CHAPTER THREE

ART, SCIENCE, AND THE NEXUS

ELIEDURING

Wilfrid Sellars's definition of the general aim of philosophy nicely

captures what one would expect from metaphysics in particular: "[T]o
understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang
together in the broadest possible sense of the term" (Sellars 1).
Metaphysics is ultimately about that: the connection and coexistence of
things. In other words, the nexus of things. Space and time (or "space­
time," the term popularized by contemporary physics) constitute its
canonical forms, though they are probably not the only ones, and space­
time itself-the joining of space and time, considered in both their logical
and sensible dimensions-admits of a great many varieties.

Adjoint dislocations

How does art fit in the picture? What is its relation to the metaphysical
issue of nexus? In order to see this, let us begin with an example: a video
by the Austrian performance artist known as VALlE EXPORT, entitled
Adjungierte Dislokationen (1973). The piece takes the form of a triple
projection. Three separate sequences of images are juxtaposed in the space
of a large rectangle: on the right, two superimposed 8mm projections; on
the left, a single projection equal in height to the ones on the right, in
16mm. The large image reveals the organizing principle of the
performance. The artist has strapped two cameras to her body, which
functions as a mobile tripod: the first camera looks out straight ahead,
from the level of her collarbone; the second is placed in the middle of her
back, pointing in the opposite direction. These are the two 8mm cameras
whose footage is projected on the right side of the screen. At first, VALIE
EXPORT walks about in an anonymous urban environment: a city square,
streets, the courtyard of a building; then through more bucolic
surroundings, climbing the slope of a low hill, crossing a field, and so on.
 Art, Science, and the Nexus 51

The film lasts eight minutes, amidst the roar of three projectors operating
simultaneously.
The title of the work speaks of "adjoint" or "conjoined" dislocations.
But what exactly has been dislocated? And what could it mean to try to
join together dislocations? One has only to watch the video, and to
perform the task of split (or distributed) attention that it demands of the
viewer, in order to see that the simultaneity one naturally expects to obtain
between these three images is broken, dislocated in a thousand ways. First of
all, the small image at the top right is not synchronized with the one below
it; nor do the two images taken together seem to correspond in any
systematic fashion to the large image on the left. The sense of dislocation
becomes more pronounced as the film goes on. Apart from two or three
moments of apparent coincidence or symmetry, there is no way whatsoever
to reconstruct, on the basis of these queerly conjoined segments, anything
like the sort of coherent sequence shot one might otherwise expect to obtain
by combining the two small images and the large one to create an
improbable 360° perspective. Dis-lokation in this case also signifies that any
attempt to reconstitute the route traced by these images, which is to say an
unfolding trajectory associated with an the sense of a duration, is hindered
at each instant, so that the form of space itself, and indeed the very sense
of a continuous movement, ends up being hopelessly blurred. Instead one
is left with a rhapsodic succession of increasingly abstract shots,
punctuated by episodic synchronizations and occasional points of
reconnection.
If cinema is the art of editing and assembling separate takes in order to
confer an overall sense of action or movement to projected images, then
VALIE EXPORT's piece plainly amounts to taking the usual rules of the
game and pushing them to their limit. But perhaps the most surprising
thing about this disrupted montage is not so much the discrepancy or
deliberate dislocation of the 8mm shots in respect of each other as the
relationship that they both enjoy with the larger image to their left. This
larger view, one soon deduces, is filmed by a third camera that never
appears in any of the 8mm shots. In principle, then, it should reveal to us
the truth of the artistic exercise, and indeed it does do this to the extent that
it shows us how the performance was carried out, while showing us at the
same time, from an encompassing vantage point that seems somehow to be
exempt from the play of shifting perspectives, the mobile site from which
the smaller projections look out upon the world in opposite directions. To
conjoin forward- and backward-looking perspectives whose lines of sight
never intersect, and then to place next to them a projection that flattens
them, so to speak, by aligning them on the same plane, namely, the wall of
52 Chapter Three

a gallery-this is a splendid idea, and by no means a simple one. But to

relate the progressive dislocation of the two smaller perspectives to a
witness-image, a central perspective that in reality witnesses nothing at all,
apart from the bare event of the performance itself, is to plunge the whole
exercise back into a state of complete indeterminacy with regard to space­
time coordinates.

