It doesn't slice or dice, but spirally rices!

A shot is imbued with a distinct yet ambiguous temporality that tunes the viewer to the objective subjectivity at hand--that which Tarkovsky calls Time Pressure. But to say that there is one temporality in the shot would be incorrect as there are various temporalities that manifest themselves within it but which overall produce one overarching temporal effect. The one and many yet again reconstituted as affect under the guises of time! It's like orchestral music where each instrument has its own affective temporality that works together with that of the other instruments to create a unitary envelope of unfolding temporality and becoming affect. Although the affect we carry away is fleeting but individuated i.e. consistent and ever-changing, reading any shot closely, we can see that there is more to the surface than meets the mind. Unlike music, there is no analog linear “mathematical wave function” that can be applied upon the image to reconstitutes the multiversity of "visual temporalities" in a shot. An image is not read as a linear stream of information--video can be "visualized" on a "waveform" monitor or relayed as a digital stream of binary code, but not in such a way that prima facie usually makes sense to a television spectator.

On the other hand, music can be digitised as a linear "waveform" as one can see on any digital audio processing software such as ProTools. But the problem remains: how does the auditory function manage to separate the various instruments, the various subjectivites, the disparate temporal saliencies of the various instruments out of the streaming audio? To keep it simple stupid, perhaps the sensorial workings of the inner ear resemble more a manual food mill than a drum, where raw vegetable sound is spirally pressed through a sieve, where the parallel processing capabilities of the brain can keep track of the various riced streams of pureed sound? This could imply that the brain is monitoring a variety of subjectivities, keeping track of an assortment of temporalities and as such juggling a variety of consciousnesses that are melded into one as affect. Perhaps another analogy would be a RADAR screen where a rotating arm sweeps circularly keeping the movement of various objects in perspective and in relative relation to the entire area encompassed by the beaconing scan.

Could affect (as the end-result of the interpretive function of the basic metaphors realised) be the flavor of temporality? Does affect constitute the temporal saliency of consciousness? Is music a metaphor for the basic rhythms of consciousness? Is time the affective intuition of consciousness? Is affect the musical intuition of life?