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Constituting Bodies: Constituting Life: from subjectivity to affect and the "becoming-woman" of the cinematic.

by Barbara M. Kennedy

[T]he aesthetic power of 'feeling,' although equal in principle with other powers of 'thinking' philosophically, 'knowing' scientifically, 'acting' politically, seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within the collective assemblages of enunciation of our era. (Guattari, Chaosmosis, 1992: 101)
The 'aesthetic power of feeling' in visual cultures evolves through an emergence of new dynamics across philosophy, film theory and feminist politics. Questions of subjectivity and the subsuming of the subjective state through the becoming-woman of 'affect' are the main focus of this paper which experiments with the concept of affect for new questions in film theory. I explore the relevance of a newly framed conception of subjectivity or the 'beyond' of subjectivity within the auspices of film theory. This new imbrication argues that a neo-aesthetic paradigm is premised upon a subjectivity which is subsumed through 'becoming'. What then are the implications for film theory which has for too long prioritised structuralist concerns with representation, signification, semiotics and a requirement of a 'subjective' reading perspective and in recent years, an overt concern with psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject, desire and pleasure? This article, taken from Deleuze and Cinema:The Aesthetics of Sensation1 seeks to explore how subjectivity, mind/brain and body are technologised, rather than being located within the psychoanalytic spaces of gendered subjectivities and libidinal forces of desire. In the process of the cinematic encounter, I argue that, rather than theorising cinema through questions of desire and pleasure, cinema may be conceived as 'modulation','event' or as 'material capture'; a processual and durational space/non - space effectuated through the 'beyond' of subjectivity.

Film theory to date has failed to provide an adequate understanding of how film matters, how it impacts, how it acts as a body in motion, in space and in time, with other material elements of our world. Instead film theory has been locked into formal analysis of ideology, representation and critiques of signification. Contemporary films display a wide range of effects, tonalities, reverberations and intensities, which connect at an affective level, beyond or before any sense of subjectivity. This paper argues that a 'neo- aesthetic' theory which accounts for how the affective is formulated beyond subjectivity, through performativity, via colour, sound, movement, force, intensity, not just through psychical mechanisms, but through material elements such as the mind/brain and body, can be discerned through a collusion with a Bergsonian and Spinozist Deleuzism. The beyond of a subjective state is orientated within the realms of the pre-personal, the autopoietic realms of a material state, where affect and intensity take us into a processual immanence, what I want to refer to as the 'becoming-woman' of the cinematic. As I argue in Deleuze and Cinema: the Aesthetics of Sensation, the becoming-woman of the cinematic takes us into the spaces of sensation, the transitional, fugitive and immanent 'beyond' of pleasure or desire.

New theoretical paradigms, premised on the work of Deleuze and Guattari enable a move beyond conceptions of subjectivity into immanent trajectories and intersticial spaces which locate, ironically a non-locatable, processual landscape of creativity. The 'boundary' that has traditionally separated the natural sciences from the humanities and social sciences might be re-thought and re-assessed through these intersticial spaces. As a result, a new concern with the material nature of creativity and matter as it functions within the production of an emergent, pre-personal state might help aesthetic theory move into more dynamic spaces beyond subjectivity, into subjectless 'subjectivities'. The implications for a neo-aesthetics of the filmic experience are volitional and exciting.

Towards the neo-aesthetic

How do we bring back a discussion of the aesthetic into film theory in a post-theoretical climate which has challenged all the elements of modernist conceptions of the aesthetic. In pre-modernist discourse aesthetics was defined in two ways, premised on subjectivity and objectivity.2 For example, in one sense aesthetics may be defined as a theory of sensibility which is a form of 'possible experience'. This perspective locates an objective element of sensation, which is conditioned by the significant elements such as space, time and form. The second definition of aesthetics encompasses a subjective element of sensation. Here the main concern is that art is a reflection on real experience and it is expressed in the feelings, through emotions such as pleasure, pain, disgust or fear. Thus an objective and a subjective dialectical definition of aesthetic. Modernist conceptions of the aesthetic were premised on a science of sensibilities, which encouraged a greater moral good. This conception of aesthetics had its origins in Aristotelian claims that the objective aim of art is beauty, which will produce in others 'the same impression as derives from the contemplation of beautiful'. 3 The beautiful was defined by specific adherence to specific form. Form was a significant element in that debate and the forms of works of art, films, poetry, novels, were analysed for specific formulaic devices: use of tone, line, space, or colour, for example. Proportion, line, colour, space and tone, were stylistic devices which were able to render a form 'beautiful' by virtue of the way these elements were used. The concept 'aesthetic' then seems locked into definitions within modernist and dualist discourse. The role of the artist as supreme originator of meaning because of some innate gift of ability was of course connected to ' transcendent' notions of goodness and morality, specifically within Romantic discourse. This usage of the term 'beautiful', then has its originations in Romantic discourse, and is something I want to question and disorientate in the location of a neo-aesthetics.

However, through a neo-aesthetics, the 'beautiful' is not necessarily consilient with goodness, the romantic, or transcendent notions, or to visual pereceptions of image or form, but to a feeling of duration, immanent and transversal trajectories, movement and processuality: what Deleuze refers to as 'haecceity' or 'intensity'.4 Neither is the 'beautiful' defined as it was in modernism, as 'individual spontaneity' or 'cultural imposition.'. This neo-aesthetic is an aesthetic premised on the materiality of the body/mind/world as process, not an aesthetic premised on standards of taste, form or beauty within a modernist dialectic, or on the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity. The beautiful, in this neo-aesthetic, is premised on processuality, performativity, continual movement not form or image. The determination of beauty becomes temporal, not reflective: an open-ended process, a feeling of flowing, rhythm, or 'becoming'. Indeed, a refreshing concern with becoming-woman rather than desire or pleasure, requires us to think about sensation as a rhythmical, durational experience, not one of static shock of excitations on the nervous system.

The concept of the beautiful in classical definitions was premised on an external opposition of object and subject, between objectivity and subjectivity. A different definition of beautiful within a neo-aesthetic involves a melding of these terms as inseparable elements of 'matter'. A new conception of the 'beautiful' and sensation within the neo-aesthetic is not premised upon romantic, transcendent individualism but it is based upon impersonal, biological, corporeal 'matter' in the material: what I refer to as an immanence of 'becoming-woman'. Thus 'beauty' has nothing to do with 'taste' or a judgement of taste, but is rather a felt 'immediacy', 'force' or 'intensity" in process. A neo- aesthetic in this sense then is an aesthetic as a transient and ephemeral manner of being in continual process, or 'becoming', where subjectivity is rendered subjectless. The affective is a material state, as much as it is deemed a psychic state within psychoanalysis. Deleuze writes of the significance of this sense of 'immediacy' or 'force' as pertaining to all the arts, 'there is a community of the arts, a common problem. In art, and in painting as in music, it's not a question of reproducing or inventing forms, but of harnessing forces.' 5

In this neo-aesthetic paradigm, process then takes precedence over form. The 'beautiful' of the neo-aesthetic is contained in its autonomy. This autonomy is a 'subjectless subjectivity' that is expressed in the process of perception. The filmic encounter involves all aspects of the body's sensibilities, not just vision and brain: eye and cortex, but the entire body, an integrating of the materiality of film and the environment. Subject and object integrate into a larger autonomy of involvement, matter and mind meld together, as a technic or as an assemblage. This understanding of aesthetics as a 'neo-aesthetics' is seen more as an empiricism than as romanticism. The neo-aesthetic experience involves a whole and total engagement with molecular forces of being in the world. A complete depersonalisation is involved, where subjectivity is rendered subjectless. Barbara McClintock explains how this 'depersonalisation' feels in describing her scientific work, 'The more I worked (with chromosomes) the bigger and bigger they got, and when I was really working with them I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system... As you look at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing is that you forget yourself.'6 Rather than a feeling being felt then by some 'subjectivity,' as we detect in earlier debates on the aesthetic, a feeling is not owned by a subject, but the subject is part of the feeling. In other words, the 'subjective encounter' is experienced within the materiality of existence. 'The world and I exist in difference, in encounter. In the feeling, being is in sensation'.7

Towards Deleuzian "becomings.....

