Temporalities, temporealities and temporamentalities

To the extent that the non-existent gap between images is absent from the succession of discrete frames, even if it determines its apparent flow, the gap between images occupies a different temporal register to succession. Collective action ascribes one form of truth to the durational aggregation of images, and a different, linear temporality. The gaps belong to another truth, and another time. As picnolepsia, the time of absence is absence from time, and might therefore be described as ontological. Where the aggregate of apparent motion emerges as a result of collective action, it is political. This political emergence might then be called a temporamentality - a government of time. The neologism needs to be distinguished from temporality, a term rooted in the distinction between the eternal, spiritual activities of the Mediaeval Church and its material, time-bound collection of tithes and guardianship of land. Descending from the mode of existing in time proper to mortals, the term now can refer to the specific differences of different modes of existing in time, like duration, instantaneity or ephemerality. Wolfgang Ernst (2016) offers another neologism, tempor(e)alities, to refer to ontological times produced by technical means, such as the millisecond transport times so critical to financial networks and computer-to-computer 'algo' trading. Temporamentalities, with their memory of Foucault's (2000) 'governmentalities', are rather constructions of temporalities and temporealities (to simplify Ernst's styling) that have achieved the status of real abstractions, capable of changing how time is organised, such as Progress. A familiar question returns as to whether temporal technologies like chronometers, determine temporamentalities, the tendency of Borst's (1993) and Mumford's (1934: 12) analyses: or, in common with all technologies, are symptomatic of a broader collective mentalité or designed entirely as servants of a dominant mode of production; or again if chrono-technologies and temporamentalities are relatively autonomous, interacting at a distance and according to their discrete internal logics. Or, as a final item in a potentially longer list, are temporamentalities and chrono-technologies in a relation of contradiction and negation? The relation between times and their measures is significant firstly because it forces the question: when is truth?; and secondly because it clarifies the stakes in animation which, as the fundamental technology for the reproduction of movement, is the chrono-technology par excellence of our era.

It is clear that movement existed before cinema. Cinematic representation of movement – animation – obeys the law that any representation stands in for a represented that is absent, which implies that movement is absent from animations. However, the optical illusion depends on a human to be deceived: dogs, for example, with their swifter eyesight, see only stills where we slip into illusion at a rate of 25 frames per second. Of course there must be movement for the illusion to occur, but like a magic trick, the decisive action has to be invisible. The shutter closes to hide the moment when the film strip ticks forward to the next frame (otherwise we would see a blur between frames), and in scanned images the fading of light from the pixels is obscured by their rescanning with a new frame, and the gaps between pixels and scanlines is just small enough to fool us. As a form of mediation, then, cinematic representation of movement is time-based, time-consuming, takes time, but unlike the time of the true movement it represents, this temporeality is subject to the temporamentality of a chronometer, the clockwork of a projector or the Herzian timing governing network protocols, computer processing and the codecs governing scanning

A little less than a thousand years ago, St Anselm, considering the mystery of God's eternity, noted

Whether, therefore, we are talking about what we may say (that truth does come to a beginning or an end), or about what we may intelligibly think (that truth does not come to a beginning or an end), truth is not circumscribed by beginning and ending (Monologion ¶19. Anselm 1998: 32).

We might come to a similar conclusion in considering the mystery of the universal constant that underpins contemporary physics. Movement as such belongs to eternity, not clocks. In animation therefore we confront the clash of two modes of time in which temporamentality overcomes and absents eternity. From the standpoint of the temporamental apparatus, eternity is the timeless nothing between frames; but Anselm teaches us that the nothing is in fact something, in this instance the principle that allows the illusion to flourish. At the same time, the illusion also depends on Virilio's picnolepsia, and the neuropsychology of human optics, our recurrent loss of consciousness in the interstices between images. It is not only the real movement that is absent but the perceiving consciousness. The question 'when is truth' thus also raises the question of who or what is present or absent in the mediation of truth, where truth is a quality of what is absented in the process of representation.

Transmitting video images today involves another temporamentality in the form of vector prediction. The near-universal standard is the MPEG codec, short for the compression-decompression algorithms defined by the Motion Picture Expert Group, a sub-group of the International Electrotechnical Commission and the International Standards Organisation's Joint Technical Committee, published by the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body with, like its partners, powerful corporate members. One technique for ensuring efficient transfer of the in-between frames is to send, not a pixel-by-pixel account of every frame, but a mathematical description of the likely trajectory of significant elements of the image from one keyframe to the next, a description known as a vector. These vectors are probabilistic: they do not recount the actual record of movement but a simulation based on the probable travel of, say, a cluster of red pixels representing a cricket ball across a field. Video animation is then not only picnoleptic but proleptic, representing real-time acts (in the case of live sports broadcasting) through representations of the likely future of those acts, or, from another perspective, showing the future as if it were already completed. In one sense this is, as prolepsis was at origin, a purely rhetorical effect; on the other, to the extent that discourse, including visual discourse, remediates what it represents, it is a performative action, perhaps most of all when coupled with the future-oriented simulations of Earth-observation networks, war-gaming and financial software.

Asking who is present during the picnoleptic blanks of real-time animated transmissions draws the answer: the codec is present, operating in real time, calculating with extreme rapidity the content of the next cluster of frames. This codec is however far from autonomous technology. It is an apparatus in Flusser's sense that embraces technical installations (the TCP/IP packet-switching protocol and with it the entire panoply of internet governance; construction standards in the electronics industry; the supply chains for metals, plastics, glass and the fabrication of chips; the ongoing colonialism and endocolonialism of resource extraction; the energy supply engineered in consort with the electronics industry; the environmental impacts of energy use, resource extraction and device fabrication; the ancient sunlight trapped in fossil fuels and the ancient energies stored in minerals; the distant echoes of the Big Bang . . . .). As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, we can no longer disentangle human history from natural history. Cosmic forces are at play in our screens. But they are occluded by the demands of corporate standardisation, and a temporamentality that mirrors a temporeality that has risen to dominance with financialisation in the period since the 1973 Oil Crisis: the colonisation of the future.