The Film’s Body - Vivian Sobchack

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Not a body in the film, but the body of the film, which does the perceiving which we see, which moves the eye of the film which we look through, as if sitting in the “brain of the screen.”

The “film’s body” is a concept put forward by Vivian Sobchack in her book The Phenomenology of the Eye. Very Cudely, if we stop reading the conventional “signs” of the film (the story, the plot) then we may experience the film as a big (sometimes giant) eye. If the film is an “eye” which perceives, then it also expresses this perception as becoming-perceived by some “body” who does this perceiving. Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty Sobchack’s notion of the “film-body” is an exciting one for film theory, and art theory in general. To begin to take account of the film’s body is to begin a existential-phenomenology of film in general (a theory of film’s “being”).

This has effects on the spectator’s body. When we watch the film, concentrating only on the signs, we might not notice these effects. When we turn this off, and watch only the “film’s body” (not the representations s intended) we begin to feel the expressions of the movement of cinema as a concrete event which we experience in viewing. I have had many drivers of cars relate to me that when they sit in their car, they feel as big as the car, that they “become the car’s body.” In this case, I may say, that when I watch cinema, there is an experience of my body getting bigger and bigger to match the size of the screen. Sobchack’s book The Address of the Eye does not analyse her experience of the film, but grounds one in a system of thought through which to perceive her later works (a kind of tool-box, as Deleuze and Guattari would say). With the “body” of the film (and herself) engaged she returns to the films in essays which re-perceive narrative-images as “body poetry,” in which the film produces non-audiovisual images in the body, much like Laura Marks work in The Skin of the Film.

This change of sensation in scale may be experienced in very different ways in cinema, especially considering the shifts in scale which we experience in film (from the close-up to the wide-shot, from affection to action). A film with a uniform perception (like classical Hollywood) would not make me awake of the film’s body, and Sobchack argues that films are not existential in-themselves. However we argue that many films announce their own existential film-body. This happens frequently in experimental films, but also in documentary and narrative films. I recently watched Children of Men, and throughout this film there were constant references to the film’s body through the light hitting the lens of the camera and making flares (reminding me that the eye is really there) and moving in a way that blurs and shatters the perception of the eye (showing that the “eye” is intentionally different from the “body,” that it cannot always perform the perceptions which the body intends it to). In both these instances we argue the film-body becomes existential in-itself. This has the potential to open onto an authorship theory which includes the existential film-body (which builds a bridge Sobchack’s work with Deleuze’s “unknown bodies,” and “bodies-without-organs”: Laura Marks was one of the first to begin building this bridge, a sturdy path of doves for crossing).

Sobchack’s theory comes at a time when Foucault’s analysis of the author casts a long shadow. An author is not a creative individual, but simply a collection of forces which represent the structures of various power-relations between individuals and institutions, indivioduals and individuals, individuals and the law (and so on). The spectator was not perceived as able to “enjoy” the experience of cinema, but only as positioned by capitalism to consume. Sobchack, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorist, seek to find new ways of expressing themselves (and allowing us to express ourselves) in the modern world of expression. For Vivian it is a political act which she does in writing about her bodily experiences as a woman. It is not directly political in its statements, but implicitly political in being at all. Sobchack’s embodied theory of cinema is, as Laura Marks writes, “a participatory notion of spectatorship, whose political potential shouldn’t be ignored. If a viewer is free to draw upon her own reserves of memory as she participates in the creation of the object on screen, her private and unofficial histories and memories will be granted as much legitimation as the official histories that make up the realm of the cliché - if not more.” (The Skin of the Film, p4

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Reading (The Wayarer Library)

 

Gilles Deleuze, The Movement Image

Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film

Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye

 

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Narrative-Image

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Genesis: Language
Binary-Images: Narrative/Poetic
First Analysis: Author-Function/Free-Spectator

Narrative language can be analysed in two ways: what it says, and how it says it. “What” it says concerns descriptions of what the image is “of”. “How” it says it concerns what the image is “in”: the “frame” around the image. This “frame” re-positions us in a particular way toward a text, and may close us off to other meanings. Being aware of how the image is framed gives you the choice to view it in the way the image suggests, to take up the “subject-position” on offer, or to construct one of your own.

