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Desire Machine Collective (DMC) is a collaboration between artists Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain, based in Assam (India). Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, they describe their work in film, video, photography, and multimedia installation as “an attempt to produce systems that resist the standardizing drives of commodification.” Their works have previously been shown at major international festivals and renowned museums including the Guggenheim New York, Palais de Tokyo, and the first Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Residue is a 39-minute film shot in a redundant thermal power plant on the outskirts of the city of Guwahati, an area surrounded by dense tropical forests and steeped in mythic history. In DMC’s own words, “the film is a reflection on constructed signs that can never be replicated or remembered, and the relationship between matter and memory”. 

In Residue, the facade of the factory is dominated by a dismal tinge of brown. Rusted steel planks and tin sheds recede and extend into space. The camera glides through the plant, peeking over looming buildings and corrugated structures. The frame is often fragmented by machine parts that intrude into it, a mélange of wires, pillars and valves. Inside, depleted meters abound from all sides, the needles stuck at zero watts. We see ammeters, receive gauges, pressure meters, clocks, valves – all devices shorn of their regulatory power. Undulating pipes fragment the factory space into uneven grids, with alternating marks of red, yellow, and blue. There is a dense conglomeration of machines of different shapes and sizes: hexagons, rectangles, rickety squares, circular wheels… It is a setting of intricacy and heightened complexity. 

The camera circumambulates around a huge barrel-like drum, its soporous movement capturing bits of paint coming off the glinty grey of the metal. Slow dolly movements, tracking shots, and meditative pans render everyday objects unfamiliar, which now abound with inexplicable mysteries. A powerful silence pervades the space, a silence that is both audible and visible. Traces of erstwhile human habitation reveal themselves – writings with chalk, a ravaged piece of paper stuck to the surface of a machine, fingerprints etched on a wall…. Soon, the machines take on anthropomorphic tendencies – two pressure meters framed together begin to resemble a pair of eyes, while an inverted cone-like structure replete with connected valves takes on the appearance of a beating heart. The roving camera mysteriously finds wax-like human figures positioned on the far end of a dilapidated factory chamber. 

Meanwhile, the thermal plant is slowly being reclaimed by Nature. Vegetation has overtaken steel structures in the outskirts of the plant, climbing up decomposed tubes and broken electric posts. The power grid is now eclipsed by the verdant green of nature threatening to encroach from all sides. At times, Nature and industry also commingle, as when walls green with moss seem to merge with ragged tree trunks. Frequent cutaways show us insects flying around in the dead of night. 

Towards the end, a strange chanting sound invades the space of the plant. Objects are now imbued with a strange power, though everything remains the same. A machine transforms into a butterfly. Power lines reflected on a water body vibrate with intensity. 

The film ends with alternating shots of industry and nature. There is a circularity to it that seems ominous; the ending could just as well have been the beginning of the film. 

Owing to DMC’s interest in Deleuze, certain aspects of his thought – concepts found in the cinema books and in Anti-Oedipus – merit closer attention, namely perception, affect, time, sound, and schizoanalysis. 

Perception and Memory

For Deleuze, perception is always subtractive in nature, guided as it is by a sensory-motor schema that orients perception (and action) towards the needs and interests of life – “We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs” (Cinema 1: 63). The thing in itself is a virtual image, whose pragmatic perception – reflection by a living image – demands an actualisation of those features that immediately interest us. In a certain sense then, the perception-image is in things, “in the luminous images themselves”. In Residue, the images of the thermal plant are those that break with the force of habit. Our commonsensical preconceptions of the workings of a factory are disrupted by its spectral embodiment. It has the appearance of a thermal plant, and yet there is no immediate function that can be assigned to its parts. It is a perception that fails to recognise and classify the object in question: the power meters are constantly depleted, the rusty oxidised metal belies the momentum that the moving camera affords it, and the lack of whirring machines makes the silence almost unbearable. It is this element of ambivalence that makes perception ceaselessly return to the object. 

