Dispositif, Matter, Affect, and the Real:

Four Fundamental Concepts of Lyotard’s

Film-Philosophy
Ashley Woodward, University of Dundee

Abstract:
Jean-François Lyotard’s work remains a largely untapped resource for
film-philosophy. This article surveys four fundamental concepts which indicate
the fecundity of this work for current studies and debates. While Lyotard was
generally associated with the “theory” of the 1980s which privileged language,
signs, and cultural representations, much of his work in fact resonates more
strongly with the new materialisms and realisms currently taking centre stage.
The concepts examined here indicate the relevance of Lyotard’s work in four
related contemporary contexts: the renewed interest in the dispositif, new
materialism, the affective turn, and speculative realism. The concept of the
dispositif (or apparatus) is being rehabilitated in the contemporary context because
it shows a way beyond the limiting notion of mise en scène which has dominated
approaches to film, and Lyotard’s prevalent use of this concept feeds into this
renewal. While matter is not an explicit theme in Lyotard’s writings on film, it is
nevertheless one at the heart of his aesthetics, and it may be extended for
application to film. Affect was an important theme for Lyotard in many contexts,
including his approaches to film, where it appears to subvert film’s “seductive”
(ideological) effects. Finally, the Real emerges as a central concept in Lyotard’s last
essay on cinema, where, perhaps surprisingly, it intimates something close to
a speculative realist aesthetics. Each of the fundamental concepts of Lyotard’s
film-philosophy are introduced in the context of the current fields and debates to
which they are relevant, and are discussed with filmic examples, including Michael
Snow’s La Région centrale (1971), Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di
Dio, 1950), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and neo-realist cinema.

Film-Philosophy 23.3 (2019): 303–323

DOI: 10.3366/film.2019.0118
© Ashley Woodward. This article is published as Open Access under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence
(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits
non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the original work is
cited. For commercial re-use, please refer to our website at: www.euppublishing.
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Keywords: Jean-François Lyotard; dispositif; new materialism; affect;

speculative realism.

“Film-Philosophy” is still a relatively recent area of study, and it is still

populating its field of sources. In particular, it is seeking beyond Gilles
Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, the two master-names who have dominated
the field so far. My aim here is to introduce Jean-François Lyotard as a
potential such source. While Lyotard never wrote any book-length studies
of film, and in this sense his work is not comparable to either Deleuze or
Cavell in scope, he produced a number of rich and eclectic contributions.
He wrote four essays dedicated to film: “Acinema,” “The Unconscious as
Mise-en-scène,” “Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema,” and
“The Idea of a Sovereign Film” (collected in Jones & Woodward, 2017).
While all are brief, they have much potential for extrapolation in relation
to his broader aesthetics and art writings (where film is also occasionally
mentioned). Lyotard also dabbled in the making of experimental film,
and his credits include the short films L’Autre scene (with Dominique
Avron, Claudine Eizykman, and Guy Fihman, 1969), Mao Gillette (1974),
Tribune sans tribun (1978), Aè blanc (1982), and the planned but
unproduced Mémorial immémorial (1987). The legacy of Lyotard’s work
on film has been extended by the films and theoretical writings of his
students and collaborators, Claudine Eizkyman and Guy Fihman (see, for
example, Eizykman, 1975; Eizykman & Fihman, 2000), as well as by later
students and scholars such as Jean-Louis Déotte (2004) and Jean-Michel
Durafour (2009). This then makes for a broad field of both theoretical
and practical resources for film-philosophy, extending far beyond what
the four short essays might suggest.
Lyotard has already been positioned as a film-philosopher in some
existing research, notably by being given a place in the book Film, Theory
and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Trahair, 2009), and by various articles
using his work in relation to film (for example French, 2010; Geller, 2007;
Mee, 2016). Until recently, however, works in English have been narrowly
focused, especially on the essay “Acinema” or the categories of the figural
or the sublime, and some of Lyotard’s work on film (several essays and his
own films) have been entirely unknown. Matters have been a little better
in France, where a book-length study has provided a broad and sensitive
approach (Durafour, 2009), but the author notes how unjustly Lyotard
has in general been ignored, polemically dismissed, or his ideas stolen
without acknowledgement by French film theorists (Durafour, 2017).
In some recent publications (Jones & Woodward, 2017; Woodward,
2014), I have sought to introduce the full range of Lyotard’s work

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in film-philosophy to the Anglophone readership, but with limited

contextualisation which would explain and justify its continued
contemporary relevance. My aim here is to redress this.
Much recent critical thought agrees on turning away from the linguistic
paradigm which dominated theory in the second half of the twentieth
century, and in exploring the extra-linguistic. In this context, Lyotard’s
work on matter, affect, the body, the visual, and so on, are due for a
rediscovery. My aim here is simply to indicate some points of contact
between Lyotard’s film-philosophy, and some notable theoretical currents
in film theory and the arts and humanities more broadly, in order to
introduce his work as being of potential relevance and interest today.
I have selected four such points of contact, which may be considered four
fundamental concepts of Lyotard’s film-philosophy. These concepts are
dispositif, matter, affect, and the real. The approach I adopt here is quite
schematic: each section will introduce the broad relevance of the idea in
theory today, then explain Lyotard’s unique contribution. The treatment
of each will be far from exhaustive, and aims to invite further research and
development.

