What comes after post-cinema? Such a question calls for speculation as a central mode of inquiry. However, this speculative turn is engaged not only by the question of what comes after the ‘post’; for post-cinema, at its best, is itself already a speculative term — despite the fact that it grows, historically, out of theories of loss (the loss of the index, the end of celluloid, the demise of cinema as an institution). Against this backdrop of mourning and melancholia, postcinema is speculative in at least two senses. First, the concept of post-cinema is future-oriented at root, as it purports to gain purchase on movements along an unfinished trajectory, hence speculating of necessity about its own future course as a determinant of present actuality. Second, post-cinema refers to media engaged materially in a speculative probing of the present. The ‘presence’ of experience is now more radically than ever — because materially, medially — dispersed, not just as a play of signifiers but across and within an ecology that is materially redefining the parameters for life and agency itself in post-cinematic times. Accordingly, the question of post-cinema’s passing is the question of time’s passing in the space of post-perceptual mediation.
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Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema
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Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema
Shane Denson, Stanford University




Abstract

    What comes after post-cinema? Such a question calls for speculation as a
    central mode of inquiry. However, this speculative turn is engaged not only by
    the question of what comes after the ‘post’; for post-cinema, at its best, is itself
    already a speculative term — despite the fact that it grows, historically, out of
    theories of loss (the loss of the index, the end of celluloid, the demise of cinema
    as an institution). Against this backdrop of mourning and melancholia, post-
    cinema is speculative in at least two senses. First, the concept of post-cinema
    is future-oriented at root, as it purports to gain purchase on movements along
    an unfinished trajectory, hence speculating of necessity about its own future
    course as a determinant of present actuality. Second, post-cinema refers to media
    engaged materially in a speculative probing of the present. The ‘presence’ of
    experience is now more radically than ever — because materially, medially —
    dispersed, not just as a play of signifiers but across and within an ecology that is
    materially redefining the parameters for life and agency itself in post-cinematic
    times. Accordingly, the question of post-cinema’s passing is the question of
    time’s passing in the space of post-perceptual mediation.


   What comes after post-cinema? This question — a pressing one today both
for theorists of ‘new’ media and for those who have identified with the putatively
‘old’ concerns of cinema studies and film theory — demands speculation as a
central mode of inquiry.1 Meanwhile, however, the notion of speculation is over-
determined; it might evoke associations with speculative realism (recent philoso-
phical tendencies such as ‘object-oriented ontology’), speculative philosophy (an
older philosophical impulse exemplified in the work of Alfred North Whitehe-
ad), speculative finance (along with the algorithmic processes that have accele-


1
 On the speculative nature of post-cinematic theory, see Shane Denson, Steven Shaviro, Patricia
Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv and Mark B. N. Hansen, ‘Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory’,
panel at the 2015 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Montréal, Canada, 27
March 2015; video of the complete panel is available online: <https://medieninitiative.wordpress.
com/2015/05/24/post-cinema-panel-complete-videos/> [accessed 18 October 2016].

                                        Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                         Shane Denson


rated such speculation and made capital not only ‘inhuman’ in its consequences
but a somewhat nonhuman affair as well), or speculative media (an as-yet under-
defined notion that might draw on any or all of the above in order to think about
the predictive, future-oriented trajectory that differentiates contemporary media
from the ‘memorial’ functions of phonography, photography, and cinema). Ho-
wever, the speculative turn suggested by this non-exhaustive list is engaged not
only by the question of what comes after the ‘post’; for post-cinema, at its best,
is itself already a speculative term — despite the fact that it grows, historically,
out of theories of loss: the loss of the index, the end of celluloid, the demise of
cinema as an institution.2 Against a backdrop of mourning and/or melancholia,
both the notion and the (suspected or only speculated) referent of ‘post-cinema’
are speculative in at least two senses, which I aim to articulate in this essay and to
put into conversation with a range of film- and media-philosophical reflections
on the fate and future of moving-image media.
   First, I hope to show that the concept of post-cinema is future-oriented at
root, as it purports to gain purchase on movements along an unfinished trajecto-
ry, hence speculating of necessity about its own future course as a determinant of
present actuality. But though such might be said of any historical development,
since life is never lived in a punctual ‘now’ but always in a thick present that is
rich with protentional and retentional traces, there is nevertheless something
special about the becoming of post-cinema. This is due to what I have elsewhere
termed the ‘discorrelation’ of subjective experience and material substrate that,
in a culmination or radicalization of media-historical impulses going back at least
to the telegraph, comes to impinge directly upon moving images in post-cinema.3
In contrast to cinema’s photographic images, post-cinema’s computational ima-
ges are generated in a microtemporal interval that is inaccessible to the macro-
temporally constituted self of subjective perception. Thus, the temporal window
of experience itself becomes the object of the minutest calculation, ‘premedia-
tion’,4 or algorithmic pre-processing at a microtemporal level. Time in the post-
cinematic era passes faster, it would appear, though precisely appearance or the
realm of the phenomenal (and specifically, that of the image) is called radically
into question in the post-perceptual space of discorrelated images.5


