Inigo Wilkins 09/05
Affect - The production of effects.
Aion - The non-chronological time of the eternal return.
Associationism - The belief that consciousness begins blank (a tabula rasa) and understands the world by forming associations from disparate sense data.
Chronos - Chronological time.
Ecphory - The environmental conditions (internal and external) necessary to stimulate the retrieval of a certain memory.
Engram - The bodily recorded responsive potential of a given stimulus.
Engraphy - The process by which a new engram is recorded, or encoded.
Duration - The understanding of the present of lived time as a feedback loop with past time that is in a process of mutation.
Habitus - The wider definition of habit that includes not just cultural and genetic heritage but also the proclivity to repeat inherent in all matter.
Heautonomy - Two distinct and incommensurable, yet complementary, systems - a disjunctive synthesis.
Homophony (Non-Differentiating / Differentiating) - The resonance of distinct engrams (as a combination of components whose differences are suppressed / as an antagonism between two groups of components)
Mecanosphere - The interacting totality of all things composed of parts.
Mneme - The recorded (both hereditary and contingent) potential of the body to react to stimuli.
Mnemosyne - The synthetic production of virtual objects that is memory.
Noematic - The immanent meaning of objects to intuition and thought.
Noosphere - The interacting totality of human minds.
Phantasm - A simulacrum that has become signaletic material.
Proprioceptive - The bodies' three dimensional sense of orientation in space.
Redintegration - The retrieval of a whole system through the perception of just a part of it.
Signaletic Material - Matter as a force of open, transforming meaning.
Simulacrum - An image without resemblance.1
The amplified reality headset is a mobile audio-visual installation that functions as an immersive recording and playback apparatus. There are multiple technical and theoretical aspects of this work which deserve detailed explanation, however, rather than exhaustively enumerating its attributes, or situating it in a chronological evolutionary history of media and artistic practices, I will focus here on the specific dual application of recording and playback fundamental to an understanding of the device, and trace a genealogy (a history opposed to origins)2 of the concepts that underlie its praxis.
As a sonic culture performance this essay does not aim to make an objective account or representation, either of the installation as a material object, or of the work of the authors whose theories it draws upon. Instead it is an interventional action that is already political, a recomposition of signs that is part of an essentially deterritorializing process. This is to say that all actions, down to the microscopic, are neither independent nor entirely determined, but rather form part of a meshwork of discourses and a metastable process of emergence or enculturation3. Acoustic theory revolts against a long entrenched domination by visual culture, with its discrete and static objects, with its Platonic Ideas and their copies, and finds instead, following Spinoza, a transforming flux of interpenetrating, coexistent, affective bodies that may be defined by relative movement or vibration. It is this affective (rather than representational) aspect of perception and memory that will be discerned and related to the technology of recording and playback.
In his seminal work 'Difference and Repetition' Deleuze distinguishes three operations or syntheses of time and in 'The Logic of Sense' he locates their correlates in consciousness using a Piercian semiotics4. This radical re-evaluation of perception and memory requires a detailed and careful archaeology.5 In order to understand this division, and Deleuze's further claims, we should delve into the emergence of memory as a field of research in science and psychology, and examine the apparently contradictory theses of two roughly contemporaneous theorists; Richard Semon, a biologist whose work, after enjoying a brief spurt of critical acclaim, went largely unnoticed until its controversial revival in the late 70s by cognitive theorists6; and Henri Bergson, whose theory that the world is composed of perception-images that are actual, and memory-images that are virtual, forms the basis of Deleuze's investigation of difference.
Semon's first great work on memory, published in 1904, entitled 'Die Mneme', was written in a time when little attention and scant experimentation had been achieved in the area, it introduced some key theoretical distinctions that lay dormant from the largely behaviorist dominated debate for over half a century, many of which are basic to the contemporary revolution in cognitive psychology. Semon's work was received, and conceived, within a discourse on heredity that was raging between the Lamarckian approach to evolution, which considered the adaptation of the organism to occur through use, and the Darwinian thesis that species transform simply through mutation and selection. Semon builds on the work of Hering and follows other neo-Lamarckians in arguing for the existence of acquired characteristics, a position that greatly contributed to the dismissal of Semon's whole opus, but one which modern biology finds increasing new evidence for.7
Contemporary memory theory makes a division of the field into three processes: encoding (the writing or recording of perception to memory), storage (the conservation of memory data), and retri..the accessing of memory data)8. The dominant conception of memory at the turn of the 20th century was based on the model of memory as learnt through repetition, Ebbinghaus expresses the consensual view that 'as the number of repetitions rises, the series are engraved more and more deeply and indelibly'9. According to this perspective the subject, the perceptual process, the object, and the memory data all remain independent and relatively unaffected by each other; it accounts for only the processes of encoding and storage, and pays no attention to the dynamic of retrieval - an area it was left to Semon to develop single-handedly. Contrary to the position that repetition has a simple strengthening effect, Semon proposes a multiple trace system where, to put it simply 'each repetition of a stimulus creates a separate, unique representation'10.