Daniel Stern's work on The Interpersonal World of the Infant, explores in detail the existence of a transitivist and fusional emergent self; a self that ignores oppositions of subject/object and masculine /feminine. Together with the work of Raymond Ruyer, Stern's work has been extremely significant to Deleuze and his conception of 'becoming'. However, I wish to foreground the significance of Ruyer's work here in several ways. His ideas have purchase in how visual perception is conceived as an in-itself outside of any scopic action of an eye-I relational. Deleuze's notion of autopoiesis, the self-enjoyment of the transivitist and emergent self, the absolute interiority, is premised upon both Stern's and Ruyers'work. Deleuze's notion of a schizoanalytic subjectivity posits multiple strata of subjectivation in a multi-componenetial cartography; one which is opposed to the 'conscious-unconscious' binary of psychoanalytic configurations and is premised on the work of Ruyer. It is not so much a total denial of subjectivity, but a recognition that it exists in pre-verbal and pathic consistencies,beyond the individual. Such pathic events or consistencies are referred to as multiplicities. It is of course, difficult for rational modes of discourse to accept an existence of a non-discursive affective pathic awareness. Ruyer's biological philosophy proposes a connection between mind and matter which does not distinguish them as seperate entities. Ruyer posits the notion of an absolute 'true form' which 'is an absolute consistent form that surveys 'itself' independently of any supplementary dimension,which does not appeal therefore to any transcendence,which has only a single side whatever the number of its dimensions,which remains co-present to all its determinations without proximity or distance,traverses them at speed,without limit-speed..' 8 Indeed one of the main contentions of Deleuze's work is that it posits an ideality that is actually a dimension of matter. All things are material. He argues, 'I see no reason to refuse the existence of the equivalent of a subjectivity or proto-subjectivity to material and living assemblages.' Deleuze seems to be looking for a sense of subjectivities which is not based on a subject, or intentionality or psychoanalytic perceptions of subject/object co-ordinates. He is suggesting, and this can be seen in Cinema 2 and in the final chapter of What is Philosophy? that there is an auto-possession, an autopoiesis, or self-enjoyment felt through the brain/body prior to any emergence of a phenomenal field..In other words the brain is the 'mind'. All we ever are is brain/mind meld. Images thus exist within this brain/mind/body meld, not outside in the world itself.

'Becomings' in Deleuze are seen as 'affects' and it is the subsuming of subjectivity through the notion of the affective state as existing in the preverbal, and material spaces of autopoiesis, that becomes central to a location of a neo-aesthetics of affect. The affect or intensity of 'becoming' is accomodated through molecularity, in these very singularites and multiplicites of the presubjective field. Deleuze writes,

' [A]ll becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming; neither the imitation of a subject, not the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed, and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire.... becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter into a particular zone of proximity.

...All becomings are molecular; the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subject, objects, or forms that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science or by habit.' 9

For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the process of 'becoming-woman,' which is key to all becomings. 'Becoming-woman' for both men and women is conceived as a molecular process, one which releases fragments or particles of 'sexuality' ( a sexuality that is no longer linked with the unified and genitalised sexed body) which break down the binary aggregations. The process of 'becoming-woman' is not based upon any recognition of an actual entity , as a 'molar' entity woman. The process of 'becoming-woman' for men and women, is a destabilization of the molar identity and as such promotes a molecular and general process of transformation. The very system of thought which prioritises a 'subject' to 'woman' is through 'becoming-woman' questioned. Subjectivity instead is subsumed through the alignment of effects of certain processes. As Elizabeth Grosz indicates,' subjectivity is subsumed through effects or consequences of processes of sedimentation, the congealing and co-agulation of processes, interrelations of 'machines' of disparate components, functioning in provisional alignment with each other to form an ensemble.'10

'Becoming-woman' is part of a rhizomatic conception of thought which does not premise definitions in fixed and binary ways. Such rhizomatics, even though not directly supportive of active feminist struggles in the molar sense, helps to open up possibilities of thinking in experimental and creative ways. It is not a denial of the political category of 'woman' entirely. The term 'becoming-woman' is used here as part of a 'molecular' way of thinking, part of a micro-politics, not a molar way of thinking. 'Becoming-woman' involves a series of movements and processes which are outside the fixity of molar concepts like 'subjectivity'. It is instead an escape from binary concepts that privilege the masculine at the expense of the feminine. 'Becoming-woman' means going 'beyond identity and subjectivity...fragmenting and freeing up lines of flight...liberating a thousand tiny sexes.' It is rather a neo-pragmatic turn on subjectivity. 'Becoming-woman' is a mapping or tracking of woman as a 'function' of a series of processes which have no referent to transcendent entities or agency. Rather these processes function or operate at a molecular level, at a level of material production. Rosi Braidotti's critique that Deleuzian 'becoming' offers no space for a specifically feminist subjectivity might be answered with the argument that Deleuze's work exposes those very mechanisms which produce such transcendent notions. His aim is to deploy the concept of 'becoming-woman' as particles or as fibres, as an element within a critical neo-pragmatics.

Deleuzian ideas enable a rethinking of the very elements in relation to which woman is understood.Thus a 'becoming-woman' will enable a move away from all those disabling concerns with subjectivity and agency maintained in a macro-political dialectic. The position of 'woman' in relation to the 'subject' has historically and culturally remainded fairly consistent. Philosophy traditionally reflected woman as other through a wide array of discourses. Irigaray has specifically referred to the notion of an immanent principle of woman in her article 'Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un' in which she describes woman's subjectivity as multiple, diffracted, dissipated, modelled on the very physicality of her sexual corporeal body. However, such a view of 'woman' consistently sees woman in the position of 'other' and as a function of 'subjectivity'. What 'becoming-woman' in Deleuzian terms does is enable a view of woman in relation to the elemental, the material, the local, forces ( mattter, passion, chaos, affection, affect,) where subjectivity is replaced through a materiality and a molecularity of 'becoming'.

