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All Thoughts Are Equal

Professor John Ó Maoilearca

Inaugural Lecture, Kingston University, 11 March, 2015

Amongst the film director Jean Renoir’s various maxims concerning the creative process,

probably the most renowned touches on the repetition lying at the heart of such creativity:

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‘a director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again’.

Yet such repetition within creation need not lead us to doubt the possibility of novelty. This

becomes clear when we look at another, cognate observation from Renoir’s fellow Frenchman,

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Henri Bergson, only this time regarding philosophy. According to Bergson, there is but one

‘single point’ that each philosopher makes throughout his or her whole career:

SLIDE 3

In this point is something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple

that the philosopher has never succeeded in saying it. And that is why he

went on talking all his life. He could not formulate what he had in mind

without feeling himself obliged to correct his formula, then to correct his

correction…. All the complexity of his doctrine, which would go on ad

infinitum, is therefore only the incommensurability between his simple

intuition and the means at his disposal for expressing it. What is this

intuition?

Coming from Bergson’s essay, ‘Philosophical Intuition’, the first answer to his question – what

is intuition? – will arrive in the form of something he calls the philosophical ‘image’. It is…

SLIDE 4

…a receding and vanishing image, which haunts, unperceived perhaps, the

mind of the philosopher, which follows him like his shadow through the ins

and outs of his thought and which, if it is not the intuition itself, approaches it

much more closely than the conceptual expression, of necessity symbolical,

to which the intuition must have recourse in order to furnish ‘explanation.’

In this talk – which you’ll glad to hear does not continue ad infinitum – I will be pursuing this

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‘infinitely simple point’ or what Bergson also calls an ‘attitude of the body’ that projects the

vanishing image of my one philosophical thought.

SLIDE 5 Books – I have managed to spin this thought out quite a bit, though.

SLIDE 6

My One Thought and Book: Post-Bergsonian Cinematic Refractions of Laruellean Animals

And the question animating such a thought, is this: how do things – humans and nonhumans,

living and nonliving, thought and nonthought, philosophy and nonphilosophy – become unequal?

(when they are ‘really’ equal, when they belong to the one thing, with no outside, to what

philosophers call a monism of immanence rather than a dualism of transcendence)?

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Here’s one dualism I have tried to address in my work:

SLIDE 7 Film and Philosophy?

• That theirs could be a relationship beyond ‘illustration’ or ‘application’

• Because both can ‘think’, in their own way

• Yet, then we must ask: what is this ‘oneness’ with respect to a philosophy or a film?

• What is the one thing they equally are?

• For if we say that this one thing is ‘thought’, for example, then how is it also different

between them?

• In other words, how are thoughts equal and unequal?

Which (finally!) brings me to the title of my talk:

SLIDE 8: All Thoughts Are Equal (that was my pre-title sequence!)

SLIDE 9: Yet Some Thoughts Appear More Equal Than Others

‘Equality’ (and inequality) are fast becoming commonplace themes at the moment given our

straitened times and recent efforts to uncover not only the vast social inequities around us, but the

origin of such inequality. (Inequality– as Rosi Braidotti was telling us – was even an ‘issue’ for this

year’s World Economic Forum at Davos – a sure sign that global capitalism is going to have to find

new means of selling unfairness as good thing.) What I would like to discuss this evening, however,

is not the equal or unequal distribution or possession of monetary wealth, or goods, or privileges, or

rights, or any other supposed property for that matter. Nor do I wish to discuss less tangible

possessions such as consciousness or sentience or even thoughtfulness – who has what, how much do

they have, and so on. But rather, I’ll be addressing simply the equality of thinking itself, irrespective

of what, or even if, it is a thinking about x, y, or z – money, rights, or consciousness. It is the question

of an equality (or democracy) in thinking, in theory, rather than any theory of a specific equality.

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So what is equality when it comes to thinking? Coming from the Latin, aequalis, ‘equality’ not

only means ‘the state of being equal’ but also ‘even’ or ‘level’. According to one figure I’ve been

working on of late – François Laruelle who describes himself as a non-philosopher rather than a

philosopher – philosophically driven arguments (about what is justice? say, or what is truth? what is

reality? etc.) – can only go so far before becoming lexically circular (that is, they eventually refer us

back to their own opening and often hidden definitions as to the nature of any possible justice, or

truth, or reality). So, for example, the truth of materialism (a very contemporary philosophical

position, yet one with roots going back to the Ancient Greeks), might rest on a certain notion of

correspondence with, or mirroring of, a reality that the physical sciences are thought to describe best.