2
  For a nuanced theoretical account, see D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a somewhat skeptical historicizing approach, see André
Gaudreault and Phillipe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age, trans.
by Timothy Barnard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
3
  Shane Denson, ‘Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of
Post-Cinematic Affect’, in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. by Shane Denson and Ju-
lia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016) <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/2-5-den-
son/> [accessed 18 October 2016].
4
  Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010).
5
  Mark B. N. Hansen, ‘Algorithmic Sensibility: Reflections on the Post-Perceptual Image’, in Post-
Cinema, ed. by Denson and Leyda <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/6-3-hansen/> [ac-
cessed 18 October 2016].

22
                   Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema


   This brings us to the second meaning of speculation, then: post-cinema is
not just a future-oriented concept, but it refers to media engaged materially in
a speculative probing of the present. The ‘presence’ of experience is now more
radically than ever — because materially, medially — dispersed, not just throu-
gh a deconstructive play of signifiers but by way of multi-leveled, networked
processing operations taking place across and within an ecology that is ma-
terially redefining the parameters for life and agency itself in post-cinematic
times.6 If post-cinema means discorrelation, however, and this discorrelation
brings with it a transformation of time that necessitates a speculative relation to
appearance (because the objects of perception, e.g. images, are generated in a
time called ‘real time’ but which is categorically outside our real-time subjective
perception), then the concept of post-cinema must finally be seen as a transi-
tional concept in a strong sense. For the ‘post’ does not mark so much an end
(as in earlier discourses of the end of cinema) but rather has its heuristic value
by virtue of marking a difference that may very well stop making a difference:
as the perceptual technology of cinema is absorbed, resituated, or ‘relocated’7
within the post-perceptual ecology of twenty-first-century media, this metabo-
lizing movement implies that the difference ‘cinema/post-cinema’ itself might
become not only imperceptible but also ultimately ineffectual. Post-cinema, as
a construct, is necessarily transitional: it will pass. When we recognize this basic
transitionality, however, then we see that the question of post-cinema is already
the question of what comes after post-cinema — and, more fundamentally, that
the question of post-cinema’s passing is the question of time’s passing in the space
of post-perceptual mediation.


Transitional Media

   What I have just said of post-cinema might, with some justification, be said of
cinema as well: the question of cinema is the question of what comes after cine-
ma. Bazin’s great question ‘what is cinema?’ gives way to speculation on tenden-
cies and trajectories that point beyond — towards speculation, in Bazin’s case,
on what he called ‘the myth of total cinema’.8 This notion of totalization carries
within itself the idea of a situation in which the cinema/not-cinema distinction
begins to break down, or in which the phenomenal differences that distinguish
the cinema from its environment become imperceptible. Thus, for Bazin, the
question of cinema’s nature gives way to reflection on a kind of nature that per-

6
  On this redefinition of the experiential environment, see Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On
the Future of 21st-Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
7
  ‘Relocation’ is one of the ‘key words’ put forward as a defining characteristic of twenty-first-
century cinema in Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to
Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
8
  André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What is Cinema? trans. by Hugh Gray, 2 vols
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), I, pp. 17–22.

