Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

The Great Acceleration of development and consumerism after World War Two facilitated the rebuilding of devastated European economies, but to this end, it also precipitated successive waves of urbanization, upon which the twenty-first century neoliberal-digital control societies identified by Gilles Deleuze, still rest. On the one hand, such progressive centralization entailed the actual separation of many previously rural populations from their natural domains. But on the other hand, such populations were also virtually reunited with such domains through an array of mediated forms that commoditized human relations with nature, and correlatively sought to determine the dynamics of such relations in ways which privileged the agency of homo economicus as tourist. However, an array of recent films have begun eroding such ‘arboreal’ striations, through their ‘rhizomatic’ exploration of nature as a liminal space where ‘thought from the outside’ can be encountered – in a manner that is moreover measurably transformative of human constitutions. Accordingly, this presentation considers Pascale d’Erm and Bernard Guerrini’s The Nature Effect (2018), among other films, as Deleuzoguattarian war machines that are laying siege to the concept of the human organism as an integral entity separate from wider nature. As will be argued, not only does this cinematic development entail variants of the ‘minoritarian becoming’ advanced by Deleuze and Guattari, but in keeping with their conception of its political value – as a catalyst of difference within the ambit of majoritarian culture – it also comprises a challenge to the current orientation of societies of control.