notes for "Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality"

These notes have ended up being unreasonably extensive. Before we get started, in order that they are not unreadably extensive, I would like to signpost the principal contents. These are found below under the section entitled A Machine Perceives and that called Bertrand Russell, a short introduction, which breaks into the source notes, providing an interval. (In addition you might try the endnote, live concepts.) The source notes themselves are intended to point to problems struck while reading Matter and Memory relating to the difference in perspective Bergson has putting together his theory of perception and that we have, which is the main claim made by Cinema Signifies ..., from a perspective on perception that is post-cinematic. The Framing note is intended in turn to sketch some of the issues which are here made more explicit.

I.

There are two ways in which cinema problematises perception:

1. in it a machine perceives;
2. discontinuity.

All three terms, problematises, the phrase "a machine perceives" and even discontinuity applied to perception, would require lengthy explanation and justification; what would be justified is their importance, how they are wrapped up in the problem: which is? In one aspect it is what I set out in "Cinema Signifies a Change"... and stated in its last sentence. More broadly the problem is what a machine perceiving and the way it cuts up what we perceive as the continuum of time forces on awareness. Partly justifying the term problematises: at least it suggests I want the term to convey something material, not ethereal and something of a physical nature; that it forces us to think.

More lengthy justification and explanation would follow from that us. Let my involvement of you find sufficient reason in this revelation of Bergson's. It comes late in Matter and Memory—

Consciousness and matter, body and soul, were thus seen to meet each other in perception.*

Let it rest there. It is taken up in what follows.

It might be a good epigraph for a book: A Post-Cinematic Theory of Perception.

*translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, in the Zone Books edition, 1991, p. 219. Original work published as Matière et mémoire, 1896.

II. A Machine Perceives

a tree imagines it's a tree does a good job of describing how a tree perceives. It has a vision in its imagination of course. (I don't say there that I am using imagination in a technical sense and that it is, philosophically, deeply rooted, as it were (in the works of Gilles Deleuze, especially on the virtual, Raymond Ruyer, the form, Gilbert Simondon (and Ruyer), ontogenesis, among others).) (see also in regard to artificial imagination) Of these names I've just cited, Simondon would seem to suggest himself as the best to deal with machine perception (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, here in Ninian Mellamphy's translation; see also Being and Technology, edited by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward).

Duration is implicit in perception, the duration with which the perception is continuous. A machine perceives when it is on, making its perception discontinuous. The perception stands apart from the discontinuity and is what a machine does. Duration concurs with what it does.

For a typewriter there is the gathering of ink onto the letter embossed in relief on the type slug, which is like the head of a hammer. Carried by the counter-sprung typebar it makes its imprint on the page. The ink is dispensed, leaving a residue on the slug, an outline on the ribbon, and disperses from inside the limits of the letter outward and down into the microcospic texture, against the tooth, the paper has. The rougher the wove the greater the spread as the ink finds its way.

The machine is unconscious, as it were, of the second part of this process; it is primarily conscious of the delivery, the carriage of force, by mechanical means, through the typebar leading the type slug to express itself as a letter which is legible. (The expression, almost like poetic expression, is indifferent to meaning.) Then the typebar withdraws, it springs back, its work done. There are several processes here that may be thought to be self-organising but are not. They are in fact being organised by what the machine does. (In biological systems they might be described as emergent, they are not this either.)

To its way of thinking, to say it boldly, the contact of the letter on the slug with the ribbon is only sufficient when the transfer onto the paper occurs of the ink gathered into its outline. Dispensed and dispersing, the paper takes over; the typebar withdraws and the typewriter carriage progresses one step. Success, the successful completion of its task, lies in the letter's legibility: the machine itself is clearly not concerned with which letter it is and what role it will play in forming a word.

This is the meaning of type: letters, punctuation, special symbols are all of a type. The machine is as indifferent to the image and its meaning as a piece of film is (whence the understanding of biological systems as undertaking to create meaning which is emergent). The successful registration of the image cannot be taken to sum up the whole process, any more than what the image is. That there is an image is what counts. The concern of the typewriter is that it is true to type.

It cannot even be said that the type is carried from place to place and it is this with which the machine is concerned. Given the distinct duration, along the attribute of perception, which it is the distinction of a machine to have, rather is it the passage from time to time.

Process misrepresents perception by defining a start- and end-point. This is said in the article, and, by imposing an internal continuity it misrepresents the discontinuity in how a machine perceives. Process is only useful for the identification of where one sort of perception, becoming a dominant theme, takes over from another.

