Introduction

In his 2000 video Sheik Attack, new media artist and former Israeli soldier Eddo Stern reconstructs the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using footage from various video games. Different genres are utilized in order to evoke particular historical periods. Clips from the strategy game The Settlers III (Blue Byte 1998) depict the early utopian days of Zionist farmers; towering buildings from SimCity 3000 (Electronic Arts 1999) symbolize the growth of modern-day Tel Aviv. As the video progresses, these images give way to rougher sequences taken from military action games. The climax is comprised of a tense scene in which unidentified commandos sneak into a house and find a woman kneeling on the floor with her arms behind her head. In a scene appropriated from an anonymous, yet emblematic, first-person shooter game, the commandos shoot her, and she collapses on the ground.

Fig. 1. Sheik Attack (Eddo Stern, 2000).

Although Stern uses the anonymous virtual violence of mainstream video games, by assembling and situating it into the real-world context of the conflict, his video transcends the indifference and desensitization generally associated with video games. Viewers are intrinsically moved by the footage despite the fact that it features computer-generated characters. This is because they understand that, at some level, it represents the death of real human beings (Halter 2006: 329).

Stern’s work is significant to this article in many respects. Born in the 1970s, Stern belongs to the first video game generation for whom appropriation of games for conveying artistic and political messages corresponds with their communication patterns, whether they live in the United States, Europe, or the Middle East. Video games are a sociocultural phenomenon of increasing relevance. They constitute a mainstream leisure time activity for broad levels of society and foster the mediated construction of reality (Bogost and Poremba 2008). The Palestinian/Israeli conflict has also become an increasingly popular game theme, allowing players to re-enact events, immerse themselves in the conflict, and reshape how they comprehend it (Šisler 2008; Höglund 2008). For example, the Syrian first-person shooter game, Under Siege (Afkar Media 2005), re-enacts the 1994 massacre in Hebron when an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Palestinians. Flight simulator Israeli Air Force (Electronic Arts 1998) engages the player in air strikes on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan during the 1967 and 1973 wars. Historical strategy games, like American Age of Empires 2 (Microsoft 1999) or Syrian Quraish (Afkar Media 2007), retell the stories of Saladin’s encounters with the Crusaders and the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, respectively.

Stern’s Sheik Attack video attempts to transcend the seeming dichotomy between computer-enabled reconstructions of reality and actual events. He uses games which are not specifically geographically located to express real experiences of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a different vein, this article explores how the real Palestine and Israel are envisioned, represented, and constructed in video games. By doing so, it examines these games’ narrative, graphical representation, and game play, in order to discuss how they (re)construct reality.

Theoretical and Methodological Framework

Ian Bogost (2007: vii) suggests that video games are an expressive medium, which represent how real and imagined systems work, and invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. Unlike film or other audiovisual media, video games are interactive, which implies that any content analysis has to cover three intertwined levels: audiovisual signifiers, narrative structure, and game play. The interactive element of game play is of crucial importance for the gaming experience, yet it poses substantial theoretical and methodological difficulties for analysis. The player of a typical video game is as much a consumer as he is a performer: actively engaged in an interactive state that is both physical and mental (Whitlock 2005). As such, the gaming experience is difficult to describe and reconstruct using classical audiovisual methods like segmentation into sequences and shot-by-shot analysis. Instead, computer-enabled simulation and its rules, which both provide and limit player’s actions and choices, have to be studied. As Frasca (2004: 21) puts it:

Video games not only represent reality, but also model it through simulations. This form of representation is based on rules that mimic the behavior of the simulated systems. However, unlike narrative authors, simulation authors do not represent a particular event, but a set of potential events. Because of this, we have to think about their objects as systems and consider what laws govern their behaviors.

The rule system that enables players’ interaction with the game also intrinsically limits it. Typically, a game provides players with a limited number of possible actions and its game play consists of their iteration. Bogost (2007: 12) refers to these typified actions as “procedural forms” and defines them as the common models of user interaction as utilized by particular video game genres. For example, typical procedural forms for the real time strategy genre are gathering resources, building, and commanding units, whereas typical procedural forms for first-person shooters are movement, shooting, and taking cover. In other words, game genres emerge from the assemblage of similar procedural forms. As suggested in my previous research (Šisler 2008: 214), the video game industry reinforces the iteration of proved and successful patterns in game genres and content, mainly due to high production costs and the competitive nature of the game market. Therefore, in games utilizing the same genre we witness almost identical patterns of representation and game play.

This article argues that representations of Palestine and Israel in mainstream video games oftentimes exploit cultural schematizations and clichés. Moreover, given the lack of media critique and academic coverage, these schematizations seem to appear in games in a more overt and explicit manner than in other media (Reichmuth and Werning 2006: 47). At the same time, many video games dealing with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict directly serve parallel, albeit contradictory, political and ideological interpretations of real-world events. This is achieved not only by persuasive narrative and graphics, but also on the level of game play, by shaping and limiting a player’s interaction with the simulated reality. Bogost (2007: ix) calls this new form of persuasion “procedural rhetoric” and defines it as the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions, rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures. For example, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively, procedural rhetoric is the practice of authoring arguments through computation and execution of processes. In the case of video games, the term procedural rhetoric means that the rules of the game themselves convey a persuasive message to the player.

This article focuses on the structural layer of games, i.e. on their rule system and procedural forms, in order to explore how they (re)construct real Palestine and Israel. By doing so, it reconsiders the ability of video games to model reality and/or to mediate the authentic representation of lived experience. Essentially, this article argues that the procedural forms, i.e. the possible actions of player, fundamentally determine and limit the ways reality is communicated. A number of games analyzed in this article, albeit produced by different developers and providing fundamentally different evaluations of Middle East history and/or the Arab-Israeli conflict, share in common procedural forms and/or procedural rhetoric. I am not suggesting that various producers utilize the same discursive strategy and result in similar content, nor am I equating producers’ contradictory political and ideological viewpoints. My focus is on game genres, and my critique is on two contrasting but equally significant and simultaneous aspects of video games: the persuasive power of procedurality and the inherent limitations thereof.

This article stems from research based on content analysis of more than 50 video games dealing with Palestine/Israel, other materials related to these games such as booklets, manuals, and websites, alongside interviews with different game producers. The content analysis involved playing the games while taking notes, recording the narrative and analyzing the structure of game play via simplified Petri Net formal description (Natkin and Vega 2003). The games were played in English, Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi. In what follows, I classify games according to their historical time frame and genre which is typically used to render that particular time frame.

Replaying History in Strategy Games

A substantial amount of video games that take place in the historical and quasi-historical Middle East are not geographically located in any particular country. Instead they exploit Middle East textures, topoi and characters in an Orientalist and fantastical manner. Particularly in those games produced in the United States and Europe, the Middle East is construed as an exotic, timeless, and ahistorical entity (Šisler 2008). Games that take place in the historical land of Palestine and are based on real events are significantly less common and almost exclusively exploit the topic of the Crusades, like Age of Empires 2, Stronghold Crusader (Gathering 2002), Civilization 3: Conquests (Atari 2003) or Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft 2007).

With the exception of the action game Assassin’s Creed, all of these games utilize the strategy genre: be it real-time or turn-based. In terms of representation, they constitute a significant exception from the general framework which depicts Arabs and Muslims as the cultural ‘Other’ (Šisler 2008; Reichmuth and Werning 2006). Most of the above-mentioned games located in Palestine allow players to take on the role of an Arab/Muslim hero. Both Age of Empires 2 and Stronghold: Crusader feature Saladin’s campaign to ‘free’ Jerusalem. The introductory narrative in the former summarizes the conflict as “an attempt of once-cultured Saracens to drive back the invaders and save their homeland.” Upon closer examination, however, we see that allowing the gamer to be an Arab or Muslim does not necessarily change the schematizing framework itself. Most of the games in question stay within the cultural stereotypes that surround the Crusades in European popular culture. Choosing Saladin, oftentimes depicted as “the Noble Prince of Islam,” to be the virtual Muslim representative does not in fact contradict Orientalist tendencies. Saladin as “far nobler than any competitor” (Stanley 2002) can be easily incorporated into the narrative of European knighthood. Other Arab rulers remain within the typical scheme, such as the computer-played opponent, the Caliph, in Stronghold Crusader: “Cruel and vindictive, the Caliph is skilled at bringing misery to both his own people and to yours. If he can get his tyrannical act together, his underhanded methods of fighting will prove a constant thorn in your side.”

Civilization 3: Conquests and Assassin’s Creed take a remarkably different approach to the issue of representation. The scenario entitled “Middle Ages” allows players to choose from four Christian and four Muslim rulers: all are individualized and presented in a culturally sensitive way. Similarly, in the action game Assassin’s Creed, the player represents Altair, an elite assassin, whose task is to eliminate both Crusader and Saracen leaders in the time of the Third Crusade. The in-game narrative states that Altair comes from a mixed Christian-Muslim relationship, leaving his personal religious adherence an open question. His violent mission is framed by a broader ethical context of stopping atrocities committed by both sides.

Fig. 2. Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, 2007).

Production of video games in the Arab Middle East is in the early stage of development, and the number of games produced remains relatively low. Most Arab and Muslim producers are strongly concerned with what they posit as their misrepresentation in US and European games (Šisler 2008). The key topics pertaining to Arab production continue to be issues of identity and religious and cultural relevance. This also applies to the two games dealing with historical Palestine: real-time strategy game, Quraish, and action adventure game, Swords of Heaven (Afkar Media, in development). The first retells, in the campaign called “Conquer of Syria,” the story of Khalid ibn al-Walid’s conquest of Jerusalem in 637 AD, whereas the latter will, according to its author Radwan Kasmiya, “cover the Crusades from a Muslim perspective and explore the rise of extremism on both sides and the religious and cultural roots of the modern crisis.”[1] Quraish is distinctively based on Islamic historiography and pays attention to topological, linguistic, and cultural details, as well as to the representation of the Byzantine enemies.

Interestingly, there are no video games that include the historical land of Israel. This has led one individual programmer, Richard Ballantyne, to create a “mod” for the game Civilization 3, which effectively adds Israel to the game along with relevant figures and sites such as Moses, King Solomon’s Temple, and the Biblical Gibbor warriors. As he explains: “I feel that Israel has made a significant impact on history (and will make a great impact in the future…), and thus feel they should have been included in the game.”[2] Modding means adjusting graphics, data, and sometimes code of an existing game in order to change or create new content. After a mod is created it can easily be distributed via the Internet and online social networks. As discussed later, modding constitutes an effective practice for dealing with misrepresentations and for localizing products into different cultural and religious contexts.

Although all these games vary significantly in their narrative, visual quality and ideological stances, their procedural forms are similar. Most of these games utilize real-time strategy and engage players in limited types of actions: gathering resources, building structures, training units, and fighting the enemy. As Schut (2007) notes, history in strategy games often focuses on some combination of politics, economics, and war. All of the games examined here, with the exception of Assassin’s Creed, demonstrate the centrality of aggressive power and/or acquisition. The structural differences between Arab and Western production are almost dispensable. When Kasmiya showed me Quraish for the first time, we discussed the level of realism achieved by the game, through aspects such as the introduction of water as a crucial resource in a semi-arid landscape, or the economic and religious connotations of slavery. While adding to the game’s realism, these aspects do not alter the fundamental game play. Similarly, Civilization 3 features aspects previously novel to strategy games, like culture, religion, or nationalism. Nevertheless, on the procedural level, their function is to help the player become more politically, economically, and militarily successful. In this context, Galloway (2006: 103) argues that the transcoding of history into specific mathematical models erases its own historical content, because the diachronic details of lived life are replaced by the synchronic homogeneity of code.

Schut (2007) suggests that the hegemonic bias of traditional historical research, focusing on the accounts of monarchs, merchants, and military campaigns, is echoed in most historical video games, ignoring new trends in the discipline of history. Relating this claim to the issue of Palestine, it is worth exploring Assassin’s Creed, the newest of the games in question. It utilizes the genre of action-adventure which gives substantially more space to narrative. The creators stress the game’s high realism in terms of architecture and depiction of daily life in the medieval cities of Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre. Producer Jade Raymond (2007) claims that, in collaboration with historians, Middle Eastern cities are recreated exactly as they were in 1191 AD. Given its topographical and architectural relevance, the game appeals to many Middle East gamers. The landscape of Assassin’s Creed is inhabited by virtual peasants, traders and beggars, women and children – the latter two who remarkably are missing in all the other games. All the characters are manipulated by relatively sophisticated controls, resulting in the creation of a vivid and vibrant medieval city. Nevertheless, on the procedural level the non-player characters are functionalized roughly into four categories: sources of information, contractors, enemies, or final targets for assassination. The structure of player missions is highly repetitive and does not allow for more sophisticated interaction. Yet, despite its limitations, Assassin’s Creed provides space for greater diversity of subjects and conveys more social, cultural, and critical histories than the above mentioned strategy games.

Mediating the Present in First-Person Shooters

The Middle East is a favorite virtual battleground. Especially after 9/11, there has been a significant increase in the number of US and European first-person shooter games focused on the region. Typically, the player controls American or coalition forces. Arabs and Muslims tend to be computer-controlled enemies, represented by dark skin, loose clothes, head cover and other similar signifiers. The enemy is generally collectivized and linguistically functionalized as “various terrorist groups,” “militants”, or “insurgents” (Machin and Suleiman 2006). Most of these games exhibit strong cultural bias by schematizing Arabs and Muslims as enemies in the narrative framework of fundamentalism and terrorism. As a rule, such games do not depict civilians and do not provide background for the deeper understanding of the conflict, reinforcing a bi-polar and conflictual frame (Šisler 2008).

Similar patterns can generally be found in the few first-person shooter games located in sites of Arab-Israeli conflict. One of these is Close Combat: First to Fight (2K Games 2005), which takes place in virtual Beirut:

You are the First to Fight – a US Marine on the frontlines of urban combat in Beirut. Lead a 4-man fire team that executes authentic Marine tactics. Move aggressively, knowing your team gives you 360-degree security, and devastate your enemies with precise air and mortar attacks. Experience a first-person shooter so realistic, the Marines use it as a training tool.

The enemies are stereotypically represented as bearded and red-turbaned terrorists described as “radicals from the extremist group Atash led by prominent fundamentalist Tarik Qadan” or para-military uniformed insurgents labeled as “Syrian-backed Militia”. Beirut in Close Combat is a hostile and bombed city, representing, in the words of Höglung (2008), a frontier zone where a perpetual war between US interests and Islamic terrorism is enacted.

