The eye in the media: Materiality and technical individuation

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-5311292/v1

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The eye in the media: Materiality and technical individuation

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-5311292/v1

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Analysing the thoughts of theorists of technique and technology such as Gilbert Simondon (1958) and Bernard Stiegler (2018), we conclude that technique and technology constitute modes of individuals and their environment, as opposed to simple tools that prolong pre-existing capacities in individuals. Indeed, technique and technology enable diverse modes of individuation, whether at the individual, psychic, or social level. Thus each time change implies new technologies that structure the milieu suspending the existing programs. Stiegler called that suspension an epoché. This essay aims to account for the current material transformations that occur due to the interaction between the individual and new computational systems. These transformations have led to reformulate, to put in epoché, the old paradigms that focused on vision, perception, and the image from an anthropological point of view. To get there, I will explore the philosophical and theoretical resonances of artefacts from the perspective of Simondon’s information processing system approach.

Additionally, I will incorporate Stiegler’s concept of deanthropologization to account for the new relationships that must be defined between individuals and machines, where classic concepts — such as the relationship between the image and human vision — must be reviewed. Currently, images are not limited to the visual because, as code, they can be processed by algorithms which do not need to “see”. Today, we also face a shift in scale, with an enormous mass of data that can be easily processed by algorithms, but not by individual humans. This is why the transformation of information into digital images or dataviz, that allow us to understand abstract and complex datafication, can be thought to establish new material relationships of individuation between algorithms and living beings.

individuation

vision

technology

matter

digital images

To contemplate a transcendental and reflective logical theory of the gaze with digital images, we must turn to the sceptical and phenomenological tradition — to Cartesian scepticism, and the sense that “others” could be machines. A problem appears in Husserlian phenomenology, in which the psyche is still foreign. In a logical theory of reflection, the mutual production of the phenomena of consciousness, the need for the other in the genesis of thought, and the interactive processes that we call “persons”, establish an eidetic reduction. This reduction excludes hyper-material worlds, but not the need for “others”. Because the other consciousness is necessarily given as the consciousness itself, only the worlds that occur in the interstices are processed as apparent moments of confinement of such interactions. The result is that they continue to be subjects of our doubt. This happens through the growing accumulation of simulacra — the ultimate alienation of “modern” societies. As humans, we understand this doubt and how to work methodologically in the intersubjective reflection on logical transformations that occur during our evolution with digital images.

Returning to the beginning, the discovery of a non-place — the location that the media is granted outside of “our world”, as objects among objects — becomes the condition of possibility for our worlds. Here, the media becomes the means of possibility for world genesis. In general, they are their own possible worlds, just as we are possible worlds for them. The difference with the old world theory is that the media already appears in our world as an objectified subject. They are not objects or bodies like us — necessarily interactive, ontological beings operating and entangled in the middle of the world’s genesis — but are processed through our interactions¹. These complexions surpass Aristotelian frameworks of thought, which are still foundational for theories of the world that attempt to reduce reality to a contingent sum of object structures of semantic size.

This allows us to observe how the terminological force of the concepts of medium, image, and what Gilbert Simondon describes as the “individuation of the technical beings”², can be applied as powerful leitmotifs for thinking about interfaces. The following questions arise: How can we think about, and focus on, the depth of the interface? Where, and how, can we find, or create, new and surprising relationships between a surface and its depth? How can we make visible the many layers that are hidden behind and within the interface? This singularity will not happen through the medium, nor will it provide a different way of treating media or serve as a technical achievement. The transition to something completely different will only be possible through the advent of new systems of meaning — a transcript or chiastic crossing of previous world models; that is, through interactive and intersubjective acts.

To rummage through pre-existing genealogies also means revealing the place of thought in thought. To do so would mean that the thinking being must make their rootedness known, and that rootedness must be revealed in the multiplicity of living and non-living contexts. Do we understand, then, that the media has been invisible until now? We said that the media has no body, nor affection, despite understanding that the compartmentalised plains (which were never separated) can be reunited to collectively create a new condition of visualisation which has, until now, remained invisible.

It is relevant to trace a genealogy of vision and image, moving towards a path of the technological medium or interface. William J.T Mitchell points out that we are witnessing a pictorial turn, to the extent that images begin to constitute an epochal paradigm that crosses various areas of research, from science to visual and audiovisual productions⁴. In truth, when applied to the field of images, semiotics and linguistics already indicate a turn in the transformation of the image into language. This transformation did not occur because of the dependence of the image on language, as Mitchell points out, but because of the emergence of computing, information theory, and therefore, the transformation of the world into mathematical language⁵. Hence, what is relevant is not that other disciplines are interested in the image, but rather how the concept of the image itself begins to metamorphose due to global digitalisation.