For instance, take the following two sentences. What they say is the same, but how they say it is different, and frames the language differently.

1. “I walked to the shops.”
2. “They walked to the shops.”

In the first a “shifter” is used (I), which puts us in the first-person. The writer speaks to us, and indicates that it is them who walked. It is “existentially” connected to them. In reading the line “I” also become the character (in a way) saying “I” walked to the shops with them. This is called “subjective” discourse, or discours (1). The second sentence is in the third-person, which suspends out knowledge of the author, and speaks the line as if it were not spoken, as if they were just walking to shops, and I just happened to know. The first frame tells “me” something from an “I” (discours) while the second frame vanishes, and attempts to hide its traces. These kinds of framing devices Foucault calls “subject-positions,” arranged for the audience to fill, to craft their experience. The second is called, in the French, histoire, and is often referred to as “objective” discourse. Histoire is a mode of discourse, which attempts to hide its traces, the presence of its “subject-positions” (they are invisible) Discours, as a mode of discourse, foregrounds its use of “signs” and “subject-positions” (the “S” is visible).

These two modes of narrative, “histoire” and “discours,” or “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” apply to all narratives, all stories, whether they are stories about leaves on the grass, stories about people, or animals, or stories about history. History is the most interesting of narratives. To crudely paraphrase Foucault, history is an “archive,” a series of documents which we can interact with. History, as we know, is written by the “victors.” History has a slant. How do we slant history? Suppress information, and destroy evidence from the past. This is what the ancient Orthodox Christians did when they sacked the libraries of Alexandria, attempting to re-write history.

This slants “what” is said, but more important to Foucault is “how” it is said, how “archives” uniformly position us toward information, and knowledge. The Bible, for instance, is slanted toward the white, light, right “God,” while the black, and dark is associated with the “devil.” These codes carry power, and distribute power across the text (forming what Foucault calls a “power-binary”). This exists at the level of what is said (ideological analysis: The Bible is racist). How is it said? As if it is “objective,” from the mouth of God himself (The Bible is also sexist, second ideological analysis). The “objectivity” of The Bible, attempts to position us in such a way that we read it as “fact,” as “history” rather than as a “story” (perhaps, at most, peppered with facts).

The “archive” may be about true events (what it says) but all archives slant what is said, and mostly hide their “shifters,” the traces of their “having-been-authored.” Foucault calls the work of philosophical “archaeology” the work of unearthing signification, and subject-positions adopted by the official archive, in order to illuminate the “stories” that they tell, to throw light on the way in which knowledge operates (as power).

There are two ways to counter the “objective,” and “official” archive: 1) Some texts in the archive illuminate their own shifters, their own subject-positions. This is an “authorship-function” (something the author does). 2) Some audience members do not choose to read the images in the way that they “officially” position us (according to the “archives” rules).

1) In cinema the most comprehensive analysis of “subject-positions,” from the cliché narrative, to the poetic, is Deleuze’s The Movement Image and The Time Image. The movement-image is the machine of the “official archive,” producing cliché, while the time-image deconstructs the cliché, and moves into realms beyond. Although these books are about the cinema, I believe the concepts Deleuze borrows from Bergson’s metaphysics have use throughout all art-theory (and creation).

2) Similarly Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye offers a theory of cinematic-perception which ignores the “official” signs/subject-positions of the narrative, and instead perceives the film as a big “eye,” and a big “body” which we wear as our own. This creates a new world of art thought, and experience. Again, although she speaks only of film, I believe her theory of the “eye” has relevance for all art-thinkers and creators. In thinking of a painting as an eye, rather than a canvas, a whole new kind of analysis can be done, an analysis which bypasses the classical archive. These two views form the two sides of the narrative/poetic text: 1) the “author-function” (traces of the author, subject-positions, “movement-images”) and 2) the “free spectator” or “free-author,” the spectator engaged not in watching the plot, but in other activities (time-images/eye/mind).

