Big Jet TV may be the epitome of the contemporary livestream. Then again, it may not be. Founded in 2016 by British aviation follower Jerry Dyer, it’s promoted as the most “Exciting Live Aviation Channel on YouTube” and offers subscribers memberships in Premium, First Class, and Super Class. Featured are air shows as well as livestreaming from international airports. But Big Jet TV (“BJTV”) went viral on February 18, 2022, during a windstorm that reached 100 miles per hour. 

It's the threat posed by the storm that turns Big Jet TV into a case study in respect to two different orders of time: 1) livestream continuousness and 2) the instant “in which” something happens—or doesn’t.  Now, to explain that this study of livestream temporalities is an experiment: Yes, the conventions of written analysis and theoretical elaboration are followed. However, visual and audio “illustrations”—still and moving images—are not embedded in the text. Instead, relevant images and sounds appear in an accompanying “Video Demo.” 

Part I. Big Jet TV: The Livestream. Overseas in 2024

For instance, on YouTube, Jerry in full screen can be seen and heard “chatting” as he looks down, selecting earlier “best” sequences for an overview—Big Jet TV Overseas in 2024: [He’s talking to viewers online and we hear him mumbling, then say “Share screen. This one here from the balcony.”  Now seen in the small insert screen to the left, Jerry comments on the image in the larger screen. In that screen we hear a roar and see an Avianca Cargo jet taking off at a diagonal, flying right and up, becoming larger until it nearly fills the screen and turns away as the camera zooms in to follow it as it disappears into a cloud]. 

 You have read in brackets a word description of Jerry’s YouTube commentary on video footage shot at the Miami airport in January 2024 and may see no issue with this description since it is an established convention in critical writing. But there is an enormous semiotic discrepancy between this short description and the several seconds of video itself. And so, this is an experiment in which key still and moving images relevant to this article titled “The Instant in Which,” are edited into what I call the “Video Demo.” The demo, however, is not meant as just an “illustration” of theoretical points.  It is a stand-alone piece. The issues with which the theory engages arise from the Big Jet TV streamed video and must return to those images because the theory is ultimately about them.     

1.Livestreaming:  The Contemporary Condition of “Immediacy”  

We should have noticed something strange in the spelling. While the noun form “livestream” is the platform, the transitive verb “livestream” conflates the video camera recording with its online circulation. Or, to livestream is to video. Note the three spelling variations: “live stream” as two words, plus the hyphenated “live-stream,” and letters run together into one word: “livestream,” all the better to suggest flow.  In our case, Big Jet TV livestreaming is airplane landing andvideotaping and transmitting and circulating via the web. In effect, then, “livestreaming” is synonymous with videotaping, transmitting, and circulating. Then, let’s add to the linguistic slippage the temporal continuousness of livestreaming which seems “always on,” that is, occurring in an always available time—accessible immediately. Historically, a listener “tuned in” to radio broadcasts and turned the dial to try to find the right wave frequency. Now, there is no more tuning in or dialing up. There’s only access. 

What if the livestream epitomizes the contemporary condition of “immediacy”? “Immediacy” is the terminological key to the zeitgeist of 21^st century cultural production, as Anna Kornbluh argues in Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023). She finds an “immediacy style” which in turn produces an “immediacy effect,” more precisely a “you-are-here experientialism” (2023, 135, 115). There is more. “You-are hereness” is underwritten by an ideology of immediacy which functions by means of the “immersive,” that popular concept Kornbluh associates with “total absorption” (14-15, 23, 17). And there is even more. For the experiential “immersive” plus the temporal “immediate” combines space and time to equal “real-time immersion” (125). For how does attention-absorbing immersion become “total” without being at the same time felt as immediate? A good question. How could this be? Yet, as I will suggest, there may be something else in livestream continuousness, especially if we break down “immediacy” into “the immediate” as the moment by moment. For if we start to think in terms of moment by moment, we may find something that we may have missed in the livestream and the condition of “immediacy.” But what? We’ll come back to this. 

2. The Ideology of Immediacy

The ideology of immediacy functions as a variant of the Marxist notion of ideology, as the “taken for granted” frames “immediacy” as a cultural condition, one that appears as nothing more than just “what’s going on.” Therefore, as Kornbuh thinks, it is “unstyled” (2023, 11). Or, immediacy’s stylelessness is like the “different sameness” found in the Marxist description of “late capitalism.” But even worse for inhabitants of the planet, this transparent stylelessness correlates with environmental degradation. For, in the course of capitalist progress, it is already “too late” given the irreversibility of so much ecological damage wrought by extreme weather, not to mention chemical pollution (14). And what is more invisible to the eye, disappearing as it does into “the natural,” than the weather?

