Transcription
Primarily known for developing the theory of dramology, which is the study of the logic of speed, Paul Varelio was a prolific French author, a cultural theorist, a social critic who wrote about a number of things from the history of technology all the way to urban planning and architecture with everything that you can imagine in between.
Today we're going to be talking about his book, The Vision Machine, which is his account of the ways in which our relationship to vision has evolved over the last couple of centuries, giving rise to a new logistics of the image or to a new way of understanding what it means to be uh a seer, a perceiver, a representer. And specifically the effect that the rise of this new relationship to seeing that he calls the vision machine. Um, and emphasis on the word machine for reasons that we'll explore in a few minutes. The way in which the rise of this vision machine has completely altered really so much about ourselves that we could say it has altered the very meaning of subjectivity and humanity.
So to begin with, let's think about the fact that according to Paul Varillio. If you think about what it means to see, well to see means to connect visually to an external world. It means to see an object and to see it always, of course, because of the limits of our biology from within the confines of our visual system. So for a very long time in the history of ideas, vision has been understood to be a limited sense. So, of course, it's a very powerful sense, but it's also a sense that only gives us limited perspectives on things. So, think about the fact that when I smell something like a cookie, I smell the totality of the cookie. But when I see the cookie, I only see the cookie from my current perspective, from my current standpoint. I don't see the back of the cookie. I don't see underneath the cookie. Whereas if I touch the cookie, yet another sensory modality, I can get a lot more information at the same time. And so vision has always had this dual identity of being the sense that we identify with the most, at least those of us who are cited humans, but also being a sense that we recognize to have significant shortcomings that just define what it means to see. Right? So for example, I can't see what's happening in the back of my head. I can't really see what's happening in the margins of my peripheral vision at the margins of my visual field. And we also know that our vision just can can lead to some errors. In some cases, we can um sometimes hallucinate things visually. Sometimes we are subject to visual um illusions where we misperceive or misjudge phenomena that are given to us through uh this particular sense. And that's just been part of what our understanding of vision is. We just recognize that that vision has these limits.
Unfortunately, according to Verilio, what has happened in the last few centuries is that we have come to have different expectations of vision largely because of developments in technology, although not exclusively where now the logistics of the image that controls our lives are governed by what he calls um a kind of desire for omnivoycancy. Uh, omni meaning totalizing or everything and voyancy um meaning the capacity to see like being a voyer. And so we now live in a culture where we expect to be able to see everything. We want to see everything in great detail. We don't want to miss everything. We want everything to be documented. We want everything to be recorded such that in principle we can always go back, check and see. And this shift from um our understanding of the limits of vision to the expectation that vision have no limits. This is what he means by the vision machine that we have now created a set of cultural and technological apparatuses that are motivated and driven by this idea that anything that escapes the visual system needs to be coaxed into the light. It needs to be like pulled out from the shadows and opened up for the human eye to be able to see and to see without missing anything. And so what we have here is something like a dream of mastery at the level of the eye or you know if we want to be even more reductive at the level of the retina where we want everything that is not just everything that is perceivable but everything that is to be perceivable. We do not like invisibility. We do not like hidden corners. We do not like opaque um uh zones or or zones of intelligibility. And so much of what uh Verilo is going to talk about in this book are the many ways in which we see the vision machine sort of making itself um announcing itself, the way it operates.
And so he writes about a lot of things. Uh, one thing I'll say about this book is that it is informationally very very dense. Um, it's a very difficult book to read. To be honest, I I struggled with it a little bit. I had to read it and reread it just to really g uh gather my thoughts. But part of the difficulty is that Verilio is really unforgiving uh with his readers in the sense that he writes about things that are very different in the same breath and he includes a lot of historical detail that sometimes is just not necessary but he includes that nonetheless. And so as you read the book, sometimes you're confused by the scope um of what he's covering, but it's because he's making a claim about the vision machine rearing its head in practically every aspect of our lives. And so, for example, just to give you a sense of the range of the book, um even though it's relatively short, um you know, it's a it's a short um uh little publication, but he writes about everything from like photography, um cinema, painting, the history of electricity, um he talks about uh the history of politics, he talks about the military. And in all of these cases, what he's trying to do is he's trying to understand how this desire for omnivoyancy manifests itself in these aspects of human life.