Fig. 3. Close Combat: First to Fight (2K Games, 2005).

Conversely, most of the first-person shooters created by Arab designers are located in Palestine and are often based on real stories from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Again, as is the case of historical simulations, these games are usually produced within a larger discursive strategy: to oppose the restrictive coding that American and European games provide (Kavoori 2008; Šisler 2008). Whereas American designers focus on Iraq and Afghanistan as the geographical manifestation of the War on Terror, Arab developers utilize Palestine as the place of a broader struggle for Arab dignity and identity. Emblematic examples are Special Force 2: Tale of the Truthful Pledge, produced by the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and Jenin: Road of Heroes (Al-Khatib n.d.) developed in Jordan. Special Force 2 recounts a story from the 2006 July War between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, while Jenin is based on the Battle of Jenin which took place in April 2002 in a Palestinian refugee camp. Representationally, these games do not differ from the US production model: they simply reverse the polarities of the narrative and substitute the Arab Muslim hero for the American soldier and schematize Israelis as enemies. But unlike the American games, where the hero is usually individualized, Arab shooter games generally promote a higher obligation to a collective spiritual whole (Machin and Suleiman 2006). The focus point is defense against outside aggression. The emphasis is on the just and moral cause of the fight. The introductory narrative for Jenin illustrates this symbolic meaning: “The Battle of Jenin summarizes the issue of Palestine. On one side, a heavily armed enemy supported by the Western colonial forces and on the other side, unarmed and isolated people of Palestine fighting with rocks and light weapons.”

In a similar way, Special Force 2 adopts the rhetoric typical for Hezbollah promotional materials: one of resistance and martyrdom. The game constructs its hero as a fearless warrior winning against the odds, despite being outnumbered by “Zionist forces” (Šisler 2008). A significantly different approach can be found in games produced by the Syrian company Afkar Media which deal with the Palestinian Intifada – Under Ash (Dar al-Fikr 2001) and Under Siege. Both games are partly based on real-life personal stories and their heroes are mostly civilians caught in the spiral of violence. The main character of Under Ash tries to help his friend who is wounded during an anti-Israeli demonstration and he himself is later engaged in a fight with Israeli police. Under Siege loosely recounts the connected stories of five different characters: some of them involving direct combat with the Israeli Defense Forces in fictitious street encounters, some re-enacting real incidents like the 1994 Baruch Goldstein killing in Hebron. In all Afkar Media games the main characters are individualized by emotional introductory video clips and background stories. Nevertheless, as is the case with Hezbollah games, combat remains the only interaction possible with the Israelis. Yet, rendering the combat, Under Siege utilizes distinctive procedural forms, such as using a sling instead of a gun, or taking cover with no weapon available at all. Apart from the symbolic meaning, these procedural forms correspond with the actual reality of Palestinian players more than the heroic Hezbollah games.

One of the few mainstream video games presenting the conflict from an Israeli perspective is Israeli Air Force (Electronic Arts 1998). This flight simulator, developed by a company in Tel Aviv, puts the player “in the air against enemies of Israeli freedom.” The game deals with the 1967 and 1973 wars and summarizes the conflict as follows:

When the enemy can cross the length of your homeland in 15 minutes, every square inch of your nation is a possible target. For the State of Israel, the national air force is the only front line defense. Surrounded by potential enemies, the IAF is constantly aware that a simple exercise could quickly turn into a life-threatening conflict.

Unsurprisingly, games dealing with the contemporary Arab-Israeli conflict reframe it in accordance with the developers’ political and ideological viewpoints. Many designers directly utilize video games for persuasive means, perceiving this media as the cutting edge conveyor of political and ideological messages, particularly those targeted at youths (Galloway 2006; Šisler 2008). Yet despite their opposing messages, on the procedural level these games share structural similarities.

First, all of them emphasize the high level of realism simulated by their procedural forms and depicted by graphical representations. Close Combat states that it is “so realistic, the Marines use it as a training tool;” Israeli Air Force claims “unparalleled terrain detail using real stereoscopic satellite data on the Middle East, with photo-realistic coloring and true elevation;” Under Ash tells “real stories about Palestinian people as they were documented by United Nations records”; and Special Force is simply “based on the lives of real people.” The phenomenon of legitimization of the game’s content through a surrounding narrative that is “based on reality” is widespread in digital games. Unlike lens-based media, video games aiming to be non-fictitious cannot claim any direct link to reality. As Halter (2006: 258) puts it: “Descriptive realism befits a visual technology that is increasingly photorealistic, yet essentially distinct from the indexical basis of photography: unlike its nineteenth century predecessor, computer-generated imagery has no natural relationship to any real-world referent. Thus, this relationship must be demonstrated, constructed, or asserted by other means.”

This “legitimization by reality” is established on various levels – through the photorealistic verisimilitude, topographical correspondence to the real world and claims of close collaboration with experts during the game’s development. Nevertheless, the realities constructed by the games are of a highly selective nature with certain parts missing or obscured. As Galloway (2006: 72) notes, realistic-ness and realism are most certainly not the same thing. The more precisely these politically engaged games mimic the real world in terms of descriptive realism, the more they give additional credibility to their presentation of reality in terms of narrative. They all purport to be both realistic and real, meaning that the narrative that the gamer becomes part of, is historically and ideologically accurate (Höglund 2008).

Generally speaking, action war games do not feature civilians and they reconstruct modeled landscapes as being inhabited solely by combatants. Interestingly, Under Siege and Close Combat feature civilian non-player characters, making them exceptional. Moreover, in both games, when the player kills a civilian, he is penalized by an instant game over: the ultimate punishment in game logic. Yet, the developers’ motivations may vary. Radwan Kasmiya, author of Under Siege, told me that by bringing both Israeli and Palestinian civilians into the game and by penalizing the killing of either one, he delivers a clear moral message. Destineer, the studio which designed Close Combat, was originally asked by the US Marines Training Command to develop a simulation that would allow squad leaders to make tactical decisions based on real urban battlefield conditions (Halter 2006: 262). Therefore, the presence of civilians in the game presumably serves as a more realistic environment for tactical simulation.

Finally, and most importantly, the rule-based system of these games utilizes more or less the same procedural forms. All of them, except Israeli Air Force, adopt the genre of first-person shooter. Although this genre offers relatively high levels of exploration, free movement, and manipulation with various objects in the virtual world, the only interaction possible with the non-player characters schematized as enemies is to fight. The pre-defined rule structure frames the player’s choices and doesn’t give them any alternative solutions to violence. As such, as Höglund (2008) argues, these games render the Middle East a site of perpetual war both through their marketing strategies and through game semiotics. The gamer can only be a soldier willing to fight the virtual war, thus supporting the games’ political rationale.

Mediating the Present Reloaded: Modding & Countergaming

Mainstream video games can be appropriated and subverted by individual gamers through modding. Through a Syrian mod for the game Red Alert (Virgin 1996), Palestinian “resistance fighters” have replaced Americans together with a new narrative, graphics, and Arabic audio; one gamer added the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) into Command & Conquer: Generals (Electronic Arts 2003), along with a new scenario in which Syria can finally be subdued; several West Bank cities have been re-created for virtual skirmishes by Palestinian programmers in mods for the first-person shooter game Counter Strike (Sierra On-Line 2000). As is the case of the Israeli mod for Civilization 3, players mostly feel that “their” perspective is missing in the original game and thus strive to change the rules.

Moreover, the emerging scene of so-called “independent games” – complete games created not-for-profit by individuals or small teams – provides a vital alternative to what many perceive as “the dictatorship of entertainment” (La Molleindustria 2004). For example, the Israeli Digital Art Lab in Holon hosted an exhibition called “Forbidden Games” in 2006, displaying a variety of alternative video games related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. As curators Danon and Eilat (2006) explain: “The alternative introduced by the [independent] games is embodied in the political and ideological content, but also in their suggestion for reconsideration of the potential inherent in the medium, the language, and the open code for creating a single package, combining values with hours of pleasure and suspense.”

Bogost and Poremba’s (2008: 18) notion of the authoritarian observer is helpful here: one who creates the illusion of freedom while constantly confining it, the most inherent “dictatorship” imposed on players by the procedurality of mainstream video game lies in the games’ adherence to a binary system of wining or losing (Frasca 2000: 3). In that sense, the only true alternative to the mainstream entertainment industry is one which transcends this binary framework itself. As Galloway (2006: 108) notes, mods tend to conflict violently with the mainstream gaming industry’s expectations for how games should be designed. Many independent titles criticizing official political rationale also undermine the goal-oriented, binary logic dominating interactive entertainment.

For example, War in the North (2006) is based on the 2006 war in Lebanon. The player must mark targets – launchers, houses – for IDF aircraft. As the game progresses, losses on the Israeli and Lebanese sides, damage to the capacity of the enemy (Hezbollah), and the level of objection to Israel in world public opinion are tracked. The game is a reflection of the Israeli perception of the war, beginning with international objection to Israel before the first shot is fired. As the number of Israeli casualties rises, objection decreases, and Hezbollah’s fire-delivering capacity catches up to and even surpasses that of the Israeli Air Force (Danon and Eilat 2006).

Raid Gaza! (Newgrounds 2009), an anonymous game released three days after Israel launched air strikes on Gaza during the operation “Cast Lead” in 2008, represents another example. The game takes a critical stance against the justification of Israeli military actions. The player defends the Israeli town of Sderot against Palestinian Qassam rockets by building missile silos, barracks, headquarters, and airports, and using them to attack the Gaza Strip. The ultimate goal of the game is to kill the most Palestinians in three minutes. The overwhelmingly disproportionate military means between both sides inevitably results in most casualties on the Palestinian side.

Fig. 4. Raid Gaza! (Newground, 2009).

Finally, the most prominent game subverting both the political and gaming framework, is an Israeli activist game, Wolmert against Rallah (2006), created during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Two interchangeable Middle East cities are engaged in an exchange of rocket and mortar fire under the portraits of Hassan Nasrallah and Ehud Olmert. When the player hits an enemy’s position, it immediately provokes a stronger retaliation. The incessant bombardment finally leads to the total destruction of both cities. In a rare case of ceasefire, the virtual inhabitants slowly reconstruct their cities – until a new attack starts their demolition all over again.

These three games successfully appropriate what were originally entertainment media for social and political criticism, but they also destroy the schematizing binary logic of wining or losing. While achieving the final goal set by the game, the player inevitably loses. In Wolmert against Rallah, subduing the enemy results in the destruction of the player’s own city; in Raid Gaza! victory is achieved automatically but simultaneously mocked and denounced; and War in the North simply frustrates the player by not allowing him/her to achieve the goals set by its rules. In the words of Galloway (2006: 111), “mods undercut themselves to such a degree that they almost cease being games.” Yet, as Bogost (2007: 42) puts it, “procedural rhetorics do not necessarily demand sophisticated interactivity.” Although all of these games simplify real-world events, the reality they construct is, in the end, more real. For Israelis and Palestinians, these games portray their actual experiences, anxieties, and frustrations more so than mainstream flight simulators and first-person shooters.

Envisioning the Future in Persuasive Games

The Iranian cultural institute, Tebyan, which is subsidized by the Iranian government, recently produced the action game Resistance (2008) set in the year 2015. The player controls Hezbollah commandoes sent to Israel to seek and destroy a secret military program focused on the development of an unknown weapon of mass destruction. The game utilizes a classic first-person shooter framework, with Israeli soldiers as enemies. Instead of the realistic video clips mimicking actual Hezbollah operations, such as in Special Force 2, the introductory video for Resistance adopts science-fiction cartoon esthetics portraying Hezbollah commandoes as super heroes. Essentially, Resistance is a clear response to US military games:

Computer games can be used for positive or destructive means. The latter represent games preparing the public for military campaigns, such as attacks on Iraq or Afghanistan, and misrepresenting Muslim forces. [Authors of these games] misuse their monopoly for developing and publishing games. [...] Therefore we aim to develop games in accordance with Islamic and Iranian values.

Hamid Roustaie, manager of Tebyan, argues that Resistance is essentially about defense, since in the game “the Zionists are developing a weapon which could destroy the whole world.”[4] Despite this rhetoric, the game adopts typical procedural forms of first-person shooter genre and does not result in any clear outcome – the secret materials are found, but the development program is not stopped. The future of the Arab-Israeli conflict is omnipresent and perpetual, and its significance is intensified by the menace of modern science.

Fig. 5. Resistance (Tebyan, 2008).

Two recent games with educational aims provide substantially contrasting views of the future. Global Conflicts: Palestine (Serious Games 2007) puts the player in the role of a journalist who has arrived in Palestine to write an article about the unfolding events. He gains information by talking to locals, e.g. a Palestinian imam, an Israeli soldier, a Palestinian mother of a martyr, or an Israeli teenager. Communication is central to game play and constitutes the only action the player can perform. The reality in the game is constructed through personal memories, whose presentation to the player varies according to the relationship he has maintained with the particular speaker. This is reminiscent of Bruner’s (2003) notion of narrative reality construction and its negotiability. Moreover, by choosing the role of a journalist – whose perception of events is mediated by subjective testimonies – as the representation of player’s virtual self, the authors immerse the player in this negotiability and allow him to explore it in a particular conflict. In the realm of video games, Global Conflicts is unique in constantly contesting the reality it creates, utilizing the persuasive power of the media for a critique of its own authenticity.

The second game with an educational twist is PeaceMaker (ImpactGames 2007), a strategy game in which the player acts as Israeli Prime Minister or Palestinian President and needs to establish a peaceful solution to the conflict. Compared to the hyper-realistic, computer-generated imagery of the action games mentioned above, PeaceMaker utilizes only still photos and news-like articles for in-game events. Yet, it succeeds in giving a realistic impression:

There’s no animation in PeaceMaker, nothing cute, nothing that someone can dismiss as “only a game.” When a missile strike goes awry, or a suicide bomber strikes, the blood and bodies you see on the screen are those of real people. More than any other game I’ve ever played, PeaceMaker portrays the truth – or a subset of it – both the good and the bad (Adams 2007).

The veracity of images extends itself to the perception of the whole game as portraying “the truth,” although in this case as a serious learning tool. The reality constructed by PeaceMaker introduces an important novel aspect in the domain of procedurality: asymmetric game play. The Israeli side has direct control over those issues that most strongly affect the Palestinians: curfews, border controls, and trade restrictions, and the Israeli PM can send or withdraw his armies at will, bulldoze Palestinian homes, or order missile strikes. Yet he can also, after suitable diplomatic maneuvering, invest in Palestinian reconstruction and infrastructure. The Palestinian President, by contrast, has very limited powers and has to beg for just about everything: money from the world community for domestic projects and security concessions from the Israelis (Adams 2007). Again, by subverting one of the fundamental rules of strategy games – the balance of both sides – PeaceMaker and its procedural forms re-create the actuality of the real-life conflict perhaps better than most more technically advanced mainstream video games.