The operational division⁶ between the real and virtual is illusory. The virtual is an extension of ourselves in a manufactured and constructed space. It is not separate from, but a projection of our being. The virtual recreates and projects the specific and local conditions of our bodies. The space of the virtual, digital, and the technosphere are worlds that reflect our virtual work back into the realm of lived experience and embodied being through a techno-translation (coding). The work that is made possible does so in a space that is without the restrictions of the embodied being. Rather, such work is interrelated with our activities and self-understanding as embodied beings. At the same time, this extension returns to the real as a fantasy or ghost, which is ultimately the critical impact of interface metaphors. Collectively, we are no longer the same. Through interfacing technologies a slow and imperceptible erosion occurs. We can never return to an innocent state.

We can elucidate that these changes of being (Dasein) arise with the invention of perspective during the Renaissance, inaugurating an era that we will call “focalisation”. Here, space is constructed and thought from the perspective of an observer, or more precisely, from the eye of the observer. The eye thus acquires a fundamental role — from a certain point of view, the image is constructed. Perspective, however, is not limited to the perceptive apparatus. This became apparent in more recent times, following the development of other projective apparatuses such as the photographic or cinematographic, which configure various gazes⁷. All of these should be considered projective devices; through each, a space and an image are projected from a point of view that constructs or builds the world.

In this sense, devices such as the telescope, photographic, or cinematographic camera construct a focused image. This is thanks to the laws of optics, a discipline which configures a series of devices capable of amplifying the visual capabilities of the human eye so that it can construct and structure space. Since “natural” perception is always mediated by such structuring devices that enable a way of seeing, these act as prostheses, expanding the natural (albeit limited) capabilities of the human eye. It is necessary to note, however, that today the history of the focused gaze, through the most diverse of optical devices, is being questioned. The result is a whole series of epistemological consequences. Ultimately, the concept of a “point of view”, or subjectivity, is still problematic. This does not mean that devices which focus the gaze disappear, but rather that the eye behind these prostheses no longer holds a central place in the construction of the image. In other words, it is no longer based on perspective and projection, and therefore, focus.

We are currently facing a paradigm shift that has been brewing for decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin indicated that the perceptual changes introduced by photography and cinema were of the order of distraction. For example, the focused perception typical of contemplating works of art gave way to a new type of perception that was less focused, capable of responding to the rapid succession of images that montage in cinema introduced, as well as life in big cities that required a certain visual training to be able to react automatically to multiple stimuli simultaneously. As Benjamin states, “It is the time of perceptual shock”⁸.

In what way do these devices reconstruct the gaze in their current production of images? The things themselves — the noumenon — are unknowable, and the relationship that occurs between these devices, how they affect us, is not a logical necessary relationship⁹. I say that these realities are unknowable because, for Immanuel Kant, to know is strictly to know through and in the structures that make that knowledge possible. In other words, what we know is phenomenical. We could say that for Kant, space and time — the a priori forms of intuition — are like lenses through which we perceive the world. Nothing we perceive can be non-spatial or non-temporal. Believing that we can perceive something outside of space and time would be a mere chimaera.

Simondon’s philosophy states that if you seek to understand the individual and its relation with these technical devices, you must enrol them in a process of which they are only a phase¹⁰. When combined with Kant’s perspective, what becomes apparent is that the individual is only one aspect of a process. What is important is the whole. But what is this process? For Simondon, it is the process of individuation; the transformation of external stimuli that are then processed internally(ensemble)¹¹. For example, the steps of life are a process of individuation, as are “techniques”. On the other hand, Bernard Stiegler speaks of “techniques” as essentially a form of memory that is constitutive of human temporality: “The technical object in its evolution is at the same time inorganic, inert matter and organisation of matter. The latter must operate in accordance with the restrictions to which organisms are subjected”¹². Humans undergo a very specific type of individuation, which is not only vital (that is, an individuation of the living organism, of life) but of the psyche (that is, it operates consciously and unconsciously). Simondon tells us that the individuation of the psyche is always grouped because a psyche is never alone. It always operates in relation to other psyches.

On the other hand, these individuation processes suffered from a very profound change in the organology of transindividuation¹³. Through what is currently called the media — television, cinema, radio, digital technology, and networks — the development of a new organology was forged, creating a new organisation and circulation of the symbolic¹⁴. Within this mode of organisation, the production of the symbolic suddenly becomes industrial, subject to industrial processes¹⁵. Here the production of symbols (on the one hand) and the consumption of said symbols (on the other) becomes an aporia, because it is impossible to consume a symbol. The symbol is not an object of consumption but of exchange, circulation, or the creation of circuits of transindividuation. Subsequently, this situation produces what Stiegler called short circuits in the process of transindividuation selves.