Rethinking 'Body'

This move to conceptualising materiality however requires a different understanding of the term body which is outside those defined by binary discourses. Deleuzian conceptions of the body,based on Spinoza, rethink the body outside of its configurations in such binary discourse. The body is perceived as a set of forces, intensities, processes, molecular and fibrous particles in connection with other forces and in consilience with the materiality of the brain. Nature, matter, affection and passion are not here perceived as static or negative terms, but flowing, transitional, relational, changing and creative. Therefore their connotations in relation to 'woman' no longer suggest 'otherness'. Deleuze and Guattari's idea of 'becoming-woman' provides machinery for a reformulation of the 'body' itself. I want to extend that thinking to a new conception of the term 'body' in relation to aesthetics and the cinematic. 'Woman' then is not conceived as a 'concept' or as a specific form of 'body' but as an element in a set of relations in process and assemblage. This is a philosophical turn on the definition of 'woman' away from transcendent definitions. Woman is definable as the processes and orders into which she is installed. The critical question then for feminism ( and I would argue post-feminism) now is not whether this is a positive or negative trope of 'woman' in representational terms, but what processes are involved in the production of 'woman' as a volitional relation of processes?

Woman is part of an arsenal of pragmatics in rethinking 'becoming' instead of subjectivity. Thus 'becoming-woman' is not captured or restricted within a specific physical form. It is not chromosomally, psychoanalytically, biologically, culturally, libidinally or socially defined. This re-wiring of processes is therefore immanent to material flows. These are not conceptually driven. They are affectively driven. 'Becoming-woman' is then, a process of affectivity, not a concept which describes a move towards a political agency or subjectivity.

Bodies without Organs.

To explore how Deleuze and Guattari connect the 'becoming-woman' to affectivity, we need to consider their idea of 'bodies without organs'. This is a new formulation of 'body' outside its definition as a set of organs, blood, bones, etc. and as seen in oposition to the mind and consciousness. In Deleuzian terms,'body' is conceived differently . The concept of 'body without organs' is an attempt to denaturalise the body. Rather than see the body as a corporeal entity, Deleuze and Guattari describe the body as set of variously informed 'speeds' and 'intensities'. It is conceived in relation to other bodies, particles of other bodies or entitites. This is premised on a Spinozist conception of the univocity of being.i.e. that everything has the same ontological status. Thus all of life in a sense becomes a 'body' in a material connection. Body without Organs refers to all bodies, animate, inanimate, human, inhuman, textual, social and cultural. But this Body Without Organs is a body which is disinvested of any psychical fantasies as we see in psychoanalysis. Rather the Body Without Organs is an abstract notion, a concept of thinking of the body as a tendency ...a becoming. As Grosz indicates,

It is the body before and in excess of the coalescence of its intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful, functional, organised, transcendent totalities,.....it is a point or process to which all bodies, through their stratifications, tend......... a becoming.11
The Body without Organs is not a place, or a scene or an actual 'body'. It is a field of consistency or immanence, for the production and circulation of the process of desire. It is the plane of consistency as opposed to the plane of organisation. If The Body Witout Organs is the space of 'becomings' it is important to see it in this abstract way, not as a defined expression about the physical, corporeal fleshed 'body'. Bodies are not stable units, but become elements in assemblage, fluid and mutable, constituting life through 'becoming'. This is an abstract level of description from the body as perceived in binary discourses of Enlightenment/Cartesian ideas. Deleuzian conceptions of body convey the main features of 'bodies' as openness, change, mutability, fluidity, processuality, duration, feedback, complexity.Through the 'body' then an immanent self-organisation replaces transcendent principles, determining the value of the 'body' from binary divisions. Thus 'becoming-woman' has nothing to do with 'real women' in the biological , cultural and physical sense of 'woman'. 'Becoming-woman' is a process of immanence, a description of a processual experience of the affect as opposed to the 'subject'.

Becomings are always specific movements, specific forms of rest, motion, speed and slownesses, points and flows of intensity. Such flows of intensity operate outside subjectivity and gendered subjectivity through the "affect". Affects are becomings, and what I want to term the 'becoming-woman' of cinema is a concern with the affective processes at work in the experience of the cinematic. Those affective processes are effectuated through the 'unthought', through the material of the 'body/mind/brain' at a deeper level than the 'subjective'. The unthought is felt as 'intensity' as 'becoming' in a molecular connection beyond any notion of an 'individuated body'.

Becomings..... to affect

The process of 'becoming' then foregrounds the affective. Deleuzian conception of 'becoming' is predicated upon a materialist aesthetic. His use of the concept 'becoming' as I have argued, is imbued with material forces of bodily affect, the contingency of forces at work within, across and outside the body. A pragmatics of 'becoming' uses contingent assemblages of thinking processes through which to distanciate the concept of 'subjectivity'. Subjectivities can be determined as merely simulacra which are subsumed to a more profound engagment with the forces of 'becoming', material, molecular, and fibrous forces, rewired, as I indicated earlier across new assemblages outside of language construction. A post-feminist agenda in film theory, as a political and ethical framework enables thinking 'outside' the boundaries of epistemological, Cartesian thought.

This new engagement with cinematic desires thus proposes to consider cinema as 'affect', where the affect operates beyond subjectivity, in the process of 'becoming'. It functions through the processual engagement with the materiality of film itself, through an immanence of movement, force, and intensity, not through a semiotic regime of signification or representation. Questions of desire are relocated or rather dislocated from sentient identification with semiotics, psychoanalysis or subjective reading positions. Rather desire is rendered processual, immanent, created through the modulational and vibrational expressions of the 'affective'.

How do we begin to define a concept of 'affect'. There is no cultural-theoretical paradigm or vocabulary that is specific to 'affect'. Texts, visual or literary have until most recently always been explained, explored, theorised and critiqued through theories of 'signfication', 'ideology' 'representation' and 'psychoanalysis'. How can we begin to explain a volitional and involutional understanding of affect if we are constrained to work within verbal language structures? Affect has been loosely aligned to emotion. But there is a significant difference between these two terms. Affect and emotion are not synonomous, but interlocked. However, they are different. An emotion has a 'subjective' content: a 'subject' functions as the experiencer of an 'emotion'. There is a clearly perceived agent or subject. Through Deleuzian conceptions, affect is not ownable by an individuated agent in the same way as emotion.

The contradiction is, how can we critique 'affect' if it is indiscernible to an agent, to a subject? It is Spinoza's work on Ethics that Deleuze uses as his grounding for the term 'affect'. Spinoza's philosophy explores the difference between affect and emotion. He explains that affect has an irreducible bodily and autonomic nature.(Autonomic here is defined as purely a physical response to something, a sensual response e.g. skin getting warmer or heart beating faster ) Affect is a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear temporality in to what might be called 'passion'.This distinguishes it from passivity or activity.

Furthermore Ruyer's work as earlier explained, gives us a newly-technologised understanding of affect as a state of 'subjectless subjectivity'. The affect exists in the materiality of the brain/body consilence at a molecular level. At this level of the non-human, proto-subjectivity, the molecular describes a state which has an understanding of its own existence. Quantum physics currently describes microtubules which exist within the emergent sense of all organisms. In other words, all molecular organisms have a sense of 'aliveness', an existential integrity, or being in the world, outside any sense of consciousness.12 Thus affect is an emotionless state, but still a state of feeling.There is a pathic proto-subjective state which is not owned by the subject. Aesthetic desires are 'becomings' and they cannot be fixed or positioned in terms of extrinsic systems of reference. Rather they are articulated through transitivist, transversalist and pathic consistencies. As Guattari writes, 'one gets to know them not through representation, but through affective contamination'.

The 'becoming-woman' of the cinematic.