All of the games dealing with the future of Palestine adopt the video game procedural rhetoric for persuasive aims: be it the pro-peace activism of Global Conflicts and PeaceMaker or the pro-Hezbollah propaganda of Resistance. Yet, the activist games, i.e. Global Conflicts and PeaceMaker, utilize the persuasive potential of procedurality to its full extent; Resistance simply echoes other propaganda material. In other words, where the procedural rhetoric of Resistance exposes the player to a reality that the game’s authors have envisioned, Global Conflicts engages him in the game’s reality construction, making a meta-commentary on the instantiation of an event and its media re-creation.

Concluding Remarks

The interdependency of game procedural forms and the ways in which they (re)construct reality is noticeable in the utilization of particular game genres to model distinctive historical periods. Strategy games are mostly used for modeling the past, while first-person shooter games typically mediate the present. Therefore, despite the different origin and background of individual games, their procedural rhetoric mostly follows unified patterns. As such, history is constructed as a relation between quantifiable processes, where everything is a question of the acquisition and allocation of resources. The present, on the other hand, is rendered a place of perpetual war, where the only interaction possible is relentless violence.

While the procedural forms of strategy games offer a broader perspective which enables diplomacy and negotiations, the procedural forms of first-person shooter games simulate only the tactical level where negotiation with the enemy is prohibited by the genre itself. Although this could partially be a result of the momentum of technology (turn-based strategy games were more suitable for the former generation of computers), the shift in genres inherently reflects changes in the geo-political situation. Thus US games from the early 1990s, such as Conflict (Virgin 1990), adopt a strategy genre and construct the Middle East as a space of tension, where peaceful solution is hard to achieve, but possible. At the same time, first-person shooters produced after 9/11 re-create the Middle East as a frontier zone in the omnipresent conflict between US interests and Islamic terrorism.

More recently, Israeli and Arab games which strive to challenge the dominant modes of representation have appeared on the market. These games utilize various genres, including what Galloway (2006: 107) calls “countergaming”, i.e. modding and alternative game outlets, and present reality from parallel – albeit contradictory – perspectives.

Although many of the games analyzed in this article utilize the same procedural forms and rhetoric, by no means does this indicate that they serve the same rationale or function. In terms of Habermas’s (1984) Theory of Communicative Action, similar procedural rhetoric can be successfully utilized in different games for both “strategic” and “communicative” action respectively. As such, the procedural forms of the strategy game genre could serve for persuasion and communication with the purpose of shaping or changing the other party’s views, e.g. Raid Gaza!, and yet the same procedural form could open a path for rational-critical deliberations, e.g. PeaceMaker. Whereas both games utilize the same procedural forms, such as acquisition and allocation of resources, only the latter fits into the Habermasian term of “communicative” action.

Several authors have already suggested that games depicting the region and the Arab-Israeli conflict which are created by developers in the Middle East, be it Arabs or Israelis, achieve a more genuine level of realism. Galloway (2006: 78) argues that realism in gaming requires a special congruence between the social reality depicted in the game and the social reality known and lived by the gamer; a typical American youth playing Hezbollah’s Special Force is most likely not experiencing realism; whereas, a young Palestinian gamer playing the same game in the occupied territories, is (Galloway 2006: 82). Conversely, Tawil-Souri’s (2007) research suggests that many of the Palestinian kids in the Occupied Territories who play these games are very much aware of the (dis)connection between the reality of the game and the reality in which they live. As a seventeen-year-old boy from Gaza (Tawil-Souri 2007: 547) explains:

Of course there are times when [Under Siege] gets me even more frustrated, because in the game I am this strong fighter, I am able to resist, to avoid bullets, to have weapons, to do all these things I am unable to do in real life. . . . It is worse with [Special Force] because there I have this feeling that I am really beating the Israelis and winning the cause. But I know it cannot happen here. I know it is not so easy to blow up their tanks or shoot down their airplanes.

At the same time, many American gamers can actually experience congruence in Galloway’s terms when playing US games about the Middle East, since these games in fact successfully maintain fidelity with their social reality. Zhan Li (2004: 68) demonstrates how many US gamers have been immersed by watching CNN news broadcasts and playing the desert levels of America’s Army (U.S. Army 2002) during the second Gulf War.

Congruence, which determines the level of realism achieved by the game, is not governed just by whether in-game reality corresponds with the social reality of the player in terms of geographical localization and narrative. More importantly, the rule system which governs the player’s interaction with the game, i.e. its procedural forms, plays a role. A key question is whether the game’s procedurality and its limitations relate to the reality of the player – to the limitations imposed on him by his real-world existence. In this sense, arguably the truly realistic games are those which successfully destroy the dictate of genre, escape the binary logic of wining and losing, and subvert the “dictatorship of entertainment.” Given the paramount influence of game genre on the (re)construction of reality, game designers aiming to create a documentary game (Bogost and Poremba 2008: 15), should not utilize the procedural forms pertaining to mainstream video game genres. Rather they should develop new ones in correspondence with the constraints that produced the actual events they aim to document, as is the case of Global Conflicts or Peacemaker, or, to some extent, Under Siege. If one is to take the definition of game genre given earlier – an assemblage of similar procedural forms – then there is no documentary game genre as such, since every truly documentary game recreates its own procedurality.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on a research project on Islam, the Middle East, and digital media (digitalislam.eu) supported by Charles University in Prague through the research grants “GAUK 125408″ and “GRANTY/2008/547″.

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Notes

[2] E-mail communication, January 2009.

[3] Personal interview, May 2005.

[4] Personal interview, November 2008.

The Coming Crisis in Real-Time Environments:

A Dromological Analysis

by

Ronald E. Purser

Department of Management College of Business

San Francisco State University

The Coming Crisis in Real-Time Environments:

A Dromological Analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper explores and critically evaluates the so-called “real-time” perspective associated with the new media of instantaneous digital communications. Drawing from the work of French postmodernist theorist Paul Virilio, the paper examines, as well as makes speculations about, the cultural implications of digital technologies, particularly in terms of the topographical texture of temporality as we move from chronological to chronoscopic time. In addition, the now popularized notion of “real-time” technology management criticized for its narrow technological determinism and instrumental disregard for lived time and human experience. Finally, the paper considers alternative topographies of time which involve the development of a participatory consciousness.

Historically, the emergence of new technologies has led to profound changes in our sensibilities as well as radical alterations in the collective field of perception. David Lowe, (1982) in his study, The History of Bourgeois Perception, argues that perception is shaped by a collective interplay of factors. Communication media, one of the main factors in Lowe’s theory, acts to frame and filter the way we perceive the world. Basing much of his theory on the work of Walter Ong, Lowe traces shifts in culture that correspond to changes in media: from orality to chirograpgy in the Middle Ages; from chirography to typography in the Renaissance; from typograpy to photography in bourgeois society; and from photography to cinema and television in the modern world.

We now stand at the brink of another profound cultural shift, moving from mass communication to interactive digital media—what Paul Levy (1998) refers to as virtualization. Virtualization is not strictly a technological change, but a different mode of cultural representation. Interactive digital telecommunication technologies are radically altering our personal and collective perception of time, speeding up and accelerating the pace of public and organizational life. As Harvey (1990) has observed, the post-industrialized world is now in an intense phase of time-space compression.

While flexible accumulation, or “post-Fordism,” was a response to the previous crisis of capital overaccumulation during the 70s and 80s, we are now entering a new economic era which I refer to as “Gatesism” (“Post-post Fordism” is much too cumbersome of a term). Gatesism represents a shift from a flexible to an instantaneous mode of accumulation. This configuration is coupled to the dynamic and logic of late capitalism, in which new information technologies provide the means for accelerating turnover times of capital in production (Harvey, 1990). Emerging real-time technologies remove the friction of the real world, by promising ever more “user-friendly” interfaces. E-commerce, for example, collapses the distance between producer and consumer, eliminating the need for intermediaries in the supply and distribution chain. Real-time consumption holds the promise of “instant gratification,” where consumers can buy practically anything, anytime, anywhere. The one-click order feature pioneered by Amazon.com is but one example of how real-time technologies produce the sense of instantaneity. Indeed, the medium of cyberspace enables images to copied, circulated, exchanged and consumed at a far more frequent and faster rate than the consumption in the material economy.

Dromospheric Pollution on the Information Superhighway

In less than a millenium we have progressed from looking through Alberti’s window of linear perspectival vision in the Renaissance to gazing at Gate’s Microsoft “Windows”—the dominant frame into the world of cyberspace. Millions of people everyday fix their gaze upon this flat screen – a technological residue of linear perspective that originated with Renaissance artists. Perspectival technologies have historically been thought of in terms of bridging spatial distance. For example, the telescope was considered as a device that allowed the observer to overcome spatial distance. But as Romanyshyn (1989) points out, the invention of the telescope also created the phenomenological sense that the moon was farther away from us. Talbott (1995) notes that such perspectival technologies are both “a symptom and cause of increasing distance” (p.278). Similarly, cyberspace collapses the sense of distance on the one hand (by creating instantaneous connections), while maintaining the phenomenological sense of a distanced subject that “interacts” with informational objects. In cyberspace, movement across surfaces of information objects—is metaphorically referred to as “surfing the net.” Linear perspective is apparent in cyberspace by the sense of extension that occurs when “navigating” and “traveling” down the “Information Superhighway.”

Classical linear perspective, which mapped the landscape and physical space through geometric coordinates against an apparent horizon, was based on a perception of distance and relief between the observer and that which was observed. With the advent of digital technologies, such spatial distance and temporal relief collapses. What emerges in its place is a heightened sense of immediacy—a “real-time” perspective. Hyper-perspectivity is now apparent as the time it takes to traverse space appears to have remarkably shrunk, creating popularized images of the “global village,” “spaceship earth,” and the “Worldwide Web.” Yet in the midst of this technological conquest of space, we have given little attention to the fact that our temporal ecology is suffering from a new form of pollution—what Paul Virilio (1997) calls “dromospheric” contamination.

The term dromospheric comes from dromos, meaning a race, running. Virilio (1997) contends that the science of ecology has neglected the influence of different regimes of temporality that are correlative to the emergence and diffusion of telecommunication technologies. Dromospheric pollution has to do with the unperceived contamination of “time distances” and compression of our “depth of field” (Virilio, 1997, p.40). In addition, Virilio (1997) maintains that ecology “…deprives itself deliberately it would seem, of its connection with psychological time” (p.23). Indeed, a major source of dromospheric pollution stems from the dominance and hegemony of clock-time as the sole measure and conception of time in organizational and managerial discourse. When coupled to the accelerating and time-distantiating (Giddens, 1991) effects of digital communication technologies, we have the makings of a temporal regime.

Chronological to Chronoscopic Time

Virilio (1997; 1995; 1994; 1991) has gone to great lengths to show that the essence of postwar telematics involves the virtual elimination of both spatial and temporal distance between events’ occurrences and their representations. Speed is no longer limited by moving across geographic distances by means of physical transport—that is, movement through chronological time. Rather, speed is equated with real-time data transmission moving at the speed-of-light—giving rise to what is now understood as instantaneity. A key driver of chronoscopic time is the shift to an instantaneous mode of production and consumption. Virilio characterizes this digitalized speed-up as a shift from chronological to chronoscopic time.

Chronoscopic time, however, is still bound to and dominated by a clock-time world, but it represents a movement away from a cultural rhythm based on analog and spatial sequences, to a world punctuated by discontinuous temporal intensities fixated on the present-instant. Symbolically, such a shift from chronological to chronoscopic time is analogous to the difference in how time is read-out on an analog versus a digital watch. Chronological time is apparent in the mechanical and sequential movement of the analog clock, as we “tell time” by noting the spatial location of hour and minute hands. Unlike their analog counterparts, digital clocks continuously flash an instantaneous read-out of the temporal present-instant. Digital clocks flash a “real-time” display, erasing the sense of transitional sequential movement. In some respects, we do not so much “tell time” when looking at a digital clock, as much as the clock “tells us.” Table 1 below shows the shifting orientations and cultural representations associated with the shift from chronological to chronoscopic time.

Table 1. Contrast Between Chronological and Chronoscopic Time Features

Temporal Sense-Making. The shift from chronological to chronoscopic time involves a radical change in temporal orientation, and the very means by which we make sense of our lives. Chronoscopic time signals an intense compression. The extensive time of history, chronology, and narrative sequence implodes into a concern and fixation with the real-time instant. What used to comprise a narrative history—sense-making based on a knowledge of the past, present and future–contracts into the buzz of a flickering present. For Virilio, the metaphor of “photographic exposure” replaces the sensibility of time as a succession of moments of present duration and that of extension in space. Digital media produce a temporality akin to photographic time, where time does not so much pass or move sequentially as it erupts, is exposed, and breaks the surface (Virilio, 1997, p.27). Rather than making sense of time through the unfolding of a narrative (before, during, after), time is perceived more in terms of abrupt and discontinuous irruptions of varying intensities (underexposed, exposed, undexposed). Virilio claims that real-time technologies have an effect of narrowing our time sense, refocusing our attention exclusively on the present, or what Walter Benjamin (1994) simply calls, “now-time.” Thus, a key feature of real-time technologies is that they function as a sort of monochronic filter that screen or cut out concern for the past and future. Noting this trend, Virilio (1997) states:

…the time of the present world flashes us a glimpse on our screens of another regime of temporality that reproduces neither the chronographic succession of the hands of our watches nor the chronological succession of history. Outrageously puffed up by all the commotion of our communication technologies, the perpetual present suddenly serves to illuminate duration. (p.137)

In a chronological world, time as duration was coupled with space as extension. Calendars and clocks served as the dominant means for regulating and synchronizing political, social and economic activities. The emergence of a chronoscopic world parallels the advance of electronic data transmission technologies, which send and receive signals at the speed-of-light. This amounts to a new time standard based on real-time capability for instantaneity, and an accelerated perspective focused on intensive duration of the “the real” moment replacing extensive duration of history.