The sociologist and aesthetic theorist Paul Virilio makes a similar diagnosis. He posits the concept of dyslexic vision to account for the perceptual changes that result from an increase in visual and audio-visual prostheses, and which take us further from the phenomena of the gaze¹⁶. For Virilio, acceleration plays a fundamental role, since the succession of increasingly faster and more ephemeral images produces a lack of significance for the observer. Images are no longer internalised, re-appropriated, or integrated into personal experience / memory. They do not leave a trace. Based on studies of dyslexia, Virilio emphasises that we would suffer from a weakening of central vision in pursuit of peripheral vision that presents imprecision as one of its characteristics (unlike central vision which is focused, and therefore, more acute).

Alternatively, Stiegler notes a crisis of attention as a consequence of new hyper material technologies, bringing about or giving prominence to reflexive, automatic behaviours. By “reflexive” and “automatic” he refers to that which is the opposite of being attentive, which implies attention¹⁷. Attention is thus called into question with new technologies, implying a phenomenon of dispersion or lack of focus. If, therefore, one can say that technological advancements, such as digital devices and social media, contribute to the fragmentation of attention and memory, then technological interventions could be said to alter both. For example, the reliance on digital memory-aids can impact our ability to engage in deep, reflective thinking. One can argue that these technologies often lead to a diminished capacity for sustained focus. On the other hand, Stiegler’s mnemonic or tertiary memory¹⁸ allows the experience to be externalised and for knowledge to be transmitted. This epiphenomenon is crucial for our explanation. Currently, psychogenetic memory, as well as sociogenetic memory, must be confronted with an externalisation of memory disseminated in an infinite number of technological devices — a technogenetic memory. This phenomenon, from Stiegler’s perspective, entails an anthropological mutation intended not only to modify the cultural-economic dimension (how symbolic goods are produced, distributed, and consumed) but, more radically, to transform the mass sensorium as the foundation of the social-historical imaginary of our time; that is, the modes of seeing and meaning.

However, there are also ontogenetic patterns that generate epigenetic landscapes. These patterns support the interpretive capacity of a sense-making and decision-making process, at the moment when a relationship with such technologies is formed and meaning is produced. We see here an opportunity to interact with both the technical environment and biosemiotics interpretation. Both perspectives can be complementary to understanding the meaning of information. This introduces a new semiotic perspective on how cellular organisms fuse to become aggregate organisms, phagocytosis, and even the life cycle itself. Let’s hope in the future that these pathways of the recognition system can be described through cellular organisms. Nevertheless, this biosemiotic approach is expected to amplify the description of minimal cognition with semiotic details of such recognition pathways.

What is presented in this reflection is a material variation of a possible approach or reinterpretation of Simondon’s concept of individuation. This is essential to rationalise how the symbiosis between subjects with information and computational systems is explored. It also marks an important milestone in rethinking the relationship between subjects and technology. Current, maximising algorithmic performance methodologies are not optimal for scientifically observing the properties and behaviours of these artificial agents, nor their individuation processes, as sensitive and affective extensions of us. Anna Munster proposes that one focus on these processes under the notion of transmateriality; as “matter in motion, matter as relations of forces, matter as energy”¹⁹. She does so to understand how technology influences our understanding of time, and how its influence is inadequate in relation to living time, whilst harbouring the possibility of modulations that are “aesthetic-political and offer new possibilities of gesticulation”. Referring to Simondon, Munster describes transmateriality as “a metastable process that precedes the ontogeny of a given material individuation. Denoting the potential to become an individuated material as a result of a difference that transforms this potentiality in the direction of a structure”. And she adds: “transmaterial relations then, are both the metastable virtual ones of pure difference and the procedural updates of a set of singular materiality”²⁰.

Secondly, attributing “true interiority” to the living individual is not the same as making it substantial; fighting substantialism is the central point of Simondon’s individuation thought. Consequently, with respect to the interiority and exteriority of the living beings, Simondon clarifies:

An immediate belief in the interiority of the being as an individual comes, undoubtedly, from the intuition of one's own body [embodiment] which seems, from the position of a thinking man, to be separated from the world by a material envelope that has a certain consistency and defines a closed space. In fact, a relatively deep psychobiological analysis would show that, for a living being, the relationship with the external environment is not distributed only on its external surface. The notion of the internal environment, developed by Claude Bernard for the requirements of biological research, shows quite well through the mediation it establishes between the external environment and the being, that the substantiality of the being should not be confused with its interiority, even in the case of the biological individual²¹.

