correspondence regarding "Cinema Signifies ..."
The following exchange took place by email between the 19 May 2026 and the 20 May 2026. I thank Aryan Kaganoff, to whom I am also grateful for publishing a small article in which the genesis of Cinema Signifies ... may also be detected, for allowing me to present it here.
Aryan Kaganoff:
I have read with great interest your article and am particularly impressed with the move you make to considering AI. That's very fresh.
Two questions I have regarding the approach of the article.
1. You seem to have deliberately avoided any quotes or references to other philosophers concerning film, why is that?
2. To what extent do you consider your theory vis-a-vis Deleuze's two volumes on Cinema (Movement Image and Time Image); do you see yourself as "Deleuzian" and have you taken Bergson into account?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
ST:
The article is not without references to other philosophers, not by name however, and none is quoted. The question has been how not to avoid: rather than avoiding proper names or avoiding a supporting quote I have avoided hedging about difficult claims and as far as possible, even though many of them I am not responsible for, lived the concepts. This is as much to say I am responsible for what is written. Writing "Cinema Signifies ..." I avoided in particular the avoidance of positions which are not supposed to be taken, for example, those casting into doubt the unimpeachable purity of concepts of flows and becoming and immanence. Yet the work is neither critical nor an example of critical thinking. That this is the case is due to philosophical commitments which are more basic. By the same token and to a lesser degree, for the same reasons, I have not used the language of enchantment and disenchantment or that belonging to an ethos of suspicion, which I recently heard it called. There's enough of this in the world.
You say "concerning film." The article is about cinema and not about film. The technical capacity for film-making is achieved at a certain point in history. The whole process of perception, which includes technology and the objects perceived by film, arrives fully formed. It can be given an exact date. This the article is about. The case of mechanisation is telling here.
We do not call cinema mechanised, yet this is what, using a sewing-machine motor to progress the film, it was. Today mechanisation exists as a metaphor. Its sense, having been incorporated into the machine as such, is lost. McLuhan above all was interested in this. From it he drew the conclusion that it is the creative configuration and structure the medium of film is capable of which is interesting. Today we need to be reminded of its technical instantiation as an essential condition. From McLuhan, as it were, Deleuze takes his cue, and not Bergson.
Mechanisation entails automaticity. In the machine (and machinism) it gains autonomy for that which is called in the article animation. The moving image is animated but not by a subject; the animation of tokens of sense in artificial intelligence is also subject-less. We cannot call AI mechanised. Not to call it the product of cinematic mechanisation removes something important. This is the fresh take on AI I have. As you can see, it's not that fresh, but thank you!
You ask after the relation of my theory to Deleuze's in C1 and C2. Without these books it does not exist. In accepting that, in them Deleuze takes Bergson to the cinema, forcing him to sit through the creative configuration and structure they effect, but not as perception. Bergson is known for rejecting the idea that cinema had a duration. No, it has a measure and is for him another way in which duration as real time is covered over by the spatialisation we make use of for convenience of reference. Deleuze gets from qualities that are durational to differences (and thereafter territories, plateaux, milieux, with Guattari) that are spatial by way of intensity. The infinitesimal difference is where measurement reaches the limit of its capacity. He does not adopt Bergson's method of finding duration or take from him as I do his theory of perception. And so, like Bergson claimed cinema to, Deleuze covers over this aspect of his cinema-going companion.
Yes, more than taking him into account, I have taken Bergson at his word. I have also considered Deleuze to be part of the problem in deciphering that word and discovering its present significance. This too is what the article's about. Cinema is my problem; it is also the problem we have today in reading Bergson.
To use the word problem like this is to take it from Deleuze. Then, Deleuze hated the idea of founding a school, and now he is the head of an industry. This brings me to my basic philosophical commitments which are affirmative not critical. Critical interpretative work needs to go on, it is part of what I would call a scholastic process of perception. My broadest call would be to know the perception by finding the duration which is continuous and, in film, discontinuous with it.
