Diagramming Movement, Time, and the Image

• In Event: Video Data and the Time-Image: Cinematic Methodologies in Education Research

Abstract

Objective:

Diagramming the running-body through a deleuze|guattarian lens, this paper examines video-based data recorded via a GoPro (a small, ‘wearable’ camera) that was harnessed to a running-body. I am particularly interested in re-examining ‘movement’ through a diagrammatic lens, and what this might mean for theorizing and doing qualitative research in a way that does not rely on representation and/or pre-determined forms of analysis.

Theoretical Framework:

Using Deleuze|Guattari’s (1977) concept of the ‘desiring-machine’ and specifically drawing on Deleuzian (1986; 1989) film theory, I conceptualize the running-body as a ‘social machine’ and the camera as a ‘technological machine’ that co-compose, creating new knowledges (i.e., ‘machinic-thinking’). Deleuze|Guattari argue that “becoming machinic” is a productive process that produces change when the machine breaks down. With a particular focus on Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time-image,’ I conceptualize the video-data as potentially producing a machinic image that resists subjectification. Deleuze explains that ‘camera autonomy’ is possible “when [the camera] stops following the movement of the characters or directing its own movement at them, to carry out constant reframings as functions of thought” (1989, p. 24). Deleuze insists that the camera does not always follow the movement of, for example, the runner. The camera frees itself from sensory-motor links and descriptions of place/space when the movement-image stops being an action-image (i.e., it breaks down). The image rather becomes “a pure optical, sound (and tactile) image [that] enter[s] into relations with yet other forces…escap[ing] from a world of clichés” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 23). The time-image thus creates ‘aberrant movement’ (i.e., movement that exceeds the image) and that Deleuze states can “no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into” (1989, p. 23). Thinking through the time-image is an engagement in queer theorizing, which becomes – what Genosko (2008) describes – “a transversalizing space in which material hierarchy is restructured” (cited in Wallin, 2010, p. 181).

Method:

Using a diagrammatic approach to analyze the data, I attend to Deleuze’s notion of time as an interval, force, and as intensity. Diagramming can be similarly thought of as an actioning force that experiments with data, putting “thought in contact with an unthought” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 214). I then turn to Deleuze’s second notion of time, which involves an ‘irrational cut’ that re-links images and works to produce a continual re-thinking of thought. He states: “The cut, or interstice, between two series of images no longer forms part of either of the two series; it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the non-commensurable relations between images” (Deleuze, 1989, p.213). The irrational cut as a diagrammatic technique potentializes the capacity of the image to exceed its frame.

Significance:

Diagramming is a generative process that produces thought. As a qualitative research method, the diagrammatic maps data, but also “images a flux” (Jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013, p. 119) that potentializes different ways of doing research and pedagogy that are yet-to-come.

Author

• Nikki Rotas, OISE/University of Toronto