In the ideology of immediacy, we hear echoes of Althusserian Marxism (Hall 1986, 32). Here is the theory that underwrote the critique of classical Hollywood narrative film form and its ideology of realism or “what you see is what you get.” But the ideology of immediacy advances beyond the 1970s critique of “presence,” the insight from deconstruction adopted in film theory as a warning that there could be no “unmediated” access to so-called “reality.” This prohibition took another tack as the “critique of realism,” now the realism of cinematic form that delivered the illusion of an immediate world. In Kornbluh, the old issue becomes clarified such that “immediacy,” formerly unmediated “presence,” is contrasted with “mediation.” “Mediation” now seems expanded beyond a 1970s insistence on concrete signifiers, with new attention to mediating, in-between forces, or foregrounded style now contrasted with the “unstyled” (2023, 11). Gone in this new theory of mediation is the semiotics lessons that called attention to iconic and linguistic signifiers as material carriers of meaning. For the video livestream is made up of apparently immaterial electromagnetic waves in continuous formation.  And given that its technology functions to modulate wave flows, the video image is “nothing but a relation of flows” (Lazzarato 2019, 82-83). How, then, do we pin down this fluid materiality so mistakenly thought to be immaterial?

3. Watching Time: The Time “In Which” You Watch 

 “Immediacy” as the contemporary condition is broad, encompassing the episodic serial streaming on Hulu that encourages “binge-watching” as well as our livestream jet airport “feed” that draws paid subscribers. But let’s separate serial episode “viewers” from BJTV’s “watchers” watching something moving. Like bird watching, airplane watching involves a waiting to see “what will happen” next. After all, the watched object is moving unpredictably into and out of the sights of the stationary watcher. But plane watching, as bird watching, can also be a cultivated pastime. Jerry assumes that you are as informed and engaged an aviation enthusiast as he is and that you are watching “with” him. You may be watching at the same time that he is watching even when you may not be watching at the same time and in the same way at all. 

Here is where the livestream “immediacy effect” kicks in—as you, the watcher, are made to feel as though you are hearing Jerry’s commentary and following the big jet movements “in the now,” as we say. You are watching what the Panasonic HC-VX1K camcorder recorded from the hotel balcony in Miami in January, 2024, watching as though those take-offs are the same as the take-offs you are now watching. But if you are watching on May 20, 2025, you now watch months after Jerry watching and shooting planes taking off and landing at the Miami airport.  A tab on Youtube even invites you to access what watchers wrote in the chat when the video was live. 

This, however, is just to address when-watching.  What about “what” it is that is watched, to return to the problem of the “unstyled” and apparently “unmediated” condition of immediacy, itself the key to understanding 21^st century cultural production. To review Kornbluh’s theory:  the degree to which watchers become subject to “total absorption” is the degree to which there is a “loss of mediation” (2023, 17). But, here’s a discrepancy:  the BJTV stream disappears at the same time that the mediation of video style appears; indeed, for some, this mediation could be the entire raison d’etrefor watching. 

4. Watching Videographic Style: Heathrow Airport February 18, 2022

We are cued to think about tech by the credit in the top right of the CNN screen—“FILMED ON” Panasonic HC-VX1K. Underneath we see the logo for TERADEK, the wireless video transmission device. Technically, Big Jet TV episodes are shot on video, not “filmed” and not “on” but “with” a Panasonic camcorder that retails for about $800. What we call technical specs include the 25mm wide angle to 600mm telephoto range and the awesome capacity to zoom from as far as ½ mile away.  The very telephoto range invites us to think about attention-grabbing stylistic devices and, after all, following jet plane landings with a consumer grade camcorder takes skill that camera enthusiasts can appreciate. But again, what are effectively cinematic stylistics coexist with the tendency to technological disappearance as in the way the TERADEK wireless transmission device promotes “immediacy” with the term “zero-delay,” an updated form of mediation denial rather like 1970s television’s promotion of pre-recorded programs as “live on tape.” Hint: There is no such thing as “zero-delay” because there is always delay in signal transmission. 

