To Derail Thinking

This essay engenders its methodology by using the theory and practice of a master Indian avant-garde filmmaker, Kumar Shahani. It crafts a methodological tool as a conceptual lens with which to discuss Shahani's practice in Maya Darpan and Baz Lurhmann's in Australia. Through the yoking together of two divergent cinematic practices within the Asia Pacific zone of contact, this essay does two things: (1) Poses general questions about cinema and the conventions of critical thought and thereby departs from standard, habitual methodologies of Film Studies so as to make contact across disciplines. (2) Demonstrates how the categories of gender and modernity are engendered through cinematic dynamisms. In doing these, film as such is considered an indispensable and irresistible ally of thought, feeling and action. Keywords: Kumar ShahaniBaz Luhrmann: Engendering Gendercinematic dynamismgender and modernityAsia-Pacific Zone Notes 1. In 1971, when I left my native island it was called Ceylon. In 1972, it became the Republic of Sri Lanka. The word 'Ceylonese' is how a very small, Anglophone, middle-class minority, including my parents and I, thought of our selves. This category included Burghers, Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils. A predictable question of many Taxi drivers from the sub-continent I encountered in Australia, during the Sri Lankan civil war was, 'Are you Sinhalese or Tamil?' 2. See Hayden White's critique of the limited discursive modes available to professional historiography in its scientific turn. We might then ask this same question of our own disciplines and practices. 3. This book has exhilarating accounts of the Lumiere Brothers' invention of the apparatus and of its implications, written from a shifting diversity of view-points; anthropological, historical, technological, philosophical, aesthetic. 4. Kumar Shahani Shahani , K. et al. (forthcoming) Cinematographic Avatars , Indiana University Press . [Google Scholar]'s formulation where he does not specify the orifice in terms of sight but as being a light sensitive aperture not unlike our skin with its tiny orifices; conversation with Shahani November 1998, Sydney. In refusing to consider the camera as a purely mechanical or inorganic instrument one seeks a third term, which is neither organic nor inorganic: nonorganic. The idea of nonorganic vitality displaces the simple opposition between the natural and the artificial and enables unprecedented forms of connection across stuff/materials. There is also a gothic derivation to this idea derived from the work of art historian Wilhelm Worringer and Gilles Deleuze. For Shahani it is the materiality of light as energy that enables him to conceptually cross the boundary between the camera and the human eye, both apertures sensitive to light. 5. Kumar Shahani Shahani , K. et al. (forthcoming) Cinematographic Avatars , Indiana University Press . [Google Scholar] and others (forthcoming). 6. Daniel Stern's work is on the ethology of infancy and I am using it here in relation to the cinematic image and of our sensations and perception of it. 7. Suely Rolnik is a curator and analyst who, during her exile in Paris from the Brazilian junta, was a student of Gilles Deleuze and was in therapy with Felix Guattari. This article is, among other things, about a letter she wrote to him on hearing of the untimely death of Guattari after she returned to Brazil. The latter's schizoanalytic therapeutic work informs her essay. 8. Stern says that 'vitality affects' as registered by the infant and studied under experimental conditions are designated as 'amodal'. This means that they do not belong to just one sense but that humans have innate cross-modal neurological capacities which set-up relays among our senses. This potential, not always developed, may be thought of as synaesthesia or the mingling of the senses. 9. Felix Guattari's political understanding of how the mind works under the condition labelled schizophrenia when viewed through a schizoanalytic practice, is brought out brilliantly in an anecdote mentioned in the course of interview that he and Deleuze did with Vittorio Marchetti. I site this in detail as it offers a rare parable of how a-signifying particles may work in our minds while we 'zone-out' with film. Rolnik's notion of subcortical awareness may also be understood through this story. A catatonic patient breaks his silence just once, while his minders, the interns play cards in his presence, an activity that would get them into trouble if the director caught them at it. His only words, after which he resumed his silence until his death, were 'It's the director!' Guattari's understanding of this gesture is more attuned to the precarity of a therapeutic encounter. While Deleuze assumes the actual arrival of the director, Guattari the analyst suggests that it's far from obvious that the patient in the story actually saw the director. He says, "From the stand point of the story, it would even be better if the patient didn't see him. The simple fact that there was a modification, a change of habit due to the presence of the young interns, the transgression of the director's law on account of the card game, could have provoked the patient to foreground the hierarchical figure of the director, to articulate simply an analytic interpretation of the situation. This represents a beautiful illustration of the transfer, the translation of the analytic function. It's not the psychoanalyst, or whoever you like, a psychologist, who is interpreting the structure of the situation. Its literally a crying out, a kind of slip of the tongue, that interprets the sense of alienation which not only the schizophrenic, but the people for whom it is such a big deal simply to play cards in the presence of patients they find themselves in ... The most zoned-out schizophrenic has instant access to such insights because he is directly flayed, so to speak, on the hooks that constitute the group in its subjective unity. He finds himself in a 'clairvoyant' situation with respect to those individuals who, crystalized in their logic, in their syntax, in their own interests, are absolutely 'blind'". This may be a parable for us working in the Australian University now; 'it's the director!' 10. My thanks to Paul Macovaz for his thoughts on cinema and the epochal. 11. See Jayamanne (2010) for an aspect of this work. 12. See Meaghan Morris' 'Crazy Talk is Not Enough: Deleuze and Guattari at Muriel's Wedding' (187–201), where she maps out some lines of movement through which we might modify our practice. 13. Felix Guattari's last work, Chaosmosis, shows the importance of aesthetics, (understood as sense perception operating also at a molecular level) to an ethical consciousness and to our ability to act in a technosphere which is not our abode alone. His wonderful idea of the three ecologies includes nature, social and technical machines and mental operations too

Aesthetics · Art history · Epistemology · Feeling · Film director · Maya · Media studies · Modernity · Movie theater · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture

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