Residue

There is always more to it than meets the eye, a residual presence that cannot be rationally comprehended. This stems in part from the screen’s ability (the frame of frames) “to give a common standard of measurement to things which do not have one… parts which do not have the same denominator of distance, relief or light” (Cinema 1: 15). The images that alternate are precisely ones that highlight the ‘decentering’ movement of cinema – crisscrossing pipes, a closeup of a socket, the towering structures of the factory… The frame both includes and excludes; every movement and cut dynamically changes the overall qualitative configurations of the factory and its parts, thus affecting what Deleuze calls the Whole or the out-of-field (hors-champ), “what is neither heard nor seen” but intuitively felt, an incessant creation of the new. 

For Deleuze, the cinematic consciousness “is not us, the spectator, nor the hero, but the camera, now human, now inhuman, or super-human” (Cinema 1: 20). The camera – the cinematographic medium – manages to extract pure movement from bodies, a movement that takes on an independent existence, wrested away as it is from the viewer’s subjective perception. The perception-image thus becomes liquid, and in its purest state, gaseous – it flows across and through the frame towards the very limits of perception, a world of ‘universal variation’ unconstrained by spatio-temporal considerations. This real, indivisible movement takes place in a qualitative time, in duration. 

Deleuze, following Bergson’s theory of Durée, goes on to declare that every actual present moment is doubled by a coexisting virtual past moment, what he calls the “memory of the present”. It is here that memory comes into play, for perception is inextricably linked with one’s latent experiences and anticipations. The political impetus of Residue lies not in what is shown but rather in the absence between the images, in the caesuras that the viewing experience gives rise to. What is seen always opens itself onto the non-visible. The thermal plant, once presumably active and productive, is now abandoned and lifeless, a dead space of neglect that belongs to the past. Machinery of all shapes and sizes abounds inside the factory premises; so do power metres and clocks, regulatory devices that no longer have a function to play. On a general level, it points to the excesses that are inbuilt in the relentless drive of capital, an originary impulse to discard a thing as soon as it has outlived its utility. Such a view lends itself to a Romantic ecocritical reading, where the incessant exploitation of Nature only serves to unleash its dormant vengeance. In one of the montage sequences in Residue, we see evanescent outlines of fingerprints etched on one of the factory walls, its wetness almost sliding off the green paint. It is the presence of a labour force that lingers on, a trace imprinted on the brute materiality of the factory site. 

More specifically, the plant also alludes to the special significance North-East India has had in the political imaginary of not just post-colonial India but also South-East Asia. Almost 90% of the borders of North-East India are international; China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bhutan are among the countries that it shares its borders with. Along with being a rich biodiversity hotspot, it also houses a diverse number of indigenous groups that have prided themselves on their local world views and knowledge systems. Thus, Residue could also at the same time be an invocation of the strained Centre-Periphery conflict that has been ongoing since Indian Independence. DMC refers to it as the “tyranny of nationalism”, a modernising tendency that has adversely affected the local geography and population. Though it barely finds representation in the nationalist discourse, the resource-rich North-East often finds its products appropriated through State power (in the post-screening discussion at Guggenheim in 2012, Mriganka and Sonal remarked that almost 166 dams were slated to be built in the NE region to supply power to industrial belts in Northern India, all in the name of developmental activities). The thermal plant in Residue – guilefully used and discarded – perhaps points to this underlying tension of (globalised) colonisation that has been acutely experienced.1 It is a place bereft of functional autonomy, or rather, one whose historical standing has been repressed. 

Yet another instance of recollection is to look at how the history of cinema itself has been inscribed in our collective memory. Residue is bound to conjure up associations with filmmakers and cinematic techniques – Tarkovsky and his dystopian images in Stalker, the durative stillness found in Theo Angelopoulos’ films, the long slow pans of Straub-Huillet, as well as the aleatory playfulness that one finds in cinematic experiments of both the West and the East. The more one reflects on the film, the more it opens itself up to a Proustian memory that simultaneously evokes and reconstitutes events. 

