when technical syntheses are superimposed upon living ones. In stark contrast
to the technical temporal objects Stiegler proffers as surrogates for our collective
temporalization in the world today,Critical Massintroduces a tension be-
tween the two fluxes that are at issue in the operation of any technical temporal
object, no matter how concealed from view: on the one hand, the flux of cin-
ematic images (or photograms) and, on the other, the flux of the living (adher-
ent intentionality). More specifically still, Frampton’s unsettling film desynchro-
nizes the flux of our spectatorial time and the flux of the image machine that is
supposedly driving it; the result is a certain liberation of our adherent intention-
ality as the force of time’s forward movement.
Insofar as it modulates our encounter with the imperceptible, micro-temporal
domain of pre-experiential incipiency,Critical Massparticipates in the devel-
opment of a new, media-centered stage in the technical contamination of phe-
nomenological time-consciousness: rather than a laboratory for excavating the
temporal structure of consciousness as it generates lived experiences in the
world at large (Stiegler’s contribution), the technical temporal object that isCri-
tical Massexplores the temporal experience of its own viewing, or more ex-
actly, it temporally excavates its own constitution in and through the viewer’s
lived experiencing of it. To put this contrast more starkly: unlike the cinematic
temporal objects Stiegler discusses (exemplarily Fellini’sIntervista),Critical
Massdoesn’t use cinema as a means to explore the temporal dynamics of some-
thing else (i.e., time-consciousness), but engages a concrete series of cinematic
images (the images on twofeet reels of film) as itself the experiential struc-
ture to be explored.
With this difference in mind, we can understand the profound implications of
Frampton’s pedagogical claims for his film:“One of the things that goes on in
Critical Mass”, he tells Scott MacDonald,“is a process of training the specta-
tor to watch the film. The work teaches the spectator how to read the work.”
In so doing, I want to suggest, what the work in fact teaches the spectator is
how she produces adherence–how, by processing the flux of concrete images
(photograms), she generates not just the sensory experience of the film, but also
the continuous time of her own living. What makesCritical Masscapable of
revealing the operation of adherent intentionality is precisely what makes it an
experimental film and also, not surprisingly, what explains its anticipation of
digital media art: it is precisely becauseCritical Masscomplicates the tempo-
ral paradigm of cinema–the coincidence between the flux of images and the
flux of spectatorial consciousness–that it can focus attention on adherence. For
what Frampton’s editing algorithms effectively do (and this applies equally to
both the two steps forward and one back that organizes the photograms as well
as the gradually mounting desynchronization of the sound track from the
images)is create a crisis within retention: in watching the film, the spectator
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 67