Classical narrative-images in cinema are called “movement-images,” or “histoire,” or the “classical realist text,” among other things. Often it is used to refer to “Classical Hollywood Film.”

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Reading (Wayfarer Gallery)

Gilles Deleuze, The Movement Image
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye

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Poetic-Image (Gaston Bachelard)

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Gaston Bachelard: “If there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and reappear… in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image.” (1)”Because of its novelty and its action, the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own: it is referable to direct ontology.” (2) “The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance… In order to clarify the problem of the poetic image philosophically, we shall have recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination.” (3)

Genesis: Language
Binary: Narrative/Poetic
First Analysis: “Author-Function” and “Free-Spectator”

Physical Definition: A narrative is a story. It is broken into scenes, and each scene develops the narrative sensibly (paragraphs and chapters in, what are ironically, called novels). A poem is a short work, broken into fragments. The audience has to complete the poem, and fill in blanks, rather than follow the story (which implies being “led”). The narrative tells a story over time, the poem reflects on a moment in time.

Metaphysical Definition: In all languages there is a difference between poetry and narrative. First there is the “object” of language (language existing at all) and then there are two modes, two ways of using (written) language: as “narrative” and “poetry.” A narrative tells a story from A, to B, to C. Poetry does not seek to carry us from point to point sensibly, but leaves the image open, and fragmented. A painting which seeks to represent the world as it was seen by the artist (or “anyone”) is “narrative.” A painting which I cannot recognise, such as an abstract, which suggests that “I” complete the image, is “poetic.”

Narrative works by subtracting the “author” from our experience of the work, creating a “suspension of disbelief.” In terms of French analysis, this is called “histoire,” an objective third-person-perspective (in which we suspend our knowledge of the second person, the author). The “poetic” does not suspend our disbelief (creating a pretend world to watch, a diegesis). It often presents images in “series,” like a “list.” In narrative I see “what” is said (the diegesis, an imaginary world). In poetry I see also “how” it is said. It makes me aware of what the French call “discours” (the opposite of histoire, a discourse which makes me aware that it is a discourse, discourse qua discourse). The “poetic” invites us to contemplate its “concrete” existence in the world as “experience,” as discourse with “me,” the spectator. The “poetic” suggests that we question our interpretations, perhaps even leaving the realm of interpretations behind. I do not really “interpret” a Mark Rothko painting, I simply experience it as a concrete, real experience of paint (4).

A poetic image suggests that we do philosophy, ontology and phenomenology with the image, to work out what it might mean to me. In this sense I am speaking of the poetic as something the author does, as a “function” of their authorship which leaves “traces” in the image. The narrative image has a clear trajectory, often using just one cliché structure in which characters encounter a problem, and then succeed in overcoming it. This structure is a “trace,” something which the author chose to do, in order to say something in particular to me, the spectator. As such, I am positioned by the text, and it has power over the meanings I produce. (5)

But, it is more complex than this. There is poetry all the time in narrative, and many poems use narrative images. Let us say then that there are works which are dominantly narrative, and works that are dominantly poetic (6). In the narrative there is always the potential for the images to open onto the poetic. In the poetic there is always the potential for the images to collapse into narrative meaning. Each text is neither one or the other, but is both narrative and poetry, in proportion (a logos of narrative, a “narratology”).

Further more, a Hollywood film (narrative to me, often devoid of poetry) would become a “poetic-image” to anyone who didn’t know the language of narrative films (considered to be a “language” by many). A Jackson Pollock painting which one person sees as concrete, another may see as figurative, like the way we see images in clouds. I have often noticed this when viewing abstract art with certain other people. I see just a “thing,” an experience of colour and paint. For them, they see things in the paintings: that looks like a face, or that looks like a car. Sometimes I do this too, but not as often. In this sense there are two kinds of “poetic images,” those that you feel were intended as poetry, and those which you have chosen to read as poetry regardless of their “author-function.”