Yet just how this mirror mechanism ultimately works is left aside – as it must be, for the truth of the

mirror (which explains truth) has to be taken on faith (on pain otherwise of begging the question).

With an abstraction such as ‘equality’, moreover, the inadequacies of any lexical strategy are all

the more instructive. To say that ‘equality means x, y, or z’ necessitates a willful blindness towards

its own semantic circularity, to wit: ‘equality equals x, y, or z’.

SLIDE 10

What of this double equality or ‘equals’? What is being equalized or equated? In what way are

‘all thoughts’ (whatever they might be?) equal? Equal or equally, what? Equal in value? Equal in

importance?

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One implication of Laruelle’s democracy of thought is that all entities are equal, that is to say

(in his language), they are equally ‘One’. To respond to this with the query, ‘equally one what?’ is to

miss the point of the gesture, for even to say ‘equally different’ (with Gilles Deleuze), or ‘equally

Being’ (Martin Heidegger), or ‘equally multiple’ (Alain Badiou), remains too philosophical for

Laruelle, too definitional. Individually, they are all One – and this is firstly a performative gesture

before it becomes an ontological thesis (that tells us ‘what they are’): Individuals make equality, they

do not possess it (as a philosophical property of difference, multiplicity, etc.).

Let me give an example to flesh out this rather abstract notion. In my work, I explore the idea

that film is philosophical – in its own way. Conversely, however, should one say that film is

philosophical because it is a type of philosophy (say, because both film and philosophy are

therapeutic, as Stanley Cavell argues, or because they both ask ‘fundamental questions’, as a

Heideggerian might claim), then one adds a third defined element, eg, a definition of philosophy in

which film is allowed to participate. Yet this third’s definition can always be defined in such a way as

to still make the type of therapy or questioning that philosophy alone instantiates qualitatively

different and superior to the therapy or questioning of film. When saying film equals philosophy, and

then how they are equal (the third element), one thereby creates a new and potentially arbitrary

definition that, again, can be made to make one half of the equation the privileged, exceptional

instance. But if there was no third quality or typing, then their equality is not defined but performed –

or invented.

And yet – haven’t I earlier said that film and philosophy both think, that they are equally

thoughtful? Isn’t that a third quality? Well, yes and no. The reason I say ‘no’ is because I haven’t

defined what thought or thinking is. I have simply said that film and philosophy equally think, but in

their own way. This is a pluralistic gesture to be sure, but, according to Laruelle at least, it is also a

non-philosophical gesture, because the job of philosophy is to attempt to enforce one or other image

alone of what counts as thought.

Despite what appears to many as philosophy’s benign, abstract and consequently (perhaps)

even irrelevant status, the attitude Laruelle adopts takes it to be the supreme form of thought control,

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or, to be perfectly clear, a device for controlling what counts as thought. Its objective is to capture

everything under its own authority – its definitions of reality, knowledge, and, most particularly,

thinking itself – an aristocratism of thinking.

Taken individually, each philosophy is as arbitrary in its starting point and circular in its

procedure as the other: the various forms of thinking privileged by different philosophies is always

done by fiat. Indeed, the history of philosophy can be seen as a litany of different baptisms of what

counts as thought:

SLIDE 11

Taken on their own, though, each of these exemplary cases restricts the idea of thinking in a

presumptive manner, either by defining what could count as thinking per se, or by positing what

counts as ‘good’, ‘proper’ or ‘true’ thinking. Ironically, of course (and not a little comically too), each

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philosopher regards the definitions of other, rival philosophies as spurious – poetry is not thinking,

nor is feeling thinking, and so on. What Samuel Johnson once said of the Irish can also be applied to

philosophers on this account: they are a very fair people, for they never speak well of one another.