Now, in terms of understanding the essence of the vision machine, he uses the term technical hyper realism to talk about what the vision machine is. And the idea there is that we now create technologies. They can be literal technologies like machines, but also techniques like painting for example, where we want to render everything in as much detail as possible because we believe that that's going to vindicate us as subjects by giving us an absolute grasp over the read. The problem uh and this is what ultimately motivates the book is that according to Varelio, this this desire for visual omnipresence or omnipotence um again at the level of the eye ultimately backfires on us because when you try to see too much or when you try to see literally everything, you end up paying a price for that. And so in the book um for example he talks about some of the effects of the visual machine um and I want to cover some of them not all of them but just the one the ones that I thought were most salient um from this book.
To begin with, he talks about how this amplification of vision has as one of its consequences as a kind of corollary a diminishment or an atrophy of memory. So the more we try to see the less we can remember. And the reason for that is because according to him, of course, memory requires that we select the things that we're paying attention to so that we identify the things that are most important, right? And actually, let me bring the book back because the the book has this epigraph um or like a quote at the beginning um at the beginning of the book right here um that talks about this. This is a quote from Norman E. Spear who says memory content is a function of the rate of forgetting. Once again memory content so what we remember is a function of the rate of forgetting. So in order to remember you need to forget and in order to forget you need to filter things out. That's how we narrow, you know, all the information that we get through all the senses to the things that are worth preserving in our memory archive. And so, Verillio makes this really interesting, I think, observation that in a world where we're expected to see everything, there is just too much detail for our minds to keep. And so, as a result, we cannot properly sift um or sift through what is important and what is not important. And that ultimately atrophies our capacity to remember. And by remember, I suspect that he means to remember things that are worth remembering. Um, because we just try to keep everything in mind, which means that ultimately we don't exercise that critical function of introducing a hierarchy between what matters and what doesn't matter.
Now, a second consequence of the vision machine is that it leads to what he calls visual dyslexia. And just think about that term. Of course, dyslexia refers to an inability to learn, to make meaning out of signs. Um, sometimes it refers to a jumbling together of symbols and signs. So, for example, I have a very mild form of dyslexia where if I'm really in a rush and I try to write something um very fast, I get the letters inside um mixed up. This happens to me in front of the classroom all the time that I'll be writing something on the whiteboard, I look at it and the words are a little jumbled. So, dyslexia has to do with an inability to either read or write um as traditionally expected. And so when he talks about visual dyslexia, he means that in the world of the vision machine, the visual world becomes jungle like it becomes a jumble. Um, it becomes confused and disordered and the eye cannot read the visual scene anymore in the way that it normally should. And it has to do with that excess of detail, with that lack of gaps, um, with that emphasis on everything being illuminated at all times that it overstimulates our visual system and we're unable to make meaning out of the world. Um, he he he talks about visual dyslexia in somewhat abstract theoretical terms, but I think about this in terms of my first experience upon moving to the United States, which was my experience of Las Vegas, um the Las Vegas Boulevard, where all the casinos are. That was my first experience of American life when I was 15. Um, and that's because I moved from Mexico to the US and we landed in Las Vegas. And I remember my experience of the Vegas strip as something that I would describe as a form of visual dyslexia. There were so many signs. There were so many announcements, so many neon lights, so many things happening visually that my eyes didn't know where to rest. Like I didn't know where to look. And so everything became senseless and meaningless and incoherent. Even though technically it wasn't, right? Every like all the words had meaning, everything was perfectly well organized, but I didn't yet have the skills to read that level of detail, that level of um abundance of information. And so I felt visually dyslexic. And I think Verilio is suggesting that in the realm of cinema, in the realm of painting, in the realm of urban planning, in the realm of war, we feel similarly overwhelmed by the visual field that we lose the ability to make meaning out of it. Hence this notion of um of uh visual dyslexia.