The “poetic image” of Gaston Bachelard is very similar to Deleuze’s “time-image,” Bertolt Brecht’s “author as producer,” and to Annette Kuhn’s descriptions of the “open,” or “feminine” mode of discourse.

See also: Time-Image, Ontology

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Notes (Wayfarer Library)

 

(1) Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, pxi.
(2) Bachelard, pxii.
(3) Bachelard, pxiii.
(4) However, is it the “material” as Greenberg holds, or the “metaphysical,” as Merleau-Ponty holds, or “movement” itself, as Deleuze holds?
(5) This paragraph draws on Foucault’s notion of the “author function,” in “What is an Author?” in John Caughie’s Theories of Authorship (Routledge, 1981) p282-291.
(6) An idea I picked up from Roman Jakobson, through Alex Greenhough.

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The Time-Image (Gilles Deleuze)

 

 

Medium: Film
First Analysis: “Time-Image/Movement-Image” or “Poetic/Narrative”
Genetic Time-Image: Noo-Sign/New-Signs
Binary Sign: (1) “Aural/Sound-Images” and (2) “Optical/Sight-Images”
Modes: (1) “Author-Function” and (2) “Free Spectator”

Time-Image: An image which is unrecognisable, or “new” to a spectator, or which “shocks” a spectator out of a narrative which otherwise makes sense. A “time-image” creates a moment in which we, the spectator, are forced to go into our own memories (hence, “time”) to construct meaning for ourselves.

Time-images are confusing movements in films, moments which make us go “Huh?” There are two kinds of time-images, “aural” and “optical.” Gilles Deleuze, who coined the term, preferred to look for them in so called “art-films,” as he called “time” the highest pursuit of cinema. He, like many others, could not see any high pursuits in what is called “low culture.” We reject the term “high” and “low” culture. The only thing this binary does is restrict people who like other other kinds of films from having access to the amazing way in which Deleuze’s thought can think moving-images. Deleuze’s thought, I find, produces more things in images than there were before, and allows me to “think” and “speak” cinema anew.

The classical time-image refers to an image which you cannot “name,” which you cannot put a “noun” to, which escapes description (many forms of abstraction are good examples of time-images). Movement-images work firstly as “nouns” (perception-images) while the time-image presents a pure optical event, and/or a pure sound-event which the audience cannot name, and therefore experiences, or contemplates the image anew. This may cause us to have no language, or to resort to the language of poetry. A movement-image presents a story that we follow toward expected actions (often clichés) and which is easily able to be communicated as language (a “plot” description). Deleuze presents the two as a binary, however, I find that there is always the potential for time-images to arise in movement, and for images which seem like “time” to collapse into movement-images (ref: “poetic”). It is never a case of simply saying a film is being an image, but to chart the way these images become over time.

I saw a good example of a time-image in Friends recently, for instance. The characters were sitting around a table discussing an incident from their past. Three of the characters had been there, and one of them hadn’t. They mentioned a little bit of the story and then stopped. The character was confused, and I, as an audience member, was also confused. What were they talking about? As they talked I began to use my imagination, to try and think what might have happened. This is a key element of the time-image: the audience is left to contemplate the image, to work something out for themselves.

This is an “aural” time-image, rather than an “optical” time-image. There are many ways in which a film can confuse you, or make you aware of “time.” By abstracting the image, by disjointing the sound from the image, and by having the characters refer to events in their past which we have not witnessed.

Then “Friends” cut to a close-up of the character who was confused, what Deleuze calls an “affection-image.” The “affect” allows us to “read” emotions on the face of the character, and to feel them ourselves, to wear their face. Then the film cuts to the thing they are talking about, leaving the characters in the lounge behind. I remember the scene from another show, and realise I am watching a “flash-back” show. But this time I am not watching the image as myself, I am watching it as the character who wasn’t there, wearing their face, “becoming them” as Deleuze would say.

