At times he had insisted on there being discontinuities in experience but he did this ignorantly, since according to his notion these were to be found either everywhere or nowhere. It could be that the very texture of experience is punctuated by intervals of absolute darkness, as are the frames of a film, and that there is no need for there to be any similarity between consecutive frames, because in the case of experience each one includes within itself its own entire and virtual history. This idea may be consistent, but is certainly vacuous. Or else, shifting the metaphor to that of montage, no matter what unexpected succession arose this could never amount to discontinuity because the mind would invent a relationship. In fact, an outlandish montage merely flatters the viewer into thinking that the perfectly ordinary functions of either weaving together a synthetic meaning, or self-consciously failing to do so, distinguishes them, in their affinity with some sort of absolute modernity, from the herd whose habituated expectations are generally satisfied. The preference for discontinuity is therefore merely an aesthetic or stylistic one, and rests on a prior complacency about continuity in the subject. This is the same as saying that the subject's world is one of seamless ideality. The subject doesn't just happen upon this world, it is its very nature, and therefore it can never have direct experience. But for the subject, continuity and mediation always feel like failure, that too is its nature.