Smoke on the Water

In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant relates an amusing anecdote about a philosopher being asked “What is the weight of smoke?” The answer given was: “Subtract from the weight of the burnt wood the weight of the remaining ashes, and you will have the weight of the smoke.”

Although Kant’s anecdote refers to the determination of substance through phenomena, we can use the same method to analyse mimesis itself. If we take our everyday reality as a phenomenological benchmark (yes, I know, it is all relative.. but we are human beings after all that work pretty much the same way from one exemplar to the next) and compare that to the everyday reality of the space station in Solaris, we see that what happens in outer-space does not happen “like on Earth”—except for the neighbor’s girlfriend running around in her negligee! The way the characters interact with each other, the various situations depicted, the concerns expressed, the switch from color footage to black-and-white, the way the characters and objects appear and disappear within the drama, are not the way that events usually manifest themselves i.e. would happen, in our everyday shared objective reality. The fact that language exists, that it serves as a common base that enables us to communicate with one another, allows one to postulate that objective reality constitutes a shared basis for subjective consciousness. And although it is impossible to ascertain whether or not this objective reality presents itself in the same way to all individuals participating in a shared consciousness, most of us behave as if it does.

If we describe through language or present through moving images a subjective reality which differs with that which we have come to expect as objective reality, and we compare the differences which emerge from this alternative consciousness or variance with reality to what we usually conceive as consciousness or objective reality, that residuum constitutes abstract meaning. And depending on which aspects of the subjective reality are compared to the common manifestation of these aspects in objective reality we end up with what could be categorized as a taxonomy of images that emerges in Deleuze’s Cinema 1—The Movement Image and Cinema 2—The Time Image.