The 'becoming-woman' of cinema, then, is a phrase which I wish to foreground as a new term in post-feminist film theory and generates from a synthesis of Deleuzian ideas on 'becoming' and 'affect'. It enables a move from thinking beyond gendered subjectivity, through a corporeal and material sense of connection with the movements of the filmic text. Desire is subsumed to 'event', a modulational event that is effectuated through the molecular, material emotion, through the processuality of the affects of the film as body, with other bodies: the ways in which colours vibrate, clash, co-incide ; the tones of their dimensions, the blending of their boundaries, the patterns of linearity. latitudinal and longitudinal, across the frame, the rhythms and movements felt across the screen , the role of sound within the synaesthetic and choreographical experience. Not in any psychic or libidinal ways as has been theorised in psychoanalysis, for example, but through the physicality of the materiality of the film as body, connecting with other bodies, corporeal, material, molecular ; bodies as life, bodies constituting life. The 'becoming-woman' of cinema entails processes beyond corporealised vision into a concern with movement-image, affect, haecceity, synaesthesia and kinaesthetics: a coagulation of cinema as a machinic, technologised, and corporeal body. For Nietzsche, there is no distinction between the world in which we live and any other 'transcendent' world'. There is not ultimate truth, no other metaphysical world to which we can aspire. Rather there is only ever the processual of the real in time, the real forces of life's natural existence in its germinal and viral contingencies. 'Becoming' epitomises that process of affirmation of the dynamic of the living in the real world, an acceptance of the cruelty of life, the joy of cruelty in that existence, the acceptance of the ineluctability of life's transience. There is no 'other' to w hich we aspire..all there ever is is the 'real' and within our experience of the real, the concept of 'becoming' serves to define life's ephemerality, life's ineluctability and sheer vibrance of rhythmic movement, force and dynamism.Thus 'becoming' in Deleuze may be described as an affirmation of the positivity of life's 'differences', life's 'ineluctability through difference and repetition'. Consequently, identity is never singular and does not exist as a determinate factor in our existence. Identity is in constant flux and process, continually swirling through a vortex of molecularity, and even subsumed through more profunond forces of the molecular. With this emphasis on processes, affirmation and movement, Deleuze's notion of 'becoming-woman' offers the existence of fluid boundaries in a materialist and vitalist sense of immanence as opposed to transcendence. How is immanence defined here?

For the purposes of this article, I shall explain that the term 'immanence' is used in contrast with the term 'transcendence'.This is a simplistic and residual explanation for the purposes of this paper and in no way is there space here for me to take on board the entire debate of Anti-Oedipus in relation to Desire. This is formulated to some extent eleswhere.13 Deleuze argues against psychoanalytic frameworks of desire. He argues that psychoanalysis is premised upon Freudian notions of desire emanating from the need to return to originations, to a lost state of plenitude, a finite sense of oneness in finitude, through Death, where there is an ultimate return to an inorganic state of oneness in death. This is a transcendent model of desire where there is a constant wish to repeat and a compulsion to move beyond death to this transcendent state. Alternatively Deleuzian debate proclaims that desire is processual, immanent, productive and energic, and has nothing to do with forces of transcendence or a need to return to a lost plenitude, through Death. Rather Desire is aleatory, processual and constitutive of joy. Desire is produced, it does not emanate from lack, or the abyssal as in psychoanalysis. It is immanent, it is energic, and dynamic joy lies in its immanence, a continual process of contemplative and productive forces.

A 'becoming-woman' of the cinematic then is an exploration of the affective, processual, the dynamic and aleatory vitalism of the forces felt across the bodies of the cinematic experience. If we can move away from thinking about 'becoming-woman' as a description of an entity, the term enables a transformation from concept to affect. The 'becoming-woman' of cinema describes the affective process of the cinematic experience where the affective is constituted through a materiality of emotion, a material sense of depth and volitional process.

Constituting bodies - constituting life

A 'becoming-woman' of the cinematic will develop and creatively engage with thinking about the affective intensities of the visual experience as it impinges on the non-scopic elements of our bodies/minds/brains,our molecular bodies, and thus outside theories of gendered spectatorship. Woman as 'image' may sit alongside the 'becoming-woman' of the process of movement-image, affection-image and the processuality of synaesthetics... a total 'becoming-woman' of cinema. Deleuzian concern with affect and the affective intensity is part of the same cartography of visions of the concept 'becoming-woman'. The 'becoming-woman' of cinema is accomodated through the relations of screens as 'bodies' as molecular bodies, with observers as 'bodies' Deleuzian ideas on the body are not confined to one paradigm. The body is a set of relations, human, inhuman, material, animate and inanimate. Spinoza suggests, 'Bodies are not defined by their genus, nor by their organs and functions, by what they can do, the affects they are capable of in passion and in action' 14 Following upon this , Deleuze relates that, 'The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body, its postures.We do not know what a body can do'15 Experiencing a film then, as 'body' describes the 'felt' experience of engaging with the rhythmic, gestural and attitudinal spaces of the bodies within the diegesis of the film's mise-en-scene, as well as bodies, outside of the text itself. Bodies do not function to 'represent' a character, (but of course they may still do that) then, but are attitudes, relations of bodies in space and time, across space and time, and within space and time. The character is articulated as attitude, as 'gest' as 'spectacle'. To realise the fundamental becoming of life requires the relinquishment of the mind/body dualism. The body then is implicated significantly within the mind/brain cinematic assemblage.The body is sound as well as vision. All elements of the 'image' come together in 'body'.

Sounds, colours, tones and shadows become attitudes of the body, felt synaesthetically, constituted at a deeper level beyond audition,beyond figuration, as Deleuze says... 'at a deeper level than that of subjectivity.' The post-new wave cinema that is now part of our eclectic neo-millenial culture is a reworking of these directions. The attitudes, and postures of the body, speed, forces, and affect, become the event of the cinematic experience, not just through avant-garde cinema, but through more mainstream popular cinema. The eclecticism of styles is bricolaged through contemporary movies, such that avant-garde practices and aesthetics have a newly revived appropriacy and a germinal role to play in the evolution of cinema.

