these opsigns, which refer to images that break the sensory-motor
schema and in which the seen is no longer extended into action, there are six varieties of
time-images. The hyalosign or crystal image constitutes a union of actual and virtual images
so they are no longer distinguishable. The chronosign is any image in which time is no longer
subordinated to space and in which time appears for itself. In the onirosign or dream image,
the movement of the world replaces action. The lectosign is that which is read or interpreted
as much as seen. The noosign refers to images that go beyond themselves toward something
129
that can only be thought. The mnemosign or recollection image is a virtual image that enters
into a relationship with the actual image and extends it. The glossary of terms in Cinema 2
is significantly shorter than in Cinema 1, which is due to Deleuzes capacity to establish the
philosophical issues in the first volume, as well as the books narrower focus. All the varieties
of time-images and their signs reflect differences in approach to the singular goal of revealing
time.11
If opsigns are the fragmenting of the sensory-motor schema, hyalosigns or crystal
images are the genetic elements that give rise to time-images in which the actual and virtual
are no longer distinct. There is no means to distinguish the object from its description, the
presentation from the re-presentation. This distinction is only possible through the sensorimotor schema, which is smashed in the time image. The past and memory, however, are
not subjective. They preserve themselves by and in themselves, as memory is not inside the
individual mind, but each mind is inside memory. As Deleuze writes, time is not inside us,
but just the contrary time is the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and
change.12
There are four crystal images to represent circular time, the living present, nonpersonal memory and the past and present combined. Deleuze turns to entire oeuvres to
distinguish these four crystalline states.13 Max Ophuls creates perfect crystals in which the
11 The distinctions between the signs of the time-image are often subtle, which is partly why, despite
the benefit of the philosophical grounding the first volume affords and the relatively few number of signs
under the time-image, Deleuzes second volume on cinema is much longer. For our immediate purposes, it
is enough to understand hyalosigns as marking the advent of the time-image and chronosigns as the forming
the most productive means for considering time, especially as extended into architecture. Their development
comprises the bulk of Cinema 2. While interesting in their own right, the onirosign and mnemosign are more
unique to film and become problematic when extended into other fields, including architecture. As such, I
have not developed them as topics in what follows. The lectosign as an interpretive strategy is covered later in
this section. Finally, the noosign, perhaps the most elusive sign in Deleuzes cinema project, is singled out and
covered separately in the final, concluding section.
13 While elements of the crystal images, as well as other signs of the time-image are apparent in Lost
Highway, any attempt to develop the signs of the time-image through recourse to only this film would be
forced. Unlike the movement-image, which Deleuze develops through a rapid-fire consideration of shots
and scenes from dozens of films, the varieties of the time-image are developed by lingering in more depth on
individual scenes, films and oeuvres as concrete examples that have inspired his taxonomy. As a result, the subtle
nuances and distinctions among the signs of the time-image are better elucidated through recourse to Deleuzes
own examples as much as the ongoing dialogue with Lost Highway developed here.
130
whole, the real, the entirety of life has become spectacle. Jean Renoir creates a cracked crystal
in which our stage roles become rehearsals or experimentations to be applied in real life,
which may be entered (and the theatrical world escaped) through fissures or lines of flight.
Fellini creates a crystal grasped in its formation or its growth, related to the seeds that
compose it.14 Fellinis sideshows and attractions continually give rise to one another and are
constantly in a state of formation and dissemination. These memories are pure, not personal
or nostalgic remembrances. Visconti creates a crystal in dissolution. Bogue writes:
Like Ophulss crystal, Viscontis is self-enclosed, but its time is
unidirectional rather than cyclical. The onrushing present provides
no line of flight, as in Renoir, and no disposition of the virtual past
overcomes the presents inevitable decline, as in Fellini. Yet Deleuze sees
in this temporality of dissolution and the perpetually too-late a final
dimension that transforms itthe dimension of art.15
In all these cases, it is no longer the narrative as such that matters but the specific
image from which they emerge, which gives us a direct image of time. There is no longer
any recourse to an originary object. The time-image operates outside the commonsensical
coordinates of space and time to emphasize the process of becoming. The four crystalline
states then pose possible relations between the virtual past and the actual present. Ophuls
perfect crystal or circular time presents a seamless link between past and present. Renoirs
split crystal affords an image of the living present that serves as an escape from the otherwise
insuperable burden of a dead past. Fellinis crystal in formation contrasts the fragility and
vainglories of the present with a non-personal memory of the past. Viscontis crystal in
dissolution combines past and present a relentless virtual realm of alternative possibilities.
The distinction between movement-images and time-images is not then an issue
of narrative vs. non-narrative strategies. What Deleuze identifies in crystal images of time
is a state of play in reflection, mirrorings, stagings, performances, spectacles, rituals and
ceremonies that present specific images of time prior to and from which the narratives
emerge.
15 Bogue 131.
131
Chronosigns distinguish between the true and false rather than the real and
imaginary and replace indiscernibility with undecidability and inextricability. Deleuze
distinguishes between three types of chronosigns to account for time as contemporaneous,
opposed and layered or as points of the present, layers or sheets of the past and as series, a
becoming as potentialization, as series of powers [puissance].16 All deal in different ways with
the ineluctably entangled relations between past as preserved, present as becoming and future
as indeterminate. This sequence is an immanent, rather than predetermined, process through
which to witness change, transformation and metamorphosis of states, qualities, concepts
and identities.
Building from Bergsons sheets of memory (planes of consciousness in search of a
given memory), Deleuze conceptualizes sheets of the past. Returning to Bergsons inverted
cone of memory, the past in general as pre-existing is the cone, the co-existence of all the
sheets of the past are its cross-sections, and the apex of the cone marks the existence of
the most contracted degree. The past itself is dilated, the present is a contracted past (only
one of its myriad possibilities are actualized), and the future is a projected past. While we
often conceive of recollection and reminiscence in terms of linear time from which we
retrieve or project elements of the past and future, as Bogue notes, The actual, horizontal,
commonsense time of the sensori-motor schema may be suspended, in which case a virtual
event emerges in an empty time when nothing happens. The virtual event takes place in a
non-chronological, vertical present unrelated to the horizontal line of actual, chronological
time.17
Deleuze further conceives of the virtual event as part of the present as well as the past.
Bogue exemplifies this virtuality of the event when he writes, If, for example, we consider
the event of finding a lost key, we may focus narrowly on the instant when we discover the
key, but we may also regard having the key, [present of the past] losing the key, [present
of the present] and finding the lost key [present of the future] as all part of the same
17 Bogue 139.
132
event. The three virtual events are enfolded or implicated in each other as simultaneous or
18
co-existing peaks of the present. In actual terms, one cannot have, lose and find the key at
once, but their simultaneous occurrence in the universe is what Leibniz called an instance of
incompossibility, the virtuality of which is for Deleuze part of the event.

