How do we know what time it is? Clocks and cellphones and all manner of other timepieces are the devices we make use of in order to let ourselves know just what time it is, and more importantly, to keep track of time. And yet, as so many philosophers of temporality have pointed out, for a long time now, most famously since Augustine’s well-known quip about time, at the start of Book Eleven of his Confessions: “If no one asks me, I know what it is.” Time, in other words, happens to us without our being able to comprehend it, or let alone even just temporarily get hold of it. Christian Marclay’s 2010 film-montage installation, titled The Clock, is a profound meditation, in the spirit of Augustine even, that instances at once both the ever-present mundane character of time as well as its, at times, maddening elusiveness. The Clock is a 24-hour video montage of thousands of film clips, mostly from Hollywood narrative cinema and television, in which the time of day is represented within each of the 1440 minutes of the 24-hour clock. The pronouncement of the time each minute, by for example a shot of a clock, a watch, Big Ben, or a character saying the time, is synchronized to the actual time of day in whatever city The Clock is being exhibited. I like to imagine then that each minute of The Clock is thus time-stamped while it also, automatically we might say, does the stamping itself. I want to thus call it a kind of auto-clock, but then all clocks are of course automatic. The Clock is then, in addition to a work of art, also a timepiece. And perhaps the timepiece that The Clock has the most affinity with is the punch clock, as though The Clock not only stamps each minute of its 24-hour duration, but so too it does the labor of denoting each minute’s arrival and passing. It might well historically be one of the most elaborate and time-intensive timepieces ever to have been constructed (Marclay had a crew of six assistants working over three years to collect the shots that he edited for the composition of The Clock), so that it remains, in the end, a fairly reliable timepiece, whose title, I remind you, unostentatiously names its function and status, we might even say, its ontological existence in the world. Think of the title The Clock as its ironic museum wall-label. For all the nuance and endlessly rich associations that happen by dint of its 24 hours of visual and aural splendor, it also just tells us, pretty accurately, the time of day. It’s a very elaborate timepiece, and as I hope to suggest: an especially timely one.
 

 
 
One question to ask here is in regard to just which time The Clock tells when it gives us, or should we say: shows us, the time. Still better: we might say The Clock keeps time for us. Many commentators are content to point out the structural spine of The Clock as the dichotomy, and complementarity, of a presumed real time with so-called reel time. And yet, there are at least three other modalities of time that appear in The Clock, when time, we might say, becomes visible: there is the time period depicted by the narrative premise of each cinema clip, the film story set in a particular period, time of day, season, or year.  Then also there is the visibility of the time period of the actual film’s production, so that say, a film shot in 1939 with its story set in the 1860s, also makes something visible of 1939 (even if the most visible cinematic feature of 1939 is the way in which the 1860s were visually produced by and for it). There is still one other temporality that resides in The Clock, which is the time each viewer recalls, more or less, having first seen the movie from which the clip has been excised.  This final temporal artifact, however, is the only one seemingly without the means by which it might become visible. It seems just that this temporality, the time in which ostensibly the spectator witnessed the film, falls short of the realm of the visible, as if the virtuality of the spectator’s experience of cinema rightly remains itself intangible, which is to say unpresentable. Its proper name would be internal time consciousness, insofar as it remains distinct from any and all external markers of time.
 

 
The invisibility of the spectator’s experience, its inability to come to appearance, to make itself present visually, is, I suspect, a mimetic homage to a deep feature of cinema itself, its own constitutive darkness, as well as to the constitutive virtuality of the experience of cinema. Still, these five different temporalities, or let us say, shapes of time, that co-exist with, and within, The Clock, do not include the most pressing occurrence of time in the narrative-cinema clips that compose The Clock, and that is the diegesis of plot in each film.
 Diegesis is perhaps most succinctly formulated by Aristotle when in his Poetics he neatly enumerates how the unity of a story depends upon the glue that sticks beginning, middle, and end together. Note that this glue is at once both intangible as well as invisible. The unity that plot gives rise to, even in the case of confused and muddled stories, is an achievement that in giving order to events thereby establishes the passing of time. And when we think about establishing an order or structure to time perhaps the first image that comes to mind is of a clock, the face of which displays at once both the unity of time (there is no time absent from the clockface) as well as the discrete units out of which we compose time. This returns us to Marclay’s Clock, and of course it is more correct to say The Clock, which indicates that his title is not in reference to any old clock, but rather that cinema is the clock par excellence according to which all time is now told, or at least has been told up to now and the advent of the digital.  So the neat collapsing together of clock time and diegetic time, the uncanniness that many experience in viewing The Clock, is also a sly demonstration of how time, after a hundred years or so of narrative cinema, is more likely to take place for us according to the apparatus of the cinema rather than that of a clock. We feel time, we live time, or to put this in a precise Kantian formulation: time is the very form that makes experience possible. If the history of the devices that have allowed us to keep time is also a history of the ways in which time happens for us, then Marclay’s The Clock intimates that the form of our experience of time is now pre-eminently cinematic rather than say, chronometric, that is, according to the device that meters time for us.
 