Perspective. The hegemonic global temporality that Virilio anticipates is a digitalized extension of the perspectival conquest of space. Conquest of space would not have been possible without the products of perspectivisim–accurate maps and representations of the actual terrain, which allowed the observer to occupy an externalized perspective in which the globe could be viewed as a knowable totality. Such maps could abstractly represent the whole population of the earth in one single spatial frame (Harvey, 1990, p.250). Spatial precision provided the tools for drawing property lines, specifying territorial boundaries, delineating social and administrative domains, and of course increasing the accuracy of communication routes (Harvey, 1990. p.249). Space not only became conquerable, but this totalizing vision altered the epistemic order of society.

There was a sensibility, however, that the map was an imperfect representation of the actual terrain–that the “map was not the territory.” Classical linear perspectivie gave us the lens to create a map of reality. In contrast, cyberspace introduces a new global vision and fundamentally different sensibility, where the cartographic image of the globe no longer needs to stand in for or represent the “real world” because in cyberspace the image has become “the world.” Digital hyperperspectivism is creating a new epistemic order, wherein the map is the territory, and, following Baudrillard’s (1983) argument, even precedes or supersedes the actual world. As Nunes (1995) points out, the potential for connectivity in cyberspace “precedes the virtual world it purports to trace; the ‘map’ of this territory it itself the territory—both globe and world at the same time.”

Whereas the Renaissance revolution domesticated space, the Information revolution is domesticating time. Networked communications combined with digital media is producing a “global time,” which has the potential of relocating and reorienting the whole population of the earth in one single time frame. Thus, in addition to a total spatial mapping of the globe, we are now witnessing an effort toward total digital mapping, an attempt—to use Bill Gate’s term—to create an ubiquitous “digital nervous system,” a total temporal connectivity. Virilio’s dystopian vision of global time suggests we will come under the dominion of a “single, monolithic perspective,” the so-called perspective of “real-time.”

For the first time ever, history will be played out under a single form of temporality—global time. Previously, history unfolded according to local temporalities, local spaces. It unfolded in regions, in nations. Now, however, globalization and virtualization have initiated a world time that prefigures a new kind of tyranny…Tomorrow, our history will be played out in the universal time of the instantaneous. On the one hand, real-time becomes more important than real space, and distance and expanse take a back seat to duration, an infinitesimal duration. On the other hand, the global time of multimedia and cyberspace dominates local time or cities and neighborhoods. Dominates it to the degree that even now we are considering replacing the term “global” with “glocal,” a contraction of global and local. (Virilio, )

Limit Speed. Speed as a phenomena in modern life became prevalent when physics separated time from space in the study of heat and movement, leading to such concepts as kinetic energy and vectors. In chronological cultures, the revolution in modes of transport led to the urbanization of space. Communication across distances took place at a relative speed, and communities lived in their own local time. Spatial proximity to terrestial infrastructures such as ports, railways and airports was a key source of economic advantage. The upper limit on speed was that placed on terrestial movement across spatial and geographic terrains. Following the urbanization of space, revolutions in digital transmission technologies—which approach the limit of the speed-of-light—will fundamentally change the topological texture of our temporal environment. The speed of electromagnetic waves reaches an absolute velocity, establishing a new globalized time standard. We have passed from the local relative velocity of terrestial transport to the global and absolute velocity of digital media transmission. Interactive digital technologies will have the effect of “urbanizing time” as we know it. Drawing from McLuhan’s notion that media technologies as “extensions” of man come to function as a total environment, Virilio points out that “…speed is not used solely to make travel more effective. It is used above all to see, hear, to perceive, and, thus to perceive more intensely the present world.”

Social Time. As pointed out above, revolutions in modes of transport—namely the railroads and the automobile—urbanized agrarian space. The vector of progress associated with the growth of modernism mobilized whole populations. The revolution in interactive instantaneous transmission, because it has the capability of eliminating spatial and temporal distance, will have an inversion effect on social behavior. Instantaneous access to virtually any source of information or service, where “everything simply and automatically comes to us,” leads to a growing inertia. The computer real-time interface replaces the geographic interval that was once based on spatial and temporal distance. With anticipated advances in virtual reality technologies that allow for remote action (teleaction), this trend toward behavioral inertia in technological society will increase. Teleaction reduces the need for movement and mobility. Commenting on this foreseeable trend, Virilio states:

…the overequipped able becomes the equivalent of the equipped disabled. There is a menace of infirmity and paralysis. But also a psychological menace, for the future generations of implemented interactivity who could see the world reduced to nothing. Generations may experience a feeling of “great internmen,” of an Earth too small for the speeds of transport and transmissions, a feeling of “incarceration.”

Politics of Time. Politics in a chronological world was enacted within the limit speeds of terrestial movement across geography. Similarly, war (politics by other means) was primarily about movement and intrusion into foreign territory. State politics was concerned with maintaining a territorial economy and defending national boundaries. Empires with superior transport and war technologies could traverse space and gain control from a distance, colonizing distant lands and countries. Politics based on a tyranny of distance required mastery of spatial movement. Politics based on a tyranny of real-time requires mastery absolute speed. Absolute speed is the royal road to absolute power. Real-time technologies obliterate the barriers of distance, which erase the clear demarcations between “global” and “local,” leading to an increasing homogenization of cultures. The new political economy is based on a tyranny of real time, where the speed of commerce dictates local behavior. War in the new global economy is based more on a policy of dissuasion and global control of information. The Gulf War was the first “live war,” which occurred in a local space, but was global in time. Privacy issues, electronic surveillance, and other associated risks of cybernetic control increase as global information networks become ubiquitous.

Ecological Concerns. Virilio contends that we must now go beyond the concerns of a green ecology to encompass the new challenges posed real-time technologies. For Virilio, ecological destruction in the post-industrial/cyberspace economy should be traced to the destruction of distance. The will-to-speed unleashes the absolute speed of real-time technologies, annhilating real space. Dromospheric pollution of our temporal economy is degrading our relationship with the natural and social environment, and radically altering the tempo of lived experience. Pollution emanating from eco-digital technologies leads to a loss of appreciation for the vastness of natural space, a vastness which provided protected intervals of time, periods of delay and relief between events and action.

Digitally induced ecological problems calls for a grey ecology, where critical attention is placed on the dromospheric pollution of time distances and the reduction of real space to nothing. This form of bio-mental pollution has a hidden factor, having to do with how real-time technologies are distorting and diminishing our perceptual “depth of field.” What is key to Virilio’s analysis is the perceptual and aesthetic nature of the environmental crisis.

According to Virilio’s theory, a fundamental perceptual distortion is occurring as the result of mutation of our cultural aesthetic. We are moving from the passive, small-scale optics of geometric linear perspective, to the active large-scale optics of digital media. Small-scale optics, which is derived from linear perspective art in the Renaissance, is extension of human vision as expressed in painting, photographs and film. An apparent and visible horizon serves as a key point of perceptual orientation for making sense of scale and perspective, and a deeper horizon grounded in our collective imagination is instrumental in deriving meaning from our situated experience. For some thing or object to exist, it literally must stand out against the background of a horizon. The depth of field in small-optics is based on the preservation of spatial distance, giving rise to such distinctions as “near vs. far,” “here vs. there,” etc. In contrast, with real-time/large-scale optics, time moves at the speed-of-light, erasing distinctions based on spatial distance. Having instantaneous access from any point in space to virtually any other point in a “real-time instant,” renders such spatial notions as “near vs. far,” “here vs. there,” meaningless. The result: a distortion of our depth of field and fundamental disorientation.

The “trans-apparent horizon” of digital media supersedes physical and cultural horizons, where “…the far prevails over the near and figures without density prevail over things within reach” (p.26). Moreover, real-time technologies introduce a “bug” or mental virus into perceptual field as a new horizon (trans-apparent) generated purely by digital media and electronic transmission of images (trans-appearances) that takes hold over the normal boundary line of the physical horizon, and also plays havoc on the deep horizon of our collective imagination and memory (Virilio, 1997).

In what amounts to a fundamental con-fusion of natural, collective and technological horizons, Virilio posits that dromospheric pollution, if left unabated and unregulated, will lead to a sharp loss of cultural memory and a degradation of collective imagination. Lamenting this loss, Virilio (1997) states:

…a practical consequence of the emergence of a third and final horizon of indirect visibility (after the apparent and deep horizon): a transapparent horizon spawned by telecommunications, that opens up the incredible possibility of a “civilization of forgetting,” a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, since it has no extension and no duration, a society intensely present here and there at once—in other words, telepresent to the whole world. (p.25)

One of the latest proponents of the real-time perspective in business, Regis McKenna, (1997) rejoices this state of affairs, as he exclaims:

We will increasingly find that the technologies of speed will not gives us the time to see or plan beyond the horizon. We will have to think and act in real time. We cannot choose to do otherwise.

“We cannot choose to do otherwise?” This technological imperative sounds dangerously totalitarian. For McKenna, the demand for speed overrides human intelligence and judgment. Fast decision-making in real-time requires instant answers. In order for us to “adapt,” we will have to develop a hyperintelligence (we have no choice), which is not situated in the horizon of human-scale optics, but in the transapparent horizon. Hyperintelligence is pure algorithmic knowing, indifferent to, and decontextualized from, local spatio-temporal horizons. The totalitarian overtones are indicative of the fact that the techno-fundamentalisim inherent in the real-time perspective will redefine and alter the very meaning of human intelligence. To think and act in real-time terms requires a certain kind of willful blindness to the future. To succeed in a real-time economy, people will be expected to function as hyper-informed yet disembodied instruction followers.

Because of the light-speed velocity of electronic data transmission, coupled with the ubiquitous presence of telecommunication networks, accidents will also become more global in scope. Previous accidents such as train wrecks, airline crashes, collapse of buildings, were confined to local territories, and situated in local spaces. We experienced a glimpse of this new type of “virtual global accident” in the stock market crash of October, 1987 which reverberated instantaneously around the globe. The recent Y2K millenium bug was another example of virtual global accident in the making, which required a massive, globalized effort to fix the problem. Critical decisions affecting human and social affairs will increasingly be delegated to computers and network technologies. The risk of global accidents increases as human agency is transferred to computer algorithms.

As alluded to above, perhaps the greatest danger and threat to our temporal ecology is the erosion of human judgment. The ultra-compressed light-time-speed of this temporal environment demands instant reactions to events (in the perpetual present). The time required for sound human judgment, communal reflection and deliberation–the sort of relief necessary for making sense of the world–is simply not available in real-time. Consider this futuristic scenario which illustrates the loss of temporal relief on the human mind:

You can call for a dual-language text of Marcus Aurelius, or the latest paper in Malay on particle acceleration. Your reading can be interrupted by the appearance of a friend in your portfolio, a look at the actual weather in Djakarta, a film clip of Lyndon Johnson’s inaugral, or, for that matter, anything, summoned by voice, available instantaneously, and billed to your central account. “Go to my files,” you might say as you sit at the airport, “and get me everything I’ve said in the last five years about Descartes. I made a remark with a metaphor about the law, coordinates, and virtual prisons. When you get it, put it up on the screen in blue. Take a letter to Schultz and file a copy at home and with the office.” But as you issue, you must also receive, and it never stops. …you miss the days of faxes, when you could hold the paper in your hands and when things were a little slower, but you can’t go back to them, you can’t fall behind, you can’t pass up an opportunity, and if you don’t respond quickly at all times somebody else will beat you to it, even if you have no idea what it is.

The man of 2016…is no longer separated from anyone. Any of his aquaintances may step into his study at will—possibly twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty a day. If not constantly interrupted, he is ta least contnually subject to interruption, and thus the threshold of what is urgent drops commensurately. …No matter how petty a matter, a coworker can appear to the man of 2016..in a trice. Screening devices or not, the modern paradigm is one of time filled to the brim. Potential has always been the overlord of will, and the man of the first paradigm (modern) finds himself distracted and drawn in different directions a hundred times a day… (Helprin, 1999, pp.263-265)

Psychological Disorders. In the chronological epoch, a major psychological disorder was that of spatial alienation. Spatial alienation manifested in forms of withdrawal or feelings of enstrangement from one’s surroundings (e.g., urban space, workplace). Other psychological maladies such as depression reflected various degrees of spatial alienation and spatial dysfunctions. Metaphors for depression are primarily spatially oriented, “feeling down,” “downtrodden,” etc, although temporal orientation is also affected.

In chronoscopic environments, temporal alienation becomes more salient. Wood (1998) describes temporal alienation as a mismatch or discordance between rational/clock-time and lived time. Similarly, McGrath (19xx) notes the importance of such mismatches between rhythms of clock-time and subjective time as sources of stress in organizational settings. Temporal alienation is contingent on two key factors which are inversely related: (1) the degree to which one obeys clock-time; and (2) the sense of one’s own presence (Wood, 1998, p.97 ). In other words, the more one tends to embody and obey the mechanical/digital rhythms of clock-time, the greater the feeling of loss of situated presence in time.

A few words need to be said about this distinction between clock-time and lived-time. As Wood (1998) points out, historically the Western idea of time evolved from Aristotle’s astronomical time, which in turn informed Newton’s vision of an “absolute, true and mathematical time” that exist independently of human presence (p.95). In contradistinction to Aristotlean/Newtonian clock-time, lived-time speaks to our direct phenemological experience of time—a dimension of time recognized by St. Augustine, and later studied by such luminary philosophers as Heiddegger and William James. The interplay between clock-time and this lived dimension of human experience is complex, and I will return to this matter later in the paper.

Suffice for now to note that chronoscopic time is the time of digital communication technology. Just as the mechanical clock commanded and regulated social behavior in the industrial era, the real-time perspective transmitted by digital media is also taking command of social and organizational life. Consider, for example, how telecommunications and computing technologies have blurred the boundaries between work and home. People now talk about having “24/7″ access, meaning, of course, that with the electronic prostheses of cell phones, e-mail, voice-mail, faxes, pagers and palm pilots that they are continuously “plugged in” to the global information network. Even Steve Jobs, the man who made it his mission to get a Apple computer on everyone’s desk, confesses how intrusive these devices have become in his own life, and just how obsessive-compulsive his behavior has become as a result of having “24/7″ access:

Technology cuts both ways. It’s a double-edged sword. …with high bandwidth to my home in place, people can send me e-mail over the Internet and I receive it instantly. What this means is that they learn very quickly that, if I want to, I can respond immediately, even if I am sitting at my computer at home at midnight. But this also means that if I don’t respond instantly, there’s no cover for me to hind behind. They expect of my now. So, at nine o’clock at night, when I’m with my family, it’s very hard to resist the urge to take fifteen minutes and go check my e-mail. It really has invaded my personal life, I have to say. It follows me everywhere, there is no escape anymore. (Jobs, 1997)

What Jobs fails to recognize is that the increase in technological bandwidth has led to a subsequent narrowing of his experiential temporal bandwidth. He, like millions of others, are embodying the dictates of a digitized “global-real time” temporal regime, diminishing their sense of “real-situated presence” in lived time. One wonders even when Jobs is with his family in the evening, if he is really “there,” “fully present”?