This is not to say that the brain stores billions of separate representations however, and we risk misunderstanding Semon if we sidestep his prescient conceptual and terminological innovations. Long before modern science accepted memory as composed of these three processes Semon theorized a complex co-determining trinity: encoding is termed engraphy, understood as the process by which a new engram is recorded, an engram being 'the enduring though primarily latent modification in the irritable substance produced by a stimulus'11. The modern scientific understanding of storage still does not dare to allow as much as does Semon in his construction of the concept Mneme, a term he uses deliberately to avoid the connotations of the word memory, instead Mneme pushes memory to its most extended sense so that it includes instinct and hereditary disposition. 'Mneme describes an organism's capacity to conserve the effects of stimulation and to interact with the environment on the basis of conserved experience. As Semon put it, it is Mneme "which in the organic world links the past and present in a living bond."'12 It is the third category, retrieval, that Semon is revolutionary in establishing, which he calls ecphory, and describes as 'the influences which awaken the mnemic trace or engram out of its latent state into one of manifested activity'13.
Semon is thus anti-associationist and his influence can be detected in the work of Selz, who argued that thought and memory are processes rather than contents, and the Gestaltists such as Kohler and Koffka, whose theories bear a great similarity to the concept of redintegration, which Semon took from Hollingworth, meaning the 'reinstatement of a whole via just one of its parts'14. Semon called this partial recurrence and it formed the basis of one half of his attack on the doctrine of associationism, the other was the subversive contention that 'association is the result of an engraphy disclosed on the occasion of an ecphory'15. This constitutes a Copernican revolution in the theorization of memory and perception; we do not recognize by a method of looking up and comparing, but through a latent tension in regard to the stimulus that both pre-exists and extends far beyond the concrete association that is repeated on the moment.16 Semon's tri-partite system in then an accumulative flux, each ecphoric stimulus both produces an engram (playback) at the same time that it records the new engram and its associations.
The engram is embedded in a network of connections and disjunctions called the engram-stratum, this means that the engram-complex is multiple itself; since its modifications are latent it contains diverse reactive potential. Thus 'each ecphory of an engram-complex produces not only a mnemic sensation. . .but through this creates a new engram which adheres to the new engram-stratum'.17 Moreover separate engrams resonate with each other to produce both non-differentiating and differentiating homophony.18 Engraphy and ecphory constitute a feedback loop that do not make an accurate copy of received sensations but rather transform them by their concatenation with a series of engram-complexes. Input-output discrepancies are thus explained as due to the 'active role played by retrieval in the storage process'.19
At first impressions Semon and Bergson seem irreconcilably opposed; the former insisting on the material quality of memory, the latter on the virtual (yet real) existence of memory, or past time, as opposed to the actual existence of actions and objects in the present. Bergson's crucial work "Matter and Memory" was published in 1896; eight years earlier than Semon's 'Die Mneme'; conceived and received within a philosophical discourse about subjectivity and free will. I would like to show that despite this distance in their work, and although they disagree on at least one fundamental point, there is a great similarity in their ideas.
Bergson continually reiterates his argument along two lines; against the common misconception, exemplified by philosophical realism, that perception has only a speculative interest whose object is pure knowledge; and against the dominant psychological explanation of memory at that time -associationism, the theory that recognition was a matter of perceiving similarity or contiguity between external sources of sense data and their internal representations20. Bergsonian perception is, on the contrary, partial, interested, located, embodied, contingent and subtractive 21 - 'actual consciousness accepts at each moment the useful and rejects in the same breath the superfluous'.22
Bergson argues that perception is directed to action not pure knowledge23, he maintains that the final explanation of perception is the 'tendency of the body to movement'24. He goes on to point out that the body is 'a centre of action; it cannot give birth to a representation'25, and that 'the brain is part of the material world; the material world is not part of the brain.'26 This is summed up on one side of his major contention; that there is only a difference in degree, not a difference in kind, between 'the perceptive faculty of the brain and the reflex functions of the spinal cord'27. The other side is the radical assertion that between memory and perception there is not merely a difference in degree, but, crucially, a difference in kind.
'The illusion which consists in establishing only a difference in degree between memory and perception is more than a mere consequence of associationism, more than an accident in the history of philosophy. Its roots lie deep.'28
It seems thus far that Semon and Bergson are in agreement; the understanding of memory and perception as a dynamic feedback process, the practical assumption that all memory relates to the action of the body in the material flux of specific environments, the anti-associationist contention that memory is not a tidy filing cabinet, or a neutral and homogenous collection of sense data, but a continually transforming system of contractions and dilations that is always in excess of lived experience or action. Association is not the choice of the subject but the result of a process of retrieval that is essentially conjunctive. The point of divergence in their theories is Bergson's definition of the difference in kind between perception and memory. For Bergson pure perception is material but pure recollection is spiritual.29
The word spiritual has many connotations and it is easy then to mistake Bergson's philosophy as reinstating all the old binary oppositions between the material object and the immaterial idea, but his system is more complex, and the duality of the material and immaterial are two interacting series which inhere in a monism of images. He ends his text triumphantly pronouncing that 'spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.'30 This polarity is better explained by the terms actual and virtual; the actual is given in pure perception, which occurs on the instant, is directed towards action and interested in objects - it is the material collision of particles or vibrations on the body thus 'actual sensations occupy definite portions of the surface of [the] body'31, this is something that neither Spinoza nor Semon would disagree with, Bergson distinguishes himself by asserting that pure memory on the other hand is powerless32 and 'interests no part of [the] body'33. He claims it is virtual, a concept not opposed to the real, but to the actual, and meaning not artificial, but potential.