Dispositif
The notion of the dispositif was introduced into film theory in the early
1970s with theorists such as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. It is a
concept also prevalent in poststructuralist philosophy, most notably the
thought of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Lyotard. The idea has
already had a significant reception in Anglophone film theory, translated
by the term “apparatus” (see Rosen, 1986), but it is gaining renewed
attention among many film theorists today. (This new reception tends to
be more comfortable with the French term, and leaves it untranslated.)
The rediscovery and current relevance of the notion of dispositif for film
theory has been charted by, among others, Adrian Martin (2011) and
André Parente and Victa de Carvalho (2008).
Both articles seek to give an account of the current relevance of the
notion of the dispositif by contrasting it with a dominant way in which
cinema has been understood in the past. Martin names this the mise en
scène, and, citing the critical work of Raymond Bellour, explains its
limitations as follows:

With the assumption of the centrality of the scene comes a great baggage,
which is precisely the baggage of classicism in the arts: continuity,
verisimilitude, the ensemble effect in acting performance, narrative
articulation, the necessity for smoothness and fluidity, centring, legibility
and formal balance. (2011)

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Parente and de Carvalho point to what they call simply “Cinema Form,”
which is characteristic of narrative cinema with its concern to create a
“reality effect” and its employment of an “aesthetics of transparency.”
Echoing Martin’s analysis, this aesthetic is that of the mise en scène, where
the focus is on the scene itself, the illusion of reality created in the
cinematic frame.
The turn from mise en scène to dispositif is a turn from a focus on the
scene itself to a focus on the mise en, the “putting into” scene, the whole
apparatus of cinema which makes cinematic effects possible (Martin,
2011). Martin defines the dispositif quite generally as “a fixed and
systematic set-up or arrangement of elements,” then hastens to clarify that

a dispositif is not a mechanistic or rigid formal system: it is more like

an aesthetic guide-track that is as open to variation, surprise or artful
contradiction as the filmmaker (who sets it in motion) decrees. (2011)

Parente and de Carvalho suggest that a cinematic dispositif can be

understood as usually having three specifiable elements: its architecture
(the movie theatre or other place where the film is shown), its technology
(the movie camera, projector, and so on), and its narrative form (the
structure imposed on moving images through editing). They argue that
Cinema Form has dominated film theory and our understanding of
cinema’s possibilities for much of its history, but that recent develop-
ments have exposed the fact that this is only one possible dispositif among
others. In short, they argue that new technologies have accentuated the
expanded possibilities of cinema, possibilities which have existed
throughout its history, but have been occluded by the almost exclusive
focus on Cinema Form. The dispositif is a concept which allows us to
better think these expanded possibilities, which are now at the forefront
of what is at stake in cinema. Among the historical cinematic dispositifs
which lie outside Cinema Form are the “cinema of attractions,” as the first
experiments in cinema, from its inception in 1895 to the first narrative
films of 1908, have been called; “expanded cinema,” which incorporates
elements of theatre and performance, and the “cinema of exhibition,” or
“artist’s cinema,” which refers to the increasingly common situation of
film in art galleries rather than movie theatres (see Parente & de
Carvalho, 2008, pp. 46–50).
Along with philosophers such as Foucault and Deleuze, and film
theorists such as Baudry, Lyotard is one of the thinkers whose work is
feeding into this renewed consideration of the dispositif. Throughout his
oeuvre, the general notion of the dispositif is developed from a number of
different perspectives, most prominently the libidinal and the linguistic.

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What is essential to Lyotard’s approach throughout these perspectives is

that the dispositif is for him (as for other poststructuralists) a way to re-
describe structures, in order to take into account the aspects of
indeterminacy within, and at the limits of, what structuralists take to be
wholly determining and determined. Lyotard’s dispositifs allow for the
disruption and change of old structures and the genesis of new ones, as
well as all the complex relations between relatively changing and relatively
static elements in and between dispositifs. For Lyotard, a dispositif may be
understood as a series of exclusions, a grid for filtering, allowing the
inscription and exhibition of some sensations, words, narratives, and
other elements, while prohibiting others. The mise en scène excludes in
order to produce a reality effect, in conformity not with reality itself, but
with certain conventions which we have learned to recognise through
cultural norms as representing reality.
Parente and de Carvalho (2008) specify that one of the reasons “why so
many theoreticians of contemporary cinema – largely inspired by
Deleuze, Foucault and Lyotard – have problematized the issue of
dispositif […is in order] to show that cinema can produce an image that
eludes traditional representation” (p. 45). In order to see this in Lyotard,
we may look to his 1977 paper “The Unconscious as Mise-en-scène,”
where he outlines the move from mise en scène to dispositif by contrasting
the “classical” space of representation (for example, Hollywood
cinema of the 1930s) with the “perspectival” space of experimental
cinema (for which Michael Snow’s 1971 La Région centrale is taken as
exemplary).
Lyotard suggests (and this is consistent with the analyses of Parente
and de Carvalho) that the aesthetic of classical Hollywood cinema is taken
from that established in the theatres and opera houses of nineteenth
century Europe. A series of exclusions is imposed which may be
understood as conforming with the construction of the theatre, where
reality (the theatre’s outside) is separated from the stage, the apparatus
required for constructing the scene on stage (the backstage, wings,
orchestra pit, and so on, are hidden, and sole attention is focused on the
unfolding of scenes on the stage). In cinema, the reality effect is created in
a similar way, through giving unity to moving images and sound
according to diegesis in the temporal order, perspectival representation
in the spatial order, and what is considered to be appropriate “film music”
in the sonic order (see Lyotard, 1973/2017a, p. 34). Moreover, we
recognise “reality” through the unfolding of images at a conventional rate,
that of 24 frames per second. The exclusions which are effected through
all the operations of mise en scène, from scripting and directing to editing,
sound design, and final production, eliminate images and sounds which

