④ The Region of Images

Yes, this has the same title as a previous digest post, but there it was ambivalent. For Bergson it means the region of images in the brain, that in his time psychology asserted and in ours that neuroscience asserts, which he denies there being. (We might adapt Bergson's meta-diagramme's becoming increasingly elaborate in order to describe language acquisition and recognition for the whole passage between his psychology and our neuroscience. It would involve exactly a materialisation of mental functions, recorded from moving images of the brain, and a dematerialisation of mental images, or what we might call their cinematisation.) Whereas the region of images means, for you reading, what? . . .

Do we only see the passage of time?

Can we hear it?

Smell it?

Taste it?

Feel it?

Perhaps, in different degrees: we hear the passage of time in its effects on a voice, on the tuning of a piano, on the material conditions of its production.

We smell time having passed in the sensory images of decay, in the whiff of the crypt, the scent of death, from the dead, and on the living, food or wood rotting; and in less extreme ways in simple changes, in how a room smells having been left for a period. We compare now and then.

We taste it like we smell it, as a smoke or a coating on the tongue.

We feel it in fabric that has grown threadbare, in textures worn down or, like our skin, wrinkled up, and inside we feel it, but as a diffuse thing, in the accumulation over time of small changes from which we infer it.

We feel it on the inside as both a living image which is that of sensation and from those images we intuit, like body images; Alphonso Lingis speaks in this sense of body image (perhaps in Abuses, 1994?). There are then the further images we extrapolate, both accurately and inaccurately, from these, like snapshots, referring them to real photos if we have them. And this is an interesting tendency to note: the still photo showing better the passage of time than the moving image.

It's as if we have to capture the moving image in its movement, freeze-frame, in order to see what it is exactly we are looking out for: which is the point. We have to go looking for signs, and when it concerns their accuracy, that is when we are most interested, have even to do so with optical signs of passing time's effects. Of course, we might bite into a rotten fruit but it's not the passage of time which we are struck by then. Or we might hear a recording of our own voice when young and think how uncanny it is; but isn't this the same uncanniness in a more extreme form of hearing our recorded voices at all? Time has passed, and that our own acoustic image escapes us more readily than our body image is interesting, but is this a case of ours being a visual culture? And isn't that the case with the question I started with? Do we only see the passage of time? That is, we may sense time's passage if we direct our attention towards it in other sensory attributes, but the actual passage, isn't this above all seen?

And what gives us to see it?

Such redolent, such pungent images as rot and decay strike us but we tend not to reconstruct the processes recording these effects of time passing. Then we tend not to question recording processes, whether of growth or of decay, at all. This Bergson saw as the great and useful novelty, as opposed to being simply a novelty, of the cinematograph: that it could record biological processes, in stop-motion. His criticism was of the process by which the cinematograph animated still images to reproduce the passage of time. The reproduction he maintained had nothing to do with the passage of time in duration. This process has moved on, from analogue to digital recording, because it was always the effect that was being sought: to show the passage of time.

Now the passage of time is most effectively, in order to sell the image, shown with contingency. And this is what sold the earliest images commercially shown, in the famous phrase of an audience-goer, that the 'leaves on the trees were moving.' Time's effects, in other words, are those of contingency. This has led philosopher Quentin Meillassoux to posit radical contingency, without it entering his purview that this is no longer the origin but the goal of contemporary film-making and, I would argue, of AI: using digital processes to reconstruct contingency.

At great expense, I might add: no longer to record contingency, it was at the beginning itself a matter of contingency that the leaves were moving on the trees, but to reproduce contingent motion by deliberate and non-contingent means. Non-contingency enters here because that the contingent motion was recorded in the first instance was an accident and so contingent on the analogue recording process animating still images to reproduce the effect of actual time passing, duration. The goal of digital film-making is adequately, in order to sell it, to reproduce by means of digital animation the contingency that is found in nature. (That is to sell it and justify the expense involved, expense and sales being in just such circular relations as reproduction and recording and contingency and time: AI here for the notion of what is animated, i.e. intelligence; animated implying by its etymology being given a soul, esprit, mind, life.)

Given contingency and the globe-squeezing effort to reproduce it, the advent of cinema altered our perception of time. The question of whether we only see the passage of time becomes less one of the primacy of visual experience. In fact it explains this cultural predominance in historical terms. The question becomes, do we only see the passage of time because of and after cinema?