It seems that here is the crux of the difference between Semon and Bergson - Semon is a biologist and insists on the materiality of memory or Mneme as physical changes or engrams recorded at the cellular level, 'he expressly rejected the views of vitalistic writers such as Bergson (1911) and McDougall (1911), who believed that memories are preserved in some non-material, "psychical" field.'34 Bergson, on the other hand, contends that the question of where memories are stored is a case of mistaken identity; since memories are not spatially extended they cannot be contained in any spatial receptacle.35 Memory is not 'localized in certain cells of the cerebral substance'36 In Bergson's philosophy there are only images, the representative categories of subject and object are no longer sufficient since they isolate static states from a fundamental becoming, 'Itself an image, the body cannot store up images, since it forms part of the images, and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it; it is the brain that is in them.'37
The apparently antithetical basis of their thought is not as contradictory as it would seem, however, and is more the result of the separate discourses in which they are embroiled. Although Semon considers engrams to be material modifications of the cellular structure of the brain, he maintains that they are not localized, but distributed, and composed of varying degrees of tension (Lashley's unsuccessful search for the engram was then fundamentally misguided38). Bergson, for his part, does not present a simple vitalism, and argues that pure recollection and pure perception are only extreme ideals and that every perception 'fills a certain depth of duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory'39. The virtual image exists only as potential bodily relations, in different states of tension which are actualized for the practical end of action in the material world, it is 'the prelude to a motor reaction, the beginning of an action in space'40
Encountering a stimulus provokes the organism to select a response from amongst the potential positions generated from past actions, but for the stimulus to be identified thus there must already have been an ordering of some kind, or rather a latent tension in regard to that form of stimulus. In Semon's terminology Mneme pre-exists engraphy and ecphory. Bergson also attests to an organisation that is always previous to perception, he states that 'every perception has its organized motor accompaniment'41 and that 'memory does not consist in a regression of the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progression from the past to the present'42, this is to say that at every moment we start from the virtual and materialize an action based on the repetition of actual associations, or cultural engrams.
A true synthesis of Semon and Bergson is only possible with an understanding of Deleuze's machinic materialism. For Deleuze, everything is machinic (including matter, both organic and inorganic, and language, propositions or ideas), this does not mean mechanical, but rather composed of diverse parts with specific functions. 'There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mecanosphere. . .The mecanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between the strata.'43
Machinic assemblages are segmented and molar, they articulate strata by reterritorialization, abstract machines draw a plane of consistency on which the strata are organised. The plane of consistency is the realm of 'pre-individual intensities', or molecular desire, and is opposed to stratification: 'Continuum of intensities, combined emission of particles or sign-particles, conjunction of deterritorialized flows: these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency; they are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of destratification.'44 This is why Deleuze cannot agree with Chomsky's universal grammar, stating instead that 'the abstract machine of language is not universal, or even general, but singular; it is not actual, but virtual-real; it has, not invariable or obligatory rules, but optional rules that ceaselessly vary with the variation itself, as in a game in which each move changes the rules'.45
One of the interesting resonances of Semon's thought is found in Hubbard, who adapts his conception of the engram to a more pathological, dualist and idealist model merged with his manic obsessive aim of social control through hypnosis and brainwashing techniques. In Hubbard's interpretation there are two movements of consciousness; the active mind responds to stimuli with a variable degree of tension determined by the engrams it ecphorizes (playback); the reactive mind passively records engrams, which determine its future behaviour (recording). The goal of practicing Hubbard's Dianetics and being a member of his Church of Scientology is to become a 'clear' - a non-irritable surface free of engrams - through a process of auditing in which the subject is prompted to discover engrams using the dubious technology of the "E-meter".
The distinction between a passive and active synthesis of memory is as crucial to Deleuze and Bergson as it is to Semon and Hubbard. Bergson distinguishes between two forms of recognition; automatic, in which the virtual image or general idea (e.g. grass) is materialized or inserts itself as memory-images in the organized motor-reaction that accompanies it (e.g. eating); and attentive, in which neither the perception-image nor the virtual image attach to a corresponding motor accompaniment but instead enter into widening circuits of free conjunction and disjunction. This is imaginative or creative thought, and leads to the actualization of new action.
Though Bergson in many ways anticipated a modern understanding of the brain and it's functioning, he was also a product of his time, and displays a fixation with the organism as a primal unit, and an extreme anthropocentric hierarchalism. For Bergson the organism is a privileged object in the material world, since it has duration, that is, it produces virtual memory-images that interact with its actual perception-images. Though, according to Bergson, all living things endure (not to mention the universe itself) it is only humans that are not shackled to their motor-habits. The cow is a 'captive of perception'46, unable to think, it consists of a 'mechanism which engages attention'47, where the godly human is able to restrain its beastly desires, and is thus a 'mechanism from which it can be diverted'.48
The writer William Burroughs had a prolonged encounter with Dianetics and the Church of Scientology, and while subverting and deterritorializing its control mechanisms, Burroughs was fascinated by the idea of the reactive mind as a determining force in consciousness and, influenced by Korzybski's theory of general semantics, he linked it with the structure of language, which he saw as a viral body that controls perception. Hence ''word begets image and image is virus'49 'Image is real. Virus is real. There is nothing but virus'50 'Image is trapped in word'51. This fusion of Semon and Korzybyski engendered the novel 'The Third Mind' and the concept of the 'other half', the parasitic organism of language that gives us the 'talking sickness'.52 It was the extended notion of recording and playback this catalyzed that grasped his attention, however, and he began tape recorder (and later film) experiments with Ian Sommerville, mixing, dubbing and inching the tape in much the same ways that Schaeffer and the school of musique concrete in 50's France had done.
