What is called “time travel” cinema is but one aspect in a tripartite series of interweaving modes of disjunctive narration which is also – simultaneously – a cinema of “many worlds” and “altered states”. Exploiting Gilles Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition (1968) allows a conceptual development of these cinematic series through three popular Hollywood film cycles beginning with Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). In so doing, film and philosophy are deployed as two series which together create inexhaustible atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman disjunctions, ungrounding everyday spatio-temporal identities, and affirming productive images of cinematic thought.
Although the three elements may playfully circulate, it is tempting to make each one correspond to an aspect […] as if the wheel were to stop three times in different fashions. (Deleuze, 2004b, p. 264)
To purloin a sentence from the very beginning of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema books (2001; 2002), this article “is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs” (Deleuze, 2002, p. xiv). The aim is to produce a taxonomy of “time travel” cinema through Deleuze's three syntheses from Difference and Repetition (2004a). The coordinates of this article are thus plotted by way of two little deviances. In the first place, there is the mobilisation of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition for an investigation of the cinema. So, the first deviancy is in not starting with the movement-images and time-images of Deleuze's Cinema books for what is – undeniably – some Deleuzian film theory. In the second place, this article explores three Hollywood time travel film cycles – beginning with Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) – through Deleuze's three syntheses. This second deviancy, accordingly, is in explicating what might be considered classical cinema in respect to Deleuze's “new image of thought” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. xv).1
There are good grounds for this approach. On the one hand, the three syntheses of Difference and Repetition – despite not being signalled as such – are already the very foundation of the Cinema books. On the other hand, the world of cinema as expressed in the Cinema books – in spite of how it may at first seem – resists the easy division of films into the classical and the modern.
Deleuze's “classical cinema of the movement-image” (Cinema 1) and “modern cinema of the time-image” (Cinema 2) are designated in the wake of Henri Bergson's philosophy of the sensory-motor system and duration from Matter and Memory (1894) (Deleuze, 2002, p. x). And the full taxonomy of the movement-image is conjured through extending Bergson's sensory-motor system through C. S. Peirce's semiosis. However, while Deleuze is explicit about these inspirations, he remains silent on the origins of the taxonomy of time-image. Nonetheless, as I demonstrated in Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016), the images and signs of the time-image correspond exactly to the coordinates of the three syntheses from Difference and Repetition.2 Not only that, the way in which the differences and repetitions of the three syntheses are captured and annulled, and escape and ascend, explains the fundamental relation between time-images and movement-images.3 Of course, none of this is surprising, as Deleuze writes, “Difference and Repetition was the first book in which I tried to ‘do philosophy’. All that I have done since is connected to this book” (2004a, p. xiii). Difference and Repetition is the very foundation of the Cinema books.
Furthermore, it is this fundamental relation between movement-images and time-images that problematizes the easy division of films into the “so-called classic cinema” and the “so-called modern cinema”, as Deleuze rephrases late in Cinema 2 (2002, p. 241). “From classical to modern cinema, from the movement-image to the time-image”, writes Deleuze, “it is always possible to multiply the passages from one regime to the other, just as to accentuate their irreducible differences” (2002, p. 279). One way to look at this is to see the movement-image and time-image as two different perspectives on the cinema: from the perspective of the movement-image, the time-image is an evolution; from the perspective of the time-image, there is an untimely relation between the two regimes.4 Or, better still, there are no movement-images and there are no time-images. There are only the many forces of the time-image and the many forces of the movement-image.5 Films are always caught between these forces: dominated, tending towards movement-image unity or time-image dispersion, each resisting the pull or lure of the other, image by image, film by film, cycle by cycle. Such multiplicity does not even turn away from Bergson, but rather is the truth of Bergsonism, where Matter and Memory attempts to “overcome” any presupposed “dualism” between the sensory-motor system and duration (Bergson, 1991, p. 9). This is the “coexistence of contraries” in Difference and Repetition (2004a, p. 178). Even the new image of thought is immediately qualified: a “new image of thought – or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. xv). Perhaps any a priori classical and modern divide presupposed here could even be said to risk an imprisoning, dogmatic image thought.6
Accordingly, if the Cinema books are an implementation of the three syntheses (of their differences and repetitions, of their capture and annulment, of their escape and triumph) then what might happen if we were to go straight to the source, return to Difference and Repetition? In the second edition of Film Theory (2006), Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake declare the “message” of Deleuze's film philosophy: “‘This is what I made of cinema. What can you make of it?’” (p. 253). Deleuze, after all, uses Difference and Repetition, Peirce's semiosis, and Bergson's philosophy to forge the twofold taxonomy of the Cinema books. To return to Difference and Repetition will allow other possible pathways to open up and even to resist the division of films into the classical and the modern, instead examining how such division may arise.
It seems to me the genre of time travel cinema presents a particularly illuminating way in. For instance, David Martin-Jones, in Deleuze and World Cinema (2011), explores three South Korean time travel films in order to show how this genre always re-establishes homogenous chronological time – is always a conquest by the movement-image, effectively capturing up and annulling the differences and repetitions of temporality (pp. 107–123). However, perhaps “time travel” cinema is poorly named. A film in which time is disrupted by time travel would simultaneously entail a displacement with respect to space, as well as the discombobulation of the travellers at the centre. Time travel is but one aspect of a complex and necessary tripartite series of interweaving modes of disjunctive narration: time travel, many worlds, and altered states. (Perhaps a better name for this genre would be the cinema of aexistempospatiality! [The ahuman, aspatial, and atemporal cinema of time travel, many worlds, and altered states. I do not expect this neologism to catch on].) David N. Rodowick, in Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997), evokes just such a possibility in his analysis of Chris Marker's La jetée (1962): the “binding of the subject […] is released”, the “chronological continuum is flayed”, and “disconnected spaces [are…] linked in a probabilistic manner” (p. 4). Time, space, and consciousness are problematized. But here we encounter the reverse of Martin-Jones's formula. La jetée is already a time-image, already modernist cinema, the film is probably not even really of the time travel genre; genre being a concept reserved for movement-images and classical cinema (p. 4).7
There is an analogous problem with Difference and Repetition. The use of the phrase “three syntheses” is ambiguous. For the most part, writers tend to use this as shorthand for the three syntheses of time. However, Difference and Repetition also explores two other syntheses: the three syntheses of space, and the three syntheses of consciousness. To reduce the argument of Difference and Repetition to the three syntheses of time is a limitation. Time cannot be separated from space. And – more crucially still – the spatio-temporal cannot be separated from that which perceives it, senses it, functions within it, thinks through it. Time supposes space, and spatiotemporally supposes consciousness, and consciousness is spatiotemporal, differentiated through temporal and spatial (dis)continuities.8
Accordingly, this article attempts to perform a reciprocal determination between Difference and Repetition and the cinema of aexistempospatiality, where Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness explicate three interconnected and inseparable modes of cinematic narration: time travel, many worlds, and altered states.