Heterogeneous space-times

Another case in point is the assemblage or subtle editing of almost

imperceptible durations and flows in some of Mark Lewis' video works.
Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan (2005) is an emblematic piece: shot in the
periphery of downtown Toronto, it relies on three basic camera moves
that together manage to display heterogeneous regions of space-similar
to the multifarious animal worlds described by von Uexkiill-at once
insulated from each other and oddly juxtaposed in the overall composition
of the film. The question is: how can the local durations animating these
disparate Umwelten be totalized, or at least brought together in a single
plane of consistency? No overall embedding space is available to host
these fragmented threads. The only way to go is to actually try to stitch
together these disjointed neighborhoods, connecting them one at a time as
the film unfolds. This is exactly what the film achieves within the scope of
its 4:28 minutes, albeit in an ambiguous manner. Constructed out of two
different but seamlessly joined shots, it alternates sweeping camera moves
and seemingly frozen frames exhibiting a variety of space-times, some of
them folded or nested within each other-see the insect finding his way
around a red plastic cup by a muddy patch filmed in close-up framing­
others merely juxtaposed in a disconnected fashion-a swamp, a
warehouse space and a parking lot against the remote skyline, a railway
track . . . To which one should add the variety of movements occurring
within the frames in these successive settings: the insect's erratic moves, a
car maneuvering in reverse motion, shrouded by a strangely suspended
cloud of dust, the smooth and slightly unreal translatory motion of a
merchandise train, etc. These interlocking or merely contiguous spheres of
existence involve incommensurable scales and motions; they differ in
content and overall tonality, sometimes like night and day, dusk and
morning. From the scale relations between the successive settings, one
may infer the deployment of a foreground, middle ground and background,
yet this does not really help making sense of the hybrid, disunified space
that is both the pretext and the result of Mark Lewis' cinematic
composition. That the film is in fact shown in reverse is almost
 Art, Science, and the Nexus 53

imperceptible, but it certainly fuels the overall sense of uncertainty that

pervades this highly contrived composition. And since no all-embracing,
embedding space or "landscape" is readily available to host the
heterogeneous durations unfolding in these different milieus, connections
can only happen in piecemeal fashion by moving-like insects or
butterflies-across overlapping and yet seemingly disconnected
neighborhoods.
The use of the pan shot brings to mind what Kracauer had to say about
"cross-section" films such as Walter Ruttmann's 1927 symphonic
depiction of Berlin, the Grofistadt, except that in the case of Lewis'
Downtown the City has almost totally vanished as a unifying element,
surviving only as a pictorial, photographic and even postcard-like
reminiscence in the form of a cityscape placed in the background of the
central "tableau". The question this raises is ecological and even
cosmological in nature. It can be roughly put this way: in the absence of a
ready-made embedding space-call it "nature" or "urban space"-in what
sense do these local durations belong to the same world? How can they be
totalized, if not by connecting them one at a time? And what does it take to
connect them, besides the camera moves ("pan, tilt and zoom") and the
natural montage effect obtained by sweeping across the motley scenery?
How is connection achieved in the absence of any intuitive sense of
continuity? The artist himself does not offer any authoritative answer to the
question of how to achieve a sense of global time on such premises, but he
certainly shares a common concern with Bergson who acknowledged,
besides the simultaneity of two instants, and anterior to it, the simultaneity
of two or more flows between which our attention "can be divided without
being split up" (Bergson 35). This is somehow connected to the issue of
divided or distributed attention, a current topic of interest in the philosophy
of psychology:

When we are seated on the bank of a river, the flowing of the water, the
gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life's
deeps are for us three separate things or only one, as we choose. We can
interiorize the whole, dealing with a single perception that carries along the
three flows, mingled in its course; or we can leave the first two outside and
then divide our attention between the inner and the outer; or, better yet, we
can do both at one and the same time, our attention uniting and yet
differentiating the three flows, thanks to its singular privilege of being one
and several. (Bergson 36)

