New Industrial Temporal Objects

Abstract

31.1 Total Digitization I would like to begin with an affirmation which at first glance may seem shocking, if not iconoclastic: I include television in cinema. For quite some time it has been said that television killed cinema. Today this is heard less often because the interactions between the two media now appear more complex-and cinema is now enjoying better days, luckily. French cinema is dynamic today, owing to the support it gets from TV broadcasters , and to the harmonious interaction over the last decade between television and cinema, regardless of the problems posed by this interaction. For example, one might object that their economic interaction increases the influence of television advertisers and their needs with respect to cinematographic production. And then there is the classic objection: the difference between a cinema screen and the television screen (and now the computer's), with the resulting difference in "spectatorial attitudes". Given that cinema is that which allows the recording and transmission/distribution of moving images, enabling them to be given back to a public (seated in a movie theater or not), I nevertheless consider television as an epoch of cinema. Moreover, on a more general plane, cinema and television produce audiovisual objects which are also temporal objects. Phonography, cinema, radio and television constitute a sector of the production of industrial temporal objects. Broadcasting in general is considered to be an industry of program fluxes. Now, if broadcasting can be an industry of flux, this is mainly because an audiovisual program is it self a temporal flux. I am using the word here in the sense in which Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, used it. In 1905 Husserl underscored the fact that consciousness is essentially a flux, a passage, a flowing away. Consciousness is first and foremost, and immediately, consciousness of the time of consciousness, consciousness of its own duration. To understand what consciousness is thus requires the understanding of what time is-the same question taken up by Saint Augustine in the fourth century. In an attempt to answer this question, Husser! begins an analysis of the singular structure of what he calls temporal objects. Such objects, in this context, have nothing to do with objects in time: all real sensate objects are in time. In question here are objects characterized by the conditions whereby they flow away with time and whereby they constitute themselves in this process (in the course of their flowing away)-as for example in the case of a melody.