SIMON TAYLOR

A framing note…

The following article advances a post-cinematic theory of perception. It draws from Bergson and Deleuze, and from the associated milieux, in biology, technics and metaphysics respectively, of Raymond Ruyer, Gilbert Simondon and Spinoza, to provide its conceptual framework. The article assumes no specialist knowledge. Rather than critical, defensive or argumentative, the method is that of affirmation, of affirmative writing, such as Deleuze finds in Nietzsche. It stages the problem from the middle. Cinema functions neither as object, medium, historical formation, nor metaphor. The article considers cinema instead in terms of perceptual affects that are cinematic, and of the change these signify in the relation, fundamental to reality, of being and time.

Cinema is shown to introduce a new perception of time, time under the condition of repeatability. The move from Bergson is to treat time as duration and to cast cinematic perception in the light of his theory of perception, clearly laid out in Matter and Memory. I attempt therefore to see around the corner of Bergson’s dismissal of cinema, and Deleuze’s cinematic metaphysics (in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2), to what cinema as duration signifies in a world to come. This world is constructed at the convenience of technology. It assumes the primary condition of cinematic time: in discrete time units, it is repeatable. The consequences of this, explicitly in regard to artificial intelligence, are the subject of the article which follows.

Cinema…

Cinema gives us a new perception of time as breakable into discrete units. Cinema introduces these into perception. It contracts time into movement and images, which breaks the continuity of perception. Perception is broken into time units, images and movements; or motion and pictures. This had before cinema not been seen.

Philosophy, the art of describing the fundamental structure of reality, and physics, the science of describing the fundamental structures of reality, have ignored cinema, the art of describing time that is fundamental to that structure, so that it has become the way time is perceived. Its own perception has been universalised, generalised.

Cinema perceives reality
to be cut up into
discrete units of time.

The cut which it presupposes is between image and movement. Any cause here lies in conditions which are properly cinematic. This is to say they take their explanatory force not from it as an historical formation or from the way it structures a preexisting perceptual or phenomenological field. Not from cinema as a technical intervention or an extension in that field, or even a technology generating a visual field, but it is from cinema as a perceiving principle that they take their force. This work on cinema takes as its prior condition that it is cinematic perception which has its own distinct and distinctive duration, by which it can be read, distinguished and can signify.

Here is the condition which conditions those that follow. Not the necessary conditions for perception but of perception, they affect everything that is perceived. To say they structure reality is a way of looking at it that admits other possible structural courses.

Other possible courses may be attributed to philosophy and to science. These are not taken. They are cinematised: the way cinematic conditions structure reality is generalised. Science’s instrumental interest is invested in technology which takes for its conditions cinema’s. Philosophy’s speculative interest aligns itself with science’s, where it is compromised, but not before compounding. Philosophy reinforces assumptions leading to science being instrumentalised by technology along lines that are cinematic for drawing their conditions from cinema, foremost among which is the criterion for its earliest success, its capture of nature. This was not yet in creative dialogue with nature except in so far as it could be shown, leading to the exploitation of and commercial interest in, where all the interests overlap, technologies better at showing it.

Among them artificial intelligence is exemplary.

We have only to swap
time-units
for sense-units.

These are the images of artificial intelligence which move. Moving they occupy time. Usefully called tokens, the trick here is to keep them moving so that the time they occupy appears to coincide with the time we used to inhabit. After cinema this is easy. The break has already occurred and we accept that the continuity of temporal perception, consciousness, is so breakable.

Against the discontinuity of time signified by cinema, which is a fact of its perception, and which does not account for the persistence of memory or allow, except for a scene or two, for that of the self, continuity insistently prevails. The cinematic is memory-less just like artificial intelligence is subject-less. A real problem of cinematic perception arises then in the perceiving subject between the biological brain and, much as we would like to reduce them to sense-units, faculties of mind. These, like memory, are irreducible.

The problem is exactly that

different processes
of perception
conserve time differently.

