DELEUZE’S “CRYSTALS OF TIME”, HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIAL HISTORY

Abstract

This paper takes Deleuze’s concept of the “crystals of time” – which condenses, metaphorically, different possibilities of what he calls the “time-image” in cinema – as its point of departure, and does in reverse what Ian Buchanan does where he proposes that one can use the notion of “schizoanalysis” from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for the exploration of cinema. In other words, what I do here is to transfer the notion of different time-crystals in cinema to different domains, namely those of human subjectivity and social history. The reason behind this attempt at cross-fertilisation is that, if one reads Deleuze’s book on Kant together with that on the time-image in cinema, the parallel between Kant’s revolutionary reconceptualisation of time (against the backdrop of the Aristotelian conception) and Deleuze’s on the time-image in cinema (as opposed to the “movement-image”) becomes apparent. It follows that, if time comprises the condition of the possibility of human subjectivity (for Kant), and the cinema of the time-image demonstrates that something similar holds for the “fullest” possibility of cinema – time here usurping the position held previously by movement in film – then the concepts employed by Deleuze to come to grips with the multiplicity of cinematic possibilities or virtualities and their actualisations may prove useful for articulating a model of human subjectivity and, at the level of collective subjectivities, social history. Deleuze’s metaphor of “time-crystals” is therefore employed here, not only to give a brief outline of human subjectivity as temporally constituted, but further to focus on social history, or more specifically on different temporal/historical aspects, virtual and actual, of neoliberal capitalism. This is done via the four types of time-crystals distinguished by Deleuze (in cinema), namely the “perfect crystal”, “flawed crystal”, “crystal of seeds” and “decaying crystal”.