Chronoscopic temporal environments tend to foster what appears to be a postmodern form of malaise—what Herbert Rappaport (1990) calls “telepresssion.” The symptoms of telepression combine a cognitive hyperactivity that is immobilized and fixated on the present. As outer events are accelerating at a rapid pace, telepression manifests as a defensive reaction to an unknown futurity. Describing the typical profile of the telepressed individual, Rappaport (1990) states:

The future of this type of individual does create an illusion of successful future extension. …they have “marks” on their time lines that give the appearance of plans. The typical problem, however, is that the future is narrowly defined in terms of present business plans, so that the future is usually not very distant. In addition, this “near-future extension” is often crowded and unrealistic. The overconcentration of goals makes the temporal experience of this person disjointed because time moving too quickly means time not personally controlled. It is precisely this sense of no control that causes the feeling of “inauthenticity” that Heiddegger expounded in his philosophical work. The experience of desynchronization with objective time creates the general feeling that there is no clear purpose to life. (pp191-192)

Rappaport’s clinical observations are suggestive of an often overlooked relationship between time and meaning. Indeed, one could say that the ways in which we embody knowledge of time is intimately tied to meaning or the quality of our lived experience. Consumerism, with its barrage of messages of “instant gratification,” is a contributing factor to what seems to be a growing telepression epidemic. High impact media messages are designed to narrow our temporal attention to the now-moment. But this narrowing of temporal bandwidth never really satisfies, and, indeed, advertisers are intent on feeding us a perpetual stream of messages so that we become “loyal customers.” In effect, continuous hyperattention on the now as the real-time instant of economic transaction actually eclipses the consumer’s sense of situated presence in time (Wood, 1998).

The postmodern subject constituted as a dutiful consumer appears as an Baudrillardian operator without subjectivity or interiority, a human terminal who clicks a mouse to satisfy every passing whim and desire. Living in such an mobius-like immaterial-material world, temporality in chronoscopic environments flashes as a “series of pure and unrelated presents” (Jameson, 1997), making it difficult to construct and weave together one’s life as a coherent narrative (Sennett, 1998). Postmodern temporality:

…can be characterized as an attitude toward time or an experience of time that….places emphasis upon maximum intensity in time, not the living in time that would be a form of praxis, but a more passive fascination or playing…The result is a flashing pointillism, a lived experience as a series of disconnected intensities. Not being able to commit to a future or to take the past seriously, the postmodernist makes do with the present. (Simpson, 1995, p.144).

The “disconnected intensities” which Simpson (1995) attributes to the lived experience of the postmodern self is symptomatic of limiting knowledge of time to the surface of the noumenal world of real-time instantaneity. As Virilio, fond of quoting Paul Klee, states “To define the present in isolation is to kill it.” Virilio likens temporal alienation to a sort of “time freeze.” With this view, time is seen as an obstacle that can compressed (“saved’) through technological means—whether such means are microwaves or pagers. Real-time discourse is confined to this noumenal-surface world, what Simpson (1995) refers to as “external history.” External history is outward-directed, coevolving with the development of technology. It is an instrumental realm where technology is used as a means to satisfy some preestablished end (Tulku, 1987).

Those suffering from acute forms of telepression define their lives primarily in terms of external history; the relationship between time and meaning for them is weak and superficial. Nihilistic attitudes toward life are common. Obedient to the regime of real-time, these people tend to reduce all relations of meaning to instrumental, means-end analysis, “What’s in it for me?” Media reports on dating behavior among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs show many of them deferring it indefinitely, while others approach it as a rational exercise in cost-benefit analysis. Writing before the Internet boom, Rappaport (1990) seems to have put his finger on the temporal pulse of the emerging E-commerce economy. His comments on telepression are worth quoting at length:

…large pool of individuals who cannot effectively extend into the future. In the first case, the images of life beyond the present are stereotyped in terms of career and money. In the broader cases of telepression, the future is more fully blocked, with content that is often just as stereotyped, but in a less predictable way. In either case, the problem centers on the question of whether an individual feels his life is meaningfully propelled by a viable constellation of values. When one lives without a clear value structure, it is both difficult to direct life in the long run and difficult to experience the sense of meaningfulness that comes from following a prescribed course. It is possible to sail a boat, for example, without charts or a compass. However, the absence of a chart prevents the possibility of a journey. One is limited to “day” sailing, so that new destinations and new challenges are out of reach. Eventually the same seascape and circumstances will produce a tedium not unlike the absence of meaning associated with a present-centered existence (Rappaport, 1990, p.192).

Today we hear a lot about those who are consumed by the present, and try to make their living off of it, the so-called “day traders.” Certainly, we could surmise, that the future was blocked for the crazed Atlanta day-trader, who gunned down innocent people, behaving quite unpredictably in the face of what must have seemed like a meaningless dead-end. Sennett’s (1998) latest critique on the personal consequences of the new capitalism goes to the heart of temporal alienation. For Sennett, temporal alienation in the new economy, where there is “no long term,” manifest in the demise of character. Character, according to Sennett, is shaped by the “ethical values we place on our own desires and on our relation to others” (p.10). The loss of long-term commitments, the destruction of loyalty, and the inability to delay gratification—the byproducts of “flexibility”—in reality makes character development difficult and sets our inner life adift. Yet, the lack of temporal attachments is propagandized (by those who stand to benefit) as the sort of “competencies” needed to flourish in the new flexible economy. For Sennett, such an appetite for flexibility that demands weak temporal attachments is pathological, as it encourages a greater tolerance for fragmentation (p.62).

In addition to the perceptual disorders noted above, a fundamental ontological problem will soon emerge as advances in virtual reality (VR) technologies unfold. VR technologies will soon have the capability “de-localizing” all sensory input. Telepresence and teleaction imply that we will be able to “see-at-a-distance,” “hear-at-a-distance,” “touch-at-a-distance,” and even “smell-at-a-distance.” VR technology will present us with an additional, or “double” reality, to make sense of alongside our “actual/concrete” reality. This duplication of reality will require a “split-perspective reality,” or an ability to function in what Virilio calls “stereo-reality.” The challenges of having to function and operate in two worlds at once will be the source of a great deal perceptual disorders in society.

Real-Time Perspective as a Temporal Regime

The real-time perspective is now the rage in the rush to form dot.com companies and adoption of e-commerce business models. Regis McKenna’s (1997) book, Real Time, seized the day, as it opens with the invitation: “Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space seems completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero. Where distance equals a microsecond in lapsed connection time (p.3)” There is a troubling lack of discrimination between our sense of time passing, what I refer earlier in the paper as lived time, or “psychological time,” and McKenna’s compressed clock-time. McKenna (1997) not only conflates clock-time with lived time, but he privileges clock-time and its associative links to technology as deterministic of our consciousness. He defines his position, stating:

Real time is what I am calling our sense of ultracompressed time and foreshortened horizons in these years of the millennial countdown. The change in our consciousness of time is the creation of ubiquitious programmable technology producing results at the click of the mouse or the touch of the button or key. Real time occurs when time and distance vanish, when action and response are simultaneous (McKenna, 1997, pp.4-5).

McKenna (1997) goes on to further define what he means to operate and do business in “real-time”:

Almost all technology today is focused on compressing to zero the amount of time it takes to acquire and use information, to learn, to make decisions, to initiate action, to deploy resources, to innovate. When action and response are simultaneous, we are in real time. (p.4)

Time compression of this sort, which for McKenna is the cause of celebration, is for Virilio a matter of deep concern. “With acceleration, ” writes Virilio, “there is no more here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal—a mix of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies” (Virilio, 1995, p.35). Geometry is negated with real-time technology, as one can be near anything in cyberspace, no matter what the distance. Hence, the need for cumbersome networks of distribution is abolished, and much physical movement can be eliminated. For example, commuting is replaced by telecommuting; attending meetings is no longer necessary with the availability of e-mail, groupware and video conferencing; going to school is seen as a laborious inconvenience in light of the choices that distance learning now offers. Typical innovations and applications of real-time technologies are heralded in the popular business press and digital zines as a positive advance by both consumers and producers alike. Rarely are such real-time technologies assessed for the disorienting effects they may have on our personal, social and collective perceptions. Even McKenna (1997) recognizes that real-time technologies will alter our cultural sensibilities, but his rhetoric bespeaks of an uncritical, inexorable economic and technological determinism:

These instances of instant satisfaction change our frame of reference. They provide different patterns and signals for setting expectations and for judging what is reality, what is truth or fiction, what is good or bad service, what is satisfaction. The cultural and value-laden patterns of our society change as we are taught by our environment to adapt to new ways of doing things. (McKenna, 1997, p.5)

McKenna’s Real Time is among a genre of management books that dictate the need for greater speed and acceleration in organizations, and highlight the importance of challenging time limits. These books share a common and flawed assumption: objective, physical time is superimposed onto lived/psychological time. In other words, the ideas put forth in these books do not distinguish the acceleration of technological time from our psychological time consciousness. For example, McKenna’s conception of real-time has a psychological time component as evidenced in his observation of “our sense of ultracompressed time,” but he devotes the entire book to a discussion of economic and technological imperatives for shortening clock-time cycles. The implicit conceptualization of time as money is treated as incidental and unproblematic.

Adam (1998) argues that associating time with money actually has the effect of “detemporalizing time,” making it into quantifiable commodity that is decontextualized and disembodied from events. The reduction of time to money presupposes that other considerations having to do with variable and contextual conditions—the time of life and living—are irrelevant and problematic. The machine clock establishes a synchronized socio-economic order that is intolerant of variations from the mean. Mechanized and commodified time is dissociated from the multiplicity of rhythms contingent flux of everyday life. In addition, once time is equated with money, dromocratic consiousness dominates all transactions, geared toward the maximization of speed.

The real-time perspective is a temporal regime characterized by such assumptions that time is exclusively objective, decontextualized, and external to the observer. It is an extension of the modernist attempt to subjugate lived experience to the dictates of the autonomous clock. Time, is, however more complex, relative and multiple in its dimensions and meanings. In essence, McKenna and other authors of “fast” books in this genre have priviledged clock time, albeit an accelerated version, and commodified it, ignoring the fact that human and social time cannot fully be explained by the former. As Adams (1988) points out, “Whilst people may use clock-time to co-ordinate, synchronize and order their social life, this clock-time is the means by which such a social life is achieved, but not an explanation for it.” (p.202)

Statements made in reference to time as duration, that is, any attempts to describe rates of change, or trace the timing or sequencing of social action, make use of Newtonian time (Adam, 1988, p.207). McKenna’s real-time perspective as a statement about accelerating rates of change, of the movement toward instantaneity, falls into this category. A key feature of Newtonian time is that it portrays time as an absolute physical reality, and considers that the flow of time is independent of human consciousness. Time in this Newtonian framework is conceptualized primarily as a measure of motion, duration and rates of change. Further, Newtonian time is abstract, decontextualized, and universally applicable. There is an apparent although not direct relationship between Newtonian time and clock time. In theory, Newtonian time is reversible, absolute and flowing continually, whereas clock-time is irreversible, since the numbering system dictates a sequential direction (two always follows one, etc.). We can think of clock-time as a mechanical analogue of Newtonian time. In this sense, “clock time” is a spatial and abstract index for measuring time. As cultural historian Gebser (1985) observed, “To the perspectival age time meant nothing but a system of measurement or relationships between two moments” (p.285). Newtonian clock-time, according to Adams (1988), must:

…be appreciated as an idea in practice: as a material expression of a particular understanding of the natural world, in which time is conceptualised through motion without change, as a spatial quantity which is infinitely divisible units, which can be numerically defined…time as a quantitative measure has emerged as a uniquely human creation…Since it has been shown that clock-time can never be the only social time, it becomes self-evident that social scientists need to use it in conjunction with other forms of social time. (p219)

Beyond Real-Time: Alternative Temporal Topographies

The conception of time as a spatialized quantity—divided into units for measure—is only the surface level, a one-dimensional plane that belies the depth of other temporalities, other topographies of time. Spatialized time is both abstract and linear, defined by quantitative measure, giving rise to such notions as duration, intervals, and sequences. Considering that there are different topographical dimensions of time, spatialized/clock-time can be thought of as the surface layer. Its texture is flat, smooth flowing, regular and relatively characterless. Functioning as a quantitative, abstract concept, it has neither vitality nor meaning.

In contrast, our primary phenomenological experience reveals a qualitatively different temporal texture, characterized by periods and cycles, change and variation, growth and development. In reality, spatialized time is abstracted from a more fundamental, subjective and organic layer of temporality. Clock-time can be thought of then as an “extension,” which, according to Hall (1984), is an “externalized manifestation of human drives, needs, and knowledge” (p.129). Extensions function like language in culture, and when they take on a life of their own, we are engaged in what he calls “extension transference.” Extension transference is apparent when the substitute takes the place of the process that was extended. Commenting on how this occurred with clock-time, Hall (1984) states. “This principle is illustrated by the way in which we have taken our biological clocks, moved them outside ourselves, and treated the extension as though they represented the only reality” (p.131).

Industrialization of culture was imbued with the clock metaphor, which permeated images of social organizations. With the real-time perspective, extension transference shifts to the computer, our new cultural idol. Extension transference involves a kind of collective amnesia. Clock-time is a collective representation for organizing social and economic activities, which has become abstracted and detached from its roots in consciousness. This process resembles what Barfield (1988) refers to as modern idolatry. We commit idolatry in the way we relate to clock-time and its real-time compatriot, for we have forgotten that temporal phenomena is in actuality a collective representation—a human creation—an extension of a deeper topography of time. We are not idolators because we create idols, but because of our blind worship of externalized clock-time. We are left with a modern picture of time that ignores the central role of human consciousness, and in so doing, treats time as an independent, external phenemonon (which we have to slavishly adapt to).

Given the insights of twentieth-century physics, it is commonplace to know that the activity of the observer is implicated in what is observed. While perception relies on sense organs, it is human consciousness that perceives. It is also an epistemological truism to recognize that the phenomenal world, the world of appearances, is not to be equated with the ultimate reality. When we see a “chair,” ultimately what is “really there” is but a pattern of moving particles. Barfield’s (1988) famous analogy of the rainbow can help shed light on the epistemological issue having to do with temporal phenomena. When a rainbow appears in the sky, we can all point to it. But in reality, if we actually walk over to the end of the rainbow, and look directly at it, there will not be anything actually there. What we call a rainbow is the conjunction of particles of water, the sun, and human vision. Like a chair, the rainbow is a collective representation. It is not a hallucination, for we all claim and agree that we see such an entity called a rainbow.

