What then is a time-image? A time-image, for Deleuze, is an image which is infused with time. That is, it is an image which is different from itself, which is virtual to itself, which is infused with past/future.

Christopher Vitale, author of Networkologies, wrote this excellent introduction to Deleuze’s cinema books:

I appear to have written myself into a study of Deleuze’s concept of the time image in order to appropriately think with time. I’m writing about the history of consciousness in this particularly challenging essay, and looking for alternative ways to conceptualize the history of consciousness as a dynamic and relational unfoldment. The idea, for me, is to walk away from linear and stadial models — I’m a bit tired of the debate around them in my circles — and simply try another approach. Walk on another road.

A proper, academic paper on Gebser and Deleuze will happen eventually, but as I am writing a manuscript for readers outside of academia, I have the pleasure of being able to ‘play’ with these ideas and intuitive connections first.

I wasn’t quite expecting this, but Deleuze’s concepts, such as the rhizome and the cinema books, have really come forward in the Fragments manuscript to dialogue together and produce interesting forays; each are creative attempts we can learn to think with time. Thinking with time produces radically different, processual concepts, ones that work at the level changing our perception of time, space, and self.

They do what Gebser called ‘systasis’ rather than synthesis and system, and arguably the most brilliant and compelling philosophers of the 20th century have been systatic thinkers — from Bergson and Whitehead to Deleuze and Guattari, Stengers, and Latour (I realize stating something like ‘the most brilliant and compelling philosophers’ is quite the subjective claim).

Generally, thinking with and perceiving time transforms what we can do with philosophy. In the Bergsonian sense, thinking can become what he called intuition. We need philosophical thought that shares a taproot into our dynamic in living world, and therefore helps us to have direct and immediate intuitions of this living world, if we are to have any chance of turning things around—walking down another road as a globalized society.

Gebser called this road, and really, this world, the aperspectival world, a world that has more to do with Bergsonian time than Cartesian space. This world is a temporal one, and time becomes the initiatory for new modes of perceiving and relating.

This transformation, call it the ‘aperspectival turn,’ in contemporary culture, is marked by a few characteristic developments such as the above attempts to perceive and relate with time-as-such through both art and philosophy. Like the time-image, aperspectivity is characterized by superseding manifold dualisms such as subject-object, past-future, human and more-than-human. The notion of the ‘planetary imaginary,’ as I argue in my new book, is a way to describe how these new modes of perception show up in culture—especially in the arts (music, film, literature, etc.), but also in the sciences.

How do we actualize an image, a film, a painting, that depicts the overcoming of linearity and dualism while still preserving such differences within a larger whole?

The so-called poststructuralists are not collapsing the world’s images of wholeness, they are pointing us to how wholeness exceeds abstract system and synthesis. They point to an ‘alive order,’ as Nora Bateson poetically describes.

Like the time image, they need to dynamically move and wriggle; they fluctuate like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle between past and future, subject-and object, without collapsing into one thing or another. They are moving images where what Gebser called “the quintessence of time” is creatively expressed at a glance.

Readers, if you have particularly illustrative examples of the time image in film and media, share them here, or reach out.

Back to book writing. Happy reading, friends.