While I was thinking and writing about the concept of the simulacrum that Deleuze introduces at the end of Chapter 1, it occurred to me that I’d seen this structure before. The way the simulacrum contains difference within itself, the way it has two parts that are qualitatively distinct, yet interwoven to the point where original and copy can’t be distinguished, is exactly what he describes as a 'time-crystal' in the second volume of his cinema book.
What made me want to pursue this connection further though was not the usefulness of those films’ images for understanding the simulacrum. It was actually the parallel I began to notice between his theory of the two types of film image, and two modes of thought I find cropping up while meditating.
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I’m sitting on my cushion. Breathing. Feeling a sensation. Maybe an itch, let’s say. It’s very difficult, but just starting to be possible, to distinguish between the sensation of the itch, the urge to scratch, and the movement that would carry out that urge. Under normal circumstances, the perception, the affection, and the resulting action, are so tightly linked as to be inseparable. “I itch” usually means the experience of all three of these simultaneously. There is normally no experience of an interval or gap between them. In Deleuzian terms, the feeling of the actual itch is already a virtual scratch, almost as if the itch required the possibility of scratching to exist to begin with.
It seems to me that reflecting on this near simultaneity teaches us something very deep about how the brain works. There are probably a lot of ways of describing this lesson, but having just read Surfing Uncertainty, the idea of the brain as predictive processor has been on my mind. Andy Clark hypothesizes that the brain is a Bayesian guessing machine whose job is to predict what will next happen to it. This theory really alters our understanding of what perception means. We often think of perception as the process of detecting low-level features in the world (tingling in leg), then gradually integrating these into higher level properties of things (localized skin irritation 1cm above left knee), then finally presenting these things to “us” for evaluation of their meaning (I have an itch), and decisions regarding what to do about them (I should scratch it). In other words, we conceive perception to be a bottom-up process. We think of action similarly, though of course the direction of information flow is the opposite. “We” decide to move a limb (I will scratch), then we somehow tell our body how to trigger the motion we want (left hand reach to knee, initiate scratch protocol #7). As I’ve phrased the description, the problem is obvious — perception converges on, and action diverges from, what amounts to a little homunculus in our head.
The predictive processing theory suggests that perception is actually based on a two-way flow of information: both bottom-up, and top-down. One higher level 'cognitive' part of the brain guesses what will happen next to another lower level sensory part of it based on information it gathers about what just happened to that part. The guess is then checked for error against the subsequent signal received at the lower level sensory neurons, and modified if necessary till the error term disappears. What we perceive then, is actually a not-wrong guess about what will happen next to our brain, which is implicitly a guess about the world that delivers a structured signal to the sensory neurons. Essentially, we create a model of the world by creating a model of our own brain, which is what leads Andy Clark to call perception a sort of controlled hallucination.
Action, on this theory, works in a similar way that seems backwards to our usual understanding. Instead of proceeding top-down from some homuncular actor, we act when one part of our brain predicts what signals our visual and proprioceptive systems would be receiving if we had already carried out the action, and then our body responds by moving in such a way that the prediction becomes correct. In other words, we move by imagining our movement as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. These descriptions of both perception and action give much more weight to what me might call the virtual, or the simulation, or the model of the world, that our brain is constantly generating than they do to the actual data coming in from our senses. The world constrains our perceptions, but it doesn't generate them.
Using PEiFP reverse translation technology, we can restate this theory in Deleuzian terms. It turns out to fit really well with what he lays out in Cinema 1 as the ‘sensory-motor schema’ that governs the movement-image. The movement-image breaks down into a perception-image, an affection-image, and an action-image. The hyphen-image construction in all of these terms is meant to convey that way that the virtual is conjoined to the actual every step of the way. Movements we perceive in the external world are already virtual images in our internal world; images of intentional actions in our heads are already virtual movements of the body. A film then functions like a sort of brain that process the real world and links up different images of it and movements in it, ultimately moving us from perception to action.