For many, the pessimism of this approach towards philosophy has to be wrong – ‘100%

incorrect’, as one of my colleagues put it to me in the staff canteen one day. Agnes Heller, for

instance, argues that ‘every philosophy is – in its structure – democratic’. In her book, Radical

Philosophy, she paints an altogether different picture of the discipline:

SLIDE 12

It was said that the challenge of philosophy, ‘Come, let us think

together, let us seek the truth together’, is addressed to everyone, for

philosophy assumes that all people are equally rational beings. It was

said that philosophy appeals to the understanding and not to the belief of

reasonable people. It was said that philosophy recognizes no other

authority than human reason.

‘Human reason’ is the sole authority for philosophy, the one that allows it to address ‘all

people’ equally. So why should Laruelle think of philosophy in such draconian terms, when so many

think of it as a force for good or, at worst, no more than a moral irrelevance (being ethically neutral)?

The reason is because philosophy’s democracy is, he claims, an illusion. For a start, how does one

define reason? Mathematically? Poetically? Ethically? etc. Even those philosophies that posit a more

open, liberal thought of ‘embodiment’, or the ‘unsaid’, or of the ‘unthought’, the ‘subaltern’, ‘thought

of the outside’ ‘pure difference’, and so on, in as much as they remain philosophical positions, also

maintain a covert dominance. Laruelle’s non-philosophy, on the contrary, is ‘the manner of thinking

that does not know a priori what it is to think.’ He does not define it.

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So, I would like to address these issues a little further by democratising philosophy in a radical

manner, using the test cases of film-philosophy and paraconsistent logic – the latter being the notion

that even two contradictory thoughts (A and not-A, ‘this is a great lecture’ and ‘this is not a great

lecture’) can both be true – can coexist peaceably, so to speak, and but not simply because they are

subjective ‘opinions’.

And this brings me back to the idea of what it is that is being ‘remade’, both by film-directors

and philosophers, in Renoir’s ‘one film’ and Bergson’s singular ‘vanishing image’ that I mentioned at

the outset. I want to look at an attitude enacted by a film, or, to be precise, by the six films (one

original and five remakes) that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions

(2003).

SLIDE 13

The Five Obstructions is made up of a set of remakes of an original work by another film-maker,

Jørgen Leth. Leth, a mentor of von Trier, is instructed by latter to remake five sequences from his

own 1967 short film, The Perfect Human (a pseudo-anthropological study of human behaviour). Each

remake comes with an obstruction or ‘creative constraint’. The constraints are as follows: 1. that it be

remade with no shot longer than 12 frames; 2. that it be remade in the most miserable place on earth;

3. that it be remade with no constraint at all (a form of meta-obstruction of total freedom); 4. that it be

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remade as a cartoon (the definition of a non-film for both von Trier and Leth); and finally, 5. that von

Trier makes the fifth remake, though it must be both credited to and narrated by Leth. As such, one

way of reading The Five Obstructions is precisely as an enactment of Renoir’s adage – that each film-

maker only makes one film, again and again – with von Trier forcing Leth to recompose The Perfect

Human repeatedly given certain obstructions. My own motive for engaging with this film is twofold,

however: for alongside thinking about how one thing remakes another, I am using The Five

Obstructions to remake, or introduce, the non-philosophical thought of Laruelle.

SLIDE 14

This will be an attempt at making a ‘Film of Philosophy’ rather than a ‘Philosophy of Film’. The

Five Obstructions will be neither an application nor illustration of (Laruelle’s) non-philosophy, but

its own non-philosophy, though one that also operates here as an ‘introduction’, that which ‘leads to

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the inside’ (intro-ducere) of Laruelle. The challenge is to develop a non-philosophical approach

directly from the fivefold structure of this film itself, albeit still of necessity communicated in textual

form. Laruelle is introduced or remade five times, with five constraints adopted from analogies to

those in The Five Obstructions. In my study, then, I introduce Laruelle tangentially via a constrained

approach: non-philosophy will thus be forced through different entryways – beginning, ironically,

with the most perspicuous one, philosophy, before continuing through paraconsistent logic,

behaviorism, animality, and performance. It is paraconsistent logic – systems of logic that reject

Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction (where ‘it is impossible to suppose the same thing to be and not

to be’ – A and not-A) – that I’ll deal with now. But I’ll deal with it through the first constraint set by

von Trier for Leth – that no cut be longer than 12 frames – rather than as a direct access to Laruelle’s

thought.