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are “badly formed,” which do not contribute to the unity and sense of the
scenes or of the whole film.
These conventions of representation, generally so familiar that they
remain unconscious and unnoticed, are exploded by the unconventional
cinematic dispositif employed in Snow’s La Région centrale. This film
radically flouts two of the three main elements of the cinematic dispositif
that Parente and de Carvalho identify: the cinematic technology, and the
narrative form. Working with a technician, Snow developed a new
technology for the capture of images, consisting of a mechanised support
able to move the camera in all possible directions. The robotic movements
could be preprogramed, obviating the need for direct human intervention
during the filming. The film itself is the result of setting this mechanism
in motion in a remote, mountainous Canadian landscape. Its 180 minutes
of twisting and turning perspectives on the landscape owes little or
nothing to narrative-representative cinema.
Lyotard (1977/2017c, pp. 52–53) lists some of the ways in which the
conventions of cinema are overturned with this exceptional cinematic
dispositif:

1. The elimination of framing, allowing us to see what is usually

excluded from the shot – including perspectives not consistent with
the upright position of the human body; parts of the cinematic
machinery itself; and so on.
2. The images do not construct a setting or stage; they do not establish
an identity. The film accumulates figures which are recognisably “of”
the same space, but without constructing that space as an identifiable
stage, a space of representation, on which a story could unfold. In
Lyotard’s words, “all the figures smash themselves on Snow’s film due
to the coagulant, centripetal, materialist force of the lens’ journey.”
3. The film does not unfold a narrative through the conventions of
temporality, pacing, and repetition of meaningful images.

Snow’s work is just one example of how experimental cinema can create
cinematic dispositifs other than the dominant narrative-representational
one (in his various writings, Lyotard also refers to the works of
experimental filmmakers such as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling,
Francis Thompson, Gianfranco Baruchello, Tony Conrad, and Werner
Nekes).
According to Parente and de Carvalho, while experimental cinema,
the cinema of attraction, and expanded cinema are nothing new, the
displacements of the classical cinematic dispositif they enact are becoming
increasingly centralised because of the many mutations of the cinematic

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image in contemporary culture: from daily encounters through personal

computing, individual creation and curation of film through portable
miniaturised technologies of capture and publication (mobile phones,
laptops), to the role of cinema in the art word, and the generalised
internalisation of cinematic ways of thinking and seeing. The traditional
cinematic dispositif is displaced along all its main axes: its architecture of
display, its technology of capture and reproduction, and its classical
narrative form. While Lyotard perhaps did not see all the consequences of
such an expansion of film with new technologies, his thinking of the
dispositif lends itself to the rethinking of film Parente and de Carvalho
call for.

Matter
In his already cited article, Martin (2011) links the currency of the
dispositif with the question of matter, writing that “it is precisely
materiality – the ways in which we define it, and deploy it, in relation
to cinema – which is at stake, and in flux, today.” This question of
materiality may be inscribed in a wider network of contemporary
questions and concerns which sometimes goes under the name “new
materialism” (see, for example, Bennet, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010;
Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Hickey-Moody & Page, 2015). Broadly
speaking, new materialism is distinguished by the concern to accord a
degree of agency to matter, objects, or things, an agency which has
traditionally been reserved for human beings. New materialism positions
itself as a corrective to the culturalism or social constructivism which
dominated the humanities in the latter half of the twentieth century; it
seeks to reconsider the importance of the material qualities of the body,
the natural world, and things in general beyond their reduction to human-
imposed systems of signification, narrative, and meaning. It sees human
beings alongside and interacting with things within complex networks.
The notion of “agential matter” reconceives agency as a dynamism
inherent in matter which makes a thing something that other things,
including but not exclusively human beings, must contend with (Poe,
2011, p. 157).
New materialism developed initially as a metaphysical and political
concern, and Andrew Poe could write in 2011 that “it is unclear yet and
how neo-materialists regard the question of whether there remains an
aesthetic dimension to ‘things’” (p. 161). This question has since been
further explored, and has been taken up by some in relation to film
(see, for example, the 2012 collection by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt,
which is explicitly framed as an attempt to meet this challenge in the arts,
and includes a section on film). As the remarks of both Martin and Poe