I looked at the friends characters in a whole new way, as if I had never seen them before. Usually I see them “signs,” not really as people, but as symbols each with a “cliché meaning” (as movement-images). For this brief moment I see them as if I “love” them, as if I really am their “friend.” I would not have had this experience if I were thinking of the images in my usual TV-watching state of mind. This is why I enjoy Deleuze’s thinking, for the folds of experience it can reveal.

Like Bachelard’s “poetic-images” (rather than “ontic-images”) (2) and Bertolt Brecht’s “author as producer” (taken up by Walter Benjamin) which seeks to construct texts encouraging the audience to “think,” which “induce[s] other producers to produce,” (3) time-images are for the creation of new experience. This is why the “genetic” sign of the time-image is the “noo-sign,” which breaks into image and sound (in cinema). “Noo-images” occur in all art forms, any time there are generic forms in which it can arise; sometimes with image (painting, drawing, film), and at others with sound (music, some poetry, film). Sometimes with real bodies (theatre, performance art, film).

Noo-images are the language of poetry, while “ontic-images” are the language of narrative (images that seek to build “one” meaning, one coherent structure). On the one hand, the time-image is an author function, a “kind” of image an author creates. This is one side of the time-image. I also think of the “time-image” as a “state of mind.” The “time-image” allows me to think some cinema and art (Friends) through in a way that it may not have intended, but which I enjoy, a moment of poetry, a meaning which I create as a free-spectator.

See also: Poetic-Image

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Bibliography (Wayfarer Library)

 

(1) Gilles Deleuze, The Time Image (1985: Athlone Press, 1989).
(2) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958: Beacon Press, 1969).
(3) Bertolt Brecht, in David A. Gerstner & Janet Staiger (ed.), Authorship and Film (Routledge, 2003) p13.

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Plato’s “Theory of Being”

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Definitions: Eidos/Ontos On

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“Eidos” is Greek for ideas/forms. It does not have a direct translation into English, often passing between “thought of ideas” and “perception of forms.”

“Ousia” is Greek for substance.

“Ontos on” is Greek for the “really real,” or the “really being” (really “on”). When one has a theory of being (ontology) one postulates a theory of what is “really real.” (ref: “Ontology”)

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Theory of Being

What is the one substance (ousia) of the universe? What is “really being” (ontos on). How does one make a theory concerning everything being. For Plato, like Aristotle, this was a matter of subdividing the universe into “eidos” (forms seen, ideas thought) and “matter” (a common “thing” from which “things” are made). Aristotle chose matter as the “primary” of these two, in that matter pre-exists the form which we perceive of it. This seems logical: there is the “matter” of the tree existing in the real (ontos on) and in perceiving it we apprehend its form with our senses, with our eyes, nose, ears, mouth and skin, after the matter has finished “being” itself. In Kantian terms forms are “phenomena” (observable) while matter is “noumenon” (unseen, invisible, in-itself and not perceived). Unlike Kant Aristotle maintained that we could know the “noumenon,” the invisible, through “ontology.” (ref: “ontology”)

For Plato it is slightly more complex. It is true that there is matter, and that there is a form which the matter gives off (a thought, a perception, an eidos). However, if we are to have any true knowledge of the world we must assume that our “forms” contain in them something of the reality (ontos) of matter. We must assume that they are not just perceptions, but have access to the real (ontic). If our forms did not have something real of matter in them, then we would not have any true knowledge of the world.

Very simply, if there is a set of things called “trees” then each tree must belong equally to the set of things called “trees.” This “equal belonging” is the “one being” of trees, the one “Tree Being” by which all other trees may be defined. In this way we can develop a series of categories into which things belong (and other things do not). The word “tree” refers to trees and not to “rocks.” The word “thought” refers to thoughts and not “movements.” If we are able to have knowledge of this essence, this “one being” after the fact (in thought) as a kind of blueprint for the thing, as a sort of “way of knowing it,” then we might assume that this blueprint pre-existed matter on the other side. How could nature produce something which acted on us as a form, without a cause, without already knowing the form? Surely, that which has an action in us (a perception of matter) has a cause, a place of origin (a triadic logic, every 1) cause proceeds to its 2) action through a 3) mean point). This active principle, if there is an essential form, must have known this form before the matter which filled this form came into being. In this case the “eidos” proceeds matter, and may be said to be “really real” (ontos on) in a way that matter, and substance is not.