For cinema it is in the shot which is always a matter of duration. For artificial intelligence it is switch-time or transistor-time which is technically effected, unlike processing-time which is its abstract or symbolic diagramme. For the process of perception embodied biologically that is biological intelligence the autonomic function of memory conserves time.

Science, taking the route dictated by its instrumental interest, technology, has not acknowledged the role of perception. Specifically it has not acknowledged how significantly cinema has affected practices in different fields, most notably neuroscience and psychology. In general empirical evidence is drawn from recorded images. Its affiliation, by way of instrumental interest, conflating technology and tools, the different fields of science have tended to take cinema for a kindred spirit and relied on it.

All these fields continue to have a relationship with the future philosophy for itself puts out of reach. This is because in large part philosophy has ceased to find its objects outside itself. It has not drawn the temporal framework into its own but instead laid out a diagramme in the terms signified by cinema ahead of itself as the abstract object of its speculative interest. It has in other words adapted itself to the temporal schema by finding other expressions for units of time and, while hypostatising continuity, shown the surface to be segmented.

An instrumental interest allies itself, a speculative interest re-processes. It is a practical interest that asks:

What is cinema?
What are its conditions?

What is in a cinematic process of perception, that it is not in the interests, which lie in establishing the fundamental structure of reality, of philosophy or physics to follow?

Repeatability: nowhere in nature, outside of a perceiving subject, until cinema, is movement identical. Nowhere do the relations between time and motion and time and space support the idea of a movement today being the exact replica of a movement yesterday, or a movement tomorrow. In nature, because it is in continuous process, there is no provision for a movement being identical over time.

Philosophy abstracts the idea of identity over time in the concept, which it then gives a practical import. This is because basic concepts like food are as necessary for life as, for the thinker, basic concepts like the meaning of words are. For the philosophical record, it has been argued that concepts like time and space are luxuries of thought and that only as fictions do they sustain their identity over time. More forcefully it has been argued they are limited movements of thought. The force of this is that consciousness itself is in the movement that plays over ideas. Physical movement, taken from the body, is made metaphysical. Put into the brain, it is as a movement that thought can be described.

The concept of the moving image has identity over time because the movement today is the exact replica of the movement yesterday and will be of the movement tomorrow independently of consciousness.

Thinking described
as a movement,
that movement too
may be separated.

Enabling its movement to be represented it is an image of thought without a perceiving consciousness, a movement of sense, without a subject of thought.

Yet it will rely on objects. The objects as little resemble the image of thought as those which confer on the moving image its reality, as little as the brain does consciousness or the images which play across it. Whether symbolic, linguistic or pictorial, whether the products of an artificial or biological intelligence, a philosophical or a cinematic perception, evidence is not searched for in the brain of an image but of a movement with cinematic identity over time. Such is the presumption with which neuroscience is preoccupied.

Assuming cinematic identity, philosophy has proposed becoming adequate to it. It has not described it in reality, except in terms which conform to philosophy’s own, it might be said, process. This puts philosophy in the position of not being able to explain what is not outside it. The terms’ adequacy is not the issue but that it is undeclared.

Philosophy cannot explain what is not outside the process with which it is continuous except by declaring that process to be cinema’s, which it cannot do. It is cinema’s own process of perception and of the temporal discontinuity, the break, it introduces into perception to which the adequation of the concepts, without structural damage, philosophy cannot admit. The terms of one, cinema, cannot be taken into another process of perception, philosophy; because of it

the essential and practical
conditions of cinema
can only be dealt with
indirectly and implicitly
by philosophy.

The first condition is entirely practical: the reliance on objects. They are technical and comprise a material process, however to say so is misleading. It makes a prior condition of parts as if wanting to oppose them to parts that are their opposites but which together form a continuous whole. First it has to be put together before it can be broken. That technical parts are necessary for the whole process, that cinematic perception is contingent on them, there is no doubt. This does not make it in principle or in fact a technical process, a technical medium, or a process or medium of any sort. It is not a process but a process of perception.

To each perception belongs
a distinct and distinctive
duration.

Time is what binds it.