Popular Hollywood cinema proves rich in such films, these three aspects appearing with particular force in three cycles beginning with Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, and Back to the Future. The narratives of each cycle are all initiated by a time travel situation concerning the past, the present, or the future. By way of each different temporal disruption, a new space is created other than the one that did exist, was existing, and was going to exist – creating diverse types of many worlds. Concomitantly, such displacements allow for encounters with varied states of being: Back to the Future with multiple incarnations; Planet of the Apes with a reversal in a hierarchy of species; The Terminator with the rise of machines and artificial intelligence. Each film cycle is a trefoil knot of atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman problematizations.9
Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness enable a consideration of such problematizations as well as their productive capacities. These syntheses map the grounding of everyday existence: the stasis of a coherent consciousness in comprehensive space and chronological time. Yet, for Deleuze, such spatio-temporal cohesion arises from a flux of disjunctions. These disjunctions occur between the constitutive elements of the three syntheses. Each has its own a foundation, ground, and ungrounding – where the ungrounding ensures a heterogeneity (Figure 1). They are thus – simultaneously and paradoxically – atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman syntheses. Accordingly, the project of Difference and Repetition is threefold: to map each of the three syntheses, to account for how stasis arises from flux, and – most significantly – to explore how flux can free itself from stasis to produce new images of thought, of life, of the world. One way to encounter such escape, for Deleuze, is through art. “Perhaps”, writes Deleuze, “the highest object of art is to bring into play simultaneously all these repetitions”, to “embed them in one another”, all these repetitions “with their differences in kind and rhythm, their respective displacements and disguises, their divergences and decentrings” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 365).
As a narrative discipline, the general principle of time travel concerns a visceral encounter with atemporality: presents fold into pasts and futures at the same moment that pasts and futures enfold presents. Such are the temporal fibres from which the cinematic narration is woven: baroque interweavings and transformations of images of the as-it-was, the here-and-now, and the yet-to-come.
Some laws become immediately apparent. Despite how it may at first seem, the domain of time in-itself (what we call the present, the past, the future) is always indeterminate, as the travellers are simultaneously in a present, in a past, and in a future. Always in a present no matter from where in time they came (past or future). Likewise, always in a past, the moment of arrival will always be the past of a yet-to-come (even when travelling forwards in time). Finally, always in a future, the moment of arrival is equally the future of an as-it-was (even if travelling back in time). Thus, there may seem to be four possibilities for time travel: from the present into a past; from the present into a future; from a past into the present; from a future into the present. Yet, these possibilities fold in upon one another once the moment of departure is mirrored by the moment of arrival. From a present into a past is a departure mirroring an arrival in a present from a future; and from a present into future is a departure likewise mirrored as an arrival in a present from a past. Whatever the situation, such a logic is merely the condition for the narration and refers us to the wonders of the science of time travel. As Nick Effingham (2015) puts it, the question here becomes “is time travel possible?” (p. 33). Yet, Effingham is wide of the mark to assert that art – “Film, TV, comics” – is “generally focused upon the possibility of time travel” (p. 33). Time travel in art – in cinema – actualises this possibility, focuses upon narrative affects, gives us visceral encounters with time. And there would be three very different encounters: presentness capturing the vital flow of life, pastness expressing sacrosanct memory and history, futureness confronting the unknowable. Each of these three encounters has been explored in Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and The Terminator.
In Planet of the Apes, four astronauts set out from Earth on a one-way trip to explore a distant star-system. After some 2,000 years travelling at near the speed of light – due to time dilation just eighteen months for the crew – the ship lands on a planet hospitable to human life. While they have leapt into the future (their world left far behind), Taylor (Charlton Heston) puts it wonderfully: “There is only one reality left – here and now”. Their former present has become the past, and the former future their new present. This here and now is a civilisation of apes, a social structure of talking orang-utans, gorillas, and chimpanzees, a sophisticated society where animalesque-humans – primitive, dirty, mute – are slaves and vermin. The famous twist in the tale sees Taylor escape into the Forbidden Zone and discover a rusting Statue of Liberty half submerged in the sand. This is not some distant world, but the Earth after some calamitous event, where ongoing evolution of human and ape has reversed hominoid hierarchy. Accordingly, Planet of the Apes is a time travel narration of the first affect, presentness (and not of the third affect, futureness, for the future is a given, determined milieu). Taylor has leapt through time to the future which is actualized as a present capturing up contemporary concerns, a warning to the USA and the world of nuclear war and the downfall of the paragon of animals: the future is actualised within the present. At one and the same time, while the originary present may be consigned to the past, this past is conserved in the present (the Statue of Liberty, the secret scroll and the little doll, and – most significantly – the human animal). Presentness overwhelms everything, subsuming past and future alike.
Things are very different in Back to the Future. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is inadvertently catapulted from 1985 to 1955 in Dr Emmett Brown's (Christopher Lloyd) plutonium powered time-machine, an upgraded DeLorean DMC-12. In order to return to the present from which he came, Marty seeks out a thirty-year-younger Doc and they jury-rig the car for such a journey. However, before Marty can go back to the future, he finds his arrival in 1955 has upset the as-it-was of his own past because he has disturbed the moment when his father and mother met, a meeting that would kick-start a chain of events and see his future parents go to the high school dance, kiss, and fall in love. Now Marty's (possible) mother-to-be, Lorraine (Lea Thompson), finds her (contingent) son-to-come “dreamy”. Marty must put things right or face de-creation – a process he begins to witness in horror through the fading-aways of his siblings in a family photograph. Of course, Marty will eventually re-establish the original past. Or rather, one ever-so-slightly improved. Back to the Future is a time travel narration of the second affect, pastness. Marty has fallen into history and memory, and this past must be cherished for it tells peoples and nations who they are now. Furthermore, the future from which Marty originally travelled acts as if it is the past of his new present: 1985 determines his passions and actions in 1955. Pastness overwhelms time.
