Abstract
On the surface, nothing could be further apart than the technological determinism of Marshall McLuhan and the ‘transcendental empiricism’ of Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless, Understanding Media and the Cinema books both look to the birth of motion pictures for insight into the nature of thinking itself. In the movies, McLuhan and Deleuze see a new image of thought that is no longer based on a Cartesian model of a machine linking discrete cells of activity, but on the active role of ‘resonant’ or ‘irrational’ intervals, in which the interstice or medium between events plays an active role in the creation of the sense that passes through it. For both, film’s significance is not only aesthetic or technical, it is also metaphysical. Film is a break boundary, as McLuhan puts it, between discrete and continuous forms or organization that offers us some new kind of insight into the nature of relations and intervals.
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Notes
Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
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On Bergson and Catholic Modernism see Paul Michael Cohen, ‘Reason and Faith: The Bergsonian Catholic Youth of Pre-War France’, Historical Reflections, 13(2/3), 1986, pp. 473–97
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See Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, ed. W. Terrence Gordon, Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 1995
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See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Athlone Press, 1986.
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Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955, p. 25.
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Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
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See the glossary appended to John Duns Scotus, God and Creatures: The Quodlibetel Questions, trans. Felix Alluntis and Allan B. Wolter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 528.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965, pp. 331ff.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 24–35.
Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, New York: Routledge, 1969, p. 308.
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© 2013 Stephen Crocker
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Crocker, S. (2013). Metaphysical Media: The Discrete and the Continuous in Deleuze and McLuhan. In: Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324504_2
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