https://quantitycinema.com/2022/07/15/on-isiah-medina-films-2010-2020 On "Isiah Medina: Films 2010-2020" by Frank Ruda, Kurt Walker, Kelley Dong, Sam Bodrojan, Phil Coldiron, and Steffanie Ling (15 Jul 2022) Frank Ruda A Cut in the Night. Isiah Medina’s 88:88 (2015) “Be void.” (Heather H. Yeung, “NYCTICORAX-NYCTICORAX”) “Nothing else to see except suspension.” (88:88) It is difficult to show and to see (a) suspension (of structure). This is not the same as to say that it is difficult to identify when a structure stops to work, comes to a halt, disappears, unravels, or molders. Structures stop (working) all the time – individual bodies for example, break, die. Collective organizations disperse, die out. Life-branches die away. Structures stopping (to) work is a mode structures use to work. It is often how they reproduce themselves. The built-in suspension of structures is part of the structure of structure. Yet, structures can also stop working and stop structuring their own suspension. Then the suspension of structure attains a different quality. Suspension (of structure) can always be a vanishing mediator of the reproduction of structure (carnival, for example). But a suspension (of structure) can also be unstructured, or a suspension of structure. For a moment, at least. This is the moment of a breakup (of the structure of suspension and structure). This is then how temporality emerges. Only by breaking up structured time, the structure of time, by suspending time, temporality emerges, appears, becomes visible, and is brought to the fore. We experienced a new sense of time. Something happened. This is to say, even though, there is no structure without the suspension of the structure (of suspending structure), some-time is created, made and marked by a suspension that cuts differently. Not-everything is then structure(d). But this means, to modify Lenin on this, that there are suspensions and then there are suspensions. One never knows in advance which is which – but we can wager. We shall – Isiah Medina wagers on the potential of suspension, he cuts right into it. With 88:88 he brings to light and makes visible how a cut (of electricity-supply) must be – meta-ontologically – understood as a symptom of an in-built suspension of structure that enforces and reproduces the latter. But he also manages to show a(ny) reproductive suspension – always and / or nevertheless – allows for an event – Alain Badiou’s thought is therefore present and pertinent throughout 88:88. For a surplus of suspension – – If all capital-movement is and always was about establishing a time-economy, a wedging time-measurement and regime of valorization, when (its) time-display disappears and reappears – when appearing time is cut –, there emerges the impossible possibility of a resetting of time, of a different running of time, for a different timing. 88:88 operates on the level of this different timing. Its medium is what cannot but appear – behold we are in the domain of the digital – to be an impossible cut. 88:88 cuts through this impossibility and works through impossible cuts. It does not present a series of images, but moves, if it moves at all, through cuts, its cuts together. It shows us nothing except cuts – – – If capital is, in Marx’s description, a movement of value that in sustains itself by valorizes itself and thereby creates a surplus (of value), this creation hinges on a constitutive suspension – we could venture to call it capital’s destitutive or suspending power: capital’s suspension is one that works in favor of the former’s reproduction. it moves everything, everything solid is evaporated – behold, everything solid is not melted, but vaporized, transformed into the polluting steam of the steam engine – except its own structural need for reproduction and growth. Everything is revolutionized so that nothing is ever revolutionized. But in its structure of revolutionizing without revolutionizing – behold it is prehistory after all, the night in which all revolutions are grey – it must suspend what is doing infinitely and ad infinitum. It thus deprives revolution of its substance; it revolutionizes in modus suspensionii (by becoming nonrevolutionizing’s revolution’s “automatic subject” (Marx)). Capital’s structure of reproductive suspension thereby creates the and organizes the impossibility of ever being able to change its operation – which it is why it can seem as if it were (in our) nature. The digital medium almost mimetically – in its form and immaterial material – redoubles this very impossibility by confronting everyone with the impossibility of conceiving of a (digital) cut. To thus suspend the predominant mode of suspension one has to do the impossible. One has cut through the predominant modes of suspension, to cut them into two and thereby cut (what) the (movement of capital does) not (cut) – Medina / cuts. In 88:88, he explores the appearance of a suspension of time-measurement – a suspension that is part of the structure’s reproductive mechanisms – and transforms this cut(ing of electricity) into something else. He enables one to conceive of another mode of suspending, one that goes against the smooth running of time, a cut of and in time which is constitutive of (historical) time. 88:88 operates with and on the level of the time of the surplus-ofsuspension, on the level of the time of the cut, of the cutting of time, of the time of cutting time. This is why Medina times differently. He forces us to think what a cut is by exploring the mode in which a cut happens (to dis-appear in the very medium it cut into). 88:88 thinks in cuts, cutting all (structures in which we assume to) cut. Medina cuts into the night of the impossibility of the cut – the digital – to clarify what it means to follow the potential of the cut in the first, and last, place). Showing us only the dis-appearance of the being of the happening of the cut, Medina cuts in novel ways – – Thinking in cuts and making thought-cuts visible – 88:88 is cutting edge –, Medina allows us see that even a capitalist (depriving) cut (of electricity) whose restitution is commonly represented as four eights (88:88) is a mode of suspension that can be cut into two and comes with a potential surplus-ofsuspension. To make this potential visible, Medina performs quarter turns. He shows us that what seems like a linear sequence of structure and suspension and suspension as structure is actually a condensation of infinity – behold the 8 is wrongly represented infinity, behold the 8 is wrongly represented infinity, behold the 8 is wrongly represented infinity – must actually be flattened. He thereby indicates a possible fo(u)rtification of infinity – – – 88:88 is ∞∞ . . ∞∞ Jacques Lacan addressed the Möbius strip relationship of consciousness and the unconscious as that of an inner eight and thereby indicated how suspension and structure (of consciousness) leads us into the zone of constitutive disorientation. What if we had to eight-y-fy the (revolutionary subject’s to come) inner eight to think something other than capitalism?