Koselleck’s Futures Past

Reinhart Koselleck

Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

Area: History of Rhetoric and Memory Studies

Preface

·      What is historical time?

·      Seek out the linguistic organization of temporal experience wherever this surfaces in past reality

Xvi: “More generally, there is much common ground between Gadamer’s T&M and the basic, interpretative framework within which Koselleck moves.  Shared by T&M and these essays is the construction of a hermeneutic procedure that places understanding as a historical and experimental act in relation to entities which themselves possess historical force, as well as a point of departure in the experience of the work of art and the constitution of an aesthetics.  Gadamer elaborates aesthetic experience by examining the development of the concept Erlebnis, or experience in the sense of lived encounter.  This term was developed in response to Enlightenment rationalism and is characteristic of an aesthetics centered upon the manifestation of the ‘truth’ of a work of art through the experience of the subject.  Gadamer then asks: what kind of knowledge is produced in this way?  There is a discontinuity between modern philosophy and the classical tradition: the development of a historical consciousness in the 19^th century made philosophy aware of its own historical formation, creating a break in the Western tradition of an incremental path to knowledge that had hitherto shaped philosophical discussion.  Koselleck takes up this problem and presents it as a historical, rather than philosophical, question: What kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity?”

1: “The sources of the past do inform us about thoughts and deeds, plans and events, but they provide no direct indication of historical time.”

3:  “All testimony answers to the problem of how, in a concrete situation, experiences come to terms with the past; how expectations, hopes, or prognoses that are projected into the future become articulated into language.  These essays will constantly ask: how, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?”

4: “Methodologically, these studies direct themselves to the semantics of central concepts in which historical experience of time is implicated.  Here, the collective concept ‘History,’ coined in the 18^th century, has preeminent meaning.”

Castells’ The Information Age

Manuel Castells
The Information Age: vols. 1-3
Area: Digital Media
From Felix Stadler’s Review
•    Castells’ main argument is that a new form of capitalism has emerged at the end of this century: global in its character, hardened in its goals and much more flexible than any of its predecessors. It is challenged around the globe by a multitude of social movements on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their own lives and environment.
•    This tension provides the central dynamic of the Information Age, as “our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self” (1996, p. 3).
•    The Net stands for the new organizational formations based on the pervasive use of networked communication media. Network patterns are characteristic for the most advanced economic sectors, highly competitive corporations as well as for communities and social movements.
•    The Self symbolizes the activities through which people try to reaffirm their identities under the conditions of structural change and instability that go along with the organization of core social and economic activities into dynamic networks.
•    Transformations amongst the trilogy
o    First: Changing relationships of production
o    Second: relationships of power and experience: crisis of the nation-state
o    Third: ties together the loose ends
•    Technology and society can’t be understood or represented without its technological tools
•    Rather than seeing identity as an effect, as a traditional Marxist would, he argues the opposite: identity-building itself is a dynamic motor in forming society
•    “A new society emerges when and if a structural transformation can be observed in the relationships of production, in the relationships of power, and in the relationships of experience” (1998, p. 340).
•    The first assumption structures Castells’ account of the rise of the Net: the dialectical interaction of social relations and technological innovation, or, in Castells’ terminology, modes of production and modes of development.
•    The second assumption underlies the importance of the Self: the way social groups define their identity shapes the institutions of society. As Castells notes “each type of identity-building process leads to a different outcome in constituting society” (1997, p. 8).
•    A society produces its goods and services in specific social relationships–the modes of production.
o    Since the industrial revolution, the prevalent mode of production in Western societies has been capitalism, embodied in a wide range of historically and geographically specific institutions to create and distribute profit.
o    The modes of development, on the other hand, “are the technological arrangements through which labor acts upon matter to generate the product, ultimately determining the level and the quality of the surplus” (1996, p. 16).
•    Identity is defined as “the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or related set of cultural attributes, that is/are given priority over other sources of meaning” (1997, p. 6).
•    Castells concludes that information technology evolves in a distinctively different pattern than previous technologies, thus constituting the “informational mode of development”: a flexible, pervasive, integrated and reflexive, rather than additive evolution. The reflexivity of the technologies, the fact that any product is also raw material because both are information, has permitted the speeding up of the process of innovation.
•    This new economy is informational because the competitiveness of its central actors (firms, regions, or nations) depends on their ability to generate and process electronic information. It is global because its most important aspects, from financing to production, are organized on a global scale, directly through multinational corporations and/or indirectly through networks of associations.
•    Rather than creating the same conditions everywhere, the global economy is characterized “by its interdependence, its asymmetry, its regionalization, the increased diversification within each region, its selective inclusiveness, its exclusionary segmentation, and, as a result of all those features, an extraordinarily variable geometry that tends to dissolve historical, economic geography” (1996, p. 106).
•    Its most distinct result is the emergence of what Castells calls the space of flows: the integrated global network. It comprises several connected elements: private networks, company Intranets; semi-public, closed and proprietary networks such as the financial networks; and public, open networks, the Internet. Social organizations reconstitute themselves according to this space of flows.
o    Technology: the infrastructure of the network.
o    Places: the topology of the space formed by its nodes and hubs.
o    People: the (relatively) secluded space of the managerial elite commanding the networks,
•    The space of flows has introduced a culture of real virtuality which is characterized by timeless time and placeless space.
•    Binary time expresses no sequence but knows only two states: either presence or absence, either now or never.
o    Within the space of flows everything that is the case is now, and everything that is not must be introduced from the outside: that is, it springs suddenly into existence.
•    Sequence is arbitrary in the space of flows and disorders events which in the physical context are connected by a chronological sequence.
•    Binary space, then, is a space where the distance can only be measured as two states: zero distance (inside the network) or infinite distance (outside the network), here or nowhere.
•    Power is concentrated in the intricate space of flows, to the extent that “the power of flows takes precedence over the flows of power” (1996, p. 469).
•    The classic embodiment of legitimizing identity, the nation state, is losing its power, “although, and this is essential, not its influence” (1997, p. 243).
•    Trapped between the increased articulation of diverse, often conflicting identities and the need to act on a global scene, the traditional democratic institutions–the civil society–are being voided of meaning and legitimacy: they lose their identity. The power of the political democracy, ironically at the moment when it reaches almost global acceptance, seems to be inevitably waning.

Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer

N. Katherine Hayles
My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
Area: Digital Media
Preface: Computing Kin
•    Materiality—construction of matter that matter for human meaning
•    The complex dynamics through which the Computational universe works simultaneously as a means and metaphor in technical and artistic practices
•    Intermediation = complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media
o    The posthuman will be understood as effects of media
2: “’Postbiological’ future: the expectation that the corporeal embodiment that has always functioned to define the limits of the human will in the future become optional, as humans find ways to upload their consciousness into computers and leave their bodies behind.”
4: “In the contemporary period, reading as ‘hallucination’ has been displaced in part by the instant messaging, chat rooms, video games, e-mail, and Web surfing that play such a a large role in young people’s experiences.  To an extent, then, the mother’s voice that haunted reading has been supplanted by  another set of stimuli: the visual, audio, kinesthetic, and haptic cues emanating from the computer.  If the mother’s voice was the link connecting subjectivity with writing, humans with natural environments, then the computer’s beeps, clicks, and tones are the links connecting contemporary subjectivities to electronic environments, humans to the Computational Universe.”
Chapter 1: Intermediation: Textuality and the Regimes of Computation
•    Comparison of speech, writing, and code
•    Code: synecdoche for information
•    Emergence
o    25: “This term refers to properties that do not in here in the individual components of a system; rather, these properties come about from interactions between components.”
22: “Even if code is not originally ontological, it becomes so through these recursive feedback loops.  In Wetwares, Richard Doyle makes a similar observation about the belief that we will someday be able to upload our consciousness into computers and thereby effectively achieve immortality.  Doyle comments, ‘’Uploading,’ the desire to be wetware, makes possible a new technology of the self, one fractured by the exteriority of the future….Uploading seems to install discursive, material, and social mechanism for the anticipation of an externalized self, a techno-social mutation that is perhaps best characterized as a new capacity to be affected by, addicted to, the future.”
33: “’Remediation’ has the disadvantage of locating the starting for the cycles in a particular locality and medium, whereas ‘intermediation’ is more faithful to the spirit of multiple causality in emphasizing interactions among media.”
33: “I want to expand its denotations to include interactions between systems of representations, particularly language and code, as well as interactions between modes of representation, particularly analog and digital.  Perhaps most importantly, ‘intermediation’ also denotes mediating interfaces connecting humans with the intelligent machines that are our collaborators in making, storing, and transmitting informational processes and objects.”
Chapter 4: Translating Media
•    If the text is stored accurately on a second storage medium, the text remains the same though the signs for it are different
o    Braille v. Print versions: the text is the same but the sensory input is very different
•    “The materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies.”
101: “With electronic texts there is a conceptual distinction—and often an actualized one—between storage and delivery vehicles, whereas with print the storage and delivery vehicles are one and the same.  With electronic texts, the data files may be on one server and the machine creating the display may be in another location entirely, which means that electronic text exists as a distributed phenomenon. The dispersion introduces many possible sources of variation into the production of electronic text that do not exist in the same way with print, for example, when a user’s browser displays a text with different colors than those the writer say on her machine when she was creating it.”
102: “Certainly the time lag is an important component of the electronic text, for it determines in what order the user will view the material.  Indeed, as anyone who has grown impatient with long load times knows, in many instances it determines whether the user will see the image at all.  These times are difficult to predict precisely because they depend on the individual computer’s processing speed, traffic on the Web, efficiency of data distribution on the hard drive, and other imponderables.  This aspect of electronic textuality—along with many others—cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.”

DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

Manuel DeLanda
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
•    Not a direct interpretation of Deleuze’s work, but a reconstruction
o    Robust to changes in theoretical assumptions and strategies
•    Three types of ontological commitments:
o    “For some philosophers reality has no existence independently from the human mind that perceives it, so their ontology consists mostly of mental entities, whether these are thought as transcendent objects or, on the contrary, as linguistic representations or social conventions.  Other philosophers grant to the objects of everyday experience a mind-independent existence, but remaining unconvinced that theoretical entities, whether unobservable relations such as physical causes, or unobservable entities such as electrons, possess such an ontological autonomy.  Finally, there are philosophers who grant reality full autonomy from the human mind, disregarding the difference between the observable and the unobservable, and the anthropocentrism this distinction implies.  These philosophers are said to have a realist ontology.”
•    Essence: a core set of properties that defines what these objects are
•    Importance and relevance – not truth – are the key concepts in Deleuze’s epistemology
From the Wiki:
•    Process-based realist philosophy
•    Deleuze’s realist philosophies don’t rely on essences
o    In the virtual, essences are replaced with multiplicities
•    Multiplicities: concrete sets of singularities or attractions
•    Deleuze’s time – heterochronous
o    “series of nested presents” (coupling of multiplicities)
•    Minor v. Royal science
o    M: pragmatic, laboratory science (more importance on well-formed problems then generalized solutions)
o    R: prestigious, proscriptive science
•    Seven core ontological components
* The (abstract) depth or spatium in which intensities are organised. Deleuzian synonyms: ‘machinic phylum’, ‘plane of consistency’, ‘Body without Organs’.
* The disparate series (multiplicities) these form and the fields of individuation they outline. Deleuzian synonyms: ‘vague essences’, ‘becomings’, ‘partial objects’, ‘concepts’.
* The ‘dark precursor’ (line of flight) which causes them to communicate. Deleuzian synonyms: ‘aleatory or paradoxical point’, ‘desiring machine’, ‘nonsense’, ‘object=x’, ‘quasi-cause’, ‘conceptual personae’.
* The linkages, resonances and movements which result (the dynamism of this system). Deleuzian synonyms: ‘convergence and divergence’, ‘forced movement’.
* The constitution of ‘passive selves’ in the system, and the formation of pure spatio-temporal dynamisms (the intensive). Deleuzian synonyms: ‘intensive individuals’, ‘larval subjects’, ‘monads (from Leibniz).
* The qualities and extensions differentiated into (the actual/extensive). Deleuzian synonyms: ‘forms and substances’
* The centres of envelopment. Deleuzian synonyms: ‘codes’.
From Bogard’s Review:
•    DeLanda defies the actual as metric space and linear time
o    How the actual emerges from the virtual as an immanent casual
•    “Whereas the actual is extended and differentiated in space and time, the virtual is intensive and formless.”
o    Science of the virtual must be one of the intensities, not extensities
•    Detailed descriptions of becoming-actual, but less time on the problem of becoming-virtual, or how the actual becomes virtual
2: “His depiction of the virtual is approached via several interrelated problems:  in terms of how multiplicities arise and differentiate themselves within virtual space, in terms of how phenomena that comprise the virtual must be characterized as “pre-individualized,” non-personal, impassive and abstract, how the virtual is a formless plane (of consistency, immanence, etc.) upon which singularities are distributed, extended and serialized into ordinary points, and so on.  The virtual, De Landa notes, has corporeal causes, i.e., it is produced by actual material processes, but is itself incorporeal and autonomous from those causes (in De Landa’s words, its dynamics are abstract and “mechanism independent”), and the relations that form between virtual multiplicities are “quasi-causal” or, as Foucault would characterize it, relations among effects of effects.”

Wiener’s Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener
Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Area: Digital Media
Intro
•    The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand, criticize, and suggest one
•    Example: Picking up a pencil
o    Unless we’re anatomists, we don’t know the muscles, etc. used in performing the act
o    Doesn’t prevent us from doing so, it’s simply an unconscious movement
•    Cybernetics: influence of mathematical logic
o    Liebniz: universal symbolism and a calculus of reasoning
o    Like his predecessor Pascal, Liebniz was interested in the computing machines of the mental
•    Gestalt: perceptual formation of universals
Chapter One: Newtonian and Bergsonian Time
•    Using Newtonian laws: all we can predict at any future time is a probability distribution of the constants of the system, and even this predictability fades out with the increase of time
o    Time is perfectly reversible: asymmetrical past and future
•    Within any world with which we can communicate, the direction of time is uniform
•    The individual is an arrow pointed through time in one way and the race is equally directed from the past into the future
•    Bergson emphasizes reversible time of physics and irreversible time of evolution and biology
•    Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structure of vitalism
43: “To sum up: the many automata of the present age are coupled to the outside world both for the reception of impressions and for the performance of actions.  They contain sense organs, effectors, and information from the one to the other.  They lend themselves very well to description in physiological terms.”
Chapter Eight: Information, Language, and Society
•    We are too small to influence the stars in their courses, and too large to care about anything but the mass effects of molecules, atoms, and electrons
Chapter Nine: On Learning and Self-Producing Machines
•    Two powers characteristic of living systems:
o    Power to learn: capable of being transformed
o    Power to reproduce themselves: multiply one’s likeness
•    Can man-made machines learn and reproduce themselves?

