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Brayard, Frederic. (2019). Meillassoux, Perconte and Digital Time as Hyperchaos
This paper is a work in progress, that emerges from my PhD in which I argued that the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux is useful when discussing issue of time and causality in digital cinema. Through this research I have discussed various perspectives in film-philosophy that argue that digital cinema provides a realist perspective on the world.
Drawing on this, I would like to discuss today how the film Or / Or, Hawick, by Jacques Perconte can be described as realist, and the nature of the real that it engages with. I will argue that Meillassoux’s speculative realism offers a framework that helps answer these questions, and perhaps, more generally, address the question of realism in digital film.
Jacques Perconte is an experimental filmmaker who has developed a practice of image production based on complex manipulations of video compression that reveal, release and liberate the movements of light and colour recorded during the shooting. His work focuses on the translations at work in the production of digital images.
In Or / Or Hawick he mixes details of Klimt’s painting The Kiss, with a shot of birds taken in Scotland. Let’s have a glimpse at extracts of the five parts that structure the film. Everything starts with a close shot of a detail of the painting emerging from a black screen. Perconte operates cinematically a gesture that resonates with what Richard Grusin describes as The Non-Human Turn (2015): the film literally focuses on the background of the painting, neither human, nor vegetal, but pure matter (the Or of the film is French for Gold). This image blends slowly with a long shot of a Scottish sky in which birds fly and hover. (05.40) The scene freezes, and birds are pushed away from the screen when the colours of the image organize in horizontal lines that slowly cross the screen, changing in shape and intensity. (09.13) They blend again in the first image of Klimt’ gold that then, fades to black. The film finishes on 10 seconds of a black screen.
Discussing such a film from the perspective of realism, might seem counterintuitive. However, recent analyses that addressed possible links between digital film and realism could easily resonate with Or / Or. For instance, I could refer to William Brown (2013, 2016, 2018) who suggests that digital film provides a non-human perspective on the reality of the world. Brown argues that science shows that all the elements that constitute our experienced world are characterised by their entanglement rather than by the fact that they are distinct entities. He sees therefore the realism of digital film in the fact that, for instance, digital cameras can cruise seamlessly through time and matter, explore and represent the world as a flow of energy, in which entities are not stable singularities but facts that emerge from, and transform through the processes at work in the general becoming of the world. From such a perspective digital cinema is thus considered as realist since it suggests a world of entanglement challenging our intuitive anthropocentric perspective that tends to establish separations, distinctions, taxonomies, and dual oppositions through which we extract ourselves from the unity of the universe.
Or / Or could obviously be analysed from such a perspective. Or / Or explores how a painting, birds framed by a human filmmaker and a compression programme can bring up stunning images of their fusion, of their interactions and of the single becoming that they experience. However, no matter how fascinating and relevant such a position might be, it is problematic to call it realist because it is paradoxical if we consider that the very power of cinema to suggest a world of entanglement and free us from the illusion of dualism, emerges from the very binary digital logic. Indeed, Sean Cubbit reminds us that digital images are changes organised on the grids of CCD and CMOS chips.
These grids are controlled through clock functions that govern latency, refresh rates, and the ordered instruction sets that place data at specific points of screens (…). In this process, every pixel acquires an address composed of its cartesian x and y coordinates. For each pixel, there is a numerical value which instructs it to display a colour. Each pixel then is equal, but every pixel can be (…) recoloured by a strictly speaking meaningless numerical operation (Cubbit, 2016).
Grids, cartesian coordinates, numerical values and meaningless numerical operation seem a very different mode of emerging and becoming than the images of a non-dualist entanglement that they can produce. We are thus facing an aporia: how can the digital world, which is not entangled, but quite contrary, a world in which every event is the consequence of a numeric decision, suggest a realism of entanglement? In other words, if entanglement is an absolute (a characteristic shared by everything that is), how can a realist apprehension of this absolute be produced through digital processes? If we want to address the realism of digital cinema, should we not expect congruence between the produced images and their means of production?
The problem is thus to identify what in the digital logic is real, is an absolute, or in other words, common to everything that is.
I will now argue that Or / Or has a lot to bring to this discussion and that Perconte puts at the centre of his practice the power of contingency that reveals itself as the absolute of time and real.
This moment epitomizes how Or/ Or places contingency at the core of its becoming. The bird flies, sometimes leaving no trace, sometimes mixing the colours that it goes through, sometimes disappearing, sometimes tracing a dark line, sometimes a clear one. The bird is contingent first from a relative perspective (it could have not flown through the frame during the actual shooting) and his presence in the film is a mere event that could occur or not.