How does this exploration of the 'body'offer new ways forward in theorising 'body' in relation to 'woman' and how is this implicated in a 'becoming-woman' of cinema. As I have already argued, the term 'becoming-woman' is not operating as a literal concept of woman as entity. But if we are to take up this debate again, I think we can discern some interesting points, but also points of tension, about woman and body, which might usefully fit into this new aesthetics of the cinematic experience and simultaneously enable a pragmatic understanding of body in relation to feminist theory. Chantal Ackerman's work for example, has presented movies which show the 'gestures' of woman and woman's body in a specifically political positionality: the female body denoting specific female states of mind, pertinent to a female character. Similarly in dance, the movements and planes of experience operate outside any descriptive faculty of the mind through language. Flows, rhythms, and speeds of different planes, flights of parallel dimensions, and vertical collusions connect the body to the wider 'body' of temporal and spatial zones. Dance and performance effectuate vortices of becoming, through a 'becoming-woman'. This is premised on the chain of states of the female body which is dynamic, volatile, contingent and multiply diffracted. It works as a processual 'gest', in movement, and rhythm, across the diegesis of the screen, a revelation and exhiliration to both coporeal, flesh and blood, women and men. This 'openness' of woman's body may seem to have essentialist connotations.Woman defined as intuitive, emotional, irrational, never fixed, in chaos and dissimulation. But that very fluidity, openness, potential for connection and amorphousness HAS presented both a political and an aesthetic claim for a feminine aesthetic (one deemed in contrast to a masculine concern with form, narrativity and structure). Although th is seems to present a tension within the argument put forward so far, we need to re-think this idea of 'woman's body' as an open chain of states, but not one located within the essentialist determinations of woman as 'body'. If we can rewire and 'technologise' the terms of 'woman' and 'body' through Deleuzian processes of collusion, then we can rethink the concepts in their relavence to both dance and performance. Film is then seem as a balletic cartography within the mainstream text as much as the avant-garde text's of Chantal Ackerman. The woman's body in performance, both choreographically in dance, as much as acting styles on screen, achieves a sort of 'strangeness' and aesthetic distanciation, evoking a depth and 'gestural' force. It becomes a ceremony, an event, a cartography , an element within an assemblage of the film's process, no longer contained as 'representation'. It functions outside of semiotics or metaphor. The cinematic screen is not merely a space for the visual representation, but becomes a cartography of the visual, through a constitution of bodies:, not just woman's body/ The screen becomes an intersticial space of variations, cuts, fades,wipes,blank screens, absences, over-exposed and under-exposed images,variations and tonalities of colour, shape, forms, and movements...a complete cartography of the screen.The screen no longer functions with merely structural values, but transversal, genetic, molecular, germinal and viral.....a set of interrelational bodies, a processual 'becoming-woman'. Indeed, cinema works through these ways as an 'experimental night or a white space over us, it works as dancing seeds, and as luminous dust. It affects the visible with a fundamental disturbance and the world with a suspension ,which contradicts all natural perception.'16 So it follows from this that the cinematic experience produces a 'body', a felt 'body', a depth of 'becoming' beyond subjectivity, which is inarticulable through verbal language and structural, semiotic explanation.

Romeo and Juliet; - a harmonics of performativity.

If we take these ideas then to some analysis of contemporary popular movies, how do we find a neo- aesthetics at work? When our bodies absorb the movements of the screenic images instead of reflecting them, our activity can be described as effort, or as I have outlined throughout as 'affect'.The 'affect' replaces or at least is a simultaneous counterpart to representation. One of the most exciting films recently which epitomises the 'becoming-woman' and performs as a body, as image-concept-affect, is Baz Lurhmann's Romeo and Juliet. Lurhmann's film produces a theatricality of the cinema which is totally distinct from the theatricality of the theatre.We see this at work equally in Strictly Ballroom.. Director's like Scorsese have often portrayed this 'gestural' or 'pathic' constitution of bodies in their films. I am thinking here of Scorsese's Age Of Innocence, where the camera movements are a beautiful choreography through colour, texture, space and sounds providing a bio-vital aesthetic. Sounds and colours become attitudes of the body, categories constituiting new bodies in neo-aesthetic consilience.

A movie like Romeo and Juliet, which works and connects specifically through movements, processuality, duration, intensities and rhythms, expresses a Deleuzian sense of 'becoming -woman'. Becoming-woman is that process of immanence, a description of a processual experience of affect as opposed to subject. The molar and the molecular in coagulation, in collusion. Any valorisation of a neo-aesthetics or materialist aesthetic, which functions within the pre-personal realm of becoming need not totally deny or distanciate an aesthetic premised on the emotions. Indeed, it should sit alongside all those other realms of film theory, to create a perspectival paradigm for film studies. Indeed, where is the space 'between'?

An imbrication then of the narrative molar level of engagement with the film's diegesis, mise-en-sc�e, plot, its 'plane of organisation' is to an extent constituted through a more fibrous molecularity; its aesthetic configurations. Through its aesthetics, the film works as a 'body' in collusion with other bodies. Its 'body without organs' might, parodically evoke an emotional concern, with love, in a postmodern climate, which is both parodied and substantiated. A total complexity in its denial and acceptance of the primordial world of 'unworded experiences' and a 'pre-linguistic insight into life'.

In exploring Romeo and Juliet through a becoming-woman and neo-aesthetics of sensation, I firstly recall Deleuze's point in Logique de la Sensation, that,

'Beyond figuration and representation, then, sensation comes from a pure power that "overflows all domains, and traverses them. This power is that of Rhythm, which is deeper than vision, audition... etc. 'A logic of the senses,' Cezanne said, 'that is non-rational, non-cerebral.'17
Romeo and Juliet resonates with multiple rhythms. Its very visual display is rhythmical, (I mean that the visuals themselves are effectively 'rhythmical' before any musical connection) with a variety of specular effects enhanced by a variety of different musical genres, in different tempos, cadences, modulations and melodies. The subjective encounter is indeed, hystericised beyond subjective spectatorial perspectives. The subjective is subsumed by forces of affect, through the elements of sensation: intensities, rhythms, flows of energy, lines of flight. Energy resonates vibrantly, passionately, incisively, through the scintillating score and visceral mise-en-sc�es. This energy is most apparent through the musical elements in collaboration with the patterns of lines of longitude, latitude, and diagonals, much like the paintings of Mondrian or Kandinsky, traversing the frames of various sequences. A veritable moving canvas. The film modulates as a choreography, as a dance, like the paintings of Mondrian and Kandinsky, with lines of flow, rhythmically moving across, through, above, within, and beyond the frame of the screen. These patternings of line are operative through specific sequences in the film and they function in contrast with and in vibration and resonance with the more fluid, gentler and softer sequences, where colour functions prior to line and dynamics.18 The 'subject' then is subsumed in the beyond of becoming, becoming-woman through and in sensation. The visual act of seeing, ceases to be a merely organic activity, 'our eye ceases to be organic, to become a polyvalent and transitory organ: objectively it holds before us the reality of a body of lines, of colours, liberated from organic representations'.19

This quotation is specifically relevant to Romeo and Juliet A vibratory facticity, a connection of sensations, vibrations and rhythms come together in the 'haecceity' that is Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, we should here remember Deleuze's quote that 'sensation contracts vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears'. 20 How then does the film exude such haecceities?

Baz Lurhmann's richly textured, erotic and visceral post-modern rendition of Romeo and Juliet takes the original Shakespearean text as its script, but fractures it through an exuberant choreography of dizzying visuals and auditory rhythms, tones, nuances: a veritable sensory delight! Contemporary popular music, classical and opera create an eclectic pastiche of sounds which eclipses each and every visual moment of the movie. Indeed, the film was, on release, marketed and promoted through its sound-track. Music 'performs' as a fibrous core through the text, creating a post-modern opera, through an assemblaged architecture of different sounds, diegetic and non-diegetic, evoking the concerns of love, sexuality, (but a sexuality outside the confines of gender; the film is in its processuality very sexy!) death and tragedy. Indeed, sounds become gestures, which are also vocal, as Deleuze writes in Cinema 2,

