I Am Out of Control of My Own Material

Charles Stivale, a scholar I admire and to whom I have been grateful on more than one occasion (not least for sending me his recently published book, On Painting, 2025, a translation of Deleuze's 1981 seminars), graciously read my "Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality," adding notes to it throughout, which I had hardly hoped for, and tearing it to shreds on the basis of style, which I could not have. I duly replied with my mea culpa, thanking him of course, and claiming complete responsibility for his incomprehension I apologised for inflicting the article on him with all its woeful and egregious scholarly and stylistic shortcomings. I said I imagined him, machete in hand, in its thicket of weeds, never to find a path or clearing, coming out the other side relieved but dismayed, perhaps even angered, that what was there to be found had not been uncovered.

I had sent him the article twice, first without the "Framing note." He had written back to ask if I had made a mistake. Had I intended there to be no title page, no information as to the field of study to be encountered in the text, and not the slightest indication of how to approach it or of what I expected from the reader? On his prompt, thinking, of course he's right, it was very offhand treatment on my part, I wrote the note framing the article in terms of his own field of interest, Deleuze studies, not to flatter him but to bring out Deleuze's presence, which before had been latent. He is represented by his concepts and neither he, nor Bergson, nor Simondon, Whitehead or Ruyer, have their proper names in the article. After I sent "Cinema Signifies ..." a second time, thanking him for the prompt to add the introductory note, he made note of the absence of scholarly apparatus, references and deferences, in the annotated copy he returned.

Does the "Framing note" frame the article as it is? Is it in the same spirit as the main body of the text? or does it lead to further confusion as to what this text is?

More to the point, is it an article? or something else? an essay? This has passed without comment. I started calling the text an article when putting it around looking for a publisher. It had grown to something substantial, both as statement and in length, not to mention style. In style it is not an academic article such as you would find in scholarly journals. You won't find it in Angelaki or The Philosopher (or Nature, who were very nice about my having approached them and suggested more specialised publications), because it has been made clear to me, directly and indirectly, they would not publish it—not in its current form. (What is the relation between style and form?) You might find it in Herri. In the context of an online magazine, this essay, this attempt at articulating something, it is likely would appear as an article. Online, outside the light cast on it by scholarly review, "Cinema Signifies ..." has the neutral quality of a post.

The "Framing note" too has passed without comment. It looks pretty standard. No comment has been made about it being the only place Deleuze is mentioned, or anyone else. That there is no scholarly apparatus has been mentioned and I admit its absence is a barrier to understanding. (I address the absence of scholarly apparatus in the correspondence and in the notes, which go some way to rectifying the situation, at least as far as Bergson is concerned.) There are not the trees you would expect, with their solidity of reference, rooted in the tradition the "Framing note" says I too am working in, to help orientate the reader, perhaps so he or she can climb up their names, using their books as branches, to get a better view of the terrain. Neither is there embedded in the text a map, nor are there in it signs to point towards any path. There is only growth, and even that is not prodigious, but limited, to a few species, which repeat.

The current reflection you are reading is not intended to extend my mea culpa but re-reading my claim that the responsibility for the review of a sympathetic reader was all my own I felt I had missed something worth reflecting on, that is, the decisions I had made while writing "Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality." That it had kept its name from Berlin where I started from the simple insight that in cinema there are no things, no beings as such, but they are temporal, is noteworthy. It had, over subsequent drafts, 3 complete, and revisions, 11, culminating in the third and final draft, transformed (I have posted both the Berlin draft and the one finished in Koh Lanta here), its transformation due to having been read aloud to my partner, whose opinion I would not value unless she was always right.

It's always with you, she said, the start. Once you get to cinema it really gets going. Both earlier drafts got the same review, beginning the revision process, in which I submitted the text to the LLM that has been modulating to my writing for a year now, which repeated what my partner had already said.

The conventional criticism of using AI in the preparation of texts is that it compromises or falsifies human authorship. It can, but what would be the use of that? The quality the human-authored text most gains from being parsed for sense by an instance of AI is clarity. As I said from my first encounter, the trouble with discussing your ideas with ChatGPT is that it shows you a version of them [your ideas] that looks like it would make more sense to others than yours and that they [others] would prefer to read. I say why in "Cinema Signifies ...", because LLMs perceive (they don't read; they don't write; they are not the subjects of their perception) sense-units. (Cinema perceives time-units.) Still, a critic might say, using even Grammarly is required to be reported, lest you mislead the reader (assessor, peer reviewer, high-stakes competition judge) with the claim that the authorship is all your own. Grammarly's offer, "Work with an AI partner that helps turn your thoughts into writing that’s clear, credible, and impossible to ignore,* announces the presence in a tool ostensibly to do with grammar of AI. It's an ethical thicket that, once entered, is hard to get clear of; the answer is to turn to the authorities, climb into their branches. I am an authority, open to being asked to write a book on the subject (the use of AI, since it is an example of a machine perceiving, is entirely consistent with my theory of perception (see section II., titled "A Machine Perceives," in the notes; I used an LLM to read "Cinema Signifies ..." for the sake of revision, it wrote not a single word: without bodily association, to repeat, an AI neither writes nor reads, but parses for sense; see also the sense made by Gemini AI of the article in its summary of 4.07.2026 (time-mark is important given the fact AI is like a camera with its lens-cap always off, giving the impression, although it does not, that it shares our present time), which is not and could not be mine). The irony is that even a sympathetic reader sees my article or essay on cinema and its revision of ontology as unclear, unable to be understood and, for the majority of those who might benefit from its thesis (helping to clear the ethical thicket of AI and authorship, for example), easy to ignore—for reasons of style. Hence this post, hence my sympathy for the review: it is as if I was attempting to saw off the branch I was sitting on, and the one I would have you grab hold of, to get a view of the terrain, with the saw of style.