The coexistence of the sheets of the past, as well as the simultaneity of peaks of the
present are best seen in Last Year at Marienbad. In this film, A (the woman) leaps from
peak to peak in a perpetual present that reveals the virtuality of possibilities, while X (the
man) explores sheets of the past in an attempt to draw A into his story. For Deleuze, the
disagreements between the screenwriter and director only serve to reinforce the virtual
character of time. Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter, sought to emphasize the fragmented
nature of the temporal jumps, while Alain Resnais, the director, pulls them together into
a qualified continuity. That is, Robbe-Grillet emphasized peaks of the present and Resnais
sheets of the past. Resnais extracted continuities from Robbe-Grillets disjunctions. However,
these continuities form a non-personal virtual past in constant flux rather than anything
approximating an objectively chronological or subjectively personal memory. The sheets of
the past become variations of a theme that installs repetition with difference to reveal the
metamorphosis of time rather than its linear unfolding.
Moreover, in Last Year at Marienbad, as well as Resnais films in general, spectators
are exposed to affect and engaged by a feeling or mood while simultaneously being distanced
from the characters. Music that undermines the dominant mood of a scene and selfconsciously literary voice-overs, for instance, allow audiences to feel characters emotions
without recourse to their own. Resnais extracts feelings from characters to reveal sheets of
the past, but relating these emotions and connecting these sheets requires the addition of a
transverse plane intersecting the entire cone or a thread running through it in other words,
a new image of thought. Deleuze writes, But when transformations themselves form a sheet
which crosses all the others it is as if feelings set free the consciousness or thought with which
18 Bogue 139.
133
they were loaded: a becoming conscious according to which shadows are the living realities of
a mental theatre and feelings the true figures in a cerebral game which is very concrete.19

Hyalosigns then make the real and the imaginary indiscernible, and chronosigns
make the true and false undecidable. These strategies help ensure the narrative operates
outside commonsense coordinates of time and space to provide a direct image of time.
Deleuze here returns to the Stoics to show how time has always put truth into crisis mode.
Future conditionals, according to the Stoics, show this relation between truth and time. In
a classic example, we can argue that if today we think a battle may or may not take place
tomorrow, then tomorrow a paradox arises when one of these possibilities becomes wrong.
We are left to conclude that either an impossibility proceeds from the possible, since what
was possible yesterday is revealed as impossible today, or that the past is not always true, since
yesterday the battle could have not taken place. However, like Zenos, this paradox is proven
to be misleading only if time is seen as discrete successions of linear events. Instead, it is
important to see all these events as part of a single becoming, which occurs if we consider the
events from inside as participants when we can experience the dynamism of time.
Time as series, the third chronosign, is intimately linked to becoming, defined as
that which transforms an empirical sequence into a series in which one element or image
does not have to logically follow from what precedes it. Bogue writes, The puissance of this
chronosign is a power of the false in that it is a power of becoming, of metamorphosis and
transformation that renders fixed, stable, true identities perpetually false.20 Time as series
allows events to be inserted into the non-chronological flow of time in such a way as to draw
attention to gaps and fissures between images rather than the logical continuity of their flow.
Orson Welles creates series by focusing on the artist, Jean Rouch through fabulation, John
Cassavettes by focusing on the body and Jean-Luc Godard through serialism.
Welles best reveals the powers of the false through the inclusion of Nietzschean
figures in his films. Neither Deleuze, Nietzsche nor Welles has any use for the man of truth
20 Bogue 149.
134
since, as an idealist, he judges the world of appearances guilty. All three view the man of
vengeance with suspicion since, although he is no longer idealistic, he negates the world
out of self-hatred. However, all three appreciate the artist because of his ability to create
value out of forgery and fakery. Artists submit themselves to becoming and enter into a
metamorphosis that is total and one with the ongoing, transformative processes of life.21
That is, the artist takes the false to such a degree that the act of transformation, rather than
the resulting form, becomes the focus.
Deleuze also explores fabulation in the films of Rouch, who combines theater and
documentary to create participative ethnographies in which subjects (re)create themselves
to become-other. The camera here never merely observes but creates, invents, even lies. As
Bogue writes, The power of the false is a generative force, the potency of time that subsumes
a before and an after within an ongoing surge of becoming.22 Placing identities and societies
in a state of disequilibrium serves to produce rather than represent realities.

Deleuze then explores the cinema of the body, which he divides into two poles: one
of attitudes and the quotidian body, and another of gests and the ceremonial body. Attitudes
allow the body to take on pasts and futures in the present and to reveal past exertions and
anxieties about the future. As such, the camera shows the history and trajectory of the body,
tracing its movements. Gests, on the other hand, serve to stylize the body, revealing its
relation to the whole of movement. Gestic cinema shows actions and characters in relation to
their social roles.
Deleuze is most interested here in the passage between attitudes and gests. For
Cassavetes, actions are created by the improvisations of his actors, whose creative intensity is
revealed in unpredictable and variable relations among other performers than in any narrative
being dramatized. Cassavetes also affects a dissolution of space as his actors bodies, faces,
as well as their surroundings, reveal a strange imprecision of coordinates. The rooms they
traverse are not clearly connected, and their location and dimensions are also obscure. The
21 Bogue 150.
22 Bogue 154.
135
performers generate space around their movements and expressions rather than inhabit a
coherent or quantifiably continuous space. That is, they embody and intensify the temporal
cadences of desire, affect and sensation.

Godard then represents a generalized serialism, what Deleuze posits as the cinematic
counterpart to Pierre Boulezs atonal serialism.23 If Welles creates series with falsifying
characters, Rouch through fabulating performers and film crew, and Cassavetes through the
bodys attitudes and gests, in Godard, the series, their limits and their transformations, the
degree of power [puissance] may concern any relation of the image whatever: the characters,
the states of a character, the positions of the author, the attitudes of the body, but also colors,
aesthetic genres, psychological faculties, political powers, logical or metaphysical categories.24

Godard exploits categories, such as genre, which are neither followed nor parodied
but submitted to a rigorous and elucidative analysis that reveals new usages, new means
of juxtaposing categories, dividing them, moving from one to another and linking them
through bodily gests. What is most significant for Deleuze is that in Godard the genre
constitutes the limit of images that do not belong to it, but which are reflected in it.25
Godards is still a cinema of the body in that each character has his or her own space, but
these spaces become theatrical as characters perform for themselves rather than an audience,
making thought visible.
While points, sheets and series all dismantle chronology as linear, points of the
present and sheets of the past accomplish the feat by affording a coexistence and simultaneity,
while time as series evinces virtuality and becoming as a force of the present. Rodowick
writes, Not-yet-become and a bringing into existence express the temporality of series as
a transformation of states or qualities into something new the apprehension of a virtual
or future event as a force in the present emerging from the past.26 Time as series, in other
words, organizes a space that is deciphered and interpreted rather than perceived.
23
24
25
26

Rodowick 142.
136
Time opens the interval to the force of the outside compelling space into a series of
non-chronological assemblages and links. The role of the spectator changes in turn. One is
no longer in a transcendent position from which to judge the veracity of the work. Deleuze
writes:
It is in this sense that, already in Welles, then in Resnais, and also in
Godard, montage takes on a new sense, determining relations in the
direct time-image. [...]We have seen that the power of thought gave way,
then, to an unthought in thought, to an irrational proper to thought, a
point of outside beyond the outside world, but capable of restoring our
belief in the world. The question is no longer: does the cinema give us
the illusion of the world? But: how does cinema restore our belief in the
world?27
Restoring such a belief entails understanding and extending the dynamics of the
time-image as distinct from the movement-image. The movement-image only allows
duration to be expressed indirectly or spatially, and it aims for laws to subsume the
world as image. The open whole of the movement-image seeks an ideal totality in which
differentiation can be integrated through rational linkages and against which life can be
judged. In the end, despite its power in introducing a new image of thought, the movementimage tries to return to an ideal world of teleology, identity and representation that can
suppress the ceaselessness of change.
As with film and the world, to experience a space, a building or a landscape as
movement is to understand dynamics of time. Deleuze confirms the intimate relationship
between time, identity and environment when he writes, [T]he only subjectivity is time,
non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not
the other way round. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest
paradox. Time is not interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in
which we move, live and change.28
Temporal movement, as well as the alien thought and disjunction it introduces, is
vital to the generative power of modernist thought and practice. As such, it is important to
137
understand that movement was always already the dominant tendency of modernism. While
movement as an object or as a quantitative force is repeatedly conceptualized and employed,
it ironically serves as a blind spot blocking out real movement as the dominant image of
thought. Our goal as theorists and designers is to extract movement and to understand it as a
continually regenerative force of flux and duration.
ARCHITECTURE AND TIME

