Presence, the edge, the abstract

In Minima Moralia para 145, Adorno writes that, in both art and kitsch, 'freedom from nature is celebrated, but remains mythically entrapped' and adds 'the Eroica, like great philosophy, represents the idea as a total process, yet as if it were directly, sensuously present. In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at its shameless revelling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation'.

If, as I propose, the kind of abstraction we meet in abstract art is truth to the subject, the self that is imagined is, in Kandinsky for example, or Mondrian, the site of ideas in process, imagined as free of nature, but actually trapped in it, which is how they engage their viewers so intensely, but their freedom from imitation is – in Adorno's account here – never carried out because they, like the nature they disdain, are present.

It remains then to see whether the nature they try to rise above is indeed present or is rather a negation produced by the very effort to overcome it. If nature fails to exist, certainly as a whole, and arguably even as part (for example the contrast observable between city and ocean looking out over the bay during lockdown in St Kilda, where the bay is metonymic of Ocean, its freedom from restraint, its curative properties, its self-curing in the absence of trade, its alterity).

It is the presence of the artwork (and equally of the kitsch object) both to itself and as object that appears, that distinguishes it from whatever it imitates. This was the discovery of the Impressionists and their impact on early cinema, documented in The Cinema Effect, which however leaves the film open to the criticism's that Bonitzer launches: that it implies not only the visible but the physical off-frame and the fictional/imaginary off-screen.

The moment of abstraction occurs in moving image media between frames, at the frame edge, behind and in front of the screen, and in intermittence. Only to a limited degree is it feasible in relation to what is on the screen, photographed or animated.

Something else occurs in the relation to sound. Likewise something occurs in lensing, where multi-part compound lenses make up for flaws, as they appear, especially at the edges of the image. Spherical aberration, with its iridescent fringing, is evidence of the emergence of an Other subjectivity in the abstract subject, as it fails to present itself – and is the medium of its failure, as it is also the means of its success.

realism and memory

a childhood in the 20th century will fade away like mist. This is what makes the Blade Runner films so poignant, 'like tears in the rain'

Will jpegs matter? Will the mass image make it possible to keep a snapshot of 2019? This too has a precursor in Blade Runner: the recovery of microscopic detail, the ability to catch what was around a corner at some moment in the past.

As Bazin said, realism can be an apotropaic against death, but that - as in RW Paul's 1896 Blackfriars film - will be transformed by those who cannot remember a horse-drawn London. The true miracle is the coincidence of picture and memory - this is what Barthes doesn't want to admit. We recall the dead as much from a handful of pictures as we do from life.

Poignant then, but are pictures worth recall for anyone but those who lived through the actuality? And for those who strive to forget . . .

The proximity of (social) realism and unrelentingness (as Eliza Cubitt reminded me) is witness to what we do not want to recall. Realism as apotropaic involves the opposite: it recalls beauty; but Realism as a school constantly evokes not memory but the future, a political goal based on sharing what has been, till now, hidden: ordinary life, as Watt argued, but also life (and death) as ordinary, and painful.

Faithful verisimilitude, scientific objectivity, social realism, are all at odds with phenomenological-affective sensuality and its inescapable nostalgia.

The question then is how certain techniques - pictorial and sonic realism - catch up all four programs of realism – and probably more.

Hardy's walk: Subjectless perception

The last line of Thomas Hardy's short poem 'The Walk' evokes 'the look of a room on returning thence'. One of the Poems of 1912-13, written after the death of his wife Emma, 'The Walk' is an eminently realist poemIt gives a clear-sighted account of an emotional state. If, as I want to argue, realism, aesthetic realism rather than scientific or philosophical, concerns truth to perception, then Hardy gives a detailed description, unburdened by sentiment, of a change in his perception.

What makes it so valuable, above and beyond its finely tuned autobiographical account of personal loss, is its play on absence and presence, on solitude which is not the same as emptiness. There is of course its Victorian atheist dalliance with death including, undoubtedly, his own (his auto-haunting) – the honest (if not entirely admirable, and all the more honest for that) self-pity where, all the same, the indifference of the universe is not exclusively about how existentially gruesome it is to be human. Instead indifference appears as the persistence of the room without her, or him. This is not the indifferent iceberg forming while the Titanic is being built that he would write about in 'The Convergence of the Twain': it has none of that poems inevitability. If anything, the absence of 'The Walk' is entirely evitable: he just has to go for his familiar solitary walk – except that the empty room now accompanies him.

So who is doing the perceiving? Emma indeed, specifically absent-Emma; and also Hardy-when-he's-not-there. And thirdly the room itself, as it waits, synchronously wit the walk, self-perceiving, precisely at the moment when he is pre-occupied with another scene ('the familiar ground'). The real (in the loose sense) is both this familiar room and its unfamiliarity now she has gone, a space that now ejects him, his consciousness, most specifically his perception of it. It is the room that is empty and which he is not present in that changes where he is and what he sees when he is elsewhere, his habitation of the landscape of his walk.