Clearly, what Bergson is suggesting here is a method for reaching

global time in a local manner, a way of weaving fiber-time(s) without
54 Chapter Three

resorting to the frame-time famously criticized by him under the heading

of the "cinematographic illusion" (During 2013). The unique capacity of
consciousness to divide itself without splitting up, and more interestingly
to unite and differentiate at once what falls within its field of perception,
underlies what is sometimes called unfocused or distributed attention.
Consciousness exhibits the baffling capacity to be one and many, not
alternately, but simultaneously. As a result, temporal unification can be
achieved in a local fashion, not by unfurling an overall sense of continuous
duration in nature ("universal time"), but by patching together limited
regions of space-time which our consciousness holds together and
differentiates in the same stroke, relying solely on its inner sense of
duration. Yet the limit of Bergson's analysis, if one wants to apply it to the
cinematic experience, is that the temporal unity of the film itself cannot be
entirely predicated upon the alleged unity of the spectator's lived duration.
For the latter is in turn continuously modulated by filmic duration, and
framed accordingly. So the logic of distributed attention must be pitched
against the generic procedures by which cinema achieves new forms of
temporal unification. And this is where metaphysics strikes back. We need
it in order to make explicit, and possibly to expand, the patterns of
connectedness exhibited in artistic forms.

Reaching the global locally: a kinked classicism

Let us state the question in the most general way possible, even though
this may feel like an abrupt jump cut. The following formulation imposes
itself: how can the global point of view attached to the idea of totality­
that is, the idea of some totality, not of the fantasmatic Whole or set of all
sets-be reconciled with the local point of view attached to the immediate
experience of particular situations and configurations given in a state of
relative dispersion? With respect to the issue of totality, or totalization,
what I shall be advocating here is a classicism of a kinked variety. All the
ontologies that, from Bergson to Sartre and Deleuze, have tried to place a
principle of radical indeterminacy at the heart of being, had to face this
problem at some point: in order to be acknowledged and identified, the
situs must be set in a global configuration space (a space of situations, an
order of places) without thereby abolishing the singularity, the
supernumerary character of its local inscription with respect to an overall
necessity that can never be assumed in advance-as opposed, say, to the
Hegelian figure of processual totality. This problematic requirement is
generally expressed in terms of an unstable solution that takes the
oxymoronic form of an "open totality"-a totality that is not closed on
 Art, Science, and the Nexus 55

itself, that is still in the making, hence inseparable from the joint ideas of
becoming and contingency. More concretely, one may think of an open
totality as being implied by a principle of local connection (what Deleuze
calls "disjunctive synthesis") that never forces us to leave the plane of
experience (or "plane of immanence"). If one interprets the situs as a finite
or situated perspective on the world, then the basic idea is that every way
of representing or conceiving the compositional space of perspectives
("Totality," "Whole," or "World") amounts, in its turn, only to one more
such perspective-another extension of the plane itself, rather than a flight
from it. William James clearly stated this principle in A Pluralistic
Universe. It is indeed the basic tenet of his doctrine of "external
relations".1 A perspective being, in the last analysis, merely a bundle of
relations ordered by a point of view (not necessarily a subject), it is easy to
extend the scheme of the "open totality" to artistic configurations
(including the cinematic idea of mobile perspective) as well as scientific
configurations (including the notion of a reference frame in relativity
theories). However, in order to understand this, further clarification is
needed.
James' famous argument against idealistic monism-the doctrine that
ultimately there is in reality only one thing, and that this thing is not
material in nature but made of the same stuff as our ideas-assumed a
very simple form: not only must the relations between two distinct terms
be conceived as external relations, not deducible from the terms
themselves, but as a consequence any relation must in its tum be
convertible into some local experience. In short, every relation in
experience is also an experience of relation; every experiential relation is a
relational experience (James 279-280). The point is that such an
experience necessarily brings with it an additional term, the point of view
of a third party, which therefore amounts to a new extension of the plane
of experience, rather than a "geometral" (or flat) overview of the situation
as a whole. For there is no perspective attached to that global
configuration space. One may well conceive of a space comprehending all
relations, but to assume that such a space is real evidently amounts once
again to collapsing all relations unto internal relations-internal this time,
to a Whole of relations, a Whole given in one piece, so to speak, for all

