DRAFTS: "Cinema Signifies ..."
Here are the two main drafts of Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality. Having begun it at the kitchen table in my brother and niece's apartment in Kreuzberg, Berlin, I completed the first draft in Koh Lanta, Thailand. On the front deck of our cabin at Baan Suan Farmstay, where German couples passed by in the morning, seeing me writing they would ask, Are you a writer? Not without an imposter's twinge, I answered, Yes. Then the next question, Are you writing a book? To manifest or delude myself I answered yes. What's it about?
I completed the second draft in Bangkok, from where we flew back to New Zealand. At my son's kitchen table in his Grey Lynn flat, I began the third and final revision. A total rewrite, it took eleven days. It appears as Cinema Signifies ... and it is this version I have been looking for a place to publish.
First Draft: Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality
This doesn't explain everything. It affects everything. It affects our philosophical, that is metaphysical, assumptions about the fundamental structure of reality. To say these structure reality is one way of looking at it, one that admits other possible structural courses, having to do with perception.
It is in fact to admit a distinct philosophical perception, which setting out to confirm the structure of reality ends by affirming its own. It does so even and even perhaps more forcefully when reality is presumed to elude direct perception and to retreat at perception's advance or at the advance of knowledge. This has been philosophy's critical role, leading to the question of whether there is a structure and whether it is fundamental. The indirect effect has been to shift responsibility from the question onto the media of enquiry, with the flow-on effect of valuing media that are neutral and offer transparency. Philosophy's task of telling has been usurped by the media's task of showing.
The division of labour between philosophical enquiry and media of enquiry foregrounds a division inside each of the sciences between the theoretical undertaking and that of observation, the media of which are presumed by the nature of the enquiry to be beyond question. Scientific instruments somehow escape the criticism directed at the media in general. Into this critical void philosophy could step if it wanted to. If it tends not to, although it can make finer and finer distinctions in many fields, this is because it cannot finally, except by the definition of limitation, distinguish itself and would sooner accept it.
Philosophy would sooner accept a negative condition than impose itself as a positive condition, which suits the sciences very well. They show what they show about the fundamental structure of reality and, apart from questioning each of the terms, philosophy does not claim to know better. It takes each in turn from out of the field in which it occurs and asks, In respect of biology, what is fundamental? In relation to physics, what is fundamental? What, for chemistry, are the relations of structure? Do they translate into other fields? What reality does structure then have? and what are the ramifications for biology?
How does this construction of reality carry over into other fields? and, if there are differences, doesn't that affect what is fundamental? How do these differences in what the fundamental structure of reality is bleed out into other fields?
While philosophy combs through the evidence, reality keeps on doing what it does. Philosophy, the art of saying what the fundamental structure of reality is, commits itself to looking backwards, at best, to the immediate past, at the conditions for creation, where it provides an opening for present creativity. Combing over the evidence for what will differ in the future, philosophy holds open the door to other fields, so affirming in them what they find, in the present which, at best again, gives the new wriggle-room. To say this gap in the door, this threshold at which philosophy stands, is all the metaphysical ground philosophy gives itself, is to deny only its present role in shaping the understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. If philosophy persists at all it is because its historical record remains unsurpassed in shaping the basic understandings from which the sciences take their own. Changes in what science, in any of its fields, assumes about the underlying nature of reality often equate with philosophical assumptions which are now historical: the new metaphysical assumptions of the sciences are the old ones of philosophy.
They are brought forward. They are able to be due to a metaphilosophical condition, a condition part of philosophy's historical provenance, a tradition, identifying it with thought that has transhistorical relevance and value, in which it does not fall victim to the vicissitudes of history or fashion. Self-questioning is part of the tradition, to ensure that this condition is met. Discoveries in science seldom necessitate an effort, on philosophy's part, of accommodation to a description of fundamental reality already made: seldom is the disruption of the field of science, for example the discovery of quantum physics, paralleled in philosophy. Such is only the idealistic version.