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quoted here suggest, there is not yet any consensus around how a
rethinking of the materiality of film can and should be thought, and
theorists contributing to this general trajectory are in fact moving in a
number of directions. It is in this context that we may consider the
pertinence of the theme of matter in Lyotard’s film-philosophy as one
such possible direction.
“Matter” is not a term made central in any of Lyotard’s writings on film,
but it is central to much of his wider writings in aesthetics. There are,
I would suggest, a number of ways matter may be seen as thoroughly
implicated in Lyotard’s reflections on film. For a start, his first and so-far
most influential essay on film, “Acinema,” may be understood in the
context of his philosophical approach at the time, sometimes described as
“libidinal materialism.” This is a phrase which names a development in
French philosophy in the early 1970s which also includes Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972/1983),
by which Lyotard’s book Libidinal Economy (1974/1993) was deeply
influenced. (This point of contact is doubly notable, since the influence of
Deleuze’s work has, of course, been instrumental in the development of
both film-philosophy and new materialism.)
Lyotard’s “libidinal materialism” might be seen as a certain take on the
web of agential things, combining human beings and things in a network
of relations vitalised by the dynamic force of libido. Libidinal materialism
is a general ontology, according to which all things are produced and
transformed in what Lyotard calls the “libidinal band.” In an apparent
anticipation of the lists of random, material, nonhuman things fetishised
by new materialists and object-oriented ontologists, Lyotard (1974/1993)
writes that the libidinal band “is made from the most heterogenous
textures, bone, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres,
swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases to paint” (p. 2). The
libidinal band is a system in which dispositifs are arrangements of material
elements invested with libidinal energy (desire) which function according
to their own autonomy, working on bodies to affect the way desire flows in
and through those bodies, changing how the bodies themselves are
organised, and how desire is channelled in them. Humans themselves are
viewed from a nonhuman perspective as “economic” systems of desire, in
such a way that conscious agency can be accounted for (in terms of
Freudian secondary psychical processes), but not given primacy, and
such that they may be seen as profoundly connected with the things in
their environment, open to transformation in relation to the flows and
dispositifs they are “plugged into.” In the libidinal band humans and
nonhuman things are constituted together, in larger economies of
libidinal flow and organisation. It is in this way that Lyotard can point

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to the intermingling of films and their spectators, where mise en scène is a

kind of dispositif which acts on the social body as much as it acts on the
body of film, and the transformations of experimental film can effect
operations on the “client-bodies” of spectators and on the broader social
body by reorganising the flows of desire in them. Taking up this line of
thought, a materialist aesthetic of film could be developed as a species of
the “libidinal economic aesthetics” Lyotard develops in this period of his
work, and briefly outlines in “Acinema.”
Another direction is suggested by Lyotard’s later aesthetics, where the
term “matter” becomes more explicitly central. Jean-Michel Durafour
(2009, pp. 128–136; 2017, pp. 25–28) has written some fascinating,
suggestive pages on the way in which this later work opens onto a
materialist aesthetic of film. Durafour distinguishes Lyotard’s under-
standing of matter from that of the philosophical tradition in a way which
resonates with current writings in new materialism. For Plato, he reminds
us, matter is purely passive, the support for forms (as exemplified by the
khôra in the Timaeus). While it may be a necessary substrate for what
exists, it contributes nothing to the essence, to what the existent thing is.
Aristotle makes little progress, as for him matter is nothing but a
“coefficient of resistance” (Durafour, 2012, p. 253) to form. Durafour then
points to the way that Henri Focillon, in his 1934 book The Life of Forms in
Art, questioned this tradition by arguing that matter itself has properties
which contribute to giving form. In art, this is evident through the ways
that different materials and tools lend themselves to the shaping of works,
so that, for example, a painting and an ink sketch of the same subject will
have quite different expressive qualities. Durafour inserts Lyotard in this
opening, suggesting that he goes much further than Focillon in giving
aesthetic primacy to matter.
For Lyotard, however, matter is not (or is not just) “material,”
understood in a physical sense. It is not, for example, the rushes of a
film, or the equipment of filming and projection, that might be studied by
a historical-empirical approach. Matter needs to be understood in terms
of the categories of philosophical aesthetics, specifically in relation to
sensation and feeling, and – at least as an initial approach – in contrast
with form. We can see with Immanuel Kant (for example) why form
has been privileged in the aesthetic tradition. For him, form is that
which prepares sensation for matching with concepts. It is what allows
aesthetic judgements between different people to be, at least in principle,
possibly consistent, since form is the “sameness” or principle of identity
applied to sensations which structures and gives shape to perceptions.
By contrast, Lyotard (1988/1991) tells us that, for Kant, matter is “what is
par excellence diverse, unstable, and evanescent” (p. 138). Matter is

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received as sensation prior to the imposition of form; it is pure and