The pressure exerted by the fingertips engages a biological theme (to speak a little like Ruyer (download link)). In truth there is no strict delineation between one theme and another, that of the machine and that of the body, for example. The continuity of perceptions, between distinct and distinguishable processes, is less pronounced than that between one and the next type bar strike. This is the nature of machinic perception. That it segues from one perceptual attribute to another is in the nature of the action-based duration which our consciousness perceives, as Bergson puts it. (84) Simply, consciousness in us moves from one action to another, in doing so it gives us the idea of its continuity over the discontinuity characteristic of how a machine, from a stick animated by the hand to an LLM animated by electric current, perceives.

Tool-use extends the powers of the body to act on things, but also creates new things in the world. From typing comes Concrete Poetry, and, eventually, ASCII. Music break:

"Cinema Signifies ..." a change in perception from the subject-less possibilities of tool-based perception to the possibilities of memory-less perception. Diaphanous images do not remember. They split from the material structure of the objects they rely on to come into existence, and are split from them by that structure. (There would be something to say about the split, the schiz in general here: see also in the article "many life-times.") Since it lies over previous understandings, this changes fundamentally our understanding of tool-use.

The images on the paper, their forms, whatever they are, true to type, from the letters embossed in relief on type slugs, the machine remembers. Over time ink fades, over time the metal outlining the letters on the slugs wears down and the letters themselves lose their definition. There is then a sort of material memory belonging to the duration that is its. We could in this regard ask about the material duration of perception in AIs. The demands made on the processing chips so great, not by the information, the prompts or the tokens comprising that perception, but by the electrical energy used to power them, it must be far shorter. Looking, it seems chips last 1 to 3 years, with the added pressure of technological obsolescence. In this case, the material memories, and the costs incurred for the regular replacement of chips by the data-centres to remain competitive, are distributed, which further obscures the point being made. This is the instantiation in material of a kind of memory, and its importance for machine perception.

Now (there are no excuses for this lengthy peroration apart from the pleasure of conducting it) just like the body is a model in the flesh of what a human looks like, so is a machine, but, importantly, along the lines of action or purpose, according to what it does. A machine embodies or models what it does when it is on; that embodiment or modeling retains the material perception of which it is the product. To talk about a machine as built, produced and set along the lines of the action for the purpose it is designed to fulfill, to focus on the being made and the maker, falls into the same error as talking about a human as designed: it neither explains the existence of the body nor what it can do, but imposes a morality about what it should do. In addition, a machine embodies or models what it does when on when it is off, it has a soul which unlike ours does not leave it at death, but comes comes on again each time it is brought back to life.

Where the soul and body meet, Bergson makes clear in the earlier cited possible epigraph: "Consciousness and matter, body and soul, were thus seen to meet each other in perception." [90] A machine is a materialisation of memory, the memory of what it is constructed to do. It only follows the outline of this purpose, its construction precedes it and when constructed continues to precede it like an ideal function. It would be an ideal movement of which the real movements involved, even in their malfunction, are in pursuit. Still, it is from the point of view of the ideal that the machine is constructed. The memory is, as it were, cast before it.

The memory determines the movement but only by following the outline of the purpose, because a memory will be initiated each time or, called on, it will give an image of what the machine is supposed to do. The movement itself is irreducible. There is then a general memory resulting from an analysis which breaks apart the machine and by sectioning the overall movement allocates roles to the parts. These parts are then brought into connection but only when first the machine is set running is the second type of memory present, a second type which is primary at each instance of the machine's employment, since it belongs to the individual machine and its function.

The template memory of a functional analysis determines only the movement in general. Of course it is against general criteria that a machine will be judged. A machine's movement is not limited to space but extends into time; this we know from computer technology, where the connected parts may have little to no separation between them and be distributed, and where the movements are pulses, existing in transistor-time. Still, not every chip will perform exactly as every other; and once millions and billions are connected, not every computational matrix or network will perform as every other. When a new machinic assemblage is brought to life its movement, which is one of perception, either remembers the template or does not perform according to specification. Either functioning or malfunctioning, a machine both perceives and remembers. However it does so discontinuously, but what obscures this fact is the record of its movement can be continuous.

Continuous, it will be repetitious. This is one of many faults found with artificial intelligence, that it is only repeating and not originating a movement of sense. And this too is what the short article "Cinema Signifies ..." uses cinema to show, that regardless of the continuity of recorded time, it is the product of a discontinuous perception. That it appears continuous is an effect of cinematic perception. Hence in the example of images streaming in real-time we do not differentiate between the time of what is being streamed, the imagery, and the time we inhabit. We could equally be streamed in real-time back into that other time. It is only there for as long as a machine perceives it; and the time of machines is intrinsically discontinuous.