If there are few examples of the time-image in cinema it is even more of an emergent
concept in architecture with time serving as an even more elusive quality. As we have seen,
architectural practice and theory, like cinema, following the crisis of movement became more
attuned to the flux of time, as well its influence on programming and history as influences on
the design process. During the 1970s, the influence of phenomenology provided an increased
emphasis on the experience of the built environment. The influence of Archigram and
continental philosophy provided formal and conceptual strategies incorporating complexity,
contingencies and chance into the design process.
Despite many similar tendencies,
the dominant modes of thought found in
these post-modern and post-structuralist
approaches remain distinct from the approach
Deleuze espouses. Claire Colebrook contrasts,
for instance, deconstruction and Bernard
Tschumis Villette Parc project (1984-1987)
(Fig. 4.02) with Deleuzes thought. While
intellectually attuned to the necessity of
creating events, Tschumis formal abstraction
fails to address the dynamics of movement in
the real world of the here and now. That is, in
Fig. 4.02 Parc de la Villette (1984-1987)
138
the end, the system of points, lines and planes Tschumi creates embraces a false movement as
abstraction. Most important, by ignoring the immanent qualities of the landscape, especially
the latent meaning and history of Les Halles and the adjacent slaughterhouse, he ignores the
temporal and social elements of the site, as well as the creative genesis of their meaning and
the ongoing potential of their becoming.
However, Colebrook writes, In contrast to [Deconstructed] pure distribution
and relation of points differentiated reality Deleuze puts forward the idea of external
relations that cannot be confused with the singular powers from which those relations are
effected.29 Difference or differentiation does not produce relations and it is not added
to relations. Rather difference is immanent to relations and as such it can be expressed
differently in each relation and can create and recreate a continual multiplicity of new
relations, each of which gives rise to a new space. To think life then is as much about
thinking time as thinking space, which entails taking architecture beyond its human territory.
Peter Eisenman is one of the few figures for whom late modernism is truly an image
of thought inseparable from critical practice. While, like Deleuze, he can be considered an
elitist, overly intellectual, still maintaining vestiges of a boundary between the mundane
and the aesthetic, his various approaches have the benefit of continually returning to the
genesis of thought to reveal modernism as movement rather than a movement. If Stirlings
work reveals the workings of thought within the mid-century crisis of action, Eisenmans
reveals strategies for going beyond movement and incorporating time into architecture, for
understanding new strategies of emergent thought and for positing movement as outside
thought as much as in images.

Despite the disparate tendencies and influences that emerge throughout Eisenmans
career and work, the one constant is his conviction that functionalism has had too much
influence on architecture, reducing the field to a positivist pseudo-science too focused on
29 Colebrook 198.
139
place, program or tectonics to incorporate the larger modes of thought of which these
elements are but one part. His early work endeavored to (re)create the deep, generative
structures that first gave rise to meaning.
While there is a strong formalism running through his early work, what is significant
is the extent to which he applies formalism to reveal the genesis of meaning, to show how
point, lines and planes can give rise to transformative elements and to eschew superficial
symbolism. Texture, color, form and other postmodern or historicist approaches that strive
to create a new architecture parlante are replaced by concepts like frontality, obliquity,
shifting and transformations that evade representation. The spaces in his early works are
still Cartesian but are ontologically focused on difference with repetition. The grid and
the elements composed on top of it are, for Eisenman, not recursive strategies as much
as processes for incorporating additions, subtractions, solids, voids, rotations, strata and
movement in such a way that the architecture remains ineffable.
Eisenman was also instrumental in revealing time as one of process. This has always
been an elusive element in architecture, which unlike cinema that literally moves, is static
and exudes its moment of capture. The work of architecture for Eisenman must reveal
the experiments and processes that gave rise to it, and these stages of the design are more
important than the final project. Architecture in this sense is invented more than received.
Most important, like hyalosigns in cinema, this early work and the emphasis on process
serves less as a direct revelation of time than to introduce a sense of play into the work that
makes indiscernible the difference between actual and virtual.

While his early works, influenced by Colin Rowe, maintain vestiges of ideal
geometry, especially the cube, Eisenmans formalism serves to reveal the virtual or immanent
potential of these forms. Instead of focusing on symbolic meaning or resolution of details
(his tectonic is rather vulgar here), he emphasizes the continual shifting that gives rise to
episodes all based on the genetic elements of thought that produce in turn a varied series of
experiences.
140
House II (1970) (Fig. 4.03) is important in particular because in both plan and
section the intervals that reveal the shifts are the dominant feature. That is, an initial shifting
maneuver gives rise to formal and experiential elements. The emerging formal details are
however, meticulously composed. What is significant is the degree to which they suggest
traditional plans and sections were constructed after the fact. Other three-dimensional
strategies of abstraction were employed without a pre-imagined or given model to yield the
unexpected or unknown. The resulting work marks the provisional end of a process, not a
telos.

While Eisenman, as much as any architect, took the genesis of thought and practice
seriously, he still tended to retreat into his own world, maintain vestiges of the avantgarde approach of an artist working from outside society, and the autonomy of his works
is still reducible to a desire to create a pure architectural language. That is, unlike Deleuze,
for whom experimentation is still part of this world, for Eisenman, the quotidian was to
be avoided. This is why functional elements were placed in interstitial openings, hidden
from the primary open spaces, and why he thought decoration detracted and debased the
Fig. 4.03 House II (1970)
141
architecture. Despite its complexity and capacity to reveal the mechanisms of design and
thought, Eisenmans early houses were still objects to be contemplated, not active participants
in this world.

However, beginning in the late 1970s, partly as a response to the rise of
postmodernism and the unfashionable tendencies of formal abstraction and partly as a result
of the increased realization that architecture had lost its relevancy to this world, Eisenman
changed strategies. If no transcendent structure, whether god or human, could be elevated
and represented, neither could pure abstraction or autonomy from the rigors of capitalism
and the quotidian suffice to account for new modes of thought within late modernism. The
immanence of time, as history, memory, process and creation needed to be addressed to
reinstall architecture as a cultural force tied to reality.

Like Deleuze, Eisenman recognizes the destruction of World War II as a starting
point for a new image of thought. He writes:

A new sensibility exists. It was born in the rupture of 1945. This
sensibility was neither predicated in the tenets of modernism nor brought
about by their failure to achieve the utopia of the present. Rather, it
emerged from something unforeseen to modernism, in the fact that
not since advent of modern science, technology, and medicine has a
generation faced, as it does today, the potential extinction of the entire
civilization.30
Recognizing that composition to some extent was always based on elements of theocentrism
and anthropocentrism, he turned to decomposition to address the dynamics of time, as well
as process. That is, neither history, memory, origins, ends nor process can be posited as stable,
simple or pure. He continues:
This suggestion of an end in the present shattered the classical and triadic
condition of past, present, and future time and, thus, its progression and
continuity. Previously, the present was seen as a moment between the past
and the future. Now the present contains two unrelated poles: a memory
of this previous and progressive time and an immanence, the presence of
endthe end of the future a new kind of time.31
30 Peter Eisenman, The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and Processes of Difference, Harvard
Architecture Review 3 (Winter 1984) 65.
31 Eisenman 65-66.
142
However, instead of a simple reception of the existing environment or landscape,
Eisenman considers the site itself as something to be invented. His project for Cannaregio,
Venice (1978) (Fig. 4.04) combines the presence of Le Corbusier, who had previously
proposed a hospital for the site, the city of Venice and his own House Xia. In so doing he
suspends dimensions both spatially and temporally. As Moneo writes, The architecture
asserts its autonomy and finds its place in a context that keeps it suspended between a future
that wasnt and a present that is destroyed in its very act of becoming.32 This strategy is
nothing less than fabulation, a metaphorical movement beyond a limit.

Similarly, instead of accepting the fashionable nostalgia of post-modernism, which
artificially linked past and present, with his Checkpoint Charlie social housing project for
the IBA in Berlin (1981-1985) (Fig. 4.05), he exposed the history of the site while extending
Berlin into its larger context within the world. He does this by juxtaposing the strata of the
city, or at least two elements of it, one historical, one abstract. The Berlin of the eighteenth
century is revealed by uncovering that scheme, while also incorporating the Mercator
Fig. 4.04 Cannaregio (1978)

32 Moneo 176.
Fig. 4.05 Checkpoint Charlie (1981-1985)
143
scheme to reveal Berlins relation to the globe. In this case we have an architectural version of
peaks of the present and sheets of the past created and superimposed to reveal time as one of
disjunction.