The rather forced rhyme of sense/thence only deepens the alienation that binds him to the affect of absence; and it is this alienation from his own perception that makes this so profoundly realist. It is a poem about the illegibility of a perception.

In theatre there is always an audience. The great fiction of cinema is that there is not. This is Ozu's mystery: what does a room look like when there is no-one there to see it? But this is the very point: seeing without there being a person to see, the purity of perception that has no perceiver (no desire, no revulsion, the scientific principle revealed as not so much objective as non-subjective. The room sees itself because the camera, given the fiction of the absent audience, is in the room and part of the room, furniture. The work of death, of the dead, in Hardy's hard-won atheism, is to impersonate the absence of a perceiver, in order to realise (as all realism is a practice of making real) a subjectless perception in all its purity.

The poem has the medium-specific opportunity to see without a point of view. Ozu works with a tripod: the camera must occupy a point. Hardy was surely not inventing Steadicam. But he is, straddling two epochs in British and European culture, inventing a mode of perception that, having already rejected divine omniscience, is no longer exclusively human.

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.

Inhuman and Insignificant Pt 2: Truth 24fps

Godard wasn't wrong when he described cinema as Truth 24 times a second; except he was looking in the wrong place

The Real remains impossible because it is beyond Symbolic (or Imaginary). But it occurs exactly as Lacan predicted: in the micro-seconds between frames where Virilio spies picnolepsia, ie when the subject is absent, that is precisely when the Real can enter.

Film/video are privileged not because of their indexicality but because of the constitutive lacunae that enable apparent movement

Motion (as telos) is limitless, and is Real as a consequence. The Real can only enter a world of objects (the Symbolic as it exists historically in the 20th/21st centuries) in the absence of objecthood.

Inhuman and Insignificant Cinema: absence and the Real

'to deliver human speech from the lie that it is already human'(Minima Moralia p.102)

The joy of photography/cinematography is their inhumanity

As natural artifice and artificial nature, photography excludes the human from anything but selection.

It is not in any sense a 'language'. The remnant that appears linguistic is only the secondary choice of using the photo, as in an advert. Its function in news is precisely to persuade that no choice was involved, and that it has been an inhuman witness.

The question of 'significance' (Minima 142) needs to be attended to in terms not available to Adorno in the 1940s: the sign, and the contest over whether existents are already signs – of what makes them appear, and by appearing makes them appear significant, ie that they appear as existent, that they exist 'for' – perhaps for us, perhaps for each other (as in camouflage) or as evidence – of history or evolution, or God. Each relies on signifying, becoming a sign-for, and on the distinction between the whatever that appears and its appearance, between the substrate of pre-significant matter and the signifier. As the chora somehow pre-dates the signified, sign-ready Symbolic ego, so there is a pre-significant material process, but even that is only to the extent that its appearance as phenomenon makes it possible to signify, and under the rule that it is only by appearing and thus becoming capable of signifying that the possibility of a pre-significant / extra-significant existence becomes possible.

What film tries so hard to record is not the appearance of things as an achieved presentation (things as they are) but the process of their appearing. What slips under the procession of images is their inhuman vulnerability to nuance and process, forming and diffusing like the clouds over Monument Valley – which in turn de-monumentalise the geology, whose appearance appears under this light as a moment in a longer history of evolution and erosion, loosening in a third stage the definitenesss of the colonial wars played out in Ford's narratives. The cinematic sign exceeds ,as it precedes, the administration of Hollywood that seeks to contain it as a circumscribed entertainment and, perhaps, an unambiguous ideology. Thus the failure of realism/naturalism is precisely where it holds the greatest promise.

Post-anti-neo-Darwinism

Neo-Darwinism saw Man as pinnacle of a tree-like structure of evolution. Post-Darwinist evolution gets rid of the idea of the pinnacle, and instead sees the ecology as the triumph of complexity. Anthropocene anti-Darwinism returns to the pinnacle model to tell us that the whole of evolution has culminated, as pinnacle, in the engine of its own destruction: the human species. Post-anti-Darwinism proposes therefore that, if climate change and pollution are human effects, humans can change them but only once the distinction of humans from the ecology ends, and therewith the distinction between the ascent model and the ecological complexity model. Undoing the distinctions human-natural and human technological, as well as the natural-technological distinction these two imply, is thus a fundamentally aesthetic as well as politically fundamental task.

Doubt

The meteorologists predicted today's weather yesterday, with reasonable accuracy, and with a respectable degree of probability.