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Space and Time

For Plato and Socrates it is the “idea” (eidos) which is real, and ideas themselves seem to have a kind of existence, a kind of “being” which is separate from our own. In this case there are beings without “matter,” before matter. For Plato, unlike Aristotle, matter could not be held to be the “first action,” the primal substance for beings such as ideas have no “matter” as such. Being is not substance (divided into matter and form) but a matter-substance which is synthesised into forms. In this case the matter-substance must also begin in forms it must have its origin in this singular “form” of beings, the essential ideas which pre-exist all matter, and all forms of perception. It is the task of philosophy then to return the mind to the “real,” the the “eidos” of things, their “essential being” (of themselves). But, if all these things are being (the ideas) what holds these ideas together? For Plato there is one being (eidos) which has three essences. For Aristotle there is one being (ousia/substance) which has two essences (matter and form).

Hence, for Plato “beings” were not only physical, but encompassed the world of matter and forms, both of which originate in the “eidos.” For Aristotle the one being was substance, and this was divided into matter and form. Plato’s “eidos” proceeds matter and form (of they are understood as perceptions). In this case matter is not the substance of forms, and forms are not the substance of matter. They are the same thing being. If two such different things are both being, then the essence of being must be that which enables them to “be” in the same world, to exist to-gether (a gathering of the two into one). To be is to be “in something.” While Aristotle went into the object (essence is in you, matter) Plato maintained that all beings are in something, and these are the essences of the “eidos.” These essences were reduced to “one in three” (rather than the Aristotelian “one as two”: substance divided into matter and form). What was essential to all “eidos,” to all ideas (whether matter of form)? Firstly “space,” secondly “time,” and thirdly the “action” (the original eidos) which develops into the “cause” (our perceptions) through a mean point (matter). Plato, like Newton, held that space and time were “really real” (ontos on) and acted as a receptacle for being, as an “essential super-structure” rather than an “essential sub-stance.”

For a good introduction to Plato general thoughts visit the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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Bibliography (Wayfarer Library)

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Vergilius Ferm (ed.)
Philosophical Systems

Plato
The Symposium
Meno
Protagoras
The Last Days of Socrates

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On (Greek)

 

Definition : On/Onta/Ontology

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“On” is the Greek word for “being.”

“Onta” is the Greek word for “beings.”

“Ousia” is the Greek word for “substance.”

“Ontology” is a logic of “being.”

There are firstly four logics of being, which form a system together. Whenever we analyse “two” (on and onta) there are undoubtedly “four” realtions which logically follow (On-Onta, On-On, Onta-On and Onta-Onta).

 

1. “On qua Onta” (the one of the many)

An example of ontology is the line of inquiry pursued collection of essays in Andre Bazin’s “What is Cinema.” Bazin, without having seen every film (onta, beings, the many) assumes that there must be something essential to cinema, something which is cinema’s being, unique to cinema. This is the “essence” of something. Bazin conceived of the essence of cinema as mis-en-scene (the arrangement of objects in the space of the frame) and montage (the arrangement of these “space-images” over time, “indirect-time-images”).

The same theory can be applied to everything. There are chairs. These chairs are all part of the set of chair-beings, the multiplicity that is chairs. If there are so many things, all which are chairs, and not tables, or pants (and so on) then there must be something essential to chairs alone, an essence. The same applies to concepts like love, virtue, or joy, and also to groups of knowledge like mathematics, science, art-theory (and so on). Whenever there are many things (onta) gathered together, and then perceived as one (on) then we do a form of ontology. In this sense, ontology is a theory of language, in which every word, every concept, has an essence. This is the art of philosophy, revealing the essence of every concept. This is very close to the way in which Socrates (through Plato) thought of ideas (eidos), each with its own signular essence, its own individual and essential meaning (ref: Plato’s Theory of Being).