Now beyond that um he also talks about some of the social and political consequences of living in a regime of hypervisuality and hyperleibility. And two effects that he mentions um in connection to this are first and foremost that in a world where everything is in the light in order to be seen, humans lose the ability to move in the shadows. And he he talks about this in terms almost of a fundamental right that humans should have to be able to hide. You know, occasionally we need a break. We want not to be seen. We want to conceal rather than reveal. Sometimes there are secrets that we don't think are for everybody to be aware of. Or even if it's just because we want privacy and solitude, whether that's just like for existential reasons or explicitly for political reasons, we want to be able to inhabit the shadows. But the visual uh the vision machine prevents us from doing from doing that. The vision machine. You can think about it almost like this this like massive apparatus that's constantly hovering over our lives, shedding light on every aspect of what we do. Um, and so I take that that inability to move in the shadows is denying us something of value that we have difficulty giving up. Like we don't want to give that privacy, that solitude, that that right to opacity. Um, in fact, but in a world where vision dominates our politics, we also have difficulty explaining why the right to opacity is so important to us because we are habituated into thinking that visuality is good, right? Like people should knowledge is power. Nothing should be hidden from public view. Um, because otherwise it raises uh suspicions. And so the vision machine not only denies us the shadows, but it also denies us the very language to articulate why the shadows actually might be a good thing because under the vision machine all shadow is either a pure absence or a form of criminality.
Now in connection to um this issue of like light versus shadows, uh Verilio also talks about how we live now in a world where there is no suspense. There is only surprise. Initially I didn't really understand what he meant by that claim. But then I started thinking, okay, well, suspense by definition is when you maintain attention over something that has not yet been revealed, right? So, think about like a suspenseful novel where it's like somebody committed a crime and you don't know who it is and there's an investigation. Um, but the whole time what maintains you tied to the drama, what keeps you connected to the narrative arc is not what you see or what you know. It's what you don't see and what you don't know. It's the shadow, right? That's what gives meaning to the story. And so the vision machine is emptying the world of suspense because everything is out in the open. Everything is revealed. Everything is documented. Everything can be checked and double checked um at at at a moment's desire. And so we don't have that. The only thing that we have is surprise. And what is surprise? Surprise is usually the moment of revelation, right? Like surprise like we are throwing you a surprise birthday party and everybody jumps out of the shadows. So we do live in a world where there are surprises but we don't recognize that there is value to what preceded the surprise right it's almost as if the only surprise or the only value of surprise is precisely its revelation as surprise exactly like a birthday party nobody would say that people waiting in the shadows waiting for the birthday person to show up was like the most meaningful activity the whole point of waiting is just to reveal reveal the surprise. But there might be cases where the hanging out in the shadows is actually quite meaningful where the point of that is not in order to be revealed but to do it for its own sake because it is intrinsically good or politically good or pragmatically good or existentially good. And so those two claims that we only have surprises but we have no suspense and that we have lost the ability to move in the shadow I think all add to a relatively compelling concern about the vision machine understood in terms of omniv omnivoy.
Now the final effect that I'll talk about in um connection to the um vision machine is his claims about the nature of subjectivity. Now Verilio himself studied phenomenology. Uh, he studied with Merlo um Merlo Ponti um at the Sorban and so he's kind of halfway in the phenomenology tradition halfway out um because he he doesn't really write about phenomenology per se but he does write with phenomenological concerns and you see that in this book where he talks about where is this let me get it um he talks in this book um in the beginning and also in the end about the way in which subjectivity has been completely redefined by the vision um machine. And what he means by this um is two things. He means that our individual subjectivity is ephacased because we are not really that important anymore. What really matters is the system of vision that is in place. That's what really dominates in our world. And secondarily that now when we think about the function of subjectivity it's not us who perform it because we have been e ephacased it's the system that performs that function. So the way he puts it in the book is that subjectivity has become an ambient effect.