Finally, The Terminator is different once again. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), a young woman from 1980s Los Angeles, will go on to mother a son feted to become the leader of the besieged human race in a yet-to-come war against the machines yet-to-arise. It is thus from the (opaque) future that a time travelling robot assassin journeys into its past and Sarah's present with a mission to stymie the conception and birth of the child (in this way the film, while set in the present, is a time travel narration of the third affect, futureness – the future is off-screen). The (unseen) future John Connor has discovered this diabolic plan and so sent back a human agent, Kyle Reece (Michael Biehn), to help Sarah. And in a twist (as astonishing as the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes and as mind-bending as the de-creation in Back to the Future) Kyle and Sarah spend a passionate night together, she becoming pregnant with his future mentor. The Terminator is a time travel narration of the third affect, futureness. Sarah encounters the future in the present which acts as a fracture, opening up to the unknowable, the possible, the impossible. This present is the past of the future, yet through time travel the original future becomes the past of a new future engendered in the present. Yet always, the future as future is sustained as opaque. Futureness impregnates everything.
Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and The Terminator are visceral encounters with presentness, pastness, and futureness. And these encounters enfold within themselves all three dimensions of the present, past, and future, each in their own way. Presentness, pastness, and futureness are perspectives of time. Accordingly, everyday chronological time is disrupted in each film by one of the three atemporal encounters (Figure 2).
It is tempting, in order to further explore these three filmic encounters, to align each with one of Deleuze's constitutive syntheses of time from Difference and Repetition. Although having many namings and being explicated in any number of ways, these three syntheses are introduced through three concepts that can be designated as succession, duration, and emptiness (Deamer, 2016, pp. 47–49).
The synthesis of the present concerns succession, the foundation of time. The living present “is a sum of contractions” and a “succession of instants”, and “to it belong both the past and the future: the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 93, 91). The present preserves the passing moment, and expects the coming moment – it is a movement through time, placing these instants into a relation of before and after in the present. Deleuze develops this synthesis of succession, as habit, from the philosophy of David Hume (pp. 90–94). Furthermore, Deleuze identifies this synthesis as passive as it “is not carried out by the mind”, but rather “occurs ‘in’ the mind” (p. 91). It is constitutive. This succession is thus “essentially asymmetrical: it goes from the past to the future in the present […] thereby imparting direction to the arrow of time” (p. 91).
The synthesis of the past concerns duration, the ground of time. Deleuze develops this synthesis from Bergson's philosophy of memory (2004a, p. 92–94). We are constituted by pure memory which – once again – is a passive synthesis. And just as the first synthesis was a perspective of time, the same goes for the second. From this perspective we are of the pure past: everything we are, everything we know about ourselves and the world is of the event we call memory. Accordingly, our present moment is a mere focal point of the past and appears as “destiny”, all of the past focused through the lens of the present (p. 105). We can also say that the future is an aspect of the past, the past is captured as “reminiscence” (p. 107). Reminiscence projects the past onto the white screen of the future. Such are coordinates of the past captured in duration.
The synthesis of the future concerns emptiness, the “empty form of time”, the ungrounding of time (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 108). The future is radically unknowable, indeterminate, open. Furthermore, just as with the first and second syntheses, the third synthesis is a perspective of time and gives us the constitutive elements of the future through the futureness of the present and the futureness of the past. The former sees the present as a “caesura” or “fracture” in the flow of time; the latter sees the past as an abyss, a “dark precursor” (pp. 111–112, 145). Deleuze derives this notion of time from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his teaching of eternal recurrence (pp. 115–119). And while Deleuze sees the first and second syntheses as passive, this third synthesis is properly “impassive” (as Deleuze puts it in The Logic of Sense [1969]) (Deleuze, 2004b, p. 10). It is neither carried out by the mind nor occurs in the mind, but is rather what ungrounds the mind.
Accordingly, for Deleuze, the three constitutive syntheses of time are three different repetitions of time. “In all three syntheses, present, past, and future are revealed as Repetition”, writes Deleuze, “but in very different modes. The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated” (2004b, p. 117). These three syntheses are three different encounters with time, and difference necessarily inhabits repetition, and the repetition of difference creates disjunction. Yet, together they simultaneously compose the experience of everyday temporality, our presence in time. This is an ascension of the active synthesis. “Active synthetic identity” is where the “fracture [of the third synthesis] is quickly filled” and “the successive presents [of the first synthesis] are organised into the circle of time [of the second synthesis], so that the pure past which defines them is itself still necessarily expressed in terms of a present” (Deleuze, 2004b, pp. 109–110). The foundation remains secure in the ground, and active temporal synthesis stands strong and stable against ungrounding tremors. In other words, the perspectives of the three different repetitions of temporality – the paradox of the atemporal – are resolved in active synthesis. Difference appears annulled and repetition appears as the same (Figure 3).
Do not these encounters correspond to the three modes of time travel cinema? Succession – presentness – subsumes the past and the future; duration – pastness – subsumes present and future; and emptiness – futureness – subsumes present and past. In this way the order of chronological time is disrupted – in each film, in its own way – by one of the atemporalities of the constitutive syntheses: a visceral encounter with succession, duration, and emptiness. Yet, while we encounter atemporality, we should not be surprised to find that the time travel narrations of Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and The Terminator reconstitute chronological order: Taylor discovers the ape-world as the continuity of the trajectory of the Earth; Marty ensures a re-encircling the past for the future, a truer present to which he goes back; and Sarah secures the human future by triumphing over the potential break in her present, the future's past. Indeed, a mark of the degree of accomplishment in the regime of time travel would appear to depend upon the efficiency of the resolution. Such a restoration of temporal order is a spell to ward off the terrors of the atemporal. To live only in the succession of the animalistic present, to become lost in the past of pure memory, to fall into the abyss of the empty future: each its own horror. Chronological time must be restored. Time travel narration concerns the healing of time.