The Wexner Center in Columbus (1983-
1989) (Fig. 4.06) takes the competition brief to

provide a better connection between the existing
oval and the larger city as a starting point for similar
archaeological and inventive strategies. The existing
buildings take on new significance when juxtaposed
by the axis of the oval building. Eisenmans
embracing of the latent palimpsest of history makes
everything around appear contingent, dependent
upon their setting and historical circumstances for
meaning.

Fig. 4.06 Wexner Center (1983-1989)
Similar projects search outside architecture for meaning. The Romeo and Juliet
project of Verona (1985) (Fig. 4.07) looks to texts for meaning, the Biocentrum in Frankfurt
(1986-1987) (4.08) employs symbols for the chain of cells used by biologists to begin his
investigation. Here, even more than his earlier projects, symbolism and reductive meaning
return. Despite his capacity to install complexity into a project, there is still a search for
images to directly reify.
Fig. 4.07 Romeo and Juliet (1985)
Fig. 4.08 Biocentrum (1987)
144
However, the Guardiola House in Cadiz
(1988) (4.09-4.11) marks the most important

turning point in Eisenmans career. The naming
of the project (instead of calling it House XII)
suggests a singularity, a turn away from the cubistinspired abstraction that marked his earlier career.
Most important, he rejects the notion of house
as simple shelter or protection. The seriousness
Fig. 4.09 Casa Guardiola (1988)
and pain of existence are equally important. It

also marks a three-dimensionality distinct from
the planar explorations that defined his earlier
diagrams, compositions and built work.
In Stealing into Gilles Deleuzes Baroque
House, Helene Frichot provides a Deleuzian
framework for reconsidering the dynamics of the
house. Contrary to conventional historiographies Fig. 4.10 Casa Guardiola (1988)
that focus on architectural meaning as determined
by absolute origins, essences, disciplinary limits
and techniques of construction, Deleuzian thought
forces us to view architectural works as more than
shelter. She then asks, What does it mean to
be without meaning, or to be on the outside of
meaning (which is not to suggest that architecture
cannot continue to produce sense)?33 Frichot
suggests that theorists from Vitruvius to Laugier
Fig. 4.11 Casa Guardiola (1988)
and Corbusier no longer provide productive

33 Helene Frichot, Stealing into Gilles Deleuzes Baroque House, Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan
and Gregg Lambert (Edinburg: Edinburg UP, 2005) 63.
145
instructions. The house as subject to universal rules, as reflecting its primitive origins or as
a machine for living (or as adhering to any other strict maxim) has become impossible to
maintain. Teleological approaches, in other words, as determinative of final forms are no
longer tenable.

The Guardiola house, in which process becomes distinct from the final product,
embraces these challenges. In addition, there is no longer any idea larger than the
architectural work. As Frichot writes, Instead we must look toward the immanent
conditions of architecture, the processes it employs, the serial deformations of its built forms,
together with our quotidian spatio-temporal practices.34 Eisenman does this, taking his cue
from the internal demands of function and relations, as well as the external forces of the
sloping sight. The final form installs affect, a bloc of sensation onto the existing landscape,
allowing the house to deform itself and its surroundings in order to create openings into an
Outside of thought that perpetuates our sensorial and philosophical becomings.
In this sense, the Guardiola house serves more to filter the internal and external
chaos of the world than as a simple protection from it. The repeating L-shapes become layers
of thresholds that continue to unfold, what Frichot calls a topological field of endless selfvariation,35 rather than a clear resolution that establishes an absolute and timeless sense of
place. In this formal and conceptual strategy we also find a superimposition of the virtual
and the actual. The virtual emerges through the resistance to representation, while the actual
as elements of the natural environment and programming punctures the virtual realm and
maintains its relation to this world. The actual and virtual are simultaneously articulated
and separated by the house as a dynamic series of thresholds and meanings through which
duration is revealed. If there is a mandate revealed through this project, it is that, as Frichot
puts it, The architect, appreciating the combinatory of chance and necessity that circulates
with every design project, must make an acrobatic leap and extract just a small, framed
moment of difference.36
34 Frichot 63.
35 Frichot 68.
36 Frichot 77.
146
Throughout we see how thought and process replace determinacy, how formal and
conceptual strategies serve rhizomatic narratives and temporal structures and refuse to delimit
interpretation. The genesis of meaning at all scales and the emergence of thought are what
concerns Eisenman. However, the elusive and newly emergent characteristics of the timeimage make it hard to situate and create architecturally, and despite his painstaking efforts,
there are still, within Eisenmans work, vestiges of representation and direct reification that
turn thought into too much abstraction, inaccessible to all but the initiated and even then
on a purely cerebral level. In the end the revelation of the time-image depends as much on
encounters, events and sensation as the strategies outlined above.
Deleuzes lectosigns, images to be read or interpreted, provide further criteria for
accounting for the relationship between creation and experience. Lectosigns allow memory
and history to become legible by revealing a non-human world that is discursive, as well
as archaeological, stratographic and tectonic. Eisenmans later work succeeds to the extent
that it introduces a discursive element into his architecture. Contrary to his earlier work, his
approach throughout the past two decades has increasingly moved away from attempts to
incorporate Chomskys deep linguistic structure and Derridas deconstructive rhetorical play
and toward a distinctly archaeological disjunction, as an untimely superimposition of images
and thoughts.
Eisenmans Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) (Figs.
4.12-18) takes as its starting point the
impossibility of representation in general
and of the Holocaust in particular.
Eisenman does not reduce the Holocaust
to statistics or the psychological
mechanisms behind the atrocities or
among its victims. Instead he returns to
Fig. 4.12 Holocaust Memorial (2005)
147
the origin of thought, the creative genesis of concepts, and applies this approach to violence
and trauma, which are not extensive, considering a direct cause and effect relationship
between the past and present. Instead he treats the Holocaust as intensive, creating a
minoritarian language that eschews clichd and worn strategies, installing in their stead
blocks of emotional violence and trauma that eschew representational meaning.

There still emerges an underlying ethical dimension to the project. Rodowick writes
(in a context exploring Claude Lanzmanns consideration of the Holocaust in Shoah), There
is a catastrophe more profound than the disappearance of visible evidence: not forgetting the
past, but forgetting the relation between present and past, which relinquishes hope for the
future.37 Eisenmans memorial reflects these concerns and temporal relations. The architect
acts ethically by maximizing the process of potential flows (of affect, percept and sensation)
immanent within the Holocaust without minimizing other flows. In other words, he
dislodges trauma from a majoritarian mode of representation that would neutralize history in
order to create a minoritarian cinematic language that works by layering history and making
incommensurability the measure of the authenticity of testimony.38

Eisenmans design constitutes an important example of recent critical practice that
neither capitulates to functional determinants nor assumes an autonomous role outside of

society and culture. Instead the design operates as an encounter with its site and with history
and installs a critical topography that forces even more encounters among the visitors and
memory, and posits thought as a final encounter in itself. It is only through new encounters,
not mere reflection, that one can counter the forces of violence and trauma, especially those
of the Holocaust. According to Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, conventional
images of thought are constructed as a reaction against these encounters, making thought a
symptom of the repression of violence. As a result, art must address thought with an attack
on the traditional moral image of thought, but also a movement towards understanding
thought as self-engendering, an act of creation, not just of what is thought, but of thought
itself, within thought.39
37 Rodowick 148.
38 Rodowick 148.
39 Deleuze Difference and Repetition 147.
148
The memorial achieves its monumentality by resisting codification or symbolic
gestures. Eisenman is not interested in representing the Holocaust, but in showing the
genesis of it, the way certain flows of history come together to allow the Holocaust to
emerge, as well as the ways in which the potentials of flows allow us to memorialize the
Holocaust in different ways. It returns to the events of the Holocaust to find the creative
impulse driving death and destruction, sacrifice and survival, as well as collective and
individual memory. For Eisenman, the key to an effective memorial is not copying other
historic forms or strategies, nor is it a matter of imitating other memorials to war in general
or the Holocaust in particular. This is significant for memorial culture and collective memory,
since nothing in the design requires one to relocate the Holocaust in its original context
or to develop a definitive perception of its events or consequences. As Francoise Choay
writes, The only authentic monuments that our era has been able to erect do not announce
themselves as such, and conceal themselves in minimal, unusual, and non-metaphorical
forms. They recall a past whose weight, and most often whose horror, prevent them from
being consigned solely to historical memory.40 Visitors instead are tasked (or allowed) to
relate the Holocaust and its remembrance to the present and extend it into the future in an
attempt to create a pure affect or sensation.

