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Time and the Static Image

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Robin Le Poidevin
Robin Le Poidevin
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Extract

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo (unless very damaging) is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 72 , Issue 280 , April 1997 , pp. 175 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1997

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References

1 I shall use ‘instant’ sometimes as shorthand for ‘instantaneous state of affairs’, and sometimes in the sense of an extensionless moment of time. The context should make it clear which sense is intended.

2 Physics, Book VI, 239b5-9.Google Scholar

3 Confessions, Book XI, 15 and 27.Google Scholar

4 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XXVII (1964), pp.Google Scholar

5 Quoted in Gombrich, op. cit., p. 294.

6 Ibid.

7 Physics, Book IV, 222a10.Google Scholar

8 Physics, Book VI, 239b9.Google Scholar

9 We could, alternatively, interpret the paradox as based on the assumption that time is discrete, so that there are in reality instants in the first sense of smallest parts of an interval. Since the idea of discrete time is one way of undermining the Achilles, it could be suggested that the function of the Arrow is to block this particular move in the dialectic.

10 See Chapter 3 of Gregory, Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge University Press, 1995), for a lucid discussion of the ways in which time is represented in pictures and film.Google Scholar

11 Currie, op. cit., pp. 79-90. Currie acknowledges a debt to Flint, Schier'sDeeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), which introduces the notions of triggering recognition capacities and natural generativity.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, the account given by Christopher, Peacocke, in ‘Depiction’, Philosophical Review XCVI (1987), pp. 383–410, in which depiction is explained in terms of the spatial properties which the representation has in the visual field.Google Scholar

13 For an accessible discussion of illusory perceptions of movement see Gregory, R. L., Eye and Brain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), pp. 99–109, and 133–136.Google Scholar

14 A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Book I, Part II, sections I and II.Google Scholar