But yet, what kind of closure is there with Taylor's scream? What kind of going back returns Marty to a better present? And what kind of untroubled future is guaranteed for Sarah against the threats of science, progress, and technology? On the one hand, such open questions point to the extensions of each original film into their cycles. Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and The Terminator have all spawned sequels.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (Ted Post, 1970) does so by replicating the affect of presentness in Planet of the Apes. A second mission discovers, beneath the surface of the ape-world, a mutated telepathic human community who worship as god an ancient atom bomb. In the third film of the cycle, however, everything is different. In Escape from the Planet of the Apes (Don Taylor, 1971) Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter), chimpanzees from the first two movies, flee the nuclear carnage at the conclusion of Beneath for 20th century Los Angeles. In so doing, Escape abandons a narrative dominated by the first affect of presentness. Rather, this travelling – at the level of the film in-itself – is an instance of the third affect of futureness (an opaque future entering into its past, fracturing the present). But – at the level of the cycle – the temporal affects are of pastness (from the ape-present into the human-past). The fourth and fifth films – Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (J. Lee Thompson, 1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (J. Lee Thompson, 1973) – while not in-themselves exploring time travel, necessarily do so within the cycle. These films chart the ascension of Caesar (Roddy McDowall), the child of Zira and Cornelius, as leader of the ape revolt. Across this cycle chronological time is disturbed again and again by atemporal forces, and – reciprocally – atemporality appears to undergo an ever more resound effacement. The atemporal affect with which the cycle began merges with other atemporalities. And in just this way the cycle charts a dissipation in the excitations of atemporal disruption, the ascension of chronological time.
Such an effacement is played out (although in very different ways) in both the Back to the Future and Terminator cycles. Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989) is composed of a disorientating number of trips this-way and that-way in time (1985 ↔ 2015 ↔ 1955), revelling in the affects of pastness, presentness, and futureness in different sequences of the film. And once again, it is in just this way – the overlaying of pastness, presentness, and futureness – that chronological time is knitted together, and the dissonances of the constitutive series are effaced. Back to the Future Part III (Robert Zemeckis, 1990), accordingly, relinquishes complexity and even teases the prospect of Doc remaining in the old West of 1885, forsaking atemporal adventures for the anchors of chronological order: love, family, community, roots. With the Terminator cycle, dominated as it is by the third affect of futureness, the replications of these movements in the sequels describe ever moving circles, focusing upon a teenage and adult John Conner (Edward Furlong; Nick Stahl) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991) then Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003). Yet together, as ongoing episodes, they simultaneously map succession, presentness. This is brought to fruition with Terminator Salvation (McG, 2009) when killer Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) travels from a present into a future present to become the first Terminator. In this way, the once opaque future is now limpid – the silent promise of an encounter between Conner and Reece fulfilled, a moment we understand as being at the origin of the cycle, its pastness. With Salvation the fracture is bound, the circle complete, and we reach the end of the line.
Accordingly, the cycle-extensions of Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and The Terminator ensure the restoration of chronological time as all the more decisive. But again, while chronological time may well have been restored, past, present, and future are rewritten – time and time again – in new spaces, in different worlds, in alternative universes. And so, on the other hand, every restoration of temporality is crucially accompanied by a displacement of comprehensive space, by the forces of aspatiality. This is the crucial point.
The question is, what are the coordinates of aspatiality? The three atemporal encounters of time travel could be grasped with little difficulty. The displacements of comprehensive space are much more elusive, their determinations fuzzy and clandestine: or how else could we be fooled by closure, return, and guarantee? It seems we must reverse the procedure of the preceding section on time, and turn first to Deleuze. “We should not be surprised,” writes Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, that “pure spatial syntheses […] repeat the temporal syntheses” (2004a, p. 289). Thus we have a second reason for exploiting this philosophy of difference and repetition. The first was to seek assurance through philosophical concepts of already demarcated filmic affects; now we find we must allow philosophical concepts to point the way. And just as the synthesis of time had many namings and was explicated in any number of ways, so too the three constitutive syntheses of space. Nonetheless, these syntheses can be introduced as distance, depth, and intensity (Deamer, 2016, pp. 57–58) (Figure 4).10
The first synthesis of space (which repeats with difference the first synthesis of time [succession]) is “distance;” but also “extensity”, “extensio”, and the “relative” (Deleuze, 2004a, pp. 288–289). Although Deleuze does not name his reference, it becomes clear he is evoking Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's “relationalist” formulation of space. Leibniz sees space as arising through the order and distance of actual (and possible) relations amongst objects and bodies. In a famous letter, Leibniz writes on this “notion of space” that for observers “many things exist at once” and in “a certain order […] according to which the relation of one thing to another” creates “their situation or distance […] And that which comprehends all those places, is called space” (Leibniz-Clarke, 2000, L5: 47). The foundation of spatiality, for Deleuze, is relation through distance.
The second synthesis of space (which repeats with difference the second synthesis of time [duration]) is “depth;” but also “implex”, the “ultimate”, the “original”, and the “absolute” (Deleuze, 2004a, pp. 288–289). Once again, Deleuze does not name the source of his conceptual appropriations, but given the description, terminology, and context he is alluding to Isaac Newton's “absolutist” formulation of space. Newton, in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687–1726), writes “[a]bsolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable” (1846, p. 77). Here space is the stage on which everything dances. It is “space as a whole”, and fundamentally “imperceptible” (Deleuze, 2004a, pp. 288–289). The ground of spatiality is imperceptible depth.
The third synthesis of space (which repeats with difference the third synthesis of time [emptiness]) is “intensity;” but also “spatium”, “energy”, “force”, the “differential”, and “sensation” (Deleuze, 2004a, pp. 289–301). Just as with the first and second syntheses of space, Deleuze keeps the cards close to his chest with the inspiration for this initial formulation, but the trajectory of the argument would conclude it to be the philosophy of George Berkeley. Deleuze calls this the space of pure difference, “the intensity of the sensation” (p. 289). For Berkeley the encounter with space is through sensation and mind. “[W]hen I speak of pure or empty space, it is not to be supposed that the word ‘space’ stands for an idea distinct from or conceivable without body” (Berkeley, 2009, p. 76 [§116]). Here, for Deleuze, space is “the theatre of all metamorphosis or difference in itself” – “a transcendental principle, not a scientific concept” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 301). The ungrounding of spatiality is the differential energy of intensity.