Affect 

For Deleuze, affect is the interval between incoming perception and ongoing action, a rupture that separates the living image as a “centre of indetermination”. Perception is always felt in conjunction with a bodily sensation that compliments it. Affective images are thus those that register at the level of virtual forces waiting to be actualised, “the quality of a possible sensation, feeling or idea” (Cinema 1: 98). Deleuze cites Bergon’s definition of affection ‘“as a kind of motor tendency on a sensible nerve”, that is, a motor effort on an immobilised receptive plate’ (Cinema 1: 74). For him, it is the juncture where something happens, since it is always an encounter with that which has not yet been experienced, a potentiality that is capable of being actualised in multiple ways. 

Residue

The famous Deleuzian schema, “the affection-image is the close-up and the close-up is the face” (Cinema 1: 87) invokes the notion that the close-up abstracts the face from its commonsensical coordinates, thus giving it over to a heterogeneity it has always possessed. The close-up facializes, in that it decontextualises a concrete entity and extracts from it a pure quality, an intensity that exists in and for itself. Moreover, the close-up is not as such related to the human face; it has the capability to extract such quality or power from any object. 

In Residue, the camera often dollies in and out, moving closer and farther away from objects. Long tracking shots capture wires and pipes as they intricately connect one machine to the other. Creepers and vines climb up electric posts, while raindrops collect on walls and ooze down in a continuous formation. In the absence of a cause-and-effect narrative, where no prior identities or relationships can be posited, what is intuitively felt is the intersection of speed(s) and slowness, and of movement and rest, the rhythm with which the camera and things relate to each other. There is a manifest tension not only between different objects but also between objects and their qualities that now take on a non-organic vitality. An occasional flash of red in the midst of grey becomes a momentous event. So does the pitter-patter of rainfall through an open window. Huge circular drums acquire a palpability that lies beyond the explainable. What is registered is not a red object but the quality of redness, not a damp wall but the evocation of dampness, in and of itself. 

The close-up extracts qualities not just from faces and objects but also from space as a whole, by decontextualising space itself. Deleuze’s term for the same (borrowed from Marc Auge) is any-space-whatever (espace quelconque), “a perfectly singular space, which has simply lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its proper parts, so that the linkages may be made in an infinite number of ways”. (Cinema 1: 109). Such abstraction ‘potentialises’ space, such that each element now has its own internal intensity and temporal rhythm. 

The defunct thermal plant, robbed of its erstwhile functionality, now literally brims with liminal potentiality. Each floor or room has a vibratory charge of its own (in one scene, the pixels of the cinematographic image itself start writhing). Space is continually created anew through the roving movement of the camera. The electric meters, though stuck at zero, achieve an uncontainable intensity; the virtual can be actualised at any point in time. The towering power grid stands erect against both the encroaching green of nature as well as the azure blue of the sky. Frequent cuts to its reflection in water show electric lines shimmering and vibrating to the point of losing their solid identities. “The espace quelconque no longer has coordinates, it is a pure potential, it exposes only pure Powers and Qualities…” (Cinema 1: 120) What is emphasised is quality over value, intensity over stable meaning. Space thus becomes haptic, loaded with sensorial details that take privilege over the strictly discernible. 

What Deleuze is interested in is the direct materialisation of blocs of sensation, to render visible not just the object but visibility itself. Evaluation thus becomes as much about imagination as apprehension; the narrative is one that is continually created.2 Deleuze picks out the term haecceity from the Western tradition and defines it as dynamic individuations without subjects” or pre-personal singularities without individuations.3 These are incorporeal events distinct from things and their attributes, events that acquire an existence of their own – a landscape, a day, an hour, a crime… As Deleuze remarks, “…What we mean by ‘to grow’, ‘to diminish’, ‘to become red’, ‘to become green’, ‘to cut’, and ‘to be cut’, etc., is something entirely different. These are no longer states of affairs – mixtures deep inside bodies – but incorporeal events at the surface, which are the results of those mixtures. The tree ‘greens’ . . .” (Logic of Sense: 8) The verb ‘to green’ exists in itself, distinct from the tree and its greenness. 