immediate sensuous presence. Lyotard concedes that this is paradoxical,
as form is required for any perceptual experience at all. Yet, this does not
mean that there is not an element of matter or pure sensation in every
form which is irreducible to it, and Lyotard points to this “unformed”
matter as what produces unpredictable affects and sensations in the body,
and resists reduction to concepts in the mind (and is thus the source of
art’s ability to surprise and move us).
According to Durafour (2017), “this matter finds a fertile ground for
expression in the cinematic image” (p. 27). For him, we may extend
Lyotard’s explicit works in order to locate the aesthetic of matter in film.
He gives two brief examples. First, Durafour (2009, pp. 134–136) points
to the closing scenes of Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di
Dio, 1950), where Ingrid Bergman’s character Karin climbs the volcano.
Matter becomes an aesthetic element of film through the rocky slopes of
the volcano, and their blending with Karin’s weeping face: the grain of the
stone and the volcanic fumes become expressive qualities indistinguish-
able from Karin’s anguish. Second, Durafour (2017, pp. 27–28) points to
the close-ups in John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968), which, with the aid of
deliberately harsh lighting, reveals the grain of human skin as we are not
used to perceiving it. This shows something uncomfortable about our
own materiality, about the vulnerability of our humanity. As Durafour
puts it, it shows bodies, skins, as “holey,” something penetrable by
sensations. According to Lyotard, we do not exist apart from being
summoned to life by the stimulation of sensation, and the recognition of
this brings anxiety because it shows that our state is one of dependence,
and the threat of nonexistence. For Durafour, the grainy, holey skins of
Cassavetes’ Faces summons our anxiety through confronting us with the
matter which we are not only sensitive to, but which we ourselves are, and
on which we depend. Durafour’s examples are perhaps too literal,
pointing to the grain of matter depicted in film in rather obvious ways.
(There would be many other ways in which matter could be presented
more subtly.) But what these examples show is that affect is aroused by, or
mixes with, the sensation of matter as expressed in film, and not simply
from the diegesis, from the composition of beautiful forms, or from the
treatment of material elements as signifiers of concepts.
Lyotard (1988/1991, pp. 139–141) specifies indeterminate elements as
presenting matter in various media: the matter of painting is colour, the
matter of music is timbre, the matter of thought is words. What would be
the matter of film in these terms? Not the cellulose nitrate or acetate itself,
but perhaps the visual and sonic specificities inherent in film – the
graininess of celluloid, the grids of video, the pixels of digital film, and

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the effects these can create. Yet ultimately, for Lyotard, matter concerns a
pure sensuous presence which can only be felt, not constructed as a
theory to be used for identification in advance. We can only properly
speak of “this” matter in this film, this scene, this shot. Lyotard’s
emphasis on matter as an aesthetic category leads, as he himself
emphasised, to the abandonment of aesthetics as a theory – that is, as
a stable system of concepts which allows us to recognise things and set
them up in a discourse of knowledge – and a materialist aesthetic of film
would compel us in the same direction. Matter would only ever be a
function of affect, something to be felt.

Affect
Affect is another area around which a recent focus of interest in film
theory (for example, Brinkema, 2014; Rutherford, 2003) can be seen
within the wider context of critical cultural theory, where, since the mid-
1990s, there has been a so-called “affective turn” (for example, Clough &
Halley, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). It may be thought of more or less
broadly: very broadly, the turn would include a recent interest in emotion
and feeling generally speaking. Yet more narrowly, affect refers to pre-
personal, pre-subjective, unconscious bodily feelings, in distinction to the
recognisable and representable emotions experienced by a conscious
subject (this distinction was influentially explained in Massumi, 1995).
Two main currents feed into the affective turn – the theory of psychobiol-
ogist Silvan Tompkins, and that of Gilles Deleuze. With the combined
influence of the latter’s Cinema books and wider writings on affect, it is no
surprise that we see Lyotard’s Vincennes colleague once again as a pivotal
figure. A host of questions and ways of answering them are thrown up by
this turn, but again we see a move away from the linguistic, semiotic, and
representational tendencies of earlier theories, which focused on the
rational structures intelligible beneath the aesthetic surface of the film,
towards an interest in how cinematic sounds and images impact on and
affect the bodies of spectators, transforming their somatic states and
feelings.
While Deleuze’s theory of affect has a clearly Spinozan pedigree,
Lyotard’s is primarily Freudian (though there is an admixture of Friedrich
Nietzsche in both). Again affect is an issue which traverses Lyotard’s
various periods and approaches, and it could be taken up in at least two
distinct ways in relation to different concerns with Sigmund Freud. In the
period of Libidinal Economy and “Acinema,” affect appears as a part of the
libidinal economy, and often called by the name “intensity” (inspired by
Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski). Affect is the intense, disruptive
effect of libidinal energy when it reaches excessively high or low states in a

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system, upsetting its equilibrium and forcing it to change. Most obviously,

in film, affects could be located at what Lyotard calls the two poles of the
acinema, stasis and excessive movement, and the effects these have on the
client-body. The mobility/immobility on the client-body and the screen
can be understood as modulations of affect in the libidinal economy, as
intensities flow between film and spectator.
I will focus my remarks here, however, on an alternative way of
approaching affect in film that we can find in the later Lyotard. In the
1980s, Lyotard’s interest in Freud moved from libidinal economy to the
functioning of “unconscious affect” and the strange economy of
Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, in which it is embroiled. After
Lyotard’s own “linguistic turn,” the high point of which is 1983’s
The Differend (Lyotard, 1983/1988), he wanted to write a Differend
part 2, which would account, in the same linguistic terms, for the
extra-linguistic things left out of that book: things such as the body,
the unconscious, colour, and affect. The proposed project was never
completed as a book, but various studies for it were written, notably
for our interest here a short essay called “The Affect-Phrase” (Lyotard,
1990/2006). In light of this essay, we can retrospectively see important
ways in which this second approach to affect was already partially
developed in relation to film in Lyotard’s 1980 essay “Two
Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema.”
Here Lyotard analyses certain effects of cinema from the point of view
of the pragmatics of language. Narrative film is described in terms of the
pragmatics of seduction suggested by some texts of Gorgias and Plato.
This pragmatics is as follows: the addressor addresses a narrative to
addressees, containing referents (characters) which they are implicitly
invited to identify with. This identification-function, through which the
addressees take the place of the referents, places them under an obligation
which is not the result of an explicitly formulated prescription. The
addressees are thus “seduced” into adopting certain viewpoints and
values, and perhaps carrying out certain actions. Such seduction
frequently functions as political propaganda, or ideology, as spectators
identify with characters on screen and adopt their attitudes.
Lyotard construes Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) as for
the most part typifying this kind of politically seductive film; its implicit
message is a condemnation of the Vietnam war. Yet, he also takes one
particular sequence in this film – the attack on the Vietnamese village
by the American soldiers – as an example of how cinema can have
non-seductive effects. In this sequence, Lyotard contends, the narrative
breaks down, as we are bombarded with sights and sounds at a degree of
intensity which breaks with the regular organisation through which the