Deleuze's three constitutive spatial syntheses are thus distance (as relation), depth (of the absolute), and intensity (through differentials). And just as the three constitutive temporal syntheses of succession, memory, and emptiness are perspectives of time, so distance, depth, and intensity are perspectives of space.
How will such perspectives appear in films initiated by time travel? They will no longer accompany chronological time, but manifest in respect to atemporality. Relation now operates through a distance between the same places at different times and without linear temporal succession: an uncanny resonance of spaces. The absolute, however, proliferates creating parallel universes, imperceptible to those caught within but remaining as memories and histories for the travellers. With intensity, the event repeats within the same space with difference, a recurrence. Accordingly, there are three different cinematic aspatialities – resonances, alternates, and recurrences – and together we can name them the narration of many worlds (Figure 5).
The Back to the Future cycle plays out each of these aspatialities in particularly defined circumstances. In the first instance: the relation of places in different temporal zones, spatial resonance. Howard Hughes declares “Part II lazily replays various scenes from the first film in a futuristic setting, as in the chase around the plaza, with Marty riding a hover board” (2014, p. 193). Yet these repetitions (in II in 2015, which is the third instance – the first occurring in 1985 and the second in 1955 during the first film) have the function of radically collapsing distance. It is a play of resonances, the play of different temporal spaces, the same place and same event at different times. The town hall clock, manure, Marty knocked unconscious to awake in a relative's house, and many such other resonating situations are the foundation of the comedy.
In the second instance: the proliferation of absolute space, alternative universes. In the first film of the cycle, Marty travels from 1985 to 1955, and in so doing – through his very presence and intervention – transforms 1955A into 1955B. Simultaneously, upon his return to 1985 it is transformed from 1985A into 1985B – Doc no longer shot to death, his father George (Crispin Glover) now a famous sci-fi writer. Part II is far more complex: Marty and Doc travel from the present (now 1985B) to the future of 2015; thus transforming 2015B (because of 1985B) into 2015C. While there old Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) steals the DeLorean and travels from this present (2015C) to the past (during the transformation of 1955A to 1955B, creating 1955C) where he gives young Biff the power to change the future. Thus Marty and Doc encounter a new dystopian present when they return to 1985 (1985C); and must travel to the past (1955C becoming 1955D) to attempt to restore 1985C to 1985B – although this would by necessity be 1985D. Closer analysis would show even more proliferations of 2015, 1985, and 1955 before Doc is accidentally catapulted back to 1885 (which will, in Part III, create further new spaces). These spaces are the proliferation of alternate, parallel universes: for it is not enough to say one ground is continually overwritten, they subsist in the histories and memories of the travellers.
In the third instance: intensive genesis of space within a place, the recurring event. Here a space in-itself becomes the place of multiplicity. In the first film, such a space is created at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance at Hill Valley High School, which acts as the stage for Marty to bring his parents together. In Part II Marty must revisit the event with another, far more dangerous, quest – preventing the dystopian future. Both realities interact in a theatre of differentials. Space is fundamentally ungrounded, the intensive, recurring event.
And such aspatialities occur (although in very different ways) in both the Planet of the Apes and Terminator cycles. In Planet of the Apes, resonating spaces collapsing distance appear in the opening moments of the first three films: the arrival of humans on the planet of the apes (Planet, Beneath); but also the arrival of apes on the planet of the humans (Escape). Indeed, the power of the third film – with this inversion – owes everything to resonance as the collapse of distance (in time, in species, in culture, and so on). In the second instance, alternate universes are generated each time the humans travel to the future in the first and second films, and when the apes travel to the past in the third film. And it is here – in the extension through films four and five (Conquest, Battle) – a new universe will explicate in episodic form the origin of the planet of the apes encountered earlier in the cycle. A question immediately presents itself: what happened in the original space that saw the downfall of humanity and the ascension of apes? The actualizations of Escape, Conquest, and Battle appear to problematize the originary transformation of the world. What were the conditions of such space if there was no Zira and Cornelius to beget Caesar, and no Caesar to lead the revolt? Perhaps, however, the second instance of parallel universes passes immediately into the third instance of the recurring event. Humans have always had to leap forwards through time for the apes to leap backwards – and this vast 2,000 year duration is a singular intensive spatial paradox, perhaps the event as unending recurrence?
The Terminator cycle would seem to take such a paradox as its procedure from the very beginning: Kyle sent back by John, the seeding of John by Kyle. Indeed, each of the first three films (Terminator, Judgment Day, Rise of the Machines) is replete with repetition, each a section of (different) space where the paroxysm is averted and the (off-screen) future transformed. And so each episode resonates with its others, replaces a former world with an alternate universe, and yet always repeats the intervention of an unseen future space in a new present space. Recurrences, alternatives, and resonances are thus implicated in one another and it becomes difficult to identify where one ends and another begins. Furthermore, such beginnings and ends collapse in Salvation, which exchanges beginning with end and end with beginning – the most perplexing displacement of space.
With many worlds, just as with time travel, each constitutive synthesis is a perspective. With time travel, presentness encompassed past and future, pastness encompassed present and future, and future encompassed past and present. Similarly, it happens with many worlds. Distance is the foundation of depth and intensity: the resonance of places subsumes alternates and recurrence. Depth is the ground of distance and intensity: alternate universes are the genesis of resonance and recurrence. Intensity ungrounds distance and depth: recurrence overwhelms resonance and alternative universes. The spatial syntheses, just like the temporal syntheses, are – simultaneously and paradoxically – disjunctive syntheses. And the synthesis of spatiality/aspatiality is at one and the same moment the synthesis of temporality/atemporality. As Henry Somers-Hall puts it, we encounter “complexes of space and time” where “the dynamism is simultaneously temporal and spatial” (2013, p. 365, 270). With the cycles of Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and The Terminator such spatio-temporal dynamisms go transmedia, extend even further through television serials, animated series, remakes, reboots, webisodes, games, comics, and so on. Against such complexes, simultaneities, and dynamisms, any closure, return, or guarantee is impossible. The wounds of time are not healed, merely loosely bound, and they seep through in space. Restoration is an illusion of comprehensive space. The terrors of atemporality return, again and again, in different spaces. Indetermination reigns! Which immediately begs the question: what – if anything – are the productive, affirmative capacities of such time travel and many worlds cinema?
