It is impossible to unreflectively speak of “rhetoric” when we face a twofold crisis of speech. First, we are no longer certain of what speaks and what doesn’t. So-called “common-sense” today couldn’t be further from the truth with regards to what speaks and what doesn’t speak. Second, of the things that do speak, we often no longer have the ear to hear what these things are telling us. Furthermore, what is even more embarrassing is the fact that the ramifications of this crisis of speech are world-historical, even cosmic, and yet we are often totally blind to this crisis. It is for this reason that the study of madness in the 20th century is even more relevant today. This crisis has presented a true inversion of sense and non-sense, health and disease, normality and abnormality. The totalitarianism immanent to the reality principle creates a feedback loop between those who attempt to recognize this principle for what it is and those who sneer and condemn those who critique as “not fun to be around”. Paradoxically, we find that there is an imperative not just for philosophers, but artists, scientists, poets, and mathematicians to match, soberly and critically, social-production’s collective madness so as to subvert it immanently. We must be mad in order to rescue the idea of truth and to establish a meaningful political project. This is done through language.
In all of cinema, filmmakers have often approached this razor’s edge of a kind of critical madness but frequently shrink back in fear, become lost in ideology, or stumble across it miraculously. Few are able to inhabit this space with consistency. One director who is able to take up this task is Andrei Tarkovsky, and the film Nostalgia is simply a masterclass on critical madness. This results in not just the critical capacity, the capacity to protest against the world as it is, of film or artworks as such to be established, but instead, Tarkovsky is able to create a kind of simulacrum, an experimental machine which directly immerses the attentive viewer into a multitude of refrains which each produce their own sensations and potential modes of subjectification.(Deleuze and Guattari define the refrain as follows: “The [refrain] is territorial, a territorial assemblage [...] The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land (sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation to a Natal” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 312). In other words, the refrain is a recurring space or motif that separates itself from its surrounding milieu. The refrain often carries an aesthetic connotation. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the romantic refrain (hence the notions of the landscape and Natal) and track its shift into modern, deterritorialized refrains. Because of this aesthetic function, the land and the Natal refer not to the actual world as it is, but a virtual world and people to come).
Our rhetorical task with regards to Nostalgia has little to do with an argument that Tarkovsky makes. In fact, it might be worthy to question the extent to which argument is speech at all, if anything can be said via the form of an “argument”. A work of art does not argue, it either protests or produces, each with a degree of fallibility. A work of art does, however, speak. Art speaks without arguing. So if rhetoric is to be rescued, it is only through an analysis of speech, which is to say that the rhetorician must necessarily become the philosopher or critic, the one who listens. We will quickly find out that Nostalgia says quite a lot. But we will also see that it only says so much through a profound silence, an ever-present muteness. This is why it is an injustice to attribute argumentation to artworks, we find that artworks today often have the most to say when they are mute. While there are certain quotations, characters speaking using words, that play an essential role in Nostalgia, it is not a movie of dialogue. Objects, the images of objects, speak much more and fill the space of the artwork with a multitude of speech. So actual words play only a secondary role when it comes to speech. Instead, we find primacy in themes, affects, sensations in their relation to objects that have their own kind of autonomy. This is characteristic of modern cinema.
It should naturally follow that the film has a twofold relationship to the body: its formalization of these autonomous images which produce in turn their own kinds of affects create the body of the artwork, but this body itself also demands a certain body to inhibit the space it creates. But modern cinema also requires a brain, a specific kind of capacity of thought. And yet, without a body to inhabit the space of the film our current notions of thought fall short in relation to the artwork. In this case, modern cinema wishes to reveal the “unthought” of thought, to create the force required to alienate us from our faulty common-sense, unmediated form of thought. So we can see modern cinema as productive in this twofold sense — it says: produce a new kind of body and produce a new kind of thought (See Deleuze 2007 pg. 189).
Clearly this is not a Cartesian dualism, in no way does modern cinema demand a reactionary reinstitution of the cogito. As we will see with Nostalgia, our new virtual subject is one that is desubjectified, a collective subject. This is a subject that preserves its individuality, its haecceity, while no longer resembling the cogito. Andrei, our hero of Nostalgia, is not a detective rationally solving a mystery. He is not even a biographer. And although it may appear as such, he is not the cliché of the poet lost in thought. Rather, he is the desubjectified man lost in unthought, it is this alone that enables our constant breaks into various dream/recollection states. We can see Andrei himself taking up an Artaudian task that plays an essential role in modern cinema: that of “rediscover[ing] the notion of a kind of unique language halfway between gesture and thought” (Artaud, 242).
So as we dive into the worlds of Nostalgia, our rhetorical (if we can call it that) task is to approach the film as a body which advocates for a body, and to see the kind of body that Nostalgia calls for we must essentially perform a taxonomy of the elements which coalesce into our experience of Nostalgia. If we can speak of the concept of “deconstruction” in the Derridaean sense, it is only in this kind of way.
To begin, Nostalgia presents us with a juxtaposition between the modern and archaic. While many directors also take up this task using dialectical opposites in their extremes (we see this tendency already in Eisenstein, but also Roeg, Godard, Kubrick, and Pasolini), Tarkovsky achieves this juxtaposition in a more oblique way. It will be increasingly clear that the content of the film itself demands this indirect juxtaposition. This is because Nostalgia must, from the beginning, walk a tightrope between two potential catastrophic results for the film. First, nothing would be worse than for Nostalgia to advocate for a simple, reactionary nostalgia for the way things used to be. If memory plays a crucial role for Nostalgia, it is in absolutely no way related to the memory of a happy past, an innocent childhood, or a better kind of state. Tarkovsky emphasizes this to the point in which potential “memories” are entirely indistinguishable from dreams, prophetic visions, or deaths. Second, the juxtaposition between the modern and archaic must be subtle for the reason that, even if Nostalgia doesn’t advocate for a lost, happier past, it equally cannot advocate for an image of the future that is immediately happy as well. Tarkovsky clearly knows that this would lead us to the same reactionary point — to present an image as immediately utopian is ideology from the beginning. Because we start from the standpoint of modern cinema, we cannot merely replicate the old forms of romanticism even if they were also tinged with sorrow. Therefore, any juxtaposition between the archaic in the modern within Nostalgia has to be a very careful, gentle juxtaposition that rescues the truth-content of this space between the archaic and modern.
