The Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy

9. Numbers and Fractals: Neuroaesthetics and the Scientific Subject

· 229 ·· CHAPTER 9 · Numbers and Fractals: Neuroaesthetics and the Scientific Subject Patricia Pisters Scientific knowledge of the brain has evolved, and carried out a general arrangement. The situation is so complicated that we should not speak of a break, but rather of new orientations . . . It is obviously not through the influence of science that our relationship with the brain changed: perhaps it was the opposite, our relationship with the brain having changed first, obscurely guiding science. . . . The brain becomes our problem or our illness, our passion, rather than our mastery, our solution or decision. We are not copying Artaud, but Artaud lived and said something about the brain that concerns all of us: that “its antennae turned towards the invisible,” that it has the capacity to “resume a resurrection from the death.” —Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image The popularity of mathematics and scientific reasoning in contemporary culture is evident from popular television series such as Numb3rs (CBS, since 2005) and Hollywood films about mathematicians such as Good Will Hunting (Gus van Sant, 1997), A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2000), and Proof (John Madden, 2005). Besides a general fascination for mathematics as principle underlying all kind of phenomena in our world, these films also indicate a particular interest in the brain, the mind of the scientist in particular. It is a classic trope to feature the scientist as a mad mind, but contemporary cinema shows that something else is at stake as well. The mathematician in contemporary popular culture may be socially not adapted, even paranoid and schizophrenic, but what is going on in this particular mind is no longer considered as completely 230 PATRICIA PISTERS deranged and totally opposed to a normal functioning brain. Instead, the scientific and “mad” mind in popular culture seems to indicate deep metaphysical and ontological truths. In this essay I will propose the hypothesis that the popular obsession with mathematics and the mind of the scientist is related to a Deleuzian ontology of differences, repetitions , and folds that finds a full expression in films that not only deal with mathematics and madness in terms of their content (such as the Hollywood films indicated above) but also in terms of their particular “neuroaesthetic” style. The limitless beauty and power of numbers and geometric figures such as spirals and fractals that are at the basis of this style are related to the limitless powers of thought where madness and metaphysics fold and unfold in each other and point toward an “ungrounded ontology” of the virtual. Departing from the idea that “the brain is the screen,”1 I will start by looking at the changing relationships between cinema and the (neuroscientific) brain, from the movement -image and the time-image to a contemporary “neuro-image.” In the second part, I will develop this concept of the neuro-image further by looking at two films of Darren Aronofksy, Pi (1997) and The Fountain (2007), relating them to Deleuze’s ideas on thought in Difference and Repetition and on Leibniz’s Baroque mathematics in The Fold. I will argue that aesthetically both of these films give us, in two different ways, direct access to a scientific brain that reaches out to the universal questions of the genesis of the universe: life, death, and belief. In doing so, these films could be considered as the extreme poles of contemporary neuroaesthetics in cinema that reveal its profound relations to the forces of the virtual. Cinema and the Brain The Movement-Image: Thought, Tropes, and the Mad Scientist Beforeenteringthespecificcharacteristicsofcontemporarycinema’s relation to neuroscientific discoveries about the brain and the mind (and the importance of mathematics), it is useful to recall how in the past cinema dealt with these issues. As Deleuze reminds us in The Time-Image, cinema has always had a profound relation with thinking, the connection to the brain even being cinema’s essence: “It is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a NUMBERS AND FRACTALS 231 shock to thought, communication vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly.”2 Cinema produces “nooshocks” to the brain; cinema and the brain enter into a circuit that produces new thoughts. The cinema of Eisenstein, which combines emotional images of attraction with intellectual montage, is for Deleuze the paradigmatic example of the organic way in which the movement-image connects to thought. In cinema of the movement-image...