In summary, the perceptual modification first detected at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century — that is, since modernity (understood as the era of the technification of the world) — is presented either in Simondon, Benjamin, Virilio, or Stiegler as a crisis of focus and attention. Yet what is perspective, if not a focus on the world?²² It is to look from a point of view, to cast the eye to the objective of a screen, digital camera, or telescope. To focus is to concentrate, to converge towards a point. Therefore, the modification of our perceptual structure goes hand in hand with a change from the perceptual paradigm towards an era that I will call distant visuality.

Thinking (us), in a “distant” perception or reality, invites reflection on the sensible operation of optical phenomenon and its inference and impact on forms of representation, as well as the epistemological transformations that occur today through the media and exact sciences. It also opens the question: What is a simulation? In etymological terms, the concept of simulation can be understood as the act of simulating something. In one sense, a simulation is fraudulent, yet this fraud could be the simulation of a symptom; of a non-existent condition which it is able to simulate.

This distant visuality always blurs. It is an element of metastability, hence the possibility of moving towards other more complete structures, or an eventual destruction and different structuring. Simondon’s message is that there are no individuals. Traditional philosophy has always looked for the atoms that make up the universe and its elements. For Simondon, there is a kind of chaotic environment and there are individuation processes. In the best of cases, a living being can be understood as a process of individuation, in the same way as a psychological itinerary and individuation is a taking of form²³.

In short, this notion of distant visuality allows us to observe life’s contractions. It reveals that the virtual, as a space, does not extend. It fixes its value, but only to the extent that it becomes exterior, thereby articulating the real in a line made by divergence or differentiation. Clinamen or freedom, notions reviewed by Henri Bergson²⁴, could be synonymous with this impulse, in which the production of information and computational systems develops. By virtue of the fact that both notions highlight their physical or material aspect, of a becoming unfolds increasingly stronger movements in their reality.

The concept of focalisation is anthropologically rooted. Here, the eye — the subject — is fundamental to the construction of space and consequently the image, but also to the extent that images are considered to have meaning for the human beings who produce and contemplate them. Image theorists such as Hans Belting (2014) or Didi-Huberman (2009) come from a tradition inaugurated by Aby Warburg, who developed a strong anthropological theory that places the body — the eye — as central to images. Belting’s anthropology of the image focuses on its meaning and reception for human beings, thus the reception of numerical, information images do not necessitate a major change; it is their meaning that is relevant and not their structure or way of functioning.

Crary (1999) and Jay (2007), who focus on the issue of perception, visualise a greater perceptual change where the eye and focus lose prominence²⁵. In essence, image theorists don’t often consider the emergence of numerical images as relevant. Since they continue to hold meaning for human beings, numerical images and their meanings are considered a product of the Anthropos. On the contrary, for vision theorists, numerical or digital images would be the final stage in a process of modifying perception; one which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Digital media constructs perspectives or paradigms, and the corresponding positions or phases, of the subject. Within the constructivist model of the early twenty-first century — most notably Sybille Kramer´s Writing, Notational Iconicity, Calculus (2003) — our use of embodiments oscillates between two poles: “art” and “cultural techniques”, or “imagination” and “calculation”. If we connect “art” with the requirements of uniqueness, complexity of meaning, and innovative meaning, then it is only art that can meet these requirements. To the extent that it draws on and works with the cultural techniques of making as a routine, it reduces complexity and neutralises meaning. Therefore, artistic and cultural techniques are no longer types of objects or processes, but complementary methods of stylising our use of signs. These were understood in terms of significant structures or codification, typically applying models derived from linguistics and rhetoric. This telescope became the human plane. In parallel, this phenomenon reduced the constitution of the human plane to the question of the human subject (if not to its effective construction, then the impossibility of it or its subversion). From this perspective, a vicious circle occurs. The only conceptual tools available are pre-humanised by virtue of the models from which they are derived. But becoming human only makes sense in relation to a shift in the non-human phase. And becoming posthuman only makes sense in terms of the human phase-shifting of itself, back to the non-human. If the non-human gradually enters and leaves, it is conceivable that it goes through phases, which raises the problem of the immanence of the non-human to all the vicissitudes of the human.

