Kevin Purkhauser

This chapter argues that Deleuze's two cinema books, read through the concept of the crystal-image, point toward a notion not explicitly named in his work: crystal-time. Where the crystal-image is standardly understood as the coexistence of actual and virtual, two facets of a single moment becoming indiscernible, this chapter argues that such coexistence presupposes a more primary, undivided field, one in which the actual/virtual distinction has not yet been drawn. Tracing Deleuze's inheritance and transformation of Bergsonian duration, the chapter follows the movement from the sensorimotor schema of classical cinema, through its postwar crisis, to the direct images of time in Resnais, Ophuls, and Godard. Crystal-time, it argues, names what these images approach but do not quite show as such: the differentiating medium from which both Chronos and Aion, and both actual and virtual, are derived. The chapter closes by considering what this implies for a materialism understood as historical rather than dialectical.

Why is utopian thinking so difficult today? This essay argues that this difficulty is rooted in a structural shift in the practice of knowledge. Under the current dominance of model-based thinking, an attitude has taken hold that I call the "as if not": while we continue to be guided by myths and imaginative worlds, we treat them as cognitively insignificant fictions. Utopian thinking depends on the vital interplay between two irreducible epistemic forms: the model, which simplifies complexity for manageability, and the myth, which keeps contradictions open to make them bearable. What is being eroded is what Musil called the Möglichkeitssinn, the capacity to hold the actual and the possible in productive tension. When this interplay breaks down, utopia either solidifies into a rigid blueprint (a model without myth) or dissolves into nostalgic compensation (myth without a model). To restore the utopian impulse, this essay proposes reconceptualizing utopia adverbially, as a mode of orientation rather than a telos. This shift is enacted through metamythologization, which describes a reflexive practice of naming the imaginary worlds embedded in our models and maintaining their productive tension. The 1.5°C climate threshold illustrates this dynamic as a modeling target that simultaneously functions as a mythical condensation of intractable political tensions.

The controversy over quantum effects in photosynthetic energy transport has not been resolved by experimental refinement alone. We argue this persistence reflects a deeper conflict between incompatible constructions of "environment" across theory, experiment, modeling, and biology. Drawing on the conceptual history of environment as an irreducibly plural notion, we develop the idea of epistemic friction: a resistance that arises when the stabilizing conditions of a concept do not travel with it across scales. Quantum biology has not yet achieved the stabilization this would require.