This project addresses the problem of monovalent interpretations of habit’s role in a creative means of living within the literature. Analyses tend to opt for an either/or logic, in which the majority of research conducted reflects a detrimental, constraining role for habit as regards creativity while responses to this dominant position still operate under a singularly-positive understanding of habit. Introducing a multivalent conception of habit is a component within the broader purpose of challenging dominant conceptions of political improvement or “progress” (acknowledging how historically- and contemporarily-loaded such a term remains), while leaving open the much-needed potential for change. The research demonstrates the dangerous, immobilizing interaction between individual habit formation and the modern, linear teleological focus on political prediction and destination. Concurrently, it points to the benefits to creativity habit can provide when individual habituation is immersed in a different sense of political engagement. This bipartite argument is made through a Bergsonian method, built up from the intuitive primacy of flow and becoming and their decomposition into apparently stable forms and relations. Inspiration is drawn not only from the works of Bergson, but also Deleuze, Heidegger, and successors. By examining the multiple lines internal to habit, the research prescribes the importance of a balanced approach to the direction of political effort between a sense of improvement which advances to livable destinations and a sense which departs from unlivable locations. This is not a balance of the middle way, but of the constant passage between polar extremes (a both/and logic of habit) and individual negotiation amongst free and constrained political actions. By opening up the complexities of habit, subsequent work can interrogate further social and political elements which enable the persistence of teleological ideology and develop new political mechanisms to promote meaningfully diverse engagement and openness to the radically unpredictable. / Graduate

Deleuze closes his study of the shift in Foucault’s work from the archive to the diagram with a consideration of the outside of the outside, maybe too affirmative a conclusion for Foucault; maybe not yet fully facing what would be the full realization of the diagram only pointed to in the “Postscript.”

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Our impressions of this lifeworld are contingent upon our ability to see (in every conflicting meaning of the word). This paper reviews a body of scholars who often share disparate, "incompatible" ontological commitments in effort to examine how their ordering of concepts may reveal a deeper fluidity and permeability between all states of inquiry, creation and investigation into Being and Time. It begins with perspective, examining our subjective presence in the context of the camera apparatus and considers how the mirroring of mechanical instrumentation, namely the rotary shutter and optics of the camera has limited the true function of the cinema to a narrow, representational form. It considers the spiritual implications of the apparatus, exploring, regardless of what is filmed, what the method of inscription from still photos into motion means in regards to consciousness. The paper then investigates what the role of abstraction is in the context of a spiritually minded camera apparatus and attempts to reconcile Deluzian and phenomenological perspectives about film consciousness. All of this is, after all, is in the conceptual support of the four channel video installation Phase Space. The paper does not seek to, or claim to apply readymade philosophical concepts to cinema, rather it explicitly attempts to examine and discuss cinema on its own virtues and investigate how it can express itself as an experimental form of philosophy.

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