From another perspective, Katherine Hayles tells us about how many new materialists refer to a distributed agency. Hayles emphasises the range of technological and biological decision making that actively constitutes much of our reality while being beyond conscious control:

Nonconscious cognition provides a means by which agency can be located in material processes and in nonconscious cognition as their emergent result, without implying the allegedly stultifying effects of a consciousness unable to transform in relation to its environment²⁶

In these terms, computational media have a distinct advantage over every other technology ever invented. Here Belting’s anthropology of image becomes problematic. First, as data, digital numerical images no longer hold exclusive meaning for humans. Secondly, images no longer belong only to the record of the visible, since they can only be stored or transmitted as information, without the need to be viewed by an individual. Furthermore, new methodologies of working with software to analyse texts or images no longer requires one to read. This is what Franco Moretti, in 2013, coined distant reading²⁷, bringing together the fields of visual, literature, and historical analysis.

Moretti’s concept of distant reading accounts for new research methodologies, made possible through the introduction of data science. This new methodology involves working with a large volume of data that cannot be processed by an individual researcher. Instead, software is used to read data and visualise certain patterns, redundancies, and so on. It is called “distant” reading because it is no longer necessary — or possible — to physically read the texts; their quantity exceeds the possibility for analysis by an individual. Only software is capable of analysing such a volume of information.

In Cultural Analytics (2020), Lev Manovich provides an alternate perspective. Positioned at the intersection of data science and media studies, Manovich’s research presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data, with a focus on visual media. His work leads to a number of questions: How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture? Added to this, if AI is capable of learning to “see”, we will soon realise that we face a paradigm shift that requires a new concept of “seeing”, and consequently, of the image.

Given that these fundamental elements (re)define our relationship with images, I prefer to adopt the concept of de-anthropologising that Stiegler uses in reference to the work of Andrei Leroi-Gourhan, a thinker of technique, who defused the limits between humanity and technicality²⁸. In that sense, digital-numerical technologies today have transformed the image into information. The consequence is that human beings no longer hold a privileged position in relation to images, since software can also see, analyse, interpret, and react. More fundamentally, images have lost their exclusively visible character.

For Stiegler, technical life, in installing technical milieus, brings a whole new kind of infidelity into play. Life—and this is the point—is therefore no longer to be conceived of as organic life but as organological life. Organological life henceforth proceeds in jumps and draws on technological shocks that impose readjustments of the entire organological assemblage:

It is an exteriorization that is at the same time an interiorization. In other words, it is what, while distinguishing an outside and an inside in a movement of going outside that is also a movement of going inside, mutually establishes this inside and this outside by their transductive relationship – the mutuality of what Derrida called the archi -trace²⁹

If we analyse the concept of the image, a possible definition would be: “a visible representation of a phenomenon”. The visibility of numerical-digital images is only one possibility among others, since they can remain in a state of information and still be analysed, and transmitted. Without the need to acquire some type of visibility, images can remain as only code. One might ask, then: is an image in the pure state of code also an image? For Belting³⁰, the anthropological perspective focuses on the practice of the image — its uses. For this author, the image goes beyond perception, because “it is the result of a personal or collective symbolization, the concept of image, it can only be an anthropological concept”. In this sense, and after Belting, the image is not confused with its support. It has a certain independence. The support is its materialisation: “since an image lacks a body, it requires a medium in which it can embody”. What counts is the symbolic, for as writes Belting, “it only becomes an image when it is animated by its viewer”³¹.

Although Belting recognises that “digital images are stored invisibly as a database”³², said invisibility would be determined only by image-data storage and other fundamental elements, such as their analysis, transmission, and interaction. In short, it would be determined as an interaction between the algorithm and the image-data, where the human does not have a central place. The human, in that sense, would simply be one more dispensable element of the interaction. Furthermore, it is no longer necessary to contemplate, see, or observe images. They can simply be “processed”, that is, to the extent that they give us information or knowledge³³.

For Belting, digital images are often considered as non-images, to the extent that they may not have a referent (question of mimesis and similarity), or may be virtual worlds where the body as a medium is annulled in pursuit of a disembodied utopia. Today, however, that is not the real problem. Today, the issue is the overabundance of data-images and the extent to which they can be processed by human beings. It is an issue of scale. It is not simply a matter of delegating the production of images to the machine — as is the case of technical images — but of said images analysis, in their visualisation. If we follow Stiegler³⁴, it is the synthesising of images that has been delegated, and that today, an algorithm is in charge of their analysis.