Schaeffer was concerned with listening to sound in itself (he called this reduced listening, as opposed to causal and semantic listening), dislocated from its environment and manipulated in pitch or direction. Burroughs was interested in the new semantic and causal relations that could be produced by cutting and splicing. He used the automaton of the machine to record a time-space and play it back into another time-space, this continued an obsession of his for serial reproduction that can be seen in his earlier quasi-alchemical attempts to distill colour by photographing photos of photos.53 The most important element in all of Burroughs work however is chance - inspired by Castaneda's anthropological discovery of the native american Indian conceptual distinction between the 'tonal'; which is the explainable, divisible world of objects (in Deleuzian terminology the striated); and the 'nagual'; which is the indeterminacy of the flow (nomadic free singularities) - Burroughs cut-up technique did precisely to literature what Cage was doing with sound and Pollock with paint54.
'the only thing not pre-recorded in a pre-recorded universe is the pre-recording itself which is to say any recording that contains a random factor'55
In 'The Logic of Sense' Deleuze develops the concept of the event as a pure surface phenomena that 'makes language possible'56. The event is always singular since it is 'both collective and private, particular and general, neither individual nor universal'57 and yet it is always double since it consists in the reciprocal impact of the virtual and the actual. In his cinema theory the event is defined as resistance, and located in the 'relation of very precise incommensurability'58 between the image and the sound. The event as singularity is a random factor, it is the eruption of the nagual into the tonal, and can be assimilated with the Lucretian concept of the clinamen, which Deleuze describes as a 'kind of conatus - a differential of matter and. . .a differential of thought'59
He delineates three realms of consciousness or sense; the depths are 'infra-sense or under-sense'60, the heights are 'pre-sense'61, and the surface is where nonsense produces sense. They are respectively: noise, silence, and language. Denotation, signification, and organisation62. Connective series, conjunctive series, and disjunctive series.63
The depths are a mixture of bodies, a projection and introjection of partial objects64; the heights are incorporeal and require identification of a good object on high yet essentially lost and always withdrawn65; between them, separating and connecting them, the surface is pure perversion, effects and events, always sexual66, the surface is two-sided or doubled and consists in the organization of sense.
'The brain is not only a corporeal organ but also the inductor of another invisible, incorporeal, and metaphysical surface on which all events are inscribed and symbolized'67
These three realms relate directly to the three syntheses of time with which we began this essay, and to Bergson's three paradoxes of time; that of contemporaneity (the present which passes as it is present), coexistence (of the former present with the present present), and pre-existence (of the pure element of the past in general).68 The first synthesis of time is originary yet intratemporal, 'It constitutes time as a present, but as a present which passes'.69 It is intratemporal because there must be another time in which it passes. The 'foundation of time' is the passive synthesis of habit (Habitus), its ground, however, is the passive synthesis of memory (Mnemosyne).70
There is both a passive and an active synthesis of Mnemosyne. The former is the fundamental alliance between memory and habit, the way in which memory-images automatically insert themselves into perception and trigger sensory-motor responses that endlessly repeat previous perceptions and actions. The latter is the manner in which the former present is reproduced at the same time that the present present is reflected.71
This is not possible, however, without the production of a time out of time in which 'the presents are embedded'; this is the third synthesis which is what Hamlet called 'time out of joint', it is 'demented', its circle unfolds, 'It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time.'72 It is Aion the 'torturous straight line labyrinth' of Borges, Freud's death instinct, Nietzsche's eternal return, Semon's Mneme, Bergson's pure memory, Burroughs' pre-recording. 73
Aion is a straight line but it is also a plane. A border that separates and differentiates and a membrane, a 'plain surface that connects'74 and associates. 'It is the 'metaphysical surface (transcendental field)' a frontier between propositions and things which is a 'distinct distribution of language and bodies, or of the corporeal depth and the sonorous continuum'75 There are two times; Chronos is 'composed only of interlocking presents', Aion is 'constantly decomposed into elongated pasts and futures'76 Chronological time is a serial segmentation, an obsessively repetitious sundering or fracture that is also a synthesis or conjunction. Everything is cyclical in chronos, from the revolutions of the planetary spheres to those of atomic particles. Noematic time, on the contrary, is a plastic, Riemannian, space, an acentred multiplicity like the sea, or the desert, which is constantly in flux77.