However, the very mode of emergence of this event – i.e. the variability of its modes of becoming – suggests also an absolute contingency. Not only can every entity be or not be, not only can every event happen or not, but the very conditions of their emergence and the laws that regulate their becoming can change at any moment and for no reason. In Or / Or, contingency affects the laws that structure the world, the principle of causality to mention the most obvious one, since the laws that regulate how the flight of a bird can affect and be affected by the sky are inconsistent. In Or / Or, more radical changes of becoming happen later in the film, when the movement of the birds freeze and the colours slide horizontally, when the gold of the painting re-emerges or when, eventually, all colours and movement disappear in a black monochrome.
In other words, Or / Or offers an experience through which we enter in assemblage with art, nature and machines, and take our distance from the daily correlation through which world and conscious subjects co-construct themselves. Or/Or observes how every entity and becomings can appear, develop, transform and disappear, and explores this contingency as the dimension beyond the status quo of the stability of the correlation between the world and our human subjectivity. By setting a dispositive through which contingency is in power through digital compression, Or/Or opens up a speculative plane in which birds, skies, art and gold can become what they are not, enter in contact, kiss, mix, blend and disappear.
The question that needs addressing now is how can contingency be the absolute, and its corollary, how does the digital logic reflect the real? In order to address these, I will now turn to the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux.
The easiest entry in the philosophy of Meillassoux is to engage with his interest in what he refers to as Hume’s problem, this is how Hume addresses the problem of “our capacity to demonstrate the necessity of the causal connections” (Meillassoux, 2008a, p. 85) or, in other words, how we can know that the events that have been repeating themselves in the past will continue to repeat themselves in the future. We know that for Hume, reason cannot prove that a given material event will repeat itself in the same manner, or, in other words, reason cannot prove that the same causes will always have the same effects. For Hume, we face, therefore, a fundamental ignorance about the world. We have to accept with ‘blind faith’ that ultimate causes rule the natural, physical world, and that they are above any possible demonstration.
Meillassoux, transforms this ignorance into knowledge and aims to substitute the principle of unreason to the principle of sufficient reason. Instead of accepting that the universe is stabilised by inaccessible rules, themselves rooted in an ultimate inaccessible reason, he argues that the universe is absolutely unstable and that everything can change arbitrarily at any time, and for no reason. From this he draws the conclusion that the laws of nature could change since they are neither conditioned nor legitimated by any superior reason, that is a superior necessary law, hidden and inaccessible that would however express itself through the set of natural laws that we can observe. Conversely, the world appears potentially subject to the radical changes generated by a time, that he coins as Hyperchaos. This is a time for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable (…) a rather menacing power – something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. (Meillassoux, 2008: 64)
Hyperchaos is thus a counter-intuitive time, radically different from our lived, phenomenological experience of duration, or from the chain of quasi-causes, causes and consequences of the physical world. It is time considered not as “the eternal law of becoming, but the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law” (ibid.
However, Meillassoux stresses that accepting absolute contingency and hyperchaos, involves accepting as their rational conclusion the principle of non-contradiction.
Indeed, if we can consider as rationally possible that any object could be contradictory, this is at the same time and from the same perspective both X and non X, such an object could only become what it already is, and could therefore not become at all, not experience the radical becomings of hyperchaos. Such a contrary law or entity could subsist and persist through any change and would be capable of everything, except for not being. It would be a necessary entity, able to actualize itself simultaneously through an infinity of contradictory simultaneous forms through which it would resist the very possibility of its disappearance.
The principle of non-contradiction guarantees therefore that everything can appear, become and disappear. If digital cinema is realist, therefore, as Or / Or suggests, it is not because it offers a reason to believe in a necessary law (for instance entanglement) but because its mode of production is based on non-contradiction. In digital film, anything can happen because the digital process is ruled by contingency, and each change and continuity is regulated by non-contradictory decisions that do not reflect a superior reason.
I mentioned earlier how Cubitt describes the nature of digital images as regulated by a ‘strictly speaking meaningless numerical operation’. Change and continuity are regulated by numerical operations that are both rooted in the logic of non-contradiction and meaningless, or in Meillassouxian terms in the principle of unreason that governs Hyperchaos. Perconte’s birds can fly through the screen erasing and tracing lines, dissolving and re-appearing, they can break the laws of causality because they are as contingent as the cosmic and digital kiss in which they lose and find themselves.
Perconte’s work highlights how digital cinema can suggest a non-human film realism. Realism is no longer cinema’s ability to select one of the possible outcomes of contingency and stabilize it as the real. It is, conversely, the practice that explores the contingency of assemblages (that include elements of nature, human subjectivity, art and machines etc) and that engages with the fact that the emergence of the world is neither regulated by intangible laws, nor necessary.
This is the filmic practice that experiments with what Meillassoux refers to as facticity, which is what ‘forces us to grasp the ‘possibility’ of that which is wholly other to the world, but which resides in the midst of the world as such’ (Meillassoux, 2008, p. 42) by exhausting its images through processes engaging with contingency and unreason.