Kochhar-Lindgren’s TechnoLogics

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren
TechnoLogics: Ghosts, the Incalculable, and the Suspension of Animation.“Temps: Time, Work, and the Delay.”
Area: Digital Media
Critical moments from the text
171: “’There is a now of the untimely; there is a singularity which is that of this disjunction of the present’”
174: “’Deployment of techno-science or tele-technology…whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever from opposing presence to its representation, ‘real time’ to ‘deferred time,’ effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts.’”
180: “The digitialization of the world makes the entirety of the past, insofar as it has left traces, available in a blinding flash of the present, even a the usage of the pas-present-future lineage is also spinning vertiginously.”
184: “If there were no delay, no relay systems that along their line of servers act to mediate Dasein’s (self)-consciousness, then there could be no phenomenon called ‘haunting’ in which the other returns.”
From annotated bib:
Claiming that “the ‘now’ and its others must be thought of differently than as the presence of the present,” Kochlar-Lindgaren confronts the linear movement of time (175). He examines a postmodern dismissal of waiting, delay, and desire arguing that, “the desire of technologies […] is to obliterate the delay” (185). Thus, the ‘desires of technologies’ is a desire that “should be satisfied before I am aware that I am desiring” (185). I will utilize this chapter in two ways: firstly, I will examine how technology promotes a non-linear movement of time by claiming that our suspended selves can be present in multiple places and have recurring presents. Secondly, how sexual enhancement drugs erase the desire to become sexually “active”—the pills create the space for sexual arousal, something that cannot happen (as easily) without the drug; therefore, the user no longer wishes to be “active” as one can be whenever one chooses.

Stiegler’s Technics and Time

Bernard Stiegler
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
Notes from class:
•    Arranging human and machinic
•    Not humanization of nature, but naturalization of the human
•    Humans are more natural through technology
o    Control societies
•    Biopower is operating system of capitalism
o    Spontaneity is not problem for system
•    Beller: not just watching
o    “selling” product
•    Something is provided for all so none will escape
o    Adorno and Horkheimer
•    Nealon: Because everyone must provide something, no one will escape
•    All subjectivity is up for grabs: everyone must be someone
•    Demographic DNA
o    Broad version of the social
o    Giant picture from Heidegger
•    Useful finality
•    Virno: virtuosity—no end product
o    Goodness is not enough
•    Steigler’s response to no future
o    Cybernetics
•    Before with technology: death
o    Now, technology leads to life
•    Blanchot: wiped out
•    What one does with life
o    The impact to cause life
o    Change
•    Leroi-Gourhan/Steigler: Posthuman as a concept
o    Machinic heterogenetic: Guatarri
o    Bodies without organs
•    Desires for the fake
o    John Lovelock: guya theory
•    Benjamin: inorganic
•    Love of articifiality
•    Paradise of the artificial
o    Hatred of natural
•    Episteme v. techne
•    What’s the who, what’s the what
o    Actors of history
•    Anthropology: feet, hands, face
•    Technogenesis: mobility, change
•    Promethesis/Meno: no origin, no future
•    Contra Heidegger: Only a god can save us no
o    Techne or time
o    No going back
•    Q: What takes the place of philosophy now? A: Cybernetics
Critical moments in the text
2: “Lodged between [mechanics and biology], technical beings are nothing but a hybrid, enjoying no more ontological status than they did in ancient philosophy.”
6: “[Dasien]’s death is what it cannot know, and to this extent, death gives to ‘mine-ness’ its excess.  Death is not an event within existence because it is the very possibility of existence, a possibility that is at the same time essentially and interminably deferred.  This originary deferral is also what gives Dasein its difference to another.”
23: “Today, machines are the tool bearers, and the human is no longer a technical individual; the human becomes either the machine’s servant or its assembler.”
50: “The problem arising here is that the evolution of this essentially technical being that the human is exceeds the biological, although this dimension is an essential part of the technical phenomenon itself, something like its enigma.  The evolution of the ‘prosthesis,’ not itself living, by which the human is nonetheless defined as a living being, constitutes the reality of the human’s evolution, as if, with it, the history of life were to continue by means other than life: this is the paradox of a living being characterized in its forms of life by the nonliving—or by the traces that its life leaves in the nonliving.”
66: “To know the essence of the machine, and thereby understanding the sense of technics in general, is also to know the place of the human in technical ensembles.”
70: external memory
95: “If technics can be given its own finality, this means that its thinking in terms of ends and means is no longer sufficiently radical.”
114: “Denaturalization will be self-exteriorization, the becoming self-dependent, self-alienation, the alienation of the originary, the authentic, in the factical, the technical, the artificial death constitutive of the mediacy of a social and differentiated world of objects, and hence of subjects, for, from this points on, it is only though its objects, (the objects it has) that the self can define and thus is no longer itself.”
131: “Love is an interested and particular passion, which risks bringing ‘destruction to the human race,’ making possible the opposite of that for which if seems to exist: ‘a terrible passion that braves danger, surmounts all obstacles, and in its transports seems calculated to bring destruction on the human race which it is really destined to preserve.”
Think: Derrida Gift of Death; Edelman: No Future
148: “With the advent of exteriorization, the body of the living individual is no longer only a body: it can only function with its tools.”
177: “The individual develops three memories: genetic memory; memory of the central nervous system (epigenetic); and techno-logical memory (language and technics are here amalgamated in the process of exteriorization)
202: “Promethia is the anticipation of the future, that is, of danger, foresight, prudence, and an essential disquiet: somebody who is promethes is someone who is worried in advance.”
207: “’In its factial being, any Dasein is as it walready was, and it is ‘what’ is already was.  It is its past, whether explicitly or not.”
(Re-read: Disengagement of the What→memory)

Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Area: Rhetorical and Critical Theory
•    The reversal of Platonism
•    Virtual is primary over identity
o    Real contains Actual and Virtual
•    Baudrillard: simulacra; Deleuze: copy
•    Desire and pleasure
•    Disinterested in truth
•    Stimulations /simulations produce effects
•    What do the Sophists offer now?
o    Why the move to psychoanalysis?
•    Couldn’t be French and not do psychoanalysis
•    Move to Anti-Oedipus
•    Capitalism has made us neurotic
•    A-O: desiring products
•    More involved in shadows and surface
•    Some overlap with the Stoics
•    One is allowed to make the virtual more actual
o    Virtual is the spillover
•    Power of the false: Nietzsche, Deleuze
o    Enjoy your symptoms: Zizek
•    Aristocratic?
o    Leisure time?
o    Over-man?
•    Competitive version of subjectivity
o    Badiou: relative subjectivity available to all
Critical moments in the text
2: “It is a subterranean dualism between that which receives the action of the Idea and that which eludes the action.  It is not the distinction between the Model and the copy, but rather between copies and simulacra.  Pure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of the simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy at once.”
7: “[Affairs, quantities, qualities] are contrasted with an extra-Being which constitutes the incorporeal as a nonexisting entity.  The highest term therefore is not Being, but Something, insofar as it subsumes being and non-being, existence and inherence.”
20-ish: Noema: the perceived as such
40: “It is a two-sided entity, equally present in the signifying and the signified series.  It is the mirror.  Thus, it is at once word and thing, name and object, sense and denotatum, expression and designation, etc.”
49: “The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; by the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribes there his dream of permanent revolution.  This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.”
53: “Events are ideal. […]  The distinction however is not between two sorts of events; rather, it is between the event, which is ideal by nature, and its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs.  The distinction is between event and accident.  Events are ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event.  They have therefore an eternal truth, and their time is never the present which realizes them and makes them exist.  Rather, it is the unlimited Aion, the Infinitive in which they subsist and insist.
61: Thus the time of the present is always a limited but infinite time; infinite because cyclical, animating a physical eternal return as the return of the Same.”
63: “What is going to happen? What has just happened? The agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has just happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening.”
110: “To be actualized is also to be expressed.”
144: “Cicero put it very well when he said that the passage of time is similar to the unraveling of a thread.  But events, to be precise, do not exist on the straight line of the unraveled thread (Aion), just as causes do not exist in the circumference of the wound-up thread (Chronos).
147: “Representation and its usage therefore intervene at this point.  Corporeal causes act and suffer through a cosmic mixture and a universal present which produces the incorporeal event.  But the quasi-cause operates by doubling this physical causality—it embodies the event in the most limited possible present which is the most precise and the most instantaneous, the pure instant grasped at the point at which it divides itself in to future and past, and no longer the present of the world which would gather into itself the past and the future.  The actor occupies the instant, while the character portrayed hopes or fears in the future and remembers or repents in the past: it is in this sense that the actor ‘represents.’”
Fave passage
88: “In this passion, a pure language-affect is substituted for the effect of language: “All writing is PIG SHIT” (that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noisy, alimentary, and excremental bits).”

Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Deleuze Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Area: History of Rhetoric and Memory Studies
Introduction
•    Time is out of joint
o    Derrida in Specters
o    Movement is subordinated to time
•    The body no longer moves: it’s the developer of time, it shows time through tiredness and waiting
•    What is present is not the image itself, but what the image represents
•    Recollection is only a former present
“The Crystals of Time”
Critical moments in the text
•    “There is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation: it is a place and its obverse which are totally reversible”
•    72: “the monsters in Freaks are monsters only because they have been forced to move into their explicit role, and it is through a dark vengeance that they find themselves again and regain a strange clarity which arrives in the lightning to interrupt their role”
•    72: “the virtual image of the public role becomes actual, bit in relation to the virtual image of a private crime, which beceomes actual in turn and replaces the first image.”
•    Is it the dead who belong to us, or we who belong to them?
•    “Time is money: art had to make itself international industrial art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time as imaginary warrants of human capital”
•    An image has to be present and past, still present and already past
o    The past coexists with the present it was
•    Bergson: We are interior in time
•    Kant: time as the form of interiority, in the sense that we are internal to time
•    Proust: We are internal to time, which divides itself into two, make sthe present pass and the past be preserved
1)    68: “In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is not ‘coalescence’ between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides actual and virtual.
2)    69: Two problems that arise for Deleuze: 1—what are these consolidates of actual and virtual which define a crystalline structure? 2—what is the genetic process which appears in these structures?
3)    70: Exchange—“the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that eth mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes film back out-of-field. […] when virtual images proliferate like this, all together they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at the same time as the character is no more than one virtuality among others.”
4)    70: Principle of indiscernability reaches it peak: a perfect crystal image where the multiple mirrors have assumed the actuality of the two characters.
5)    72: “We no longer know which is the role and which is the crime”
6)    73: “This is the circuit of two virtual images which continually become actual in relation to each other, and are continually revived.”
7)    74: “The crystal is expression.  Expression moves form the mirror to the seed.  It is the same circuit which passes through three figures:
a.    actual/virtual
b.    limpid/opaque
c.    seed/environment
In fact, the seed is on the one hand the virtual image which will crystallize and environment which is as present amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallizable, in relation to which the seed now plays the role of actual image.
8)    78: “The cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation.”
9)    78: “The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, it time.  The crystal image thus receives the principle which is its foundation: endlessly relaunching exchange which is dissymmetrical, unequal and without equivalence, giving image for money, giving time for images, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end.
10)    79: It is clearly necessary for it to pass on for the new present to arrive, and it is clearly necessary for it to pass at the same time as it is present, at the moment that it is the present.  Thus the image has to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time.  If it was not already past at the same time as present, the present would never pass on.  The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and its comtemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.
a.    Bergson’s ‘paramnesia’: recollection of the present
11)    79: “The virtual image in the pure state is defined, not in accordance with a new present in relation to which it would be (relatively) past, but in accordance with the actual present of which it is the past, absolutely and simultaneously.
12)    80: “It is the virtual image which corresponds to a particular actual image, instead of being actualized, of having to be actualized in a different actual image”
13)    81: “Since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.  Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past.  Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal.”
14)    82: Bergson on time: “the past coexists with the present that is has been; the past is preserved in itself as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past present that passes and past which is preserved…duration is subjective.”
15)    83: The actual image and the virtual image coexist and crystallize; they enter into a circuit which brings up constantly back from one to the other; they form one and the same ‘scene’ where the characters belong to the real and yet play a role.”
16)    87: ”What we see through the pane or in the crystal is time, in its double movement of making presents pass, replacing one by the next while going towards the future but also of preserving all the past, dropping it into an obscure depth.”
17)    96: “This is the idea, or rather the revelation, that something arrives too late.  Caught in time, this could perhaps have avoided the natural decomposition and historical dismantling of the crystal-image. […] This something that comes too late is always the perceptual and sensual revelation of a unity of nature and man.  Thus it is not  a simple lack; it is the node of being of this grandiose revelation.  The ‘too-late’ is not an accident that takes place in time but a dimension of time itself.
Tying it all together
1)    What does Deleuze mean by crystals?  Something that is crystallized is simultaneously solid and reflective—just as time is passing and present, present and future.
2)    The crystal is the mirror that reflects the virtual image back to the actual image.  Thus the roles are reversed: even though the actual is seeing the virtual, that reflection is then the actual, not the virtual since this is the only representation the actual will be able to ‘see’