Chronos is a metronome, it constitutes a striated space, it is metrical rather than rhythmic, measured according to a logos such as the gram or the octave.78 Aion pertains to what Boulez calls smooth space or non-metric multiplicities,79 it is composed of rhythmic intervals between plural vibratory milieus.80 'One is cyclical, measures the movement of bodies and depends on the matter which fills it out; the other is a pure line at the surface, incorporeal, unlimited, an empty form of time, independent of all matter.'81
Chronos is allied with Habitus, the sensory-motor accompaniment, and the present that passes - this is what constitutes the actual. 'Chronos is an encasement, a coiling up of relative presents, with God as the extreme circle'.82 It is the seat of rationality and empirical science83, the TV news is its figurehead (Burroughs claimed that TIME magazine journalists 'write the news before it happens'84) For Bergson, 'nothing is less than the present moment'85, because the instant has just passed as soon as one denotates it, but also because we take only the barest details of the world in a snapshot taking process continually imbricated by virtual diagrams, and recomposed with memory-images 'every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the progress of the invisible past gnawing into the future.'86
Chronos is always two series; the first is the single series of habit that functions by connection - 'if. . .then' - ; the second is the passive synthesis of memory which is conjunctive - 'and' - ; the third series constitutes Aion and is affirmative divergence - 'or' - 87. 'Between the two presents of Chronos - that of the subversion due to the bottom and that of the actualization in forms - there is a third, there must be a third, pertaining to the Aion'.88
The third term, the eternal return, is not the endless repetition of the same but the repetition of difference for itself. 'It is no longer the future and past which subvert the existing present; it is the instant which perverts the present into inhering future and past.'89 Free action occurs on the instant - the 'actor belongs to the Aion'90 whose present is the 'most narrow, most contracted, and most instantaneous' - the virtual. The event is the multiple collision of the actual and the virtual, the particular and the general, Chronos and Aion. The surface is a rupture, 'a cerebral crack at the limits of which the event appears'91, but this split is not the traditional alienation of the subject in a phenomenological world since the 'real difference is not between the inside and the outside, for the crack is neither internal nor external, but is rather at the frontier. It is imperceptible, incorporeal and ideational. With what happens inside and outside it has complex relations of interference and interfacing'92
For Deleuze the task of reversing Platonism is to exchange essences for events as 'jets of singularities'.93 He locates this reversal in Nietzsche's eternal return, as an affirmative synthetic disjunction, where 'the communication of events replaces the exclusion of predicates'.94 The production of this topological surface95 is generated by 'the erection of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces, which traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate through their distance and in their distance.'96
The paradoxical instance or esoteric word is genitive in each series; the connective depths have unpronounceable monosyllables or unrecognizable objects, the gallop which hastens the passing of presents, the vortical movement of deterritorialization (e.g. smooth space, musique concrete); the conjunctive heights are pivoted around the convergent instance, the territorializing ritornello, the falling back of the pasts that are preserved; the disjunctive surface is distributed through the divergent or nonsensical instance such as the silent monolith in Stanley Kubrick's '2001 space Odyssey' which distributes sense.97
Though it is the territorializing idol that 'renders possible a conversion of depth into partial surfaces'98 it is not the withdrawn phallus of Chronos that organizes the series, but the phantasm - a simulacrum that has risen to the surface99. This is to say that language, which used in its most extended sense as including the production of any sounds, images or movements (i.e. music, body language - Mneme), is, like nature, not attributive but conjunctive and disjunctive, it is 'the principle of the diverse and its production. . .[which] does not assemble its own elements into a whole'100
The Platonic tradition, which has dominated Western thought for over two millennia, is founded on the subordination of matter to ideas, of affect to representation, the suppression of the flow of partial objects or simulacra in favour of the proud anguish of the static lost idol. Deleuze overturns this, stating that the 'simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and reproduction.'101 Affect is composed of 'trillions of oscillations'102 or simulacra which 'are not perceived in themselves; what is perceived is their aggregate in a minimum of sensible time (image)'103 Instead of the Apollonian order of the same and the similar, identity and association, unified subject that selects, Deleuze, with Joyce and Nietzsche, invokes a 'Dionysian machine'104, where the model no longer operates; the topological surface of Aion, the eternal return105, as pure simulation, is the realm of the phantasm and the smooth space that the amplified reality headset explores.106
The first synthesis of time is the binding of excitations that constitutes Habitus.107 Semon calls this primary repetition phasogenous ecphory108. This is intra-cyclical repetition - where two series, light and its receptor, ecphory and engraphy, repeat the same thing. The development of an organism, the evolution of a species, and the crystallization of a language, all have their basis in an originary, and automatic, proclivity to imitate. It is in this sense that 'habit precedes pleasure'.109 The second synthesis of time is the impulsive desire (often repressed) that projects or inserts memory-images into perception.110 Here is cyclic repetition - where the same thing, lost essence, is endlessly demasked, repeatedly disguised.111
However for Freud as for Deleuze it is not repression that causes repetition but the third synthesis, the originary principle of the death instinct, as repetition itself, or Aion, which is constitutive of repression as serial disguise. Thus 'I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat.'112 Repetition does not cause memory (as Ebbinghaus thought) any more than (repressed) memories cause (their own) repetition - rather, memory is precisely the positively inventive production of repetition. Repetition is not understood negatively here, but as the productive synthesis of time, following Hume's observation that repetition 'changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which repeats it'113
It is in the third synthesis that thought occurs - in the active synthesis desire produces a virtual object, and attentively draws a motor-diagram that leads to new action.114 The virtual object always has two sides, that of bodies and propositions (to eat/to speak), it is fragmented, however its lack is positive, and its essential operation is displacement.115 Thus 'repetition is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object (object =x)'.116
This is the repetition of the eternal return, it is repetition as 'the emission of singularities'117 and is thus opposed to the 'generalities of habit but also to the particularities of memory'118 Repetition in Aion is not the again and again of metric reproduction, it is the rhythmic difference between the two series (connective habit, conjunctive memory) that it both pivots and overflows119
The greater part of perception is sensory-motor and automatically reproduces previous relations. Perception takes what is useful for it, it is reductive, always less than the object, but always more, in that, into the object are projected so many memory-images, abstractions120, generalities, and clichés.121 This is what is meant by Burroughs' assertion that ''image is virus'122, it is normal perception that is a degraded copy, and it is only when we do not take an object for what we know it to be that it then becomes affective in its own right.
