This book aims to place the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in dialogue with contemporary digital media, and is animated by a conviction that this move might help us to better understand both digital media and Deleuze’s thought. While Deleuze himself wrote relatively little about the digital, my claim is that his work nevertheless offers us a valuable set of concepts for thinking through the explosive proliferation of digital images that characterises twenty-first-century life. In particular, I argue that his two-volume study of cinema – Cinema I: The Movement-Image, and Cinema II: The Time-Image – can help us to grasp the complex ways in which digital images both provoke and problematise our thinking. These images make us think, in the simultaneously troubling and optimistic senses of that phrase, and I believe that Deleuze’s work is particularly useful in drawing out this tension. In this context, I turn to the difficult concept of the ‘outside’ (dehors), which Deleuze takes up from the literary philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, redeploying this idea to help us think through digital image cultures.

The ‘outside’ emerges from one of Deleuze’s keenest intuitions about film: that it is the site of unique experiments with the unseen. In order to understand this apparently paradoxical claim, we might think first of a simple example from Chaplin. In A Woman of Paris (1923), a train arrives at the platform, but all we see are the shadows and luminosity of its windows, traced across the waiting woman’s face. We don’t actually see the train – it doesn’t, indeed, exist – yet its implied or virtual presence determines the very content of the image. In this way, through an exercise in framing, the image is constituted as much by what is ‘outside’ the frame as that which we see articulated before us in movement and in gesture. Of course, we might object that this device is found in other artforms. Painting has long used similar methods for projecting an ‘out-of-frame’, such as often implicates the spectator. But cinema’s capacities for the expression of both movement and time afford it unique powers in this space. By putting its images in motion – or rather by composing images from motion – cinema likewise renders this ‘unseen’ kinetic, causing it to become dynamic, fluid and multiple.