Autonomy and Time

This thesis reimagines a question first posed by film philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, a question Deleuze attributes to Martin Heidegger and Antonin Artaud: what is it about the moving image that forces us to think? Such a question arises when the sensory-motor schema breaks down and thought is confronted with its own void, what Deleuze refers to as ‘“the inpower [impouvoir] of thought”, the figure of nothingness, the inexistence of a whole which could be thought’ (1997b:168). Nearly half a century later, following the slow movement of recent decades (much like the Italian neorealism that preceded it), the urgency of this question has shifted. Today, cinema does not simply present us with a direct image of time in isolation, but does so within a media environment increasingly shaped by television, digital media, and audience-centric approaches. In this changed landscape, it is much more fitting to ask: how does time affect the audience of the moving image? And, further, how does time itself modulate our capacity to think—before, during, and after the image—as part of an ongoing, durational experience? The relationship between the past, present, and future encapsulates the core uncertainty of this renewed question. Firstly, by reducing time to a causal link between affect and effect, both the social sciences and the humanities have constrained our ability to think about time in relation to cinematic experience. Secondly, the assumption that such an experience can be aggregated under the concept of ‘the audience’ has led to a number of generalisations about the majority of its viewers, often at the expense of minority perspectives, echoing concerns raised by the ethnographic turn of the mid-to-late 20th Century. Thirdly, there remains a lingering presumption that Deleuze (and, to a lesser extent, Félix Guattari) might still offer a definitive answer to these questions—without acknowledging that our capacity to think has also been shaped by Deleuze’s work since the publication of the Cinema books. This presumption runs counter to Deleuze’s own insistence in Difference and Repetition that philosophy generates more problems than it solves (2001:xix-xxii). As the question of our capacity to think traverses multiple disciplines, it becomes increasingly difficult to situate this problem within the bounds of any single epistemological framework. Rather than a gap within any one particular theory, it emerges instead as an onto-epistemological tension: one that implicates both how knowledge is formed and how our own experience is structured around that knowledge. The difficulty of reconciling epistemology with lived experience poses a challenge for those seeking to move beyond Deleuze, since few existing modes of research consider the intersection of affect, temporality, and interpretation—despite the enduring influence of Deleuze’s work. In response, this thesis draws on both content and textual analysis to develop a new and original theoretical framework grounded in a process called microphilosophy. Where philosophical pluralism tends to treat theories as discrete, competing systems, microphilosophy allows for the fluid interplay of concepts from a variety of disciplines, woven together in ways that respect their differences while facilitating new modes of interpretation. Grounded in hermeneutic principles, this methodological approach also emphasises the importance of context in shaping how we, as academics, engage with our ideas. Far from being static, theories themselves evolve through the same interplay of time, affect, and the audience’s own lived experience, which itself shapes the nature of the research problem while it unfolds. Consequently, microphilosophy approaches theory not as a fixed system, but as a dynamic, evolving process. By exploring how time, rather than affect, shapes our interpretation of a given film, and how that interpretation is, in turn, shaped by the affective residue of past encounters, this thesis identifies a recursive relationship that forms the interpretive horizon through which cinematic meaning gradually emerges as part of an ongoing experience. When theoretical approaches diverge across fields and disciplines, an autoethnographic perspective is adopted as a way of addressing the privilege that Deleuze, in conversation with Michel Foucault, once identified as the tendency for intellectuals to speak on the behalf of others while failing to acknowledge their own implication in the theoretical frameworks they construct (1977:209). Framed as a call to recognise one’s own role in theoretical production, the interpretive method developed here is not only recursive and interdisciplinary, but also self-reflexive—attuned to the situated nature of thought, and the contingent affective conditions through which meaning takes shape.<p></p>