 

 
 
Cinema, rather than some other timepiece, has become the meter by which time is parceled out for us, and by us. And I take the best evidence for this to be the case is that The Clock not only becomes a clock, but more emphatically, becomes a clock by eviscerating all diegesis from cinema. That is, cinema has come to function as a timepiece for us only because the narratives that had once been the means by which cinema maintained its unity in us, have all but been effaced in our experience. The Clock is then the demonstration of the culmination, but so too therewith the end, of cinematic time. Put differently: the experience of The Clock is not a cinematic experience, or rather, it is indeed the most emphatic of cinematic experiences if what we mean by that is the experience of the dissolution of cinema as that which structures experience, and therewith gives it its content. We are no longer in the cinema, the cinema is rather inside us, and thereby no longer that which mediates our experience; our experience has instead collapsed together with it, from inside it. Cinema, as a timekeeper, has thus achieved something perhaps afforded no other timepiece, the substitution of its measure of time for any other. The plethora of clocks, indeed their very ubiquity, is testament to their failure to have synchronized sufficiently with our modes of experience. The Clock in other words, is the final timepiece, a clock that signals the end of needing any means, other than cinema, for keeping time. Montage is the explanation most often given for the peculiar temporality, and indeed ontology of the virtuality of cinematic time. That is, cinema’s constitutive darkness, the blank abyss on either side of each of the 24 frames per second, is a gap that somehow aligns with the passage of time that we cannot see and somehow cannot experience either. Cinema, by granting us something to see in this darkness, and by diegetically holding for us the threads that string events and movements together, relieves us of the burden of imagining how else things might have come together in visibility and into coherence.

 
This brings to the fore the status of the medium of cinema. I want to suggest that Marclay’s turn to cinema is in line with what prompted his earlier work as a so-called turntablist. Consider how Marclay described his sound work some years before The Clock. In a 2003 interview with Ben Neill in Bomb magazine, Marclay had the following to say: “A lot of my work is a commentary on the commercial aspect of music and the recording industry. Recording technology has turned music into a commodity. Working with the material of that commodified music, commenting on it, and making recordings that do the same thing, is compelling.”[1] If we then wonder in what way or how such work is “compelling” according to Marclay, we find him later in the same interview commenting directly on the topic of how the unities within experience might be provided by a particular medium or technology that synchronizes with our own capacities. Here he points directly to his first substantive work in video, a 2003 piece titled “Video Quartet”: “We always hear sound as one, even though most contemporary music is created in the studio out of hundreds of fragments. So one could argue that the music is the glue to ‘Video Quartet’.”[2] Marclay makes this comment after claiming that the difference between video and cinema lies primarily in that the former unites sound and vision while cinema “is all about postproduction and Foley sounds.” Marclay here seems to be aligning the experience of a unity, or let’s say: unified experience, with the technology or medium that itself either records or produces cohesive, seamless objects. A complicating factor in this schema comes with the acknowledgment that mediums and technologies of course come with a history, they change. And with these changes comes the concomitant transformation of experience, of what Marclay here designates the aesthetic: “There is the evolution of technologies, and then there is the evolution of the aesthetics that go along with technologies.  They’re intertwined. Really interesting art leads the way, points technology in the direction it needs to go, or should go.”[3] Another way to parse this insight is that technology needs direction in order to produce, or reproduce, experience. This is not then a question about how experience might be genuine or authentic but rather concerns the nexus of how experience is at once both embedded in technologies and objects as well as potentially prompted by technology and artifact. In this light, of what we might also call technological memory, it’s interesting to turn to Thomas Levin’s 1999 essay on Marclay’s relation to the medium of the gramophone record. Levin writes, “The moment the scratch is no longer the signal of malfunction but is instead the almost nostalgic trace of a bygone era of mechanical reproducibility, one can say that it has become auratic, and as such it suddenly becomes available for aesthetic practices of all sorts.”[4] (This, by the way, might also well function as an apt description of how The Clock is the medium of video demonstrating at once both the completion as well as the overcoming of cinema.) The apparently new technology is but the laying bare of the now supposedly old technology. A technology might be taken up, perhaps at the end of its life-cycle, and made to yield something else, some novel experience of the technology, what we might describe as the re-technologization of an existing technology. On the other hand, there are some, Rosalind Krauss most prominently, who see The Clock as suffused with the medium of cinema, or as she puts it: “Christian Marclay is a holdout against the eclipse of the medium.”[5] Either way, it seems that something is accomplished by Marclay’s work that is central to the medium of cinema, which leads to a rather striking conclusion about the nature of technology, or at least how it appears in his work.
 