1 "Pragmatically interpreted," James says, "pluralism or the doctrine that [reality] is

many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related. Everything
you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely
'external' environment of some sort or amount. Things are 'with' one another in many
ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word 'and'
trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes" (James 321 ).
56 Chapter Three

eternity. This is a speculative fable. Against the dream of a mathesis

universalis, James asserts that experience never closes itself, that
"something always escapes." Radical empiricism comes at that price.
However, giving up the Whole in that sense does not necessarily amount
to relinquishing the concern for the global. Achieving some form of
totalization remains a valid task for the metaphysician, provided he is
ready to trade the traditional forms of classicism-the acknowledgement
of totality as a prob lem -against an open, relativized, framework.
Granted, every experiential relation may be converted into a relational
experience, every combining of perspectives yields a new perspective.
This intuition inherited from James is more generally characteristic of the
second wave of philosophical modernity inaugurated by Marx, Darwin,
Freud, and Nietzsche. It more or less secretly stimulates the thinking of
Levi-Strauss, Deleuze, and more recently Latour. It is still apparent in
those who struggle with the internal difficulties of the anti-metaphysical
orientation attached to James' original formulation, an orientation that is
still apparent in Deleuze despite his unfailing attachment to metaphysics
(reaffirmed in the famous statement: "I feel like a pure metaphysician . . . ").
Meditating on this situation, some philosophers-Badiou, first and
foremost-were led to forswear any oblique reference to a totality and
contemplate instead the pure multiple as the basis of all ontology-a non­
totalizable multiple of multiples. My contention, on the other hand, is that
there is some room for an updated form of classicism, one that still
entertains the idea of totality as an overall scheme for the coexistence of
things, without clinging to the idea that coexistence only comes in one
shade.

Loose coexistence

Short of embracing Badiou's radical alternative to classical

metaphysics, I believe there is room for a variety of intermediate positions
that the allied powers of art and science will help us to better apprehend.
The basic intuition is rather straightforward: coexistence and togetherness
come in many forms; things can hang together loosely. It is once again
William James who wrote: "What pluralists say is that a universe really
connected loosely, after the pattern of our daily experience, is possible,
and that for certain reasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred" (76). What
is distinctive about this coexistence of the "loose" kind? What does it
mean for things to hang together "loosely"? And more importantly, how
should we come to terms with the apparent contradiction involved in
binding the conjunctive power of connections-Whitehead would later
 Art, Science, and the Nexus 57

speak of "prehensions"-and the disjunctive state resulting from a

diversity of distinct, local perspectives on the world?
The point is that there are several ways for things to be separated from
each other. The most obvious cases, those that come more readily to mind,
involve spatial separation: the experience of absence as distance or
remoteness in space. Such is my relation to a remote part of the universe
(Andromeda), or a remote part of the planet: the Tigers in India, to refer to
William James' famous paradigm of "ambulatory" thought. Tigers in
India, or Peshmergas in Syria, is a clear instance of an absent experience
to which I am nonetheless connected through a smooth series of
intermediaries supplied by the world and its various "media." Separation
in time is often conceived in very much this way: such are events pictured
in a distant past or future . . . But the kind of separation that arises from
causal disconnection is quite different. There are locations or regions in
the overall nexus of the world that are so remote from each other that they
hardly interact at all. One may view them as insulated from each other as
far as active connections are concerned. Think of a tribe preserved from all
contact with civilization, somewhere in the deep forests of New Guinea­
at any rate, such an example was available in James' time. Think of a
black hole cut from the surrounding space by the barrier or horizon that
prevents any radiation from crossing a certain threshold. Or think about
the limits and thresholds imposed upon the exchange of information by
current communication technologies. In The Nature of the Physical World,
Arthur Eddington aptly reminds us that relativistic effects need only
concern us below a certain spatiotemporal threshold--one that allows two
events to be connected and to interact causally through some physical
signal, such as an electromagnetic wave. "At the greatest possible
separation on the earth the thickness of the neutral wedge is no more than
a tenth of a second; so that terrestrial synchronism is not seriously
interfered with" (49). "Suppose," Eddington continues, "that you are in
love with a lady on Neptune and that she returns the sentiment. It will be
some consolation for the melancholy separation if you can say to yourself
at some-possibly prearranged-moment: 'She is thinking of me now.'
Unfortunately a difficulty has arisen because we have had to abolish Now.
There is no absolute Now, but only the various relative Nows differing
according to the reckoning of different observers and covering the whole
neutral wedge which at the distance of Neptune is about eight hours thick.
She will have to think of you continuously for eight hours on end in order
to circumvent the ambiguity of Now" (Eddington 49).
One may protest that this is true only of certain limit cases involving
very high velocities neighboring the speed of light. The point, however, is
58 Chapter Three