We can extend this analogy to time, since time is also a collective representation. While we all can point to the clock and agree that time is passing, if we go to look directly for time, we cannot find it. Even our sense of the present is a conventional notion, a relative term. If we attempt to look for the present, it slips away. Time appears to be always moving, never fixed. The “present” is very much like the presence of a rainbow, the outcome of a very powerful collective representation. Moreover, the present is not independent of some object that changes as we normally assume. So called “real-time” appears to be a counterfeit.

One reason time is such a slippery concept to understand, is because it is not based in matter. Our conventional approach is to treat time as some objective referent, based in matter. This seems misguided, as we do not have any sense organs for perceiving time. Noting this fact, Adam (1998) argues that in order to appreciate the complexity of time, we need to embrace our sensual embodiment and tap the evocative power of our imagination. As she states:

Since we have no sense organ for time, we need—even more than for the landscape perspective—the entire complement of our senses working in unison with our imagination before we can experience its working in our bodies and the environment. Such an effort at the level of imagination is needed if we are able to take account in our dealings with the environment of latency and immanence, pace and intensity, contingency and context dependence, time-distantiation and intergenerational impacts, rhythmicity and time-scales of change, timing and tempo, transience and transcendence, irreversibility and indeterminacy, the interrelation between Merk- and Wirkwelt, the influence of the past and the projection into an open future. (Adam, 1998, p.55).

It is interesting to note that “pre-perspectival” cultures (Gebser, 1985) were not detached from their own collective representations as we have are with our perspectival worldview. Barfield notes that for us moderns, “…the only connection of which we are conscious is the external one through our senses. Not so for them.” (p.11). Given our bias toward the senses, it is understandable then why we have so little connection and such a superficial relationship to time, which, is not in matter. This leads us to consider the epistemological link between time and mind, between human beings and phenomenal world may be of a different, perhaps “super-sensory” order. That order, as suggested by Barfield, is that of participation, or, to use Coleridge’s term, the “primary imagination.” To function as moderns, we have suppressed our awareness of our participation with the representational nature of the phenomenal world as a whole, including that of time. Our dominant mode of thinking relies on models (constructed from analytical thought about thought), and then relate to such models as if they were actually and literally true (rather than as representationally and relatively true). In this sense, we have gained the ability of scientific rational analysis, attained the powers of perspective by positioning ourselves as separate from phenemona, but all at the expense of maintaining a nonparticipatory consciousness. As noted above, this has been the function of modern idolatry. Thus, it should come as no surprise why time has been regarded as totally independent of our own consciousness and why such empty notions as “real-time” can be accepted uncritically.

Recognizing the role of participation and imagination in the figuration of temporality leads us to consider other topographies and textures of time. Our dominant cultural concept of time has been limited to the topographical surface—a spatialized view of time—which has led to our propensity to idolize outward-directed extensions. As an alternative, a focus on the participatory nature of temporal perception can help us to “own” and take more responsibility for our own extensions, for human consciousness is correlative to phenomenon. Critical to this process is an examination of how primary imagination (or figuration) constructs our collective representations of temporal experience. Rather than limiting our participation to the surface of time, participatory consciousness offers us a way of exploring the complex topography of “whole-time.” An exploration of whole-time may serve as a counterbalance to the real-time perspective with its insatiable appetite for speed, power, and negation of lived human experience.

REFERENCES

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Gebser, Jean (1985). The Ever-Present Origin. (Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas trans.). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, Calf.: Stanford University Press.

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Wood, John (1998). Redesigning the present. In J. Wood (Ed.), The Virtual Embodied. London: Routledge

….

Conversation between Paul Virilio and Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Paul Virilio: As theme for this conversation about the public view, I would like to quote a sentence from Maurice Merlau-Ponty: ‘The problem, what is the subject of the state, what is the subject of war, is of exactly the same nature as knowing the subject of perception.’
Hans-Ulrich Obrist: The Public View as title of the ‘Jahresring’ is to be seen before an active as well as in front of a passive background. The question of the public nature of art presents itself. Work in public implies active interventions as well as the exposure in view of the control instruments. The construction and/or destruction of the public nature is an important aspect of artistic practice. We ask whether the private aspect can continue to be separated from the public sector or whether that which is public becomes more a kind of negative form of the private. The monument has a function of reminding. With the invention of techniques of replication and the acceleration of pictures, the reminding function has been placed in question. How has the role of the monument changed due to the acceleration of public pictures?

Paul Virilio: The monument is primarily a signal, a sign, an appeal. A monument thus is not bound to refer to past, to an historical or other event. It is primarily a moment of stopping or pausing in the habits of everyday life.

The most important function of the monument to me seems that it causes us to pause, where the urban everyday life is a life of mobility, of mobilization, of forgetting, of habits, of repetition, of rituals, etc. The monument interrupts repetition. It is intended to awaken, to provoke. The monument can be architectural, such as all great memorials. One identifies the monument much too much with the colossal. I believe there are pictures that have the function of a memorial as well as there are paintings, sculptures, and architectural works that have a memorial function. To me this aspect seems to be an important element of the public image: the public image, however, is far more than just this monumental dimension. Indeed there is no private image anymore. In a certain way, every structured society organizes – Merleau-Ponty says that explicitly – first the perception. Tell me how you perceive and I tell you who you are. Tell me which collective public view you have and I tell you who you are. The education, the training of perception is done via rituals and the repetition of dance.

Through the religious ritual, through liturgy there is pageantry which provides the fundamental infrastructure for the people, the axis of the public. I would say there is only the public view. Every epoch reconstructs the perception of society. The state, the function of the state primarily is the organization of the world view. The state is the world view, the perception of the world. Even before the acts of command, the commands of organization, work, war, there is an alignment, a training of the view. In this sense, the perception of the Quattrocento really is the manifestation of a world view that continues into our time, but is dwindling, especially today. I believe in the end of the perspective of the Quattrocento and in the development of a new perspective.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Jean Gebser tried in his texts about the development of the history of perspective, which he conceived in 1932 and wrote in the 1940’s, to work towards an aperspective perception of space which succeeds the unperspective and perspective world. he was not yet able to realize the connection between this development and the speed of media and the resulting tyranny of real time, but already he predicted a new age of perspective.

Gebser differentiates between three stages of perception of space: the unperspective world includes the period of time from prehistory until the Renaissance and gives witness to a close bond between the inward and the outward. The opposing elements of the pillar and the cave are not yet connected to a single space construct. In the Renaissance, two dimensional thinking and seeing is expanded into three-dimensionality. Man begins to see himself as a subject. The background in front of which he appears is objectified. The perspective period seems today to have reached an end point. ‘Fear and being pleased as well as isolation and loss of individuality’ (Gebser) create the tension necessary for the transition. Gebser’s idea of the aperspective space remains rooted in the media of painting and of sculpture. Based on the simultaneous presence of different views he sees, especially in Braque and Picasso, a concretization of time. Paul Virilio: I try to explain a perspective which no longer is the perspective of real space, of an altarpiece or the stage setting of the Italian theatre, or the ideal Renaissance town, but rather the perspective of real time, the perspective of teletechnologies which are technologies of the ‘live’, of live transmission, technologies in which electronics dominate over optics.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: We have proceeded from the monument. Due to loss of individuality, its importance and function change. And …

Paul Virilio: The monuments are mass media. The monuments are really the first means of mass communication. When the people from the Middle Ages go into a cathedral or a Protestant Church, they do so in order to obtain information. Thus the monument is the first means of mass communication and as a consequence a dematerialization then takes place in the book, then in the press, in radio broadcasting and on TV. In a certain respect, the audiovisual media are the heirs of the monument.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: The one who observes becomes the one who is observed?

Paul Virilio: Here we come back to the sentence by Marcel Duchamp: ‘It is the spectators who make the pictures.’ The picture does not exist through the view or the hand of the artist who creates the picture, but through the view of the potential spectator. Marcel Duchamp’s sentence is mass media: it is not the painter who makes pictures, it is not the one who acts, it is the spectator. It is the one who looks over the shoulder. One never looks alone, one always looks together, that means a monumental, pictorial, or other work can only come into existence if there are two perspectives, the one being the view of the one who acts, the one who paints the picture, the one who constructs the building, and the other one being the view of the spectator who appreciates the picture. Therefore the view multiplies, there is no individual view. A collectivizing of the view takes place: this is probably the reason why some exceptionally important artists have disappeared from art history, because they have not found any spectators who looked over their shoulders, because they have remained alone in their view. They have created on their own and no one has come to look at their work and their picture, to discover. I am convinced that there is an entire Pantheon, a Louvre, a Pinakothek full of exceptional, unique artworks that have disappeared because this view has remained alone, has not doubled through the public spectator, be he an art lover, a bishop or art critic.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Klier’s ‘Giant’ shows the permanent presence of surveillance cameras as a scenario between Huxley’s Brave New World and Mussak. The movie lives in the tension field of a supernatural aura of removed pictures on the one hand, and the underwater character which threatens to drown everything on the other hand. The world of the cameras proliferatively goes from the outer space again back into the inner space. It resembles Escher’s endless loop, a stream of surveillance pictures from which no escape seems possible. Julia Scher even continues this idea by having her own company ‘Security by Julia’ and by actively using surveillance techniques. Scher uses the exhibition situation for the installation of cameras and other instruments of surveillance at strategic spots of the museum or gallery. Her work has an interactive character, the spectator is to be warned of our bodies being public pictures. He sees himself on the screen and thus becomes part of the installation. The system which creates its own pictures returns the view of the spectator: the artwork looks back.

Sam Samore uses the medium of photography like a voyeur. He gives order to series of photographs. Although everyday pictures of people reading their newspaper or sunning themselves come into being, I see the photographed person as a victim and I see an alien danger behind him. The people in his photographs are potential victims and potential perpetrators at the same time. The spectator generates chains of actions like a detective where there are none. All of a sudden there is a whole crowd of detectives, spies, terrorists: of horrid and hunted people. Also an artwork which I have recently seen at Hans-Peter Feldmann’s fits here. The combination of two positive pictures – a girl who holds her mother’s hand during a Sunday walk, and a picture of the Matterhorn – when combined suddenly fall into the incomprehensible. No doubt something terrible has happened to the child in the mountains.

Paul Virilio: The term ‘feedback’ is actually much better known than ‘viewback’. The term ‘feedback’ clearly shows that one looks together, that a single view does not mean seeing, but making blind. In a certain respect, the view is collective, it is never done individually or alone, never from a lonely point. Today, however, the fact is new that the spectators are not amateurs anymore, nor critics, nor discoverers, but spokesmen, intermediaries. The journalist is an example of that. The journalist who looked at the Gulf War for us has completely deceived us. The Gulf War is an exceptional moment of picture warfare. For the first time the pictures, the weapons of communication, not only provided an opportunity to create a way of seeing, a public view, but to officially blind, deceive the public with the help of the military.

What is bad is that the spectators are not passionate people or accomplices anymore, but intermediaries in the sense of people who exert a function to which they are not committed, a function which is that of a machine, or mechanical. The cameraman who films the war in the desert sand directly on the spot does not, such as Duchamp’s spectator, transmit something that he was told to look at, something that he was ordered to do by the information pool controlled by the army, or the boss of the editing committee.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Due to the disappearance of the accomplice, the question about the function of artistic practice posses itself anew.

Paul Virilio: In the new public view, that is, that of electronic mass media, lies a moment of making blind which will continue to develop. Since Renaissance artists had a kind of provocatory function: with a lot of skill and cunning they pointed out new things. Let’s take the Impressionists, the Cubists, Muybridge, or Marey, the artist has a function of revelation, a function which in my mind presents a contrast to information and enlightenment. Now with the public view of electronic machinery and direct live transmission, there is no work anymore, there is nothing but a camera-bearer. In this respect the Gulf War was particularly tragic since it has destroyed our confidence in the credibility of means of communication for good. One new well that there was biased interpretation, but that is not really bad. Every view is an interpretation. There simply was conscious manipulation and thus blind-making of the audience. The public view has turned into public obscuration, and that for six months, this is what makes the event so unique.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Gebser’s dream seems to have failed.

Paul Virilio: That means that the automatic view has become a view which is supposed to make the television spectator blind. That is what is new. Since one was allowed to believe in transparency, the tele surveillance by Michael Klier seemed like a view of quasi-godly transparency. One has, however, realized that this quasi-godly transparency is a blindness, a weakness. But for this, the Gulf War was necessary. If one looks at the surveillance cameras, this certainly has a police dimension. But during the Gulf War, so much was said and shown in order to fixate the view, and this was for the first time organized by the army, by the Pentagon, and in secret agreement with the press. Let us take an example from today, June 8, 1991. The Nouvel Observateur publishes on page 1 an article with the headline ‘How We Have Been Lied To’. That is scandal. The journalist should have written ‘How You Have Been Lied To’, for it was his work, he hides.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: The picture apparatuses have been programmed for ‘live coverage’ and the eye of the camera is organized and programmed. Much of this was anticipated by you in the ‘Logistics of perception’ long before the Gulf War. During the war you quoted Kipling: ‘the first victim of war is truth’ and have associated that not in small measure with Ted Turner’s CNN.

All pictures which are outside the planned program are excluded or even prevented. It is this apparatus-imminent program for the production of pictures which offers a starting point for forms of resistance. The game is continued, if necessary against the picture apparatuses and their tendencies that are making themselves independent in order to thus rediscover the unexpected.

How do you see the role of photography?

Paul Virilio: I would like to quote Robert Doisneau: ‘Taking photographs means not to obey’. Photography, painting, literature, the press, they mean disobedience. Who obeys does not inform anymore. In some way art always is disobedient. The difference which you can make between fine arts and commercial or little art is today corresponded by the difference between the art that obeys and the art that does not obey. Great art does not obey. All others are arts that are of low quality, even pitiful.