There is a process of setting up this juxtaposition for Tarkovsky. In the first shot of the opening credits, a handful of figures and a dog walk onto a hillside with a lone telephone pole. These figures silently and purposefully arrange themselves and then quite literally freeze, crystallize, into an image. It is now impossible to tell if the figures are sitting idly as the camera rolls or if we are now viewing a still image. This already hints at the next shot, which is of a lone tree and a lone telephone pole in a field, viewed at a distance in a shot just as still as the prior one. We can see then that the dialectical contrast between the modern and archaic finds its form in the crystallization of an image. The figures, tree, and telephone poles are all equally mute, they are in no way in a dialectical combat. It is in this sense that Tarkovsky, in this mute image, perhaps does not truly portray a dialectic between the modern and archaic at all. We are closer to Benjamin’s dialectic at a standstill, as the muteness of these objects attests to their impermanence in the face of a looming catastrophe (which for Tarkovsky is quite literally the end of the world), but they are on a kind of equal footing in which, for the briefest of moments, we see a coexistence between the two, as if both wish for a history that has yet to begin.
We must clarify — the first two shots present a dichotomy just as strong, perhaps even stronger than the archaic/modern dichotomy. It is the “dichotomy”, or rather, relation, between the actual and the virtual. The virtual presents itself in the space of the dream/recollection/death and is almost always presented in black and white. This was the first shot of the opening credits. The actual is where we find the “plot” occurring in colour. From the first two shots, we already see the tension of the modern and archaic in both the actual and virtual. Furthermore, both are equally “real”. This does not mean, however, that the real is separate from unreality, the uncanny, as we will see. The strange mist of our second shot in the field shows that the world of actuality quite often feels more unreal, more alienating, than the world of dreams. The world of the actual is missing something essential (this is becomes the motivating force of the film, especially in the sense of Domenico’s, the “madman’s”, Praxis, as he later proclaims: “we must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream”). But the world of the virtual is also affected. Benjamin characterizes Tarkovsky’s virtuality when he writes: “the dream waits secretly for the awakening; the sleeper surrenders himself to death only provisionally, waits for the second when he will cunningly wrest himself from its clutches. So, too, the dreaming collective, whose children provide the happy occasion for its own awakening” (Benjamin 1999, 390). If we find something haunting in the virtual shots of Tarkovsky, this lies solely in the element of this dream awaiting its awakening. It should be quite clear that, especially as the final shot of the film shows, there is a high degree of patience, of waiting with the heroes of the film. Waiting for a possible future rather than longing for a lost past. This is the wisdom of children in the film — they have no past but only a future that does not yet exist, a future that perhaps will never exist (as Dominico’s son asks if it is the end of the world), which gives them a greater sense of maturity compared to the adult’s drunkenness or modern qualms. Therefore, there is something about the situation of the child that is not integrated into the modern, yet completely avoids the nostalgia of the archaic past.
Women, Eugenia specifically, play a more ambiguous role. Eugenia is the modern woman par excellence. When she enters the monastery in the first scene, she asks the critical question of why it is only women who are devoted in prayer, why they are confined to that role. The priest is briefly tripped up, and replies honestly that women’s devotion comes from their instinctual allegiance to the family. This is the source of Eugenia’s discomfort to kneel — as the modern woman, she doesn’t wish to succumb to the age-old patriarchal oppression. But the archaic creeps into the modern. We begin to see that Eugenia is neurotic, she lacks the capacity for any kind of aesthetic experience as a result. This culminates in the scene in which she talks of finding her boyfriend in Rome, as she lapses into the modern form of patriarchal domination, a modern heterosexuality. Furthermore, when Eugenia loses her composure with Andrei and slaps him, is this not warranted, not because Andrei was treating her with contempt but because Eugenia sees a kind of subjective strength in him that she is blocked from in her subordinate position as woman? The moments in which she loses composure are the most important deterritorializations with regards to the refrain of modern femininity, where she briefly becomes-child in her race up the stairs of the hotel. Furthermore, even Andrei is by no means a saint — ancient violence creeps in when he slaps Eugenia after he is slapped. This eye-for-an-eye violence initiates the kind of force to immediately make his nose bleed, and we enter a new religious refrain of bells and chanting. This is not the grandiose punishment of the priest or a sadistic violence, but instead the sign of going from a modern to religious refrain.
The religious refrain has little to do with catholicism. Instead, it finds its highest degree of power in the act of devotion. Tarkovsky is constantly trying to transfigure the spirituality of religion onto every image, giving each image a kind of spiritual autonomy. Furthermore, the religious refrain must distinguish between faith and devotion. Although there are certain similarities, Andrei should not be a simple knight of faith. Devotion strengthens faith by eroding it, as the devoted act now produces the kind of proof that faith necessarily must lack. Eugenia is unable to see this truth-content of devotion since she is barred from the kind of spirituality that comes with genuine aesthetic experience. This leads to neurotic breaks in her refrain, she is unable to devote herself to anything at all (Such as When Eugenia angrily calls Andrei a “saint”, she is closest to recognizing the extent of Andrei’s devotion, which frightens her further). Furthermore, devotion manifests itself as non-sense or madness (devotion finds its highest power in the utterly arbitrary act of fulfilling Domenico’s wish of crossing the pool with the flame) while faith sticks to the conformism of common-sense. The Italians who always chase Domenico out of the pool calling him crazy surely have faith in catholicism but absolutely no devotion to anything. In this sense, reification is tied to a prohibition on devotion. One of Andrei’s tasks is to rediscover the spiritual through devotion (we can see this through the juxtaposition between the face of Madonna and the virtual image of Andrei’s face). He can instantly recognize that Domenico’s “madness”, a madness that itself remains obscure, subterranean, is closer to the truth of things than any of our modern figures (“we don’t know what madness is [...] they’re closer to the truth”). So when we hear a strange dialogue between Madonna and God, in which God says, “I always let him feel my presence but he’s not aware of it” — should this itself not cast doubt on the cliché of the God who passively watches his creation from the heavens? It is as if the old forces of religion enter the picture to try to capture Andrei’s rapid deterritorialization, a deterritorialization that he can hardly cope with at times in his fear and drunkenness, the madness that amplifies his poetic refrain.