Actually, in the schools, its practitioners are called on to respond as soon as any discovery of science and technology gains popular and fashionable momentum to prove the relevance of their field of training, to stake-holders, students shopping for courses, share-holders and academic boards of governance. Independent researchers and public intellectuals have to respond to a present in which the future is always presumed to be looming into visibility, or else risk their own invisibility. Concepts, memes, tokens: these are the successive forms in which ideas are transmitted. Each corresponds in turn and conforms to structural features of the media of their transmission, which can equally be said to be technological media of their construction. * [Jo asks why are you asking this? you haven't said. Or are you repeating what is known? and to what purpose?] Technological forms, old and new, are, in fundamental terms, what is in contention.
The schools, including Media Studies, have their own platforms to promote the visibility of their descriptions, interpretations and criticisms of this state of affairs. No platform is neutral and seldom is it constructed for the ideas it communicates or the interests it serves. It is owned privately by others. That these ideas are in competition in a neutral network or web of interests is another ideality. Platforms act as power-nodes overpowering that neutrality. In effect the informational layer of the technological infrastructure, excluding from the invention of the alphabet to the internet no media, encouraging their competition, acts as a multifocal magnifying glass.
Artificial intelligence may be the notion being magnified. It also structures the form and image, token, of the idea. In other words, criticisms, descriptions, interpretations, ideas about what it is, without any change in level, are taken up into the informational layer by artificial intelligence as tokens. They are sense-units, units of what artificial intelligence can follow. Tokens both meet the conditions of sense and they are what it senses. If artificial intelligence can be said to have any degree of consciousness at all, or any interiority, it is in conferring importance on what makes sense that it owns a particular portion of the world.
Ideas about the limitations and problems of artificial intelligence simply make sense too. That a larger and larger portion of the world comes under coverage of artificial intelligence is due magnifying effects belonging to the informational layer, which has plasticity and serves as milieu for the one portion, the portion containing information, which tokens capture. It is an effect of the informational layer itself, plasticity enables states and markets to squeeze it to provide the most desired optics, that the world in its most desirable aspect can be compressed through a single lens, and that the point of view so presented can be dominant.
The discussion, of negligible value, centres on the division between information and infrastructure. To claim a controlling interest on either, it seeks to place limits on the other: information, data forms an immaterial layer over things, which retreat; the material infrastructure engages energetic flows from which things emerge. For the latter case, energy is informational; for the former, information itself is the motive force. Structuring a human-comprehensible world, it may not be real. The realist point of view maintains that it is real, that we are enchanted by the pictures playing over it. Each cuts the world in the way it would like. Both are of negligible value in a world in which making sense is an operating condition of technology.
That is, neither realism nor idealism in these forms can do more than exaggerate or downplay, emphasising or minimising, the role of technology as the medium of science. They cannot explain it. This is the situation before technology started talking back.
Philosophy did not and has not considered the significance for its own fundamental assumptions about reality of cinema. What is cinema? Is it infrastructure? Is it information?
Cinema is simply the medium of moving images. If compared to artificial intelligence which is the medium of moving information, informational tokens being what make human sense, cinema provides the technological infrastructure of that movement. In either it comes about there is an interest in hiding the technical means, the trick to generating images which move and information which makes sense. There is an interest in magic, the magic of cinema and the magic of consciousness.
Consciousness outweighs cinema but in cinema there arises the division the trick of it obscures, and it arises there first, between brain and mind. Here, the realist will aver, the mind doesn't want to know the trick, but ought. The idealist will contend the mind gives to the elements constituent of reality their fundamental shape, of which the brain is one.
The condition, as it was for artificial intelligence of the division between thought and its image or sense, is cinematic. Nowhere in nature does movement occur identically. 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, outside of any consciousness of it. In nature there is no provision for a movement being identical over time. Philosophy has expended considerable resources describing, for the realists, identity in the concept, and the identity of occurrence of events separated in time, for idealists, as either being that identity in the concept is necessary for consciousness or for sustaining life: for the philosopher as well, it's no good if the reciprocity between the body and what it eats cannot be recognised. The limit set by realism is that such concepts as time and space are luxuries of consciousness, as is philosophy and thinking itself, without which, however, as idealism returns, the identity over time of consciousness comes into doubt. It itself comes to be considered a movement, engaging recognition, which divides again between objective and subjective representations. As a movement exactly describes cinematic representation. It is movement that cinema supports the identity of over time. 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. If thinking is described as a movement that movement too is separable, enabling its movement to be represented as an image of thought, a movement of sense, without a subject of thought.