 
Though it is generally considered the invention of some novel way of accomplishing something, perhaps even accomplishing something novel, technology might contrariwise be considered the other way around, that is, that it comes into being not at the beginning of something, but rather at its termination. Technology, in other words, appears at the close of certain practices of life. It marks and indeed codifies the rigidification and automatism of particular human practices and ways of doing things, ways of seeing, we might even say. The automatism of cinematic experience—and I suggest: by extension, of any medium that gives form to human experience—is most deftly delineated by Stanley Cavell’s encounter with the medium of cinema in his justly renowned The World Viewed, where he argues that the peculiarity of cinema is that the medium is “profounder” than any of its individual products. This makes Cavell’s reflections on cinema especially akin to The Clock’s deep dive into it; (that is, if it’s not the case that The Clock merely skims its surfaces). Cavell notes that “movies allow the audience to be mechanically absent.”[6] Note that “mechanically absent” does not mean that a machine somehow allows the audience to be absent, rather, to be mechanically absent is to absent oneself by mimetically becoming machine-like. Cavell’s focus is not unlike that of Walter Benjamin’s famous mechanical reproducibility, a concern in the end with how the medium of cinema engenders experiences that are not seamlessly continuous with human histories (Benjamin of course hoped that the discontinuity of cinematic experience with human history provided cinema a truly liberatory potential). In the case of both, we might say that cinema represents the insertion of the mechanical between the pores of human experience. Here is how Cavell puts it: “In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory). In this, movies resemble novels, a fact mirrored in the sound of narration itself, whose tense is the past.”[7] I include the end of this passage, in regard to sound, as we will return to the topic of the role that sound plays in The Clock’s success at creating continuities amidst the incessant cuts that constitute montage. The kinship between the mechanical and the automatic is that both allow the viewer to be present, but in a substantially less emphatic manner. As Cavell explains, “Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands.  Hence movies seem more natural than reality.  Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities…”[8] In The Clock, the responsibility of viewing, or as I suggest, the responsibility for locating oneself, for being present in time, is taken out of our hands and is put, and please excuse the pun, in the hands of a clock. Though Cavell might well have had something else in mind when he wrote of the burden of “private fantasy and its responsibilities,” I want to suggest that the largest and most overarching feature of “private fantasy” comes not by dint of the content of any fantasy but rather the keeping watch over oneself, the monitoring and surveillance of the self in time. And this feature of fantasy—i.e., I am watching myself[9]—is what aligns it most succinctly with the 24-hour format of The Clock, and thus helps explain why the viewing of it is so often felt to provide no small amount of relief, as it is also just this aspect which allows The Clock to be mis-described, by Marclay himself even, as entertainment.
 
 

 
 
I leave aside for the time being the question of cinema and entertainment, and return instead to the nexus of the mechanical and automatism, and especially to the notion that the two of them combine to produce the feeling of the natural.  As Cavell has it: “The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition.”[10] The Clock, by means of the mechanism of cinema, succeeds in displacing us from our natural habitation and yet it regularly and, most importantly, reliably and predictably, indeed each minute, returns us to the illusion of a non-cinematic natural habitat: the correct time of day. The Clock thereby, in re-habituating its viewers to the locale and presentness of the time-clock, affirms as natural our displacement into the rigors of the 24/7 arena. The most notable difference between the experience of cinema and that of The Clock is that with the former we are compensated for the displacement by the affirmations of narrative, while with the latter the comfort of that affirmation is withdrawn. It seems we do not object, in our viewing of The Clock, to the withdrawal of the comforts of narrative cinema because we have become even more firmly entrenched in our habituation to the 24-hour clock, a passing of time that doesn’t require even the compensations of narrative, of humanly-paced time. And yet, the automatism that Cavell formulates as an alternative accounting for the nature of medium, is not something for him to bemoan. That a behavior, production, even a responsiveness might become automatic is hardly, for Cavell, a kind of straightjacketing of human experience; it might instead signal, and make possible, a liberation from the labors of production and reception. As Cavell explains, this shift within artistic medium, in its relation to the human maker, is what is specific to modernism: “Modernism signifies not that the powers of the arts are exhausted, but on the contrary that it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself—to declare, from itself, the art as a whole for which it speaks, to become a present of the art. One might say that the task is no longer to produce another instance of an art but a new medium within it.”[11] We might well adapt this explanation of modernism’s transformed relation to medium—and therewith to the meaning of automatism for human experience—to Marclay and The Clock. This would help explain the ambiguity as to whether The Clock is itself but another film—that is, “another instance of an art”—or if it isn’t rather something else, as yet unseen, “a new medium within” cinema.

 

Paying attention here to the specificity of Cavell’s formulations yields further insight when we apply it to The Clock. The premier achievement of the modernist work is for it to become “the muse of the art itself.” This muse, and the art itself, “declare” the “art as a whole for which it speaks,” and therein produce a “new medium” within the existing one. The new medium then not only comes from within the old but has as its task nothing more than to declare that it speaks for the whole art. I submit that this is a fairly apt description of what The Clock achieves. And the questions that now arise have to do with the significance of this new medium and especially the meaning it has for human experience. But first we might appreciate that what allowed Marclay to take up the task of cinema coming to speak differently, or rather to show something other than further instances of what it had already produced, is of a piece with his longstanding orientation—recall his early transformations of how phonograph records might do something other than that for which they were intended—not so much to interfere with a recording technology but rather to make it speak or sound different from the boundaries within which it had been produced. This means for a particular technology that something might well emerge from it in its afterlife, in the life it declares beyond the fulfillment of the intentions that circumscribe it as a boundary. But the beyond needs to be understood not as something that succeeds by exceeding the boundaries of the art, rather it is that which declares itself anew from within. The implication for the already existing technology/medium is that it has reached if not its termination point at least reached the point at which it no longer nonchalantly continues to produce further contents, further instances of itself. Put differently: the end of a certain span of life for a technology or a medium is signaled by the declaration of the newness of the medium itself, and indeed from within. This possibility also implies a built-in obsolescence, an infantile senility even, at the emergence of any technology.

