Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 42, November 2002
Ted Kafala
Cinematic Media in the Age of the Quantum Particle
London: Sage
Publications,
2000 ISBN 0-7619-5802-9 (hb)
0-7619-5803-7 (pbk) 103 pp. Paul Virilio's recent
book, _Polar Inertia_, presents an elegant and sometimes
artful analysis of two emerging technoscientific realities:
1, the cultural shift toward 'sightless', 'lensless' digital
imaging and representation, with some focus on its effects
on the cinematic sense of time and the remote transmission
of online media; and 2, the effects of the emission as
photonic light and other quantum phenomena of our 'bodies'
(in remote *telepresence*) and our 'minds' (as virtual data
and information), as the existential, live manifestations of
the 'new physics'. With the recent release of Jennifer Leigh
and Alan Cumming's _The Anniversary Party_, one of the the
first full length, mainstream feature films to be shot and
edited entirely with digital equipment (the transfer to 35mm
celluloid appears as an unnecessary after-effect, or moot
point in the film's production), and the sudden emergence of
completely unreal, virtual leading actors in 3D animated
films, such as _Final Fantasy_, the recent technocultural
shifts to digital 'vision' are still eventful and
topical. Simulation in an era of
post-photographic technologies involves the reproduction and
consumption of multiple visual surfaces and images that are
oftentimes photorealistic but also somehow 'unreal'.
Virilio's ideas seem to raise the question: How do the
capabilities behind digital imaging challenge the
assumptions about real-time interaction and notions of time
and space embodied in conventional film theory? This is too
concrete a question for Virilio to answer directly in this
book, but he does make inferences that lead his readers to
conclude that computer imaging provides new horizons and
thresholds for cinematic theory, particularly in
deliberations over the nature of pure simulation. The 'New Physics' of
Digital Vision Virilio heralds a major
cultural shift in cinematic form, from conventional
Renaissance perspective and depth of field, to sightless,
digital, synthetic vision. The basis of this emerging
*teletopological* cinematic representation are the rapid
processes surrounding the *disintegration of indirect
light*, or more precisely, the optics of photonic light.
Virilio explains that the turn in favor of
'tele-videography' and the proliferation of small digital
cameras, including Webcams, (of course) involves the
compression of ordinary objects into scattered Cartesian
arrays of 3D pixels, but also the rather new, instantaneous
transmission of perceptible appearances over optic fiber
networks in a way unrelated to 'ordinary' analog mass media
communication (2). The resulting synthetic perspective is
not unlike some kind of paraoptic perception, but deviates
from all antecedents by its (trans)mutation of both
appearances and distances into light energy. Consequently, even the
somewhat contemporary video signal is transformed and
digitally rendered from electromagnetic wave to photonic
energy, a process that Virilio marks as the possible union
between wave optics and relativist cinema. However, I am
convinced that Virilio often merges and fails to discern the
distinctions between the electromagnetic and quantum light
technologies around which he weaves tangled discursive
threads throughout the book. Until Stephen Hawking and Roger
Penrose, physics has rarely been accessible to the
nonspecialist, and more seldom the stuff of trope and
metaphor as it is here. Nevertheless, _Polar Inertia_ is an
important book for beginning to assess the revolutionary
cultural impact of digital *visionics* in media studies, for
affirming the crisis of representation and ambiguity
surrounding the factual in the visual domain, and for
anticipating the age of paradoxical logic and *telepresence*
(as the possibility of the 'actual' end of
modernity). In this context, one also
has to wonder whether Virilio's acknowledgment of
*speed*
as the engine of the acceleration, breakdown, and parabolic
distortion of images (and imaging) redeems an
anti-ocularcentric turn in Western thought (particularly
French poststructuralist thought); or does it forewarn of an
active *hyperCartesianism* and extension of classical
optical communication by 'electro-optical' communication.