Formally, the dominant feature
of the site is the mass/void formation

constituted by the contrast between the
nearly 3000 steles and the pedestrian space
between them, which are organized along
an abstract grid. The varying heights and
angles suggest nothing more than the
power to differ, as does the constantly
varying and expressive play of light and
40 Francoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, Lauren M. OConnell, trans. (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001) 11.
149
shadow the steles create. Eisenmans use of geometry is not a tabla rasa onto which form
and is added but is actualized only by the formation and inclusion of it. James E. Young
writes, In their multiple and variegated sizes, the pillars are both individuated and collected:
the very idea of collective memory is broken down here and replaced with the collected
memories of individuals murdered, the terrible meanings of their deaths now multiplied and
not merely unified.41 The steles as such do not possess a didactic function, remaining instead
silent blocks onto which visitors can project their thoughts and desires as they traverse the
site.

The immediate precedent for Eisenmans design is the land art from the 1960s and
1970s. Such abstraction resists codification and symbolic gestures, which could immediately
be appropriated and turned into a tool for negative and reductive monumental history.
The lack of inscription on the steles suggests a less immediate precedent in the prehistoric
megalithic structures of menhirs found at Carnac and elsewhere. By removing the sculpture
from a pedestal, or by treating the topography itself as a pedestal that obfuscates the
boundary between art and life, Eisenman challenges the dichotomy between monument
and art, as well as the one between landscape and architecture. That is, Eisenman takes the
majoritarian language of the abstract monument and by denying it a role of signification and
by refusing the familiar forms an element of irony or shock, turns it into a language of forces
or a minoritarian language.

The differentiation that occurs within a rigidly gridded field also evinces the
distinction Deleuze and Guattari draw between striated and smooth space. Striated space
is hierarchical and quantitative but provides necessary raw data from which to base design
decisions of scale and program. Smooth space, on the other hand, is a locus of intensities and
is subject only to nomadic law, that which maximizes potential. Striated and smooth spaces
are not opposed to each other in a negative fashion, however, but instead give rise to each
other. Deleuze and Guattari write, The striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable
41 James E. Young, Germanys Holocaust Memorial Problem and Mine, The Public Historian. Vol.
24, No. 4 (Autumn 2002) 78.
150
elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal
melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation,
continuous development of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the
production of properly rhythmic values.42

The memorials rigid grid and appeal to familiar forms marks its space as striated.
However, the monuments success relies on its ability to incorporate smooth space, which
refers not to a literal folding or formal experimentation (though there are elements of
that) as much as its relation to Berlin, which it productively engages. Unlike other recent,
minimalist monuments, such as Maya Lins Vietnam Memorial, the design is not cordoned
from the city and relegated to a
site separated for remembrance.
Nor, like the World Trade Center
design, is its connection to the city
reterritorialized and impeded for
security reasons. Nor does it make
direct reference to the politically
charged site 20,000 square meters
between the Brandenburg Gate
and Potsdamer Platz that marks

the administrative headquarters of Hitlers organization. Instead its formation marks both
a point of continuity and a break or fissure with the urban landscape. The economically
enviable location would, if capitalist reterritorialization operated illegitimately, be occupied
by a market-driven design, and the scale of the steles is clearly distinct from the surrounding
buildings.

However, such incorporation into the city serves to insert the past into the present
without appeal to transcendent or monumental notions of history or an overt narrative

strategy. The memorial connects past events with present reception and a future vision for
151
addressing the Holocaust and keeping its memory moving. A minoritarian monument
as such signifies a particular difficulty in Berlin because not only does such a work refuse
to close or neutralize the original event and its ensuing trauma, it creates new modes of
representation, brings to light new forms of meaning, new concepts, percepts and affects
and continually returns to the origin of violence and trauma, not its conclusion. As Young
writes, But if the aim is to remember for perpetuity that this great nation once murdered
nearly six million beings solely for having been Jews, then this monument must also embody
the intractable questions at the heart of German Holocaust memory rather than claiming to
answer them.43

The undulating ground plane on which the steles are organized also disrupts
expectations and posits the real power of the monument, like that of cinema, in its potential
for movement in all its physical, perceptual, conceptual and affective manifestations.
However, unlike film directors, architects do not have direct, personal control over their
actors. Young considers the way architecture can address this conundrum when he writes:
Part of what Eisenman called its Unheimlichkeit, or uncanniness, derived
precisely from the sense of danger generated in such a field, the demand
that we now find our way into and out of such memory. And because the
scale of this installation would be almost irreproducible on film shot from
the ground, it demanded that visitors enter the memorial space and try to
know it vicariously through their snapshots. What would be remembered
here are not photographic images but the visitors actual experiences and
what they remembered in situ.44

43 Young 71.
44 Young 77.
152
This experiential movement also reminds us that Berlins topography is fraught with
trauma. As such the design suggests that history is not a succession of stages, but a series of
attempts to reconfigure the world. The monument reminds us that there are a multitude
of virtual realities awaiting realization or submergence by history. Spatial and temporal
movement never corresponds to a logical progression or idealized, transcendent, romanticist
state as in the picturesque garden. The movement is a disjunctive one among the past,
present and future. As such, the design allows us to come to a greater knowledge of ourselves,
not in the Socratic sense in which subjectivity is an ideal awaiting realization but in the sense
that one is a desiring-machine.

In addition, topographical differentiation produces intensity and prevents urban
life from being stalled. Deleuze and Guattari take continual recourse to landscape and
topography because it is here where their concept of becoming-animal or becomingimperceptible, an extreme result of employing a minoritarian strategy, is most apparent. In
looking at Cezannes paintings, as well as Melvilles literary relationship between Ahab and
the whale, Deleuze and Guattari quote Erwin Strauss who writes:
The great landscapes have a wholly visionary characteristic. Vision is what
of the invisible becomes visible [] The landscape is invisible because
the more we conquer it, the more we lose ourselves in it. To reach the
landscape we must sacrifice as much as we can all temporal, spatial,
objective determination [] In the landscape we cease to be historical
beings, that is to say, beings who can themselves be objectified. We
do not have any memory for the landscape, we no longer have any
memory for ourselves in the landscape. We dream in daylight with open
eyes. We are hidden to the objective world, but also to ourselves. This is
feeling.45
The memorial deals as much with the void left by the loss perpetrated by the Holocaust as
the horror of violence itself. Feelings, sensations and affects are engendered by the memorial
through a revealing of the virtual potential of the site and the Holocaust and by refusing any
reference to an external or objective world.
45 Ewrin Strauss, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy? 230n6.
153
While the topography and geometry of the Berlin memorial eschew functional
reduction, the reluctant addition of a didactic program reinstalls utilitarian value, detracting
from the overall sensation of the design. The subterranean information center reflects a
typically commodified museum agenda (exhibition galleries, seminar rooms, bookshop,
offices, etc.). The below-grade spaces also resist the differentiation seen above ground as the
former merely reflects or alludes to what is above. Most important, the information center
reterritorializes and suggests an illegitimate conjunctive synthesis when it forces visitors to
identify with one particular groupEuropean Jewsas opposed to all those affected by the
Holocaust, imposing a more conventional and monumental return to the original trauma or
event. The program signifies the return of Chronos, laying out the events of the Holocaust
in linear temporal and geographic fashion, which resubordinates time to space, suggests a
clear division of time and a non-disruptive causal link between the past, present and future.
However, Eisenman does reverse the typical dichotomy between terranean and subterranean
spaces, especially with respect to Holocaust memorials. Whereas the dark journey through
the Holocaust is often artificially reproduced by submergence, here the elements above
ground allow the Holocaust to remain a vital and ongoing element of the city.

