The work of Gilles Deleuze was dedicated in a fundamental sense to a particular political problem, that of the production of what he described as a new type of ‘people to come’. This would be a people distinct from the historical peoples produced by nation-states, institutions, laws and social contracts; a people different to those dreamed of and made possible by the many different ideological projects of the modern era. It would be a people defined indeed by a positive destruction of the conditions of possibility for those various projects, brought together by a desire not to change the world in order to make it a better place, but to see the world for what it really is, in all its incoherence and brokenness. This would be a people, he argued, no longer concerned as such with the problem of how to act but precisely with how to see, and how especially to see the intolerability of the world as it is revealed to be, once we start to privilege sight over action, and open our perception to the poverty and forms of oppression that otherwise pass us by (Deleuze 2005; Deleuze 1989; Reid 2013). This new people, this ‘people to come’, expressed in effect, Deleuze argued, a new typology on which to base its struggle against poverty and oppression, that of ‘the seer’, and a new kind of imaginary on which to form political community, a community of seers possessive of the collective perception of the intolerability of present social relations and defined by a common will to destroy them and remake those relations anew (Reid 2013).

A community of seers possessive of the collective perception of the intolerability of the present; this is also a people that, Deleuze tells us, endures a particularly intense relation with images as such. A people that, as the second volume of the Cinema series tells us, does not simply know how to use images in order to render its movement efficient, by subjecting images to its bodily needs, but sees time in its images, and that, in seeing time, also suffers disorientation, losing that capacity for efficiency in movement within space that was the hallmark of the peoples of the past (Deleuze 1989: 44–7).