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narrative is constructed. Under such conditions, meaning is lost, swept

away in the tide of intense visual and sonorous effects. Here the addressee
(i.e., the film’s spectator) escapes the seductive effect, since there
is no longer a narrative which could impose an obligation. Lyotard
(1980/2017d) writes:

There is a panic on the scene. All the little stories concerning the principal
and secondary characters sketched previously are wiped out or blurred,
rendered ungraspable in an instant. The scene empties itself of meaning.
The eloquence, and the implicit prescriptions which are associated with it,
sink in the overflow of information. […] There is nothing to do, nor to plan,
nor to remember, nor to sense, there is nothing on the horizon. One is
stupid. The panic is that no narrative can take charge of the chaos of the
given and propose an obligation for the addressee. This addressee is not
seduced. (p. 59)

While fragmentary and immature in articulation, I suggest that we see

here an intimation of the affect-phrase. The affect-phrase is Lyotard’s
attempt to formalise feeling as a phrase. According to The Differend,
phrases in general present a “phrase universe,” consisting of the four
instances of addressor, addressee, referent, and sense. Such a universe
does not determine any necessity regarding what phrase may be linked
with it (i.e., follow on from it), but it does imply “pertinences” of
linkage – that is, there are some phrases which will follow more
“naturally” than others. Lyotard (1990/2006, p. 104) defines the
affect-phrase as an unarticulated phrase. This means that it is silent,
and in technical terms, that it does not present a phrase universe. It has
no addressor, addressee, or referent. It has a sense, but only as the
minimal meaning of a feeling, pleasure and/or pain. The affect-phrase
occurs in the context of articulated phrases, but can only suspend or
interrupt their linkage, damaging the genre of discourse in which it
appears (Lyotard, 2006, p. 105). In the Coppola sequence, there is a
“disarticulation” of the pragmatic instances, addressor, addressee, and
referent, such that narrative meaning fails. From a narrative pragmatic
perspective, this failure is equivalent to silence. Structurally the failure of
seduction and the affect-phrase are similar insofar as they both indicate a
break in narrative meaning (for the affect-phrase, a break in any genre of
discourse), and are thus construed negatively from the perspective of
discourse.
In “Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema” (1980/2017d),
Lyotard tells a story about a student of his, a Vietnam veteran, who
found it impossible to talk about the war. Lyotard then suggests that
the attack sequence in Apocalypse Now helped him (Lyotard) to

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understand why: because the student felt deauthorised to do so, to

translate his experience into the meaning that narrative bestows upon it.
Between his feeling regarding the war and any discourse about it,
there is (in Lyotard’s more precise later terms) a differend, an
incommensurability which does not allow translation without losing
that which is essential to the feeling itself. While again the attempt to
articulate this idea remains immature here, we can see an intimation of
the way Lyotard will later take up and develop Freud’s idea of the
unconscious affect, a key source for his idea of the affect-phrase.
With this way of treating affect in relation to film, we see something like
a reversal of the Lacanian-Althusserian critique of filmic ideology.
For Lyotard, the entire aesthetic dimension of film (the imaginary) is
not reduced to ideological-seductive effects, which would need to be
rationally analysed (reduced to the symbolic), ruining our enjoyment, as
Laura Mulvey (1975) has put it, in order to escape ideology. Rather,
ideology-seduction is constructed through a rationalising process acting
as a filter for sensations and imposing on them the “good form” of
narrative. Lyotard proposes that these effects can be avoided, not by
escaping into rational abstraction, but by delving deeper into sensation,
into aesthetic experimentation. Lyotard’s approach(es) to affect may be
located at the junction of the concern with the ideological function
of film and with its wider effects, of the linguistic turn and the affective
turn, of the formal and the felt. Moreover, his concerns with the
unconscious affect speak to theorisations of trauma, of memory and
memorialisation, and how these might be enacted through film. Silence,
or an overwhelming proliferation of strident sounds and dazzling images
both register a feeling which can only interact negatively with articulate
sentences, narratives, representations, or social and political subject
positions, but which in so doing both calls attention to the limits of these,
and forces them to change. Affects in film are thus indices both of the
limits of representation, and of positive transformation.

