About two-thirds of [theimages] exhibited the President’s face as a familiar icon of
benignant, immobile blandness. But the remaining dozen, more or less uniformly dis-
tributed, were pictures of a face that was not quite the same nor yet entirely different,
whose expression suggested, during instants newly visible, the extremes of terror and
of rage, suicidal despair, the forgetfulness of sleep, or the vacuity of utter confusion.Commenting on the significance of the displacement, Frampton imagines the
birth of a non- or sub-conscious agent operating at cross-purposes to conscious-
ness and capable of directly grasping the micro-perceptual:“It seems to me, al-
most, that another mind grasped and manipulated the features, reaching out
with a kind of berserk certitude through temporal fissures whose durations
could be measured in thousands of a second.”
If photography came to realize such a potentiality as the culmination of its
historical mission, that has everything to do with its own shift from a concern
with exploring the visual detail of representable space to a focus on exposing
and making proleptically actual the microtemporalities hidden within time. As
Frampton depicts it, this culmination coincides with, and is intensified by, tech-
niques of frame-by-frame analysis and subsequent development of technical ca-
pacities for analyzing film–or, to be more precise, for slowing down, reversing,
and delinearizing the filmic flux. Photographic explorationof filmfurnishes the
richest instance of our access to the properly imperceptible domain of micro-
temporal sensibility, and Frampton’s reference to anthropologist Ray Birdwhis-
tell’s use of filmic analysis reveals precisely how such access can impact future
perception by being fed back into, and thus indirectly influencing, the flux of
experience. Birdwhistell, who founded kinesics as a field of inquiry and re-
search, used film to capture the interaction of a mother and infant in a house-
hold that had already produced two schizophrenic children; through meticu-
lous, frame-by-frame analysis, Birdwhistell was able to identify one moment in
which the mother appeared to give the child contradictory signals. In his recap-
ping of this mediated research, Frampton appears to be struck by the massive
temporal disjunction between the time of inscription and the time of analysis:
“Birdwhistell states that rigorous examination of such films requires, on the
average, about one hundred hours per running second of real time....If there is
a monster in hiding here, it has cunningly concealed itself within time, emer-
ging, in Birdwhistell’s film on four frames...that is, foronly one-sixth of a sec-
ond.”
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 63