This is not to say that biological duration is any different, but in the case of our own bodies we find it difficult not to separate body and soul. And yet with every machine, including the biological one on which this metaphor is imposed, that it breaks down, memories give out, a typewriter has lost its function, a new personality has taken over to compensate the missing parts of the old, shows us their mutual reliance. Where they meet says Bergson is in perception.

III. Bergson sources from Matter and Memory

These are not working notes. They are source notes, found in Bergson's Matter and Memory, from which Cinema Signifies a Change in the Fundamental Structure of Reality draws. Cinema signifies a change in the fundamental structure of reality Bergson describes. Yet Bergson's thinking is the condition of possibility for my thinking that it, in both cases, does. The notes which follow capture the article at the specific points in my reading from which it resulted.

Bergson points to the acquired habit of attaching movements to elements as hindering our extraction from motion of inner continuities which have the quality of duration and so, as qualities, correspond to distinct durations (of perception):

These elements, he goes on,

atoms or what not— ... interpose their solidity between the movement itself and the quality into which it contracts. As our daily experience shows us bodies in motion, it appears to us that there ought to be, in order to sustain the elementary movements to which qualities may be reduced, diminutive bodies or corpuscles. Motion becomes then for our imagination no more than an accident, a series of positions, a change of relations; and, as it is a law of our representation that the stable drives away the unstable, the important and central element for us becomes the atom, between the successive positions of which movement then becomes a mere link. ...

–p. 203 (Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, Zone Books, page references are to this edition, with hyperlinks added in this section indicating the 'page' to be found in the pdf online edition:), p. 83

• perception contracts or solidifies elements such that actions can take place;
• perception requires something solid to work with is the assumption;
• that "our daily experience" is not as Bergson describes is my point here;
• the "law of representation" no longer holds
• Bergson positions these atoms as the missing link, like the movement between successive individual frames of analogue film in cinema;
• but true movement is missing from cinema for him;
• Bergson's thinking however lets a stronger argument be made when it is accepted that cinema contains true movement and moving images;
• therefore his problem is not ours;
• (Images are his middle term and give him leverage over the idealist and realist positions of his time. Images are materially present for Bergson and in duration, that is, real time.)

But not only has this conception the inconvenience of merely carrying over to the atom all the problems raised by matter; not only does it wrongly set up as an absolute that division of matter which, in our view, is hardly anything but an outward projection of human needs; it also renders unintelligible the process by which we grasp, in perception, at one and the same time, a state of our consciousness and a reality independent of ourselves. This mixed character of our immediate perception, this appearance of a realized contradiction, is the principal theoretical reason that we have for believing in an external world which does not coincide with our perception.

–pp. 203–204, ibid. in the online version

• this is Bergson at his most radical, kicking against any sort of anthropocentrism by placing the body at the centre of its experience, so projecting, not perceiving, from the viewpoint of acting, a state of consciousness, onto external reality.

Interval

Bertrand Russell, a short introduction

It is sometimes said that Bergson goes a bit soft with his philosophy of lived experience. This is an entirely false view, in which the spectre of Bertrand (lovely name) Russell and his hatchet job on Bergson can, after all the years since the publication of A History of Western Philosophy, 1945, yet be discerned. Chapter 28 is devoted to Bergson. (The book is available in pdf here. Page references to the online edition follow.)

Russell's beef with Bergson is in the claim that with him the assault on reason, begun with Rousseau, reaches its apogee. He is the popular proselytiser of an irrationalism (Russell specifically says a "Bergsonian irrationalism" (782)) which is political in the sense of what we would now call an anti-politics. (see here) This makes philosophy available to political manipulation of the MAGA style. The Western system itself is shown to rest on philosophical foundations that are in radical disconnect from reason.

Russell's finding is taken up in the division between analytic (good politically) and continental philosophy (the fashionable nonsense of postmodernism, as Alan Socal and Jean Bricmont frame it (pdf), 1997). More importantly for the article "Cinema Signifies ...", and explaining the weight placed on the relation of science to cinematic perception, Russell's prejudice is perpetuated in the rift between science and philosophy. Scientific practice is thought to be above the intellectual shenanigans of philosophy and the personality politics of the various names to which philosophical schools claim their adherence. Interestingly, a gendered hierarchy appears in Russell apropos Bergson which is also continuous with the 'hard' and 'soft' of sciences, that between masculine intellect and feminine intuition.