But what has this to do with equality? I have proposed that all thoughts are equal. Nonetheless,

it is the case that some thoughts discriminate against other thoughts – deeming themselves superior

because, for instance, they are true and others are false. And this hierarchy of true and false is set

(ultimately) by philosophy. Whether it be a correspondence philosophy of truth (where these

thoughts mirror the way things actually are); a coherence philosophy of truth (where these thoughts

form a superior assemblage – superior because it is either simpler or more complex – take your

pick); or a pragmatic philosophy of truth (where these thoughts do more work, are more effective,

etc) – such truths are, I have claimed, ultimately based upon a circular or question begging assertion

(of what counts as actuality, simplicity, complexity, or what works). Conversely, what if we were to

argue that everything is true – not because truth is ‘subjective’ (traditional relativism) but because

truth has been equalized without any definition of it? At a limit, this democracy of truths might even

include contradictory truths. The coexistence of contradictory truths – pertaining to things such as

square circles or perpetual motion, or simultaneously (and ‘objectively’) a good and bad lecture, is

treated by paraconsistent logic.

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But before all that, let’s go back to film-editing.

CLIP of The Perfect Human (1967) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9kls6bMkRo

One way of describing film-editing is as a cinematic a priori in as much as certain maxima (long

takes with no cuts) and minima (cuts every n number of frames) are involved in what allows us to

discern figures, movements, and even story. Above a maximum, and one has no cuts at all, just a

one-take film such as Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). This upper limit is benign enough in

terms of individual films because all of them do have at least one cut, at the very end (without it, we

would not have a film at all). The lower limit, however, is far more influential, with edits that can

reach the level of single frame numbers and thereby render films unwatchable. One might call the

first obstruction that Lars von Trier sets Jørgen Leth, therefore, an impossible a priori. The demand

is that he must cut his film such that no single edit lasts longer than 12 frames, or half a second (at

the normal rate of projection of 24 frames a second).

Naturally, von Trier chose this constraint – enough of a challenge for any film-maker – in the

full knowledge that this would be particularly difficult for Leth on account of his realist preference

for long takes in his own work. This is his ‘soft spot’. For Leth, ‘the part of a film I enjoy the most is

when one can feel time flow through a single scene. There should always be room for time. A film

should breathe naturally.’ In his project to destroy The Perfect Human, von Trier has done his best

here to eliminate this time, yet without going all the way to a film of still images like Chris Marker’s

La Jetée (1962).

CLIP 10.25 to 15.50: https://vimeo.com/107037960

In the 12-frame shot, film does not breathe so much as hyperventilate. And yet, in the final product,

Leth’s ingenuity comes to the fore. As Murray Smith describes it, ‘Leth edits together shots in

forward and reverse motion, overcoming the 12-frame limitation to create the impression of smooth,

sinuous motion.’ Leth is pleased with himself and the result he has created for von Trier: ‘we’ve got

things under control ... The 12 frames are a paper tiger!’ And even von Trier has to congratulate him:

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‘The 12 frames were a gift! It was like watching an old Leth film!’ (though he also comments that

‘one always feels furious when it turns out that there are solutions’).

The first and most obvious analogue for non-philosophy in all this is the equality imposed on

the film by this editing restriction (though some cuts might be even shorter than 12 frames, the

overall impression is of a homogenizing process – at least in terms of editing – because none are

more than 12 frames). Akin to the equality of notes played in musical serialism (a model Laruelle

says he used in his 2011 book Anti-Badiou), the equality of shot-length is a material implementation

of democracy, a flattening or equalizing process. Shot length is equalized, or rendered ‘banal’ (to use

von Trier’s term). Nonetheless, Leth gets around the banality or ordinariness that might have ensued

from such equality with his own aesthetic skill so that a certain quasi-pacing of different durations is

restored. And, no doubt, even if Leth had been unable to achieve this, he still continued to create

visual inequalities (and interest) through the remaining devices left to him – image composition,

color, and sound.