The power of images that Mitchell³⁵ and Freedberg³⁶ talk about is therefore cultural, symbolic, just as it is for Belting. It is worth asking, then, the extent to which data-images are capable of conveying cultural aspects, because although the paradigm of the network and globalisation tends towards breaking with local cultural models, on the other hand, data analysis makes it possible to determine and predict local behaviours, depending on the information collected every time we connect to the web. These are the default digital footprints that Louise Merzeau³⁷ talks about. But it is necessary to highlight that the power of data-images does not reside in their observation or contemplation — in their being seen. Their power lies in the information they are capable of conveying, independent of sight.

Similarly, André Rouillé³⁸, in his book dedicated to numerical-digital photography, points out that the emergence of cameras and cellphones with screens marks the decline in dominance of the construction of the gaze. Looking through a camera lens today is one among many options, since the screen allows the eye to be placed at a distance from what it is intended to photograph. Rouillé talks about how “this kind of non-sighted (numerical) aesthetic is also an aesthetic of what envelops things and events in a flow of images produced “in burst”. This succeeds an (analogue) aesthetic governed by an eye armed with a viewer, and by the law of the single and sovereign image, taken at the “decisive instant in the precise place” ³⁹.

When applied to the notion of “object-image” that Simondon developed in Imagination and Invention, it implies rethinking the relationships between technique and imagination beyond traditional oppositions (material / ideal, sensible / intelligible, concrete / abstract, interiority / exteriority), both at a psychic and collective level⁴⁰. Firstly, “images” are described as intermediaries between the subject and the world, which circulate from the inside out, through “introjection” (of external images in the imagination of the subjects) and “projection” (of subjective images about external objects). Secondly, “object-images” are described as intermediaries between the past and future, which ensures the “cultural continuity” of human groups: they are materialisations of collective meanings, which must be revived and transformed through cultural activities. Thus, for Simondon, “object-images” — which can be technical objects, prosthetic objects, or aesthetic objects — seem to play a crucial role in individual and collective imaginaries.

Since the beginning of hominisation, the production of knowledge from sensations has been mediated by techniques. In fact, know-how (technique) and knowledge are difficult to disentangle formally. It could be said that techniques always complement the courses that sensations must follow on their path to provisionally crystallise as knowledge. To summarise, for Stiegler, the externalisation of memory in hypomnemas is the very condition of the gap between reflective human consciousness and the sensations and reflexes that guide the animal within its semiotic environment⁴¹. However, it should be noted that supplementation already occurs at the body level. The brain’s interface with the world is already mediated by layers of neurological organisation, nested feedback systems, and retentional contexts that selectively and sequentially transport sensations from outside to inside — “nervous currents”, as William James called them⁴². These layers of evolutionarily sedimented supplementation constitute the organic prehistory of technical supplementation. That is to say: the organism is always already prosthetic. As Brian Massumi rightly points out: “What art and technology do is extend the existing regime of natural and acquired artifice of the body, which has long been active in the production of the "virtual reality" of our daily lives” ⁴³.

In review, the concept of technical individuation accounts for the profound changes that our perception currently undergoes. If we extrapolate this idea to visual analysis, talking about distant visualisation is equivalent to thinking about a new type of perception that is carried out through data analysis, which is possible thanks to the transformation of the image into data. If we want to study a certain historical period, we can access large databases of image libraries and perform a distant visualisation. In this case, that means that the one who “views” is the software. It is they who establish patterns, connections, and links between a gigantic corpus of images that lies beyond the reach of humans. This is precisely why the work of Lev Manovich, with his concept of Cultural Analytics, is important⁴⁴.

On the other hand, the notion of distant visualisation has certain antecedents and a varied horizon of applications on how we relate with digital images nowadays. Virilio has already pointed out — with respect to the photographer who simply machine guns, instead of stopping to focus — that by observing from behind a lens, the photographer no longer sees what he is photographing. It is the device that does it in his place, at a speed beyond that of the human eye⁴⁵. That is to say, although the photographic device is a perceptual device par excellence, its introduction and technological evolution made it increasingly faster, going beyond natural perception. As a result, it necessarily leaves the eye behind. The eye no longer manages to focus on each one of the images produced in burst. This has the consequence that the human eye becomes accustomed to not seeing and to being seen through it. Produced by technologies, this is called the delegation effect. That is, we delegate to technologies certain operations that we previously performed ourselves.