“Actualisation”, writes Deleuze, “takes place in three series: space, time and also consciousness. Every spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by the emergence of an elementary consciousness” (2004a, p. 273). And here we have our third reason for exploiting Deleuze's philosophy of difference and repetition: no longer echoing the already demarcated times of time travel, nor even the determination of the spaces of many worlds, but the very genesis of a whole new domain. It is here that the productive capacities of atemporality and aspatiality become apparent and inescapable. This is the synthesis of consciousness, and is introduced in Difference and Repetition through three concepts designated as individuation, differentiation, and dramatization (Deamer, 2016, pp. 63–65) (Figure 6).
Deleuze names the first synthesis of consciousness as “individuation” (that which repeats with difference the first synthesis of time [succession] and the first synthesis of space [distance]) (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 308). The body is and reflects an “intense field of individuation” (p. 308). Single cell lifeforms precede complex, multicellular lifeforms; the egg is a single cell which will replicate through fertilisation. Individuation is an ongoing, unending praxis until degradation and death. Deleuze's first constitutive synthesis of consciousness – the foundation – is individuation.
Deleuze names the second synthesis of consciousness as “differentiation” (that which repeats with difference the second synthesis of time [duration] and the second synthesis of space [depth]) (2004a, p. 307). This is what Deleuze calls the “pre-individual field” (p. 307). Here species characteristics are where “the entire world may be read, as though in a crystal ball” (p. 309). The evolution, or unfolding, of all life from the initial spark, indeed, from the very death of stars. Deleuze's second constitutive synthesis of consciousness – the ground – is differentiation.
Deleuze names the third synthesis of consciousness as “dramatization” (that which repeats with difference the third synthesis of time [emptiness] and the third synthesis of space [intensity]) (2004a, p. 307). It is “intensity which dramatizes” (pp. 306–307). It is becoming: connections with others, every lifeform becoming a colony, and such an assemblage an element in other diverse assemblages, other people, peoples, species, environments, objects, and so on. Individuation is the passive synthesis of foundation, differentiation is the passive synthesis of the ground, and both are ungrounded by so many rhizomatic connections that dramatize life – the impassive synthesis. Deleuze's third constitutive synthesis of consciousness – the ungrounding – is dramatization.
The constitutive syntheses of individuation, differentiation, and dramatization have any number of names, and are explicated through several trajectories, including Sigmund Freud's structuring of the unconscious (Deleuze, 2004a, pp. 119–148). The terminology and explication are thus not only biological, evolutionary, and sociological, but also psychoanalytical, linguistic, and philosophical. One such instance names these three synthesis as “in essence symbolic [foundation], spiritual [ground], and intersubjective [ungrounding]” (p. 131). Together they form the active synthesis of coherent consciousness which Deleuze terms the differenciated. Here individuation, differentiation, and dramatization are resolved as the I, the self, and the other as the “figures of differenciation” (p. 319). The I “is the quality of human being,” the self “forms the psychic organisation,” and the other “is another I” (p. 324). Thus constitutive forces give rise to the stasis of “identity” (p. 320). Differenciation annuls disjunction “by being cancelled out in this differenciated system that it creates” (p. 319).
Yet simmering beneath, above, within, and beyond differenciation is “de-differenciation” – the ungrounding effect of dramatization (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 323). De-differenciation is “a protest by the individual which has never recognised itself within the limits of the self and the I,” and where it is “the I which is [already] an other” and “the individual in intensity finds its psychic image […] in the fractured I and the dissolved self” (p. 323, 324, 322). Crucially, the “error,” for Deleuze, “is to believe that this indetermination,” this de-differenciation “indicates something incomplete” (p. 321). Rather, it is a “full, positive power […] floating, fluid” (p. 321). This is the power of the ahuman forces, where the ahuman – according to Patricia MacCormack (2014) – is a term that proposes “encountering the outside of human” states and thus “verges on a nothing that includes everything” (pp. 1–2). Or what Anna Powell will designate with respect to the cinema as “altered states of consciousness” (2012, p. 4). The disruptive powers of individuation (the fractured I), differentiation (the dissolved self), and dramatization (the assemblage) are the coordinates of a third cinematic discipline that (after Powell) can be named altered states – indeterminacies set free through the spatio-temporal dynamisms of time travel and many worlds. Accordingly, the three moments of ahuman forces captured in the cinema of altered states can be named the fractured I, the dissolved self, and the new assemblage (Figure 7).
The Back to the Future cycle explores the fractured I. The human centre that is Marty McFly – through time travel and many worlds – encounters this altered state in a number of ways. Marty McFly is played by Michael J. Fox, who will also play his own children Marty, Jr. and Marlene McFly in Part II; and in Part III, Seamus McFly, his Irish immigrant great-great-grandfather. Such multiple roles occur with a number of different actors: Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen (1985), Griff Tannen (2015), and Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (1885); Lea Thompson as Lorraine McFly née Baines (1955 and 1985), and Maggie McFly (1885). Also, the same actors will play the same character at different ages in different times with prosthetics; and – when a spatial zone multiplies, such as when 1985 becomes dystopian – the actor will transform the look and feel of their character with respect to that situation: Lorraine goes from prudish suburban mum and wife of George to alcoholic surgically altered wife of uber-anarcho-capitalist Biff. Such procedures of the fractured I permeate the Back to the Future cycle.
The second altered state refers to dissolved selves, and it is such ahuman cinematic powers which pervade the Planet of the Apes cycle. In the first film the human travellers are subjected to a radical decentring through a direct confrontation with englobing species-populations. From Taylor's perspective the reversed hierarchy of hominoids – talking apes and mute humans – is fundamentally disruptive of what he (and by extension, the proposed human spectator) assume as natural and given. Yet – and here lies the genius of the film – such a disruption to the order of things takes place on the plane of the apes: it is on the planet of the apes and for the apes that the decentring is enacted, forming the narrative arc of the film. And in Beneath such a decentring of the human-species is augmented through the encounter with the mutant telepaths. But it is the sequence of Escape-Conquest-Battle where dissolved selves are explicated and explored in the most radical fashion. Zira and Cornelius, then Caesar and his comrades, become the focus of the films, the proposed human spectator no longer being asked to identify with a cinematic human centre. Such sly anthropomorphism is a radical method of grounding the ahuman power of the cycle, enabling a concomitant animalising of humanity.