where the visible body disappears......... What is freed in non-desire is music, and speech, their intertwining in a body which is now only sound, a body of new opera. It is no longer the characters who have a voice, but it is the voices, or rather the vocal modes of the protagonist (whisper, breathing, shout, eruction) which become the sole true characters.21
The mise-en-sc�e of Romeo and Juliet, is set within a contemporary American/Brazilian cityscape - in fact from the statue of Christ which looms out and provides an ambivalent icon of both love and death, we can see this is set in Rio de Janeiro (a westernised Verona in several senses of the word). Here, Shakespearean lords and kinsmen are replaced with a sexy, colourful array of young popular dudes, straight and gay, transvestites, bisexuals, transsexuals, punks, bikers and sado-masochists. We are given characteristic emblems of the contemporary world of corporate finance (Paris) or else exotic, plumed and pulchral visions of excess and the carnivalesque (Mercutio). Romeo (Leonardo di Caprio) seems to fit somewhere inbetween, but his tendencies towards romantic love render him an innocent among such company! An innocent who nonetheless finds himself guilty of murder. Love and hate yet part of the same equation of passion. However, that charming, witty and parodic post-modernism merely enthrals in its parallelism or repetition in difference of love, tenderly and sensitively enacted through the innocence of youth. (Claire Danes as Juliet and Leonardo di Caprio as Romeo). The cynicism of parody is thus tinged with the proverbial delights of a 'neo-romantic' venture as a reply to the horrific renditions of a culture embroiled in the sometimes bereft despair and ugliness of irony, parody, deceit, critique and an all-pervading fear of the existence of 'love', or what that might mean in a post-post-structuralist climate! Fear of tradition, a disrespect for originations, a disdain for 'depth' and 'meaning' are ironically juxtaposed, becoming simultaneously a respect for a text and language that does speak with metonym and metaphor - a denial of everything Deleuze stands for. Such contradictions. The movie is both post-modern and yet post-post-modern in its forces, intensities and resonances of haecceity. Shakespearean language, taken out of its traditional literary context, becomes part of the 'energies' as it colludes and collides with contemporary sounds, diegetically and non-diegetically, through which the film impacts. Meanings, whether parodic or not, are actually not what concerns this Deleuzian exploration of the 'event', the 'haecceity', the 'becoming-woman' of the film.

There is across the movie, a repetition-in-difference of all the various elements: generic characteristics such as character, plot, narrative, but also in terms of time and spatial zones. A difference-in-repetition across visual and aural 'affects' through 'becoming'. A neo-aesthetics here, is explored through differential relations - unlike Freudian psychoanalytic ideas on pleasure (tied up with inorganic death originations) and 'bound excitation'. Deleuze refers instead to 'differential relations', differentiated forms of material and molecular elements of our make up. So the generic characteristics no longer hold the only validity for understanding the impact of the cinematic event. Instead, other categories impose: colours, sounds, fill the in-between spaces of the filmic text. The ways in which the colours clash, coincide, resonate, the dimensions of their tones and blurring of boundaries, the linearity across and within the frames - provide rhythms and movements across the screen, and this functions as sensation as opposed to 'pleasure'.

Rather than think of the movie as a filmic version of the famous romantic myth, I want to explore how Romeo and Juliet works as a rhythmical, processual and moving set of energies and intensities. It is an intensely rhythmical experience, set within a variety of different intonations of metre, timbre, pace, tone and voice. Certainly it does operate at the level of the molar, or semiotic and the ideological and psychoanalytic readings could be a mechanism through which to explore its text. Such possibilities are inherent in the textual elements. (For example, the scene where Romeo and Juliet meet is replete with looks, gazes, returned stares between glass, screens and/or mirrors. Also, the Boschian-like party sequence has some beautiful characters straight out of Freud's 'uncanny'. ) However, the entire experience, as a two hour event, works as a 'body' in connection with a rhythmical set of performances, resonant through a varied display of musical notations, scales, cadences, contrapuntal nuances, dissonances and lyrical patterns which collide and vibrate with both dialogue and visuals.

The music provides the main system to the film. We can discern a set of sequences, cleanly defined across different types of music. Through the music as an overall architectonic fibre, we find a neo-aesthetics at work. When our bodies absorb the movements of the screenic images, instead of reflecting them, our activity can be described as effort, or, as I have outlined, as 'affect'. The 'affect' replaces or at least is simultaneous to representation. One of the most exciting films which epitomises the 'becoming-woman' of sensation, and performs as a body, in locomotion, as a concept-image-affect, Romeo and Juliet produces a theatricality of the cinema which is totally distinct from the theatricality of the theatre. As Artaud and Carmele Bene suggest, the cinema can bring about a more profound theatricalisation than theatre. Here bodies embrace, entwine and intertwine, bodies which animate the scene, as Deleuze states, 'each body has both space and light, the body is also sound as well as vision, all components of the 'image'come together on the body'.22

The film quite literally begins with a small television screen, centre frame. A face, (the screen is face, her face the screen) of a female presenter introduces us to the narrative of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. From an instant image of a television screen displaying a face, we are carried into the spaces of the film's mise-en-sc�e. The face/screen becomes a body through a vibrant choreography of camera and cinematographic rhythms and cacophony of sounds. The film displays a vast array of forces, sheer velocities... force, movements, which are dynamic, ecstatic and jouissancial in their fluidity... a fluidity which is both static and dynamic. Take, for example, the opening shots of the movie. From the small television screen the camera pans out in vast sweeping gestures, as though carried on a helicopter, which then becomes part of the image.

We are carried, cinematographically, into the screen, on the helicopter, taking us into a contemporary Brazil/American city/beach esplanade, juxtaposing 16th century Verona, through sweeping rhythms of the camera, flying across, through, from all angles and positions, in a dizzying choreography of chaos. Still, blank screens with the words 'In Fair Verona' or 'A pair of star-crossed lovers' are juxtaposed with the action shots. The materiality of both sound molecule and the felt, haptic, experience of the visual, collide to carry us outside of our fixed bodies, to the extent that we feel that we do actually move, fly, swim, with the camera, in a dizzying disorientation. The heart literally races (remember the definition earlier of the affect as an autonomic physical response) with the viscerality of this sequence. We really do, as Deleuze indicates, occupy the interstices of the edits, cuts, wipes and fades of the camera, becoming part of the cinematic body and constituting a wider 'body' of world/body connections 23

We feel the energy exacerbated through images of heat, death and destruction. A dramatic intensity proliferates the screen. Signifiers on billboards indicate contemporary destruction. Stills are framed in close-up shots, alongside wipes and fades. The Capulet Boys, and the Montague Boys invade/seduce our space on the screen, parading their sexy, angular, Romanesque bodies through a palette of exuberance: cobalt, ultramarines, violets, blues, rich warm yellows, passionate and exotic reds. Flames engulf the screen in several places, creating a haptic scenario of passion and danger together. Textures of diamond-studded metal guns/swords, gleaming, feral, feline teeth, snarling, glowing bodies in armour seem to come straight out of a neo-western, replete with Sergio Leon-esque music. The hero's cowboy image is replaced with the majesty of the Roman centurion. Tybalts's erotic bodily display is matched by his equally intense and dynamic words, 'Peace, I hate the word ...'. His words act as a figural gest, in terms of the pitch, intonation and tone, as a cadence with the music, to present a poetic vibration with the diegetic musical sounds. The intensities of the movie are felt through its processual rhythms of colour, movement and sound. The flow and rhythm are so important to the diegesis of the film as are the feelings of openings, floating, floating and flying, effectuated through diagonal, vertical and other lines of movement.

