. For an example of this line of questioning, see D.N. Rodowick,The Virtual Life of Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,); Rodowick claims that digital
cameras cannot capture duration, which is to say the temporal reality of human
experience, but can only inscribe the cycling of the computer as it performs the var-
ious algorithms it utilizes to generate images.
. For an example of this line of questioning, see Babette Mangolte,“A Matter of Time:
Analog Versus Digital”inCamera Lucida, Camera Obscura: Essays for Annette Michel-
son(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,).
. Tom Gunning,“Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Rea-
lity”,Differences:A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.():-, here.
. Christian Metz,“On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema”inFilm Language: A
Semiotics of the Cinema, transl. M. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
),-, emphasis added.
. Gunning,-.
. Metz,-, emphasis added.
. The original context for Metz’s concept of cinema’s“insubstantiality”is the compar-
ison of cinema with the theater, a contrast introduced by Arnheim. Based on Arn-
heim’s view, the theater differs from the cinema in that it takes place in real time and
space (whereas films gives us“images only”), and it gives us an experience of“rea-
lity itself”rather than an“illusion of reality.”While Metz rejects the binary terms of
Arnheim’s contrast, its basic framework still seems to haunt his conception of“in-
substantiality”or at least the unquestioned assumption that what is visual is non-
material.
. Gunning,, emphasis added.
. Deleuze, of course, famously argues that Bergson misunderstood the cinema in
Creative Evolution, but that his analysis of movement inMatter and Memory–which
informs the Deleuzian concept of the movement-image–comprises the fundamen-
tals of a solid understanding of cinema’s operation. Gunning offers a more specific
criticism of Bergson’s error inCreative Evolutionand suggests that Deleuze only re-
inforces this error:“Great confusion (which I feel Deleuze increases rather than dis-
pels) comes if we do not realize that the analytical aspect of the cinematograph that
Bergson took as his model for this tendency to conceive of motion in terms of static
instants derives from thefilmstripin which motion is analyzed into a succession of
frames, not theprojected imageon the screen in which synthetic motion is recreated”
(Gunning,).
. Massumi,.
. I borrow the term“depresencing”[Entgegenwärtigung] from Eugen Fink, Husserl’s
last student who worked on the late manuscripts on time (the so-calledC-Manu-
scripts) in the earlys. Fink coins the term“depresencing”to name the world’s
ongoing temporalization, the world’s continuous moving out of the present into the
past (and hence opening up the reality of a future) that, Fink argues, is itself the
conditionfor time-consciousness to continue to presence (and to experience its pre-
sencing as a thick nowness, that includes a retentional and protentional supple-
ment). See Fink,Studien zur Phänomenologie,-(The Hague: Nijhoff,).
. Manning,-, emphasis added.
. Ibid.,, emphasis added.
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 69