Video’s perpetual present resists being organized into textual memory

Evidence

For one thing, twenty-nine minutes in video is much longer than the equivalent temporal segment of any feature film; nor is it excessive to speak of a genuine and a very acute contradiction between the virtually druglike experience of the present of the image in the videotape and any kind of textual memory into which the successive presents might be inserted (even the return and recognition of older images is, as it were, seized on the run, laterally and virtually too late for it to do us any good). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 226

Categorization

• DEFINE: Effectively introduces the ‘perpetual present of the image’ as a defining trait of video, relevant to the reader’s core task of characterizing the postmodern aesthetic of affect.
• DEEPTHINKING: Nuanced thesis that the video image’s temporality is fundamentally incompatible with memory structures — a genuine paradigm claim about medium-specific affect, not just a description.
• XREF: connects to: Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory; Clip-show culture operates like anterograde amnesia, unable to make new memories — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2426; Digital storage differs in kind from human narrative memory — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 154