The performativity of the film is indeed very beautiful. But not in any romantic sense of the word 'beautiful'. The processuality of the film takes over the formality of the aesthetic form of narrative closure. Things just 'flow'. The eye of the spectator moves in a dance of its own, in matrixial ways, imbricating the tactile within the scopic, a haptic sense of 'relationality.' This relational space is at the interstitial space of the subject and object, the in-between as I mentioned earlier. Such eroticisation of the eye means that the spectator's gaze functions processually to incorporate a synaesthetic assemblage; a 'felt' experience. The beautiful, as Brian Massumi suggests, 'in this view of aesthetics, is the incipient perception of the vitality of matter, its dynamogenic strength or force. Its autopoiesis'.24

Postmodern in its eclecticism, pastiche and parody, the diegesis presents choreographed bodies, flying, dancing and elegantly displaying and performing, such that we experience the totality of the screen as a body in movement, constituted from several bodies in locomotion. Some of the most evocative scenes are the fight sequences, where guns/swords are projectile prostheses and become part of the owner's performance, deftly choreographed to the point of vibratory exhilaration Symphonies of classical music, Mozart's 25th symphony and at times operatic music from Tristan and Isolde, drift into street style, bombastic rapper riffs and chords. Repetitious chords and riffs frisson through the body's depths. We are literally carried into the movie through sound as much as image. We 'become' part of the processuality of the film's movement, into a filmic body, as a whole harmonics of performativity. This sequence ends with the police warning the two houses of Capulet and Montague, of ensuing catastrophe in the light of their continued aggressions.

Cut............... to different music, different sequence ... Angel, a gently rhythmical piece, augmented with a stunning colourful mise-en-sc�e, brightly highlighted, of fireworks; purples, pinks, turquoise, gold, at Sycamore Grove. This is followed through with the move to the party scene, following Romeo's scene with Mercutio where they both indulge in drugs. Mercutio's speech to Romeo on 'love' in its lyricism, rhythm and volatility, designates an hysterical madness, whilst performing as an intensity, a volition within the patterns of sounds, resonating and bouncing off from the previous music. What follows is a beautifully choreographed and colourful drug-induced hallucination; catherine wheels swirling in colourful resonation in rhythm with the camera movements, circular tracking shots, which are circular and reeling in motion; this swirling action, together with the primary colours, impinges on the brain/eye movements in specifically pleasurable ways; nothing fixed, nothing angular. All is rhythmically and beautifully choreographed providing a processual experience. Colour experienced before form, movement before form25 But only ever so gently mediated, that the process is almost instantaneously 'felt'. The variation of rhythms in the sequences contrast, complement and disrupt others or else they work as prosthetic assemblages.

The highlight of the party sequence is Mercutio's erotic display of cross-dressing, resplendent in white sequinned corset and stockings, (contrasting with the deep purple of the other dancers) white wig resonating against the masculinity of his moustached and dark, passionate, rich features. A delicious delirium of erotica. He descends the staircase to the vibrant sounds of Kim Mazelle's 'Young Hearts' (parody intended of course). His/her dance is part of different dance modes in the film.26 In contrast with the earlier frenetic displays of flying bodies, his musical sequence gives a gentler swaying and creatively sculptural quality to its bodies and to the body, the wider 'body' constituted by both film, spectator and world. Bodies weave, collide, connect, oscillate and interrelate through a diegesis of 'malleable images'. Visions of excess, tactility, sensuality and the frisson of sexual exorbitance and transgression are visualised and hapticised (from the word 'haptic') through shapes, colours, and tones moving in time, but also dislocated from time. Demons, angels and whores become tropes from mythical fables and fabulations. Cleopatra to Caesar are masqueraded within the vibrance of the mise-en-sc�e and seem to come out of Freud's 'uncanny'. This is, of course, all an hallucinatory dream, induced by drugs, but as a film it works on the brain, as a form of altered state. Just as drugs work on the brain in chemical ways which affect the synaptic and neuronal mechanisms of the cellular structures, so too film as matter works on the brain in similar ways. Thus, such images are not purely 'images' (yes, of course they do also operate 'as' image - seen by the eye, but the eye/I is not a passive vessel of visual stimulants. Images are not merely representations, for interrogation, but 'elements of sensation', as the 'stuff' of matter, brain formations. The colours, movements and oscillations generate/compose the brain's active processes. The act of 'seeing' is not a passive thing, neither is it only an eye-I relational of psychic manifestations (although of course there is still a role for psychoanalysis and its more recent manifestation, in film theory. I am not trying to suggest we should deny this, but to suggest other frames in which film works on the brain). The brain actively creates the perception through molecular, and cellular actions. Percept and affect form as a block of sensation. The 'aesthetic composition agglomerates in transversal flashes, the self, the other, the material and the incorporeal, the before and the after... in short, affect is not a question of representation and discursivity, but of existence'. Indeed, it is this rich body of percepts and affects that displaces any fixed idea of identity and thus makes room for richer creative tendencies, accommodated through the imbrication of brain/mind and body, in collusion with the wider molecular and cellular body of life.

Juliet is introduced through her angelic costume, virginal white and delicately textured, marking the ethereality and chastity of her innocence. This works both as parody and yet is in its symbolism, tenderly sincere. Metaphorically and metonymnically then, the film does have many resonances. But in a Deleuzian sense, the film impacts as matter, as a processual 'event' in ways outside of representation, metaphor or imagery. It connects, it constitutes a 'worlding' process. It is a total worlding of experience of molecular forces through a materialist aesthetic.

The party mood is counterpointed by Des'ree singing the popular track 'Kissing You', with its romantic, soft and delicate rhythms and intonations, romantically bringing Romeo and Juliet together for the first time, but distanced through the screens of a vast aquarium. The languorous liquidity and fluidity of the colours and tones lends a sensuality to the mood and feel of the sequence. The swaying rhythms of the music are echoed through the liquid perception of the fish, swimming and wafting in the rippling water. Water provides again one of those molecular ways in which matter effectuates brain mechanisms. Pleasure is evoked by the gentle fluidity of rippling effects. Colours; greens, turquoise, blues, opals, lavenders are painted across a canvas which fades and wipes into a liquidity of sensuality and sensation. Dissipated lighting and rippling shades enhance the transience of the scene, highlighting the ephemerality and processuality, not only of this sequence, but the very image-concept-affect of 'love'. This is further enhanced by a display of camera movements, in a different dance structure; a swirling set of bodies, which reflects a charming and tender pattern of gazes, glances, looks, gestures, smiles and eye contact: matrixial patterns of looking across and between Romeo and Juliet, as Juliet dances with Paris. ( The dance sequence in The English Patient has similar resonances). The dance itself is a gentle, romantic, slow, delicate and controlled action of bodies, faces, close, and apart, resonances of ambiguities, sensibilities and sensitivities across two bodies which are eloquently apart - interestingly one looking, the other looked at! The depth of material emotion is part of the same canvas as romantic love.

The famous balcony sequence offers much in the way of vibrant movements, oscillations of lines, rhythms and resonances. A haptic sense of vision is created through the liquidity of the images, and the tactility of textures. The curtains sway eloquently, softly evoking haptic sensuality. The two bodies literally collide, resonate, and force each other apart here, swimming under water, and exhilaratingly in and out of each other's consciousness. Again, reflection, colours, tones and movements work together to create the undulating sensuality of the scene. The bodies in the water modulate, through both movement and colour, a liquidity of perception, where the perceived image is diffused into vibrations, so that the liquid movement goes beyond itself into a material, energic element (see earlier). The formation of the 'image' is defined by molecularity, not by visual representation. Sensation is accommodated through this molecularity.