We might thus visit again the notion that the coming into existence of a technology happens at the end of a certain practice or form of life. Technology appears as the onset of the mechanical and automatist, it is the particular intensification of a practice into the boundaries that will contain it. The new medium, or new technology, that speaks from within what exists, and declares itself, is thus the acknowledgement of the obsolescence that was not only there at its origin, but so too is that which made its emergence possible. And it’s just here that we might hear the ambiguity in Cavell’s formulation that something becomes “a present of the art.” The finitude of the medium or technology, only incipiently present at its start, becomes fully, explicitly present—it is the feature that is declared—in the medium now become new to itself. A ‘present’ has too the implication that it arises as a gift, a token in celebration of the completeness of the medium. The gift thus announces the closure of the medium as it had been and the opening of it into what will become of it. The becoming present of the medium announces the completion of its arrival, and thus so too indicates the closure of what it had been. I’m suggesting that cinema’s closure is enacted by The Clock, and that the fulfillment of this medium and technology likewise marks—as it had in its first instances barely more than a century ago—the end of a certain form of human life. We couldn’t know, until The Clock enacted it for us, that the onset of the technology of cinema was the end of something else. Virginia Woolf first announced it in reference to 1910, exactly a century before The Clock: “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”[i] And though Woolf’s claim is often cited as a marker of the recognition of the arrival of modernism, it took one hundred years for her claim to be fulfilled by the demonstration provided by The Clock.
[i] Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924).
 

 
If, as I’m suggesting, The Clock brings to completion and fulfills the automatism inherent to the technology of cinema, what follows from this fruition, from this new medium ushered forth from within the existing medium? With Cavell we might suggest that a kind of freedom arises from the completion of automatism. This new automatism frees the object, the individual artwork as well as the medium, and grants it the possibility of a renewed autonomy. As an example of the autonomy granted to cinema, Cavell writes of this freedom coming precisely from the mechanical having set into motion the still photograph. This, he asserts is the basis of cinema’s overcoming of—liberation from—the “inherent theatricality” of the photograph.[12]
 The suggestion is not that our freedom follows from cinema, or any other medium or technology whose automatism induces a like automatic experience within us, rather, it is cinema that might free itself, by means of the mechanical and its own automatism, to become not so much something else, but something more like its true or own self, or indeed muse to itself, as Cavell would have it. What meaning and significance might it have for us, this notion of a medium coming fully into its own, becoming autonomous? Presumably, the autonomy of cinema means that it is also free of us, free from us. And what then could it have become that we might make some sense of? I want to suggest that cinema’s liberation from its own previous constraints might well put it in a position for us to make use of it as a model. That is, the medium of liberated cinema, the automatism of cinema produced by The Clock, has nothing in particular that it does for us or gives to us. Rather, we might look to it, mimetically, and though it is ostensibly a mere technology, it is akin to human capacity, and thus might show how something might become other than in service to something else. The Clock demonstrates its own autonomy first by being merely a clock, a technology seemingly independent of us, and despite its coming into existence exclusively due to human actions nonetheless turns back upon us and demands that we adjust, accommodate, and conform to it. We come to exist in thrall to the clock, its very independence from us is what makes possible the turning of ourselves toward it and the harnessing of ourselves to it. The technologies of timekeeping come to be not only an alien but an oppressive encumbrance upon us. And our liberation from them, from any and all technologies of timekeeping—whatever such a liberation might betoken—depends perhaps not so much on our liberation from the technology but rather the technology pointing out, becoming even, the means by which it brings to appearance its own termination and completion.
 
 

 
Heinrich von Kleist’s justly famous and provocative 1810 essay on the marionette theater comes to mind here, insofar as it was one of the earliest attempts to describe the potentially liberating effects of the transmission of the mechanical into human experience. Kleist’s insight was to recognize the aesthetic beauty of the entirely mechanical movements of the marionette. The promise of the mechanical, especially in regard to aesthetic experience, was not that the onset of the machine age would liberate human beings from drudgery, rather, the grace and beauty of the mechanical movements of the dancing marionette signal the freedom from exclusively human agency and intentionality, which cannot help but be piecemeal and limited. The onset of the mechanical introduced an alteration in the status of artifacts. Artifacts had always only been defined according to their being the products of human activity. With the onset of the mechanical a gap comes to exist between human activity and its products. The mechanical intervenes as a mediation within human making; the machine, and with it the automatic, open up a space, a new potential place, within human making. That space, or gap, is not merely an absence, or a place from which the presence of the human has receded; it is rather a space where the possibility of something else, of an image say, might come to appearance. For Marclay in particular it might be more likely that a sound, or a sound-image is the thing that steps forward into the gap generated by the mechanical.
Some critics see Marclay, even well before The Clock, as interested less in the apparitions produced by the mechanical and more focused on the material out of which sound and images are made. Here for example is the art historian Pamela Lee describing, in 2003, the trajectory of Marclay’s making: “the central problematic that Marclay’s work repeatedly takes up: the stark contrast between the seeming evanescence of aural culture and its stubborn materiality, as borne out in the form of its visual supplements and physical props.”[13] We noted earlier that Marclay’s own account of his interest in listening to sound, and recorded sound, has to do with the way that particular unities of experience occur within the listening, as opposed, we might imagine Marclay contending, to the somewhat piecemeal manner of the visual scanning of objects and scenes. Lee sees Marclay as focused not on experiential unities but on the disjunct between the material of sound production and the experiences elicited from it. As she has it, “What remains, as in all of Marclay’s art, is a recalcitrant material fetish—a commodity fetish, really—that takes the form of wasted tape, scratched vinyl, bruised album covers, and twisted musical instruments. Playing on our nostalgia for such largely obsolete and mangled media, Marclay’s work comprises an aesthetics of missed communications—he doesn’t seek seamless integration of sound and vision but documents the fallout that results from their confrontation.”[14] One imagines it would not be difficult to transfer Lee’s early, global criticism of Marclay to The Clock, for it is certainly easy enough to see the nostalgia that emerges in response to so many of the film clips, and so too might one readily transfer what Lee calls the material fetish of the sound works to those very same film clips, for they have become the material units out of which The Clock is composed. What then might the “fallout,” following Lee, consist of in regard to The Clock? Certainly the “confrontation” in The Clock is unavoidable, between the real time of the time of day and the reel time of cinema, even when the viewer’s experience is of these two times having pleasurably collapsed together.

