Deleuze’s crystal-image, the Anthropocene, and education

In Cinema II by Gilles Deleuze, the time-image, there is a chapter (4) called, the ‘crystals of time’. Deleuze’s chapter puts forward the thesis that there is discernible in cinema moments wherein time is in-between an internal or virtual state, where it could be said to be an attribute of the unconscious and likened to a dream-state, and an external or actual state, where time is an objective aspect of the world, that may be understood, for example, as ‘clock-time’. It is in these in-between times that ‘time-in-itself’ becomes discernible, as in Tarkovsky’s Solaris , in which the voyagers are trapped in an internal state by the unexpected manipulation of the strange new planet, or as the author’s perception-memory in his film, Mirror . Dreams are mixed up with external waking hours, life has become a ‘crystal-image’, whereby the characters are unable to discern whether life is real or imaginary, truth or fiction. Beyond a metaphor, the ‘crystal-image’, wherein time oscillates between memory and future-apparition, describes how we are schooled from the earliest days to university, and drawn along modernist lines of progress, efficiency, high cognitive functioning and the pursuit of capital, and are exposed to the realities of the digital panoply, neoliberal ruthlessness, ecological catastrophe, and one world capitalism. In sum, the teaching and learning that we are engulfed in from birth comes from the past, the Holocene, wherein human growth was possible, yet we have arrived in the Anthropocene, a retrogressive state, with human reality falling apart under pressure from its own impulses (like a crystal).