This has been true for painting since the rise of Impressionism with respect to the trite, to realism. This is true for abstract art with respect to the figurative. This is true for hyperrealism with respect to the abstract. There is no art without a break and without disobedience. The contemporary technologies of public picture production and the public view, however, aim at making us compliant and obedient, not only the television spectators, but also the camera operators and those who act in the picture of this world. Be it journalist, film producer or video director, everyone has the same function, that is admonish, to awaken. A genuine monument does not tell us to obey, it makes us stop and pause, do not forget! I will give you an example. In the 1980’s I am driving through Berlin and arrive at the Berlin Church which is located in the city center and which is destroyed. And in the vicinity of this church I encounter a billboard with the inscription ‘Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Do Not Forget!’ The sign has the function of a signal. Here you see the ruins of Berlin, but do not forget the ruins of … I would call that disobedience, because when I am in Berlin, I am thrilled by the pleasure, the alternative society, that is the 1980’s. And all of a sudden something tells me to stop! Wake up! That is the monument, the memorial. That is the moment when I am called. No view of the world develops without a break. In this respect Galileo is as important as Copernicus – not due to their systems but due to the change they caused to come about. They have destroyed one view of the world in order to replace it with another, and thus breaking is the fundamental in their work. They have placed the world in a different light, and not for me the great philosophers are not so much the Hegels, Kants, or Platos, but rather the men of change such as Heraclitus or Nietzsche. That is the capability for disobedience. That is, to be no Hegelian anymore when everybody loves him, to be no Marxist anymore when everyone loves him.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: What public does the artist want? Especially with respect to the public claim of a work, the question poses itself what you call disobedience.

The model of drawing back seems to be rather rare in today’s situation. The break presents itself more often in a free interplay with various contexts in which the artist consciously enters into relationship with his political, economic, and social environment and defines himself through these relationships.

The artist concretely lets himself in for a certain environment but reserves himself the liberty of leaping and the possibility for distance. It seems important to me to not raise this game of context and the political, economic, and social connection of art into a principle. The question about the public view must also do justice to the fact that good paintings continue to come into existence. The painting comes through the back door.

Paul Virilio: It is certain that science, technology, physics, and metaphysics cannot be separated from art. Art is a place where science encounters metaphysics. It is the concern of art to be the bond between these areas. I will give you an example: for Italian painting of the Renaissance period, there is no difference between the science and physics of that epoch and the paintings of an Uccello, a Piero de la Francesca, the writings of an Alberti or the architecture of a Brunelleschi. There is a unity between science and technology, faith, the metaphysical dimension of art.

By and large there was a unity between art and technology which was destroyed in the 18th century. I would like to use architecture as an example. The break between the art of building and the technology of construction is an invention of artillery in the 18th century. Artillery had such power that materials had to be invented which could not only withstand their own weight and load – that is natural factors – but also artillery. And thus it was the engineers of the Ecole Mezieres, the first big school of military engineers which formed during the revolution with Gasparin Ecole Polytechnique, who all of a sudden said about certain techniques of architecture: ‘Now we have a new technique, the reinforcement of the building so that it withstands the thrust, the impact. That is the task of the artillery man, not that of the bricklayer’. From then on there have been two worlds, a world of art, of architecture, and the world of construction technique, of military engineering. You can see up to what point this break later takes place everywhere. This is an aberration. For Marcel Duchamp, not those are artists who create bidets, but the spectators. This is closely connected with the memory as I have explained in my book about the bunker. In a certain respect they link to the great unity between the scientific, the technical, the metaphysical ideas and the ‘art of seeing’ as Huxley would say. Seeing is an art, not painting, not forming, not sculpting, not carving, not constructing. The first art is seeing. Seeing is collective. Seeing is never done alone.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: The genuine disobedience does not seem to exist.

Paul Virilio: It is hard to say what disobedience means for disobedience is actually surprising. It is not easy to describe a surprise. One encounters here an interest of mine, i.e. that for coincidence. It is hard to say which event will take place tomorrow. Art is based on disobedience, on break. It is, however, impossible to predict tomorrow’s coincidence. One can only see a past event that has taken place, one can however, not predict the event which will break our view of the world and change us. Today it is very important to be alert, to watch out for the ‘machine de vision’, that is for the new electronic machinery. The Gulf War has shown that there is a mode of control of the public view to an unprecedented extent. In this respect the Gulf War is symptomatic for the future view of the world. In exactly that way the break with Paulo Ucello manifests itself in fights in the great battle of the opposition of his knights. Every epoch of war is accompanied by change, mutation of perception. The function of the eye is the function of the weapon. In war one does not only experiment with bullets, rockets, grenades, cruise missiles, but one also always experiment with seeing. And the Gulf War has in respect to totalitarian view provided an exceptional public image of which none has spoken. Forty Iraqis, who at the moment of the ground offensive in Kuwait, standing heavily armed in the fox hole, were passed by a drone. A drone is a 10 foot long pilotless model airplane with a TV camera on board which records every event. It is a toy which can be remotely controlled over a 100 mile distance. In a truck there is a screen from which pilots remotely control the drone, operate camera, and record the enemy. And if it is shot down there are no losses. The forty Iraqi solders came out when they saw the drone approaching. In a circumference of 12 miles there was no one. They surrendered to the camera. That is the picture. That is the new signal. At the end of the war they gave in to a flying camera because they knew that someone watched them via that model airplane.

In a certain respect, the coincidence or the break or the disobedience will take place in view of the new technologies, of this new live view, of this total global view. One will have to be a parasite to find a break through this, and in that respect I very much liked the film by Klier, since he begins to ask that question in a prophetic manner. It has to be looked into much closer and much more thoroughly. How, that is the task of the artist.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: As a reciprocal result, an intimacy takes effect, a loss of sense for society. The fear of surveillance techniques and the expansion of the public view is paradoxically accompanied by an ever deeper, but at the same time futile, withdrawal into the private sphere. Which is only confirmed by an embittered despair about anonymous surveillance. This withdrawal in the course of time results in the loss of the ability to think in public dimensions.

Paul Virilio: Absolutely. The new optics is not bad as such. Bad or even shocking, is the function of control. In the ‘Machine de vision’ I mentioned that even industrialization was an element of breaking with art.

Reproduction, the similar object – Andy Warhol has shown that very clearly – was an element of breaking with unicum, the unique worth of an author, with the original. I claim that today we are experiencing the industrialization of seeing. It is no longer the objects which are reproduced in series and become serial, it is attempted to industrialize the common view. This is very good as long as this common view is not industrialized.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Like the CNN where the view of the Gulf was industrialized.

Paul Virilio: CNN was equal to the industrialization of the view of the world. I have seen it like that since August 2nd. This is a very crucial element which one should regard with skepticism. One cannot defend oneself against the industrialization of seeing without simultaneously being against the means which are used.

Another aspect of an obviously paradoxical nature is the question of freedom with the life technique, with real time transmission. A priori real time resists the freedom of interpretation. It happens too fast. During an accelerated recording such immediacy comes into existence that a man can no longer analyze freely. He is paralyzed by the speed, he is passive. How can real time become active? How can immediacy become active? Those are great questions. At the moment there are no answers, at the moment the tyranny of real time is governing. Real time causes anguish which makes me passive as a spectator. The succession of pictures happens too fast. I can not make use of my freedom of interpretation. The freedom of acting, yes, I can aim my camera at this or that. But I do not have time for interpretation. And this as a last consequence endangers democracy. Democracy means dividing decision. And here the decision does not even rest with the camera operator but with the speed of the electronic circuitry and that is the speed of ‘feedback’.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: In the practice of the artist is the possibility of choice, the possibility of distance, of deceleration and interpretation. Therein lies his enormous importance. Paul Virilio: An artist is primarily an interpreter. But when there is no time for interpretation because technology is faster, what happens then? This is an aesthetic question and this is a political question and an ethical question.

Those are great questions which have not been answered yet. In this respect the Gulf War has been extremely negative. With it the tyranny of real time has inevitably started, the tyranny of a picture that escaped the entire world.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: In your essay ‘The Public Picture’, you draw parallels between the tyranny of real time which we experience, and the tyranny of the strongly developed wish for light at the time of the French Revolution.

Paul Virilio: One is subject to an overexposure. The real time overexposes us, it dazzles us. In a certain way we have not learned to wear sunglasses against the live glare. Sunglasses should be invented so that we are not dazzled by real time, that is the task. I am greatly amazed by the increased use of dark glasses. That provides a special look behind which I think something deeper is hiding and that is vulnerability of the view, to want to retire into one’s shell, to shut one’s self off, as if dark glasses were a kind of mask, a protection from view. Such as hard hats protect against shocks and thrusts, dark glasses could protect against the view.

The most interesting glasses I know are those of the Eskimos. The Eskimos make a kind of protection of view from a powderhorn in order not to be dazzled by the snow, those are glasses that have a very narrow viewing slit in front of the eyes.

Not as protection against sun, snow or light reflection, but against electricity, electronics, flashbulbs, changing lighting, we will soon need glasses for watching TV; furthermore, there are glasses for relaxation. Here the metaphor somehow forces itself upon us of those who in or in front of the other’s eyes are victims. For this reason I think that ‘The Public View’ is a very good title.

Behind the public view, the question of the public picture also poses itself. And there, as a city dweller I must say that the public space, the square, the meeting place, the theater hall, remain in – as I would like to call it – polar inertia and are in the process of being replaced by the public view. That means that the material, geographical, and geometrical aspect of the place, the square, the scene is increasingly replaced by an iconographic dimension of the public view. The public view in real time replaces the public place. The representation becomes more important than the actual event.

We are living in an epoch which is as important as the transition from the Middle Ages to Renaissance. This means that everything which used to serve to form a view, the entire public view of the past is presently being hollowed out, depleted. And a new public view has not yet been created. The view has burst like a glass. One is not sure anymore of what one sees. Therefore, also the doubt in the aesthetic of seeing. Aesthetics can only develop if there is a more or less common view of the world. At present this is, however, not the case. Our seeing is done separately, individually. An aesthetic of seeing does not exist in reality. Here we are faced with a basic change, a mutation of life. We are in the process of changing the world.

Paris, 8 June 1991
….

Paul Virilio: The Event Landscape – A Perspective over Time

The Spectator
Christopher Alexander’s title: “A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art” implies the emergence of a new of aesthetic appreciation, that separates the postindustrial, multimedial civilization now emerging from the mentality of the mechanized Newtonian age of the 17th through 20th centuries, much as the emerging Renaissance consciousness saw a separation from medieval mentality. Jean Gebser had, some 50 years ago, seen this historical pattern, and had drawn up his version of the “Foreshadowings” of the coming transformation. But he could not yet account for all the crucial natural science and technological influences on the new type of consciousness emerging. Especially, he could not envision the effects of the just-then starting computing movement. His framework of the mental structure was based on a spatialization of the world, hence the other key term of his work: the perspectivic mind, which subordinated its world in the hierarchical framework of spatial visualization. Spatialization of time was, as we recall, also a main component of Einstein’s theory.

Paul Virilio (1998) has given us another important document of the new type of consciousness emerging. We may note, though, that this image is entirely contained within the perspectivic metaphor which Gebser assumes that the world is breaking away from. It is called the Event Landscape.

Virilio (1998, transl. A.G.): For God, all of history is an event landscape. For Him there is no succession, because everything is there in the moment… This hardly imaginable transhistoric landscape extends across all eons, across all epochs, and from one eternity to the other. And in this hardly thinkable landscape arise, since the beginning of time, the generations, which draw contrasted outlines against the horizon of an eternal present… A time landscape, in which the events are taking the place of a surface pattern… in which the past and the future are emerging out of one and the same movement, and their synchronicity is manifesting self-evidently. *

….

Manuel de Landa

Link to lecture on Deluze

UNIFORMITY and VARIABILITY

An Essay in the Philosophy of Matter
by Manuel De Landa.

Uniformity and Variability:. The development of the science and engineering of materials in this century has many aspects which promise to enrich the conceptual reservoir of the philosopher of matter. In this essay I would like to explore a few of the philosophical issues raised by new developments in materials science, particularly the new awareness of the importance of studying the behaviour of matter in its full complexity. This awareness has, in turn, resulted in part from the creation and experimentation with materials which involve a heterogenous meshwork of components, such as fiberglass and other composites, as opposed to the simpler and more predictable behaviour of uniform, homogeneous materials such as industrial-quality steel.

Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and an expert in the history of materials, has explored the development of the philosophy of matter in the West, from the ancient Greeks to the present day, and has concluded that for the most part, the study of the complexity and variability of behaviour of materials has always been the concern of empirically oriented craftmen or engineers, not of philosophers or scientists. In his own words:

“Through most of history, matter has been a concern of metaphysics more than physics, and materials of neither. Classical physics at its best turned matter into mass, while chemistry discovered the atom and lost interest in properties…[In both metaphysical speculation and scientific research] sensitivity to the wonderful diversity of real materials was lost, at first because philosophical thought despised the senses, later because the . . . the new science could only deal with one thing at a time. It was atomistic, or at least, simplistic, in its very essence.” {1}

This author claims that by the time Greek philosophers like Democritus or Aristotle developed their philosophies of matter, practically everything about the behaviour of metals and alloys that could be explored with pre-industrial technology, was already known to craftmen and blacksmiths. For at least a thousand years before philosophers began their speculations, this knowledge was developed on a purely empirical basis, through a direct interaction with the complex behaviour of materials. Indeed, the early philosophies of matter may have been derived from observation and conversation with those “whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behaviour of materials during thermal processing or as they were shaped by chipping, cutting or plastic deformation.” {2} For instance, Aristotleis famous four elements, fire, earth, water and air, may be said to reflect a sensual awareness of what today we know as energy and the three main states of aggregation of matter, the solid, liquid and gas states.

As metaphysical speculation gave special meanings to these four elementary qualities, their original physical meaning was lost, and the variability and complexity of real materials was replaced with the uniform behaviour of a philosophically simplified matter about which one could only speculate symbolically. It is true that sixteen-century alchemists recovered a certain respect for a direct interaction with matter and energy, and that seventeen-century Cartesian philosophers intensely speculated about the variable properties of different ways of aggregating material components. But these early attempts at capturing the complexity of physical transmutations and of the effect of physical structure on the complex properties of materials, eventually lost to the emergent science of chemistry, and its almost total concentration on simple behaviour: that of individual components (such as Lavoisieris oxygen) or of substances that conform to the law of definite proportions (as in Daltonis atomic theory).