Andrei, as the poet, cannot be categorized as siding with the modern or archaic. This gives him a great affinity to Beaudelaire, which can be seen in the correspondence (the grayness of Rome’s streets and ruins of crumbling buildings contrasted to the sliver of green vines outside Domenico’s window). Tarkovsky wishes to side with nature, a nature neither idealized nor destroyed, through an integration of the poetic refrain into the cinematographic image.
Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the land or homeland as the concomitant of the refrain is essential. To be absolutely clear, the landscape of the refrain, the homeland, has nothing to do with nostalgia for one’s happier past. This, in fact, is a major threat to the refrain. We can see this tension play out in Hölderlin’s romanticism: “You quiet place, in dreams after hopeless days // You taunted me, the homesick, but stayed remote, // And you, my house, and you, my playmates, // Trees of the hillside, my old companions!” (Hölderlin “Return to the Homeland”, 67). Hölderlin does not present a detailed utopian vision of the homeland — clearly it is initiated by and intermingled with a profound melancholy, and although the dream enters the refrain of the homeland, it is the dream of one’s childhood, of the house and playmates. If Hölderlin sets the territory of the poetic refrain, it is in Trakl that Tarkovsky finds his greatest affinity with regards to the homeland. This affinity has to do with communicability. Where the old romanticism initiated the refrain by the enunciation of the poetic subject, in Trakl and Tarkovsky it is the incommunicability of objects that speak even louder. The poet is now the passive listener, which requires much more strength. Tarkovsky’s task is to make the muteness of every object in every frame rise to a deafening pitch (Antonioni, Tarr, and Angelopoulos also take up this task). Revealing the inner, secret silence of objects grants them the highest degree of deterritorialization. It is not the poet who yearns for the homeland but objects that yearn for their redemption in a transfigured land. This turns the old romantic quality into a source of distress. The new refrain reveals the frightening power of reification that turns speech into a silent plea.
We can see that the problem of communicability is a problem of the land. When Eugenia asks “how can we get to one another?” referring to her block from understanding Andrei, Andrei replies “by abolishing the frontiers [between states]”. Even the problem at hand and its solution are marked by a discordance in communication between Andrei and Eugenia. There is equally an incommunicability between Italy and Russia that Andrei is torn between. But Andrei’s answer solves both the problem of the individual communication between him and Eugenia as well as the broader problem of incommunicability as such. The territorialization of the land, its capture, subsequently territorializes its inhabitants and their power to speak. Speech is replaced with clichés. Furthermore, the different refrains that each character is caught up in (modern, religious, poetic, schizophrenic) pose additional problems of communicability between refrains themselves. If the strongest territorializations separate humans from one another just as states, only the most powerful deterritorializations will suffice to provide lines of flight or to traverse refrains. Each character then is in search of some kind of praxis. Eugenia fears the poetic madness which causes her to lapse into her own narcissistic madness that ends with her complete territorialization into the heterosexual couple. Domenico becomes so afraid of the territorialization of the world that he builds his own private refrain, the house completely shut outside of the world for 7 years, in an attempt to create a new earth, a genesis of the land that is not yet, but this results in the loss of his family, the end of a world (There is a strange affinity between Plato’s allegory of the cave and Nietzsche here. The “outside” for the boy, the outside of the shadowplay of the cave, happened to be an entirely new shadowplay, as the birth into the “real world” marked the end of the prior world — a labyrinth is created). Furthermore, we hear a brief anecdote regarding a maid who set fire to her master’s house because she was homesick. But this is only a passing anecdote, the last remaining history of the conscious class struggle of a fragmented people, which perhaps no longer exists. There are no longer the homes of masters to burn but only ourselves, as Domenico shows, since we have completely internalized the slave mentality.
Andrei’s refrain gets us closest to the homeland. The home itself is always at a distance — we are unable to see a clear image of its interior. This distance and closure does not show a lack of deterritorializing power, however. Deleuze writes, “not only does the open house communicate with the landscape, through a window or a mirror, but the most shut-up house opens onto a universe” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 180). The home itself then occupies the intermediary position between the romantic land, the Earth, and the modern cosmos. It is situated sparsely in the landscape just as the Roman citizens are situated on the city stairs. This is the universal or cosmic aspect of the refrain, its applicability to all situations, objects, and people. Both the fragmented people and the home silently wait. We can see that the land necessarily exists as the concomitant to the refrain — what is missing are the inhabitants that actualize this virtual world. In Deleuze’s words, “the hero needs a people, a fundamental group which gives him its blessing, but also a makeshift group which helps him, which is smaller and more heterogeneous” (Deleuze 2002, 154). In Nostalgia we only have the slightest hint of a people, which is shown through those who coalesce into a purposively arranged image.
Adorno writes that “in his text, the writer sets up house [...] For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live” (Adorno, 93). This is the quality of refuge found in the poetic refrain. But clearly the forces of the refrain simultaneously transcend the writing which birthed them. The poetic refrain clearly requires an immense discomfort, a madness that is incompatible with mere escapism due to its profundity. Andrei’s actual text burns in the moment the poetic refrain gains a certain degree of its own autonomy. Therefore the text is absolutely essential to those without a home, yet it seeks its own destruction.
Madness becomes the last refuge of the rational subject in the modern world. Objective madness today is called “common-sense”. The poet tries to fulfill the ground between the crippling territorializations of common-sense and the unwieldiness of schizophrenic deterritorializations. When madness finds itself in contradiction to common-sense, this only redoubles or multiplies this very madness. It is the result of a dialectic — the madman has experience beyond contradiction and this itself becomes contradiction in a world that is dialectical. This is why the plea of the giant banner, “WE’RE NOT CRAZY, WE’RE SERIOUS”, is true but instantly territorialized in an untrue society. The insane reverse their diagnosis onto the surrounding world, as Domenico proclaims, “the healthy have put the world to ruin”. We can see the madness of Nietzsche clearly here — these horrible, horrible inversions and backwardness!