 

Another way to pose what Lee calls the “confrontation” staged by Marclay’s work is to ask more directly after the character of the experience of watching The Clock.  The Clock is an instance of, as well as an intervention in, the medium of cinema. (Just as we might note that it is also an instance of and intervention in the medium of timekeeping.) Cinema history, as well as the history of the experience of cinema, is under question. For many film theorists the era of cinema, or at least the era of great cinema, has passed. As D. N. Rodowick notes, “We feel these consequences now because cinema has been in the process of disappearing for quite some time, and, in fact, has largely been displaced by video.”[15] Or, still more conclusively: “The question is not whether cinema will die, but rather just how long ago it ceased to be.”[16] Indeed, in reference to the former passage: The Clock is itself a literal instance of cinema being displaced by video as it exists precisely as a video composed of mostly film snippets. The Clock is a reflection as well as an enactment of this displacement in its material existence but so too does it register as a displacement of the experience of cinema insofar as Marclay has the video screened in museum or gallery settings, often with sofas and other such conditions and environments that can’t help but efface the cinematic origins of much of the material screened. Interesting to note is that the lack of a start or end time of The Clock also recalls Cavell’s reminder that until 50 or so years ago patrons made no special effort to arrive for the beginning of a film’s screening. Films were screened more or less continuously and each filmgoer usually sat through one full screening regardless when their viewing began. For Rodowick and others, cinema as a medium—this extends to other mediums as well—is not determined by the material supports by means of which, or better: within which, an object comes to be. Here it is helpful to put special emphasis on the central term of Rodowick’s book title: The Virtual Life of Film, and to understand if not the persistent dying of cinema, then instead what we might call the ongoing constitutive disappearing of cinema. That is, cinema is not only something that once was and now is no longer, it is also a medium (and the experiences within it) whose existence is in a constant condition of disappearance. And this not merely in reference to the effacement that happens with every projection of light through a film copy, or the physical decay of the material of film stock itself, but the perpetual and persistent evanescence that is part and parcel of the experience of cinema. The ongoing absenting central to cinema—perhaps this explains why film is so adept at provoking longing—is something carried over from the medium of the still photograph, those units, and the gaps between them, out of which cinema arises.

 

 
The peculiarity of the virtual in photography, different from the virtuality of pictorial space in painting and drawing, and much taken note of by the likes of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Cavell, and others, is that the photograph captures a space—let’s call it an image—which is no longer present (and especially to the viewer). But the conundrum for human experience becomes temporal rather than spatial, that is, what perplexes the viewer of the photograph is how to account for the duration of the photograph’s now absent space, and image, into the present. The photographic image has spatial extension but not temporal duration. By rights, we might imagine, the photograph ought to expire as it comes into existence, and because it does not its image thereby maintains a natural balance or symmetry with that which it purportedly captures. Just as the moment expires, so too ought the image whose extension it shared. And thus, a kind of spatial justice—and with it a temporal one—restored.
The perplexing condition induced by photography is greatly increased by film insofar as the latter seems to construct out of the very absence of duration in the photograph just that which makes it persist as duration. Film then appears as a kind of homeopathic cure to the absent duration that every photograph witnesses. But of what substance then, and experience even, is the duration produced by cinema? As Rodowick puts it: “This is one of the deepest paradoxes of film experience—the recurring desire to relive in the present a nonrepeatable past.”[17] I want to suggest that The Clocksomewhat resolves this paradox; and we might also ask whether we are satisfied with the resolution it offers. Rather than a full reliving of the past, it might better be described as a viewing of the past, and that what The Clock in particular brings to the screening of the past in the present is the reassurance of the duration of the present. Ironically enough, this reassurance falls somewhat short of living, that is, experiencing, or even a reliving. We instead observe, and we might say: record the passing of what has already happened as something somehow present in us as observers, or better said: as archivists. We archive, alongside and in synchrony with The Clock, both the passing of cinematic time as well as record our presence within the metronome of the cinematically ticking clock. We are allowed to witness not the sound of the ticking clock but the viewing of it. Crucial here is to realize that we witness, watch, archive and record—but do not live—what happens in The Clock. The experience The Clock nonetheless affords us is the realization of our place as witness to a time passing that is not our own. And this realization, in turn, might tell us a great deal about what we have become, especially in our relation to the variety of times and timings that press ever more closely upon us in modernity. If we return for a moment to Augustine’s famous realization that though he knows what time is, he lives it we might say, he cannot explain it, which is to say that he acknowledges the unrepresentability of time.
 