3)    There are three formations of time: present, past, and future.  However, these three are not that seamless.  There is a coexistance, an exchange between them: the present becomes past as it is also becoming future.  The past and the future have this ‘intermediary’ of the present.  There is a reliance of all time on other time.
“Peaks of Present and Sheets of Past”
Critical moments in the text
•    The crystal reverses time’s subordination to movement
•    Memory is not in us—we move in a Being-memory
o    The past is a pre existence, and already-there
•    Time – past  language – sense   thought – idea
•    St. Augustine: present of the future, of the present, and of the past
•    Nietzsche: suppress your recollections or suppress yourselves
1)    98: The crystal reveals a direct time-image, and no longer an indirect image of time deriving form movement.  It does not abstract time; it does better: it reverses its subordination in relation to movement.  The crystal makes visible the hidden ground of time, its differentation into to flows: presents which pass and that of pasts which are preserved.  Time simultaneously makes the presents pass and preserves the past in itself.
2)    98: “It is the same as with perception: just as we perceive things where they are present, in space, we remember where they have passed, in time, and we go out of ourselves just as much in each case.  Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Being—Memory”
3)    99: “the coexistence of circles” […] “Between the past as pre-existence in general and the present as infinitely contracted past there are all the circles of the past” […] “But they succeed each other only from the point of view of former presents which marked the limit of each of them.  They coexist from the point of view of the actual present which each time represents their common limit or the most contracted of them.”
4)    99: Bergson: time-image → language-image → thought-image
5)    100: “If the present is actually distinguishable form the future and the past, it is because it is presence of something, which precisely stops being present when it is replaced by something else.
6)    100: “it is an empty time that we anticipate recollection, breakup what is actual and locate the recollection once it is formed”
7)    100: St. Augustine
a.    present of the future
b.    present of the present
c.    present of the past
8)    101: Robbe-Grillet: “In his work there is never a succession of passing presents, but a simultaneity of a present of past, a present of present, and a present of future which make time frightening and inexplicable”
9)    105: “The coexistence of sheets of virtual past and the simultaneity of peaks of deactualized present, are the two direct signs of time itself.”
10)    108: “The term baroque is literally appropriate.  In this freeing of depth which now subordinates all other dimensions we should see not only the conquest of a continuum but the temporal nature of this continuum”
11)    109: “And here again cinema is Bergsonisn: it is not a case of psychological memory, made up of recollection-images, as the flashback can conventionally represent it.  It is not a case of succession of presents passing according to chronological time.  It is a case either of an attempting to evoke, produced in an actual present, and preceding the formation of recollection-images, or of the exploration of a sheet of past from which these recollection-images will later arise.  It is an on-this-side-of and beyond of psychological memory.  These two extremes of memory are presented by Bergson as follows: the extension of sheets of past and the contraction of the actual present.”
12)    112: temporary states of permanent crisis
13)    117: “an architecture of the memory such that it explains or develops the coexistent levels of past rather than an art of peaks which implies simultaneous presents […] the disappearance of the centre or fixed point.”
14)    123: Bergson: distinction between the ‘pure recollection’ which is always virtual and the ‘recollection image’ which makes it actual only in relation to a present. Pure recollection should definitely not be confused with the recollection-image which derives from it.”
15)    123: “When I take up position on such a sheet, two things can happen: either I discover there the point I was looking for, which will thus be actualized in a recollection-image, but it is clear that the latter does not posses in itself the mark of the past which it only inherits; or I do not discover the point, because it is on a different sheet which is inaccessible to me, belonging to a different age.”
16)    125: “If feelings are ages of the world, thought is the non-chronological time which corresponds to them.  If feelings are sheets of past, thought, the brain, is the set of non-localizable relations between all these sheets, the continuity which rolls them up and unrolls then like so many lobes, preventing them from halting and becoming fixed in a death-position.”
17)    125: Renais: “something ought to happen around the image, behind the image and even inside the image.  This is what happens when the image becomes time-image.
Tying it all together
1)    Deleuze is concerned with time and images and how these two interplay and confuse (?) time.  We know from the previous chapter that time is based on three moments, and these are easily confused in cinema because the director is concerned with the image, and can play with time as a specific entity.  If time in the film becomes meaningless, where the time lies is easily misunderstood, or even dismissed.
2)    We ‘expect’ cinema to be ordered chronologically, but because the directors are curious about time, too, this is not always the case.
3)    Deleuze examines permanency and time and their layers:
a.    there are temporary states of permanent crisis
b.    a disappearance of a fixed point
c.    if the circles are all coexisting, then maybe there is no permanence excepting of the immediate past upon which the present must rely
Questions about the text/larger context
1)    Why are we seeing the division of time into two (presents of pasts and pasts which are preserved) and the three (presents of past, present, future): how are these different, similar, work together?
2)    Discussion question: “A distinction is always made between the real and the imaginary, the objective and the subjective, the physical and the mental, the actual and the virtual, but that this distinction becomes reversible, and in that sense indiscernible”  How is the distinction always made: isn’t it twisted sometimes?  What about in the previous chapter?