So can “mediation” counter the apparent transparency and even faux “zero-delay” immediacy of “immediacy”? No and yes.  Jerry’s Big Jet TV livestream channel both exemplifies Kornbluh’s “unstylization” (2023, 11) and is analyzable as the antithesis of an “immediacy effect.” This is because, for moving image experts, we watch to see, not to unsee the video camera style, especially with so many of his camcorder shots show a tour de force display of technique. In one, the camcorder operator is challenged to keep the enormous jet in the frame, beginning from a long long long shot (3 longs) then moving closer to the runway to the point that the plane fills the frame. There is the remarkable shot from below looking up as the plane flies overhead, reframing as it approaches the terminal. The camera zooms in and out, sometimes to disorienting ends, but most miraculously also produces a telephoto floating effect in which a giant jet seems to hover in the air, a contrast with rapid swish pans over the exterior ground that rush to frame another incoming plane, a dot in the distant field. Here is an exercise in speed as well as scale. Jet speed is slowed by the telephoto effect and a distant speck slowly drops down into the frame, becoming an enormous, lumbering runway giant. Runway lights glisten as they blur, a rack focus effect that no realist aesthetic would indulge. Then, a large truck moves into the frame filling 2/3rds of the bottom foreground, effecting a temporary horizontal blockage. Here, then, is the opposite of livestream style as disappearing or evaporating and “unstylized.” Instead, here is a primer of “cinematic styles” rendered in video. The Panasonic HC-VX1K video camera is in fact promoted for its “Cinema-Like” effect that can give a “cinematic touch to your videos.”  So, no, the mediation of videographic form is not unstyled, but appears stylistically at the same time that it dissolves into the livestream. 

5. The Critique of the Ideology of Immediacy

Let’s go further to develop and at the same time to critique Kornbluh’s central concept—the ideology of immediacy (2023, 14). Yes, there is a certain genius in the development of a theory that posits an even later stage of the “late capitalism” to which Fredric Jameson alerted us (1991). Periodic updating is required to keep up with the dangers capitalism has historically posed (Baumbach, et.al., 2016). Hence the solution to shift from the periodization of “late” to the time in which it is “too late” to save the world ecosystem from the damage capitalism has wrought. The concept of “immediacy” is here deployed as a devastating critique of contemporary culture:  social media, internet sites, entertainment streaming, and phones with screens to which we are said to be mindlessly “glued.”  Note, however, that this list is an apples and oranges mix of devices, practices, and consumer services. Yet in one sweep Kornbluh finds their commonality in the “temporality of unremitting instantaneity” (2023, 116). But another problem. This critique implies a harsh judgment of users. Internet video livestream watchers, as television videots before them, are easily denigrated, and critics, leaping over capitalist social relations, find an easy target in livestream absorption. Watchers are associated with the impatience of an “instant demand” that expects everything “immediately,” not to forget that such habituated watchers are thought to have attention spans so short that they can only concentrate on what is “immediately” in front of them. How is it that attention deficiency, earlier only symptomatic, has become the condition of all cultural production? 

To ask this question is to ask about ideological function. In asking we find that ideological effects are not necessarily guaranteed. For there is a doubleness to the ideology of immediacy the ideology that supports the “total absorbtion” described as “immersive.” Let’s not forget that the Marxist theory of ideology holds that there is always something in ideology that indicates real historical relations, no matter how mystifying the representation of “This is just how things are.” The ideology of immediacy, Kornbluh goes on, “holds a kernel of truth” (2023, 14-15). What would that be? In Marxist theory, this is the final “truth” of economic or social relations (Hall 1986, 35). Kornbluh intimates that this “truth” is that everything has been transformed into a catastrophe (14-15). Let’s go further. 

For there is an experiential difference between the continuousness epitomized by the livestream that holds attention on actions and events-over-time, and the disastrous “earth-shattering” singular event-in-time that erupts in massive destruction. And the question remains as to whether every event is catastrophic in scale and scope or just made to seemcatastrophic, especially if all news is “breaking” news. Because if there is no longer any difference between the state of what Kornbluh calls “crisis-continuousness” (2023, 17) and the singular catastrophe itself, we need to know—immediately. What then, if anything, constitutes opposition within the ideology of immediacy—an intervention or interruption that offers resistance to that ideology? But the question as to what constitutes resistance, even as the concept has lost its effectivity, remains. The Althusserian concept of the dominant Ideology, capital “I,” was criticized for offering no “outside” to the point that there was no way out, everything being Ideology. The same might be said for the historically specific, lower case “i” ideologies as, for example, the ideology of immediacy, which as formulated, also seems to imply that it is so pervasive as to allow no “outside.” There may seem to be no “outside”; but in the following, the argument is that the continuousness of the ideology of immediacy is undone by the “inside.” ([1970], 2024). 