 

 
 
It is just this feature of time, its irrepresentability, that the onset of photography in the mid-19th century makes all the more poignant. Here is how Mary Ann Doane, in her book The Emergence of Cinematic Time, explains this conundrum regarding representation and time, and especially how the promise implicit to photography comes home to roost in cinema: “Photography is allied with a ‘thisness,’ a certainty in the absolute representability of things and moments. The promise of indexicality is, in effect, the promise of the rematerialization of time—the restoration of a continuum of space in photography, of time in the cinema.”[18] This promise of cinema, following close on the heels of the promise of photography, that time might somehow be rematerialized, is precisely the urgency underlying the structural dichotomy of The Clock. The synchrony of real time and reel time, seems to perform each minute just that rematerialization of time inherent to the structural promise of cinema. And yet, The Clock also demonstrates, in its own urgency of minute followed by minute, as well as by its absolute penetration of every minute of the 24-hour clock, that the promised rematerialization of time never quite arrives, or rather: it feels as if it is scheduled to arrive each and every minute and yet, never quite does so. We are left with the illusion—amidst the actual appearance of the representation of time—that time has indeed arrived. We are nevertheless left with the assurance that were it to arrive, say in the next minute, it would in fact not be late for its own scheduled arrival. So though the promised rematerialization never quite succeeds in materializing our temporal experience, at least we are assured that we await it in the nearest possible proximity. We will not be late for the imminent arrival of the truly present moment of duration. And that proximity is at once both visual—the familiarity of the film clips—as well as temporal, for we will certainly not be caught late for its arrival.
 
 
 

 
This is one of the great ironies of The Clock, the perpetual dislocating into the next minute the timely arrival of the representation of time that would truly initiate its rematerialization. It’s nearly a recreation of an early cinematic slapstick occurrence: you say you want to know what time is, well here is the time: “The cinema would be capable of recording permanently a fleeting moment, the duration of an ephemeral smile or glance. It would preserve the lifelike movements of loved ones after their death and constitute itself as a grand archive of time.”[19] The Clock succeeds in making itself into just such a grand archive of time, however, even as an archive it asserts the curious contention that it is absolutely up-to-date, indeed, up-to-the-minute, timely, and thus present in some way, even if just alongside us. And yet its presence is perhaps only as present and up-to-the-minute as any other timepiece. Following Doane’s analysis of cinema as the premier modernist technology for the rationalization of time, by means of the experience of its displacement, I would add that such rationalization has as its object the administration of temporal experience. My contention is that one of the greatest demonstrations performed by The Clock is that it reveals the passing of what had been for millennia the dominant mode by means of which the displacement of temporality had been effected: narrative. The long history of narrative, of the great variety of permutations and even interruptions of and interventions in the Aristotelian beginning-middle-end, finally comes to closure through the preliminary transformation of narrative, by cinema, into a time-based visual narrative. The introduction of montage as central to and constitutive of cinema is the precursor for the possibility that visual narrative will eventually make itself capable of dispensing with narrative altogether. Narrative might then fully and finally become what it has all along already been: the technology of timekeeping. The Clock is then the arrival of the fulfillment of the promise not only of cinema but of narrative as well.
 
 

We no longer require the devices of narrative to suspend ourselves within, instead, any old visually ticking clock will do. Doane finds in Pasolini’s writings one of the clearest expressions of how cinema translates narrative discourse into something that is at once both historic and present: “For Pasolini, what makes a filmic discourse past tense is not its repeatability but something interior to the discourse itself—the cut that coordinates two separate presences and reconfigures them as a historic, that is, meaningful, present.”[20] Note first that the move away from the repeatability of film is to mark a distance apart from Benjamin’s reproducibility as the key feature denoting the novel character of the experience of cinema. For Pasolini, instead, it is less the mechanical and more the montage technique, the cut, no doubt facilitated by the apparatus of the movie camera, that heralds the entrance of the virtual into cinematic experience. It’s important to foreground the primacy of the cut precisely because The Clock itself keeps the cut as its pervasive and overarching technique, despite some commentators who want to find narrative and narratives seeded throughout its 24 hours. The Clock appears to be continuously updating itself, making itself present, on time, and there with its spectators as well. One might also argue that The Clock cleverly elides the present by continuously arriving just alongside it. The difficulty of the present, of being present, is not new to The Clock. The longstanding problem of the present, of present experience, is the result first of the fact that we do not have a faculty by which we might directly experience time, and secondly, due to the nature of the present itself which stands right here, in front of us, as both contingent and meaningless. Photography, and then cinema, promised to make the present endure, to give it duration, which entails not only prolonging it, but so too making it noncontingent and historical, which is to say: meaningful. Put differently: cinema promises to compile an archive of the present (please do not fail to hear the paradox of that). As Doane puts it: “But what is a historic present if not a present that can be successfully archived?”[21] This should put one immediately in mind of The Clock, which, if nothing else is literally a vast archive, if not of the present then of the short history of cinema and indeed as though such a history is a fully sufficient archive of the present, or at least our present.