The lyricism of Shakespeare's words works in delicate contrast to the post-modern parody of a '90s pastiche. The film continues to impact through the 'unthought' interstitial spaces, through the molar and the molecular. Juliet's initial speech, the famous 'Romeo, Romeo...' speech, works as a lyrical musical refrain, setting in counterpoint, the flickering, visual movements of the camera. It also works as a delicate parody, given the humour and comedy of the acting styles here - comic, awkward, angular, and farcical at times. Romeo continually falls over, colliding into things. The sequence ends with Romeo rushing off to Father Lawrence's, to the track, 'You and Me, Always, and Forever', a light-hearted and uplifting lyrical piece.

Music continues to provide the fibrous tissue for the film's diegesis and impact. In the rest of the movie, the variety of tones, lyrics and melodies of the musical notation, provide vibrational contrasts across and between sequences. The marriage of Romeo and Juliet is played out to the track 'Everybody's Free to Feel Good'. But the following death of Mercutio and Romeo's revenge on Tybalt, set in counterpoint and resonance with the marriage sequence, by the dramatic operatic music. Romeo's ensuing madness and banishment are further enhanced through the musical score, with intradiegetic music effecting its force upon our experience of the movie. Flashing lightning, chaotic camera angling, uncontrolled fits of passion and despair from Romeo's words, (firstly when he realises the severity of his killing of Tybalt and echoed again when he hears of Juliet's death) vibrate through the sound molecules of the soundtrack, all in contrapuntal collision with the earlier, delicate and joyous sequences. But such resonances (and I use the word resonance here in the Deleuzian sense) don't merely provide diegetic elements to a narrative. In Deleuzian paradigms of the 'beyond of desire' they impact with the molecularity of the brain to provide the processuality of the beyond of subjectivity, the becoming-woman of the cinematic, the aesthetics of sensation. In terms of my overall argument, then, the cinematic experience is something beyond the purely representational. If film theory has located debates within representation, semiotics and theories of desire premised on some sort of visual encounter with identity and subjectivity within that scenario, then to date such film theory has omitted to consider the wider impact upon the mind/brains/bodies of those who experience film. It works as sensation, as an experiential event of becoming. The becoming is modulated through the processes of brain/mind/body formations in collusion with the visual and aural elements of the textual format.

The final sequence of Romeo and Juliet's romantic death effuses bright colours: blues, golds and silver, and sensual lighting is diegetically created within the mise-en-sc�e through candlelight. Such colours collude, vibrate with the musical score, with the notational elements of the music, within the synapses of the brain's functioning processes. Of course, the emotional nuances also impinge (or maybe they are created) through the totality of the experience, a commingling of sensation, and total imbrication of molar and molecular elements. Indeed, scientific research has not yet been able to totally explain the ways in which emotion is effectuated within the brain's cellular functioning patterns. It is within the molar and the molecular perhaps? Consequently in rethinking any aesthetic within film studies, it might be pertinent for us to engage with this imbrication of ideas... not opposing, but conjoining perspectival views.

A becoming -woman of the cinematic then is premised on this neo-aesthetics of sensation; a neuro-aesthetics of affect and sensation, rather than a subjectivity. Such a neo-aesthetic works through the molecularity of matter. Within its modulational elements, colour, as I have explored above is specifically significant, and is the first impact within the brain's cellular functioning. Colour is extremely resonant in Romeo and Juliet, and it operates across the canvas of the film as a certain energy expenditure, conceived through certain cellular activities. Visual experiences are not necessarily premised on the mechanisms of the eye, as such, or on seeing. Sensation is accommodated within the brain's functioning. The various forms of motion, which are referred to as processual, and therefore pleasing to the brain's mechanisms, are prevalent throughout the movie. Gyrating wheels, circular camera movements, circular tracking shots echoing spinning wheels, swirling bodies, heads, arms, legs, shapes in collusion with the sounds are molecular elements of sensation.

The spaces of this paper have allowed me only to touch on new analyses of the filmic experience, which rather than negate the representational, suggest that there are other ways in which we can theorise the cinematic experience.27 Subjectivity is subsumed through a 'becoming-woman' of the affect and the processuality of the film's force, intensity and sheer viscerality. Such aesthetic theory is premised as a neo- aesthetics of energetics rather than a Lacanian structuralist, semiological aesthetics. In conclusion, I would suggest that the becoming-woman of the cinematic cannot be located in terms of extrinsic reference, such as we might find in semiotic or semantic regimes, or in spatio-temporal co-ordinates. The becoming-woman of the cinematic is knowable, is accessible through a processuality and awareness of transversalist, transitivist and pathic consisitencies. It infects us through affective contagion... not through representation. It exists as a particle of Zen. You either get it or you don't. Perhaps it is time to return to aesthetics, to relinquish the plethora of sociological and cultural contamination of film studies and to return it as an art form to its place in the primordial 'depths' of the body.

Based on Kennedy, B.M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000. This paper is a much edited version of several chapters in this book.For more information see Amazon.com or frenchculture.org

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Notes

1 Kennedy, B.M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000
2 We could trace this dualism back to philosophers such as Kant who wrote about this in the Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Judgement.
3 Fernando Pessoa, A Centenary Pessoa, p. 254.
4 The word 'haecceity' derives from the Latin form, 'haec' meaning 'thisness' and was used in the texts of Duns Scotus and the later poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, denoting an experience of 'thisness', an immanent sense of becoming, nothing to do with a transcendent understanding of being.
5 Ronald Bogue,'Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force' in Patton, P. (ed) Deleuze: A Critical Reader, (Oxford, Blackwell ) p.257.
6 Barbara McClintock in Brian Massumi, 'Deleuze, Guattari and The Philosophy of Expression' in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, p.756.
7 Brian Massumi, 'Deleuze, Guattari, and The Philosophy of Expression,' in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, p.765.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, p.210.
9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.274.
10 Elizabeth Grosz, 'A Thousand Tiny Sexes:Feminism and Rhizomatics' in Olkowski, D. and Boundas, C. (eds) Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, Routledge, 1994, p.191.
11 Grosz in Olkowski and Boundas, p.201.
12 See Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, (1997) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
13 See Kennedy, B.M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000
14 Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, p.74.
15 Deleuze, 1985, p.189.
16 Deleuze, 1985, p.201.
17 Dana Polan, 'Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation' in Olkowski and Boundas, p.240.
18 Semir Zeki, in his book, Inner Vision explains how within the brain there are five specific areas in the cortex, where the visual image reeived by the ocular nerves is translated by virtue of specific cells within the cortical structure. Within these colour and form are perceived at different intervals, although almost indiscernible intervals of time.
19 Polan, in Olkowski, p.241.
20 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, p.211.
21 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.191.
22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.191.
23 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.191 - 223.
24 Brian Massumi, 'Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression' in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, (September, 1997) p.16.
25 Semir Zeki explains how the brain responds to colour prior to form or movement, but so acutely close are the mechanisms, that they seem almost instantaneous. In fact, they are not. Colour is recognised as primary to form.
26 Dance often functions in film as a way of distanciating any fixed or gendered spectatorial positioning. It articulates a matrixial space, or a matrixial gaze, where gendered identity is unfixed and oscillates. See description of Basic Instinct and Romeo is Bleeding, in Kennedy, B.M. in 'Post-feminist futures in film noir' in Aaron, M. (1999) The Body's Perilous Pleasures, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
27 For a more detailed engagement see Kennedy, B.M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, (2000) Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Copyright © 2002 Barbara M. Kennedy. All rights reserved

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