Residue

In a remarkable sequence in Residue, the camera tilts down a mossy area of growth, replete with greenish dirt and efflorescent rock (a bluish disintegrating ceramic object catches one’s attention). The image cuts to a slow downward movement along the vertical axis, a thick greenish undergrowth with snatches of brown. A sudden cut transports us to a damp wall. The downward movement is now accentuated along the entire length of the wall. On it are varied hues of green. Paint has peeled off at some places to reveal the brown plaster inside. Intricate shapes conjure up their presence, almost like an abstract painting. 

It is an existence marked purely at the level of a proliferating affect, a becoming-green. For Deleuze, cinematographic realism is precisely this: cinema’s power to actualise unfolding events – forces, emotions, powers, ideas, and thought, rather than the representational realism that is content with mere verisimilitude. 

Time and Thought 

A pure time-image appears when the sensory-motor schema breaks down, when our cliched ways of interacting with the world are put in crisis. What come to the fore are pure optical and sonic images. “Reality becomes lacunary as much as dispersive” (Cinema 1: 207), thus bringing forth a cinematic point of indiscernibility. The image is such that it cannot be recognised; it acquires a temporal density that breaks free from all organised systems of thought. “The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time” (Cinema 2: 125). 

For Deleuze, the possibility of capturing time in its pure state springs from the aberrant and acentered movement characteristic of the movement-image, which reveals time as ‘the Whole, as infinite opening’. In Residue, there is no dramatic action to speak of; the movement is unmotivated, neither extending into nor even induced by action. In one especially striking sequence, the camera moves down the vertical axis while dollying out, only to embark on a horizontal tracking shot along a dense factory chamber. In the elemental and asyntactic plenitude of the image, we see a roving kaleidoscopic view of pipes, wires, bolts, gauges, containers of different shapes and sizes, and also brief bursts of colour. Areas of alternating light and darkness come into view. The camera reaches one end of the room, turns stationary, and then begins to move, slowly repeating the tracking movement back to its starting position. This is not mere mechanical repetition; on the contrary, it is repetition that produces creative difference, a qualitative change in the temporal dimension of thought. This thought, needless to say, is as much corporeal as abstract. 

Residue

A pure optical and sound situation thus ‘makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable. (…) It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities’ (Cinema 2: 18). Thought comes face to face with the as-yet-unthought, thus compelling us to stray from the automatism of our habits, cliches and opinions. Deleuze calls it the ‘noosign’, or the thought-image. Along with being a thought-image, the modern visual and sonic image is also one that has to be read (lectosign), not in the sense of customary interpretation of an image but rather of a re-enchainment that depends on its internal relations of sight and sound. For Deleuze, two ways of stimulating virtual dimensions of time and thought are the irrational cut and the image-sound relationship. The irrational cut ‘determines non-commensurable relations between images” through the interstice – the gap between images that exists in itself. It is here that a constitutive ambivalence presents itself, for one encounters an absence that is as productive as actual presence. It is in this sense that “reflection is added into the image itself” (Cinema 1: 213), a phrase that Deleuze uses for Godard. 

Sound

In Residue, the visual and sonic image share a disjunctive relationship. The sonic realm accompanies the visual image as an autonomous continuum, constantly sliding beneath the visuals, always out of step with what is shown. The sounds used are quite distinct – frequency signals, crackling noises, ethereal tunes, the roar of a machine starting up, all of them sounds of technology, non-diegetic and manufactured. Occasional sounds of Nature intrude into the soundscape – bird call, the chirping of insects, the thrum of raindrops… Going by the soundscape, the factory perhaps stands in for an acoustic microcosm of the world that is increasingly being colonised through technology. 

In a certain sense, what the incommensurable sounds do is expand the visual image into the out-of-field world, thus bringing to light hitherto unperceived dimensions of the real. Towards the latter half of the film, as the camera tracks along the factory ceiling, a strange guttural sound invades the space. A syllabic chant is repeated twice. We cut to the next image; the camera slowly dollies out to reveal a towering circular structure replete with holes and valves, the very heart of the factory plant, and two steel pipes projecting out of the top. The image is accompanied by a hypnotic chant, part-machine and part-human, a hybridised chant that resuscitates the factory space into existence. As such, the chant is linguistically meaningless, pure gibberish, but one that nonetheless seethes with variation and intensity. It is language pushed to the limits of meaning and articulation. It has a strange effect on the corresponding image: a radical reversal now presents itself, where all that was seen and experienced up to that point acquires a retroactive vitality. 