The Real
“The real” has been placed firmly on the agenda for film theory with the
emergence of second wave Lacanianism in the late 1980s. A pivotal figure
here is of course Slavoj Žižek, and other notables include Joan Copjec
and Todd McGowan. In contrast to the first wave (represented by
influential figures such as Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey), which
viewed film on the model of the mirror phase and gave priority
to the imaginary register, second-wave Lacanianism pointed to the
misunderstanding of the gaze by these earlier theorists and sought to
rehabilitate Jacques Lacan’s relevance to film through a refocusing of

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attention on the register of the real (see McGowan, 2008; McGowan &
Kunkle, 2004). For Lacan, the real does not designate empirical reality as
constructed and perceived by an adult mind, but rather the residues of
our first, infant perceptions of the world which persist in the unconscious
and at times insist in our psychic life, disrupting the sense we make of the
world. For Lacanian theorists, films are interpreted as analogues for the
drama of psychic economy, in which elements of the real intrude into and
disrupt the fantasy which structures the narrative.
The real is a concept which appears in its own way in Lyotard’s
film-philosophy, emerging in his last essay on the topic, “The Idea of
a Sovereign Film” (2000/2017b). Here he is concerned to locate the
artistic event inside, or immanent to, representational narrative through a
discussion of “realist” film. He defines this as follows:

I will call realist any art (literary, pictorial or filmic) which represents
perceptual reality (visual, sonorous, etc.) and the human voices which
belong to this reality. And also which narrates the movement of reality,
which renders its succession in a narrative: a beginning, an event that is a
kind of conflict, a crisis, and the outcome that constitutes the conclusion of
the narrative. (p. 63)

In this essay, Lyotard primarily focuses on Italian neo-realism, but clearly

extends what he means by realism to the films of the French New Wave
and New German Cinema, as well as to auteurs of other countries such
as Orson Welles and Yasujiro ˉ Ozu. He locates these realist films
historically to their emergence after the Second World War, and explicitly
follows Deleuze in characterising this emergence of neo-realism in film
as a transition from the movement-image to the time-image. With films
of the movement-image, all images and movements are subordinated to
the overall narrative form (which, for Deleuze, corresponds with the
“sensori-motor schema” of the body). With the neo-realist films of the
time-image, by contrast, while the narrative form remains dominant, it

admits or tolerates, to various degrees, movements which do not flow to the

same rhythm as the flux of the whole, blocks of temporality in suspense,
whose relative arrhythmy does not necessarily signal that we find ourselves
at the acme of the narrative. (Lyotard, 2000/2017b, pp. 63–64)

Lyotard calls these moments by a myriad of names: “uncanny

moments,” “intense instants,” “temporal spasms,” “filmic facts,” and so
on. But for our interests here we may draw attention to his naming them
“the ontological real,” and for simplicity’s sake use the term he takes from
Paul Schrader (1972/2018) to describe them: “stases.” Stases are

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ambiguous moments where, on the one hand, the sound-image remains

consistent with and subordinated to the representative-narrative form of
the film, but, on the other hand, they present a “sovereign materiality.”
Stases present “the presence of an unfamiliar reality in ordinary reality”
(Lyotard, 2000/2017b, p. 65). The film seems to become interested in
something which is part of the narrated reality, in a way which is
somehow in excess of the story being told. An example is the way the
camera might linger on an everyday object, such as a pot of water boiling
on a stove. Lyotard (2000/2017b) invokes a metaphor of breath, and
explains:

The breath deregulates itself, the breath which regularly animates the
narrative. A tracking shot forwards or backwards, very slow or very quick, a
zoom, a panorama, a freeze frame, a fade, a defocusing, an ellipsis in the
linking of shots, and many other procedures can also produce this
breathlessness. (p. 65)

If the object we are presented with in the image remains recognisable

and is not deformed, then how is it altered? Lyotard specifies that it is
the space-time in which the thing is presented. A stasis is contrasted with
a sequence-shot, where the latter suggests “a network of associated
images, a potential constellation of situations, people, objects” (Lyotard,
2000/2017b, p. 66), in such a way that these associations unfold in
narrative, chronological time. The stasis is a “temporal spasm” which
contracts these various associations and the space-time of perception,
and accumulates in itself the virtual presence of all past and possible
events associated with the presented object. This accumulation is
potential and intensity. Lyotard refers to Kant and Deleuze to describe
the stasis as a “transcendental factuality immanent to sensations”
(2000/2017b, p. 69). That is, he specifies the stasis by saying that
rather than chronological time as such, that of “ordinary experience,”
which is presented as unfolding in narrative cinema, the stasis presents
the transcendental condition of possibility of temporality as such.
The stasis is static because it presents the form of time, which does not
flow past.
Considered as a transcendental argument, we may say (following
Deleuze and Kant) that in order to experience temporal succession,
our capacity to grasp what passes in time must be a constant; it must
not pass. This capacity for grasping is what Kant calls a synthesis
(Zusammennehmung), which gathers together the already-past and the
not-yet in a paradoxical present instant. When stases are presented in
neo-realist films, then, they are sound-images which present, within

