Fortunately, cinema has no more stories to tell, which means that it can find images in things (Cache 1995, p. 153).
Abstract
What potential can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari for critical legal scholarship? The authors argue that their work can be deployed to re-think ‘critique’ by directly addressing the place and role of the ‘critic’. It is argued that the continued commitment to a stance of ‘resistance’ in CLS is underpinned by never-ending dualisms which, if not confronted and replaced, can only make CLS ever more redundant. The authors ask: ‘what is critique beyond the dualism of power and resistance, of state and nomad?’ This question arises from a belief that critique is still capable of being effective, but only if there is the courage to experiment, and to think creatively. In this sense, the ‘exhaustion’ of critique is framed as an opportunity to re-think and re-engage with the politics of law. The paper diagrams, through image and film, a critical thought: the potential of the artisan. Film is utilised not as representation, nor as illustration, but as a thinking mind in its own right, through which questions relating to the state, political action, and creative thinking can be (re)framed. Such a re-framing is essential, it is argued, for an engagement with the emergence of societies of control.
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Notes
Despite the usefulness of this distinction, we chose to employ Deleuze’s use of ‘the diagram’ (Deleuze 2003) in preference to ‘mapping’. This is primarily because of the strength with which he develops ‘diagramming’, but also because of a concern we have that ‘mapping’ (both in general, and in more critical scholarship) has been deployed within our own and related disciplinary fields in (we believe) an overly structured form, which tends back towards representations and model building (Bottomley and Moore 2008, 2012a, forthcoming). This is explored further in Bottomley and Moore, ‘Law, diagram, film: surveillance and seduction’ (2012b, forthcoming).
In this, there is the danger of a curious dis-placement, inasmuch as the critic remains detached from what s/he critiques: in which case, Baudelaire’s flâneur unfortunately remains the model for the modern critic. In a sense, critical legal scholars are specialised to the extent that they seek to insist continuously upon this detachment, precisely because they suspect that they lack it and are, thus, implicated, by connection, in the object of their critique. The critical lawyer’s dilemma: can there be lawyers without law?
See further Bottomley and Moore (2008, 2012a, forthcoming).
The threshold is in fact the penultimate point, the furthest that can be gone to if the apparatus in question is to maintain its consistency. Beyond the threshold is the limit, and here the apparatus would begin to deterritorialise.
It is worth noting that the roles of the two women play out a maternal/sexual configuration, offering to the male figure the potential of ‘being saved’ in a quasi-redemptive trope.
Through destruction by nuclear weapons—a theme developed, wrapped in religious iconography, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).
The framing of these characters in such clear religious and racial designations is interesting—our conjecture is that they are constructed to symbolise a lost (or much marginalised) spirituality, invoked as essential for the carrying of an ethical value to ‘being truly human’. When linked with the figures of the court of elderly women, it also serves to locate, within the logic of the film, those whose function it is to preserve memory: without memory of the past, the future is in jeopardy. A ‘message’ also carried within the two films previously discussed.
For an overview, and insightful commentary, see Campbell (2011).
Which is not to say that we are against humanity! Rather, the question of subjectivisation (as raised by Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Badiou, and Esposito, amongst others) remains an on-going problem which, according to Deleuze’s analysis (1992, chapter 12), poses a great difficulty for film after the golden age of Hollywood cinema, when a path of action was still discoverable. To distort Deleuze a little, it is not untenable to understand the time-image as closely tied to the problem of subjectivisation and control.
In the end, is the heroism of the wise ape, who protectively hides the truth, so different from that of the wise human who insists upon his right to reveal it, whatever the cost?
Consequently, an apocalypse seems inevitable and yet is interminably delayed. Perhaps, to echo J.G. Ballard, we will not finally be able to leave the twentieth century until such a catastrophe has been realised.
An implicit modern tension is evident here—how are we to understand ourselves? To what extent can we recognise a single story, from the multitude available, as one worth recording and/or telling? In other words, how are we to recognise (and preserve) what is important? See further Moore (2010) and Bottomley (2010).
Which, given the conditions, can be little more than records of previous journeying between the few points of stability within the desert (most obviously, an oasis), and tracing the intrusions made into the terrain (pathways, roads and minefields) by the armies. The problem is not so much how to follow the map, but rather how to interpret it given changes in conditions, and, even more crucially, when to ignore it.
As Bergson (1991) talks of perception being subtracted from pure perception.
Moore (2012a, forthcoming).
This provides a different aspect on modernity; one that is, without doubt, a problem, but not one which is understood in its essence to be a threat or an unpredictable catastrophe.
In the context of art, Bridget Riley’s work offers an excellent illustration of how the conjunction of the smooth and the striated produces holes. Even more, and going beyond what we can develop here, her work crucially prevents lines of perspective (and hence ‘rational’ spaces) from developing, producing instead undulations and vectors of movement, through the assemblage of colours used.
Therefore we can think of the five assembled together as forming the central ‘character’ in the film, rather than the more obvious desert.
And hence the ambiguous ‘ending’ of the three films creates an imperative, in sequels, prequels, re-boots, and re-makes to try and resolve (or rather defer) this unsettling open-endedness with an ‘and then…’, or in providing further back stories to explain ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘because …’.
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Films
Beneath the Planet of the Apes, directed by Tim Post, USA: 20th Century Fox, 1970.
Ice Cold in Alex, directed by J. Lee Thompson, UK: Associated British Pictures Corporation, 1958.
Logan’s Run, directed by Michael Anderson, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976.
Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, USA: 20th Century Fox, 1968.
Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973.
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With thanks to Nadine Boljkovac and Peter Goodrich.
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Bottomley, A., Moore, N. Law, Diagram, Film: Critique Exhausted. Law Critique 23, 163–182 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9102-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9102-0