'A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing. As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés. But if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear: a pure optical-sound image'.123
Deleuze argues that early cinema was dominated by images that showed movement through space of actors and objects that are understood as operating in a causal and chronological sequence. He calls this the movement-image and argues that rather than being composed of static instants it constitutes 'a mobile section of duration'.124 Watching action films, and Hollywood cinema, anticipation is continually fulfilled - we see a gun and recognize the stance associated with firing it, and when we hear the shot we expected, Habitus glows with delectation. Other practices that can be (but not necessarily so) automatically accomplished, such as playing written music, sports, cleaning and reading rely on the pleasure of differentiating intensities inscribed in a field, of composing and decomposing virtual motor-diagrams of the body in space.125
In post-war cinema, however, there emerged in the avant-garde a new kind of image that overturned the subjugation of time to movement126, an image that disrupted Chronos and upset Habitus. This is the pure optical and sound situation (op/sonsign) whose anomalous difference from itself renders it incapable of attaching itself to a motor-accompaniment, and necessitates imaginative understanding. Time images are produced by two main factors, firstly the irrational cut127, and secondly the 'free indirect relationship'128 of sound and image that Deleuze calls audio-visual heautonomy.129 By not referring themselves to habitual action, time images deliver perception to itself.130
Non-Spatial Time Travel
Automatic recognition 'works by extension'131 - that is, by connecting to a habitual movement that generalizes, and passing from one particular example to the next. Attentive recognition, on the other hand, is not extended, and does not move on.132 For example when I see a croissant I immediately recognize it, and understand it in terms of the memory of past actions on croissants (i.e. eating), if on the other hand I am blindfolded and given a croissant, the tactile sensations will stimulate many different, but not distinctly formed, active responses. Automatic recognition reproduces a copy, of former relations between the particular object and the general idea, where attentive recognition is able to draw a map and make desiring configurations of the object - it is cartographic and diagrammatic. Bergson says 'the progress of attention results in creating anew, not only the object perceived, but also the ever-widening systems with which it may be bound up'133
This is not dissimilar from Semon's understanding that ecphoric stimuli release multiple engram complexes that resonate in differentiating or non-differentiating homophony. Essentially it is a failure of recognition, or an inability to find anything useful in the object, that causes this noematic activity. 'The purely optical and sound situation (description) is an actual image, but one which, instead of extending into movement, links up with a virtual image and forms a circuit with it.'134 The arh consistently produces such momentary intervals where virtual objects are produced to fill in gaps of understanding and the actual object is caused to pass through many planes of memory.
Burroughs insolently contends that his tape recorder and scrapbook experiments constitute time travel.135 He explains that, focusing on a particular aspect of the image will act as a 'port of entry'136 into another time. This is particularly true when the images have a direct relation to a certain time, for example a photo of a person met on holiday, a magazine picture of an early explorer etc. The port of entry is an ecphoric stimulus that retrieves a series of engram-complexes; it is an op/sonsign, a time image, that is, an actual object that forms a circuit with a virtual object. Virtual objects and memory images do not exist in a homogenous container but are rather multiple singular states of varying contraction, and inhere on planes or sheets of the past. This is why Deleuze agrees with Burroughs: 'when we read a book, watch a show, or look at a painting. . .we constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them. In this way we extract non-chronological time.'137
The arh has been constructed in opposition to the modern understanding of the virtual as a 'non-real' computer simulated environment, or as a liberation from the confines of corporeal substance. Instead it understands the virtual as a field of potential that can be actualized in concrete movement. Rather than disembodiment, and entry into a matrix of striated space where the subject is a perceptual master in a representative order maintained by a logos, the arh is a trans-embodiment and entry into a smooth space, or nomos, where the subject is perceptually disabled in an affective disorder. The effect of putting on the arh is one of both isolation and extreme proximity to the environment. More importantly the information it has recorded is not the discarnate gaze of the tripod, or the clinical ear of post-produced sound - the intensity of the audio-visual data is multiplied by the synchronous recording of proprioceptive orientation within the environment.
Bergson maintained that only the living being, as a natural system with a vital impetus, can produce duration. The mathematical system and the mechanical recording are artificial and inorganic systems; they do not change or endure.138 Burroughs experiments prove him wrong, the recording automaton constitutes an irritable surface with its own particularities, playback has an affect that is more than its cause, automatic cut-up produces associations that crafted literature is unable to make. Instead of Bergson's anthropocentric vitalism, which posits a noosphere, Deleuze defines a mecanosphere or machinic phylum, where organic and inorganic, corporeal and non-corporeal, interact in the process of the production of difference. The audio-visual and proprioceptive recording surface of the arh is capable of re-inserting past milieus into present ones - it therefore has machinic duration.