But wait, this parallel brings up an immediate puzzle, does it not? Who is noticing the chain of perception-affect-action during a meditation? Who is watching the film? Who is trying to predict what parts of the world, and for what purpose? We seem to have removed the subject and replaced it with some type of input-output, sensory-motor, automata. And yet, we are this very automata. So how can the linkage between actual and virtual get made to begin with? Who programmed this machine
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After this long setup, I come to my main point. There’s another type of thinking, and another type of cinematic image, that doesn’t fit into the schema I've described so far. As I’m sitting, I can feel a sort of phase transition between the sensory-motor schema, and this other mode. Instead of following my thoughts or observing the flow of itchy sensation progress from perception to action, I transition, sometimes suddenly and sometimes more gradually, to a state where the sensation and the observation of the sensation are not really separate. They don’t merge exactly though either. It would be better to say that they crystallize. Though conceptually distinct, they get united in one experience of what is going on in this moment. This is the difference in feeling between a truly meditative state and a more typical state, however attentive and introspective it may be. Instead of moving from sensation to sensation, or from thought to thought, forming connections which I can later unpack like the itch, awareness seems suddenly to be, for lack of a better term, everywhere at once. Bodily sensations, sounds, thoughts, and the awareness of these, all seem to be present at the same time as part of a single experience. The moment and the awareness of the moment crystallize, and the movement of thought stops in some sense.
This structure corresponds exactly to the quote we started with. It's how Delueze describes the simulacrum or what calls the Time-Image in Cinema 2. This struck me as a really interesting connection, so I went back and started watching a few of the films he mentions in the chapter where he first describes the time-image. He thinks there are actually various types of time-image, but the crystal-image is the first and simplest example he gives. So, what exactly does the crystal-image look like?
The first film he talks about is The Lady From Shanghai. It’s a pretty good movie, though like many of the films we have from Welles, the studio editing has marred the final product. It does, however, have one perfect scene, the mirror shoot-out finale. It gives us a great example of the crystal-image we can illustrate with one still:
Elsa and Arthur Bannister, each of whom intended to betray the other, end up facing off in a funhouse mirror situation where each is multiplied and confused with the other in a sort of double-double-cross taken to infinity. The conditions of normal perception and point of view are smashed, literally, and we’re shown a direct image of how these obviously distinct characters are nevertheless interchangeable, each reflected in the other, trapped in the same game, sharks circling one another.
Next, I watched one of Fellini's late films, And the Ship Sails On. The plot follows a bunch of opera singers taking a cruise on the eve of WWI to scatter the ashes of their late friend, a recently deceased opera diva. In the meantime this cream of European society are forced to give an impromptu concert to the swarthy stokers in the engine room, then join the folk dance of the Serbian refugees the captain rescues. It has the typical whimsicality of late Fellini, along with his tendency to make the film absorb the whole world by including a narrator who speaks directly to the camera and scenes where the shot pulls back to reveal the sound guys at work. While there's not one particular shot you would call a crystal-image, the whole works revolves around the way opposite poles get entangled and exchanged, but together form one image of the two sides of the ship of history. And did I mention the rhino?
I could go on multiplying examples. And as I watch more films, I might. But let's not lose the main thread. What's essential in all these examples is pretty clear, and it is summarized in the initial quote -- at least two qualitatively distinct sides are put together in one image. There's a sort of dynamic resonance between the different parts of single image. Movement is implied within a single image, rather than through a succession of images. This is the 'coalescence' that leads Deleuze to call it a crystal-image, in opposition to the organic movement-image which involves moving the organism from perception to action.
If we now know what the time-crystal looks and feels like, and we also know how to make it, what exactly can learn from it? Deleuze thinks that this type of image is showing us time directly by showing us how the process of time acquiring a direction works. The point where actual and virtual are made to touch in one image is exactly the point where time splits into a present and a past. This should remind us of our discussion of how the simulacrum is symmetry breaking in the developing embryo of time. But let's approach things this time with the cinema terminology. Here is Deleuze quoting Bergson's Matter and Memory in Cinema 2:
Finally, here's one last speculative connection. Can the idea of the time-crystal and its contrast to the sensory-motor scheme lead us in the right direction to investigate what's happening in the brain during meditation? According to Andy Clark, the brain is a machine for predicting 'what's in the next image'. Surfing Uncertainty doesn't really delve deeply into why the machine would be set up this way, or how this is even possible (as in, why is there an organism to begin with). For his purposes its enough to mostly just assert that this kind of machine seems like it would have great evolutionary benefit for any animal cruising around trying to make a living in a complex world. He does, however, spend lots of time talking about how a brain might implement this sort of algorithm.