In the end, the success of a critical monument such as this can be seen in the
accidental, irregular, impromptu and detourned activities occurring within the monuments
topography. As Michael North writes, By inviting its own violation, the monument humbles
itself in the eyes of beholders accustomed to maintaining a respectful, decorous distance. It
154
forces viewers to desanctify the memorial, demystify it, and become its equal [] Ultimately,
such a monument undermines its own authority by inviting and then incorporating the
authority of passersby.46 This element of play enhances its relation to the city and augments
its role as an architectural multiplicity, a vital element of (or structure for) smooth space. The
only programmatic elements that truly resonate in the design are the seemingly irreverent
ones, as when people picnic or play hide-and-seek between the steles. North continues, As
the aesthetic focus shifts from the object to the experience it provokes, the relationship of
the two goes beyond mere implication: the public become the sculpture, dissolving the old
opposition between artist and audience.47 As such, the monument is not benign, and visitors
cannot be passive. To traverse the site is to enter a debate with the work and its multiplicity
of meanings, but also to locate oneself in, as North puts it, a community whose nature is
open to question.48

Memorials and monuments by themselves, like most architecture, are inert and static.
They depend on visitors and their experiences to realize the full potential. The work of art
gives the event a body, a life, a universe, but does not actualize it. As Deleuze and Guattari
write:
A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that
happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations
that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and
women, their re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle
[] But the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in
the vibrations, clinches, and openings it gave to men and women at the
moment of its making and that composes in itself a monument that is
always in the process of becoming, like those tumuli to which each new
traveler adds a stone.49
Monuments, like art, create potential worlds that depend upon the violence of sensation, not
the violence of spectacle. The emergence of relationships between observers, visitors, desire
46 Michael North, The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament, Critical Inquiry
Vol. 16 (Summer 1990) 279.
47 North 261.
48 North 278.
49 Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy? 176-177.
155
and memory return us to an intense germinal influxthe pre-human condition in which

intensities, flows, movement and differences cannot be reduced to a single-point perspective
or language and in which meaning is constantly created anew.
Architecture in this sense becomes the new machinery with which to create meaning
and think the outside. For architecture, resisting the conflation of space and time is more
problematic than in cinema, but as we have seen, merely formal strategies that represent
forking and contingent paths are limiting. Architecture must also address movement at a
conceptual level that aims to reveal narrative and temporal space as rhizomatic. Deleuzes
folds of the soul and pleats of matter are anything but superficial. Recent strategies nominally
tied to Deleuzian thought run the risk of repeating the mistakes of functional modernism,
which only delimited time rather than revealing its complexities.
Deleuze reveals the sacred center of the time-image when he writes, That the present
moment is not a moment of being or of present in the strict sense, that is the passing
moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have
started, and cannot finish, becoming.50 Following this logic, like Lost Highway, the goal of
architecture is to create incompossible worlds. Architecture as image must contain temporal
variations that allow thought to behave creatively and actively rather than nihilistically and
reactively.
Satter | Conclusion
156
Conclusion:
On the Spiritual Automaton
For Deleuze, cinematic images serve as the tangible matter from which varieties of movement
and time arise. However, the material world that architectural designers, theorists and
historians explore can serve equally well to reveal duration and change, which philosophy can
formulate as concepts and install as values.
The movement-image addresses the relationship between image and thought,
revealing the processes that take us from image to thought, from thought to image, finally
uniting image and thought. That is, within classic cinema, the whole gives rise to one of three
processes: a movement from image to concept in which the parts give rise to a recognition of
a larger whole; a second movement from concept to image in which each part presupposes
a whole; and identity as the union of image and thought through a coherent sensory-motor
apparatus connecting mind and world.
The collapse of the sensory-motor schema at the end of the movement-image is
then a breakdown of the relation between humans and the world. Modern cinema, as well
as many architectural theorists and designers, following the crisis of movement, create the
means to restore the connections between humans and lived experience. For Deleuze, the
Satter | Conclusion
157
aim of modern cinema is to create a renewed belief in this world rather than to recover an
idealized past or create a futurist utopia.
To accomplish this, modern cinema develops new relations with thought from
three points of view: the obliteration of a whole or of a totalization of images, in favour of
an outside which is inserted between them; the erasure of the internal monologue as whole
of the film, in favour of a free indirect discourse and vision; the erasure of the unity of man
and the world, in favour of a break which now leaves us with only a belief in this world.1 For
Deleuze, the time-image of modern cinema is never a methodological application of a preexisting thought. Rather, the time-image creates and brings into being that which does not
exist. He writes, To think is to create there is no other creation but to create is first of all
to engender thinking in thought.2
The time-image the direct presentation of time provides a strategy for
reenergizing thought through the staging of events and encounters that provoke, as well
as the affirmation of life as change. Movement as an element of space, time and thought
works against counter-productive processes of capture or captivation that seek means of
representation in order to effect transformation, and Deleuzes conceptualization of this
process is novel.
The noosign as the final sign of the time-image, forms an image which goes beyond
itself towards something which can only by thought,3 forming a spiritual automaton, which
puts us in contact with the outside of thought and forces us to think anew. Noosigns here
are related to noology, the study of images of thought with which this project began. While
the movement-image presaged an important new role for images of thought related to a
distinctly modern, Bergsonian notion of duration, an ensuing crisis of movement revealed its
innate limitations. However, the time-image as a response to the crisis installs another image
of thought.
1
2
3
Deleuze Cinema 2 187-188.

Deleuze Difference and Repetition 147.
Satter | Conclusion
158
Reda Bensmaia sums up the trajectory of Deleuzes cinema project and brings us to
our final concept when he writes:
Like Spinozas, Deleuzes method in Cinema 1 and 2 includes (at least)
three great moments, each narrowly implicated in the others: a first
moment in which the apprehension of movement and the objects
it carries is granted to intuition or to the immediate contents of
consciousness, also the moment of film analysis as simple imagemovement or image-representation; a moment when it is no longer
movement as such, but the dislocation of movement that precedes
analysis, and thus, the eruption of image-time and image-figure; and
finally, a third moment, on of synthesis, albeit disjunctive, when it is an
unthinkable Outside that takes on the order of thought the thought of
the unthinkable: spiritual automaton. 4
The thought the spiritual automaton conjures is alien, apersonal, compelled by
involuntary responses that forcefully resist habit. In this sense, the Mystery Man of Lost
Highway serves as spiritual automaton from which are uttered words that are neither
subjective nor objective, neither an internal monologue nor arising from an external
place. The spiritual automaton forms a free indirect discourse disconnected from a specific
interlocutor or subjective perspective. However, in Deleuzes cinema, a figure such as this
serves less to represent a spiritual automaton than to give rise to a new image of thought
in concert with its laws. The automaton as a machinic mode of thought is not reducible
to machines, robots and computers. As Rodowick argues, Conceptual innovation is more
important here than technological innovation.5 This spiritual automaton is topologically
present in images themselves and revealed as immanent within viewers, as well, eliciting
thought beyond thought.
Noosigns, the spiritual automaton and the time-image create a mental cartography
that reveals a non-representational, non-humanized world, which Deleuze alternatively
describes in architectural language as archaeological, stratigraphic and tectonic. Space in
this sense becomes an event or an encounter with limits in which the interstices of time as
inexplicable and disjointed allow the outside to enter thinking.
4 Reda Bensmaia, On the Spiritual Automaton, in Space and Time in Modern Cinema According to
Gilles Deleuze, Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005)
147.
5 Rodowick 175.
Satter | Conclusion
159
Deleuze finds this new image of thought most clearly conveyed through three
cinematic devices: the point-cut or irrational cut that separates two entities but belongs to
neither; the probabilistic re-linkages that affect the entire series; and the topological white
or black screen that makes visible the interstice itself. These devices are most apparent
in Lost Highway during the series of images in which bodily transferences and identity
transformations take place. Freds initial metamorphosis into Pete is highlighted through
rapid-fire flashes of images, which re-link the world of the first act with the world of the
second act without identifying with the logic of either. These flashes are followed by a blue
then black screen that emphasizes the cut itself more than any direct meaning or symbolism.
When Alice appears for the first time as a seemingly blond version of Renee, the
re-linkage that transfers identity is highly aestheticized with more subtle cues signaling the
irrational cut and its relinkage. The visual components of Petes world are undermined by the
aural components of Freds world, especially his jazz playing on the radio, which gives Pete
a headache and hints further at a liminal state between two worlds. This sequence is again
followed by Lynchs version of the white/black screen.
The final transference of identity in which Alice disappears and Pete morphs
back into Fred is marked by a point-cut in which the latter emerges from the ground on
which the former has just lain. However, the black/white screen becomes aural as the two
soundtracks, the plaintive melody that marks the provisional finality of Petes world followed
by the cacophony of strings that returns us to Freds, are divided by total silence. The
final transference remains indecipherable but completes Lynchs cinematic moebius strip,
returning us to the first scene of the space of the first scene and finally a repeat of the image
with which the film began, now imbued with excessive meaning.