The audio-visual installation that accompanies this dissertation is a probe for investigating these theories. It will consist of a headset that simultaneously records and plays back visual and sonic stimuli. The effect of this is to produce a specific type of time image that Deleuze calls the crystal image.139 The crystal image consists of an oscillation between the smallest, most contracted circuit of memory, or the 'internal limit of all relative circuits'140, and the largest most diffuse layer of the past or virtual, the 'outer-most, variable and reshapable envelope, at the edges of the world'.141 Wearing the arh one is forced to perceive perception and to think thought, the sensation of coexistent action and reaction, or actualization and counter-actualisation, is potent. The crystal image makes visible and audible the tearing apart of time as it moves in two directions, one of which is recorded as past (Chronos), the other of which (Aion) plays back, and is 'launched towards the future'.142 The crystal image is often a sonically charged phenomena, exemplified by the ritornello, or refrain - it consists of the crystallization and coexistence of the actual image that passes, with the virtual image that is projected back. It is 'the point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself.'143
The arh is not, as MacLuhan would argue, an extension of the human eye and ear; it is a transformation of perception, and a multiplication of the cerebral surface. The audio-visual environments and events that are recorded will be selected and manipulated in order to create time images that enter into circuits with virtual objects and cause the wearer to travel through diverse layers of the past. The arh functions as a prosthetic transcendental surface, extending the crack into the non-human apparatus, it is designed to ecphorize deep engrams, to 'make time and thought perceptible'144, to re-write the pre-recordings, and resonate Aion.
1 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.295
2 As Foucault defines it, genealogy 'rejects the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for "origins."' Foucault, M. 'Language, Counter-Memory, Practice'. Cornell University Press. 1980. p.140 He further contends that the 'body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. It's task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.' Ibid, p.148
3 Stengers, I. 'The Invention of Modern Science - Theory Out of Bounds'. Trans. Smith, D.S. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.18
4 'all thought is in signs', all images and signs are deterritorializations. Rodowick, D.N. 'Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Post-Contemporary Interventions)' Duke University Press. 1997. p.39
5 Some of the more readily acceptable premises of his argument are best summed up in this passage: 'Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time. Need is the manner in which this future appears, as the organic form of expectation. The retained past appears in the form of cellular heredity. Furthermore, by combining with the perceptual syntheses built upon them, these organic syntheses are redeployed in the active syntheses of a psycho-organic memory and intelligence (instinct and learning). . .Each contraction, each passive syntheses, constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active syntheses.' Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.73
6 Such as Tulving, and, notoriously, Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.
7 Schacter, D. 'Stranger Behind the Engram - Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 1982. pp.117-127
8Ibid, p.149
9Ibid, p.191
10 Ibid, p.192
11 Ibid, p.132
12 Ibid, p.132
13 Ibid, p.132
14 Ibid, p.173
15 Ibid, p.182
16 What would the criteria be for association if we had to match a particular utterance of a word with memories of the same word, all uttered in different accents and contexts, in order to understand it?
17 Ibid, p.187
18 Ibid, p.183
19 Ibid, p.190
20 Thus Bergson is an ally of Semon's in reversing the process of association, stating that the 'difficulty would be insuperable if we really had only auditory impressions on the one hand, and auditory memories on the other' Bergson, H. 'Matter and Memory'. Zone Books. 1991. p.110
21 Marks, L. 'The Skin of Film'. Duke University Press, 2000. pp.41-2
22 Bergson, H. 'Matter and Memory'. Zone Books. 1991. p.146
23 Ibid, p.31
24 Ibid, p.45
25 Ibid, p.20
26 Ibid, p.19
27 Ibid, pp.23-4
28 Ibid, p.137
29 Ibid, p.24
30 Ibid, p.249
31 Ibid, p.139
32 Ibid, p.137
33 Ibid, p.139
34 Schacter, D. 'Stranger Behind the Engram - Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 1982. p.179
35 Bergson, H. 'Matter and Memory'. Zone Books. 1991. p.149
36 Ibid, p.121
37 Ibid, p.151
38 Schacter, D. 'Stranger Behind the Engram - Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 1982. p.203
39 Bergson, H. 'Matter and Memory'. Zone Books. 1991. p.244
40 Ibid, p.131
41 Ibid, p.94
42 Ibid, p.239
43 Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Athlone Press 2003. pp.69-71
44 Ibid, p.70
45 Ibid p.100.
46 Bergson, H. 'Creative Evolution'. Dover Publications, Inc. 1998. p180.
47 Ibid, p184.
48 Ibid, p184.
49 Sobieszek, R. 'Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts'. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. p22.
50 Ibid, p22.
51 Burroughs, W.S. 'The Ticket that Exploded' (note 21) p145.
52 Sobieszek, R. 'Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts'. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. p22.
53 Sobieszek, R. 'Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts'. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. p.33.