We must listen to Kierkegaard’s question: “How is madness related to genius? Can the one be constructed out of the other?” (Kierkegaard, 132). If genius lies in its proximity to truth, we can clearly see a zone of indiscernibility between genius and madness. So it is not a matter of constructing one out of the other, but of bringing out this singular power of genius-madness. But there is a paradox here, which is that genius requires immense subjective strength while madness entails a power of desubjectification. So if we can speak of Kierkegaard’s “construction” as applied to the poet, the poet then has the twofold task of amplifying their power of desubjectification that comes from their madness, making it multiply, spread across refrains, while simultaneously contradicting their own madness through a profound lucidity, a sobriety that makes any straightjacketing of this deterritorialization appear as more mad than the deterritorialization itself. Andrei tries to learn this from Domenico, as the latter will not accept a single cigarette, he is devoutly sober, while Andrei takes more risk in his drunkenness. An entirely new inversion, the most profound and the most mad, is now introduced. Where we expect the poet’s artistic sobriety, we instead get drunkenness, where we expect a lunatic we get a lucid calculativeness.
What the poet and the madman have in common is their ability to inhabit and to think through the virtual or non-representational. Art is often considered no more than sublimated madness, as Freud attests to in Civilization and its Discontents. But for this reason artworks both reflect their inner virtuality as well those who bring them into being through their aesthetic inclination, which is simply the capacity to relate to the object in a way that transcends a phenomenological relation that is fully territorialized to representation only. Tarkovsky brilliantly shows that Andrei, but especially Domenico, function exactly the same as any work of art themselves. Domenico’s actions are the inner logic of works of art, and this logic is non-representational. Domenico emphasizes this frequently. For example, he states “one drop plus another drop makes a bigger drop, not two”, and shortly after, the camera pans as he walks through his home, where Domenico walks through a door that is not attached to any wall, with “1+1=1” scribbled on the wall in the background. Domenico’s example regarding drops of water is factually correct and affirms difference/non-representationality, and yet, Domenico’s non-sense appears to the representational as indistinguishable from madness. Andrei sees the truth of Domenico’s non-sensical logic through his capacity for aesthetic experience, which is reflected early on when he states, “poetry is untranslatable like the whole of art”. This is because the aesthetic hinges upon the virtual, which is exactly that which prevents its translatability (the virtual cannot be represented).
If poetry and madness are inseparable, we clearly find that our poet and madman are also inseparable. We do not find that Andrei and Domenico are the same person the whole time, but neither are they separate individuals or “subjects”. Both are desubjectified but retain their respective haecceity as constituents of a poetic assemblage. It is for this reason, that the allusions to the end of the world are to some degree prophetic — when Domenico dies, so does Andrei. The end of the world is twofold: Domenico and Andrei die since they are components of a poetic machine that itself also potentially dies with their deaths.
Furthermore, desubjectification brings about an uncanny quality that the viewer is immersed in as an initiation into this new kind of madness, the deterritorialization of subjectivity. Tarkovsky uses certain cinematographic techniques to amplify this uncanniness or déjà vu. For instance, in the very first scene the camera pans across a landscape as a car drives through it, until the car exits the frame. A moment later in the same shot, the car re-enters the frame from where it just exited. This shows a kind of molecular doubling before we are even introduced to any of the characters. This doubling, the uncanny shot, finds its highest degree of intensity in which Andrei, in the corner of Domenico’s house, apparently glances over at someone. The camera pans away from Andrei and for a moment no one is seen, until we find that Andrei himself re-enters the frame through the same pan shot, glancing toward where his initial look appeared. It is a mirroring without a mirror. Tarkovsky uses these shots that are right on the limit of what the camera and actor can do without relying on the magic of after-effects, which serve the purpose to launch the viewer into the same conceptual space as the characters. It is pointless to ask if Andrei is having a hallucination in this instance, seeing himself when he is actually looking at Domenico — what matters is the role these moments provide with regards to producing shifts or deterritorializations in our poetic assemblage.
Mirroring, whether through the uncanny shot or the use of an actual mirror, does not obscure, complicate, or confuse a previously stable plot, but always serves the function of revealing some essential truth that was previously obscured by the actual. When Eugenia seemingly asks Andrei, “why are you afraid of everything?” we only see her reflection speaking to herself in a mirror. In this instance, the mirror reterritorializes a question that was assumed to be an outward question, and redirects it back to the questioner. This results in seeing more clearly than ever the extent of Eugenia’s fear. This fear comes as the result of Eugenia’s brief role as the messenger between Andrei and Domenico at the beginning — the poet/madman only appear together after Eugenia leaves in a fuss, because she was not serving as an intermediary between two subjects but instead as a component in an already singular assemblage. This gives her the fear of madness.
While there are moments where the poet and madman become inverted we should not entirely confuse the two. We are speaking of a specific, historically determined kind of poet and kind of madman. The modern does not find themself in the situation of being easily integrated into the old forms of Platonic madness. Allegory now enters the picture. Foucault writes that the poet and madman “share [...] on the outer edge of our culture and at the point nearest to its essential divisions, that ‘frontier’ situation — a marginal position and a profoundly archaic silhouette – where their words unceasingly renew the power of their strangeness and the strength of their contestation” (Foucault, 49-50). This “frontier” marks the exact limit of madness/sanity with regards to the reality principle, one that is constantly displaced by the deterritorializing power of our poetic assemblage. Its silhouette is profoundly archaic in the sense that the modern views itself as having surpassed the immaturity of ancient intoxications, and the fact that the poet resuscitates myth for the function of demythologization. The poet is an alchemist rather than a necromancer — they are to produce new modes of subjectification rather than revive a new archaism in order to preserve the same kind of subject. Guattari writes, “the task of the poetic function, in an enlarged sense, is to recompose artificially rarefied, resingularised Universes of subjectivation” (Guattari, 19). Rarefaction is the key to the poetic assemblage, for creating a people to inhabit the refrain of the homeland (In physics, rarefaction is the reduction of the density of a given wave, specifically longitudinal waves like soundwaves. This can occur in any medium and is common after a shock wave. When Freud connects the impulse for repetition in both the dreams of shock-patients and the play-impulse of children in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and when Callois describes the role of shock in certain forms of play in Man, Play and Games, it is not the deterritorialization of shock itself that is desired to be repeated, but rather, the resulting space opened up in rarefaction that is to be repeated. Shock, as a deterritorialization, then has two essential properties: it opens up the necessary space for new modes of subjectification while also being able to traverse any medium and interfere with other waves in a given assemblage or across multiple assemblages. This should be considered in our subsequent analysis of sound and music).