The end credits reveal the artist – Geshe Ngawang Tashi Bapu (Lama Tashi), a Grammy nominated monk from Arunachal Pradesh in the North-East who has perfected the Tibetan “Deep Voice”, a multiphonic Buddhist singing technique utilised in sacred prayer. The ‘non-sensical’ chant itself alludes to an opening up of consciousness, a glimpse into the singular presence of Becoming that evades all fixity, becoming not just in the Deleuzian sense of an immanent in-betweenness that resists the present4 but also one that belongs to a 2000-year-old Buddhist philosophy of momentariness and cyclic causality. It reflects a reinforced belief in local knowledge systems that offer differing models of reality and thought. 

DMC’s stance against Western impositions of thought is also subtly alluded to in their resistance to the Renaissance notions of perspective and convergence, which influence two vital aspects of filmmaking: narrative and framing. This is evident in Residue’s ‘rhizomatic’ narrative structure: it has neither beginning nor end, but rather seems to expand from the middle. There is no sequentiality intrinsic to the film; any scene or sequence can be connected to any other without losing out on intrinsic meaning. On the framing side, the rectilinearity of the perceived factory space is often obstructed by looming machines that intrude into the frame and fragment it, thus opposing its ‘natural’ scopic flow. 

Such polymorphic construction enables and even demands the existence of ‘lines of flight’ that break open the cracks of everyday systems of (unconscious) control. This essentially follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire as positive and creative, desire that directly produces reality. 

A Schizoanalysis of Cinema 

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari outline a conception of Desire as a synthetic process, as incessant production whose sole goal is to propagate itself. They call it desiring machines/the productive unconscious, which, as opposed to the psychoanalytic notion of lack, is an affirmative desire infused with production. The unconscious here is conceived not as a theatre but as a factory. For DandG, there is no reason why Desire should be stimulated into existence through external forces. Rather than getting mediated through the Oedipal triangle, they insist that Desire is revolutionary in itself, a machinic activity that invests the social field directly through myriad everyday actions and decisions. In psychoanalytic terms, it is the production of the Real in itself, the ‘autoproduction of the unconscious’ (AO: 28). 

Deleuze (and Guattari) defines schizophrenia as “the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as the ‘essential reality of man and nature’” (Anti-Oedipus: 5). It is a reference not to the illness but to an unfolding process of heightened intensity, where the schizophrenic suffers from ‘too much reality’ i.e. from having witnessed desiring production in its pure state. Referring to literature, Deleuze remarks that schizophrenia is ‘the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode (Anti-Oedipus: 145). Everything is production, in the sense of ceaseless becoming that flows and connects. 

Residue

In Residue, there are frequent cuts to a swarm of insects flying around in pitch blackness, a chaotic flow that is nonetheless productive. A dead butterfly hangs from a string, its membranous wings shifting in and out of focus. As nature overtakes the neglected plant, a spider is seen busy at work, its sinewy legs constantly in motion. Later, over the roaring sound of a machine starting up, we see two pressure gauges – assuming the appearance of anthropomorphic eyes – stuck at zero. As the sound gains momentum, the outline of a butterfly is superimposed onto the image, soon dwarfing it altogether; the machine transforms into a butterfly. Nature and industry, usually treated as an established binary of social life, here become flowing and relational. There is a circularity in the process – industry extracts raw materials from nature but also returns its refuse to it. For Deleuze, recording and consumption is part of production itself. “…Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain.” (Anti-Oedipus: 6). Everything is a machine connected to another machine. As Micheal Hardt remarks in his lecture notes, “the human, the machinic, and the natural are all one. They are all processes of production. The first great advantage of the schizophrenic is its recognition of this unity.”5 It is how the schizophrenic sees things, not what they see, that is instrumental. 