Through this review we can try to explore this topic and raise the following question: what are the effects of the digitisation of objects and images on individual and collective imaginaries? As invented objects, technical objects are necessarily related in some way to human beings. But the inventor, for Simondon, is not an ingenious demiurge who creates ex nihilo through his own imaginative resources. Simondon describes technical invention as a process that transcends the individual psyche. First of all, in most cases, there is not one inventor, but a succession of inventors who, separated by time and space, communicate through already existing technical objects. These technical objects, detachable as they are from the space and time of their creation, support what Simondon calls relations of cumulative participation⁴⁶. What appear to be necessary prerequisites for a deanthropologization of the gaze, is in fact a selection of pre-existing technical objects from which elements or schemes of operation can be extracted, scientific knowledge of natural effects (physical, chemical, or electrical), as well as suitable materials. As Erich Hörl states: It is always an “epokhal techno-logical shock” that interrupts a specific organological assemblage⁴⁷. Last but not least, for Simondon, what is required is an awareness of a problem to be solved. The most difficult and paradoxical part of the invention process is that it requires a kind of “vision” that represents a state that does not yet exist, and in which the problem is solved. This field of purpose, as he calls it, is in tension with the actual field of experience, which is characterised by incompatibilities between subsets of the system, a lack of functioning. According to Simondon, the game of limits, the overcoming of which constitutes progress, resides in the incompatibilities that arise from the progressive saturation of the system of subsets. However, by its nature, this improvement can only occur as a leap, as a modification of the internal distribution of functions, a reordering of its system⁴⁸.

Competing Interests

The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Ethics approval

This is an observational study. The Wits Research Ethics Committee has confirmed that no ethical approval is required.

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The author declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

Author Contribution

Renzo Filinich Orozco was solely responsible for the conception, research, analysis, and writing of the article titled “The Eye in the Media: Materiality and Technical Individuation.” This involved the critical engagement with the works of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, as well as the exploration of the relationships between technique, technology, and individuation. The author also conducted all theoretical analyses on the implications of computational systems for human vision, perception, and the concept of deanthropologization. Finally, Renzo Filinich Orozco prepared, revised, and approved the final manuscript for submission.