These strategies give rise to an unceasing liminal dimension an interstitial space and
time that marks the point of undoing, subversion, and the limits of identity. Through this
interval, binaries are disjunctively united through movement to undermine any distinction
between nature and culture, diachrony and synchrony, immanence and transcendence. As
Satter | Conclusion
160
Grosz writes, One could say that the in-between is [] the very essence of space and time
and their indication. And thus inimical to the project of architecture as a whole.6
However, if we view architecture as a series of irrational disjunctions conducive to
continual creation rather than as part of a pre-given whole, the discipline becomes more
untimely (in Nietzsches sense), creating worlds from the virtual matter of duration. Within
spatial studies, distinctions between natural and built environments, form and meaning,
visualization and construction, structure and ornament lose significance. Architecture as such
restores thinking to relevancy and becomes more responsive to life and qualitative change

Closely related to new formal, spatial and temporal strategies apparent within
such liminal space, entering the noosphere as the outside of thought temporally divides
the subject, making I become other. The movement-image of classic cinema, as well as
much early modern architecture, assumes a collective identity, and as such bodies act and
react in causal relations. The time-image of modern cinema, as well as some contemporary
architecture, is based on an identity in a constant state of becoming, searching and
experimenting among a host of multiplicities. The body here acts hesitatingly and
indeterminately, recognizing that perception and memory are not in us. Architecture, as
such, does not endeavor to provide an enclosure or background on which a givable whole can
be revealed. Rather it reveals our place inside of time and memory.
As we have seen in considering three canonical figures of modernism, the design
process, the dynamics of buildings, their environments and users thrive to the extent they
are no longer viewed as static masses reasserting a constant and foundational identity. By
incorporating the flux of time into issues of site, programming, form and space, architecture
gives expression to forces of becoming that are immanent to bodies and matter and allow for
their continual transformation. Architecture then emerges as a series of potentialities defined
by relations and forces of the power to affect and be affected.
6 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2001) 94.
Satter | Conclusion
161
The question for architectural historians, theorists and designers becomes how to
keep architecture open to the Outside and how to compel architects and architecture to
think. Grosz writes:
Deleuze poses a new understanding of difference, in which thought
(thought in concepts, thought in images, thought in building materials)
asserts its full force as event, as material modification, as movement
beyond. Insofar as architecture is seeking not so much innovation, not
simply the latest fad, but to produce differently, to engender the new, to
risk creating otherwise, Deleuzes work may be of some help, although it
remains unclear more precisely how.7
Deleuze helps by replacing a logic of certainty with a renewed logic of invention.
Despite (or because of ) an absence of universal validity and procedural rules, the capacity for
ingenuity, experimentation, novelty and singularity form the basis for explorations of space
and time. More important than any immediate functional, formal or structural demands
is conceptualizing an interplay among past as memory, the present as an actualization of
virtualities and the future as a temporal realm always already present through which the
capacity of the built and environment and its inhabitants to operate differently is revealed.
The virtual realm of duration operates beyond function, productivity, efficiency and
intention, affording a means for the built environments, its cultural artifacts and relations to
become truly new, something other, something outside thought, resisting the merely possible
to give rise to elements of excess. The new here is not a negation of what has preceded it,
but an encounter with something outside of thought. The new is disjunctive and disruptive
rather than transcendental or ideal. Architecture operates in this sense as an act of resistance
that undermines the globalization and banalization of form, content, information and
meaning.
In Deleuzian terms, architecture following cinemas lead, operates best on a plane of
immanence, which Rodowick concisely defines as a universal variation on an asubjective
plane of movement where matter=image,8 and Deleuze and Guattari tie to the noosphere,
7
8
Grosz, Architecture from the Outside 64.

Rodowick 175.
Satter | Conclusion
162
noology and the spiritual automaton when they write, The plane of immanence is not a
concept that is or can be thought but rather than image of thought, the image thought gives
itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find ones bearings in thought.9
The Outside here is also excess, a dynamic in which expenditure, instability, fluidity and the
extra-functional are powerful forces.
Grosz develops this notion of excess in architecture when she writes:
As Bataille identifies it, architecture must seek its own excesses, its bestial
monstrosity, its allegiances with forces, affects, energies, experiments,
rather than with ordinances, rules, function, or formFor Bataille, what
is more or excessive is that which has no function, purpose, or other use
than the expenditure of resources and energy, is that which undermines,
transgresses, and countermands the logic of functionality.10
The search for rules and professionalization of the discipline that prescribed correct and
teleological ways to design in previous eras becomes impossible when movement is included
in architectural thought, and symbolism only remains part of the architectural lexicon at the
expense of a larger understanding of how we actually make meaning.
Architecture in this sense becomes modulation, the necessary design of distinct and
fixed forms that function well only when they also compel and allow for the continuously
changing dynamics of the users, their environment, needs and psychological states.
Architecture must design for two systems: the closed set and the open whole, the striated
and the smooth, the empirical and the transcendental, the actual and the virtual. Movement
makes architecture performative, never satisfied to passively filter its environment.
In a similar manner, architectural theory must understand that anything that endures
changes. Accepting that we live topologically does not mean that we must build in a literally
topological, non-Euclidean manner but instead requires an eschewal of correspondence or
representation in favor of participation. The Deleuzian event becomes a means to elicit a
response from architecture (as opposed to a specific or prescriptive response).
9 Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy? 37.
10 Grosz Architecture from the Outside 155.
Satter | Conclusion
163
Architecture emerges less as a sequence of finished objects than as a series of spatial

and temporal processes that facilitate a continuous flow of matter and duration. Space and
form become dynamic by resisting resolution, recognizing that we can never fully know in
advance what a work is capable of and addressing the intentions of the past, needs of the
present, and desires of the future. Movement is what imposes unity on this multiplicity of
experiences and affects, and unlike conventional mapping, it does so without recourse to an
overarching structure, so the new and the potential for change remains.
Architecture as an image of thought, inhabitants as spiritual automata and
architecture theory as noology evince the force of time as change and entail an eschewal of
reflection or correspondence with an ideal reality in favor of participation, understanding
architecture as events and involuntary or chance encounters that do not aim for a response as
much as a series of potential responses. Deleuze writes:
The spiritual automaton is in the psychic situation of the seer, who sees
better and further than he can react, that is, think. Which, then, is the
subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between
man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible,
the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought: something
possible, otherwise I will suffocate. It is this belief that makes the
unthought the specific power of thought, through the absurd, by virtue of
the absurd.11
It is through the absurd that the new, the Outside, the unthought are given to thought.
Absurdity here is not to be understood as a lack of sense, logic or meaning, despite the fact
that within a dominant or pre-existing context it often seems so. Rather, absurdity facilitated
by the spiritual automaton is nothing less than the creative emergence of thought and the
power to think differently. Understanding the dynamics of movement within space and time
is vital to a new image of thought, under which the absurd, rather than truth, becomes the
highest power of thought.
Satter | Bibliography
164
Bibliography
Arnell, Peter and Ted Bickford. James Stirling: Buildings and Projects. New York: Rizzoli