Certain sounds and certain forms of music (if we may separate them) play an essential role in this function of the poetic assemblage. Tarkovsky gives sounds their own autonomy which affect our assemblage more than speech or writing. Essential to the autonomy of certain sounds is the fact that sound also finds itself doubled, mirrored, or transformed into an uncanniness which corresponds to, or rather, amplifies the desubjectification of Andrei and Domenico. We hear constant drops of water, which send out reverberations into the territory of the refrain. At a particularly extreme point, we hear sounds of machinery echoing through the subterranean home of Domenico even though there is no clear source or indication of construction inside or outside of his home. These two sounds, natural and artificial, create zones of interference within the poetic refrain, resulting in further deterritorializations that affect the actions of Andrei and Domenico or even create the necessary power to send them into virtual zones of dream or memory. Therefore, we can see the material ramifications of the forces of nature-history in our specific poetic refrain.
It is in this sense that Tarkovsky’s work might be characterized as surrealist. Benjamin writes that for the surrealists, “life seemed worth living only where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth; language seemed itself only where sound and image, image and sound, interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called ‘meaning’” (Benjamin 2005, 208). It is only when image and sound combine in such a way that we can speak of any autonomy with regards to language, where language seems itself. But as soon as language gains this autonomy its codified meanings begin to melt away, language no longer takes the proper role of signifying. That’s why the landscape or grove is never merely a simple landscape or grove (Proust attests to this).
If we wish to speak of composed music rather than natural/artificial sounds, it is Beethoven that plays an essential role for Tarkovsky. Adorno writes, “when you hear Beethoven [...] it somehow seems that existence itself, or some hero [...] is being glorified, extolled, or adorned in some way. And that penetrates the musical language itself, which contains a multitude of ornamental and decorative elements” (Adorno lectures vol 1 pg 25). If Beethoven represents the highest truth of the bourgeoisie but also their incredible failure to meet this truth, Beethoven can only function in Nostalgia in the most broken, distorted sense. When Andrei’s glance to himself in Domenico’s home initiates Beethoven, it is quickly cut off when the camera continues to pan past Andrei and lies upon a horrifying image of a disfigured doll/baby, which is the manifestation of the complete death of the previously pregnant bourgeoise dreams. Beethoven grants us adornment, but it is the adornment of the refrain of ruins and of broken glass and bottles. Beethoven remains dormant until he is liberated by an instantaneous cut of a synthesizer at the moment Domenico self-immolates, to which we hear the Symphony No. 9. Consider this moment with Adorno’s characterization of Beethoven in mind: "Irresistible in [...] Beethoven’s music is the expression of the possibility that all might be well. However frail, the reconcilement with objectivity transcends the invariable. The instants which a particular frees itself without in turn, by its own particularity, confining others—these instants are anticipations of the unconfined” (Negative Dialectics 306). Adorno is not speaking of dialectics here — something of Beethoven transcends representation. What Domenico’s act of self-immolation shows, with regards to Beethoven, is that there is no possibility that the world might be well prior to the instant of self-immolation. The juxtaposition between Beethoven’s utopian urge and Domenico’s horrifying death is only apparently dialectical — it is only through such an extreme act of negation that we see Domenico’s self-immolation was not really negation at all, but rather, the liberation, the extension of, all sorts of intensities. It is for this reason that the mime enters only at the moment before Domenico’s death. Rather than imitating Domenico’s actions as they happen, it is the mime that anticipates their liberation through various minute perceptions. In this sense, Domenico’s death, in its liberation of previously virtual or territorialized intensities, is fission, which results in the multiplication of these very intensities across new bodies. This results in a transversal communication between refrains that was previously blocked. Becoming is the anticipation of the unconfined. Beethoven then is the result of certain deterritorialized refrains and the necessary force of fission across refrains. Becoming, not mimesis.
The mime shows that becoming necessarily entails repetition. Tarkovsky uses various kinds of repetition in order to multiply certain intensities or reconfigure certain refrains. The first and most obvious form of repetition is that of the black and white shots which serve as an illustration of the virtual world of dreams, daydreams, memory, and vision. Furthermore, in the initial scene at the monastery, the camera follows the exact same route for a pan shot in two different instances, one for Eugenia’s entrance and another for the entrance of the nuns. This serves as a means in which to juxtapose different refrains, in this instance between the religious refrain and the modern refrain, amongst a common root of feminine inhabitants. But the repetition of the route of the pan shot finds its highest degree of intensity in the three repetitions of Andrei attempting to cross the pool with the candle at the end of the film. This multiplies Andrei’s devotion to the non-sensical task of affirming the non-representational. But each repetition comes as the result of the fission of prior milieus (each repetition is never the exact same), which we saw initiated by Domenico’s self-immolation. Our last notable form of repetition is that of certain objects, which we will now discuss thoroughly.
Deleuze writes that in modern cinema, “objects and settings [milieux] take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an importance in themselves” (Cinema 2, pg 4). Objects in Tarkovsky’s work take on an exceptionally high degree of autonomy and thus importance. This is what enables their “speech”. The objects of Nostalgia generally serve two functions: that of speech and also serving as transversal lines between refrains. With regards to speech, objects become signs to be deciphered. But the speech of objects is asignifying — a jar is never a simple jar, which in turn motivates the object’s decipherment. Once deciphered, we can then see their role as components within various refrains. But this all begins with listening, which motivates Andrei’s urgent call to “listen to the voices that seem useless”. That which is useless to common-sense thought, what seems the most silent or dead (old jars, feathers), is of the utmost importance to the philosopher and artist. It is objects deprived of their use-value, the scraps, that take on the highest degree of the power to speak. Furthermore, the repetition of objects themselves redoubles their power of speech. The objects of Nostalgia include jars/bottles, forms and sites of water (puddle, drops, the cavern or subterranean), animals (the dog or horse), feathers, and the flame or candle.