There is a general cascade of gendered binaries which are more or less hidden by the hold of science on the popular imagination. The least hidden is now perhaps feminine intuition, which is in the process of looking for scientific foundation and neuroscientific validation. Most hidden is the alignment between technology, in particular social technologies like artificial intelligence, and masculinity. The development of gendered AIs, as the development of anatomically correct companion dolls, with which an intellectual discussion can be held and which can replaced when they wear out, is seen rather to be an anomaly than the symptom it is.

The binary in Bergson vilified by Russell is that between life and mechanism. Of course in mechanism Russell sees the work of reason, of science, towards the liberation of all of society, regardless of class, race or ... gender? Russell believes the binary relation between life and mechanism to explain Bergson's mass appeal.

At the time both philosophers were at work Bergson was a superstar, popular, as it was remarked at the time and has been ever since, to a remarkable degree among women, as if it were the most remarkable thing for women to be interested in philosophy. (While giving an overview of the Bergson phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century, Emily Herring's Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, 2024, plays into this, perpetuating the binary by simply and superficially reversing it.) It is as if women could not have been expected to see beyond the claims of life versus machines and lived experience versus the cold formulations of the engineers of a medicalised society (for the reproduction of the social conditions of reproduction) to the point about time itself being lived illustrating a profound insight into duration as absolute time.

The following formulation of duration is much richer than that of lived experience, both for the quality of time and of consciousness encountered in perception. (Perception is outside, it belongs to a reality independent of ourselves. see ⓪) This is the point of this note:

—the duration which our consciousness perceives—

–p. 206, p. 84

Before leaving Russell's reading of Bergson the role cinema plays is worth briefly considering. Cinema comes in at the moment Russell wishes to show Bergson does not know what he is talking about when it comes to mathematics. He has just said he is unqualified to pass judgement on Bergson's citing of scientific examples and references in his arguments but he is qualified in maths. To refute Bergson on number Russell uses a logical argument. He then writes:

Apart from the question of number, which we have already considered, the chief point at which Bergson touches mathematics is his rejection of what he calls the "cinematographic" representation of the world. Mathematics conceives change, even continuous change, as constituted by a series of states; Bergson, on the contrary, contends that no series of states can represent what is continuous, and that in change a thing is never in any state at all. The view that change is constituted by a series of changing states he calls cinematographic; this view, he says, is natural to the intellect, but is radically vicious. True change can only be explained by true duration; it involves an interpenetration of past and present, not a mathematical succession of static states. This is what is called a "dynamic" instead of a "static" view of the world. The question is important, and in spite of its difficulty we cannot pass it by.

–p. 804

This is a fair representation of Bergson's use of cinema as a spatialising metaphor, it represents his understanding of the mechanical fact of moving images comprising consecutive frames which give only the illusion of movement. We might say the same of AI's construction of sense-units: when they break down we can see the constitutive parts; we can see how the illusion is constructed. When they are in continuous flow what we read or see makes sense. It is continuous with the sense it makes, whether the flow is mechanical or not.

I am drawing attention to Russell's adoption of cinema in the metaphorical role Bergson assigns without asking any critical questions about it, since Russell goes from Bergson to Zeno and applies the metaphor of cinema to Zeno's famous paradox dealing with the continuity of motion.

Zeno argues that, since the arrow at each moment simply is
where it is, ... the arrow in its flight is always at rest.

–Ibid.

Then:

A cinematograph in which there are an infinite number of pictures, and in which there is never a next picture because an infinite number come between any two, will perfectly represent a continuous motion.

–p. 805

Clearly the cinematograph is supposed to supply the counter-argument to Zeno's and undo the paradox. There is no paradox, Russell alleges. For the mathematical view motion is in itself and not in the thing, as an internal state, as Bergson assumes it to be, or in the external state of affairs, as Zeno assumes it to be.

Russell contends that from the paradox of there being no changes but things in Zeno, Bergson succumbs to the paradox of there being no things but changes, which is also found in Heraclitus. (p. 805) Moreover, Bergson abolishes space, according to Russell (p. 806), so that the arrow is never anywhere. Could it not be asked of the motion supported by mathematical reason, is it ever anywhere? and does it ever belong to anything?

In contrast, Bergson's problem is not so much motion as time. Duration Russell says he does not understand,

I do not fully understand it myself, and therefore I cannot hope to explain it with all the lucidity which it doubtless deserves.

