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Writer's pictureMarielle Ingram

On Time Crystals and Interfaces

In his (extremely dense) essay, "Machines to Crystalize Time", Maurizio Lazzarato argues for an understanding of video as a technology which "imitates perception, memory and intellectual work" par excellence. The main thrust of his argument is that, unlike cinema, video is able to operate both in present timescapes as well as in past timescapes, seamlessly. That is, you can rewind video just as fast as you can record it. Our brains, by Lazzarato's lights, operate in the same way as delineated by Bergson's analysis. Lazzarato's argument also hinges on the fact that original analog video technologies operate live: every pixel in a video image is a real beam of light created through the electricity of a cathode ray tube--a kin to the electrical processes of the human brain.


This is the bulk of Lazzarato's essay but along the way he mentions the word interface. Lazzarato offhandedly claims that (1) "natural perception as a relation between flows...is functionally guaranteed by the body, consciousness and memory, which operate as genuine interfaces...", (2) that "As a part of the body, the brain functions only as an interface" but (3) "[the brain is] an interface in which the interval between the movement received and the movement executed is maximal". These two and a half offhanded sentences made me think more about the Galloway essay. I think Lazzarato only means to think about the brain as a means through which our perceptions are folded into ourselves. Also, continuing with Bergson's thinking, since the objects in the world are images--not, I don't think, in the same way that Kant thinks of noumena and phenomena--then the brain is very much like an interface, since interfaces are containers or perhaps surfaces for images. Indeed, our brain recalls images, moves them out of our view, holds them, closes them, much like our current user interfaces.


For Galloway, though, "the interface is an agitation or generative friction between formats". Can these two ways of thinking about the interface be resolved? Galloway goes on to make his notion of the interface as agitation more clear by stating that "the interface is a medium that does not mediate". Lazzarato's picture, on the other hand, of the interface as the brain makes the interface workable. Is there some unworkability about the brain-interface and our perceptions then?


These two texts also call upon each other by thinking through the interface as refractive. In Galloway's account, this reference is evident, by the first paragraph he asserts that the "catoptrics of the society of the spectacle is now the dioptrics of the society of control". For Lazzarato, it is more nuanced but, on my reading, the use of the word crystalize forces us to think of the crystal, an object which is created under great pressure--in this case resulting in the compression of time and thus a time crystal--but if the brain compresses time much like video and modern day technologies to create time crystallization then, like Galloway's interface Lazzarato's brain-interface, must also refract. Is refraction unworkable? Is refraction at the core of the interface's agitation? Or are these accounts too disparate to resolve?




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Marielle Ingram
Marielle Ingram
Oct 15, 2018

I don't know how to directly reply to comments...if that's even possible.


But, to comment on my own post, I think these comments are also interesting in the context of Lazzarato's piece being about time. A lot of phenomenological accounts of the self rely on or critique the idea of the self as time consistent or time dependent; that is, either the self as:


(1) a minimal self (see Dan Zahavi's work for more on this) which is consistent over time and is workable no matter what representations or events it is able to fold into itself over time--something like an ego

(2) a narrative self which, as you can probably guess, relies on a conception of the self which…



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acstanfield
Oct 15, 2018

To further riff on the 'unworkability of the brain-interface and its perceptions' and on Chris's comment:


If, after Galloway, one understands an interface to be a process of exteriorization - a process of producing a failure/rift that delineates an object from its surrounds - then one could argue that the unworkability of the brain-interface is its failure to fully cognize and incorporate its environments and neighboring objects. In this way, the self thus produced is less a semi-coherent, semi-consistent object - less an individual - than it is a failure of an environment/system/place/time to congeal into coherence.

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cgortmaker
Oct 14, 2018

Your question, "is there some unworkability about the brain-interface and our perceptions then?" makes me think of an account Adorno gives of dialectics that I always find myself returning to:


"To know or to cognize something always resembles a process where something other or non-identical which confronts us is taken up into our own consciousness, is appropriated in a certain sense or made into something of our own. And this paradox—that knowing means translating something into identity, while yet relating to something which is non-identical, since otherwise there would be no process of knowing at all—this otherwise irresolvable paradox is precisely what calls for the labour of the concept for that process of both self-unfolding truth and self-unfolding thought…

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