54 Cox, C. & Warner, D. 'Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music'. Continuum. 2004. p163.
55 Burroughs, W.S. 'The Ticket that Exploded' (note 21) p166.
56 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.209
57 Ibid, p.173
58 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.256
59 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.306
60 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.266
61 Ibid, p.266
62 Ibid, p.154
63 Ibid, p.270 Simulacrum, idol, and image. Ibid, pp.217-219 Bachelor, lost betrothal, and couple (problem). Ibid, p.251 Tragedy, irony, and humour. Ibid, p.159
64 Schizophrenia, pre-Socratic subversion, and sadism belong to the depths
65 manic depression, Platonic conversion and masochism are of the heights
66 Ibid, p.151, pp.217-219, p.266, p.254
67 Ibid, p.255
68 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.82
69 Ibid, p.79
70 Ibid, p.80
71 Ibid, p.81
72 Ibid, p.88
73 Ibid, p.111
74 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.75
75 Ibid, p.142
76 Ibid, p.73
77 Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Athlone Press 2003. p.484
78 Ibid, p.478
79 Boulez, P. 'Boulez on Music Today' trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett. Harvard University Press. 1971. p.83
80 'Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. . .Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction. . .Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of milieus. . . Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical. . .A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter' Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Athlone Press 2003. pp.313-314
81 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.73
82 Ibid, p.186
83 'modern science is defined by the aspiration to take time as an independent variable' Bergson, H. 'Creative Evolution'. Dover Publications, Inc. 1998. p.336
84 Burroughs, W.S. 'The Adding Machine' (note 21). p.49
85 Bergson, H. 'Matter and Memory'. Zone Books. 1991. p.150
86 Ibid, p.150
87 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.199
88 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.191
89 Ibid, p.189
90 Ibid, p.171
91 Ibid, p.279
92 continues. . . 'of syncopated junctions - a pattern of corresponding beats over two different rhythms. Everything noisy happens at the edge of the crack and would be nothing without it. Conversely, the crack pursues its silent course, changes direction following the lines of least resistance, and extends its web only under the immediate influence of what happens, until sound and silence wed each other intimately and continuously in the shattering and bursting of the end' Ibid, p.177
93 Ibid, p.64
94 Ibid, p.199
95 'The idea of positive distance belongs to topology and to the surface. It excludes all depth and all elevation, which would restore the negative and identity.' Ibid, p.197 'The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space at the limits of the living; there is, in fact, no distance in topology. . .[at] the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another' Ibid, p.119
96 Ibid, p.199
97 Ibid, p.270
98 Ibid, p.260
99 'These are the characteristics of the simulacrum, when it breaks its chains and rises to the surface: it then affirms its phantasmic power, that is, its repressed power.' Ibid, p.298
100 Ibid, p.303
101 Ibid, p.299
102 Bergson, H. 'Creative Evolution'. Dover Publications, Inc. 1998. p.301
103 Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.313
104 Ibid, p.300
105 'The phantasm is the process of the constitution of the incorporeal. It is a machine for the extraction of a little thought, for the distribution of potential at the edges of the crack, and for the polarization of the cerebral field. . .[it] has the property of bringing in contact with each other the inner and the outer and uniting them on a single side. This is why it is the site of the eternal return.' Ibid, p.252-3
106 'What appears in the phantasm is the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it had imprisoned. It literally releases them like spores and bursts as it gets unburdened. . .the phantasm represents the event according to its essence, that is, as a noematic attribute distinct from the actions, passions, and qualities of the state of affairs'. Ibid, pp.244-245
107 'binding is a genuine reproductive synthesis, a Habitus. An animal forms an eye for itself by causing scattered and diffuse luminous excitations to be reproduced on a privileged surface of its body. The eye binds light, it is itself a bound light.' Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.96
108 'lens development in the frog's eye is critically dependent upon the optical vesicle containing the epidermis. In his terminology, the optical vesicle acts as an ecphoric stimulus, liberating an engram-complex that contains the information necessary for lens formation.' Schacter, D. 'Stranger Behind the Engram - Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science'. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 1982. p.136
109 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.97
110 Hence Eros-Mnemosyne 'posits repetition as displacement and disguise, and functions as the ground of the pleasure principle'. Ibid, p.108
111 Eros is sick, and 'Chronos is sickness itself' Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.24
112 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.18
113 Ibid, p.70
114 'Eros tears virtual objects out of the pure past and gives them to us in order that they may be lived.' Ibid, p.103
115 Ibid, p.102
116 Ibid, p.105
117 Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.201 The principle of the emission of singularities is two series and their differentiator, the empty square, 'both word and object at once: esoteric word and exoteric object.' Deleuze, G. 'The Logic of Sense'. Continuum. 2004. p.60
118 Ibid, p7
119 'repetition is the thought of the future: it is opposed to both the ancient category of reminiscence and the modern category of habitus. It is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power' Ibid, p.7
120 The 'sensory-motor schema is an agent of abstraction' Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.45
121 'the image constantly sinks to the state of cliché: because it is introduced into sensory-motor linkages. . .it is a civilization of the cliché where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us. . .at the same time, the image constantly attempts to break through the cliché' Ibid. p.21
122 Sobieszek, R. 'Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts'. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. p22.
123 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000.p.20
124 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 1- The Movement-Image'. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. p.22
125 'Biophsychical life implies a field of individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations. The quantitative and qualitative process of the resolution of such differences is what we call pleasure' Deleuze, G. 'Difference and Repetition'. Columbia University Press. 1994. p.96
126 'time is no longer the measure of movement, but movement is the perspective of time' Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.22
127 Ibid, p.13
128 Ibid, p.261
129 Ibid, p.251
130 'opsigns and sonsigns refer back to 'chronosigns', 'lectosigns', and 'noosigns'.' Ibid, p.23
131 Ibid, p.44
132 'instead of an addition of distinct objects on the same plane, we see the object remaining the same, but passing through different planes. In the first case, we had, we perceived, a sensory-motor image from the thing. In the other case we constitute a pure optical (and sound) image of the thing, we make a description.' Ibid, p.44
133 Ibid, p.46
134 Ibid, p.47
135 Sobieszek, R. 'Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts'. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996. p.20
136 Ibid, p.21
137 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.123
138 Bergson, H. 'Creative Evolution'. Dover Publications, Inc. 1998. p.22
139 These may be found in the films of Ozu, Fellini, Herzog and Lang.
140 Deleuze, G. 'Cinema 2- The Time-Image'. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.80
141 Ibid, p.81
142 Ibid, p.81
143 Ibid, p.82
144 Ibid, p.18
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