–p. 796

so his angle of attack is by way of memory,

Bergson's theory of duration is bound up with his theory of memory.

–pp. 806–8

And he cuts to the bone by maintaining that what duration assumes is still time as it is assumed by mathematics to be. In fact, without assuming it, in duration alone, time ceases to be. There is no line linking past, present and future for time to move along. I feel that Bergson leaves himself open to an attack he would not have seen coming by holding on to consciousness. Russell's final judgement:

There is no room in this philosophy for the moment of contemplative insight when, rising above the animal life, we become conscious of the greater ends that redeem man from the life of the brutes. Those to whom activity without purpose seems a sufficient good will find in Bergson's books a pleasing picture of the universe. But those to whom action, if it is to be of any value, must be inspired by some vision, by some imaginative foreshadowing of a world less painful, less unjust, less full of strife than the world of our every-day life, those, in a word, whose action is built on contemplation, will find in this philosophy nothing of what they seek, and will not regret that there is no reason to think it true.

–p. 810

Bergson does not pair consciousness with thought, height or anything transcendent of the brute state of being (or, in Russell, the "life of brutes," which ones?). He pairs it with activity. It produces a pause in the action of the body, a zone of indetermination, allowing memory to intervene in it, as to what course of action, whether physical or or not (of a body of thought), but in any case real and actual, to follow.

Why I feel he leaves himself open is perception crosses the line between thought and extensity and sometimes it is unclear whether Bergson is talking about a perception I have or perception in the abstract, perception as an action without a subject. This makes duration subjective. It is actually worse than the soft option of taking Bergson's philosophy for being one of lived experience. Duration as being exclusively that which our consciousness perceives takes everything away from it and leaves it as an empty historical gesture which Bergson was hysterical enough to make again and again in his works.

It is telling that Russell first says he cannot understand and therefore cannot lucidly discuss it and then goes on to demolish the concept of duration, but by that time what was left could just as easily have been flicked away and the demolition-job was overkill. Well, not entirely, it was Bergson's reputation that was buried. The way cinema enters Russell's chapter on Bergson is interesting, mainly because it does not seem to be called for by the staging of the argument, so it comes in like an uninvited dinner guest who holds the key to what will, either during dinner or soon thereafter, ensue, like Poirrot who has been closely and disinterestedly observing the other guests gathered under cover of anonymity. Its disinterestedness is even more interesting because this is what Russell is presupposing of reason that will enable to be of guidance to action and in particular political action.

It might even be said to be consciousness in the image of cinema. It is interested only in itself. Like Poirrot's little grey cells, it pursues its own task, along its own lines, in a timeline aside from that of the dinner party that is its own. In other words it has its own duration and it may even be mechanised. In Poirrot's case it is clockwork, of such sublime sensitivity it may as well be assembling the motes in the air as they pass under the drawing-room lights. To say so differentiates consciousness, internally, by placing external triggers far finer than hairs which perform the work of perception outside; so that it is not the work of cogitation which produces the final revelation but of ever finer discriminations in succession, each occupying an instant of decision, in a zone of indetermination. The grey cells themselves remain undistinguished. In the image of cinema consciousness is duration continuous with perception.

"Cinema Signifies ..." handles the problem which this presents. Cinema as perception machines timelines. Any action in them, any thought held, or sense, is secondary, since cinema primarily perceives durations of time. In fact, the act of vision Russell calls for is baggage the cinema image does not need to carry, so that consciousness so conceived is inseparable from a timeline which alone has agency. It would be the same if it could be shown in the past as in the present or the future. The mistake would be to assume thought as anything more than a disposable contents.

Interval ends

To show that,

Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.

–p. 208, p. 85

Bergson sets up this thought experiment:

... try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience;

• already something nags, seems inaccurate: the objects of daily experience are embedded in a scene which surrounds me;

then, resolve the motionless continuity of their qualities into vibrations on the spot;

• I feel like an aphantasist being asked to imagine I'm on a beach. You ask me to imagine? I don't have pictures in my mind!
• As for a motionless continuity, or a continuity of qualities, I am aware only of them only if I focus in on them, and remain conscious if not of their movement of mine;
• it is an intellectual exercise to produce in my awareness any sense of vibrations and this seems to be something science would support as an underlying vibratory matter;

finally, fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility (that undivided act which our consciousness becomes aware of in our own movements):

• we would sooner be aware, I believe, of the kind of continuities which movement has in film sequences, on screen, and see in our own movements breaks in a continuity of which we are aware only in stillness;
• as for "the divisible space", this has less the nature of space than of time;
• and of the divisions we impose, artificially, on time we know, but they are part of our awareness such that we have to suffer a shock to lift us out of the regular divisions of time;

you will thus obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure, and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception.

