cinema[1|2]blog::clog
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

immobile sections + abstract time.

This is one half of Deleuze's opening 'formula' and is derived from his consideration of Bergson's thesis that movement is distinct from the space covered. I guess to begin with it isn't a particularly difficult idea, though for someone coming from cinema studies you tend to already feel, well, that there's a precipice you're about to tumble into somewhere round about.

If you approach this via Xeno's paradox, for instance of the archer, the arrow, and the target, it helps. In this paradox the archer shoots an arrow towards a target, and at any point we can easily determine where the arrow will be in the plane of its trajectory at any point in time (velocity = distance/time, for instance). With can divide this point in time so that we can calculate where the arrow is at 3 seconds, 3.3 seconds, 3.33 seconds, 3.333 seconds and so on and so forth.

However, no matter how small or minute we make our time scale, or take our measurements, all we will ever be able to calculate (and 'see') is where the arrow is at that instant (at 3.3 seconds it is, let's imagine, 6.2 metres from the archer). We will never be able to find that moment in time where the arrow actually moves from one point to the next. This is the paradox Xeno described (well, one of them) and is what Deleuze describes as abstract time (mechanical time).

So, simply, even if we measure the time of the arrow's flight to thousandths of a second and its distance to fractions of a millimetre all that we could reproduce is where the arrow is at any instant in time and space, but never the moment at which it moved from one point in space to the next. Nor, for that matter, would we be able to 'see' that movement. In other words, what this reproduces in relation to the flight of the arrow is not the movement of the arrow through that space, but the location of that arrow at any-instant-whatever, which in this example are being defined by our viewing or measuring apparatus - the movement of the arrow from one cartesian point to the next will always appear to have happened between our scales of measurement.

For Deleuze, following Bergson, this paradox only happens because space and time are treated as equivalent to the extent that they're both conceived of as quantities. However, for Deleuze (via Bergson) this is a category error as space may be a quantity but time is a quality.

[Sun 8 Dec 2002]