A schizoanalysis of cinema, then, is to treat cinema itself as a machinic assemblage, as a body that performs and combines with other bodies. It is cinema freed from the dominant semiotic regimes of representational meaning and drawn to the asignifying points of rupture in a film-event, towards an immanent sensation of movement, affect, duration, and intensity. Cinema as a vertiginous interplay of sounds, textures, reverberations, and rhythms; the collision and resonance of colours, the dissonance between sound and image, and the haptic intensity of the (un)/perceivable. It involves a shift from the Renaissance premise of a disembodied eye to considering both cinema and spectator as embodied entities, a move beyond mere perception to sensation “encompassed across the synaesthetic, kinaesthetic, the proprioceptive and the processuality of duration and movement.”6

As Deleuze remarks in Cinema 2, “The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life…” A cinematic schizoanalysis demands that we remain open to the idea of the ‘felt unthought’, affects that bypass subjectivity and are felt inwardly in and through the body. Such pathic affects are not just experiential but also deeply political, triggered as they are by the socio-political situations around us. These are the forces/energies that have been blocked and stultified into dominant patterns of representation, especially in a complex post-colonial multiplicity like India.

Residue

In his introduction to Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Ian Buchanan contends that “in order to engage with cinema as a whole, we need to take Deleuze as a whole.” This entails mobilisation of concepts drawn from his other works to exhume a range of questions that didn’t find their way into the formal schema of Deleuze’s cinema books, namely the practical realities of filmmaking and film-viewing – one’s predilection for certain films, production and distribution networks, aesthetic traditions, historical context, as well as media hegemony. It is to question the Oedipalisation – strict regulation/repression of social flows/differences – of mainstream cinema as well as molar regimes of identity – nationalism, ethnicity, gender, history, language – that repression thrives on. 

DMC’s works, in this sense, contrast the mainstream cinematic industry on two counts – they not only destabilise the dominant conventions of film language (a deterritorialising tendency) but also undermine its conveyor-belt production methods. For DMC, media practice is essentially collaborative and participatory; it is a process that is inclusive of multiplicities. One of their projects called Periferry is located on a government ferry barge on the Brahmaputra river, which starts in Tibet and flows through India, China, and Bangladesh. It is an alternative artist-led space whose aim is to activate marginalised public spaces, mainly through conversations and collaborative experiments with fellow media practitioners from all over the world. Through this perpetual flux of goods, ideologies, and identities, DMC hopes to raise questions about nations, borders, and boundaries, and how they relate to contemporary artistic practices. Similar to Residue, it is a deliberate appropriation of an ‘abject’ place (whose history goes back to British colonialism), where the place opens itself up to pure heterogeneity.7 

In certain ways, DMC’s works demand the presence of a spectator that hasn’t yet been codified by the given models of political, social, or psychological platitudes, a spectator that is always becoming and thus belongs to the future. It is precisely this belief in the possibility of new ways of interacting with and relating to the world, of a willingness to create new concepts that makes their task a Deleuzian one, namely that of actively fabulating a ‘people that are yet-to-come’.

Endnotes

  1. In an interview, DMC remarks that Residue has a special resonance within the context of Australia and its aboriginal history. ‘The colonial past and the violent exploitation of resources in the context of globalisation are all issues that have an urgency in Australia and our work.’ https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/desire-machine-collective/
  2. ‘Affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgement as transcendent value: “I love or I hate” instead of “I judge”’ Cinema 2, pp.141
  3. Haecceities are simply degrees of power which combine, to which correspond a power to affect and be affected, active or passive affects, intensities.’ Claire Parmet and Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, pp. 92
  4. ‘We are not in the world, but we become with the world, we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming plant, animal, molecular, becoming zero.’ Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy? pp. 169
  5. https://people.duke.edu/~hardt/ao1.htm – Reading Notes on Capitalism and Schizophrenia
  6. Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, pp. 46
  7. It is interesting to note that for Foucault, the ship is the ‘heterotopia par excellence’, ‘the greatest reserve of imagination’. ‘…the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea…’ Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias

About The Author

Vedant Srinivas has a BA in Philosophy and a postgraduate degree in filmmaking. His interest lies in the interstices of literature, art history, cinema, and anthropology. His writing has appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Offscreen, Fipresci-India, and Chalachitra Sameeksha.

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