Species of anti-ocularcentric discourse resist the static
taxonomies of a rigid space- time in modernist vision,
whereby *knowing* was no longer an imitation of the world
based on similitude, but a self-contained universal science
whose function was to represent forms, magnitudes,
quantities, and relations of objects in a homogenous,
mechanical space. Virilio pays homage to Foucault and
Merleau-Ponty in this regard for shaking up the order of
things in the Western eye, disturbing the primacy of
perception, and questioning the 'electronic apartheid' of
the media world (although he perhaps deliberately neglects
Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray when they criticize Western
thought for its reverence of mimetic representations, for
its rejection of phantasms, its consumption of women for
*specularization*, and its framed, visual reduplication of
male-dominated ideas). The reader of _Polar
Inertia_, then, is led to believe that the shift toward
sightless, digital vision is a movement away from the
modernist perception that emphasizes the movement of visual
information in a mechanical, linear, segmented time, and
toward a new perceptual revolution deriving from past and
present breakthroughs in quantum theory. Virilio, however,
is highly critical of the effects of the 'lensless',
synthetic, point to point digitalization/manipulation of
appearances, and the accelerated 'photonic' transmission of
those appearances. He suggests that the effects of the new
'active' optics are a deepening of some of the negative
aspects of Cartesian objectivism and conventional camera
cinematography, particularly regarding the emergence of
paradoxical forms of duration and space-time
regimes. Digital Technologies and
Regimes of Cinematic Space-Time Virilio explains that the
origins of the paradoxical logic and erasure of images in
the digital realm lies in photography and cinematography:
photography created a chronoscopic system of underexposed,
exposed, and overexposed instant snapshots, leading to the
consideration of the time of succession as a series of
instants with little or no duration. Similarly, in
cinematography, the reduction of the through-time of one
frame of film (to 30 frames per second) over many years,
offset by the spatial elongation of the graphic film itself
(to 35mm, 70mm in Omnimax), has resulted in substantial
temporal foreshortening (60). The progressive speeding up of
space-time in this media both approaches and is dependent on
the almost absolute zero interval of *light-time*, the speed
and frequency of the photon-bearing wave, or time no longer
stopped! Therefore, Virilio suggests a close relationship
between camera photography (an epitome of modernist
technology) and digital high-resolution perception based on
binary information and photon particle
transmission. The 'direct lighting'
associated with the camera obscura of Renaissance
perspectivists conveyed a 'new representation of the world'
that led to the 'passive' classical optics of the lens and,
much more recently, to interactive computer-videography
(31). However, the strength of this historical trajectory,
and the role of conventional optics, if any, in digital
*visionics*, remains to be debated. It is more difficult to
dispute the obvious recent alterations in representation and
display from wall surface to screen, multiple window, and
various other forms of computer interface. The reliance on
the rapid movement of light in digital technologies, beyond
Virilio's fondness for the fusion of optics and kinematics,
does necessitate the revision of the status of those
space-time regimes and classical intervals of extension and
duration known before modern photography. Virilio suggests
as outcomes: 1, a relativist concept of temporality; and 2,
a more immediate, intuitive 'real-time telereality' that
supplants the real-space reality of objects and
places. With the 'new physics' and
the crisis in temporal and spatial absolutism, the constant
speed of quantum light (photons as 'active' quantum of
light) becomes the yardstick that delimits the parameters of
the perceived world, permitting multiple points of view and
a relativist concept of time as successive moments. Virilio
clarifies how Kant's premise (that time cannot be directly
observed) collapses when we consider how Einstein's
point-of-view theory corresponds to a realm of photonic,
subatomic physical particles (39). In this dimension,
quantum theories of representation lead to the infinite
deepening of the temporal sense of the 'instant': the
measure of duration is no longer 'duration', but minute
measures of relativist space-speeds. Virilio's return to
Bergson's concept of multiple durations pushes him closer to
Deleuze's study of the cinematic time-image in _Cinema 2_,
and Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson's thought itself in
_Bergsonism_. In his previous book, _Vision
Machine_, Virilio
draws on the Bergson of _Matter and Memory_ to delineate the
virtual, phatic image, the image-time freeze, as the basis
of Proustian multidimensional memories and thoughts. Now
Virilio captures the Bergson of _Duration and Simultaneity_,
and the intuitive time without duration in quantum events
that implodes subject-object distinctions. Bergson, the
futurist prophet of relative intensive moments of time, is
turned on his head. Deleuze's notion of the time-image in
contemporary cinematic approaches does not seem incongruent
here as a break with direct representation that shatters the
linear, empirical continuation of time, the empty and
unfolded form of time, or the separation of the *before* and
*after*. Neither does Virilio make a great leap to discuss
the implications of an ethics based on perspectivism and a
diversity of point-of-view as a consequence of new theories
of representation; rather, he is disparaging of any
ontological realities that may emerge in digital endo-space,
implying that they could only result in distortion,
hallucination, quantum dazing, or vertigo (40). From the Abyss of
Inertia The book concludes with
its final chapter, 'Polar Inertia', the state of the optical
body in remote telepresence, in 'ersatz time' (Husserl), or
at a point of absolute zero consumption and dissipation of
kinaesthetic energy. How is such an absolute bodily inertia
possible? Does Virilio believe that we are approaching
ultimate 'couch potato' stasis through our remote control
lifestyles and virtual reality environments? What are the
ramifications of such a state of stasis for cinematic
representation in online cyberspace realms, or 'sense
surround' all encompassing home entertainment systems?
Virilio attempts to sell this critical point by making
references to Hawking's theory (in _A Brief History of
Time_) of the possibilities of a pure dimension of imaginary
time and virtual speed in quantum physical spaces, but there
are no proofs of the existence of such 'quantum voids',
black holes, or absolute infinities without animate
organisms. The absence of movement in the non-place of
'interactive' cyberspace may therefore be considered a pure
trope. In _Polar Inertia_'s
extremist conclusions, therefore, Virilio may join the group
of ultra-pessimistic critics of simplistic portrayals of
technoculture (his interesting analysis of the shifts in
cinematic representation withstanding). The reader may be
reminded of the Baudrillard of _The Illusion of the End_:
the radical illusion of the material world that creates
media simulations as both the producing and erasing of
signs, which render each event as waste and residue in the
dustbin of history. Some readers may also be reminded of
Kevin
Robin's
contribution to this debate, _Into the Image_, which fails
in its attempt to rupture virtual worlds by overestimating
the intoxicating effects of alternative realities rather
than firmly uprooting the progressivist technoscientific
argument that surrounds virtual reality at its foundations.
It all sounds very familiar: as a direct application of the
closed Cartesian logic of disembodied and 'transcendental'
vision, the new postmodern *scopic* regime disconnects image
and experience, isolating images that find their basis in
real cultural experience from those that are only
*perceived* as real. We exist as phantom particles in a
virtual void that encapsulates us like a sensory deprivation
box. _Polar Inertia_ is an an interesting and valuable book
by an esteemed scholar, but by denying that social ethics
and values lie behind the production and consumption of
synthetic, simulated environments, interpreting them only as
pure appearance, or content-devoid aesthetic form, Virilio
(like some who came before him) may be ignoring the
importance of everyday language and experience in the
understanding of images. College of Applied
Science University
of Cincinnati,
Ohio, USA Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Ted Kafala, 'Cinematic
Media in the Age of the Quantum Particle',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 42, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n42kafala>. See also two more
_Film-Philosophy_ reviews of Virilio books: Sean Cubitt, 'Unnatural
Reality', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 9, February
1999 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol3-1999/n9cubitt>. Douglas Kellner, 'Virilio
on Vision Machines', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 2 no. 30,
October 1998 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol2-1998/n30kellner>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
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