Next is the images. Here it breaks. The image is separated from the structure supporting it, the objects relied on, by that structure. We see it as if the culmination, as if the whole process were achieved in it. So far the break is notional, it is one of sense, but it is decisive. It is fundamental for technology that it get better at achieving it and work towards its own disappearance.

From the moment of the separation between the image and its structure we place, because of instrumental interest science places, in technology the confidence that lets us be taken in by the trick, in exemplary form, of a subject-less sense and of memory-less movement. It is as if, transcending its condition of prior dependency and moving independently, the image summed up the continuous process of perception. The objects relied on are still there, but we are less likely to question theirs than, as simulation, hologram, we are reality as such.

The action by which cinema secures for the image its autonomy institutes the condition of dependence that movement has on time. For the same reason that philosophy cannot explain what is not outside the process with which it is continuous, it is difficult to assert which is prior, independence or dependence. Both result from animation. Belonging to the cinematic image, this is automatic, another way of saying it is perception without subject perceiving. The moving image has always been animated but without a subject animating it. That is, the movement is not animated. It is separated from the technical structure underlying it with which it forms a continuous whole.

This action is the image’s insertion in a new time-line. Here the time-line is cut short, or it is prolonged past the movement. In order to win independence from the present where it was either recorded or where its motion was fabricated (that we prefer to call what we call animation, over the animation moving images have intrinsically, is itself a product of the circumstances being outlined) the movement is made dependent on a time. It is a mistake, a metaphysical mistake, to think of cinema’s presence being ours.

The time in which
the image is inserted
is neither that of the present
nor of any past.

It originates its movement in a possible time aside from any other and, as an aside, it may be noted that this possibility exceeds its instantiation. Once the cinematic possibility of a movement being recorded has come about it is as though this is the case in general and universally. No playback is necessary.

Insertion names an action. Technical media need only be inferred to achieve the same result: the image’s independence from these as from any other bodies. The action includes the time in the image, producing a further condition. Having already gained independence from physical means and perceiving subject, this condition propagates itself in mental life, where it needs no support. (Yet neuroscience still looks for actions in the brain to account for it. And yet

the discretisation of sense
engaged by artificial intelligence
is ignored as the key to its success,

the technology invisibilised.) It is then a condition of the way in which philosophy has adapted itself, or mutilated itself to adapt, to cinema: time and movement, in the specific sense of the image, are one, and a movement is included in a time without seeing that it is discrete. Why not? because it is a product of the continuous whole of a form of perception that is not itself seen to be discrete.

There can be no continuity underlying it but that of duration. This the theory of duration does not allow. The time-units, the segments of time-line, into which all images are inserted, their inclusion a condition of cinema, are discontinuous.

What makes cinema a process of perception is that this perception, well away from objects and subjects, of discontinuity is in continuity with the process underlying it. Cinematic perception has a time, that of fixed and distinct images, by which we can distinguish it. Artificial intelligence similarly has a time, of fixed and discrete sense-units, or tokens, by which we can also distinguish it. What the two hold in common, although they are different, is that in both the discontinuity is not seen for the continuity. Then, not a process: to say process covers over with its continuity the breaks that occur continuous with it. Process in fact makes the breaks its own, of its start- and end-points, and not those of the perception.

Holding time in the movement with which it is continuous, a moving image carries a time forward, that is distinct from either past or present, into the future. This is the distinguishing feature of a moving image. It is forever concurrent with a line, its ends arbitrarily set, that although infinitely extendable and infinitely contractable, can never reach the future.

On the side of still images, beings are extracted and, preserved, memorialised. On the other, they are reunited with the episode of movement that defines them. The contrast does not hold for our perception. In the still we include the episode which together with the image forms the memory. We give it a subject.

The whole process of perception that is cinema’s is not summed up by the image but by the apportionment,

the parceling off
of temporality.

For this perception there is no other matter, no substance but out of it is constructed the reality it perceives; which is another way of saying, neither movement, nor image, time runs through its veins. Cinema apportions time against movement, so that having won independence from a time in which it was it has none from but is dependent on the time in which it is. This in turn has as little to do with the past, the present or future as a singular heartbeat.