Yet it will rely on objects and the objects will as little resemble the image of thought as those conferring its reality on the moving image, or, as little as the brain does its informational layer and the images which play across it. Whether symbolic, linguistic or pictorial, whether the products of an artificial or biological intelligence, a philosophical or of a distinct cinematic perception, the presence of which is being outlined, evidence is not searched for in the brain's infrastructure in the form of an image that has identity over time but as movement. Nonetheless an identity is assumed. The medium for the search is cinematic.
Tokens do not preexist their apprehension by the subjectless thought of an artificial intelligence. Moving images do not preexist their natural medium. They are a new nature the significance of which has not been sufficiently interrogated by philosophy.
Instead philosophy has proposed an adequation to cinema (what is fundamental to cinema being movement is identical over time) that again does not describe its reality but in terms which conform to it, putting philosophy in the position that it cannot explain what is not outside it. It is then an undeclared adequation in which philosophy backs away or only deals indirectly with the two great flows coming from cinema. One the counterflow, they are great in the sense of fundamental; and to use the image of flow is to borrow from philosophy a term it proposes, among others, like becoming and emergence, in affirmation of the structure of reality, but more to the point, in confirmation of its own.
The first is what flows and is carried along: nothing more than images; but neither idealist images nor realist images. These are peculiar, so allowing them to be replayed apart from it, for having been separated from the supporting structure, the objects relied on, by that structure. This is the reality we call technology and in it we place the confidence that allows us to be taken in by the trick, for example, of a subjectless sense: images moving independently of any underlying reality. It is not quite any. The objects have to be placed in a particular way and they have to be present. We are less likely to question theirs than we are reality.
The next great counter-flow, although, for obvious reasons, it is difficult to assert which is prior, although they have a logical order, they both come up at different times, is the dependence of things on the times in which they are inserted. Things are not independent of the times in which they are inserted. To state it negatively gets the point across more clearly: things are not as we would assume them to be. One flow counters another which is only logically prior, to be dependent on the times in which they are inserted things have first to win their independence from the time in which they were inserted, of which they were a part.
The word insertion here has the role of naming an action. It involves a camera, some medium for playback, technological media. These need only be inferred. Animation implies other media to achieve the same result: independence from the media of the image. The image does not thereby gain independence from time. Unless it is a still image. Still images have independence from time simply in being taken, which is often as far as we go in questioning the media of moving images: irrespective of the time in which they were taken, they are able to be transposed from place to place. In contrast, the moving image is made dependent on the new time, in which it moves, in which it is inserted.
With a still image, the situation is reversed. A time is memorialised in it from which it has been extracted and of which it is accepted to be only the partial representation, opening the way to its complete fabrication: it is accepted that although what it depicts may be more or less real, the time, either of its manufacture or the time depicted, cannot be anything but, it is the time of yesterday and today. The future is open to it as a place it can be taken, not a time. This is the distinguishing feature and introduces a passivity with regard to the future. A moving image holds time in the movement with which it concurs.
Movements are unique for holding this little parcel of time. On one side, beings are extracted and preserved, held in suspension; on the other, they are reunited with their movements which define them. We have no clear concept for what this is, this time, capable of being parceled up, belonging to the moving image. We do know it to be passive before the technological process enabling it, of an active insertion, which can be fabrication, into a time with which its movement more or less concurs, on which it is structurally dependent, a passive dependency by which it is formally defined.
In this definition, things, beings and images coincide. The activity of the medium does not explain their association by passivity. The role of technology as the medium of science is explained by it.
