Central to Deleuzean philosophy are the concepts of sense, series and the event. Put simply (if this only were possible), the sense is a change in intensity in the lower levels of consciousness. Within the changes of intensity in these shifting senses, our being and action becomes lunged forward in social and cultural settings and in all forms of life. The sense always stretches into two directions, toward an increasing intensity and away from another. It is never cognition that speaks, because there is always sense before it (Williams 2008: 91). Indeed, cognition expects a ‘completed’ and static state whereas sense is prior (i.e. the emerging sensation) in becoming.
Videography note (2):
Emerging intensities of senses and their expression can be interpreted in BIP as the second author (the autoethnographic researcher) explains defeat while being close to tears. In this scene he moves toward a realization of defeat but equally constructs possibilities that may lie in the future.
Additionally, in the course of the both the PTS and the PMW projects, the autoethnographic member expressed multiple feelings of distancing, while becoming more analytically aware of the social practices he used to enthusiastically engage in his community, he simultaneously notes a melancholy sense of disenchantment. While moving toward understanding, intensities seem to carry with them a simultaneous emergent distanciation, even melancholy, banality.
For Deleuze, senses become constituted into events, and the event is something that lunges the subconscious to experience new intensities, a
“novel selection in ongoing and continually altering series” (Williams 2008:
2). All of experience, the collective being of all things thus becomes a resonating and indefinite rhizomatic mesh of senses and events that connect and interconnect into an infinite series where one event changes one sense and its becoming in the series (say, action in a social setting), which causes events in other series (how the sense of other beings [human and nonhuman]
in the setting is altered), resonating and creating new senses in relations without end. There is a sort of structural-poststructural distinction about sense and its intensities here, as we see (somewhat paradoxically) how Deleuze breaks out of the stability of cognitivism to connect it with the structures of material (and bodily) emergence. Rational pursuits are thus deemphasized, as there is more in how both the subconscious (through shifting intensities of sense and subsequent affects) and the conscious (interpretation and the subsequent qualitative distinctions) intertwine. There is more than rational understanding, and this understanding is a material and bodily one, allowing us to “associate this material inscription with an emotional one; to generate affirmative change that runs through each replaying of the initial event” (Williams 2008: 18). This seems to point out that changes in material emergence (and in our embodiment) evoke shifting senses to which we then assign affective qualities (was a change e.g.
‘good’/’bad’). Sense in itself, in its indefinite unfolding, is always neutral, the qualities we assign to them determine how (always socioculturally shifting) they influence new relations “reverberating forward and back in time”
(ibid.: 4, emphasis in the original), or:
“Like the cathedral, its only quality is to have been made by men. Thus it is not hidden by appearances; it is it, on the contrary, which hides appearances and provides them with an alibi […] What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed or reproduced; it has to be created” (Deleuze 1989: 146)
For further consideration, we need to add the concept of the singularities, which “are a matter for the surface, that is the surface between the depth of bodies [in a very literal and physical sense] and the height of ideas, where
‘between’ means operating in both” (ibid.: 107). Singularity could be seen as the physical indication of an event that connects embodiment to changing shifts of senses and thus changes ideas (e.g. the first gray hair or “It was the morning when my father stared back from the mirror” [ibid.: 93]). One must not confuse the singularity as a mere physical attribute, however, as “The singularities aren’t the actual knots and bends in the stick [the physical attributes of a piece of wood that determine its potential for usage], but the relation between these and the ideas surrounding them” (ibid.: 110). Thus, senses change in intensities in resonating series as events change their reverberating relations. These events have a physical ‘surface’ that attaches the continuum of emerging embodiment to the other end of the pole and of ideas to the other. The surface is the condition for open renewal of the relations between the two poles (ibid.). Such abstract notions find more grounding, as we go on to consider the potential of material agency in non-representational theory (see 2.9.2).