Part II. Big Jet TV. Heathrow airport. Storm Eunice. February 18, 2022 

Focused on Heathrow airport February 18, 2022, Big Jet TV registered 200,000 live viewers the day that winds from Storm Eunice reached 100 miles per hour around London. CNN picked up the story from The Guardian.  

6. What Are We Watching For?: February 18, 2022

In the first clip featured on CNN, we see large jets near the runway and hear commentator Jerry describing difficult landings in one of the worst storms to hit the UK in decades. Over the jet roar he comments “Easy, easy…OK, tippy toe, tippy toe,” then “Swing, man…” as the first jet lands. CNN adds a second clip that calls attention to a British Airways jet landing and Jerry is dubious: “Surely not…surely not,” as the second jet wobbles within feet of the runway.  Continuing, he urges “Let’s do it, let’s do it…,” and finally confirms “It’s down.” Jerry, part weatherman, part sportscaster, sets up the storm conditions and calls the “plays.” He encourages watchers to follow the shaky landings of gigantic jets that, one after the other, waver just before touching down. “We’re primed to see every approach as a “near miss,” that is, the near avoidance of catastrophe, the watcher encouraged by Jerry’s vernacular exclamation to focus on the very moment, the “instant in which” the plane, “tippy toe,” just touches down on the runway.                 

7. The Accident “Waiting to Happen”  

Culture kicks in. There is the banana peel on the sidewalk beneath the foot the second before the treacherous slip. And yet a still image of a foot about to step on a banana peel only exemplifies the expression and not the philosophical problem. The imagination of how such accidents really happen is “brought to life” by a gif. Oops. If nothing else, the gif gives motion to the requisite “in-time” dimension key to the philosophical problem of the “instant,” the problem to which we now turn.  

If an accident is just “waiting to happen,” as is often said, that’s just another way of saying that it’s likely to happen. Right? Big Jet TV’s livestream popularity during Storm Eunice exemplifies our fascination with the increased likelihood of an accident that might happen, and yet, one that might not happen. But are watchers watching “in the event that” it will happen or, conversely, in hopes that it won’t? Which is it? Or is it something slightly different—that our continued watching implies that an event is “expected” to happen at the same time that it is expected to be averted. Jerry’s rig set up at Heathrow on February 18, 2022 thus exemplifies an intriguing concept in documentary film that Jean-Luc Lioult names the paradoxical “expectation of the unexpected” (2004). The camera operator waits for the event before the camera for the moment “when and if” an event-in-time occurs. Something might or might not happen, but we don’t know either when or what—one way of explaining the fascination with cinéma vérité as a documentary style of shooting, preceded as it is with an expectation of “unexpected” actions.   

And so, we “hedge our bets” given the uncertainty of events-in-time by saying “when and if”  in reference to future events that might (or might not) occur. For even if they are likely to occur, we still can’t predict when. Yet given a heightened degree of expectation due to the historical increase in tornados and hurricanes (or investment in the likelihood of something happening for which we’re unprepared), we invest heavily in an idea that there are more and more accidents just “waiting to happen.” Think of the reduction in the number of U.S. air traffic controllers after January 2025, and the implications. News coverage has referred to screen black outs and electrical outages, especially at the Newark, New Jersey, airport. Bringing viewers “up to the minute” at Newark airport on May 12, 2025, a newscaster referred to a “glitch” in the system (Dhaiwal 2025).  Now think whether such a “glitch” exemplifies an “accident waiting to happen” if it occurs in the air traffic control system.  