                                                                                               23
                                        Shane Denson


sists after cinema has perfected its ‘total and complete representation of reality’9
and hence become indistinguishable from it. Can we say, then, that the idea of
cinema itself already leads inevitably to the idea of post-cinema?
   It would perhaps be hasty to affirm this suggestion, and it is anyway compli-
cated for Bazin by his insistence that ‘cinema has not yet been invented!’10 But
the anachronism and the paradox of the Bazinian idea — according to which the
mythical ideal of cinema precedes its technical implementation, but where the
full realization of the cinema (its ‘invention’ in a strong sense) would also imply
its end (in the sense that it would no longer make sense to distinguish cinema
from nature or reality more generally) — might in fact shed light on what I am
calling the transitionality of post-cinema.
   Consider, in this connection, the strangely incompatible set of definitions that
Wiktionary, the collaborative dictionary companion to Wikipedia, offers for the
term ‘postcinematic’.11 On the one hand, the adjective is said to mean ‘after the
decline of cinema’; on the other hand, however, and far more surprisingly, it
is also defined as ‘after the invention of cinema’. But if this latter definition is
surprising, it is not for all that illogical: while terms like postmortem and pos-
thumous imply that something happens after the conclusion of something else
(when life is over, for example), other uses of ‘post-’ imply only that something
happens after the advent or occurrence of something (for example, post-Kantian
philosophy refers to philosophy conducted in the wake of Kant’s influence; it
commences not with Kant’s death but with the publication and reception of the
Critiques). Seen thus, these are two completely distinct meanings of the term
‘postcinematic’ — implying, by extension, two distinct notions of post-cinema:
either the post-cinematic era commenced in 1895 or thereabouts, with the inven-
tion and public exhibition of the Cinématographe, or it commenced much more
recently, for example with the demise of celluloid and photographic indexicality,
or by virtue of some other hypothesized decline (e.g. a waning of the collective
audience, the eclipse of the big screen by a plethora of little ones, or the decline
or downfall of some set of properly cinematic values). One of these meanings is
therefore predicated on the birth of cinema, while the other is predicated on its
death.
   Accordingly, the two meanings on offer here are clearly contradictory with
respect to one another, but perhaps there is some truth to be found in the con-
tradiction. Again, I am interested in thinking about post-cinema as an essentially
speculative notion, not so much as a state attained definitively in connection with
some determinate event, and certainly not one that would be defined in terms of
an absolute historical break, but more perhaps as one of the inherent questions
of cinema. Taken together, the two definitions might nudge us towards this spe-


9
  Ivi, p. 20.
10
   Ivi, p. 21.
11
   ‘Postcinematic’, in Wiktionary: The Free Dictionary <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/postcin-
ematic> [accessed 18 October 2016].

24
                     Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema


culative and transitional understanding: by focusing alternately on cinema’s birth
and its death, i.e. on the beginning or end of its ‘life’, they suggest significantly
that post-cinema is central to the cinema’s very existence, to its being or beco-
ming. Nevertheless, the two definitions are hardly saying the same thing; with
respect to periodization, as we have seen, it makes a huge difference whether we
define post-cinema in relation to cinema’s birth (let us call this definition 1) or
in relation to cinema’s death (definition 2). However, we might pair definition
1 with Gaudreault and Marion’s observation that cinema has died at least eight
‘deaths’ in the course of its life, the first being pronounced right at the moment of
its birth — by none other than the father of the Brothers Lumière, who said that
‘Cinema is an invention with no future’.12 In this sense, all of cinema has been
post-cinema not just in the sense of coming after the advent of moving images
but in the more common meaning of after cinema (i.e. ‘after’ in the sense of fol-
lowing its demise). Definition 1 and definition 2 therefore merge or converge in
this unorthodox historiography of cinema.
   But things get even more complex when we take into account Gaudreault and
Marion’s notion of the ‘double birth’ of cinema.13 On this account, cinema was
born first as an apparatus (ca. 1895) and then as an institution (in the 1910s). It
is this second birth that, for Gaudreault and Marion, is the authentic birth of
cinema. Thus, cinema’s first death comes before its actual birth, and the advent
of post-cinema is therefore rendered, paradoxically, a pre-cinematic reality. This
view might be seen as a sort of distant cousin of Bazin’s notion that the cinema
is itself a speculative ideal that has not yet been invented; in Gaudreault and
Marion’s alternative, cinema’s death is likewise a speculative ideal that precedes
the cinema’s invention. Taken literally, this would imply a reductio ad absurdum
of definition 2 (according to which post-cinema is ‘after the decline of cinema’);
for what is after the decline can hardly come before the advent, except in some
metaphorical or conceptual sense (for example, as an inherent trajectory or con-
ceptual inevitability, the way that death might be said to be inseparable from life
in general and therefore precedes any actual or individual birth). But though it
would be wrong to take Gaudreault and Marion’s suggestion in an overly literal
sense (indeed, their point is to cast doubt on the notion of cinema’s ‘death’ in
the first place), their history of cinema’s multiple births and deaths might help
us to see post-cinema neither in terms of everything that follows the invention
of cinema (definition 1, a ‘nominal’ and relatively uninteresting definition) nor
as something that follows the demise of cinema (definition 2, the more common
but ‘vulgar’ definition) but as a potential or speculative possibility inherent in
cinema itself.
   What can we say, then, to flesh out an alternate definition of post-cinema — a
‘definition 3’, so to speak? First of all, the lesson to be learned from these pa-
radoxes of births and deaths, beginnings and ends, would seem to be that life