One of the key pieces of the story I left out in my earlier exposition is the idea that the brain needs a means of deciding which is the most salient thing to predict at any given moment. Should it focus on sounds, or sights, or proprioception, and what if these sensory modalities are telling conflicting stories? What combination of these will give us the best guess about the part of the future we care about? His answer to this question is to propose that attention is a mechanism that allows the brain to change the weights given to each of the various predictions it is constantly making of all its sensory input. The core idea is that if a sensory input is providing very clear consistent data then it must be picking up some clear consistent pattern in the world; it's a good bet that pattern will be a useful guide to action; we should put lots of stock in how well we're predicting this pattern. If, instead, we're just getting a bunch of wildly varying noise on some channel, it's not going to make sense to try and predict every fluctuation of it; we should just ignore the fact that our best efforts don't match up with the date very well. This attention algorithm (weighting signals by an estimate of how precise they are) is then the brain's way of controlling the amount of top-down versus bottom-up processing going on depending on circumstances. The theory becomes a pretty complicated pretty quickly, and I'm not going to do it justice here. The takeaway for my purposes is that the brain has an algorithm for controlling how seriously it should take the errors where its own internally generated predictions don't match the information coming from its sensory neurons. Late in the book he hypothesizes that many psychogenic conditions (like autism or schizophrenia or the occasional acid flashback) might at base be related to problems with this algorithm. It turns out that noise can become signal with just a little priming, and that it can take relatively little for perception to become an uncontrolled hallucination.
If this attentional algorithm turns out to be so central to our feeling of ourselves, what happens if our brain tries to predict what it will do next? That's what the whole brain is supposed to be doing, predicting what will happen to other parts of itself, right? So why not predict the way the prediction will work? Clark doesn't discuss this in Surfing Uncertainty, but this would complete the parallel to Deleuze and meditation -- two qualitatively different things get tangled up in a single, paradoxical moment. Presumably, you would need a certain amount of re-wiring to get this sort of feedback loop off the ground, if normally there are no circuits dedicated to predicting the next move of these particular parts of the brain. Would 1,000 hours of sitting around breathing be enough?
The cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world. This is why, very early on, it looked for bigger and bigger circuits which would unite an actual image with recollection-images, dream-images, and world-images.Adding another metaphor to the mix may or may not be helpful in understanding the simulacrum and the Eternal Return, but it at least does open up a new set of concrete images we can use. This is the beauty of the cinema books. You get the same Deleuzian concepts as always, but, if you watch the films he discusses, this time with (moving) pictures!
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Should not the opposite direction have been pursued? Contracting the image instead of dilating it. Searching for the smallest circuit that functions as internal limit for all the others and the puts the actual image beside a kind of immediate, symmetrical, consecutive or even simultaneous double. The broad circuits of recollection in dream assume this narrow base, this extreme point, and not the other way around.
...
If we take this direction to the limit, we can say that the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a double or a reflection. In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is 'coalescence' between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.
What made me want to pursue this connection further though was not the usefulness of those films’ images for understanding the simulacrum. It was actually the parallel I began to notice between his theory of the two types of film image, and two modes of thought I find cropping up while meditating.
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I’m sitting on my cushion. Breathing. Feeling a sensation. Maybe an itch, let’s say. It’s very difficult, but just starting to be possible, to distinguish between the sensation of the itch, the urge to scratch, and the movement that would carry out that urge. Under normal circumstances, the perception, the affection, and the resulting action, are so tightly linked as to be inseparable. “I itch” usually means the experience of all three of these simultaneously. There is normally no experience of an interval or gap between them. In Deleuzian terms, the feeling of the actual itch is already a virtual scratch, almost as if the itch required the possibility of scratching to exist to begin with.
It seems to me that reflecting on this near simultaneity teaches us something very deep about how the brain works. There are probably a lot of ways of describing this lesson, but having just read Surfing Uncertainty, the idea of the brain as predictive processor has been on my mind. Andy Clark hypothesizes that the brain is a Bayesian guessing machine whose job is to predict what will next happen to it. This theory really alters our understanding of what perception means. We often think of perception as the process of detecting low-level features in the world (tingling in leg), then gradually integrating these into higher level properties of things (localized skin irritation 1cm above left knee), then finally presenting these things to “us” for evaluation of their meaning (I have an itch), and decisions regarding what to do about them (I should scratch it). In other words, we conceive perception to be a bottom-up process. We think of action similarly, though of course the direction of information flow is the opposite. “We” decide to move a limb (I will scratch), then we somehow tell our body how to trigger the motion we want (left hand reach to knee, initiate scratch protocol #7). As I’ve phrased the description, the problem is obvious — perception converges on, and action diverges from, what amounts to a little homunculus in our head.
