Anarchy & Alchemy

by Corry Shores
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The following presentation was scheduled for the 2012 Deleuze Studies Conference in New Orleans. A canceled flight prevented me from giving it. Yet I highly recommend it. And because it is liberated from its actual occurrence, I am expanding it to include an Andy Kaufman section. The work here is in part inspired by jtriley's response to one of my blog entries. At the end I will place extra discussion to make this into a promised reply to jtriley's post.

Corry Shores

Who's the Real Paul Masson? Personal Non-Identity in Deleuze's Orson Welles

Orson Welles had difficulty obtaining funding for his movies, so he raised his own money through acting

He even did commercial advertisements.

Yet we can hear in his infamous “frozen peas” outtakes that this was not always his favorite form of acting.

Later he endorsed Paul Masson wine in television commercials. We will see in the outtakes that he reads from a script. So he is acting. But the character he portrays is still himself, still Orson Welles. And his job is to represent the product. If we drink enough of Paul Masson, we become drunk. In these outtakes, is Orson Welles intoxicated? Or is he perhaps faking or acting drunk?

The final version uses the footage but with overdubbed audio. Does it feel like a more authentic presentation of Paul Masson wine? We compare the two and wonder, who’s the real Paul Masson?

Both versions were scripted for Welles; both are false self-portrayals in a sense. But did we feel that the first one was more real or had more power of authenticity of some sort? And what about the humor in this parody? Does it not seem like an honest, and yet, original presentation?

These clips serve to introduce our main theme of the originating power of the false. We will combine Deleuze’s writings on determinability in the third synthesis of time with his explanation of Orson Welles’ notion of fakery. Somehow, fakery as forgery or as role-acting can be productive of our authentic self-becoming and it is based on the temporal immediacy of the now and the next. Self-falsification might be how we continuously vary from ourselves, and it could rest upon the paradoxical structure of time. Let’s begin first by noting that Orson Welles considered himself a magician.

He explains:

Fortune telling as stage magic is as well fakery for Welles. Yet this falsification can magically transform the performer into someone too close to the real.

The fakery became real through the acting. Forgery can somehow be authenticity. Welles’ film F for Fake is partly a documentary on real life painting-forger Elmyr.

So normally we think of the forgery as coming after the model it falsifies. Yet there is way for self-creative originality to be produced through forged falsification. Consider Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast. It had every appearance of a normal music radio show that is periodically interrupted by progressively unsettling news flashes that detail an alien invasion. Millions of listeners panicked, thinking the invasion was real.

Now, notice how Welles confesses he uses normal broadcasting conventions. Then also note that the second reporter thought Welles’ faked broadcast seemed more real than normal ones.

Yet, the broadcast’s believability is not its production of reality. There have since been recreative variations of it for example, similar techniques but with different content. Although it began as a forgery, as a fake news story, it nonetheless became a real dramatic form inspiring other variations and tributes. Regarding Welles’ fakery, Deleuze writes:

“the forger cannot be reduced to a simple copier, nor to a liar, because what is false is not simply a copy, but already the model. [...] the artist, even Vermeer, even Picasso, is a forger, since he makes a model with appearances, even if the next artist gives the model back to appearances in order to make a new model [...]”

Now, fakery as the creation of reality has the temporality of becoming. Deleuze writes

“it is so difficult to define ‘the’ forger, because we do not take into account his multiplicity, his ubiquity, and because we are content to refer to a historical and ultimately chronological time. But everything is changed in the perspective of time as becoming.”

To illustrate the ‘pure event’ of becoming, Deleuze recalls the scenes in Alice’s Wonderland when her body rapidly expands.

As she becomes larger, she of course becomes larger than the size she just was. But in that same stroke, she is as well ‘becoming smaller’ than the sizes she is now growing into. If we are assuming she will continue her growth, then in the next moment, she will be larger; but, that coming largerness is still smaller than the even larger size that comes after that. So it is not that Alice is larger and smaller than herself. Rather, Alice is becoming larger and smaller than herself.

"Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming […]. becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future."

Deleuze third synthesis of time is the synthesis of the future: it synthesizes the now with the next, and he roots his account in Kant’s critical analysis of Descartes’ cogito argument, I think, therefore I am. We will put aside many of its complexities to focus on the concept of determinability, which is like the infinitely tight crack that temporally differentiates the now from the next while at the same time bringing them together into absolute immediacy.

To illustrate self-consciousness as a disjunctive synthesis with our now and our next, Deleuze turns to the story of Actaeon’s transformation. After he happened upon goddess Diana bathing naked in the wood, she turned him into a deer. He becomes aware of this when seeing his new animal form reflected in the water. Actaeon both recognizes it is himself, for it is his self staring back at him, while at the same time, he must recognize himself as becoming something completely different than who he had been right up until then. In a manner of speaking, to be self-conscious means we must look in the water and see a dear, and yet still identify with that other, as if to say, “that is me, but who am I?” Being a self means being an other to oneself. Now consider our first time jumping into deep water. At the moment of the leap, we in a way have determined ourselves as being a capable swimmer. However, we have not yet reached the water and actualized our new status. In that passage between states, we affirm our determinability, our always being glued to the other self we are becoming. Consider then Deleuze’s discussion of the relay characters in Welles’ Mr. Arkardin. Because of how each character follows the other in succession with all being odd but in their own ways, they seem to be a series of metamorphoses, as if one character hands off the baton to the next in a relay race.

Do we not undergo metamorphoses throughout our lives, as if we as well hand off the baton from one state of ourselves to the following different one? Each runner is different, but all are connected by a chain of direct contacts. We see this sort of determinability in Rosenberg Cool Hand Luke. When Luke claims he can eat 50 eggs, he is not then really such a person, because no one has done it before. Yet by making the declaration, he glues himself to his forthcoming self-variation, and in that way affirms his determinability.

Is this something like acting or like making oneself a forgery? Consider this clip of Welles passing himself off as Churchill, who was passing himself off as Welles, who was passing himself off as Othello.

Acting as someone we are not can in many cases be a source of vitality and growth, and an inherent part of every moment of our lives. Perhaps we have some control over our self-forgeries and we may guide ourselves toward worthwhile and vital selves to become. Let’s now end with a celebrity roast. Welles, like all other participants of these shows, makes light of the celebrities with slightly insulting jabs. But no so for Jimmy Stewart. Welles instead roasts other actors lacking Stewart’s courage to give anti-violent male portrayals. When we emulate admirable traits even to the degree of mimicry, now really, would this be inauthenticity? Or is there another standard at work? Could not fraudulent self-forgeries be evaluated according to the vitality, originality, and constructive self-creativity they produce? , would insult the celebrity in the roast. But not so for Jimmy Stewart. His jokes were directed at those unlike Stewart, the rest was praise, admiration, and declaration of the worthiness of becoming more like him.