I'm not going to defend the content of "Cinema Signifies ...," but, because of my response to it being torn to shreds, not because it was, the style. In case we enter into irresolvable confusion over the separation of form and content, both enter into the "material" of the title to this post, of which, stylistically, not being capable of bringing the content to clear expression, I was or was not out of control. I am sympathetic to a reader, particularly a scholarly one, unable to make sense of a text of mine because of bad grammar.

The review of this text pulls out the unattributable demonstratives and the ambiguous pronouns, the missing syntactic subjects, or their overrun by multiple contenders. A reader may be misled also by the absence of proper nouns; since they lead to ambiguity, the two may be connected. The question arises not only of whose concept is being discussed, but is it the concept in general? the common notion, say, of cinema? And also, what is the "it" referring to? in a typical formulation:

It is then a condition of the way in which philosophy has adapted itself, or mutilated itself to adapt, to cinema: time and movement, in the specific sense of the image, are one, and a movement is included in a time without seeing that it is discrete. Why not? because it is a product of the continuous whole of a form of perception that is not itself seen to be discrete.

The first "it" appears easy but has several grammatical explanations. "It" is a dummy or expletive subject. Extra to need, "it" is only there to supply a syntactic subject; or else "it" is an impersonal subject, as in "It rains." Otherwise, "it" anticipates a subject to come later in the sentence; or is there for emphasis.

The "it" here is of an "it's raining" kind but also emphasises the condition philosophy has mutilated itself to adapt to, which is cinematic. The second "it" is where the confusion really arises: ... "because it is a product"... The movement of thought submits to the cinematic condition being seen by philosophy as continuous when discontinuous. The most important word here is product, a product of perception. The continuous whole of a form of perception that is not seen itself to be discrete refers to cinema. Philosophy ignores what the article, coming form a practical angle, points out: cinematic perception produces discontinuity, the discretisation of time-units.

I write in the "Framing note" that I am trying to see around the corner of Bergson's dismissal of cinema. In the article I come back to this point, but without saying "Bergson," rather "duration." The theory of duration cannot admit the kind of durational perception cinema produces because it is discontinuous and mechanical (which pulls at a thread: in my reading of Bergson's Matter and Memory I notice his use of "perception" slowly and surely becoming "my perception," representative of human perception. "Perception" is for the initial chapters in the strongest sense "outside." It gradually takes on the hue of a human attribute, not exclusively, but the movement is there towards the anthropic—so that to discontinuous and mechanical we might add:) and artificial. Continuity is everywhere in Bergson, however not, I am arguing, everything; but it is the greatest obstacle to our understanding of him after cinema. We impose not a spatial framework over our concourse with the world but a cinematic one; it is also the greatest obstacle to our understanding of cinema after Bergson (not the only reason, his is a defeated world-view, see Jimena Canales's The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, 2015; see also post on The Marginalian, its citation of Arendt apposite: “It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it,” from The Life of the Mind, 1977 (also covered by The Marginalian).)

The most frequent note made, made with metronomic regularity, in the review of "Cinema Signifies ..." is "Referent?" i.e. what does the "it" in the text refer to. In my letter replying to it with sympathy and gratitude I wrote of my "conscious decision not to include footnotes, references (or even in the body of the text to assign a proper name to a concept), being compounded by unconscious decisions, which have ... to do with style." After I sent it I asked myself to what extent these were unconscious decisions, and if they were, how could they have to do with style? Unless I am out of control of my own material. I also wrote:

I confess I doubted every it that floated like a dandelion seed away from its referent, so far in some cases as to lose it (the referent) altogether, but, under the illusion I was engaging the reader in a less precise but more informal vernacular style of address, persisted (I did).

It is a sentence that risks losing the subject altogether, this time the "I." In fact, I didn't doubt every "it," I questioned it. Same with the "this-es" and "that-s." Same with every grammatical decision. That is, I was conscious of tracing some kind of edge, which if the text fell off of would make it, as the review suggests, incomprehensible. Not, however, entirely so. No, but it would make it difficult enough, even for a sympathetic reader, that he or she just might throw their hands up in dismay, or continue slashing through the undergrowth, only to emerge thinking, if you wanted to tell us something Simon, why weren't you clearer?

Strange. I don't think the text obfuscates. It is clear, in its way. And the way it is is its style. This style has an impersonality to it, an impersonal recursivity, which asks the reader to look back at the beginnings of sentences to the sentences which came before, or to see in the one they are reading anticipations of the next, for the referents of, in particular, the "it." "It" figures largely, a kind of slippery stepping stone, offering itself in continuation of the path and offering itself with the certainty of the impersonal, at the same time as it makes the steps uncertain. It continues the flow, the movement and does not break it, but causes an eddy, a localised spiral, circulating back and forth.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking to prefer this reading of it. More wishful would be to see in the style, in the slippery, eddy-making interruptions in the flow of the style, jolts which put the reader off their sure footing. This, writing, is how I experienced them, like twinges or twitches. Little shocks, which I shocked myself by including.

And finally there is the question of

What is it?

It at its most grandiose is whatever, cinema included, signifies a change in the fundamental structure of experience or reality. Neither reality nor experience is adequate to time, which is, Bergson writes

—the duration which our consciousness perceives—

[see notes for "Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality" for source and significance]

It is (the) unconscious.

...