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1 ‘The Multiplicity is Among Us’: Silence and the Machinic Phylum in Fritz Lang’s M (1931)
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Published:October 2021
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Abstract
The book opens with an analysis of M, Fritz Lang’s first sound film, starring Peter Lorre as the child murderer, Hans Beckert. The film borrows a lot of the techniques that were popular in German radio at that time –the sound of gongs to introduce new scenes or programmes; newspaper headlines read aloud as diegetic exposition – and it also lacks a musical score (a staple of so-called silent cinema during actual screenings). The film’s key ideological underpinning is the World War I veteran Ernst Jünger’s application of the war ego, based on the dictum, ‘kill or be killed,’ to the peacetime ego of ‘thou shalt not kill’ whereby the former overrides the latter in a mechanized society driven by what he called ‘second consciousness’ and what Michel Foucault would subsequently call the dispositif. The film’s silences represent what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘machinic phylum,’ a vector of forces that links different points as pre-subjective singularities but also brings them together as aggregates/totalities. Thus the phylum represents Beckert’s untrammeled desires that defy the dispositif (largely because they are unrepresentable except as an internal snuff film that can only be halted in the actual act of killing).
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