Events and the Method of Dramatization

Abstract

We have been grappling with the problem of Deleuze and Guattari’s modernism, a problem that arises in their work on language and linguistics (chapter four), and which is brought into ever sharper focus through the critical reception of Deleuze’s cinema books, particularly, the provocative and important critiques that we found in Rancière and Badiou (chapter five). As we saw in the previous chapter, the problem of Deleuze and Guattari’s modernism orbits, in many important respects, around an issue of aesthetic autonomy. Indeed, many of the questions we posed in chapter five sought to shed some light on this issue. Can cinema think? Does Deleuze philosophically circumscribe cinema by downloading a philosophical meta-language on it? Was our Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattarian inspired reading of Boogie Nights just another example of this desire for philosophical mastery? Does cinema (or the art-work more generally) inevitably become the philosopher’s plaything, subject to the whim of the philosopher’s concepts? Or, to generalize even further: is the very notion of a philosophy of art or aesthetics always-already problematic by virtue of the fact that it is an act of appropriation which sabotages any autonomy or intrinsic significance that we may want to attribute to the art-form or art-work?