–p. 208, p. 85

• I invite you to try the thought experiment above before continuing.

Now bring back consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long, intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colors will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes.

–pp. 208–209, p. 85

• Again it is possible but only through intellectual effort to do so;
• which makes me think that the duration which our consciousness perceives has changed:
• the quasi-instantaneous views of Bergson's example sound like photographic stills;
• the long intervals rather more like shots of long duration, or else the shift into slow-motion, we are familiar with from film;
• condensation of vibrations into vivid colours can be intellectually arrived at but is for me at least not a matter of direct apprehension.

We are perhaps more familiar with change than we are with the phenomenological examples so far cited:

The change is everywhere, but inward; we localize it here and there, but outwardly; thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation.

–p. 209, p. 85

• but are we not now more used to our bodies being constituted through an unstable multiplicity of images?
• and to mobility as the norm?

That there are, in a sense, multiple objects, that one man is distinct from another man, tree from tree, stone from stone, is an indisputable fact; for each of these beings, each of these things, has characteristic properties and obeys a determined law of evolution.

–p. 209, p. 86

Bergson goes on to say that the separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely clear-cut.

• what stands out for me is this word, "beings;"
• isn't it the case, it came to me reading the passage that the existence of beings is hardly an indisputable fact?
• We are inclined to remember and imagine scenes, perhaps with "hero" beings, properties which because they are used in the action the scene foregrounds have a particular emphasis, a function quite apart from the thing-ness of beings;
• what was ontologically indisputable now seems phenomenologically open to question;
• moreover these "hero" beings are like us not centres of action but scenic properties:
• cinema leads us away from solidifying space into things and condensing time into moments we can grasp and act effectively on;
• we are observers of ourselves in the scenes we live and those we remember as much as participants;
• still, this is not a negative result:
• cinematic perception contracts time in order for it to act on it, not us;
• condensing and solidifying objects or subjects and inserting these into a time, although movement might initially cut it out, the cinematic image does not require movement to sustain it;
• cinema re-structures not only imaginative life but the assumptions with which philosophy approaches reality:
• that there are no longer separate beings as such means a change in the fundamental structure of reality;
• we don't have a philosophy adequate to the way cinema solidifies, condenses and contracts things and beings scenically.
  • I am now mooting the use of the term 'phase' for scene, to indicate the way a particular duration, period of time, or scene stands out, to indicate its bracketing, marks made setting it off from other possible scenes, cutting it out, for the reason of it or something in it being remarkable, striking;
  • after writing this note I landed on time-units, implying the unitary and discontinuous temporality which is a feature of cinematic, and post-cinematic time;
  • we do however have a philosophy adequate to the way cinema extracts not the quality of movement as an a priori, and qualities of things, beings a posteriori;
  • we have a philosophy adequate to way cinema does not do this;
  • being therefore tending, as a result, apart from whatever affect or property of the scene, mood of the phase, called it to our attention, to melt into the mise en scène, enter a contextual weave, fray, lean on each other for support, become inseparable from those aspect they are leaning on, be it a colour index present in the mise, like a red scarf picking up on the red of a sports car, a blue and luminous night, the burning tip of a cigarette, a detail in the duration of the scene which presents phasing;
  • we do have a philosophy adequate to cinema in the way of a philosophy of becoming,
  • but that it does not suffice but forms the problem of cinema badly:
  • it is in undeclared adequation to the invention of moving-images as a new nature of beings that it forms itself. Cf. in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari's call to "overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings" in favour of "pragmatics." (p. 25)

... at the same time that our actual and so to speak instantaneous perception effects this division of matter into independent objects, our memory solidifies into sensible qualities the continuous flow of things. It prolongs the past into the present, because our action will dispose of the future in the exact proportion in which our perception, enlarged by memory, has contracted the past.

–p. 210, p. 86

• the corollary to the points above is that Bergson's 'our,' his assumptions about what 'we' experience no longer refer to us.
• If the ontological status is up for grabs, or now tends to flow in scenic sequences, phases, units of time, what about the rest?

Memory, imagination, past and future:

Present:

To reply, to an action received, by an immediate reaction which adopts the rhythm of the first and continues it in the same duration, to be in the present and in a present which is always beginning again—this is the fundamental law of matter: herein consists necessity.