Jars serve multiple functions across refrains. They are most often associated, however, with the religious refrain. Therefore, the jar or bottle often attests to the powers of devotion we discussed earlier. But it also has the other functions of serving as a means of initiation into the divine/poetic madness. The jar or bottle then points to a virtual affirmation, a properly Dionysiac affirmation within the poetic or mad assemblage. But now we can truly see the transversal role of objects, as bottles and jars take on a musical quality when combined with droplets of water reverberating inside each territory of each jar or bottle. When assemblages combine into a larger refrain, we can see each bottle become a site of imperceptible yet localized deterritorializations (numerous jars are lined up in the home of Domenico). So, while this order can certainly be scrambled or reversed, we can see how the specific object of jars or bottles often have a trajectory from religious, to poetic/mad, to musical refrains. We also see, however, that the repetition of these objects marks certain changes within a refrain (like the jars and bottles rescued from the bottom of the town’s pool that have become calcified). But more than any other object, jars and bottles serve the role of a historical memory of labor cemented into the commodity. It is as if only when we see the calcification of the jars and bottles that their full truth is revealed. Objects deprived of their use-value show in a particular fashion their secret, the secret of the labor congealed within them. Therefore the calcification of the jar or bottle is the calcification of history itself that is reiterated through commodity-production. This only serves to amplify the stakes of Andrei’s task of rescuing the non-sense of the non-representational through his carrying of the flame — history serves as his mute witness.
Water takes on a more enigmatic function. It is most often seen in the form of puddles and droplets, and it occurs mostly in Domenico’s subterranean home as well as in the virtual black and white space. We can derive two primary functions from water — its mirroring and its musical quality. With regards to mirroring, the reflection in the puddle, this is perhaps best illustrated in the final shot, where we see Andrei and the german shepherd mirrored in a puddle they lie close to as the camera pans outward. While the reflection of the puddle illustrates some form of truth, it does not function in an identical way to that of the mirror we discussed previously. The primary difference is that the mirroring-function of the puddle has a stronger yet more subtle effect on the refrain. This is why the setting of the puddle is essential. Where we previously saw mirroring occur almost exclusively in the actual, the mirroring of the puddle is at its strongest in the virtual. In the final shot, it is not the case that the puddle serves to replicate the same image above it. Rather, the puddle gains its own autonomy through depth. The puddle disrupts the landscape, the ground, by funneling all of the forces of the surrounding landscape into a single point, which then in turn further deterritorializes the surrounding landscape. Therefore, we should neglect our initial common-sense assumption of the puddle as something that is shallow, rather, it is the deepest of wells, perhaps bottomless (in the section of Zarathustra titled “The Return Home”, Nietzsche writes: “Everything among them talks; no one knows any longer how to understand. Everything falls into the water; nothing falls any longer into deep wells”. It is essential to note then, that water is immediately associated with our initial problem of communicability. Depth is a question of meaning, which unites the epistemological and the empirical). It is in this sense that the puddle serves as a rupture in the virtual itself, but one that compounds its intensity. This can be seen when the puddle itself reaches a point of intensity (as it begins to reflect the arches) which initiates a new deterritorialization in the refrain, as raindrops begin to form a kind of shroud over the entire image (The rupture in the virtual which leads to the droplets/mist spontaneously appearing is quite paradoxical. It serves the double-function of both veiling the image, distancing the viewer from it or not letting them in, while also infinitely dispersing this image into individual monads (each droplet) that now reflect an entire world). This necessarily occurs because Tarkovsky invents a new kind of depth, marking this as one of the greatest shots in the history of cinema (see fig. 1). Every component of this assemblage (the circle of the arch, the puddle, Andrei, the dog, the columns, and the home) has a clear autonomy but also reliance upon each other element in the virtual image (the entire image would collapse if it were not arranged in this way). In short, the puddle marks the cavitation of the virtual (while this results in shock, we should consider this positive element of shock that we discussed earlier with the phenomena of rarefaction).
If the puddle is most noteworthy for its cavitation, the individual droplet is necessary for such a cavitation. If we recall Domenico’s note on adding two drops of water together to get a single drop of water (the virtual equation 1+1=1), we can still note haecceity through reformulating the equation as 1+1’=1*. It is in this sense that each individual drop attests to a larger plane of immanence while still displaying its unique monadological character (or rather, machinic character). We can say that 1* is the puddle, or rather the immanence of a given refrain, and 1 or 1’ are each droplet, or the specific components of an assemblage.
It is absolutely essential to note that water waves are a combination of both surface and longitudinal waves. Surface waves are what give the puddle its essential “depth”, while longitudinal waves are what enable the properly musical quality of individual droplets. We have emphasized before the role of the concept of the echo as that which maps the space of a given refrain through its reverberations in a function similar to that of echolocation. But sound waves do not have the function of also being surface waves until we introduce a notion of fluid mechanics into our refrain.
Recall the localized deterritorializations of sound which occur when water drops into jars, bottles, or into puddles. In these instances sound gains a properly musical quality. We can consider this musical quality as a reflection of the relationship between natural beauty and art beauty. It is in this sense that each individual droplet, each shock which results in waves of sound, no matter how imperceptible, carries with it a specific historical determination that links history and prehistory. Adorno writes, “natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical; this legitimates at the same time that it relativizes the concept [...] In the experience of natural beauty, consciousness of freedom and anxiety fuse” (AT 65). Applying this to Nostalgia, one might assume that the glimpses into natural beauty that we constantly see (such as in water or the glimpse of green vines outside Domenico’s window) are merely as is, abstract glimpses of nature which itself as a concept is abstract. This abstraction is what leads to the assumption that nature is ahistorical — the rain and leaves are timeless, do not say anything, do not have a history. This assumption reifies natural beauty to the point of destroying its experiential content. When Adorno writes that “art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty”, this is because it is only in the experience of natural beauty that art speaks in a manner that points beyond itself (AT 71). The experience of nature is much different than the experience of natural beauty, since the historical quality of natural beauty is that which points toward a future of affirmation. Sade parodies the idea that nature itself, ahistorical, already contains utopian forces in its chaos, which only emphasizes the necessity of the experience of history contained within natural beauty. The difference between nature and natural beauty is a difference between the planes of actuality and virtuality. If art were the imitation of nature alone it would be the reproduction of the actual. It is through natural beauty that art is able to spark the potential of actualizing its virtual content, which is the process of history itself. So the historical dimension of natural beauty gives natural beauty its content, while making that content historically relative (this is plain to see across the various artistic periods). Freedom and anxiety fuse in natural beauty for the reason that these are the very stakes of historical development itself. For instance, the sound of water dripping gains a historical dimension in that it becomes the anxious ticking of a clock. This reflects the timekeeping of being “on the clock” having to organize human beings under the division of labor. It is no surprise then, that we then hear the whirring of machinery that we mentioned earlier, as natural beauty directly reveals its historical content of labor. This multiplies the sense of anxiety all the more.
