"Time crystals"

Taking up Deleuze’s concept of “crystals of time”, Maurizio Lazzarato proposes an understanding of video as a double of the temporal relations between perceiver and perceived, with each becoming a difference not simply from the other but from itself. In a sense, this perhaps offers a paradigm of and for the ethnographic as a reflexive practice. Attentive to the technical sensorium and its historical inventions of experience, Lazzarato declares: “the technologies of vision force us to denaturalise our mode of apprehension,” where “machines to crystalise time are at the heart of the processes of the production of subjectivity, because time… is the power to affect and to be affected.” In exploring how essay-film (distinct from documentary) might provide examples of this for a decolonising understanding of museum ethnography today, my presentation will address both historical materials and film work of my own. I wish to consider here how an anthropology of images in metropolitan museums “exposes” the anthropology that these museums themselves present in their own image; or, in Preziosi’s suggestion, “what it is we imagine we see when we see museums imagining us.”