 

2. “On qua On” (the one of all ones)

A logic of “being” is a theory which can be applied to everything we think, everything we know. If one follows that to “be” something, one must “not be” something else (which is being itself) then one can also follow this with the notion that all these things being a set together have something in common (being itself).

Plato’s theory of being was centred in “thought.” Aristotle’s was centred in physical existence. For Aristotle thoughts were not “being,” they were had after “being” had happened in the “real world.” For Aristotle the world happened, and then we had thoughts about it, and hence thoughts must come after objects in the world. The “real world” or “really real” is referred to as “ontos on” in Greek, and for Aristotle refers to objects. For Aristotle each of thse objects is being part of a set of objects, of beings, just as in Plato. All of these objects have a single “essence” as in Plato. The only difference is that Aristotle centres his thought on objects in the world, not thoughts in the mind. For Plato the word tree is always a word, always a concept. For Aristotle the word tree stands in for the real thing.

After conceiving of everything in the universe as “being” itself, and not being anything else Aristotle then went one step further. He asked: if there is rock-being, and people-being, and other animal-being, and planet-being (and so on) then is there not something essential to all of these physical “beings,” something which was common among all “being.” The science of rocks, of animals, of people, of planets, all these performed the task of asking “on qua onta.” To ask what was common to all these beings was to ask “on qua on.” This was the special object of “metaphysics.”

What is common to all being? What is the “being of being”? For Aristotle it was “substance,” or “Ousia.” Substance was comprised of two sides: one which visibly faces us, and one which is facing away, invisible. The one facing us Aristotle called eidos, or “form” which comprised of our perceptions of forms, and our “ideas” of/as these forms (Plato’s “eidos”).This was what we saw and perceived with the other senses. Form is what varies, rather than what is common to “being qua being.” Aristotle argued that there was something underneath “form/eidos,” something we cannot see. This was the common feature of being, which he called “matter.”

 

3. “Onta qua On” (the many of the one)

Aristotle did not like the atomist view, that matter could be broken into more pieces (into atoms, and energy, just as substance had subdivided into form and matter). Lucretius, however, a Latin poet, took up this approach. He argues that if there was a universal matter, of which we were all made, then it would also break down into finer and finer particles, into “grains” (like Egyptian thought). These tiny, and indivisible particles he called, after the Greek atomists, “Atoma.” In Lucretius’ only (surviving) book, The Nature of the Universe, he theorises half of a working “Theory of Thermodynamics” (energy is indestructable, and simply changes forms, all things must tend toward balance) and many more things besides. This then reverses into “on qua onta” and produces our conception of energy (a “one” of the “many” atoms). Considering that Lucretius was writing in 50 A.C.E. his work is startlingly ahead of its time (relatively speaking).

 

4. Onta qua Onta (the many of the many)

In a sense, Liebniz’s physics approaches this final mode of ontology, an understanding not of the many as one, or the one as many, or the one of all ones. In Leibniz the atom is called the “monad” and has a “soul,” and an area for “windows” (which indicate a perceiving consciousness). Rather than material atoms Leibniz starts again from an “intersubjective” position in which everything is living, every smallest particle of our world alive and conscious. Each monad of matter is conceived as “folds,” and “pleats” rather than as atoms, or separate particles. “Matter is folds and the forces that act to create un/folding.”

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Bibliography (Wayfarer Gallery)

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Aristotle, The Metaphysics

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (for a great impression/review of this book visit What Birds Give Up: The Fold Notes)

Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe (for a great impression of Lucretius visit: The Timeless Infinite Universe)

F.E. Peters, A Lexicon of Greek Philosophical Terms

Plato, The Symposium, Meno

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