8. The Post-Industrial Accident Meets the Natural Accident 

With so many kinds of “accidents-waiting-to-happen” situations, new categories have emerged. Paul Virilio in The Original Accident contrasts modern age “industrial accidents” with “natural accidents,” to which he adds the “post-industrial” accident (2007, 7). He proposes, citing Aristotle, that if “the accident reveals the substance” this means that “the invention of the substance is the invention of the accident” (5).  But Virilio requires updating. His points of historical reference are the Chernobyl nuclear power station meltdown April 26, 1986, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and the 2001 fertilizer factory disaster in Toulouse, France (63). To this we add the March 11, 2011, Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power reactor nuclear meltdown, a “post-industrial accident” triggered by the “natural accident” of a tsunami and earthquake. In this vein, Big Jet TV’s livestream during Storm Eunice in February 2022 picked up on the possibility of another “post-industrial accident,” the accident-prone jet invention combined with a “natural accident”: a windstorm. Two kinds of accidents came together, both “waiting to happen” due to climate change, therefore, together, “fall out” from unchecked capitalist expansion “too late” to be stopped.

And yet, to return to Virilio, to “invent” the nuclear power plant is to “invent” the nuclear reactor accident. 

Jean-Luc Nancy, addressing Fukushima, goes further: “There are no more natural catastrophes” he says. Neither earthquakes, floods nor volcanic eruptions are “natural,” he goes on, and any distinction between technology and nature is “no longer valid” (2015, 34). 

The big jet airplane is now indistinguishable from the windstorm. And still, Jerry’s Heathrow watchers waited for an accident that did not happen on February 18, 2022. Virilio, finally, is not so interested in accidents, taking the position that “privileging the accident” is to focus on the present to the detriment of the past or the future (2007, 19, 23). He has noticed new kinds of accidents but then fallen back on an old complaint about loss of the past. How, then, to counter Virilio’s dismissal of the accident? Nearly a century before, Gaston Bachelard developed a theory in defense of the instant—L’intuition de l’instant /The Intuition of the Instant (1932). And, déjà vu, Bachelard’s theorization begins with the accident. Devised as a challenge to Henri Bergson’s theory of temporal duration philosophically fashionable at the time, Bachelard finds a single factor missing.  What is it that Bachelard thinks Bergson has overlooked? Accidents.

9. Again: The Decisive Cut in Time’s Streaming

Why accidents? As Edward Casey positions Bachelard, his interest in the “decisive cut in time’s streaming,” is in what it is that “brings time itself to a dead halt—at least momentarily…” (2003, 118). Now back to Jerry channeling viewer anxiety about jet landings at Heathrow during Storm Eunice. The streamer and the watcher are hanging onto, just there for, that very moment “in which” the landing gear touches the runway. Jerry doesn’t know whether it’ll come off, “from one minute to the next,” as we say, given the jet engine’s combat against wind velocity that he’s narrating. If Jerry plays to our anxiety he also registers our surprise, then relief, followed by wonder as to how pilot skill delivers the miracle—every time “on the nose”—or almost: when it takes the jet two tries, “touching down” in the second attempt, to land.  Jerry comments as the plane wobbles in its descent towards the ground. “You’ve just gotta find that moment… a pocket of clear air” within the storm, an opening just right for the smooth drop down. For this we have another expression applicable to the luck of the instant. It’s “hit or miss”—adjacent to the “close call,” a “call” that is  Jerry’s to make. 

Now we are ready for Bachelard’s “metaphysics of the immediate” (2013, 62).  Because

that is not all—in case you thought that the instant was a just a “blip.” Yes, Big Jet TV fans might think of their watching as a hobby. Yet there is something profound in livestreaming Heathrow airport storm landings and listening to commentary “minute by minute,” as we say. Here is everyday philosophical engagement with the difficulty of lived time, “from one minute to the next,” in which, to spell it out—we never know what comes next. 

10. The Instant In Which

The everyday temporality of “immediacy” also contains the temporality of “the instant in which.” How do we know? We know because of numerous English colloquial expressions. The outcome of events may “turn on a dime.” Maybe it’s the “second’s difference” of the stopwatch or the minute that gets caught in the “photo finish.” Numerous phrases reference this shortest of moments: in “the blink of the eye,” in “a second’s time,” in the “flip of a switch,” in a “split second,” or in “no time at all.” Notice the tiny word “in.” In these expressions, “in” seems to lose its status as a preposition and becomes a container. On further consideration, what is intriguing about the “instant in which” is both the “in” and the “which.” Why?  1) The “in” suggests that whatever it is, all of it is “in” that instant, contained in it, concentrated in that instant and not another one. As we say, it “only takes a second.” However, 2) The addition of “which” seems to indicate events beyond the instant because “in which” implies a set of circumstances following from others. What, then, is the difference between “in which” and “within which”? Not so much, except that “in” references both spatiality and temporality—the “in” time squeezing together the “here and now,” here (place) and now (time). But how is it that so much can be contained in the instant when an instant doesn’t last long enough to lend itself to analysis? For if immediately over, it could not function as a container holding anything.  And yet, Bachelard finds more “within” the instant than we might have imagined.  