Events and singularities reverberate with the intensities along the series, yet are simultaneously transformed by the series themselves causing new senses of individuation. Series should not be confused with sequences as there is no prior ordering (Williams 2008), and neither can an experience emerge from emptiness, for there are no novel starts (something loosely comparable to a hermeneutical notion). There is thus no center and no linearity in any series or the subsequent agency arising from it. Neither does this notion imply reductive possibilities in any way – the changes of the intensities of sense and subsequent human agency have nothing to do with choices or free will, only the outcomes of resonating intensities of experience. There are two poles in the manifestation of the shifting senses, there is always both depth and surface – deep emotional states, and how these states go on to constitute relations with the embodiment of the spatiotemporal and material arrangements. Thus:
“Relation is not the property of objects, it is always external to its terms. It is also inseparable from the open [all material and experiential emergence], and displays a spiritual or mental existence. Relations do not belong to the objects, but to the whole, on condition that this is not confused with a closed set of objects [e.g. an experiment design]. By movement in space, the objects of a set change their respective positions.
But, through relations, the whole is transformed or changes qualitatively. We can say of duration itself or of time that it is the whole of relations” (Deleuze 1986: 10)
This we can also see from the aforementioned Alice in Wonderland example (Williamson 2008: 27). The actual event is thus a spatiotemporally manifesting material occurrence (e.g. spilling of coffee in an increasing state of aggravation [ibid.]), and that event is also of depth as in its changing of the spiller’s sense of aggravation extending to his past of the reasons for his easily aggravatable nature and to the future of how this aggravation brings about new senses with relation to this past. Through videography, we can potentially produce spatiotemporal illusions of emerging relations at both the deep and surface levels by utilizing certain forms of visuals, considered further [see 2.5]). Furthermore, for Deleuze, an individual is not a distinct entity, but rather a process of individuation, as novel events bring about new intensities of sense that instill action (Williams 2008: 89). There is no stable or static state of being, only constant becoming. This is true of videography as well, as we will later discuss. Social settings in spatiotemporally embodied surroundings offer glimpses of this becoming, this shifting of intensities that resonate across all individuating series. One must note that textual accounts cannot express the resonant emergence in similar ways, as they rather describe one particular perspective into phenomena (see also 3.2). Text is the emergence of a perspective put forth via a certain textual structure, whereas video is an expression of multiple ones, each with emerging spatiotemporal agency (including the perspective, but reaching beyond, as we will soon see).
Videography note (3):
Thus, when we film social settings, what we see are the altercations in intensities in indefinite resonating series that go on to constitute new relations both within and beyond the setting that our video illusionarily expresses.
In PTS, we do not see tensions contained in the social settings – we see a glimpse of the global resonance of intertwined series where shifting senses constitute resonating series that emerge in a complex and emerging negotiation of cultural meanings. We attempted such illusions by not constructing and expressing interviews (or
‘interrogations’) of ‘talking heads’, but rather we produce perspectives into conversations within meaningful spatiotemporal contexts – this might potentially create more convincing illusions of the emergence of both intensities and meaning-makings (see IV).
Additionally, via videography, we can see glimpses of both the depth and surface in the emergence of shifting senses. The depth is one of changes in intensity that are the altercations in affect (the expression of emotional states, see also 2.6.2) and the surface the relations of these changing senses with the spatiotemporal and material arrangements that both constitute and restrict the social settings.
If we draw parallels to the CCT discourse, we can see how these infinitely resonating series of senses (albeit precognitive) can be recognized in hermeneutical frameworks (e.g. Thompson 1997; Gadamer 2004/1976) that note on the becoming of subjects through their interaction, the ‘fusion of horizons’, and call for the need for reflexivity and empathy in ethnographic research (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; see also Van Maanen 1995; Ruby 2000; Brownlie 2006 Pink 2006; Sherry and Schouten 2002; Peñaloza and Cayla 2006; Goodall 2000; Richardson 2000).
But these notions are fixed in the cognitive constructions of realities, and, with the conceptual tools of Deleuze, we can add ideas of experiential subconscious becoming and material agency. Indeed, when the researcher enters into and learns about the social context and relations s/he is changed, but likewise, so are both those under study and the very constituent material context itself (through action or relations that will bring about future action).
In both, these events cause shifting senses and altercations in their series that go on to call for reflexive consideration in research and empathy in the act of interpretation. And, as it should be clear, these processes never reach a consummation, but rather manifest in a moment where the work of interpretative perspective is reported as a work of research – for us, at best, a narrative of convincing academic fiction. See 3.1 on how videographic research in consumer culture theory is conceptualized as an emergent becoming of relations simultaneously within and beyond the research settings.