that such effects, although negligible when one considers speeds and
distances commensurate with the usual scope of human action, always
exist in principle. So they cannot be entirely disregarded if one is
concerned with making sense of the general scheme of things-the way
they hang together. Moreover, there are a host of situations where those
effects become more sensible: these situations arise whenever the
transmission of information--digital or otherwise-across space is
achieved through the exchange of electromagnetic signals, with the
inevitable desynchronization of flows, time delays, and ensuing blind­
spots. Think, for example, of the slight but very perceptible difference
between numerical TV and ordinary Hertzian TV during the live broadcast
of a soccer game, the confusion that results from the same information
being transmitted with a few seconds delay in two distinct but neighboring
locations (with the ensuing interplay of anticipation and frustration) . . .
I could go on and on: my point is that there are a wealth of empirical
situations where the issue of (causal) disconnection rises to the fore,
drawing our attention to the fact that togetherness cannot be considered
apart from the various modes of disconnectedness embedded in the fabric
of physical and human reality. James must be celebrated for having raised
the general issue. But I believe it is Whitehead's merit to have suggested a
general scheme for weaving together interconnectedness and
disconnectedness in a vision of cosmic solidarity that makes room for the
chunky, and at times discrete nature of experience. Time itself, James said,
comes in "drops." Whitehead also embraces the notion of a discrete,
"epochal" time, and he does so not on phenomenological grounds but from
an ontological perspective, because he acknowledges the essential
separateness of "actual occasions"2 within the general "advance of nature."
Eschewing totality altogether, speaking of unity without totality, can only
be a verbal solution in that respect. We must seek a concrete
understanding of the paradoxical nature of the nexus by unpacking the
manifold meaning of togetherness. Contemporaneity (being together in
time) is but one among many possibilities: it does not necessarily
presuppose an absolute notion of the cosmic present, since becoming can
be viewed as a bundle of simultaneous unfoldings without any reference to
a sharp-edged, instantaneous "now." Again, there is a plurality of modes
of disconnection or separation within togetherness. In order to avoid the
temptation of retotalizing the nexus under one single overarching
scheme-be it the "extensive continuum," narrowly interpreted as the

2In Whitehead's system, actual occasions are the basic ingredients of any event or
process, and hence the final units of reality.
 Art, Science, and the Nexus 59

spatio-temporal structure underlying a particular physical theory, or God's

(or the quantum particle's) presence and action upon the world beyond the
strictures of locality-, the first task is to understand how togetherness
welcomes various forms of the negative: disconnectedness, separation,
tem poral indetermination, etc. Although nature in some sense "conspires"
with every actual occasion,3 the nexus is no plenum. This is what separates
Whitehead's and Leibniz' cosmologies. There is no cosmic medium, or at
least it does not come in one piece. The bonds of mutual immanence that
make up the nexus are in fact hollowed out through and through: there are
holes, gaps, and blindspots, insulated regions, things "loosely" connected
across space and time . . . In order to reach a relativized, differentiated and
pluralistic understanding of togetherness or coexistence, it is necessary to
make room for causal disconnection within the causal nexus. This is
illustrated-but no more than illustrated-by the relativistic effects
discussed above. The fact is that, at every level, similar schemes of
disconnection are at play, interlocking with the interconnectedness of things.
In order for genuine connection to obtain anywhere, there must be real
disconnection somewhere. This is the main lesson behind Whitehead's
concept of the thick present: "contemporaneity," as distinct from Einstein's
narrow, instant-based "simultaneity" (During, 2008).
To sum up, connectedness and disconnectedness always work together.
James similarly observed that we are not forced to choose, as the idealist
wants us to believe, between absolute independence and absolute mutual
dependence:

Either absolute independence or absolute mutual dependence-this, then, is

the only alternative allowed by these thinkers. Of course "independence," if
absolute, would be preposterous, so the only conclusion allowable is that,
[ . .] "every single event is ultimately related to every other, and determined
.

by the whole to which it belongs." The whole complete block-universe

through-and-through, therefore, or no universe at all! [. . . ] What pluralists say
is that a universe really connected loosely, after the pattern of our daily
experience, is possible, and that for certain reasons it is the hypothesis to be
preferred.4 (James 76)

3 "In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times," Whitehead writes in

Science and the Modern World (91 ) . This is directly related to the cosmological
notion of perspective, which implies that "every location involves an aspect of
itself in every other location."
4
This, by the way, is to my knowledge the first occurrence of the "block­
universe"-a designation that has since been popularized in discussions about the
ontological significance of space-time physics. James was implicitly referring to
Bradley' s view of the universe as a Whole unified by internal relations (see above).
60 Chapter Three

When it comes to making sense of the whole of experience, empiricism

is always confronted with a dilemma: it must account for the fact that
nothing is by essence radically subtracted from the plane of experience, or
cut from the extensive becoming of nature, while allowing for every
possible degree of disjunction or disconnectedness within togetherness. This
difficulty reflects a more general tension between monism and pluralism,
solidarity and locality-a tension that is still apparent in Whitehead's
particular brand of empiricism. Such a tension is in a way inevitable, it
cannot be resolved by resorting to a universal scheme of togetherness that
would achieve totalization once and for all. For as James put it: "Things are
'with' one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or
dominates over everything" (James 321). In that respect, there is indeed an
essential inexhaustibility or incompleteness of the whole. As we saw earlier,
the very notion of perspective (or situs) seems to prevent the plurality of
perspectives from being integrated within a totalizing perspective. A
perspective always lends itself to other perspectives; there cannot be a total
perspective, any more than there is experience in general. As a result,
coexistence is thoroughly pluralized: it turns out to be a multilayered,
multimodal concept. In Whitehead's system, its meanings range from
simultaneity in the mode of "presentational immediacy" to contemporaneity
understood as causal independence, through the concepts of "cogredience"
and "co-presence" associated to the possibility of shared motion. Each of
these notions spells out in its own way a definite mode of togetherness
within universal becoming. Yet, to repeat, pluralizing the object of
metaphysical inquiry does not amount to giving it up altogether.

Art, Science, Metaphysics

In that respect, the schemes devised by artists and scientists alike

function as precision instruments, rather than models, for metaphysical
intuition. I mean that they may serve to intensify and complicate that
intuition, stretching it beyond its natural threshold by calibrating an entire
range of alternative conceptions of space-time, each presenting itself as an
overarching framework for mapping the nexus of embedded perspectives.
They may show us, for example, that space-time may be perfectly regular,
uniform, and symmetrical-and therefore "global," in the sense that its
metric form is fixed once and for all-while at the same time being
perfectly local, in the sense that the linking up of perspectives is defined
by strictly local operations, so that the overall properties of space are not
immediately given, but can only be discovered or inferred at the end of a
 Art, Science, and the Nexus 61