It is often the case that in poetry art is most able to strongly reflect natural beauty. In this regard, there is an incredible affinity between Tarkovsky and Beaudelaire. For instance, take Adorno’s characterization of Beaudelaire with Tarkovsky in mind: “Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous. Beaudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes, and the medium of this experience is poetic form. This raises him supremely above late romantic sentimentality. The power of his work is that it syncopates the overwhelming objectivity of the commodity character — which wipes out any human trace — with the objectivity of the work in itself, anterior to the living subject: The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity” (AT 21). There is not a single shot in Nostalgia that is innocuous, particularly in its manner of speech. Tarkovsky fully accepts the muteness of reality so that it may be otherwise transformed. Furthermore, Tarkovsky follows in Beaudelaire’s footsteps by applying the latter’s poetic method to cinema, erecting a new, properly poetic form of cinema (perhaps there was something cinematographic in poetry prior to the age of cinema). The inescapable muteness of Nostalgia is the silent scream of the commodity form itself, transubstantiated into the work of art. There is a whole, subterranean language of natural beauty that screams, cries, stammers, mutters, and sometimes giggles underneath its silence. Sometimes this takes a musical form. But what Adorno calls the “enigmatic character” or riddle-character of “nature’s language” converges with its historical element in its temporality in particular (AT 73). When Adorno and Horkheimer write that “all reification is forgetting”, the anxiety of natural beauty in Nostalgia is the anxiety of universal reification not just losing its historicity in the act of forgetting, but also the anxiety of forgetting a potential future that might be different from reality as it is (Dialectic of enlightenment 191). This itself is the maddening force of the subterranean dripping. But the poet/madman assemblage is the machine of preserving history through the creation of new assemblages, modes of subjectification: “And this world issued a strange music, // Like running water and like wind, // Or grain that a winnower with movement rhythmic // Stirs and shakes into his bin. /// These forms faded and were no more than a dream, // A sketch slow to come, // Upon the forgotten canvas, which the artist completes // By memory alone” (Les Fleurs du Mal 129 from “A Carrion”).
There is one more essential element of water in Nostalgia that we must consider: the role of the puddle. The puddle often shows up in both the actual and virtual worlds. In the former, the puddle is most often in the interior of buildings (such as Domenico’s subterranean home) and is frequently disturbed with the shock of constant drops or steps through the puddles. In the latter, the puddle is often outside and reflects the world above tranquilly, like in the final shot of Andrei and the dog. There is something immensely complex in this distinction. Adorno writes that, “natural beauty is suspended history, a moment of becoming at a standstill. Artworks that resonate with this moment of suspension are those that are justly said to have a feeling for nature. Yet this feeling is [...] fleeting to the point of deja vu” (AT 71). We believe that pure virtuality can only be sensed as fleetingness, transience. This is not because of a dichotomy between the movement of the dialectic and a non-movement of the dialectic at a standstill. As we continually note, dialectics play a role in the actual insofar as representation plays a role in the actual elements of conscious perception. But virtual elements commingle with the actual in their speeds and intensities which we have been analyzing, and, as Bergson notes, virtuality is immanent to consciousness via the link between perception and memory. So throughout this analysis, we have been studying the mixture of virtuality and actuality as it appears in the actuality of the film, while the virtual realm stands in mute opposition to it. It is in this sense we can analyze the virtual from how it is loosely signified from the actual (the 1+1=1 for instance). But if we begin to take seriously Tarkovsky’s portrayal of the stillness of the virtual, it is not the case that when the dialectic freezes into an image it then becomes one image amongst various others that we had already been perceiving. While the actual is composed of extensivities, we see in shots like the final shot of Nostalgia a pure intensity that flashes up in a moment of apparition. What flashes up in the apparition or in the fleeting feeling for nature, does have a profound historical content (which gives it the quality of deja vu), but it takes the form of pure intensity. It is this intensity which has the double-character of transience and imperceptibility. Because it is not extensive, nothing specific can be diagnosed, no object identified. The surrealists pointed us in this direction — when Magritte notes Ceci n’est pas une pipe, we could equally say Ce n’est pas un chien in the final shot of Nostalgia. Both attest to the intensity found in the sensation of natural beauty, but cinema achieves something in the autonomy of time-images that the surrealists at times were unable to capture. In short, the stillness of the water in the virtual in contrast to constant disturbances of water in the actual are only a surface or apparent difference which does not suggest a dead, frozen, virtuality, but instead a sensation of natural beauty that carries such a degree of intensity that its milieu-components are made imperceptible and can only be sensed in moments of extreme transience.
Our next object of analysis are animals — the dog and the horse in particular. The dog occupies the actual and virtual worlds in the same way as Domenico or Andrei. Interestingly, the dog appears to belong to Domenico in the actual, but lies beside Andrei in the virtual. In this regard, the dog serves as a kind of transversal link between the actual and virtual. It becomes a machinic element in the poet-madman assemblage. It obtains a kind of spiritual role, like a guardian, in the final scenes of the film in the double death of Domenico and Andrei. It is in this sense that when the dog senses Domenico’s incoming immolation, its bark is not only for Domenico but Andrei as well.