This connection between non-philosophy and variable cutting merits further investigation. It is

notable, in fact, that Murray Smith turns to film theorist David Bordwell in his discussion of The

Five Obstructions’ editing, specifically with reference to this alteration of its basic element:

SLIDE 15

It is this ‘theme-and-variations’ structure that bestows on the film its strongly – if not

decisively – formalist character. David Bordwell has proposed the term parametric for

films which make the systematic attention to and variation of style a primary focus (a

‘parameter’ being any dimension of style – shot scale, editing rhythm, film score, for

example – which can be systematically varied). One of the enabling conditions for

such parametric form, according to Bordwell, is ‘banality’ of theme.

Oddly enough, though, Smith does not connect von Trier’s stated aim to banalize a great work of

film (The Perfect Human) with Bordwell’s view that all such parametric films are thematically

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banal. Bordwell’s own view is that parametric films function by overt contrast with the standard

form of cinema, which has become the classical Hollywood narrative work over the last 70 years or

so. For Bordwell is an essentialist: films fit into two general categories of norm and transgression,

and he rejects the idea that there is nothing cognitively fixed about the conventions of cinema.

Most significantly for us though, Bordwell links classical Hollywood editing to a cognitivist

essentialism of thought. Here, though, it is a forced thought based upon the rate and manner of

inferences made by the viewer in response to the visual stimuli in any one film. Here is Bordwell:

SLIDE 16

When Antonioni or Ozu dwells upon a locale that characters have left, or when Dreyer

insists upon a character’s slow walk across a parlor, the viewer must readjust his or her

expectation, reset the scale of significance to be applied to the syuzhet [story

organization], and perhaps play with a more open set of alternative schemata. Rhythm

in narrative cinema comes down to this: by forcing the spectator to make inferences at

a certain rate, the narration governs what and how we infer.

Some of these inferences are produced in a top-down direction, through the viewer’s own

speculations, so to speak. Others are hardwired, for Bordwell, and generate more predictable

thoughts. In either case, ‘both bottom-up and top-down processing are inferential in that perceptual

“conclusions” about the stimulus are drawn, often inductively, on the basis of “premises” furnished

by the data, by internalized rules, or by prior knowledge.’ In Leth’s remake of The Perfect Human in

half-seconds, then, something more than simply automated thought occurs. In Bordwell’s terms, its

transgressive, accelerationist cutting highlights its own status as an ‘art film’.

On one Laruellean level, the equality of shot lengths in Leth’s remake of The Perfect Human –

at least according to von Trier’s original intent to banalize Leth – created a democracy of instants, a

serial film where no shot is able to speak louder than any other. Leth got around this constraint,

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however, and therewith restored a number of narrative values and inequalities as well. And yet, a

second Laruellean dimension occurs at just this moment.

We can imagine a non-philosophical rendering of Bordwell’s essentialist position without

great difficulty. In Bordwell’s philosophy, the essence of film is made to conform to one theory (his

cognitivist philosophy). To convert this essentialism into a pluralism, one could just as well say that

all film speeds are a kind of thinking (not just Hollywood’s speed as cognitive inferential thought),

and that a ‘parametric’ film thinks at a certain non-standard frame-rate. Film is materialized and

made to think in one and the same gesture. The speed of thought becomes the speed of cutting, but

not as an input for human inferences, but as its own nonhuman form of thought (of which human

thought is but one sub-species).

There is indeed a logic attaching to this parametric speed of film-thought, a paraconsistent

logic that relates to frames per shot as well as the frame-rate of projection, especially as

paraconsistency is explained by Graham Priest. This would be a physicalized logic that renders

abstraction as speeds of extraction, or cuts. This notion of physical ‘extraction’ can be linked to

paraconsistent logic. The equality of cuts in ‘flattened’ editing creates a democracy of thoughts

(however miniscule each ‘decision’ – or cut – is) that juxtaposes contradictory positions. Let me

explain why we might see them as contradictory.

