Meontological-Gyrational Investigation: Re-examining Gilles Deleuze and Film Phenomenology via Daoism

Abstract

This research focuses on how Daoism can integrate and reframe Gilles Deleuze and film phenomenology’s theories, whose different discourses on cinematic spacetime, the operational process of the image-consciousness, as well as the relationship between humans and the cinematographic image, have aroused heated debate. On the one hand, Vivian Sobchack points out that Deleuze overlooks the significance of our lived experience and the lived space that is in-formed with time in his two volumes on cinema. By taking cinema as a lived-body, which inhabits a lived-world, film phenomenology emphasises an intersubjective exchange between the filmic body and the human body, with each body being at once an embodied subject and an enworlded object. On the other hand, Deleuze criticises that film phenomenology fails to consider the formational process of beings, individuality, and subjectivity, because they take the two bodies as separate entities, which initiate two centred consciousnesses: a cinematic consciousness and a human consciousness. Deleuze contends that these two bodies are best understood as processes of individuation or becoming, which are transindividuated into an anthropotechnical consciousness or image-consciousness.

Despite their different understandings of body and consciousness, their theories are not contradictory to each other. Rather, they can be examined integratedly via Daoist philosophy. According to Daoism, Dao (often translated as the Way or way-making) serves as what Thomé H. Fang calls a meontological basis of forms and existences, which is potential to generate all things and relationalities through an interaction between two mutually contesting and interdependent forces: yang (a creative force or active state of being) and yin (a procreative force or passive process of becoming). The modulation between these two mutually transformative forces, meanwhile, involves a gyration to fan (return) to Dao, which further triggers the reconstruction and reconfiguration of different things and relationalities. Based on this understanding, I argue that Deleuze’s transindividuation of the image-consciousness can be reinterpreted through the modulation between two forces (yang and yin), which is instantiated into film phenomenology’s intersubjective and intrasubjective exchanges between two bodies. As each body can be considered an ever-changing assemblage of forces, with their modulation constantly fan (returning) to Dao (pure relationality), the relationships between subject and object as well as humans and the cinematographic image are continually in-formed, reversed, dismantled, and reconfigured.

By initiating a cross-cultural conversation between Daoism, Deleuze, and film phenomenology, this line of research can be regarded as a response to a call for decolonising film theory and philosophy via Asian thoughts and methods. Such an approach has already been conducted by a group of film scholars since the 1990s, who employed Asian philosophies and ideas as a method to address certain issues insoluble or overlooked in Euro-American debates. Meanwhile, this comparative dialogue lays a theoretical foundation for us to better understand films of the South China New Wave, which is a new film movement that emerged in China around 2015. I examine how the cinematic space of these southern films becomes part of a life-process, how its operation of the image-consciousness initiates a fragmentary-navigational observing process, and how its Daoist aesthetics of you (navigating) presents a sense of aimlessness, disorientation, and rootlessness of the young generation under the contemporary postsocialist context.

Date of Award	1 May 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Ho Lok Victor Fan (Supervisor) & Chris Berry (Supervisor)