The predictive processing theory suggests that perception is actually based on a two-way flow of information: both bottom-up, and top-down. One higher level 'cognitive' part of the brain guesses what will happen next to another lower level sensory part of it based on information it gathers about what just happened to that part. The guess is then checked for error against the subsequent signal received at the lower level sensory neurons, and modified if necessary till the error term disappears. What we perceive then, is actually a not-wrong guess about what will happen next to our brain, which is implicitly a guess about the world that delivers a structured signal to the sensory neurons. Essentially, we create a model of the world by creating a model of our own brain, which is what leads Andy Clark to call perception a sort of controlled hallucination.
Action, on this theory, works in a similar way that seems backwards to our usual understanding. Instead of proceeding top-down from some homuncular actor, we act when one part of our brain predicts what signals our visual and proprioceptive systems would be receiving if we had already carried out the action, and then our body responds by moving in such a way that the prediction becomes correct. In other words, we move by imagining our movement as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. These descriptions of both perception and action give much more weight to what me might call the virtual, or the simulation, or the model of the world, that our brain is constantly generating than they do to the actual data coming in from our senses. The world constrains our perceptions, but it doesn't generate them.
Using PEiFP reverse translation technology, we can restate this theory in Deleuzian terms. It turns out to fit really well with what he lays out in Cinema 1 as the ‘sensory-motor schema’ that governs the movement-image. The movement-image breaks down into a perception-image, an affection-image, and an action-image. The hyphen-image construction in all of these terms is meant to convey that way that the virtual is conjoined to the actual every step of the way. Movements we perceive in the external world are already virtual images in our internal world; images of intentional actions in our heads are already virtual movements of the body. A film then functions like a sort of brain that process the real world and links up different images of it and movements in it, ultimately moving us from perception to action.
The historical crisis of psychology coincided with the moment at which it was no longer possible to hold a certain position. This position involved placing images in consciousness and movements in space. In consciousness there would be only images -- these were qualitative and without extension. In space there would be only movements -- these were extended and quantitative. But how is it possible to pass from one order to the other? How is it possible to explain that movements, all of a sudden, produce an image -- as in perception -- or that the image produces a movement -- as in voluntary action? If we invoke the brain, we have to endow it with a miraculous power. And how can movement be prevented from already being at least a virtual image, and the image from already being at least possible movement? What finally appeared to be a dead end was the confrontation of materialism and idealism, the one wishing to reconstitute the order of consciousness with pure material movements, the other the order of the universe with pure images in consciousness. It was necessary, at any cost, to overcome this duality of image and movement, of consciousness and thing. Two very different authors were to undertake this task at about the same time: Bergson and Husserl. Each had his own war cry: all consciousness is consciousness of something (Husserl), or more strongly, all consciousness is something (Bergson). Undoubtedly many factors external to philosophy explain why the old position had become impossible. These were social and scientific factors which places more and more movement into conscious life, and more and more images into the material world. How therefore was it possible not to take account of the cinema, which was being developed at that very moment, and which produces its own evidence of a movement-image?I remember going on a meditation retreat when I was in the midst of reading this passage from Cinema 1 and thinking that sitting did often have the feeling of watching a little film in my head. That metaphor has gained new life recently by disassociating the components of an experience like the itch, which is a bit like watching the movie in slow motion. In short, there’s a parallel between my experience of meditation, Deleuze’s theory of cinema, and Andy Clark’s predictive processing idea. It revolves around the way an actual experience is already tied up with a related virtual world.