12
     Gaudreault and Marion, p. 26.
13
     Ivi, pp. 31–35.

                                                                                  25
                                        Shane Denson


happens in the middle; we should accordingly shift our focus away from the limit
cases and think about cinema and post-cinema in the course of their becoming,
as they exist in transit. We need to look at things in medias res. There is a tempta-
tion among critics to mark the limits, to define a period or constellation as a
closed unit, but this fails to capture the reality of being-in-the-middle, of finding
oneself somewhere along an unfinished trajectory (which is the only place one
can really find oneself), trying to intuit what that trajectory might be, where it
started and where it might lead. We should be guided by this in our attempts to
describe post-cinema, which is nothing if not a moment of radically unresolved
change. Let us start, then, from the following question: how does it feel to be in
the middle of change?


In the Middle

   We might take a cue from Steven Shaviro, who in his reflections on ‘post-cine-
matic affect’14 refers to Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’.15 It
is worth returning to Williams’s explication of this concept, which is designed to
militate against dichotomies such as that between the ‘social’ and the ‘subjective’
— dichotomies which according to Williams attempt to account for the present
at the expense of reifying the past, i.e. through the ‘conversion of experience into
finished products’.16 There is something similar at work, I suggest, in reifying the
cinema as past in order to either celebrate or condemn our post-cinematic con-
dition. This involves an exaggeration of the fixity of the object called ‘cinema’, a
denial of the inherent flux and openness of its borders. And this media-historical
impulse both draws upon and feeds back into a media-ontological fetishization
of film, especially pronounced with respect to the question of indexicality.
   Without a doubt, the very real material connection between pro-filmic reality
and its imprint on celluloid was capable of giving rise to those powerful and
uncanny experiences described so eloquently by Stanley Cavell17 and, more re-
cently, David Rodowick:18 the continuity of recorded and projected image placed
viewers in the strange temporal situation of being ‘present’ at past events. And
this situation is, I think, directly relevant to an assessment of cinema’s particular
‘structure of feeling’, to the temporal quality of being-in-the-middle of a cinema-
tic experience and, by extension, in the midst of a cinematic era. But it should be
emphasized that this description privileges one level of the overall reality, that of
subjective perceptual experience, at the expense of another, that of the microsco-

14
   Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010).
15
   Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1977), pp. 128–35.
16
   Ivi, p. 128.
17
   Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press,
1971).
18
   Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film.