Philosophy in effect has not kept up its part of the bargain, which is to guarantee a scientific epistemology. In the same sense that it, at best, grants thought to movement and made it active, and said this is how philosophy shapes the underlying structure of reality, it has seen technology as actively shaping the information it gathers. It has let it be assumed that the medium of technology, like any medium used to gather and carry data at any stage of knowledge production, shows only a representation of reality and not the reality itself. It has not seen the passivity of things, beings, before the media of their reproduction as images. It has not said that in cinema we have an exception, which proves the rule, signifying a change in the underlying structure and of how reality is understood to be.
The technology of cinema gathers and carries the movement of things, beings and images. The philosophical description of the real structure has looked to construction not to the materials, not to of what cinema constructs the reality it perceives. It has not kept up with cinematic perception, which has overflowed its epistemological boundaries. This is what is meant by cinema signifying a change in the fundamental structure of reality: we know that structure cinematically. There is a third great, meaning fundamental, flow from cinema in which are caught up things and beings as much as images. Perceiving their movement, it parcels it up according to the time it takes, such that having won independence from a time it has none from this, but is functionally dependent on this time and formally defined by it. Where earlier it was said the dependence of movement on a bounded part of time, a parcel or interval of time, was structural, there the relation was of more or less concurring. If it is said to be functional here it is because although the movement depended on time, the time does not depend on the movement. It need not concur with it, can exceed it, fall short of it, and, the active part, it can produce a sense of movement when there is none.
The unexpected result of this is that there are no beings in cinema but those of time. The shift in assumptions is ontological: there are no independent beings into which, for whatever reason, we cut reality up, only times. Their dependence on a time concurrent with their movement, say the movement of thought which we might in this way historicise, does not matter finally. Real movements slide into fake ones. It is just to be part of a scene that we act and, having been part of a scene, that we remember.
Second Draft: Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality
Cinema gives us a new perception of time. In recorded movement we perceive time. Cinema contracts time into the moving image, something that had before cinema never been seen. What it signifies, in one particular aspect, is where this text will be going. It is from the particular angle of a distinct perception that cinema changes the fundamental structure of reality. Its significance overflows, as any intervention in that structure must, the viewpoint or angle of view. It exceeds it because cinema's intervention has not been acknowledged. The properties of the moving image not being examined has led cinema to be an unacknowledged condition of knowing. These epistemological conditions result from the ontological with regard to the moving image, time and perception.
To impute to cinema a causative function is incorrect. The cause here lies in the conditions. Among these, that cinema has not been sufficiently, only poorly examined, that philosophy has not put it as a problem, or only badly, is primary, and, affecting what metaphysical assumptions are made about the underlying structure of reality, is where to start. Cinema does not explain everything. In affecting assumptions about the fundamental structure of reality it affects everything. To say these structure reality is a way of looking at it that admits other possible structural courses, having to do with perception.
Philosophical perception, setting out to confirm the structure of reality, ends by affirming its own, even, and even more forcefully, when reality is presumed to elude direct perception and to retreat at perception's advance or to the advantage of our knowledge of it. Such has been philosophy's critical role. It has led to the question of whether there is a structure and whether it is fundamental. The indirect effect has been to shift responsibility from the question onto the media of enquiry, with the flow-on effect of valuing media that are neutral and transparent. Philosophy's task of telling has been usurped by the media's task of showing.
The division of labour between philosophical enquiry and media of enquiry foregrounds a division inside each of the sciences between the theoretical undertaking and that of observation, the media of which are presumed by the nature of the enquiry to be beyond question. Science's instrumental interest, which goes under the name of technology, has not, scientific instruments themselves have escaped the criticism directed at media in general. Into this critical void philosophy could step if it wanted to: media capturing the real movements underlying the structure of reality is where the advance in technology and scientific progress is shown. The purchase instrumental interest gains is through cinema.
If philosophy tends not to, although it can make finer and finer distinctions in many fields, this is because it cannot finally, except by the definition of limitation, distinguish itself. Philosophy would sooner accept a negative condition than impose itself as a positive condition, which suits the sciences. They show what they show about the fundamental structure of reality and, apart from questioning each of the terms, philosophy does not claim to know better. It takes each in turn from out of the field in which it occurs and asks, In respect of biology, what is fundamental? In relation to physics, what is fundamental? What, for chemistry, are the relations of structure? Do they translate into other fields? What reality does structure then have? and what are the ramifications for biology?