We may hear it beating and feel in the pulse blood pumping. It is that body’s time it belongs to, which it animates, no other. For biological perception, the question is always, will it reach into the future? and what has it recorded from the past that may impede it? The present is open to it, when we hear and feel our heartbeat, in the same way, that when the lens-cap is off and the camera is on, what unrolls before it are the images it animates. They are its body, whose time, although movement depend on it, does not depend on movement.

To follow once more the steps which the first condition, the fact of having the bodies in the form of the technical objects cinema relies on constantly present, leads us to miss: the diaphanous bodies of images are freed from the underlying structure sustaining their reality by that structure; they are made dependent on a time, which, to continue the analogy, is their life-time. At each stage it is their movement that matters, until we realise that what enables the freedom and capture of movement also accounts for its absence, when

all we have
is the heartbeat.
The constant
presence of technology

is a sign of its constant presence. This is the error metaphysics is entirely capable of pointing out, but does not: instead presence itself is parceled off into discrete units of time, which according to cinema it is.

A shot can be long or short. It can be continuous with the present. It bears neither a relation of cause or effect to the movement inside it. This is where the time of the shot most closely resembles the time of the physicists. The present that was assumed continuous is now assumed to be breakable, to comprise episodes. These lose the contact with the future the present was supposed to have and cannot reach it. Any action taken here will remain a part of this local duration, which exists indifferently either to action or to motion.

The significance of cinema also consists in enabling us to live as many life-times as there are episodes. Our conscious continuity in the present bundles them by the memorial associations, to which they are placed in relation, we have made in the past. Consciousness, determined as the sum of those relations, its contents are cinematic inasmuch as they result from continuity- cuts. Cuts between durations, they are covered over by the association, which, locally placed, for consciousness loses its relation to the past. It is

a mood,
an atmosphere,
formed from sensation,

for being which it is not entirely visual and may even supplant vision, taking from it its priority.

That this is what appears to happen for those with aphantasia presents a kind of limit case for cinema. In it the assumption of a perceptual modality in which vision takes precedence is tested. Aphantasics, although they may dream in images, experience consciousness without visual imagery. Memorial associations are formed on the basis of conceptual, verbal and non-visual sensory data, so that films tend towards being recalled according to tone, emotion and mood, sometimes with isolated objects, the role of which is symbolic. Its importance in this context is to support the notion that

cinema,
through the way it conserves time,
signifies a change
in the structure
underlying visual perception,

in the way light structures it.

Perception of ourselves as subjects, as much as we are the objects our perception relies on, reminding us of the presence of our bodies, reminds us we have agency. We can conduct our movement independently of the world and of the time the world moves in. Its time-line, assumed to be indifferent to our movement, aggravates the problem already identified: we cannot drag the temporality in which we are immersed into the future. It is as if the future readily perceived by biological perception is unavailable to us.

The condition that results from specifying the length of shot, whether long, short or in continuity with a present, which, despite its openness, it can only describe as a discrete unit, makes abstract that time. Having made movement independent, forming the time around it and then removing the movement, which determines the shot, the time-unit can be anywhere in time. It does not belong to today, yesterday or tomorrow. It may have abstract entity but it is such that cinema concretises that abstraction and is no more abstract than the written word.

For thought
the moving image
represents a desirable
abstraction.

Philosophy aspires to the condition of the view from eternity that is not theological or ontotheological. Cinema proposes this view as one of immanence. Philosophy need only ignore that at the same time that it concretises it discretises.

A shot’s start- and end-points are arbitrary, so that, it bears repeating, in principle there need be neither: a shot can in principle be continuous with all of time, a cut can hold the life-span of the universe or, from bone to satellite, 4 million years. In practice start- and end-points are creatively configured.

Before movements and relations, or thought and all the metaphors used for it, before consciousness, sensation and perception, before being and the media and processes applied to it, cinema is a way of structuring time.

There are
no beings
in cinema.