–Ibid.

A section of Loren Eiseley's work The Night Country considers creativity and what it takes:

Thoreau, however, presents in his writing an interesting paradox. In his reference to the excessive strain of heightened attention, one might get the impression that creativity was to him a highly conscious exercise that had wriggled into his very fingertips. That he was an intensely perceptive observer there can be no question. Yet he wrote, in those pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian days of 1852:

I catch myself philosophizing most abstractly when first returning to consciousness in the night or morning. I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works like a machine without friction. I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual, and made observations and carried on conversations which in my waking hours I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if in sleep our individual fell into the infinite mind, and at the moment of awakening we found ourselves on the confines of the latter.

The psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie has speculated that “the creative person is one who in some manner, which today is still accidental, has retained his capacity to use his pre-conscious functions more freely than is true of others who may potentially be equally gifted.” While I do not believe that the time will ever come when each man can release his own Shakespeare, I do not doubt that the freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

–p. 215 of my now looseleaf paperback edition, held together with a postman's rubberband published by Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1971

• ... below or outside the conscious mind, yet the opening into which they interpose their images is that zone of indetermination, which is all that consciousness or freedom is;
• I like however Eiseley's picking out of pre-consciousness, of a function that is there before it is conscious and in that sense below consciousness, it can't consciously be chosen:
• I would say this is true of perception in general as it is of poetic perception;
• and obviously true of biological perception;
• now philosophy, which is supposed to be the highest exercise of consciousness, Deleuze would concur in thinking, uses functions which are pre-conscious, of creativity:
• philosophy may be considered to be an attribute of perception for this reason.

Bergson's "a present which is always beginning again" in one sense belongs to pre-conscious apprehension, an engagement in existence independent of us. Bergson has used this formulation for the present before earlier on in Matter and Memory:

If matter, so far as extended in space, is to be defined (as we believe it must) as a present which is always beginning again, inversely, our present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements, and nothing else. And this system is determined, unique for each moment of duration, just because sensations and movements occupy space, and because there cannot be in the same place several things at the same time.

–p. 139, p. 56

• reality has the "continuity of becoming" writes Bergson on the same page;
• all of reality has this continuity, not simply the scene or phase of it we find ourselves in:
• yet only for "beings able to fix, at long intervals [this might suggest itself as an even better term than scene or phase], that becoming to which their own becoming clings" as in the quote below;
• beings may also refer to the attributes of substance existent as perceptions:
• Bergson's thinking here comes close to a philosophy of moving images such as Deleuze elaborates, which although adequate to cinema is undeclared in its adequation and cannot form the problem of cinema outside its own.

Is the impression one of always beginning again?

• I would say, as in the passage just quoted, that the significance of always beginning again is where memory does not determine the content of the images but only goes so far as to enable imagination, a minimal recognition they will come (each perception having a will to power);
• as such it is pre-conscious, a pre-conscious faculty in Eiseley's sense;
• the interest in "always beginning again" is that with cinematic thinking it means something entirely different from what Bergson intends and suggests a pathological position in regard to reality, that one cannot become and has always to start again;
• so it is automatically imputed to consciousness and imputes to consciousness that which Bergson intends of material life without it.
  • yes, interval might serve my purpose, as an interval of movement, calling it a cinematic interval could be confusing;
  • I have settled on using time units. (see "Cinema Signifies ...")

If there are actions that are really free, or at least partly indeterminate, they can only belong to being able to fix, at long intervals, that becoming to which their own becoming clings, able to solidify it into distinct moments, and so to condense matter, and by assimilating it, to digest it into movements of reaction ...

–p. 210, p. 86

Bergson says here something about the "meshes of natural necessity" which the movements of reaction, if they are free or partly indeterminate, will pass through.

Now, this is interesting: searching the online pdf for the reference, I left out "natural" from the phrase "meshes of necessity" and the search took me to the final lines of Matter and Memory where this phrase occurs.

There are two meshes at issue, one belonging to homogeneous time, the other to homogeneous space, both are illusory. Their necessity is due the exigencies of action, the body as essentially a centre of action.

In a post-cinematic world the body is not but technology is the centre of action and the meshes of necessity are sooner identified with and presumed to belong to the domain of machines acting independently than with us (see above, A Machine Perceives). Although there are times bodies are identified with machines as if themselves the meshes of necessity we are caught in. My point is that Bergson holds on to this idea until the end of Matter and Memory.