How does this construction of reality carry over into other fields? and, if there are differences, doesn't that affect what is fundamental? How do these differences in what the fundamental structure of reality is bleed out into other fields?
While philosophy combs through the evidence, reality keeps on doing what it does. Philosophy, the art of saying what the fundamental structure of reality is, commits itself to looking backwards, at best, to the immediate past, at the conditions for creation, where it provides an opening for present creativity. It adopts the temporality framing consciousness.
Combing over the evidence for what will differ in the future, philosophy holds open the door to other fields, so affirming in them what they find, in the present which, at best again, gives the new wriggle-room. To say this gap in the door, this threshold at which philosophy stands, is all the metaphysical ground philosophy gives itself, is to deny only its present role in shaping the understanding of the fundamental nature of reality, which it does in respect of the past. If philosophy persists at all it is because of its historical record in shaping the basic understandings from which the sciences take their own. Shifts in what science, in any of its fields, assumes about the underlying nature of reality often equate with philosophical assumptions from the past being instrumentalised: the new metaphysical assumptions of the sciences are the old ones of philosophy.
Discoveries in science seldom necessitate an effort, on philosophy's part, of accommodation to a description of fundamental reality already made: seldom is the disruption of the field of science, for example the discovery of quantum physics, paralleled in philosophy. Such is the idealistic version. Actually, in the schools, its practitioners are called on to respond as soon as any discovery of science and technology gains popular and fashionable momentum to prove the relevance of their field. Independent researchers and public intellectuals too respond to a present in which the future is always presumed to be looming into visibility. Concepts, memes, tokens: these are the successive forms in which ideas are transmitted. Each structures its message. This we know, it can be identified with its structure. We do not see the element that is cinematic. Enabling it to compete in the general optics of an ontology of movement, each is severed by that structure from its movement.
The general field forms an informational layer, it is like a multifocal magnifying-glass, except moving, separated from the infrastructure sustaining it. This is the technological medium, still structuring the message, with its instrumental interest. Not only in the field, also under current magnification, artificial intelligence is exemplary of the divisibility of movement and infrastructure by which, form and image, token of the idea, are structured.
Artificial intelligence contracts tokens. Taken up into the informational layer by artificial intelligence, tokens are sense-units, units of what artificial intelligence can follow. They both meet the conditions of sense and they are what it senses. If artificial intelligence can be said to have any degree of consciousness at all, or any interiority, it is in conferring its present importance on what makes sense that it owns a particular portion of the world. That a larger and larger portion of the world comes under coverage of artificial intelligence is due magnifying effects belonging to the informational layer, which, serving as medium for the one portion, the portion containing information tokens capture, has plasticity. An effect of the informational layer itself, plasticity enables the squeezing by which it provides the desired optics, in order that the world in the most desirable light come under a single lens, through which the part instrumentalised, sense can dominate.
The discussion, itself taken up into the informational layer, centres on the division between information and infrastructure. The idealist view is that sense-information structuring a human-comprehensible world, it may not be real. The realist point of view maintains it is, and that we are enchanted by the pictures playing over it. Each cuts the world in the way it would like. Both leave the cut undisturbed, as if it were the temporal framing of the scene it discloses.
Philosophy did not and has not considered the significance for its own fundamental assumptions about reality of cinema. What is cinema? Is it infrastructure? Is it information?
We know cinema to be the medium of moving images. Compared to artificial intelligence, held up against another medium of movement, but of sense, cinema supplies the technological infrastructure, instrumentally interested, of that movement. In either case there is an interest in hiding the means, the trick to generating images which move and those which make sense. There is an interest in magic, the magic of cinema and the magic of consciousness.
Consciousness exceeds cinema but in cinema there arises first the division the trick of it obscures, for consciousness, between brain and mind. Here, the realist will aver, the mind doesn't want to know the trick, but ought. The idealist will contend the mind gives to the elements constituent of reality their fundamental shape, of which the brain is one.