Now, I have argued elsewhere that it is possible to read Laruelle’s work as a project in

realizing aporia – taking deconstructive antinomies as real objects (rather than irreal, failed,

representations) – Jacques Derrida meets Gilles Deleuze, so to speak. This would make the

experience of non-philosophy that of realized contradiction – which could then be compared with

Hegelian dialectic. Even though he starts from the vantage point of paraconsistent logic, Graham

Priest does in fact argue in tandem with Hegel that ‘the world is contradictory’. Significantly, one

example he uses to show this contradictory world at work is cinematic. When we see a process or

motion – as when a cup breaks – we see contradiction: ‘something is a cup and not a cup the instant

it breaks into pieces’. And this he calls a ‘cinematic account of change’ in virtue of the fact that: ‘The

universe would appear to be more like a sequence of photographic stills, shown consecutively, than

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something in a genuine state of flux or change’. Cinema makes movement out of stillness. It can

even make contradictory states (cups and non-cups) co-exist through movement.

But here is where I would part company with Priest, for, in using the moving image as a

model for paraconsistent thought, he puts too much emphasis on the (still) image and not enough on

the movement itself. Throughout his work, Priest argues as a modern logician who has taken a

Hegelian turn for the ‘dialectical idea that contradictions may be realised in a process of change’.

Contradiction creates process or movement. But what if it were they other way around – that

movement generated contradiction as its derivative? In Jorgen Leth’s first remake of The Perfect

Human, alternatively, there are the ongoing movements of cinema that produce contradictions out of

movement. The man moves, and it can only be composed of 12-frame immobilities by

immobilisation (that is, by removing the movement). The spasmodic ‘jump cuts’ (what Gilles

Deleuze in Cinema 2 calls ‘irrational movement’) that make up the man’s movement only instantiate

one kind of cinematic movement and, therewith, only one kind of logic with one kind of

discontinuous consistency. Cinematic inferences (Bordwell’s cognitions) come in many forms or

edits, but they all belong to cinema. It is only a philosophical abstraction that absolutizes one of

them, be it through naturalism (Bordwell) or logic (Priest). Yet, for Laruelle, such abstractions are

philosophical positions, cuts (from the Real), that are better viewed as ‘extractions’ under a non-

philosophical redescription. Indeed, the very notion of ‘consistency’ can be multiplied in material

fashion, such that it now operates as both practice and as the physical manner in which poses or

atttitudes are held (or edited) together (‘consistency’ from con-sistere, ‘to stand still, together’). The

physical has multiple consistencies (and logics) all its own, as seen in the (dis)continuity of a scene

(or an argument), which is never perfectly smooth but always has jump cuts (or ‘leaps of logic’) of

varying dimension, some of them more perceptible than others.

Here is my own final, leap in logic, then:

When saying that film is philosophical, one must not take this equation – this equality – as one

conflating two fixed and separate entities. Rather, the statement ‘cinema is a philosophy’, is an

invention within immanence, an exploration of how this pair can be equalized, but without defining

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either of the two – nor their union – at the outset. For, if everything is equally philosophy (as defined

as X), we still have to account for the appearance of those films or philosophies that also actually

look like a film or a philosophy, and those others which do not. They have a self-identity after all,

even if only an apparent one, and the appearance of a (self-) identity counts for something, a

something that can then be used as the basis of an exceptionality (were one so inclined). Anything

less, such as to say that the self-identity itself is merely an illusion, still leaves the basis for illusion

as such unaccounted for.

Alternatively, to say that film is philosophical too in a non-philosophical manner, is not another

logical equation, but a remodeling, a hypothesis to be explored, a new comparative that must be only

one amongst many. Saying that ‘X equals Y’ in this Real identification is also to say that ‘X could

equal Z or Q or R’, and so on. Of course, this multiplication of Real identities could ‘explode’ into

triviality, but only in a theory separated from practice. In practice, that is, performatively, the

identifications have each to be executed in actual spaces and times, in Real momentary postures or

attitudes (and not in the philosophical position of everywhere and always). Any thing looked at

closely enough can be anything else. So a film can be philosophical, in its own way. This ‘can be’ is

the paraconsistent leap (or cut) of logic, but it can also be the benefit of our doubt, of our resistance to

definition. All thoughts are equal, but what that equality consists in has to be invented each and every

time in an ongoing process of equalizing.

© John Ó Maoilearca 2015 Not for reproduction, citation, or distribution without permission

Film clips and text quotations for educational use only