is part of a larger domain of movement, what I propose to call movement-varia-
tion. Movement-variation can be understood as the correlate of duration in the
precise sense that duration’s materiality is comprised of incessant, asynchro-
nous and heterogeneous temporal change across divergent scales of being. The
worldismovement-variation.
Accordingly and irregardless of how we understand Bergson’s criticism of the
“cinematographic illusion”,we must situate cinema, the art of the movement-
image, within a much vaster domain of movement-variation. In this sense, too,
the restoration of the phenomenological basis of the impression of reality–the
restoration at issue in Metz and in Gunning–must be understood not as some
“reality effect”specific to the cinema, but as an instance of a broader phenom-
enological claim about movement and sensation. Put another way, if part of
Gunning’s point is that post-classical film theory goes awry in dismissing the
sensory experience of moving images as (psychological) illusion, the resulting
affirmation of a certain“genuineness”of the senses must be extended to the
sensory experience of movement as such (not just cinematic movement). In-
deed, the“reality”of sensory experience in the cinema itselfstems directly from
the broader“genuineness”that characterizes sensory experience as such.
With his concept of“thinking-feeling”, Brian Massumi expands Metz’s reality
of impression well beyond the domain of cinema. Specifically, Massumi seeks to
reposition the divide separating representation and participation in relation to
the“direct and immediate self-referentiality of perception.”In addition to being
the perception of an object, Massumi suggests, perception is always doubled
back on itself–it is always also the perception of its own passing. As the correlate of
and source for the doubleness of perception, the object’s constitutive“out-of-
sync-ness”with itself is implicated within a phenomenology of appearance
that, like Gunning’s insistence on the“genuineness”of sensation, focuses on the
“reality”of perception’s immediate participation in the movement-time of ob-
jects rather than their representational status. Like Gunning, Massumi is struck
by the insistence of movement’s reality, which he defines as“what we can’t not
experience when we’re faced with it. Instead of calling it an illusion–this move-
ment we can’t actually see but can’t not see either–why not just call it abstract?
Real and abstract.”The“genuineness”that Massumi accords“abstract”ex-
perience serves to deepen and also to exfoliate the immediate, reality-conferring
power of movement: as a kind of surplus or excess of the object in relation to
itself, a folding into the object of its potentiality to be experienced otherwise
than it is in its strict actuality, abstract experience embeds embodied living with-
in worldly“depresencing”in a way that confounds any subject-object distinc-
tion.
Returning now to the question of cinema, of its specificity as the art of the
movement-image, we can better appreciate how it functions as a technology to
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 53