the discrete image

Echographies of Television: filmed interviews (Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler) translated by Jennifer Bajorek
(Cambridge, UK: polity Press) 2002

The Discrete Image (Bernard Stiegler) 147-163
p155-156
The continuity of the analog image is a reality effect which ought not to conceal the fact that the the analog image is always already discrete. Not simply because it is composed of atomic grains, but because it is subject to framing operations and choices about depth of field, because it has its reality effect according to the photographic and literal context in which it is inserted, etc. ...
This can of course be seen more clearly in the animated image,in which a plurality of discontinuous images are sequentially connected, the art of the director and of the editor consisting in effacing this discontinuity (in occulting it) by playing with it . By utilizing the discontinuity of the image, they put continuity to work on the side of the spectatorial synthesis, which is what, for example, the belief that this was is.... The artist's job is to assemble the analytic elements such that the synthesis will be made more effectively.
...
The image is always discrete, but it is always discrete, as it were, as discreetly as possible. If it were discrete indiscreetly (shamelessly as it were), its discreteness would have no effect on us.

p157-158
This new cognizance [connaissance] stands in sharp relief against the background of the prior and intuitive knowledge I have of analog this was, as well as of the analogico-digital "perhaps this was not." This belief and incredulity are nothing other than the synthesis effected by the spectator, who internationalizes the spectrum as having been. By discretizing the continuous, digitization allows us to submit the this was to a decomposing analysis. Essentially synthetic (for example, in the spontaneous synthesis of the this was), the spectator's relation to the image thus becomes an analytic relation as well.
p158
We must in fact take two syntheses into account: one corresponds to the technical artifact in general, the other to the activity of the subject "spontaneously" producing its "mental images." However, Barthes shows perfectly well that it is the technological synthesis effected by the machine (the camera) that makes the intentional synthesis possible, that is to say, the belief in the this was.
p159 The analogico-digital technology of images (just like that of sounds) opens the epoch of the analytic apprehension of the image-object.

P161 -162
The analysis I've proposed, of the two syntheses (spectator and camera), such as they can never be separated from each other, signifies that the evolution of the technical synthesis implies the evolution of the spectatorial synthesis. Both syntheses are actually constituted in the course of what Simondon called a transductive relation (a relation which constitutes its terms, in which one term cannot precede the other because they exist only in relation). That is to say, new image-objects are going to engender new mental images, as well as another intelligence of movement, for it is essentially a question of animated images. The intelligence I'm talking about here is not the intelligence of what I called the new knowledge of the image. It designates techno-intuitive knowledges -- intensions in the Barthesian sense- of the new kind, which will of course be, moreover, affected or able to be affected by new knowledge, and that's opportunity.

P163 rethink what Hollywod has up to this point done in the domain of the culture industry
For it has done in accordance with a reifying schema, and by opposing production to consumption, that is to say: by putting analysis on one side (production) and synthesis on the other (consumption).