But wait, this parallel brings up an immediate puzzle, does it not? Who is noticing the chain of perception-affect-action during a meditation? Who is watching the film? Who is trying to predict what parts of the world, and for what purpose? We seem to have removed the subject and replaced it with some type of input-output, sensory-motor, automata. And yet, we are this very automata. So how can the linkage between actual and virtual get made to begin with? Who programmed this machine
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After this long setup, I come to my main point. There’s another type of thinking, and another type of cinematic image, that doesn’t fit into the schema I've described so far. As I’m sitting, I can feel a sort of phase transition between the sensory-motor schema, and this other mode. Instead of following my thoughts or observing the flow of itchy sensation progress from perception to action, I transition, sometimes suddenly and sometimes more gradually, to a state where the sensation and the observation of the sensation are not really separate. They don’t merge exactly though either. It would be better to say that they crystallize. Though conceptually distinct, they get united in one experience of what is going on in this moment. This is the difference in feeling between a truly meditative state and a more typical state, however attentive and introspective it may be. Instead of moving from sensation to sensation, or from thought to thought, forming connections which I can later unpack like the itch, awareness seems suddenly to be, for lack of a better term, everywhere at once. Bodily sensations, sounds, thoughts, and the awareness of these, all seem to be present at the same time as part of a single experience. The moment and the awareness of the moment crystallize, and the movement of thought stops in some sense.
This structure corresponds exactly to the quote we started with. It's how Delueze describes the simulacrum or what calls the Time-Image in Cinema 2. This struck me as a really interesting connection, so I went back and started watching a few of the films he mentions in the chapter where he first describes the time-image. He thinks there are actually various types of time-image, but the crystal-image is the first and simplest example he gives. So, what exactly does the crystal-image look like?
The first film he talks about is The Lady From Shanghai. It’s a pretty good movie, though like many of the films we have from Welles, the studio editing has marred the final product. It does, however, have one perfect scene, the mirror shoot-out finale. It gives us a great example of the crystal-image we can illustrate with one still:
Elsa and Arthur Bannister, each of whom intended to betray the other, end up facing off in a funhouse mirror situation where each is multiplied and confused with the other in a sort of double-double-cross taken to infinity. The conditions of normal perception and point of view are smashed, literally, and we’re shown a direct image of how these obviously distinct characters are nevertheless interchangeable, each reflected in the other, trapped in the same game, sharks circling one another.
Next, I watched one of Fellini's late films, And the Ship Sails On. The plot follows a bunch of opera singers taking a cruise on the eve of WWI to scatter the ashes of their late friend, a recently deceased opera diva. In the meantime this cream of European society are forced to give an impromptu concert to the swarthy stokers in the engine room, then join the folk dance of the Serbian refugees the captain rescues. It has the typical whimsicality of late Fellini, along with his tendency to make the film absorb the whole world by including a narrator who speaks directly to the camera and scenes where the shot pulls back to reveal the sound guys at work. While there's not one particular shot you would call a crystal-image, the whole works revolves around the way opposite poles get entangled and exchanged, but together form one image of the two sides of the ship of history. And did I mention the rhino?
Here is Deleuze's full description:
But, in The Ship Sails On, the ship makes the face of a growing polygon proliferate. It initially splits in two according to the division of bottom to top: the entire visible order of the ship and its sailors is at the service of the grand dramaturgical project of the singer-passengers; but, when these passengers from the top come to see the proletariat at the bottom, it is the latter who become in turn spectators, and listeners to the singing competition which they impose on those at the top, or to the musical competition in the kitchens. Then the splits changes its orientation and now divides the singer-passengers and the proletarian-shipwrecked on the bridge: here again the exchange is made between actual and virtual, the limpid and the opaque, in a Bartok-like musical device. Then, later, the split has become almost a splitting in two: the dark warship, blind and closed-up, terrifying, which arrives to reclaim the fugitives, is actualized all the better because the transparent ship carried out its funeral dramaturgy in a marvelous circuit of faster and faster images where the two ships end up exploding and sinking, giving back to the sea what ends up as the sea, an eternally amorphous environment, a melancholy rhinoceros which stands for Moby Dick. This is the mutual image, this is the cycle of the crystal ship in a pictorial and musical end of the world.
Finally, I also saw Kon Itchikawa's An Actor's Revenge. I'm a little surprised that this film isn't more famous; I'd never heard of it before, yet it's quite a gem. The plot is easy to summarize: a male kabuki actor, famous for playing only female roles, finally takes revenge on a group of theater-going businessmen who caused his father's death 20 years ago. Again, the film is structured by a circuit of exchange that welds together opposing poles, in this case the male and female, the actor and their role (a pair Deleuze frequently uses to illustrate the qualitative difference in kind between actual and virtual).