Bergson’s Matter and Memory

Bergson, Matter and Memory
Area: History of Rhetoric and Memory Studies
Content
Intro
• Relation of sprit and matter through memory
• Image: <representation but >thing
o An existence placed halfway between these
• Where do objects exist: independently of or only in the consciousness?
• There’s a dissociation between existence and appearance
• Thought: mere function of the brain and the state of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain –or- Are the mental and brain states two different versions?
• Memory is the intersection of mind and matter
• The classical problem of the relations of soul and body is centered upon the subject of memory of words
o Ex: Complex thought → breaks itself into images → then, these images are pictured through the movements of how they would be acted out in space
• This is what the cerebral state indicates at every moment
• The relation to the mental to the cerebral is not a constant (simple) relation
“Of the Survival of Images”
Critical moments in the text
• 133: Three processes—1. Pure memory 2. Memory-image 3. Perception
• 134: perception is bound to expel the memory-image to expel pure memory
• 135: Strong states: supposed to be set up my us as perceptions of the present weak states: representations of the past
• 135: The error of associationism: “placed in the actual, it exhausts itself in vain attempts to discover in a realized and present state the mark of its last origin, to distinguish memory from perception, and to erect into a difference in kind that which it condemned in advance to be but a difference of magnitude. To picture is not to remember.
• 136: a remembered sensation becomes more actual the more we dwell upon it, that the memory of the sensation is the sensation itself beginning to be.
• 140: sensation in its essence, extended and localized; it is a source of movement. Pure memory, being inextensive and powerless, does not in any degree share the nature of sensation. That which I call my present is my attitude with regard to the immediate future; it is my impending action
• 142: “How comes it then that an existence outside of consciousness appears clear to us in the case of objects, but obscure when we are speaking of the subject?
• 145: “When a memory reappears in consciousness, it produces on us the effect of a ghost whose mysterious apparition must be explained by special causes. The adherence of this memory to our present condition is exactly comparable to the adherence of unperceived objects to those objects which we perceive; and the unconscious plays in each case a similar part.
o Think: Derrida’s hauntology
• 146: “Our memories form a chain of some kind”
o 147: form a part of a series
o 147: elements determine each other
• 147: Existence, in the empirical sense of the word, always implies conscious apprehension and regular connection
• 148: “But how can the past, which by hypothesis, has ceased to be, preserve itself?”
• 149: “Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past”
• 149: “Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; in truth every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”
• 156: resemblance v. generality
• 161: “unceasingly going backwards and forwards between the plane of action and that of pure memory”
• 164: choice of memory
• 166: “each recollection is a fixed and independent being […] what we have to explain, then, is no longer the cohesion of internal states, but the double movement of contraction and expansion by which consciousness narrows or enlarges the development of its contents.”
• 167: association of simplicity v. association of contiguity
• 173: everything depends on cohesion
• 176: “so that memory, finding nothing to catch hold of, ends by becoming practically powerless; now, in psychology, powerless means unconsciousness.
Tying it all together
• It seems like Bergson is concerned with a progressive memory whereas Deleuze is more so focused on the coexistence of thoughts and their reliance upon each other to form new ones. Deleuze says that each thought replaces the previous (coexistence the present is at both times becoming past and future); Bergson as progressive because there is a reliance on a past thought to form the present one.
• For Bergson, perception pushes memory through the past and retains itself in the present
• Bergson seems more concerned with a personal present: I guess that’s all we can really know, especially with conflicting histories. Benjamin states that we can only ‘historicize’ if we forget about the present (its effects).
o What about Jameson here—historicizing the past only in the present
• Consciousness: subject v. object
• We perceive only the past—here Bergson again differs from Deleuze
Questions about the text/larger context
• Is it the present that summons action? Are we ‘doing’ for future purposes?
• 143: “It is supposed that consciousness, even when linked with bodily functions, is a facuty that is only accidentally practical and is directed essentially toward speculation.” What does Bergson mean by accidental? Is it accidental because we’re never in the moment, that it just occurs?

Conclusion
•    Neither in perception or memory does the body contribute directly to representation
•    Memory and perception are turned to action
•    Consciousness is neither subjective (it is in things, not me), nor relative (the relation btw. The ‘phenomenon’ and the ‘thing’ is not that of appearance to reality, but part of the whole).
•    232: “Everything will happen as if we allowed to filter through us that action of external things which is real, in order to arrest and retain that which is virtual: this virtual action of things upon our body and of our body upon things is our perception itself.”
•    Our perception indicates the possible action of our body on others
o    Our bodies are capable of acting on itself and others
•    External bodies: separated by space
o    When distance is nil—the body is our own and it is real
•    No longer a virtual action
•    Interiority => affective sensations => subjectivity
•    Exteriority => images => objectivity
•    Pass from perception to memory, abandon matter for spirit
•    Theory of memory: both theoretic consequence and experimental verification of pure perception
•    Pure perception: present object / Memory: absent object
•    Double thesis:
o    Memory is only a function of the brain, there’s only a difference of intensity between perception and recollection
o    Memory is something other than a function of the brain and there is not merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection
•    Recognition: past and present come into contact
•    Recollection is only weakened perception, then perception is something like an intenser memory
•    Memory: not a regression from present to past, but a progression from the past to the present
•    240: “But the truth is that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act; it is sensory and it is motor—our present is, above all, the state of our body.  Our past, on the contrary, is that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.
•    Memory => Mind   Perception => Matter