• The metaphor is a curious mixture:
• the verbs belong to multiple domains: fixing, clinging, solidifying, condensing;
• but also, assimilating and digesting, all through a mesh, or, passing through the mesh if the actions are free or partly so;
• the metaphor has elements belonging to both material and biological processes, like filter-feeding.

Cinema decentres this whole idea by providing meshes which are its own, which support its lines of perception, always time-lines and always, while appearing to be continuous, broken.

• the mixture of verbs points to different fields of action and of perception;
• digesting is biological;
• assimilating can be logical as well;
• condensing belongs to bodies but is physical and not necessarily biological (indicated by the terms used by Deleuze and Guattari the difference is between the molar and molecular);
• solidifying suggests something we don't think of images doing,
• then fixing suggests something we do think of as done to them;
• clinging is even more strongly suggestive, of dependency in contexts of entrapment, while perception always occupies its own zone of indetermination, which Bergson leads onto in the continuation:

... moments of reaction which will pass through the meshes of natural necessity. ... The independence of their action upon surrounding matter becomes more and more assured in the degree that they free themselves from the particular rhythm which governs the flow of this matter. So that sensible qualities, as they are found in our memory-shot perception, are, in fact, the successive moments obtained by a solidification of the real.

–p. 210–211, p. 86

Bergson goes on to posit homogeneous space and time as meshes which join by a common thread our existence to that of things.

• I would suggest that for post-cinematic perception solidification of the real does not happen.

Our perception ... is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within. The several kinds of perception correspond to so many directions actually marked out in reality. But ... this perception, which coincides with its object, exists rather in theory than in fact: it could only happen if we were shut up in the present moment. In concrete perception [as we might say perception in practice], memory intervenes ...

–p. 218–219, p. 89

• except when it does not:
• cinematic imagery itself is memory-less;
• this is not however to say that the mechanism by which it is achieved does not bring its memory to bear in how a machine perceives (see above);
• the present moment as it is called by Bergson becomes doubtful under cinematic conditions.

Finally the quote with which these notes began:

Consciousness and matter, body and soul, were thus seen to meet each other in perception.

–p. 219, p. 90

The question will be, in what perception?

• and is it that of a machine?
• or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, an abstract machine?

live concepts: endnote

In the brief correspondence I had with Aryan Kaganoff* I said writing "Cinema Signifies ..." I tried, as part of a practice in affirmation, which the theory of perception can only try to hold onto, to live the concepts. I received the reminder I needed to risk living concepts from Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier and co-written with Eskil Vogt, 2025. The film is in part a reflection on the conjoint practices of performance and cinema. As such, the only film I can think of which comes near to it is Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, 1981. Klaus Maria Brandauer can even be said to resemble Stellan Skarsgård, although they are very different films, but what each seems driven by is an ethos of both performance and cinema that is a political principle and at once the memory of one. From this both films derive their pathos.

The effort therefore required to live concepts is like that requiring the performer to embody a persona. The risk is that of occupying often extreme positions for the most dubious reasons of entertainment. Skarsgård in Trier's film is a director who must live his principles in a world which has ushered in their redundancy. The moves the film makes, away from the obvious, of accusing the character he plays either directly or by proxy, at the hands of the plot, of being a monster and sexual predator, are not so interesting to me as this: the truth it tries to hold onto of this awesome responsibility, which, in truth, if we were to remind ourselves of it would disable us from carrying it out. To live concepts then is a case of being on the outside of them, in a liminal zone which can collapse at any time, as the film can, could have, into being the cliché of saying this man is lost, morally, artistically and so on. Rather it says, this world is not lost, if you have the moral and imaginative strength, or simply the strength, to live it.

Yes, you have to look at it out side of your mind, a character in Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth (2019) puts it. You almost have to believe it is hardly of any consequence at all, the concept which you are trying (you mustn't) to live. A different reminder: my daughter selected a number of things I have written from this site and presented them to me in the form of a printed book for my birthday.

The book is a beautiful object, its aesthetics, choice of font and design are impeccable; and so is the care which has gone into selecting the works presented. Some of them are from almost half a lifetime ago, but is it a quality of the book, the printed item, they are borrowing that accounts for how they stand up? I wondered, that they stand up to being read without making me wince in shame or recognition? Yes of course; whatever it is, it is not from the quality of the thought that they embody, of the concepts which each in its different form tries to live, that they do. In some way, the ideas are as contingent as diaphanous images. Rather it is by the will to exist that they live at all.