I'm honored to christen the blog with excerpts from one of my favorite thinkers : Felix Guatarri. This is part one of a two-part post arguing for a conception of film seperate from the paradigm of a story.

These are excerpts from two articles - "Cinema of Desire" (1973) and "Poor Man's Couch" (1975)

This is bascially a mash up of the two (Word changes, reordering lots of deletions)I know Guatarri would approve but don't use any of these excerpts in a acdemic journal ;)

"Film has become a giant machine for modeling the social libido...

The capitalist system does not function by simply putting a flux of slaves to work. It depends on modeling individuals according to its preferences and, for this purpose, to propose and impose models of desire: it puts models of childhood, fatherhood, motherhood, and love in circulation. It launches these models the same way the automobile industry launches new lines of cars. The important thing is that models always remain compatible with the axiomatic of capital : the object of love should always be an exclusive object participating in the system of private ownership. The fundamental equation is enjoyment = possession.

Cinema television and the press have become fundamental instruments of forming and imposing a dominant reality ... Beyond being means of communication, of transmitting information, the are instruments of power. They not only handle messages, but above all. libidinal energy. The themes of cinema - it models its, its genres, its stars - are, whether they want to be or not , at the service of power. And not only insofar as they depend directly on the financial power machine, but first and foremost because they participate in the elaboration and transmission of subjective modes.

A machine treats you like a machine, and the essential thing is not what it says, but the sort of vertigo of abolition that the fact o being "machinized" provides for you. With people dissolving and things passing unwitnessed , one abandons oneself to a guilt-free world... at the movies one pays to be invaded by subjective arrangements with blurry contours in order to give in to adventures that, in principle, have no lasting effects.

"In principle" because the unconscious, as soon as it is exposed (to cinema), becomes like an occupied territory. Cinema in the end, has taken the place of ancient liturgies. Its function is to renovate, adapt, and assimilate the ancient gods of bourgeois familialism. The religion is serves borrows the language of "normal" communication that one finds in the family, at school, or at work. Even when it seems to give the "normal" character a chance to speak, it is alway, in reality, a reconstitution, a poppet, a zombie-model , and "invader" who is ready to be grafted onto the unconscious in order to dominate it...

When it is exploited by capitalist and bureaucratic socialist powers to mold the collective imagery, cinema topples over to the side of meaning (signifying). Yet its owen effectiveness continues to depend on its pre-signfying symbolic components as well as it a-synifying ones : linkages, internal movements of visual images, colors, sounds etc. But unlike speech and writing that, for hundreds of years, indeed thousands, of years has remained pretty much the same as a means of expression, cinema has in a few decades, never ceased to enrich its technique. To catch up with these effects the powers that be have tried to increase the control they exercise upon it. The more i enlarges its scale of aesthetic intensities, the more systems of control and censure have tried to subjugate it.

The successive inventions of cinema , insofar as they enriched the possibilities of expressing desire, have led capitalism to take possession of cinema and to use it as a privileged instrument of social control, as long as this terrain continues not to threaten the foundations of established control. It would be completely different if the masses were a liberty to make the kind os film they wanted... The miniaturization of the material could become the determining factor in such an evolution... though nothing guarantees us that what will develop will not be more reactionary than what is broadcast by national television. ut they could become instruments of liberation of great importance. ..
the super-8 and the video-tape recorder could be turned into means of
writing that are much more direct and much more effective than
discourses pamphlets and posters.

Against the notions of eros and eroticism, I would like to oppose that of desire and desiring energy. Desire is not, like eros, tied down with the body, the person and the law; Desire is constituted before the crystallization of the body and the organs, before the body and the organs, before the division of the sexes, before the separation familialized self and social field. It does not respect the ritual games of war between the sexes: it is not sexual it is trans-sexual. Nothing essential leads to the subjugation of the child, the women, or the homosexual. In a word it is not centered on dominant significations and values: it participates in in open, a-signifying semiotics, available for better or worse. Nothing here depends on destiny, but on collective arrangements in action.

In conclusion I must say of cinema that it can be both a machine of eros i.e. the interiorization of repression, and the machine of liberated desire.

Whatever its stereotypes its conformisms, cinema is overflowing with the richness of its expressive means... if one can imagine another film praxis being constituted in the future, a cinema of combat attacking the dominant values in the present state of things..."

The central themes that really interest me and I want to talk about in the next post are :

• The idea of film producing/re-enforcing/modeling the subject (i.e. the sense of "I")
• The idea of film usually being an erotic machine - a machine that maipulates and probuces erotics
• The rich formal potentials of film that allow it to on occasion become a machine of liberation