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chronological time, something of the subterranean conditions of

possibility of time. The network which ties the sound-image to other
sound-images in the narrative unfolding do not disappear, but they are
strained; reality as constructed by representative-narrative chronology
does not vanish, but is suppressed. The ontological real is what subtends
reality, like another reality within the reality we typically live according
to the sensori-motor schema, which comes to the fore with the
“uncanniness” of the stasis.
How then does Lyotard’s real compare with the Lacanian real in
the context of film? The broad similarity between the two terms is that
they are both contrasted with “reality,” understood not as a simple given,
but as constituted. The real, for both Lyotard and Lacan, lies in an
ambiguous relation of both complementarity and tension with respect
to reality: the real is that from which reality is constituted, but which
persists, insists, and resists within that reality. It is also highly
intriguing – and one cannot help but wonder if this can be nothing but
a coincidence – that Lyotard (2000/2017b) invokes the gaze and the
voice – two Lacanian examples of the intrusion of the real (see Žižek,
1999) – in his discussions of the “uncanny instances” (p. 69) in
neo-realist film. These proximities are highly suggestive, and give us
sufficient reason to believe that a comparative analysis and development
of Lyotardian and Lacanian notions of the real in film-philosophy may
well be highly productive.
However, in the “Sovereign Film” essay, Lyotard specifies that his
conception of the real must not be understood as a piece of psychical
reality, like a dream that would erupt into waking life. Rather, this real
belongs to the register of the secondary psychical processes, but is
something like the undercurrent of their workings. Lyotard (2000/2017b)
writes that in filmic stases

reality allows “a real” to surface in its familiar components, one that seems
to emerge from reality itself, and not from a reality which is only psychical.
It is not “my” unconscious (the filmmaker’s or the viewer’s) that manifests
itself then, but the unconscious of reality. (p. 68)

This takes Lyotard’s film-philosophy in a direction away from the

Lacanian concern with psychical reality and, I would like to suggest,
towards a speculative realist aesthetics. Such an aesthetics is still in its
infancy, and we must content ourselves here with sketching out a few
basic points which might be taken up for further development.
The popular philosophical movement of speculative realism, which
has quickly developed over the last decade or so, takes its principle

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task to be the rehabilitation of realism against the anti-realism it believes

has dominated post-Kantian philosophy (see, for example, Bryant,
Srnicek, & Harman, 2011). In various different senses, speculative
realists want to think the real, rather than accepting the “correlationist”
stance that we can only ever think within an impure admixture of the real
and the thought itself which thinks it. While primarily a metaphysical and
epistemological endeavour, a few recent developments have attempted
some speculative realist forays into aesthetics (for example, Askin, Hägler,
& Schweighauser, 2014; Shaviro, 2012; Shaviro, 2014). While Kant is
typically positioned as the key adversary of speculative realism, some of
these recent suggestions have painted a more positive picture of his third
Critique. While the first makes the objects of knowledge revolve around
and conform to the forms and categories of the mind, the third Critique
seems to open a passage to a direct aesthetic contact with the real prior to
or beyond such forms and categories (Askin, Hägler, & Schweighauser,
2014, pp. 10–12).
Arguably, Lyotard takes just such a direction, pursuing the
transcendental analysis to the point of contact with sensation, where
it is pure, evanescent difference, sheer sensory data, prior to the
syntheses which give it form and make it presentable. For Lyotard
(1988/1991),

the paradox of art […] is that it turns towards a thing which does not turn
towards the mind, that it wants a thing, or has it in for a thing which wants
nothing of it. (p. 142)

The problem that poses itself then for aesthetics is, “how can the mind
situate itself, get in touch with something that withdraws from every
relationship?” (Lyotard, 1988/1991, p. 142). These formulations, while
brief and suggestive, seem to anticipate the attempts to think the real
beyond the conditioning imposed by the mind with which speculative
realism is concerned. Some of Durafour’s interpretations of Lyotard’s
aesthetics head strongly in this direction. For example, he writes, “the
question of painting: how does colour ‘see itself’? The question of music:
how does sound ‘hear itself’?” (Durafour, 2012, p. 263). That is, the
questions of art and aesthetics for Lyotard are questions of how to access
sensation as it is “in itself,” prior or other to the ways that we throw
networks of sense over objects in order to tame and domesticate them for
our needs. It is not a question, Durafour (2017) notes, of believing that
cinema can give us the “things-in-themselves” (for “how would we know
what they are?”), but of letting things come “half-way to meet us” (p. 27).
If film is movement, then the real, the matter, of film would be the

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condition of possibility of movement, time itself. The question of cinema

would then be: how does movement feel itself move, or, how does time feel
itself temporalise?

Conclusion
I have proposed Lyotard’s work as a still very under-exploited resource for
film-philosophy. It might be objected that Lyotard’s interventions are too
disparate, and do not form a cohesive whole: the essays are written from
quite different theoretical perspectives, address different issues, and do
not give us a clear picture of what a Lyotardian film-philosophy would
look like. There are two responses to be made here. First, despite their
surface heterogeneity, at a sufficient level of generality we can see that
Lyotard presents a body of work which offers alternatives to the still-
common tendency to “read” films, to interpret their meaning according to
signs and significations. Instead, he focuses on the non-signifying
dimensions of the body, affect, pragmatic relations between film,
spectator, and society, and the “real” which resists interpretation, all in
ways which challenge and complicate similar moves in phenomenology
and psychoanlayis. This is why I have suggested that Lyotard’s work is
ripe for rediscovery in the contemporary context, with its move from
cultural constructivism to realism and materialism. Second, the dispersed
and fragmentary nature of Lyotard’s ideas was very deliberately
cultivated, and can be viewed as a strength. Lyotard was a thinker who
doubted the ability of any one perspective to capture what is at stake in
philosophical reflections, and approached philosophy experimentally,
working as many artists do: trying something out, abandoning it, and
trying something else. This method prevents us from treating Lyotard as
another master-thinker to be slavishly repeated or applied: it requires us
to select from his works, and develop them ourselves in creative ways.

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