11. Vertical Time as Stacked Time 

Bachelard finds a concentrated accumulation of contradictory possibilities and ambivalent feelings in what he calls the “vertical dimension.” It is all stacked there rather than stretched out—one moment on top of another rather than one after the other, or Bergsonian horizontality.  Countering Bergson, Bachelard’s time contains a “multitude of contradictory events enclosed within a single instant.” In addition, he sees “accumulated simultaneities” as “ordered simultaneities” (2013, 59). The instant gains depth-dimension by virtue of this internal order. For to Bachelard, “time is order and nothing but order. And all order is time.” Therefore, the order of ambivalences within the instant is time that is not linear and horizontal, as in so many other paradigms, but that order is “vertical time.” For horizontal time is “the becoming of others, the becoming of life, the becoming of the world” (59). Clearly, becoming “over time” has had its theoretical appeal in Deleuzian philosophy, following Bergson. To challenge Bergson is to challenge Deleuze.

So to challenge Bergson, another shape, “vertical time,” is prerequisite to the theorization of the “instant in which.” All of the possibilities (this or that) are placed, one on top of the other, all the better to be packed into “no more than an instant.”  The instant is thus made to seem more rather than less and not too little to matter.  But wait. Remember that the instant, if nothing else, is immediately over. Or so it would seem. And so the contradiction, the singularity of “the instant in which,” is the moment that an ideology of immediacy must smooth over in emphasizing the durational as continuousness, interminability, and, consequently, irreversibility. 

Now to expand on what it is that the “which” adds, as “this” opposed to “that.” Note the additional analytical possibilities if we consider the “instant in which” something happened after which “nothing would ever be the same again.”  So where philosophical questions arise will be in the area of consequences and potentialities, considering that significant historical change could be set in motion, as we will see, not necessarily by developments over time or by shorter term upheaval but just “in” (so to speak) the smallest instant. Then to dramatize this question and to up the ante:  Given the state of world affairs, with “everything hanging in the balance,” as we also say, there is a related idea, equally intriguing, and that is this: that “in an instant” a mistake could be “caught” and rectified “before it’s too late…,” that is, before something catastrophic “happens.” It’s strange that world historical consequential events can so precariously “hang in the balance” relative to something so apparently inconsequential—the mere second-in-time “in which” an event either takes place—or doesn’t. Something happens or doesn’t happen. In contrasting the continuous with the momentary, we find the something else in “immediacy,” especially if broken down, moment, by moment, as “the immediate.” And what is the something we may have missed in the livestream (as I promised)? If there is something that we have missed, it is the “instant in which” the event does or doesn’t happen.

12. “Surprise, Surprise”: The Philosophy of Things That Happen in an Instant

Back to Big Jet TV. Over and over again, February 18, 2022 is the rehearsal of but also the engagement with what was both expected and not expected at all. Bachelard further counters Bergson with dedication to the “sudden” and consequently the “surprise.” As Casey describes Bachelard’s connection between suddenness and surprise: “Only what happens suddenly can truly surprise me; and what surprises me arises suddenly” (2003, 120). But now that we think of it, how is it that we didn’t see that the “sudden surprise” always occurs in the instant? Yes, of course, “sudden surprise” may come after waiting and worrying, anticipation and anguish.  But all that wondering is not “it,” is it? The “surprise” is the experience of an instant “in which” what wasn’t before, now is—even if it’s only “just” or “barely” there, as we also say.  That the moment can be “momentous,” however, suggests that the “instant” is calibrated relative to another moment, one which is more “drawn out” and “in which” we finally see the “aftermath,” the “after which…” nothing will ever be the same again.  