The actor is bracketed with his public role: he makes the virtual image of the role actual, so that the role becomes visible and luminous. The actor is a 'monster', or rather monsters are born actors -- Siamese twin, limbless man -- because they find a role in the excess or the shortcoming that affects them. But the more the virtual image of the role becomes actual and limpid, the more the actual image of the actor moves into the shadows and becomes opaque: there will be a private project of the actor, a dark vengeance, a strangely obscure criminal or justice-bringing activity.
In the case of An Actor's Revenge, the process of exchange is particularly well illustrated by the way the film is shot against a black background that gives the appearance of a theater set to many of the scenes from 'real life'.
This plays off against the scenes of the theater, which expose the real mechanics of the performance, including stage hands and the heads of the audience members.
I could go on multiplying examples. And as I watch more films, I might. But let's not lose the main thread. What's essential in all these examples is pretty clear, and it is summarized in the initial quote -- at least two qualitatively distinct sides are put together in one image. There's a sort of dynamic resonance between the different parts of single image. Movement is implied within a single image, rather than through a succession of images. This is the 'coalescence' that leads Deleuze to call it a crystal-image, in opposition to the organic movement-image which involves moving the organism from perception to action.
It is the virtual image which corresponds to a particular actual image, instead of being actualized, of having to be actualized in a different actual image. It is an actual-virtual circuit on the spot, and not an actualization of the virtual in accordance with a shifting actual. It is a crystal-image, and not an organic image.Now that we have an idea what a time-image looks like, we should ask how it gets made and what we might learn from it. How does Deleuze think you form a time-image? Well, first you have to have something that interrupts the sensory-motor scheme:
The sensory-motor link was thus the unity of movement and its interval, the specification of the movement-image and the action-image par excellence. There is no reason to talk of a narrative cinema which would correspond to this first moment, for narration results from the sensory-motor schema, and not the other way round. But precisely what brings the cinema of action into question after the war is the very break-up of the sensory-motor schema: the rise of situations to which one can no longer react, of environments with which there are now only chance relations, of empty or disconnected any-space-whatevers replacing qualified extended space. It is here that situations no longer extend into action or reaction in accordance with the requirements of the movement-image. These are pure optical and sound situations, in which the character does not know how to respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases to experience and to act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip, comes and goes, vaguely indifferent to what happens to him, undecided as to what must be done. But he has gained in an ability to see what he has lost in action or reaction: he SEES so that the viewer's problem becomes 'What is there to see in the image?' (and not 'What are we going to see in the next image?')One good way to interrupt the sensory-motor schema is to sit for an hour with your legs crossed and move only to breathe. It seems to me that the basic meditative technique is designed to induce precisely the crisis of the brain's movement-image that Deleuze saw as necessary for producing a direct time-image that would divide cinema into two types (he thinks the break happened roughly around WW2 — though he’s writing a typology of images, not a history of cinema). The difference between the two types of images boils down to the way they portray time. The movement-image shows us time indirectly; we know it passed because stuff in the world changed places, or we moved from perception to action. The time-image, by contrast, shows us time directly, as the condition of possibility or the presupposition of movement. Another way to say this would be that the movement-image starts with the actual states of the world that the lead us to see the virtual thread linking them, whereas the time-image starts with the vast sum of virtual possibilities which can then be actualized in different ways. If the different parts of the movement-image (perception, affection, action) all bear witness to the way the virtual intervenes between actual images, the time-image shows us the exact point of contact that allows the two sides to touch. For the world of possibility to have an effect, it has to somehow get linked to the actual world -- exactly the point of Bergson's inverted cone image where the entire past converges on S.
If we now know what the time-crystal looks and feels like, and we also know how to make it, what exactly can learn from it? Deleuze thinks that this type of image is showing us time directly by showing us how the process of time acquiring a direction works. The point where actual and virtual are made to touch in one image is exactly the point where time splits into a present and a past. This should remind us of our discussion of how the simulacrum is symmetry breaking in the developing embryo of time. But let's approach things this time with the cinema terminology. Here is Deleuze quoting Bergson's Matter and Memory in Cinema 2:
Our actual existence, then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other ... Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection ... will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.This is precisely the feeling of observing oneself in that meditative moment, and perhaps why people talk about having an out-of-body experience where time flickers or even stops (I have only felt these very briefly). It's like watching the wheels of your mind (which is watching the wheels of your mind (which is (...))) turning. This infinite feedback loop would never end -- if it were happening in time. But the idea is rather that this regress is time happening. Imagine that, instead of one tick of the clock for each reflexive level, the entire infinite series is one tick of the clock, one thought, the filling up, budding off, and moving on, of one moment.
