The Notion of Becoming-Child: A Deleuzian becoming-child of Tarkovsky’s cinematic practice

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the philosophical notion of becoming-child in respect to the films of the Russian director, Andréi Tarkovsky. Children, the image of the child and the gendered figures of the girl and the boy are themes that run through the work of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and feature prominently in his joint writings with the psychoanalyst, Félix Guattari. Rather than trying to explain who the Deleuzian child figure (as a metaphysical entity) is, or to explore many different children found in his texts, this thesis focuses instead on a generative force that constitutes a child and precedes the apparently confining parameters of adulthood. Breaking prior templates of thought, what springs up in between the binary of the child and the adult is sweeping up both of them into a becoming, which is a continuous becoming-different of identity along vectors or trajectories set by either term (Deleuze & Guattari 2011: 249). The Deleuzo-Guattarian child articulated in their collaborative text of 1980, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (an accompaniment to their 1972 text, Anti-Oedipus) provides a framework for understanding a child and children explored throughout this thesis. Resolving the undecidability of the adult-child binary is as an invitation to consider a generation of children as vectors or trajectories of affect. These pre-personal and pre-ontological movements of individuation will be used for diagramming a child and children in their becomings. The affective analysis also suggests ways of thinking the degrees of power constitutive of the becoming-child of children. The concept of becoming-child explored in this thesis focuses on the language of becoming (affect, assemblage and milieu). Considering the positive contribution of the child to its own individuation is therefore unhinged from actual children, but not separated from their ways of communication and modes of expression. It is important to note that relating to the world ‘by means of dynamic trajectories’ is not a capacity that is proper to children (Deleuze 1997: 61), but can be activated by actual children under the right conditions. The project of (re)thinking the becoming-child is a project of experimentation, of composing rather than constructing, previously un- or under-explored ways of (re)producing/revealing children as performing through creative practices of literature and cinema, in order to discover new possibilities of existing and engaging with the other(s) and the world(s). Through ethical expression, we need to evaluate our current mode of existence, seeking to expand, change, or abandon it in the effort to achieve another way of living and another form of community. The thesis attempts to further intensify and expand the concept of the becoming-child in order to examine possible connections with Tarkovsky’s cinematic practice. The aim is to enable Tarkovsky’s cinema to turn to the outside – to a non-representational force of becoming (a constitutive of the becoming-child of children). The thesis then explores how Tarkovsky’s films are assembling with various outside(s) – of language, art, society, community and subjectification – in experimentations with the world and further in exchange between selves and others. Tarkovsky’s cinema in both its formal and textual aspects might be productively linked, as this thesis argues, to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-child. According to Deleuze, cinema is involved into the production of images and a quest for ‘thought without an image’ (Deleuze 1994: 132). The dissertation is therefore not searching for an image or a model, but an ever-varying series of ways and means (practices, operations and procedures) constrained only by what we bring into an encounter with the outside confronting an inside, unthinkable and unthought –through cinematic experience. These multiple vectors of thought commonly demonstrate the intimately bound relationship between aesthetics, ethics, politics and ontology that will be explored through Tarkovsky’s cinema.