process of exploration that proceeds from place to place by connecting

neighboring points of view. Thus, the space-time of special relativity is
compatible in principle with any "flat" but globally warped local space
(cylinder, torus, Mobius strip, Klein bottle, and so on). In my book Faux
raccords (During 2010), I have sought to show that the filmic and mental
space-time of Hitchcock's film Vertigo can be seen to have an overall
structure of the Mobius-strip type (a disorientation space), although it can
only be inferred from a succession of local jump cuts.
More generally, such examples suggest that classicism in
metaphysics (and perhaps in art and science as well) may come in a
warped-or, better, kinked-form. It is no accident if the theory
formulated by Einstein in 1905 (the "special theory of relativity") was
contemporaneous with the advent of cubism. At root, it depends on two
axioms of immediate metaphysical import. I believe these axioms are at
work, in a different setting, in two emblematic works by Dan Graham:
Two Correlated Rotations (1969) and Present Continuous Past(s) (1974).
I have shown elsewhere (During 2010) that these cinematic installations
respectively incorporate the two fundamental ideas of Einstein's theory:
on the one hand, a principle of reciprocity that asserts the radical
equivalence of all perspectives (what physicists since Galileo have
considered to be a "relativity principle," originally limited to inertial
frames); on the other hand, a principle of locality, or local action,
involving the transmission of signals from place to place, one place at a
time (this limiting principle is embedded in the idea of a finite maximum
speed equal to the speed of light in a vacuum; stated in more positive
terms, it implies that every action or interaction takes time). In a nutshell:
first, there is no privileged point of view; second, there is no action at a
distance. The famous relativistic paradoxes (dislocation of simultaneity
relations, length contraction, time dilation) directly derive from the
"shearing" of classical space-time induced by the conjoined work of these
two principles. Dan Graham is a contemporary of Einstein in that sense.
By incorporating in his works a dual principle of reciprocity and of
locality, he contributes to the intuitive grasp of the new conditions of
coexistence illustrated by the paradoxes of relativity; he gives shape to
what Whitehead tried to capture under the concept of "contemporaneity"
mentioned above: the fact that some events, distributed as they are in
space and time, cannot be causally connected by principle and are to that
extent separate. The temporal relation between such events is in a genuine
sense temporally indeterminate. In their case, the ascription of
simultaneity relations can only be relative-a matter of perspective, as
Einstein relentlessly stressed.
62 Chapter Three

This should come as a reminder to all those who seem to have settled
in a fundamentally Newtonian universe. For it is no use to celebrate or
lament the fact that the digital age has abolished all distances, that the age
of instantaneous connection and "real time" is now upon us, if one still
believes in infinite speeds. For Virilio and the like, we live in a plenum of
instantaneous electronic stimulations; the sense of place and distance is
lost for good. But the principle of locality embodied in Dan Graham's
cinematic pieces forces us to go beyond the ordinary thresholds of
perception which underpin such apocalyptic visions. It calls for closer
attention to the tears, the jump cuts, the blindspots that punctuate the
course of human experience, and that cinema and video-art have long
made it their business to explore according to their own means. Talk of
instantaneity is not absurd; it only lacks precision. It errs through an
excess of anthropocentrism, relying on a rustic phenomenology of lived
durations and speeds. Art and science, on the other hand, relayed by
metaphysics, suggest that the world is really more interesting than some
would make it seem.

Works Cited

Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity. Leon Jacobson, trans.

Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999.
During, Elie. "Durations and Simultaneities: Temporal Perspectives and
Relativistic Time in Whitehead and Bergson," in Handbook of
Whiteheadian Process Thought, Michel Weber, ed., vol. 2.
Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag, 2008.
-. Faux raccords: La Coexistence des images. Aries: Actes Sud, 2010.
-. "Cinematography and the Extended 'Now': from Bergson to Video
Art," in Bildbewegungen - Image Movements, P. Rathgeber & N.
Steinmiiller, eds. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Hamburg, 2013.
Eddington, Arthur. The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1928.
James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. London: Longman, Green & Co.,
1909.
Sellars, Wilfrid. Science, Perception, and Reality. New York: Humanities
Press, 1963.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1925.
-. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1929.
The Art of the Real:

Visual Studies
and New Materialisms

Edited by

Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen

Cambridge
Scholars
Publishing