A brief, largely improvised sketch on Deleuze's concept of the "time-image" (subject to later revision)

Patrick Simpson; March 5, 2025 (25.3-5)

[I watched the first half of Marguerite Duras's India Song last night, and I'm thinking on what it means to feel dislocated in time.

I found out about the movie from a secondary text analyzing Deleuze's two Cinema books, the Movement-Image and Time-Image (the secondary text is Deleuze's Time Machine by D. N. Rodowick). Rodowick brings up India Song as an example of a film in which the "time-image" aspect of cinema takes precedence over the representation of movement in the "movement-image." As Rodowick describes it, there was a cultural transition from emphasis on the "movement-image" to emphasis on the non-linearity of the "time-image" in global cinema post-1945: the second World War, in this analysis, was a globally traumatic event that disrupted the smooth images of progress seen in the likes of both Hollywood continuity editing and Soviet montage. After the brutual nonsense of global fascist and totalitarian takeovers---after the nonsense of the Holocaust, and after the nonsense of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki---nobody could believe in a notion of historical "progress" anymore.

Trauma destroys time, or at least, it destroys the notion of a comprehensible relation between past, present, and future. To be "traumatized" is to experience a loss of reasons: it is to lose "reasoning" as such. The continental theorists of the first half of the 20th century---I'm thinking of Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer, specifically---described in eloquent prose the obliteration of Enlightenment "rationality". After the war, what is there to say about Kant's "categorial imperative," or Hegel's "absolute knowledge"?---and this question goes far beyond mere critique of the concepts. The trauma is realizing that perhaps it would have been better if Kant and Hegel and Rousseau and Hume (and before them, Hobbes and Locke and Descartes and Newton and Galileo, and so on) had never written a word, never thought the thoughts that they thought. The terrible truth is not that these thinkers had it "wrong" (i.e., made a conceptual or logical error in their arguments)---the terrible truth is that the universal concepts of Truth and Justice these thinkers penetrated simply "do not apply". That there's something else going on, and there's always been something else going on, and that "something else" has more to do with cockroaches and mustard gas and the splitting of atoms than it does with anything resembling what we normally associate with "human nature". There might be Truth and Justice, but we are not the possessors of it, and never will be, and the centuries-long attempt to discover and describe and universalize and enact those ideas was, at bottom, not "wrong", but literally incomprehensible. Because that chain of events---from the early rationalism of the Scientific Revolution, to its further development in the Enlightenment, to the spread of that "rationality" to the rest of the globe through Europe's colonial power---directly led to the senseless murder and torture of millions of civilians. So why "reason" at all? I'm not putting any of this particularly well---I'm repeating myself.

But there's no helping it. After 1945, people kept living. But what is there to do now? Now, time is "out of joint", as Deleuze likes to say, quoting from Hamlet. It's "out of joint" because we no longer have History, or what we had once thought might be History was something entirely different, taking an entirely different form than anyone could have predicted. There is no longer comprehensible movement from past to present to future, a logical chain of events from which we can extrapolate and use that extrapolation to decide what to do next: individual lives and the larger social collectivities of religion, nation-states, and so on, no longer possess a "beginning, middle, end", and now exist in a suspended duration that always changes. Lost in Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths": there is no longer a North Star by which to navigate the garden, decide whether to go "left" or "right" at each fork. Stalin's totalitarianism is "of the same stuff" as American capitalism and colonialism. In Duras's India Song, characters wander empty rooms and tell themselves half-forgotten stories of why they're here, or where they might like to go next: paraphrasing, "Bombay is better than Calcutta. The access to the ocean makes a difference." But none of them belong, and they will never belong. We move from room to room and that is all there is: there are no "choices" as such. Everything already happened, and happened a long time ago, and now nobody quite remembers all of it, and it wouldn't matter anyway, but we're all still here in these empty rooms, gazing at each other and wondering, sometimes taking a step in that direction, or that direction, or perhaps simply standing and letting time's movement wash over like a dream or nightmare.

I woke up this morning and looked out the window and saw my neighbor walking her dog; before, I had opened the blinds (an old routine that still brings me comfort) after a night in which I was, at times, convinced that I needed to lie still underneath the coffee table in the living room for a long time, which I did, until it no longer made sense, and I picked myself up from the floor matter-of-factly, as though nothing had happened, and fell asleep on the living room couch, where I then woke up this morning. My cat jumped on the kitchen counter and gazed out the window above the sink at nothing, and I picked him up and let him out onto the porch, and then sat with decaf coffee in the living room and saw my neighbor walking her dog, a routine I'm used to seeing and which brings me comfort. My parents came downstairs and I said I was feeling okay, and I was, and last night has already disappeared, and it also hasn't.

I need to watch Hiroshima mon amour tonight, is something I want to write here, but it's not necessary: I'll either watch it tonight or I won't, and these words have little bearing on what happens, though still some bearing. Actions still have consequences, but as Hume says of our perception of causality, there is no necessary relation between Event A and Event B---only, as Deleuze would phrase it, a "passive synthesis" (see, for example, the chapter "Repetition-for-Itself" in Difference and Repetition, published 1968 amidst tumultuous liberation movements soon to be co-opted by larger forces of profit and violence we are still struggling to understand). The Indian lights the incense in the room as he is expected to do by his white superiors, and smoke rises constantly, and I have nothing more to say here, for now. Why did I write this? Not for no reason, but also not for any particularly discernible or comprehensible meaning: I simply wanted to do it, and now something else will be happening as I type these last words and enclose this overall HTML paragraph element with another tag and save the file and get up and do something else with my time. ---written mid-morning to early afternoon (time is now 12:36 pm)... (subject to later revision, as always)]