Hidden, the division is accepted and naturalised. It becomes in the nature of media as such, as it does for the medium of artificial intelligence, to assume cinematic properties. An ontological property of cinema is repeatability: nowhere in nature, outside of mind, 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. Yet in nature there is no provision for a movement being identical over time.
If philosophy has expended considerable resources describing identity in the concept, and the identity of occurrence of events separated in time, it is with the idea of its necessity for supporting the operations of life: it serves no one if the reciprocity between the body and what it eats cannot be recognised from one day to the next. The argument put up that concepts such as time and space might be luxuries or sustaining fictions is brought down by this fiction extending into consciousness, casting into doubt its identity over time. Then consciousness itself becomes the movement that plays over ideas. Taken from the body and put into the brain, it is as a movement that cinema describes it and in movement that cinematic representation enables and fixes its identity over time.
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. If thinking is described as a movement that movement too is separable, enabling its movement to be represented as an image of thought, a movement of sense, without a subject of thought.
Yet it will rely on objects and the objects will as little resemble the image of thought as those conferring on the moving image its reality, or, as little as the brain does its informational layer and the images which play across it. Whether symbolic, linguistic or pictorial, whether the products of an artificial or biological intelligence, a philosophical or of a distinct cinematic perception, evidence is not searched for in the brain's infrastructure of an image with identity over time but of a movement. Its identity is assumed. The search is cinematic.
Tokens do not preexist their apprehension by the subject-less thought of an artificial intelligence. Moving images do not preexist their memory-less medium. They are a new nature, insufficiently interrogated by philosophy.
Assuming it is fundamental to cinema that movement is identical over time, philosophy has proposed an adequation that again does not describe it in reality but in terms which conform to its own, putting philosophy in the position that it cannot explain what is not outside it. It is then an undeclared adequation to cinema in which philosophy backs away or only deals indirectly with two of its essential conditions. One is the counter of the other.
The first is the images: they are separated from the supporting structure, the objects relied on, by that structure. From this they have movement and the structure exists as a technological medium. In it we place the confidence that lets us be taken in by the trick, in its exemplary form, of a subject-less sense, the tokens of it moving independently of an underlying reality. Although the objects, the supporting structure, have to be there, placed in a particular way, we are less likely to question theirs, a state of affairs brought about by images moving independently, than we are reality as such.
The second condition, although for obvious reasons it is difficult to assert which is prior, although they have a logical order they exist at once, is the dependence of things on the times in which they are inserted. Things are not independent of the times in which they are inserted. To state it negatively gets the point across more clearly: things are not as we would assume them to be. Against the first condition, which is only logically prior, in order, with the second condition, to be dependent on the times in which they are inserted, things have to win their independence from the time in which they were inserted, of which they were formerly a part and of which they are memory-less.
The word insertion here has the role of naming an action. It involves a camera, some medium for playback, technological media. These need only be inferred. Animation implies other media to achieve the same result: independence from the media of the image. The image does not thereby gain independence from time. Unless it is a still image. Still images have independence from time simply in being taken, which is often as far as we go in questioning the media of moving images: irrespective of the time in which they were taken, they are able to be transposed from place to place. In contrast, the moving image is made dependent on the new time, in which it moves, in which it is inserted.
With a still image, the situation is reversed. A time is memorialised in it from which it has been extracted and of which it is accepted to be only the partial representation, opening the way to its complete fabrication: it is accepted that although what it depicts may be more or less real, the time, either of its manufacture or the time depicted, cannot be anything but, it is the time of yesterday and today. The future is open to it as a place it can be taken, not a time. This is the feature distinguishing a moving image. Holding time in the movement with which it concurs, it carries that time forward, only ever unfurling inside brackets that only arbitrarily set may be moved.
Movements are unique for holding a portion of time. Moving images carry that time into the future. On one side, beings are extracted and preserved, held in suspension; on the other, they are reunited with the movements that define them to which a unique portion of time belongs. That we have no clear concept for what this is, this time, that is not the present, that is only arbitrarily defined by a temporality framing it, is part of the problem. We know it to be dependent on the technological process enabling it, of an active insertion, itself open to artificial reproduction, into a time, with which its movement more or less concurs, as a portion. Structurally dependent on this portion, it is a dependency of movement that formally defines it.