 

The Clock is an archive, as some have noted, of the present of our collective unconscious memories of film. And the point I want to make here is to ask the question as to what kind of experience it is, this experience of the archive. The answer I’m struggling to formulate is to say that we have become something other than spectators of cinema, or even its history, when we sit and watch The Clock. We are, I think, archivists, witnesses, observers rather than spectators. And we have this fundamentally different experience of cinema now because we have—thanks in part to cinema itself—in becoming auditors, and must acknowledge our transformed experience of time. This brings us to the question of pleasure, and to what has been made tolerable in our experience of time. Doane observes that one of the genuine successes of cinema is its alteration of our experience of the present: “The present—as the mark of contingency in time—is made tolerable, readable, archivable, and, not least, pleasurable.”[21] But I wonder here of the pleasures of The Clock, if they are not, in being the pleasures of the 24-hour present, also thereby the resignation in the face not only of the ever-present clock, but of the loss of everything but the present. Doane thus measures pleasure according to how successfully we have become adjusted to a present that no longer feels rife with contingency and possibility but instead has settled into us as another feature of administered life.
 
 

One refuge from the condition of administered life lies in our dreams and our dreaming. And yet Hollywood has often been described as a dream factory. Cinema has not only given us dreams of life so too has it provided the occasion, the locale, the movie theater, where we might doze and dream. Jonathan Crary’s well-known 2013 book, 24/7; Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, is much concerned with the variety of attempts under 21st century capitalism to invade and occupy our sleep time.[22] Crary thus, early in the book, finds himself formulating the state of contemporary life in terms of how the experience of duration has not so much been eclipsed as it has rather been extended into the entirety of the 24-hour day. Duration, just the condition which so many early modernist thinkers imagined as the rich core, and genuine prize of human experience, has been turned into its opposite, into a condition which allows no escape or alterity. Duration has been flattened out in its extension to the full cycle of the 24-hour day. Duration, the El Dorado that promised a fully present now, with all the meaningfulness of immediacy, has been achieved. Human beings now experience duration ceaselessly. In what seems a rather precise description of The Clock, Crary describes the transformation of human experience “characterized as a general inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning. It is a time that no longer passes, beyond clock time.”[23] The “continuous functioning” of The Clock is one of its signal features, and note the ambiguity of Crary writing of time passing only insofar as it is merely clock time, of there being no time beyond clock time. However pleasurable, the experience of The Clock is an experience of relentlessness, of the demand that we remain attentive, not to any narrative or snippet of story, but to the rigor of clock time. It is at once the pleasure of duration as well as that of a certain emptiness, as we need not attend to anything, except the time, and the time, parceled out and measured and announced by The Clock, reciprocally attends to us. We have achieved a kind of mutuality, a homeostasis even, with the marking of time. It is a relief to have to attend to but one thing only, and The Clock, very helpfully we feel, won’t let us forget to attend to it. This feeling of mutual attentiveness, of support even, is perhaps what Crary means when he describes human life as being inscribed in one system, one automatism, or another. And though Crary’s primary focus is on the way these systems displace us from sleep, I want to suggest that The Clock curiously enough allows us a certain kind of sleep, a suspension of sorts within its nonstop visual ticking. Though not technically asleep when we attend to The Clock, we nonetheless achieve something like its nearest equivalent, the somnolence of but a single repetitive task, and indeed one in which we are every minute supported by its prompts. Crary makes a neat observation regarding this quasi-sleep state when he notes the increasingly common label of a machine or software existing in what is called “sleep mode”: “One seemingly inconsequential but prevalent linguistic figure is the machine-based designation of ‘sleep mode.’ The notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationality and access. It supersedes an off/on logic, so that nothing is ever fundamentally ‘off’ and there is never an actual state of rest.”[24]

 

The 24-hour format of The Clock instantiates this condition of perpetual “low-power” readiness. We might also call this a kind of optimization of the observer, and note how far we have come from the image and the concern regarding the programming of the observer that one finds in a film like The Matrix. The premise of that film has to do with what we might instead call the operationalization of the observer, and thus The Matrix shares a vision of the capturing of the subject, not unlike an early sci-fi film such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it’s something different that happens with The Clock. And this difference is best appreciated within the long stretch of modernism’s history that concerned itself with duration and attention. It’s as if the long-desired goal of enabling and extending duration has been achieved, albeit with the dislocation of the place and format of attentiveness to neither the subject nor the apparatus. It’s rather a new degree of synchronization—one that is pre-figured in the synchrony of temporalities in The Clock—so that the observer is no longer the most apt description of where, or on whom, this new synchrony lands. It may be that instead of describing this synchrony, or mutual accommodation, landing somewhere, it would be more appropriate to consider how the synchronization affects each side of the relationship. That is, rather than describe a novel development of some feature of the cinematic apparatus, or, on the other side, some transformation within the confines of the observing subject, we might instead consider how what were once taken to be prominent features on each side have rubbed against one another, so to speak, and effectively worn down what was most characteristic of each. The wearing down of the friction, of the very alterity, between the observing spectator and narrative cinema, has neatly eliminated the spectator’s observations as well as cinema’s narrative spine. What we find in their place is a neat symmetry of ever-present attentiveness, an archive and its archivist. And this attentiveness, we might add, is one that seeks no particular object, and an accommodating ‘cinema’ that need not bother to present itself as having beginning, middle, or end. This triumph of automatism, if you will, is no achievement of the apparatus nor of the observer, it is rather their mutual polite bowing down in the face of one another.