26
                  Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema


pic physical interactions between light, silver halide, and retinal rods and cones.
The latter level is of course outside the realm of normal phenomenal experience,
but it is not altogether different in this respect from the digital substrate of zeroes
and ones that is commonly held responsible for destroying the indexical relation
and, by some accounts at least, for destroying the cinema itself as an experience
and an era.
   My point is not that nothing has changed, that there is no difference between
cinema and post-cinema; on the contrary, I think that the intercession of digital
processes changes things quite radically. But the difference is not to be located
solely in the interruption of analogical processes or experiences, for as I have
suggested already, those experiences were themselves undergirded by material
processes that are discontinuous with respect to integral or ‘molar’ experience.
On the other hand, though, it is true that the encoding of images is quite diffe-
rent from the apparently far more contingent capture of light in photochemical
processes, where the array of crystals forming the images is different not only
from frame to frame but also from print to print. Rodowick has highlighted this
contrast between code and crystalline contingency and argued that digital ima-
ges lack the materiality, and the attendant entropy, of photographic images —
for digital information is capable of being copied exactly, and without loss, in
a way that photographic images are not.19 Accordingly, Rodowick suggests that
digital images, as informatic inscriptions, are no longer indexical but belong to
the symbolic register (in the categories of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics).20
   It seems wrong, however, to reduce (or inflate) digital information or data to
an exclusively symbolic register, because like the crystals of silver halide that give
photochemically based images their characteristic ‘grain’, digital information too
retains its materiality, even physicality. To begin with, digital images are not ‘real-
ly’ reduced to zeroes and ones in the first place (as Rodowick says); that is indeed
a symbolic rendering of them, such that we can grasp them cognitively, but a
string of binary digits (such as ‘1111 0011 0010 1010’) is merely a representation
— as should be clear from the fact that it can be converted to a hexadecimal
value (‘F32A’) or decimal number (‘62250’). With respect to the algorithmic pro-
cesses of encoding and decoding, zeroes and ones stand in as proxies for material
processes, for a much less binaristic flux of voltage differentials, the actualization
of which is never as neat and clean as any of these representations would suggest.
And in terms of storage, the code base is likewise subject to material processes of
entropy and decay, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has emphasized in his forensically
based ‘reading’ of hard drives.21 It is thus simply untrue that digital images are
immaterial entities, so rather than follow Rodowick in tracing a shift from the
indexical (associated with Peirce’s ontological category of Secondness) to the


19
   Ivi, pp. 110–24.
20
   Ivi, p. 120.
21
   Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012).

                                                                                       27
                                          Shane Denson


symbolic (associated with Thirdness), we might instead follow Mark Hansen in
his suggestion that digital images in fact produce new Firstnesses.22 That is, far
from being immutably inscribed in an unchanging codebase, digital images are
imbricated in highly volatile and generative algorithmic processes that fail to re-
produce ‘the same’ image over and over but in fact produce entirely new images
with each playback. Glitches and compression artifacts give us a glimpse of this
generative processuality and point us towards a new temporal quality of moving-
image media and our experience of them.
   I will turn in a moment to this new temporality, which I argue ushers in and
exemplifies the new speculative quality of post-cinema. Before doing so, howe-
ver, I want to emphasize what I take to be the significance of this discussion of
indexicality. In highlighting the microscopic processes at work in both cinematic
and post-cinematic media, I am trying to counter a certain fetishization of the in-
dex, which perpetuates unrealistic stories about the mechanisms both of cinema
and of digital computation alike. One conclusion to be drawn from this is that
we should not exaggerate the clarity and precision of the dividing line between
cinema and post-cinema. But this should not lead us to conclude that there is
simply no difference, or that the term post-cinema is gratuitous and serves only
to exaggerate the distinction in precisely this way. There are very real differen-
ces: material differences, as well as social, contextual, and perceptual ones. And
even if, as I suggested at the outset of this essay, these differences are destined to
fade (especially if ‘convergence’ is thought not in terms of a homogenization but
rather a multiplication of media forms, among which the cinema/post-cinema
distinction becomes less central or pronounced), the term post-cinema neverthe-
less serves an important heuristic function at present in not only highlighting the-
se differences but pointing to their role in this multiplication of media-technical
capacities (or affects: the power to affect and to be affected). In short, the term
post-cinema serves to focus our attention on the transitional flux in which we
currently find ourselves.
   And the debate over indexicality and encoding, far from being beside the
point, is symptomatic of this transitional experience — part of what it feels like
to be in the midst of this change. Much of the debate has been conducted —
whether for celebratory or elegiac purposes — towards the goal of delineating
our medial past from our present. This goal, as I have suggested, is misguided
in its reifying impulse. But the positive upshot of the debate, as I see it, is that it
causes us to recognize that there are always microscopic or extra-perceptual pro-
cesses happening right ‘in the middle’ of mediated perception: between subjec-
tive experience and the objective event or situation that is being presented to us.
This insight, I suggest, is essentially anti-reificational with respect to subjective
experience, which it shows to be founded upon volatile pre-subjective processes
that are capable of unsettling the supposed fixity or transhistorical stability of


22
     Hansen, ‘Algorithmic Sensibility’.

28
                  Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema


the subject. In other words, we discover here the transformative agency of a me-
diating layer between subject and object, and this discovery should be seen as an
integral part of the post-cinematic ‘structure of feeling’. Finally, though, we need
to look closer at the way in which the transformation of this mediating layer is
reconfiguring our experience, especially with respect to temporality.


