Modulating Movement-Perception
Generalized from this specific deployment, the temporal disjunction opened up
by the photographic exploration of film forms the impetus for Frampton’s own
concrete experimentations with the temporal flexibility of cinema. The formal
principle at work in these temporal excavations is, as Annette Michelson inci-
sively discerns, the logic of the Dedekind cut. Named for German mathemati-
cian Richard Dedekind, the Dedekind cut (formulated in, the year before
Fox-Talbot’s first photographs):
is a partition of the rational numbers into two non-empty parts A and B, such that all
elements of A are less than all elements of B and A contains no greatest element. The
cut itself is, conceptually, the“gap”defined between A and B. In other words, A con-
tains every rational number less than the cut, and B contains every rational number
greater than the cut. The cut itself is in neither set.For our purposes, which is to say, insofar as it concerns Frampton’s introjection
of photographic (micro-)temporality into film, Dedekind’s cut introduces a cer-
tain scale flexibility into the concept of the instant. The significance of this flex-
ibility can be discerned by contrasting it with Deleuze’s concept of the“any-
instant-whatever”, which cinema inherits from early modern science and which
understands instants to be identical to and equidistant from one another.If the
any-instant-whatever names the cinematic construction of the instant, the Dede-
kind cut–understood as an operation to divide past and future and thus as
coincident with the“now”–designates a variable, counter-cinematic, prop-
erly photographic instant. This variable instant marks acaesura that can occur
anywhere within a continuity, and not simply at privileged regular intervals (the
spatial equivalent of rational numbers). Indeed, it belongs to a conceptualiza-
tion of continuity in which continuity is prior to division. As the basis for a
media practice, the Dedekind cut thus affords the possibility for an intensive
logic of division, one that does not oppose continuity and discontinuity; specifi-
cally, it affords the possibility to operate on an intensive timeline and suggests a
correlation between virtuality and scale-specificity such that what emerges at
more coarse-grained temporal scales relates to what transpires, simultaneously
but beyond perception, at finer-grained scales, as actualization to virtuality. On
such an intensive timeline, the standardized time of cinematic movement would
be doubled by a variable, intensive time of photographic (micro-) movement.
To get even more concrete: the logic of the Dedekind cut informs the ontology
of Frampton’s infinite film; indeed, on one understanding, Frampton’s film sim-
plyisthe postulation of an infinite continuum that can be divided and delimited
- actualized–through variant media interfaces and at variant timescales, only
64 Mark B.N. Hansen