Rhizomatic Narratology: Towards a Philosophy of the Global Digital Village

This paper seeks to interrogate Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as integral to a philosophy of narratology within post-digital film spectatorship. Tensions are created around received philosophical theory when innovative technology is taken up by an established exhibitive form to create a new socio-aesthetic practice. The emergent phenomenon of using mobile phones as platforms for the making (and showing) of film for a post-digital society, creates new opportunities for filmmaker/audience engagement with meaning creation and understanding of shared experiences of certain filmic narrative and spectatorial realities. The defining terms we use throughout are phone films (to describe the film products themselves) and cell cinema (as a descriptor of the social phenomenon of exhibiting and sharing films at dedicated film festivals) . The post-digital represents a breakdown of the authoritarian structures which guide traditional narrative practice.  What Deleuze postulates in his theory of ‘the worst’ is not the breakdown of these barriers, but the reaction to the breakdown.  If the barriers are transgressed then the reaction of the author is to impose boundaries with greater force.  This amounts to an act of authorial violence against the reader or spectator. The individuated yet networked mode of engagement of post digital media circumvents authorial regulation, producing a visual regime that diverges from classic accounts of normative cinema spectatorships. In ‘online events’ and as language-unspecific components of international film festivals, post-digital cell cinema challenges existing forms of visual discourse. Its scope is both trans-national and inter-cultural, whilst aspects of narrative truthfulness are held in tension with aspirations for creative expression. Post-digital filmmaking is rhizomatic because its barriers are porous. Therefore, this paper explores the discursive activity, central to the engagement of digital filmmaker and spectator, which inhabits a space where truth and reality are scrutinised in terms of narratology and contemporary validity.