But predictions of longer and more devastating fire seasons may be a) incorrect (the further ahead the future, the more determinants there are in play, and the less assurance that predictions will be accurate; prediction becomes statistical -- rather than the accuracy of predicting a cool change around 4.00pm). Similarly the larger the scale, the more abstract the forces: not the causality of a weather system approaching from the SE at 5..00pm but combinations of dipole, el Ninõ, ocean surface temperatures . . . Counting in anthropogenic forces including carbon and greenhouse gases, water extraction etc no longer clearly causal, opening the field for doubt.

In a previous note I worked with truth's antonyms as lies, fictions and fantasies, using the distinction that lies and fictions are not believed but truths and fantasies are. Now we need to address doubt. and to distinguish it from systematic (Cartesian) doubt

Systematic doubt, historically the basis for the Western critical tradition, has been a tool for critical theory versus scientism and common sense. But today it is embraced in the new tactics of populist neo-nationalism (with which neo-liberalism clothes itself in the era of its triumph, which is also the era of the crisis of US hegemony. Every nation positions itself urgently to make the most of the rise of China (and beyond that of India, and somewhere down the line of Turkey) as well as in relation to its reluctant and often rebellious citizenry (and of course against its traditional foes, indigenous and migrant). Preliminary distinctions:

DOUBT 1 is a fortified, strategic position that refuses truth by characterising it as merely one belief among many in the 'marketplace of ideas' - ie a pro-position that all truths are equal.

DOUBT 2 is a critical move in the process of argument, a transitional stage, a recognition of the fundamentally antagonistic relation between truths. Any truth asserts itself as the only one.This is also the case with highly specific truths (it will rain at 4.00pm tomorrow; it is raining now), where the particular stands over against the universal. Doubt 2, critical doubt, asserts the irreducible difference between truths.

Commodity fetishism revised

The commodity-form, a hundred and fifty years ago, could be described as "the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things"*

Today however, in the context of social media, the frontline of the real subsumption of consumption under capital, this condition has been reversed. Today, the relation between things assumes the fantastic form of social relations.

*Capital volume 1, part 1, chapter 1, section 4 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret; page 165 in the Penguin/NLR translation.

Truth (preliminary note)

Truth

1) is a practice.
The Eternal Wisdom has truth a great crystal to which we might ascend. Science, pop science at least, has it something to be approached asymptotically, better with each generation.
Truth is not a construct but the work of constructing, on one side the increasing elegance of its logic, on the other how persuasively it describes the tohu va bohu of the world. The most fascinating practices do both.

2) as legal category
The oxymoron 'formal agreement' is therefore a contradiction: a dialogue (can dialogue ever be exhausted?) that 'ends' in a formal (and performative) statement (guilty/not guilty). Motive (soft) and occasion (hard), testimony (soft) and evidence (hard) assimilated into a single unambiguous verdict.
Query: can ambiguity ever be true? Are some occurrences truly ambiguous.

3) factish, truthiness, post-truth
2018: truth is not to be disdained, even if it means defending institutions we have always criticised (media, intelligence services, judiciary). Is common sense – which is so easily identifiable with ideology – in crisis, eradicating the common in favour of embattled tribes? Or do a) clichés and truisms b) embodied knowledge, habit, know-how and c) 'truths widely acknowledged' still have currency, as common, as commons.

4) hypothesis, proposition, surmise etcetera.
There are subjunctive modes of truth to place alongside ambiguity, the former a trajectory, the latter a condition, not far removed from confusion and proximates like controversy. (Distinguish an ill-formed question that cannot be answered unambiguously or uncontroversially from a well-formed one that is too difficult or whose answer is too complicated. We expect truth to be simple. Is it?)

Reservations: Mathematical (Badiou) and quantum (Barad) ontologies do not much deal in truth in senses 1,2 and 3: concepts of void, multiplicity, intra-action and topology - of the foam of being/becoming – are not crystalline, though persuasively descriptive.
Response: this (descriptive) ontology clashes with (elegant) administration to produce the historical (persuasion, work) as performance of truth in hypothesis testing, verdicts to be picked over.

First diagram on truths

and their contraries.

[annotation: 'Belief' here describes phenomena like pensée sauvage, theology, the hidden hand of the market, certain forms of environmentalism: - a systematisable certainty that x is the case which provides the axiom(s) for a cathedral of thinking. 'Evidence' might perhaps better be expressed as 'Testimony']

a) Truth is a practice and therefore requires media through which it can be practiced: instruments for capturing evidence, means of storing and ordering arguments and beliefs, modes of transmission, persuasion, establishing.
b) therefore truth has a history. As a practice, truth therefore has a media history. The first diagram allows for histories of modes of proof and typologies of data, for example.