International Publications, 1984.
Ballantyne, Andrew. Deleuze and Guattari for Architects. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 2009.
Benjamin,Walter The Arcades Project, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and
Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press, 2002).
Behrendt, Walter Curt. Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems, and Forms. London: Martin

Hopkinson, 1937.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Book Jungle, 2009.
---. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New

York: Citadel Press, 2002.
---. Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press,

2007.
Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus: A Readers Guide. New York:

Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
---. Deleuzeism: A Metacommentary. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Buchanan, Ian and Gregg Lambert, eds. Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,

2005.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Boston:

MIT Press, 1991.
Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Trans. Anne Boyman.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Choay, Francoise. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Trans. Lauren M. OConnell.

Cambridge. Cambridge UP, 2001.
165
Colebrook, Claire. Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum International

Publishing Group, 2006.
----. Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2002.
Debord, Guy. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. April 10 2010. <http://

library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2>.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York:

Zone Books, 1991.
---. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
---. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colubmia UP, 2004.
---. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
---. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
---. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 2002.
---. Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New
York: Columbia UP, 1990.
---. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
---. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.
---. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: George Braziller, 1972.
---. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books,
1992.
166
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of

---. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of

---. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
---. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York:

Columbia UP, 1994.
Eisenman, Peter. Diagram Diaries. New York: Universe Publishing, 1999.
Peter Eisenman, The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and Processes of Difference.

Harvard Architecture Review 3 (Winter 1984) 65.
Flaxman, Gregory, ed. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge.Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New
York: Routledge, 2002.
----. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage 1994.
----. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage,
1995.
----. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard
Howard. London: Tavistock, 1965.
----. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge,
2002.
Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History.

New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 1969.
----. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard UP,

1941.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York:

Columbia UP, 2008.
167
----. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: MIT Press,

2001.
Hanssen, Beatrice, Ed.Walter Benjamin And the Arcades Project. London: Continuum

International Publishing Group, 2006.
Hitchock, Henry-Russell. Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. New York:

Payson and Clarke, 1929.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke

UP, 1992.
Kennedy, Barbara M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2000.
Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture.
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Trans. Thomas Y. Levin.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.
Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert

Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 143-161.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Wiley
Blackwell, 1992.
Levine, Donald, Ed. Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: Chicago UP,
1971.
Lynch, David and Barry Gifford, Lost Highway The Screenplay, Feb. 5 2010,

<http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhscript.htmlLynch>.
Lynn, Greg. Animate Form. New York: Princeton UP, 1999.
---. Ed. Folding in Architecture: (Architectural Design Profile). West Sussex: Academy Press,
2004.
Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake,

Balthazar Getty and Robert Loggia. October Films, 1997.
Manufactured Landscapes. Dir. Jennifer Baichwal. Perf. Edward Burtynsky. Zeitgeist Films,

2006.
168
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP,

2002.
Massumi, Brian, ed. A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. New York:

Routledge, 2002.
Moneo, Raphael. Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary

Designers. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
Nesbitt, Kate. The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking (An Aesthetic of )
Abstraction. New Literary History, Vol. 26 No. 1 (Winter 1995) 95-110.
North, Michael. The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament. Critical

Inquiry Vol. 16 (Summer 1990) 260-279.
Parr, Adrian, Ed. The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005.
Pevsner, Nikolaus. Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius.
London: Faber and Faber, 1936.
Rajchman, John. Constructions. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Rendell, Jane, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian, eds. Critical Architecture.

New York: Routledge, 2007.
Rowe, Colin. Introduction, Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier.
New York: Oxford UP, 1972.
Stivale, Charles J. Ed. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2005.
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Trans.
Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1979.
Taut, Bruno. Modern Architecture. London: The Studio, 1929.
Totaro, Donato: Gilles Deleuzes Bergsonian Film Project (Parts 1 and 2). Offscreen.com

(available at www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze1.html). 31 March

1999. Accessed 05 April 2008.
Venturi, Robert, Scott Izenour and Denise Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas - Revised
Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1977.
Vidler, Anthony. Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism.

169
Williams, James. Deleuzes Ontology and Creativity: Becoming in Architecture. Pli 9

(2000), 200-219.
Young, James E. Germanys Holocaust Memorial Problem and Mine. The Public

Historian. Vol. 24, No. 4 (Autumn 2002) 65-80.

Architecture As An Image of Thought1

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Architecture As An Image of Thought1

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Copyright 2010

Architecture as an Image of Thought:

Program Authorized to Offer Degree:

This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a masters thesis by

and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects,

4.09 Peter Eisenman, Casa Guardiola (1988)

Fig 0.01 Casa Batll, Antoni Gaud

Fig 0.03 Einstein Tower,

Fig 0.02 The Rietveld Schrder House,

Fig 0.04 La Citta Nuova,

In order to properly understand movement, it is important to resist the need for

Extending Deleuzes philosophy into architecture in this manner attempts to rescue

Fig. 0.05 Human Motion Study,

Fig. 0.06 Human Motion Study,

Fig. 0.07 Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2,

memory gets, the wider the circuits of virtual

pasts must get to understand it as a more

broader and more distant or disparate pasts.

The process of attentive memory is thus a

solely on what interests us and must call other

strategies of memory and duration into play.

Fig. 0.08 Henri Bergsons Circuit of Memory

Section Two, Cinema and Any-Space-Whatever, focuses on the connection

Horizontal Linkages of an Extendable World

Fig 0.09 The Movement-Image

image down into its constitutive signs,

past, present and future, between

acting subject in the present world.

Fig. 0.10 Bergsons Inverted Cone of Memory

Fig. 0.11 The Time-Image

(1981-1985), he juxtaposes the strata of the city: contemporary Berlin is superimposed on

Satter | The Movement-Image

Fig 1.01 Still from Lost Highway (1997)

A 21st Century Noir Horror Film.

Satter | The Movement-Image

The lost highway, then, is not a metaphorical representation of movement in

Satter | The Movement-Image

Satter | The Movement-Image

Satter | The Movement-Image

Satter | The Movement-Image

Satter | The Movement-Image

the College de France on the Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought

Satter | The Movement-Image

principle of its representation: movement can

Fig. 1.02 Nicolas Oresme, Diagram of Movement

horse, in aquatic animals and mollusks, in

Marey, a French doctor and physiologist became involved in aesthetics when he

Satter | The Movement-Image

Fig. 1.04 Etienne Jules Marey, Human Motion Study

Fig. 1.03 Etienne Jules Marey, Human Motion Study

B. Gilbreth (1868-1924) and Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), who experimented with

Satter | The Movement-Image

Fig. 1.07 Eadweard Muybridge, Equine Motion

Fig. 1.08 Eadweard Muybridge, Human Motion

these photographers to treat movement aesthetically and conceptually (Figs. 1.09-1.10).

Satter | The Movement-Image

While Giedion identifies the importance of thinking in terms of movement, in the

Satter | The Movement-Image

experience of it constantly changing. This is partly because of his appreciation of concurrent

Satter | The Movement-Image

However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement

Satter | The Movement-Image

So far, Deleuzes (and Guattaris) concept of movement suggests a means for