The horse, on the other hand, occupies a much different function than the dog. It does not appear in the same way in the virtual and actual worlds. In the actual, the horse only appears as the bronze statue of Aurelius in Rome, while in the virtual, we see a majestic-looking white horse. We have a historical and mythical horse, although we can look at them as one and the same. The one in Rome is under construction, and as Domenico delivers his speeches from atop the horse he becomes the new Aurelius, the minoritarian leader of a history to come. But this history is also blocked by the construction beams, and calcified just like the bottles in the empty pool that Andrei finds in his walk with the flame. In this sense Domenico tries to transform, or rather, rescue a history that is on its last leg. Furthermore, the statue was at one point covered in gold, and it is said that on the day of judgement that it will once again transform into gold. The truth-content of this myth carries over into the virtual in the form of the white horse. In Judeo-Christian views, the messiah is said to come to earth on a white horse. But the white horse of the virtual presents no ideological image of the Revelation, it instead stands at a distance, silently, and without a rider. There is no historical subject to fulfill this revolutionary myth. But in the virtual there is also not a complete distinction to be made between the horse and other assemblage-components, they all play a role in a common plane of immanence, in a singular intensity. Any glimpse of affirmation in the virtual is a kind of messianism without the messiah, while the actual shows that there must be a political subject that enables the revolutionary and world-historical rupture into the new human to come.
Where we first saw water as marking a kind of depth with regards to space, the feather, on the other hand, introduces an ascending/descending movement that marks a verticality, or “height” in a given refrain. This could be seen in the images of stairs as well, but it takes on its highest degree of intensity with regards to the feather. A flock of birds fly up in a rush, like when they fly out of the refectory, only to have their feathers slowly fall back down. Ascension brings the earth toward the heavens and descension brings the heavens down to earth. The religious implications are clear in this regard, the motif of the bird is highly spiritual. But this brings forth an issue that is an old philosophical problem, back to the Greeks. In Plato’s Phaedrus, while categorizing different kinds of madness, he describes the madness of the lover, not the madness of the poet, in terms of “the man who, on seeing beauty here on earth, and being reminded of true beauty, becomes winged and, fluttering with eagerness to fly upwards but unable to leave the ground, looking upwards like a bird, and taking no heed of the things below, causes him to be regarded as mad” (30). For Plato, it is the experience of beauty which initiates the upward movement that is socially regarded as madness. Tarkovsky takes up a similar question that equally relies upon the question of the bird/feather. But there are numerous essential differences in Tarkovsky compared to Plato. First, where Plato issues a priori a capacity to be initiated into madness via aesthetic experience, Tarkovsky, as we have seen, has been constantly calling into question the degree to which this is possible in modern administered society. For Tarkovsky, objects take primacy over any pre-established subject. This is pushed to the point where the question of what kinds of becomings each character is caught up in are irrelevant or even nonexistent, rather, each character, as we have seen, is alienated from one another, caught up in their individual decomposing refrains that only function fully cohesively in the virtual realm. This often takes the form of the motif of the modern inability to love, which differs starkly from Plato. This alienation from others leads to very few moments of ascending movement from Tarkovsky’s characters. No one reaches toward the heavens à la Mayuri in Steins;Gate. So we see the old Platonic form of madness in love completely abolished in favor of the poetic madness that also relies upon a relationship to beauty.
But the motif of the bird is salvaged and renewed, as Tarkovsky enables it to gain a complete and overpowering form of autonomy with regards to its function in the poet/madman assemblage. Two moments demonstrate this autonomy: the birds which fly out of the refectory which initiate the switch from the face of the Madonna to the virtual face of Andrei, who then picks up a feather, looks up, and then sees an angel walk by the home slowly in the distance; and then the moment when, while Andrei is drunk in the subterranean home of Domenico, a feather slowly spirals down from a hole in the ceiling to land in a puddle.
Our immediate question is: what is the relationship between the flock and the lone feather? That which erupts versus slowly spirals? We can see that both point toward natural beauty and both have the power to initiate strong deterritorializations in a given refrain. It is in this sense that they also serve as transversal lines between the actual and virtual as well. Furthermore, both are stripped of the musical quality that is to be expected from anything to do with birds, that autonomy instead is granted to water. Where they differ is that the ascension of the flock points toward sudden, nomadic, swarming, and cosmic deterritorializations within the actual, while the descending movement of the feather points toward a quiet, subtler yet more intense virtual prospect of a singular kind of human being. The many and the one.
When Adorno describes “something frightening [which] lurks in the songs of birds”, he notes this same fright, “appears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divinations, forever presaging ill fortune [...] The ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity” (AT 66). There is a clear historical constellation here with the flock that travels through ancient, primordial fears, through christianity (the refectory), and lives on in natural beauty as well. But what Adorno misses is the source of this ancient fear, “the spell in which [birds] are enmeshed”, is precisely the source of a great revolutionary power (66). The eruption of the birds is the eruption of the ancient power of the pack, the swarm, which religion and modern enlightenment thought continually capture and repress. It is an actual image of a virtual political assemblage that itself is yet to actualize. It is pure, complete, collective bodily innervation. In this sense the ascending movement is profoundly historical.
The flock initiates a kind of circuit which brings us to the feather as Andrei picks it up in the virtual realm. Where the flock was actual, we are now brought to the opposite end of the motif of the bird, the feather which is now a completely virtual partial object. The angel gives us a clue toward what an actualization of this object would look like. The Many of the flock find its virtual counterpart in the slow movement of the One of the angel, which gives us a glimpse into a new kind of human. It is a human without God, without idols, but a human which is now angelic (recall the white horse here as well). But this brings us to another moment in the same circuit which appears much later, as the virtual feather actualizes itself in the descent toward the puddle. This marks the completion of the circuit, as the feather lands in the puddle, in a moment of quiet deterritorializing shock. So while there are the two initial divisions between the flock and feather, the deterritorialized refectory versus the one feather falling from the heavens, they each form a single circuit which brings us from the actual to the virtual and back to the actual which is now in a completely renewed form (as we are brought to Rome where Domenico gains a public political role and now Andrei is able to have just enough strength to fulfill Domenico’s wish regarding the flame). So the ascending/descending movement of the bird/feather enables the following formula: A → V → A’ .