How can cinema depict the not-yet-existing, go beyond the fractured I and dissolved self to create new assemblages in future times and intensive spaces? The Terminator cycle achieves just such an incredible cinematic expression of the inexpressible. Impure animalities appear in the becomings of the Terminators: from the cyborg experiments involving Marcus Wright and the first mass produced organic-skinned machines (T-800s) to the liquid T-1000 and the shape-shifting T-X (Terminatrix). Dissolved selves are thus captured in the conjunction of human-machines: on the one hand, the human form which is adopted by the Terminators; on the other hand, the displacement of the human race to an enslaved population under threat of genocide. The fractured I is simultaneously conjured up: we see John Connor in various becomings – an effect of the spatio-temporal moment in which each film captures him (foetus, child, teenager, man). Reciprocally, the simultaneous individuations of the T-800s (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) are a fractured I, transforming from assassin to protector through reprogramming and multiple embodied machinic states (learning human ways, a becoming which is enacted in a parody of the differenciations of other, self, and I). Yet, such individuations and differentiations are a ruse. Everything happens off-screen through the on-screen embodiments of an invisible intelligence that can only be differenciated by the Terminators. It is the unseen Skynet – in its various spatio-temporal incarnations – which permeates the mise-en-scène of the films. It is an assemblage over and beyond the fractured I and dissolved self. With Skynet – a spectre of impossibility, an echo of an intensive future – the Terminator cycle captures the not-yet-existing, the ahuman power of new assemblages. An ahuman power that finds new ways to be embodied in the fifth film in the cycle, Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015). Here John Connor becomes the next level of Terminator (while the original Terminator ages and becomes human). The film ends, of course, in defeating Skynet, yet teases the viewer with more horrors to come in the yet to be released and eagerly awaited (at the time of writing) Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller, 2019). Where is the affirmation here? Where is the affirmation in such endless recurrence, such ongoing total war, such species-death, such unassailable implacability? The affirmation – it is true – has no human centre; it is rather the purest of affirmations. It is an ahuman affirmation. It is the affirmation of life, in all its difference. As Neitzsche would have it, the tragic: “life going on eternally beyond all appearance and despite all destruction” (2012, §16, p. 80).
Each cycle creates its own de-differenciation, taking the ahuman power of dramatization, differentiation, or individuation and allowing it to become disruptor by way of the domination of new assemblages, dissolved selves, or fractured Is. All elements must necessarily subsist within each film and each of the cycles – as we have seen with the Terminator. Yet, it is the domination of one of the three disjunctive altered states of the ahuman that gives to each of these filmic cycles its own power of affirmation.
The three series of the atemporal, the aspatial, and the ahuman – the syntheses of time, space and consciousness – are captured up and created by Hollywood through images of time travel, many worlds, and altered states. Film and philosophy are in this way two regimes which lend to each other dissonant images and disruptive concepts, one problematizing the other – back and forth – producing ricochets of thought.
Accordingly, these Hollywood films of time travel, many worlds, and altered states are poorly served by any notion of closure, return, or guarantee. What violence must be done to ahuman, aspatial, and atemporal paradoxes in order that each disparate constitutive series should cohere and each synthesis align? Such repression is only possible through theories of closure, return, and guarantee imposed upon a fundamentally disjunctive narration of manifold modes. Resolution is not inherent to the films, but a silencing by methods of analysis that (mistakenly) privilege final moments, or see images as homogenous, or have an objective to decode, to pronounce judgement, designate an answer (as if a film is in need of an answer). These are three procedures of silence. Silences: no matter the good intentions, no matter how politically engaged, no matter how well researched. And this silence is a violence to the clamour of the images and concepts; a stifling of ideas, laughter, and horror. Encountering popular aexistempospatial Hollywood cinema through Difference and Repetition allows us to affirm such films and see them as demanding thought. In this way, such a perspective affects our reading of Deleuze's Cinema books. There are no movement-images, there are no time-images. There are only time-image forces and movement-image forces. The movement-image attempts to compose a coherent consciousness in comprehensive space and chronological time from disjunctive syntheses, and the time-image attempts to sustain disjunctions within spatio-temporal identities. Films are always caught between the movement-image function of order and the time-image function of chaos. Dominated, tending towards movement-image unity or time-image dispersion, each resisting the pull or lure of the other, image by image, film by film, cycle by cycle.
The mark of great cinema – of films and cycles such as The Terminator, Planet of the Apes, and Back to the Future – is in their resistance to silencing. And this resistance is engendered through interweavings of pastness, presentness, and futureness; of resonating spaces, alternate universes, and recurring events; of fractured Is, dissolved selves, and new assemblages. Pulsating forces, ever turning circles, inexhaustible disjunctions of the atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman. Such maximal powers, forces, symptoms, signs, images, consequently create great films of the tripartite cinema of time travel, many worlds, and altered states.
1. The “limitation” imposed here means that rather than exploring the whole world of cinema, as in the Cinema books, this article is more akin to Deleuze's exploration of Marcel Proust and À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time [1913–1927]) in Proust and Signs (1964–73).
2. I was far from first in proposing a link between the Cinema books and the three passive syntheses. D. N. Rodowick, in Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997), writes “time-images emerge from what Deleuze calls, in Difference and Repetition, the three passive syntheses of time” (p. 127). However, Rodowick leaves it at that. David Martin-Jones (2006), Richard Rushton (2008), Joe Hughes (2008), and Patricia Pisters (2011; 2012) went on to explore, in their own way, this connection. All see the three passive, or (better still) constitutive syntheses of time as giving us both movement-images and time-images (and in Pisters' case a third image, the neuro-image). I outline these theses in my essay “A Deleuzian Cineosis: Cinematic Semiosis and Syntheses of Time” (2011), proposing a very different model. The three syntheses of time give us not only the time-image, but also correspond exactly to the three time-images (hyalosigns, chronosigns, and noosigns) as well as all their constituent elements. In my Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016), I develop this argument even further, showing how time-images not only correspond to the three constitutive syntheses of time, but also to the often “forgotten” (as in my own original essay) three constitutive syntheses of space and three constitutive syntheses of consciousness, also from Difference and Repetition.