Speculative Temporality

    Let us recall the uncanny cinematic experience of being ‘present’ to past
events, an experience attributed to the indexical ontology of photographic ima-
ges. As we have seen, this paradoxical temporal experience rides atop a layer
of complex material interactions that, in some respects at least, are not all too
different from the computational materiality of digital images’ encoding. Never-
theless, it would be wrong to suggest on this basis that post-cinema’s temporality
has not been subjected to a radical transformation. And this temporal shift, as
we shall see, explains in large part the renewed urgency of speculative thought in
the post-cinematic era.
    The question of what I am calling post-cinematic temporality is something that
Maurizio Lazzarato has dealt with under the heading of his ‘video philosophy’
— a philosophy of what he calls ‘machines to crystallize time’.23 These machines,
which are exemplified in the video camera and further perfected in digital came-
ras and computer processors, have a direct line on our becoming-in-time, as they
operate at speeds that far outstrip our cognitive processing and, on this basis, are
in fact capable of modulating our perception itself. For rather than tracing pro-fil-
mic objects and fixing them photographically as the perceptual objects of vision,
such time-crystallizing machines operate directly on the sub-perceptual flux of
matter, producing images and other sensory contents through material operations
that in no way resemble the perceptual acts to which pre-electronic analogue me-
dia (phonography, photography, etc.) are held to be analogous. At stake, above
all, is the increased speed and precision of the microtemporal operationalization
of the mediating layer or interval that, as we have seen, exists between the integral
subjects and objects of any mediated perception. Post-cinematic machines dilate
this interval and hence bypass the molar perspective of the subject. And not only
do they do so at the stage of image capture, but also in computationally based
playback, which is not categorically different in terms of generating images on the
fly, in a carefully timed balancing act between the computational resources and
demands of processors, graphics cards, and competing processes, among other
things. Effectively, then, though these images may be based on a binary code that
serves as a sort of script, they must be generated in ‘real time’ by means of an er-
ror-prone and always imperfectly instantiated act of algorithmic ‘interpretation’.


 Maurizio Lazzarato, Videophilosophie: Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus, trans. by Stephan
23

Geene and Erik Stein (Berlin: b_books, 2002).

                                                                                       29
                                      Shane Denson


Such images are ‘executed’ more than they are ‘screened’. These acts of proces-
sing and execution are a part of the materiality of post-cinematic images, part of
their volatility and excess with respect to the symbolic register.
   There is, of course, a cinematic moment that persists in post-cinematic media-
tion. Digitized films still present themselves to us as quasi-filmic events, and the
sub-perceptual materiality of computational image processing, logically enough,
goes largely unnoticed in subjective perception. But there is nevertheless a kind
of displacement, a non-actuality, a lack of positivistic self-presence, or what Der-
rida might call a ‘spectral’ logic implicit in this view of post-cinematic mediation,
and it is important to account for it if we are to understand our current transitio-
nal moment. In its absorption into a post-cinematic media ecology, cinema does
not end, but its persistence is less as an actuality than as a quasi-virtual moment,
a kind of memory-image that supplements and explodes the confines of a pun-
ctual present or a concluded past. Moreover, post-cinema’s relation to cinema is
not just one of retention (or memory) but also of protention (or anticipation).
It implies what Mark Hansen has called the ‘feed-forward’ logic of twenty-first-
century media24 — the logic of predictive analytics and algorithmically generated
timelines, playlists, and newsfeeds. It is in this respect, above all, that the tempo-
rality of post-cinema diverges from that of cinema.
   Post-cinema, with its microtemporal processing, produces essentially post-
perceptual images; here, what Deleuze called the ‘dividuality’25 of formerly
discrete subjects is enacted at the level of the perceptual object, which is no
longer stamped as a discrete photographic entity but modulated as a variable
and infinitesimally divisible quantity. Such modulation is dependent upon codec
settings, available processing power, bandwidth limitations, and buffering, so
that the pixillated images we see on our digital devices are in a very real sense
‘data visualizations’. And all the while they generate a further stream of data or
metadata that delivers information about our attention and perception to cor-
porate interests like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Netflix. This metadata,
it should be pointed out, is not ‘meta-’ in any metaphysical sense of a detached
second-order register; in many ways, it is the primary data, while our sense data
has become secondary or supplemental for the purposes not only of the money-
making machine but also for the production of sense data to come. Futurity is
implied in this equation in a way that explodes the simple feedback loop as we
have known it. This is not only about surveillance, but about control in a newer,
non-deterministic and non-disciplinary sense — in the sense described by Gilles
Deleuze in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’. Wendy Chun reminds us
that ‘the English term control is based on the French contreroule — a copy of a
roll of an account and so on, of the same quality and content as the original’.26 As


24
   Hansen, Feed-Forward.
25
   Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 59 (1992), 3–7 (p. 5).
26
   Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 4 [emphasis in the original].

