4 b 4 b 4 (x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4)
Imagine the frame physically squashed and collapsed into a line. It’s barely visible, like the leading edge of a mirror, except that at its end only a point is visible.
The frame was never a limit or constraint. It was, in a way, an incitement. It asked: What do we want to put in the frame? What do we want to show? The information revolution has been about putting trillions of frames together but collapsed onto themselves and stacked so the only visible part of them is that point of light or dark at its end.
Each frame has, however, become endless, in the sense of a line, having neither beginning nor end. But the beauty in this schema derives from the fact that none of the lines can cross. The design is contrived in such a way as to completely rule out cross-contaminations of force.
Once a frame collapses into an infinite line, it properly envelopes a totality. What we choose to put in the frame and show is a whole world. In other words, each frame is an attempt to totalise and essentialise. Force is about what we put through. The collapsed frame becomes a line of force.
Deleuze writes about Nietzsche’s aphorisms in this way, as confluences of force: What is it necessary to put through them in order to make them work? The type of work Deleuze has in mind for them is liberatory and revolutionary. So the demand for readers of the aphorisms is to make the connection with an outside of thought. A connection with the outside is already part of the construction of the aphorisms, part of the way they work, but readers are necessary to the process as a kind of raw material or as willing subjects. Readers of the aphorisms are, in this reading, subjected to a becoming-revolutionary so long as they will and are willing but regardless of what they will.
A forced cross-contamination of totalities, a crossing of lines, and the putting of disparate things in apposition: isn’t this just another squashing of the frame? Opening a window, letting in a new light, under the tyranny of which, new things will be exposed? And with the will of the reader channeled by the lines of force (or line of forces) and subjected to their pre-existing tyranny can we really say the possibility of escape arises? From the law, the contract or the institution?
The black humour, the irony might lie in pointing out that resistance is futile and that no one can escape the future. Because the future will have been collapsed, a channel stacked, archived, amongst other channels … frame on frame, frame of reference of frame of mind, collapsed … the machine in the ghost, line of force beside line, and line after line … a reading machine as much as a writing machine, a war machine as much as any machine, framing its material, forcing the material according to the frame, and making of the process fact.