Undoubtedly, the “instant in which” may come after anxious anticipation. We may worry about “when and if”—or “if and when,” first “if,” then “when.” But all that waiting and wondering is not “it,” is it? The “surprise” is the experience of an instant “in which” what wasn’t before, now is. In “The Surprise of the Event,” Jean-Luc Nancy confirms our philosophical suspicions. For Nancy picks up where Bachelard left off in his refutation of time as succession. “Time” as well as “event,” as Nancy puts it, is “still too subjected to a thematics of succession, continuous-discontinuous” (1998, 98). Against continuousness he poses the “pure present of ‘it happens’” in which surprise has to do with the “presence of the present inasmuch as it happens” (97). Thus Nancy makes “the event” contingent on “surprise”: “What eventuates in the event is not only that which happens, but that which surprises”—and even to the degree that it “surprises itself” (91). The event “surprises itself”? Really? What kind of event “surprises” even itself?    

Conclusion:  

What Philosophical Ideas Jerry Channels: The Instant in Which vs. Livestream Immediacy

Jerry’s Big Jet TV livestream on February 18, 2022 engages thousands of viewers in the deepest of existential questions that perplex philosophy. Thus every touch down can bring to mind the omnipresent conditions for disaster, whether averted or not. To pinpoint the temporality of the “instant in which” the great catastrophes of post-industrial progress were set in motion is to think that another, and then another just might be again. It would only take a moment. 

The Cat’s Pounce

If we didn’t succeed in convincing readers with the example of Big Jet TV, it’s not likely they will be convinced with a more popular internet phenomenon.  But let’s try once more by testing the same concrete exemplification Bachelard himself offers of the wind up to the sudden flash of the instant—the cat’s pounce:   

Once triggered, the cat’s pounce will of course develop a duration sequence 

according to the laws of physics and physiology—laws that regulate complex 

functions. But before the complicated process of the leap is actually set off, 

there has already been a simple, brutal instant of decision (Bachelard, [1932] 2013, 21). 

So here is our TikTok cat poised to “pounce” on a mouse. Look Carefully. For what, then, do we watch other than for “the instant in which” a cat decides to catch mouse? Or whatever it is that the cat is deciding to do—or not. 

Cat Encore

Look again: Question: What kind of event surprises itself? 

Answer: The cat catches the fish—or not. 

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“The Instant in Which…: What Big Jet TV Livestreaming and TikTok Cat Videos Have in Common” is a video demo that accompanies the academic article by Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film and Media, Columbia University

Works Cited: 

“Big Jet TV—Today’s Surprising Obsession” 2022. Silver Magazine (February 18):https://silvermagazine.co.uk/big-jet-tv-todays-surprising-obsession. Accessed May 10, 2025. 

“Big Jet TV: Livestreaming of Planes Landing During Storm Eunice Goes Viral.” 2022. 

The Guardian (February 18)  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/18/livestreaming-of-planes-landing-during-storm-eunice-goes-viral-bigjettv.  Accessed May 1, 2025. 

Naveen Dhaiwal. 2025.  “Newark Liberty Airport Suffers Third System Outage in Less Than 2 Weeks, Impacting Hundreds of Flights.” May 12

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/newark-liberty-international-airport-system-outage-delays-cancellations/Accessed May 19, 2025. 

Louis Althusser. [1970] 2024.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation.”  New Critical Writings in Political Sociology Vol. 2. Ed. Alan Scott, 

Kate Nash, 299 – 340. London: Routledge: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003572923

Gaston Bachelard [1932] 2013. The Intuition of The Instant. trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron. 

Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 

Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young, and Genvieve Yue. 2016. “Revisiting Postmodernism: An  Interview with Fredric Jameson.” Social Text 34, no. 2 (127): 143 – 160. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3468026. Accessed May 10, 2025. 

Edward S. Casey. 2003. “The Difference an Instant Makes: Bachelard’s Brilliant Breakthrough.” Philosophy Today 47, no. 5: 118 – 23. 

Stuart Hall. 1986. “The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without Guarantees.” Journal of Communication Inquiry. 10, No. 2 (Summer): 28 – 44. 

Fredric Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso and Durham: Duke University Press. 

Anna Kornbluh. 2023. Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. 

Maurizio Lazzarato. 2019. Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism. 

Trans. Jay Hetrick. New York: Columbia University Press. Ch. 3. Video, Flows, and Real Time

Jean-Luc Lioult. 2004. “Framing the Unexpected.” ejumpcut No. 47: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/Lioult/text.html. Accessed May 15, 2025. 

Jean-Luc Nancy. 1998. “The Surprise of the Event” in ed. Stuart Barnett, Hegel After Derrida. New York: Routledge. 

_____. 2015. After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes. Trans. Charlotte Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press. 

Paul Virilio. 2007. The Original Accident. London: Polity.