30
                    Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-cinema


a verb, to control enters into English in the sense of ‘to check or verify accounts’,
in particular by referring to a duplicate register. But in post-cinematic media the
idea of the register, the record, or the memorial function more generally of con-
trol shifts to a future-oriented, protentional one, whereby the subject of percep-
tion is actively anticipated or called into existence by means of microtemporal
calibrations of data and sensory streams.
   Portending the future, or better: protending it, these media synthesize time
or becoming through the real-time generation of data that point backwards and
forwards at once. Perception itself is dispersed, along with the data of its gene-
ration, between here and there, now and then, between the two rolls or scripts,
where the acts of reference and correlation between them explodes the static
‘now’ of either one and enables the generation of new experiences and affects
in real time (or, what amounts to the same, in a microtemporal duration that is
outside the window of subjective perception).
   This describes the temporal/experiential dynamics of Autotune, a popular al-
gorithmic voice-modulation program, which Lisa Åkervall has recently analyzed
as an exemplary medium of post-cinematic modulation.27 In this software-based
process, a real-time input (an audio signal) is analyzed and compared to a set of
possibilities (the discrete notes or values inscribed on the contreroule or control
script), subjected to modulation accordingly, and made to correspond to the
acceptable values before the signal is even made available for perception. Past,
present, and future are synthesized here, their discrete natures dissolved in the
interplay of script and counter-script. Of course, it is possible to analyze the situ-
ation logically or algorithmically, and to study the exact path of the signal with
the help of technical instruments, so that we might claim that it only appears
that time is subject to transformation. But since it falls beneath the temporal
threshold of perception and thus undercuts or bypasses appearance itself, this
microtemporal processing does indeed revolutionize time for all intents and pur-
poses — which is to say, for all human intentionalities and telic goals, which are
structured in the molar temporal space of gross phenomenality. But what does
this have to do with the moving-image media we are considering under the ru-
bric of post-cinema? In short, the microtemporal ping-pong that characterizes
the Autotune process also conditions digital images in computational video play-
back, which is especially evident in processes like motion smoothing, where new
images are generated on the fly and interpolated between a just-past image and
one that is just-to-come, which means that both of them must be assessed before
any image is made available for perception.28 In both cases, what we find is a
situation very different from that of cinema: for it is not just that post-cinematic
media operate according to a temporality that is faster than that of photographic


27
   Lisa Åkervall, ‘The Truth of Autotune’, paper presented at the 2016 conference of the Society for
Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, Georgia, 3 April 2016.
28
   See also Denson, ‘Crazy Cameras’, which deals with these processes in greater depth and ex-
plores the ways they inform particular movies.

                                                                                                 31
                                     Shane Denson


processes, but that they actively generate the objects of our perception in a mi-
crotemporal interval — effectively anticipating the subject and modulating the
intentional relation of perceptual experience itself.


Conclusion

   What this means, finally, is that we are forced to assume a speculative relation
not only to the future but also to the present. In a post-cinematic media regime,
we can henceforth only speculate on the objects of our perception, on the present
image itself, whose momentary presence eludes us in the feed-forward process
of image generation. In his theorization of the dilation of affect and concentra-
tion of temporality in image-processors or time-crystallizing machines, Lazzara-
to notes the essentially speculative project that these machines make thinkable:
namely, the possibility of discovering in them a Benjaminian ‘messianic time’
beyond the chronological time of the clock, an opening of the present onto a
utopian, speculative future, which amounts to the harnessing (or unleashing) of
the power of temporality itself.29 And while this remains a somewhat cryptic pos-
sibility, hence a speculative project in a strong sense, it is precisely in this sense, I
suggest, that the question of post-cinema’s passing is the question of time’s passing
in the space of post-perceptual mediation.




29
     Lazzarato, pp. 157–82.

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