Now, I want us to think about this in terms of CCTV cameras, like all the cameras that you see um in public space that, you know, the police use for like um seeing who runs a red light. Uh, the cameras that um 7-Elevens put outside to, you know, like see what happens. The cameras that maybe people put outside of their homes also to protect themselves against um invaders or robberies, whatever the case might be. So think about this very practically. We really do live, this is especially true in urban settings, in spaces that are hyper seen by cameras. Cameras are always recording everything that happens in the city. And so what ends up happening is that the function of seeing is no longer performed by humans with biological bodies with limited visual systems. Vision is now performed by this system of techniques, technologies and apparatuses by this system of dispositives to use a fucodian term that are technological impersonal but widespread. And so when he says that subjectivity has become an ambient effect, what I interpret him to mean by this claim is that subjectivity can now be predicated of that of that visual machine itself, the machine that is in place um in order to produce images to interpret images such that it's no longer humans who are in charge of doing so. And in fact towards the end of the book he has um some interesting remarks about artificial intelligence about and you know this is a book from several decades ago but he was already aware of this trajectory um that we are following toward computers making images. So no longer humans making images but also computers interpreting those images. And so if you think about the basic function of seeing, which is to register and interpret, that's not something that's done by human vision in many cases anymore. It's done by the vision machine, whatever that means.
So if you decide to uh read this book, which I recommend, I'll just give you um the heads up that it is a very difficult theoretical text. Um, it's very demanding. Sometimes you have to battle his writing style a little bit. Um, but it's also very informative because he makes connections across vastly different domains and I take that to be one of Aurelio's strengths as a thinker. It's his creativity um at the level of um synthesis bringing very se things from very different uh areas together to make a point about our relationship to vision.
So to conclude with an illustration of this when he writes about the vision machine I mentioned that he talks about art like photography, cinema, uh painting but he also writes a lot about war and how war has changed our relationship to sight. He talks for example about the development of aerial photography, right? Like these like top down shots u like shots, visual shots um um that were originally created for the purposes of military strategizing. Um, and that makes sense that he would be interested in this because Paul Varillio was born in 1932 um in Paris. And so his early years were completely shaped by war, by the Nazi occupation of Paris and France more generally. And so he he was really interested in the brutality of war, but also how war alters our our sensory capacities. Um, and so he takes you know these descriptions of war and war photography, aerial photography. He talks about the discover well not the discovery but the the invention rather of documentaries. Um, because some of the first documentaries were meant to be war documentaries. So it was part of the military industrial complex. And so he takes this observation about vision in war and then connects it to things that don't seem related. Um, so for example he has a chapter where he talks in great detail about criminal justice. Um, and he talks about how nowadays when there is a crime you know we don't really trust the testimony of witnesses anymore. Like we don't really rely on individual vision anymore. What we tend to rely on more when making judgments about what really happened, who is guilty, who is innocent is we rely on technical reconstructions of the scene and on technologies like um like fingerprinting um you know that again hinge on revealing making visible what is invisible. So, think about when you put like a black light to a crime scene and then all these things start coming to the light as an expression of the vision machine. Um, he also talks um about the French Revolution and the politics of ratting out your neighbors and loved ones for being monarchists. Um, where the idea was uh especially during the reign of terror that if you see someone doing something suspicious, you needed to report it. Um, and so the politics also of the way in which we hold each other in check as citizens based on what we see. It reminds me of that um of that saying like if you see something say something that we often teach kids as a way of helping them navigate dangerous situations that happens on a large social scale according to Verilio. And so he takes these observations about war, observations about revolution, observations um also about criminal justice and courtroom proceedings, combines them with observations about art and photography um with discussions about CCTV and AI to try to make a case for this thesis that is at the heart of the book, which is that the vision machine is shaping and he does use the word distort at one point is distorting our vision by reconfiguring it from the ground up. And as it does that, not only does it atrophy our memory, but it also denies us this fundamental right to move in the shadows and ultimately culminates in this evaporation of our subjectivity where our subjectivity is sort of sublated into the vision machine itself such that it's the machine understood in very general terms. Um, it's the machine that sees, that represents, that interprets, and it's no longer the living, breathing human.