What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogenous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out of unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal.You may feel cheated to find after all of this that I'm not quite sure what more to make of this parallel between cinema and meditation. It hardly sounds crazy to me to say that meditating is like watching time pass, but then, it also sounds a bit vapid. There's a number of other vague connections I might make here. For example, there seems to be some sort of relationship between this definition of time and consciousness or subjectivity. In meditation, this appears in the form of a paradox; trying to continually narrow your focus to the tiny point of each breath on your upper lip somehow ends up expanding it till it takes in a simultaneous consciousness of your whole body, the sounds around you, and even the way thoughts flow through your head. It's hard to know whether to call this expanding your consciousness, or making your conscious self smaller. The ambiguous feeling parallels Deleuze's commentary on Bergsonism:
Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life. And it is true that Bergson had to express himself in this way, at least at the outset. But, increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, and changeTime is defined as the moment of splitting of actual from virtual, of breath from awareness of breath. But this is also the moment when they touch, when their difference is held together as one. This moment of connection is what makes it possible for the actual world to change, to live and move and access something more than its inert state. Perhaps this possibility is why there is anything we call experience at all? Why it is 'like' anything to be an organic automata?
Finally, here's one last speculative connection. Can the idea of the time-crystal and its contrast to the sensory-motor scheme lead us in the right direction to investigate what's happening in the brain during meditation? According to Andy Clark, the brain is a machine for predicting 'what's in the next image'. Surfing Uncertainty doesn't really delve deeply into why the machine would be set up this way, or how this is even possible (as in, why is there an organism to begin with). For his purposes its enough to mostly just assert that this kind of machine seems like it would have great evolutionary benefit for any animal cruising around trying to make a living in a complex world. He does, however, spend lots of time talking about how a brain might implement this sort of algorithm.
One of the key pieces of the story I left out in my earlier exposition is the idea that the brain needs a means of deciding which is the most salient thing to predict at any given moment. Should it focus on sounds, or sights, or proprioception, and what if these sensory modalities are telling conflicting stories? What combination of these will give us the best guess about the part of the future we care about? His answer to this question is to propose that attention is a mechanism that allows the brain to change the weights given to each of the various predictions it is constantly making of all its sensory input. The core idea is that if a sensory input is providing very clear consistent data then it must be picking up some clear consistent pattern in the world; it's a good bet that pattern will be a useful guide to action; we should put lots of stock in how well we're predicting this pattern. If, instead, we're just getting a bunch of wildly varying noise on some channel, it's not going to make sense to try and predict every fluctuation of it; we should just ignore the fact that our best efforts don't match up with the date very well. This attention algorithm (weighting signals by an estimate of how precise they are) is then the brain's way of controlling the amount of top-down versus bottom-up processing going on depending on circumstances. The theory becomes a pretty complicated pretty quickly, and I'm not going to do it justice here. The takeaway for my purposes is that the brain has an algorithm for controlling how seriously it should take the errors where its own internally generated predictions don't match the information coming from its sensory neurons. Late in the book he hypothesizes that many psychogenic conditions (like autism or schizophrenia or the occasional acid flashback) might at base be related to problems with this algorithm. It turns out that noise can become signal with just a little priming, and that it can take relatively little for perception to become an uncontrolled hallucination.
If this attentional algorithm turns out to be so central to our feeling of ourselves, what happens if our brain tries to predict what it will do next? That's what the whole brain is supposed to be doing, predicting what will happen to other parts of itself, right? So why not predict the way the prediction will work? Clark doesn't discuss this in Surfing Uncertainty, but this would complete the parallel to Deleuze and meditation -- two qualitatively different things get tangled up in a single, paradoxical moment. Presumably, you would need a certain amount of re-wiring to get this sort of feedback loop off the ground, if normally there are no circuits dedicated to predicting the next move of these particular parts of the brain. Would 1,000 hours of sitting around breathing be enough?