3. See footnote 2: Martin-Jones, Rushton, Hughes, and Pisters do not take account (in aligning elements of the three constitutive syntheses with the movement-image) of Deleuze's active synthesis. In both my “A Deleuzian Cineosis” and Three Introductions, I align the three constitutive syntheses with the time-image, and the active synthesis with the movement-image, explaining how they interact in relation to the discussions in Difference and Repetition, arguments which will be again be explicated throughout this article.
4. See my essay “Cinema, chronos / cronos” (2009, p. 172) for the full outline; and David Martin-Jones's Deleuze and World Cinema (2011, pp. 303–307) for other versions and the development of this kind of relation.
5. See my Three Introductions (2016, pp.172–173) for a detailed exegesis of this formulation.
6. Rodowick begins his Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997) with just such a claim: “Deleuze unselfconsciously yet fundamentally redistributes the oppositions [of traditional] film theory… realism / modernism, illusionism / materialism, continuity / discontinuity […] I believe that The Movement-Image and The Time-Image are more productively read as a challenge to those schemas” (p. xi). Rodowick then, however, immediately goes on to reify the schema in the opening couple of pages of his first chapter, with a description of two films from “classic cinema” and “modern European cinema, as well as the New American cinema” (pp. 3–4). But as we have seen above with the “so-called classic cinema” and the “so-called modern cinema”, Deleuze himself challenges such a division. This challenge is also in the film readings, Cinema 1 will explore experimental filmmakers such as Michael Snow and Marguerite Duras (2001, p. 122), and many filmmakers, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Luis Buñuel, and Werner Herzog appear in both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.
7. See my chapter “Time travel and temporal paradox: Deleuze, the time-image and Russian Ark” (2015) for a close analysis of this position. In addition, I too look at a so-called modernist film through the time-image. The argument in this article thus confronts my formulation there, as much as that of Rodowick and Martin-Jones.
8. Foregrounding the synthesis of time is perhaps inevitable and understandable given its significance in modern philosophy, from Immanuel Kant's revolution onwards, and in the positioning in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. On the one hand, we have books such as Keith W. Faulkner's Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (2006) and Jay Lampert's Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History (2006), which only really look at the syntheses of time. As mentioned in footnote 2, my first foray into this area is marked in a similar way. On the other hand, books such as Joe Hughes' Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (2009), while exploring the other syntheses, do not give them equal status since they “do not […] refer to the pure temporal syntheses which put difference into communication with itself” (p. 168). More recent work is changing this, as well as my own Three Introductions, Henry Somers-Hall's Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (2013) gives each of the syntheses equal possibilities for the disjunctions usually reserved for the temporal. In wider Deleuze studies, of course, there has been much work on spatiality and consciousness. For instance, Deleuze and Space (2005) has chapters by, amongst others, Manuel DeLanda and Gregory Flaxman, and Réda Bensmaïa explores disjunctive spatiality in relation to the cinema, although only in respect to modernism and the time-image. For work on Deleuze and consciousness, for instance, see Anna Powell's Deleuze, Altered States and Film (2012) and Patricia MacCormack's The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory (2014). This article draws upon these texts, and others, in an attempt to bring many of these themes together.
9. This article is an attempt to develop a taxonomy of signs for what I am calling the tripartite cinema of time travel, many worlds, and altered states, bringing these three aspects together in order to broaden the conceptual toolkit and focus applicability. In this way, its aim is very limited. It is not a history of time travel films, but an ontology of aexistempospatiality in cinema. It will thus not perform detailed close analyses, nor involve wider cultural studies engagements (although the cultural dimensions of the three film series are briefly discussed where necessary). I know this may be disappointing for some readers, and for that I can only offer some further indicative reading here. I have already mentioned and will mention some excellent work on films from the perspective of time travel in the main body of this article, and have included my own (footnote 7). However, for a more detailed account of the Planet of the Apes series see Matthew Freeman's “‘Who knows about the future? Perhaps only the dead’: Configuring the Trans-Temporal Timespan of Planet of the Apes as a Transmedia Saga” (2015). For the Back to the Future series see Pete Falconer's “Time Travel and the ‘Afterlife’ of the Western” (2015). For the Terminator series, check out Elena Trencheva and Sofia Pantouvaki's “A Stitch in Time: Film Costume as a Narrative Tool Beyond Time Linearity” (2015). There is a brilliant overview of the whole genre from a cinematic and transmedia perspective in Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod's introduction in Time Travel in Popular Media (2015) (from which all the aforementioned essays are taken), that touches upon all three film cycles alongside many others. That book also has appendices giving timelines of literature, films, TV shows, and comics. Some of the essays there expand the canvas to many worlds, but Alanna Thain's “Anarchival Cinemas” (2010) takes such as its starting point, with her more recent Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema (2017) returning many worlds to time travel, as well as using Deleuze. For altered states, as mentioned in the previous footnote, see Anna Powell's Deleuze, Altered States and Film (2012). For wider reading in philosophy, film, and science fiction see, for example, the work of Steven Shaviro, particularly The Universe of Things (2014), and Sean Redmond's Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (2014). And the work by Constantine Verevis on seriality in the media (film and TV remakes, sequels, and trilogies) is essential, for instance, Film Remakes (2006), Second Takes with Carolyn Jess-Cooke (2010), and Film Trilogies with Claire Perkins (2012).
10. While I used the same concepts for the three syntheses of space in my Three Introductions, I introduced and explicated them in a very different way. Here, my aim is to show how Deleuze's multiple explorations of each of the three syntheses are always “historical” in the Nietzschean sense of the term, erupting philosophically, scientifically, and artistically as events. This whole section of Difference and Repetition, accordingly, begins with the famous dispute between Gottfried W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, a supporter of Isaac Newton, and sums up with Kant's reformulation in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781–87), which concerns not only Newton and Leibniz, but also George Berkeley (pp. 288–291). See also Gregory Flaxman's “Transcendental Aesthetics: Deleuze's Philosophy of Space” (2005) for more on this aspect of Difference and Repetition and spatiality.
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