What Martin wants to speculate on is the implications of Roemer's discovery for the relation between time and the image. By l800, it was recognized that looking at the light from distant stars was gazing at something that had left its source before the very existence of the human race, indeed likely before the existence of the earth and perhaps even the solar system. By the late 20th century, some astronomers were talking about seeing almost as far back as the birth of the universe itself. Astronomical hindsight thus presented the viewer of the heavens with a remarkable conundrum. Sight is, after all, often understood to be the most synchronous and atemporal of the senses, capable of giving us a snapshot image of a world frozen in time.
Vision instantaneously comprehends many things juxtaposed, as co-existent parts of one field.
One glance discloses a world of co-present qualities spread out in space, ranged in depth, apprehended en bloc in an instantaneous perceptive synthesis. A visual image arrests the flow of time like a syncope. We literally see what is not, or what is no longer. The gap between appearance and essence, subjective experience and objective stimulus is as wide as it can be. Instead of the infamous 'metaphysics of presence' that deconstruction tells us is based on the logocentric, phonocentric and ocularcentric prejudices of Western thought, we get an explicitly visual instantiation of the ghostly trace of the past in the present, but one that is neither an hallucination nor a technologically induced illusion.