Things, beings and images, each having their portion of duration, coincide in this definition. The activity of the medium does not explain their association by passivity, this too would be to ascribe neutrality, to describe moving images as imprinted by reality. Technology's role of providing science's instruments of perception is instead explained by dependency.
Philosophy in effect has not kept up its part of the bargain, which is to guarantee a scientific epistemology. In the same sense that it, at best, grants movement to thought, made it active, and said this is how philosophy shapes the underlying structure of reality, it has seen technology to be actively shaping the information gathered through it. Philosophy has let it be assumed that technological media, like any used to gather and carry data at any stage of knowledge production, shows only a representation of reality and not the reality itself. It has not seen the dependency of images on technology carries with it a portion of time. It has not said that in cinema we experience a break, that it signifies a change in our understanding of how reality is and behaves.
Cinema gathers, holds and carries the movement of things, beings and images. Its philosophical description has looked to construction not to materials, not to its real structure or of what cinema constructs the reality it perceives. It has not kept up with cinematic perception, which overflows its epistemological boundaries. This is what is meant by signifying a change in the fundamental structure of reality: we know that structure in the way cinema signifies, means it to be and perceives it.
A third essential condition follows from the other two. Cinema apportions time against movement, so that having won independence from a time in which it was it has none from the portion in which it is. Although the movement depends on the time, the time does not depend on the movement. It need not concur with it, can exceed it, fall short of it. Simply by setting a local duration, by an image being bracketed in this way, a sense of movement can be produced when there is none.
The real structure of cinema causes things to be separated from that structure. Divisible from it, they move independently. It is this movement cinema follows. Its action produces a new time for movement to take place. The portion they are given is essential. Their local duration fulfills ontological conditions for cinema and epistemological ones, so that they can be still and yet movement is inferred. It is only the local movement of time, only the portion of time in its local duration which moves.
Although only the portion of time moves, because it applies equally to still and moving images, in practice the brackets come off. To universalise, as all is change and everything in motion, what here is local and specific is a mistake. It takes movement again over time, when cinema has released time from movement. Temporal parameters, the brackets it uses, being arbitrary and contingent, there is no going back to temporal relations as there is none between independent beings. There are no beings in cinema.
Cinema shows beings. That they move independently of the media supporting them technology does not explain. Technology has only an instrumental interest in achieving it. Then like memories they are dependent on the times in which they occur. It is assumed they are extracted from those times. Like stills, but on screens and by media such as holograms, they can be moved from place to place. It is assumed that once recorded they are preserved and can be taken into the future. We form the image of memory on their basis. Cinematic media are memory-less, just as the sense produced by artificial intelligence is subject-less. For neither is there a subject of perception. There is the array, the disposition, the arrangement of technical objects they rely on, for digital media this includes symbolic objects, to which they are irreducible. Neither is the perception, distinct for cinema in contracting moving images, for artificial intelligence contracting the tokens of sense, which structures reality, nor does it look at reality in a certain way, to which viewpoint it can be reduced. Perception takes a course between ontology and epistemology, in the cases of cinema and artificial intelligence we are not used to it and it has not been explained to us that such perception is outside and not inside the technical array.
This presents philosophy with the difficulty: is it on the side of the biological array from which consciousness emerges or is consciousness a projection? At best it adopts the ground of consciousness itself, which is of conscious perception's creative, as it were, window. This is where concepts are created. This leaves philosophy uncredited with a distinct perception and, in its actions, although not to the present, temporally bounded. Cinema signifies a shift in the contents of consciousness. Released from the time they were, they are inserted into a portion of time to describe, that ends by describing them. The contents tend to sink into this imagined scene of which they are not the memory. It is more like they are the elements of which a mise en scène is comprised and from it that they take what being they have. In this sense there is a typology or a topology rather than any of the independent agency our consciousness would lead us to believe we have, particularly in regard to the future, where it cannot drag the temporality, without any beings in common, with which it is identical.