Anna Munster. “Transmateriality: Toward an Energetics of Signal in Contemporary Mediatic Assemblages”, in Cultural Studies Review 20 (2014): 150 (https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v20i1.3836).
Alberto Romele, Marta Severo, and Paolo Furia. “Digital Hermeneutics: From Interpreting with Machines to Interpretational Machines”, in AI & Society 35(1) (2020): 73–86 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0856-2).
André Rouillé. “Esthétique (numérique) de la dispersion.” Éditorial 396 (27 Septembre 2012).
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Bernard Stiegler. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998.
Bernard Stiegler. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008.
Bernard Stiegler. Elements for a General Organology, in Derrida Today 13 (1) (2020): 72-94
Bernard Stiegler. “General Ecology, Economy, and Organology”, in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, edited by Erich Hörl and James Burton, translated by Daniel Ross, 129–50. Bloomsbury Publishing 2017.
Bernard Stiegler. The Neganthropocene. Translated by Daniel Ross. Open Humanities Press 2018.
Catherine Malabou. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press 2019. https://doi.org/10.7312/mala18736.
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Gilbert Simondon. El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos. Translated by M. Martínez and P. Rodríguez. Buenos Aires: Prometeo 2008 (Originally published in 1958).
Gilbert Simondon. La individuación a la luz de las nociones de forma y de información. Buenos Aires: Cactus 2015.
Gilbert Simondon. Imagination and Invention. Edited by Joe Hughes and Christophe Wall-Romana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2022.
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Heidegger's notion of the “world picture” (1977), for example, emphasises a significant shift in perception. Traditionally, the world was understood as an interplay of beings and their relationships, where humans were participants within a larger, dynamic whole. However, in the modern age, this holistic view gives way to a representational view, where the world is perceived as an image or a set of data points to be analysed and controlled. This change reflects a deeper transformation in the essence of being, where the world becomes a construct of human intellect and technological prowess. The concept of the “world picture” highlights how seeing and perception are fundamentally altered. The world is no longer encountered directly but is instead mediated through scientific and technological frameworks. This representational seeing distances humans from the authentic experience of being, as the world is now interpreted through the lens of calculation and manipulation.
Gilbert Simondon. El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos. Translated by M. Martínez and P. Rodríguez. Buenos Aires: Prometeo 2008 (originally published in 1958).
The notion of “media” at play here refers to the “storage, transmission and processing of information”. That is the basic definition of media in general. Media include old-fashioned things like books, familiar things like cities, and new things like computers. See (Kittler, 1999: 144). Friedrich Kittler. “There Is No Software”, in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, 219–29. Redwood City: Stanford University Press 2014, 144 (https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804792622-016).
William J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995), 21.
William J.T. Mitchell, The Language of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7.
To read more about this operational division, see Kittler, “There Is No Software”.
Jacques Déotte. “Le milieu des appareils.” Appareil (9 February 2008). Accessed 9 January 2024 (http://journals.openedition.org/appareil/75; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/appareil.75).
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 117.
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993).
Simondon 2008, 177.
Simondon 2008, 178 .
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998, 150.
The notion of organology is analysed by Bernard Stiegler as a condition of human and technological constitution. This philosopher considers organological processes as a generalised ecology concerned with life and the production, exchanges and consumption of meaning. Therefore, he believes that these organological processes can lay the foundation for an ecology that examines how signs (information) are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within technological systems with culture. See Bernard Stiegler. “General Ecology, Economy, and Organology”, in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. Edited by Erich Hörl and James Burton, translated by Daniel Ross, 129–50. Bloomsbury Publishing 2017.
Theodore Adorno and M. Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Cultural Studies Reader. Edited by Simon During. New York: Routledge 21999, 31–41.
Stiegler 2017.
Paul Virilio. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose. London and New York: Bloomington 1994, 8.
Bernard Stiegler. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008, 117.
Ibid., 97.
Anna Munster. “Transmateriality: Toward an Energetics of Signal in Contemporary Mediatic Assemblages”, Cultural Studies Review 20 (2014): 158.
Ibid., 159.
Gilbert Simondon. La individuación a la luz de las nociones de forma y de información. Buenos Aires: Cactus 2015, 152.
As Alberto Romele states, “In the specific field of digital technologies, hermeneutics is not out of the picture, both in a ‘special’ and in a ‘general’ sense. First, because language, signs, and symbols, which have been brutally defenestrated by philosophy of technology after its ‘empirical turn’, have come back in force. In computation, indeed, it is a matter of special kinds of signs, which are both human-readable and machine-executable.” See Alberto Romele, Marta Severo, and Paolo Furia, “Digital Hermeneutics: From Interpreting with Machines to Interpretational Machines”, AI & Society 35(1) (2020): 76 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0856-2).
On this point, see Jean Barthélemy. Simondon ou l'encyclopédisme génétique. Paris: University of France Press 2008, 9–19.
Given the assent, it seems that only the anecdote serves as an answer. Bergson dedicated his first courses to Epicurean philosophy through the study of Lucretius (1883), reserving the expression of assent for the doctrine of the clinamen (1937: 24) and, later, to topics related to the philosophy of nature, especially the stoic and the fatum notion as a product of the same strange logic (2004: 72). See Henri Bergson. "Lucrecio." Hiperión no 20 (1937); and Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Dover Publications, 2004.
See Jonathan Crary. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1999; and Martin Jay. “Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision,” in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Edited by Todorov Tzvetan. Berkeley: University of California Press 1993: 163–185 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppwvv).
Hayles, 2017: 77
Franco Moretti. Distant Reading. London: Verso 2013.
Bernard Stiegler. Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008.
Stiegler 2020 : 88
Belting 2011: 14
Ibid., 22–39.
Ibid., 49.
Ibid.
Stiegler 2008.
Mitchell 2009.
David Freedberg. “Movement, Embodiment, Emotion.” Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac. Accessed 25 January 2024 (http://journals.openedition.org/actesbranly/330; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/actesbranly.330).
Louise Merzeau. “Les paradoxes de la mémoire numérique.” Intercédii n. 244 (2013). Accessed 15 January 2024 (http://merzeau.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/InterCDIMerzeau.pdf).
André Rouillé. “Esthétique (numérique) de la dispersion.” Éditorial 396, 27 September 2012.
Ibid.
Gilbert Simondon. Imagination and Invention. Edited by Joe Hughes and Christophe Wall-Romana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2022.
Bernard Stiegler. The Neganthropocene. Translated by Daniel Ross. Open Humanities Press 2018, 48.
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Edited by Jeremy Carrette and Eugene Taylor. London: Routledge 2003.
Brian Massumi. “Envisioning the Virtual,” in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. Edited Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014, 64.
Lev Manovich. Cultural Analytics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2020. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11214.001.0001.
Paul Virilio. The Vision Machine, translated by Julie Rose. London and New York: Bloomington 1994, 25.
Gilbert Simondon, El modo de existencia de los objetos técnicos. Translated by M. Martínez and P. Rodríguez Buenos Aires: Prometeo 2008, 163.
Horl 2017, 25
Simondon, 32.

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The eye in the media: Materiality and technical individuation

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Abstract

I. Introduction

II. The eye in the media3 : Crisis of focalisation

III. The eye as a medium: From anthropology to the deanthropologisation of the image

IV. Conclusion

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