Our attention is called to order in our being asked to be attentive, and yet we are likewise admonished, in effect, by the movement of the images themselves, not to become absorbed by them. This formulation was made famous by Walter Benjamin when he declared that cinema was the premier training ground for this condition of distracted reception. Peter Osborne takes up this theme in a 2004 essay and amplifies it by stating that “Art distracts and art is received in distraction.”[25] We are, in other words, as Michael Fried formulated it in the 1960s, absorbed by successful works of art, or rather, we enter a condition of absorption. [26] And yet, as Osborne points out, this call by art—and especially enhanced by the context of gallery, museum, etc. in which the art is presented—to be distracted has a distinct “disciplinary character” to it. That is, the demand by art to attend to it has both an ostensive function, it points us toward that to which we are to attend, as well as the command for attention to be paid. We might well wonder here for a moment whether we haven’t succumbed to the lesson of our long apprenticeship under modernism’s forceful commands and learned too well the condition of disciplined attentiveness. The Clock instantiates that command and merely extends the logic of disciplined attentiveness to its proper condition of allowing no reprieve, and thus fill all 24 hours. Osborne noted, some half-dozen years before The Clock, that beginning in the 1990’s a good number of artists were taking advantage of the traditional commanded-attention zones of fine art exhibition and inserting into them the commanding-attention format of film and video, and that “these are issues with which modernist and avant-garde art has grappled since the 1940s. They are raised especially sharply by the temporal aspects of recent uses of film and video in art spaces. For the dialectic of attention and distraction is a dialectics of duration.  This is a dialectics of continuity and interruption, of rhythm. As such, it is a particular inflection of the process of temporalization—the production of time—itself. Film and video works in art spaces intervene into this temporal dialectic, syncopating the time of the viewer into new rhythms and forms.”[27] And the term suggested by Osborne for this experience of these “new rhythms and forms” is duration, the key notion in Bergson’s account of how time might paradoxically be a continuity composed precisely of ongoing alterations. Duration then comes to be constituted as a unity brought into being by the alteration inherent to motion.
 

We considered previously how in the early history of cinema montage was the means by which an alterity of motion, through cuts, was introduced. And the success of montage in constructing continuity was to a large extent aided by the traditional expectations and habits of narrative. This was the premier format for cinema during the first half-century of its existence, and is what Gilles Deleuze designates the movement-image. Following Deleuze, cinema’s second half-century begins with Italian Neo-Realism, directly after World War II, and that format he designates the time-image. Please note that some commentators have not only remarked upon the kinship between Deleuze’s time-image concept and The Clock, but have even gone so far as to describe The Clock as in fact a demonstration of that notion. Here, for example, is one of Deleuze’s conclusions regarding the time-image, and coincidentally with shades of Cavell: “If cinema is automatism become spiritual art—that is, initially movement-image—it confronts automata, not accidentally, but fundamentally. …The man-machine assemblage varies from case to case, but always with the intention of posing the question of the future. And machines can take hold so fully on man that it awakens the most ancient powers, and the moving machine becomes one with the psychological automation pure and simple, at the service of a frightening new order: this is the procession of somnambulists, the hallucinators….”[28] It’s no coincidence that many describe the experience of The Clock as hypnotic or mesmerizing. It’s interesting to speculate here just what Deleuze intends when he writes of the awakening of ancient powers in response to the automatism of the machine having gotten hold of the human being. One thought is to imagine that the ancient power awakened in the viewers of cinema at the end of its time-image history, that is, the viewers of The Clock, is that what might be among the most ancient powers in us is just the power of timekeeping, of keeping time, which is to say our ancient power is that which later comes to appear as the automata of the form of experience. The ultimate automatic aspect of being human is the very capacity for experience in the first place. And though we like to imagine that capacity as a certain openness to the world, like the classic empiricist image of the blank slate, we might better instead, and in light of the history of how mediums come into existence and then become, in time, traditional or automatic, rather say that one of the most ancient powers in us is the power to be machine-like. There is a double mimesis at play here: the mimesis of being like the machine as well as the mimesis at the heart of the machine itself, the automatic as the magical power of repetition. In light of this it might be that William Pater’s famous formulation did not go far enough, for it is not merely that all art aspires to the condition of music, but apparently so too does human life. Here is how Deleuze formulates the history of cinema in regard to its relation to time: “Time as progression derives from the movement-image or from successive shots. But time as unity or as totality depends on montage which still relates it back to movement or to the succession of shots. This is why the movement-image is fundamentally linked to an indirect representation of time, and does not give us a direct presentation of it, that is, does not give us a time-image. The only direct presentation, then, appears in music.”[29] One of the most important features of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema is of course the historical transition from movement-image to time-image, and the critical implication of this lies not so much in how the character of the cinematic image changed but rather in the transformation of the spectator in relation to that image. The movement-image, by representing time, provide a model by which the spectator might represent time in herself, might also thereby represent herself in time. The time-image, on the other hand, offers no representation of time and instead somehow makes time present. The spectator thus, in losing the cinematic representation of time, becomes present alongside, or within, the time-image itself. The triumph of the presentness of time, of time finally becoming presence, occurs by means of the overcoming of the representation of time. Time arrives, or rather, its arrival must be such that it continues, without pause, to arrive each and every minute. The spectator who once integrated herself with the representation of time, ceases by means of The Clock to be a spectator at all and instead becomes one with the automatism of cinema. And yet this dissolution of the spectator might just as readily be imagined as the emancipation of the spectator.[30] The spectator thus no longer stands, or sits, opposite some screen or another, and instead yields—automatically, we might say—to the automatism of presence. A present no longer requiring representation or even Cavellian transcription.