nting accumulation of nostalgic moments achieves substantial and present presence in its sudden accession to momentum and the consequent possibility of effective action. As did Andr Bazin (1967), we might think of photography, then, as primarily a form of mummification (although, unlike Bazin, I shall argue that cinema is not.)[21] While it testifies to and preserves a sense of the world and experience's real "presence," it does not preserve their present. The photographic--unlike the cinematic and the electronic--functions neither as a coming-into-being (a presence always presently constituting itself) nor as being-in-itself (an absolute presence). Rather, it functions to fix a being-that-has been (a presence in the present that is always past). Paradoxically, as it objectifies and preserves in its acts of possession, the photographic has something to do with loss, with pastness, and with death, its meanings and value intimately bound within the structure and investments of nostalgia.Although dependent upon the photographic, the cinematic has something more to do with life, with the accumulation--not the loss--of experience. Cinematic technology animates the photographic and reconstitutes its visibility and verisimilitude in a difference not of degree but of kind. The moving picture is s a visible representation not of activity finished or past, but of activity coming-into-being--and its materiality comes to be in the 1890's, the second of Jameson's transformative moments of "technological revolution within capital itself." During this moment, the combustion engine and electric power literally reenergized market capitalism into the highly controlled yet expansive structure of monopoly capitalism. Correlatively, the new cultural logic of "modernism" emerged, restructuring and eventually dominating the logic of realism to more adequately represent the new perceptual experience of an age marked by the strange autonomy and energetic fluidi...