There was, as Cyril Stanley Smith observes, an “immense gain” in these simplifications, since the exact sciences could not have developed without them, but the triumph of chemistry was accompanied by a “not insignificant loss”. In particular, the complete concentration of analysis at the level of molecules caused an almost total disregard for higher levels of aggregation in solids, but it is there where most complex properties of interest to todayis material scientist occurr. {3} As it is usual in the history of science, there were several exceptions. Galileo studied the strenght of materials in the sixteen-century, and in the seventeenth while Newton was reducing the variability of material behaviour to questions of mass, his arch-enemy Robert Hooke was developing the first theory of elasticity. As materials scientist James Edward Gordon has remarked, “unlike Newton, Hooke was intensely interested in what went on in kitchens, dockyards, and buildings -the mundane mechanical arenas of life…Nor did Hooke despised craftmen, and he probably got the inspiration for at least some of his ideas from his friend the great London clockmaker Thomas Tompion…”. {4} Despite the imporatnt exceptions, I believe it is fair to say that, at least in England, much more prestige was attached to scientific fields that were not concerned with these mundane mechanical arenas where materials displayed their full complex behaviour. This may be one reason why conceptual advances in the study of materials, such as the key conceptual distinction between stress and strain (one refering to the forces acting on a material structure, the other to the behaviour of the structure in response to those forces), were made in France where applied science was encouraged both officially and socially. {5}

James Gordon has called the study of the strenght of materials the Cinderella of science, partly because much of the knowledge was developed by craftmen, metallurgists and engineers (that is the flow of ideas often ran from the applied to the pure fields), and partly because by its very nature, the study of materials involved an interaction between many scientific disciplines, an interdisciplinary approach which ran counter to the more prestigious tradition of “pure” specialization. {6} Today, of course, the interdisciplinary study of complexity, not only in materials but in many other areas of science, from physics and ecology to economics, is finally taking its place at the cutting-edge of scientific research. We are begining to understand that any complex system, whether composed of interacting molecules, organic creatures or economic agents, is capable of spontaneoulsy generating order and of actively organizing itself into new structures and forms. It is precisely this ability of matter and energy to self-organize that is of greatest significance to the philosopher. Let me illustrate this with an example from materials science.

Long ago, practical metallurgists understood that a given piece of metal can be made to change its behaviour, from ductile and tough to strong and brittle, by hammering it while cold. The opposite transmutation, from hard to ductile, could also be achieved by heating the piece of metal again and then allowing it to cool down slowly (that is, by annealing it). Yet, although blacksmiths knew empirically how to cause these metamorphoses, it was not until a few decades ago that scientists understood its actual microscopic mechanism. As it turns out, explaining the physical basis of ductility involved a radical conceptual change: scientists had to stop viewing metals in static terms, that is, as deriving their strenghth in a simple way from the chemical bonds between their composing atoms, and begin seeing them as dynamical systems. In particular, the real cause of brittleness in rigid materials, and the reason why ductile ones can resist being broken, has to do with the complex dynamics of spreading cracks.

A crack or fracture needs energy to spread through a piece of material and so any mechanism that takes away energy from the crack will make the material tough. In metals, the mechanism seems to be based on certain defects or imperfections within the component crystals called dislocations. Dislocations not only trap energy locally but moreover, are highly mobile and may be brought into existance in large quantities by the very concentrations of stress which tend to break a piece of material. Roughly, if populations of these line defects are free to move in a material they will endow it with the capacity to yield locally without breaking, that is, they will make the material tough. On the other hand, restricted movement of dislocations will result in a stronger but more brittle material. {7} Both of these properties may be desirable for different tools, and even within one and the same tool: in a sword or knife, for instance, the body must be tough while the cutting edge must be strong.

What matters from the philosophical point of view is precisely that toughness or strength are emergent properties of a metallic material that result from the complex dynamical behaviour of some of its components. An even deeper philosophical insight is related to the fact that the dynamics of populations of dislocations are very closely related to the population dynamics of very different entities, such as molecules in a rhythmic chemical reaction, termites in a nest-building colony, and perhaps even human agents in a market. In other words, despite the great difference in the nature and behaviour of the components, a given population of interacting entities will tend to display similar collective behaviour as long as there is some feedback in the interactions between components (that is, the interactions must be nonlinear) and as long as there is an intense enough flow of energy rushing through the system (that is, the population in question must operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium). As I will argue in a moment, the idea that many different material and energetic systems may have a common source of spontaneous order is now playing a key role in the development of a new philosophy of matter. But for materials scientists this commonality of behaviour is of direct practical significance since it means that as they begin to confront increasingly more complex material properties, they can make use of tools coming from nonlinear dynamics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, tools that may have been developed to deal with completly different problems. In the words of one author:

“. . . during the last years the whole field of materials science and related technologies has experienced a complete renewal. Effectively, by using techniques corresponding to strong nonequilibrium conditions, it is now possible to escape from the constraints of equilibrium thermodynamics and to process totally new material structures including different types of glasses, nano- and quasi-crystals, superlaticces . . . As materials with increased resistance to fatigue and fracture are sought for actual applications, a fundamental understanding of the collective behaviour of dislocations and point defects is highly desirable. Since the usual thermodynamic and mechanical concepts are not adapted to describe those situations, progress in this direction should be related to the explicit use of genuine nonequilibrium techniques, nonlinear dynamics and instability theory”. {8}

Thus, to the extent that the self-organizing behaviour of populations of dislocations within ductile metals is basically similar to the spontaneous collective behaviour in other populations, tools and concepts developed in very different disciplines may apply across the board, and this may help legitimize the intrinsic interdisciplinary approach of materials science. As I just said, however, the common behaviour of different collectivities in nonlinear, nonequilibrium conditions is of even greater importance to the philosopher of matter. This is very clear in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who are perhaps the most radical contemporary representatives of this branch of philosophy. Inspired in part by some early versions of complexity theory (e.g. Rene Thomis catastrophe theory, and the theories of technology of Gilbert Simondon) these authors arrived at the idea that all structures, whether natural or social, are indeed different expressions of a single matter-energy behaving dynamically, that is, matter-energy in flux, to which they have given the name of “machinic phylum”. In their words: “. . .the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneoulsy; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation. . .” {9}

The term “phylum” is used in biology to refer to the common body-plan of many different creatures. Human beings, for example, belong to the phylum “chordata”, as do all other vertebrate animals. The basic idea is that of a common source of form, a body-plan which through different foldings and stretchings during embryological development, is capable of generating a wide variety of specific forms, from snakes, to giraffes to humans. Deleuze and Guattari, aware that nonlinear population processes are common not only to animals and plants but to metals and other inorganic materials, have extended this meaning to refer to a common source of spontaneoulsy generated form across all material entities. I began this essay by quoting the opinion of a metallurgist, Cyril Stanley Smith, on the historical importance of sensually aquired knowledge about the complex behaviour of metals and other materials. And indeed, in Deleuze and Guattariis philosophy of matter, metallurgists play an important role:

“. . . what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarly hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable . . . Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. . . The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device.” {9}
One aspect of the definition of the machinic phylum is of special interest to our discussion of contemporary materials science. Not only is the phylum defined in dynamic terms (that is, as matter in motion) but also as “matter in continuous variation”. Indeed, these philosophers define the term “machinic” precisely as the process through which structures can be created by bringing together heterogenous materials, that is, by articulating the diverse as such, without homogenization. In other words, the emphasis here is not only on the spontaneous generation of form, but on the fact that this morphogenetic potential is best expressed not by the simple and uniform behaviour of materials, but by their complex and variable behaviour. In this sense, contemporary industrial metals, such as mild steel, may not be the best illustration of this new philosophical conception of matter. While naturally ocurring metals contain all kinds of impurities that change their mechanical behaviour in different ways, steel and other industrial metals have undergone in the last two hundred years an intense process of uniformation and homogenization in both their chemical composition and their physical structure. The rationale behind this process was partly based on questions of reliability and quality control, but it had also a social component: both human workers and the materials they used needed to be disciplined and their behaviour made predictable. Only then the full efficiencies and economies of scale of mass production techniques could be realized. But this homogenization also affected the engineers that designed structures using this well disciplined materials. In the words of James E. Gordon:

“The widespread use of steel for so many purposes in the modern world is only partly due to technical causes. Steel, especially mild steel, might euphemistically be described as a material that facilitates the dilution of skills. . . Manufacturing processes can be broken down into many separate stages, each requiring a minimum of skill or intelligence. . . At a higher mental level, the design process becomes a good deal easier and more foolproof by the use of a ductile, isotropic, and practically uniform material with which there is already a great deal of accumulated experience. The design of many components, such as gear wheels, can be reduced to a routine that can be looked up in handbooks.” {10}

Gordon sees in the spread of the use of steel in the late nineteen- and early twenty centuries, a double danger for the creativity of structural designers. The first danger is the idea that a single, universal material is good for all different kinds of structure, some of which may be supporting loads in compression, some in tension, some withstanding shear stresses and others torsional stresses. But as Gordon points out, given that the roles which a structure may play can be highly heterogenous, the repertoir of materials that a designer uses should reflect this complexity. On the other hand, he points out that, much as in the case of biological materials like bone, new designs may involve structures with properties that are in continuous variation, with some portions of the structure better able to deal with compression while others deal with tension. Intrinsically heterogenous materials, such as fiberglass and the newer hi-tech composites, afford designers this possibility. As Gordon says, “it is scarcely practicable to tabulate elaborate sets of “typical mechanical properties” for the new composites. In theory, the whole point of such materials is that, unlike metals, they do not have “typical properties, because the material is designed to suit not only each individual structure, but each place in that structure.” {11}

I do not mean to imply that there are no legitimate roles to be played by homogenous materials with simple and predictable behaviour, such as bearing loads in compression. And similarly for the institutional and economic arrangements that were behind the quest for uniformity: the economies of scale achieved by routinizing production and some design tasks, were certainly very significant. As with the already mentioned homogenizations performed by scientists in their conceptions of matter, there were undoubtedly some gains. The question is, what got lost in the process. I can think of several things.

First, the nineteenth century process of transfering skills from the human worker to the machine, and the task of homogenizing metallic behaviour went hand in hand. As Cyril Stanley Smith remarks “The craftman can compensate for differences in the qualities of his material, for he can adjust the precise strength and pattern of application of his tools to the materialis local vagaries. Conversely, the constant motion of a machine requires constant materials.” {12} If its is true as I said at the beggining of this essay that much of the knowledge about the complex behaviour of materials was developed outside science by empirically oriented individuals, the deskilling of craftmen that accompanied mechanization may be seen as involving a loss of at least part of that knowledge, since in many cases empirical know-how is stored in the form of skills.

Second, as I just said, not only the production process was routinized this way, so was to a lesser extent the design process. Many professionals who design load-bearing structures lost their ability to design with materials that are not isotropic, that is, that do not have identical properties in all directions. But it is precisely those abilities to deal with complex, continuously variable bahaviour that are now needed to design structures with the new composites. Hence, we may need to nurture again our ability to deal with variation as a creative force, and to think of structures that incorporate heterogenous elements as a challenge to be met by innovative design.

Third, the quest for uniformity in human and metallic behaviour went beyond the specific disciplinary devices used in assembly-line factories. Many other things became homogenized in the last few centuries. To give only two examples: the genetic materials of our farm animals and crops have become much more uniform, at first due to the spread of the “pedigree mystique”, and later in this century, by the development and diffusion of miracle crops, like hybrid corn. Our linguistic materials also became more uniform as the meshworks of heterogenous dialects which existed in most countries began to yield to the spread of standard languages, through compulsory education systems and the effects mass media. As before, the question is not whether we achieved some efficiencies through genetic and linguisitic standarization. We did. The problem is that in the process we came to view heterogeneity and variation as something to be avoided, as something pathological to be cured or uprooted since it endangered the unity of the nation state.

Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, the nineteen-century quest for uniformity may had had damaging effects for the philosophy of matter by making the machinic phylum effectively unrecognizable. As the behaviour of metals and other mineral materials became routine, and hence, unremarkable, philosophical attention became redirected to the more interesting behaviour of living creatures, as in early twenty-century forms of vitalism, and later on, to the behaviour of symbols, discourses and texts, in which any consideration of material or energetic factors was completly lost. Today, thanks in part to the new theories of self-organization that have revealed the potential complexity of behaviour of even the humbler forms of matter-energy, we are begining to recover a certain philosophical respect for the inherent morphogenetic potential of all materials. And we may now be in a position to think about the origin of form and structure, not as something imposed from the outside on an inert matter, not as a hierarchical command from above as in an assembly line, but as something that may come from within the materials, a form that we tease out of those materials as we allow them to have their say in the structures we create.

References:
1) Cyril Stanley Smith. Matter Versus Materials: A Historical View. In A Search for Structure. (MIT Press, 1992). p. 115
2) ibid. p.115
3) ibid. p. 120 and 121
4) James Edward Gordon. The Science of Structures and Materials. (Scientific American Library, 1988). p. 18
5) ibid. p. 21 and 22
6) ibid p. 3
7) ibid. p. 111
8) D. Walgraef. Pattern Selection and Symmetry Competition in Materials Instabilities. In New Trends in Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern-Forming Phenomena. Pierre Coullet and Patrick Huerre eds. (Plenum Press 1990). p. 26
9) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. (University of Minnesota Press, 1980) p. 409
10) James Edward Gordon. op. cit. p. 135
11) ibid. p. 200
12) Cyril Stanley Smith. ibid p. 313

Ingrid Richardson

Issue No. 18 2010 — The Face and Technology

By Ingrid Richardson

This paper considers the prevalence of screens in day-to-day life – from the televisual and cinematic to the many computer and mobile screens encountered in both domestic and public spaces – and suggests that each of these encounters has its own corporeal and interfacial modality. More specifically, the discussion will explore the relational and frontal ontologies of the face and the screen interface, focusing on the specific body-technology relations to emerge from our corporeal or somatic incorporation of television, computers and mobile screens. In particular, I will suggest that our engagement with media screens at a perceptual and corporeal level can be theorised by way of a phenomenological method that is supplemented by a critical understanding of the various ontological tropes and “body-metaphors” that are deeply embedded in our experience of screen interfaces. This focus on the perceptual and metaphorical aspects of the body-screen – and more specifically, face-screen – relation, can provide some insights into the historical and ontological affinity between faces, windows, frames and screens, and the complex ways we “turn” to them with varying degrees of attention and distraction. Finally, I aim to show how this affinity is challenged at a fundamental ontic and perceptual level by our experience of contemporary new media and mobile screens.

In its phenomenological focus, drawing from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and post-phenomenologist Don Ihde, my approach is framed within the broad premise that every human-technology relation is also a body-tool relation, and as such every merger with technology invokes certain kinds of being-in-the-world, and particular ways of knowing and making that world. Such a perspective considers the screen interface as quite literally an aspect of our corporeal schematics; that is, through routine use screens have become part of the dynamic arrangement of our embodied experience. A corollary to this approach is the notion that  our engagement with screens and interfaces is medium specific, such that each screen modality – whether televisual, computer or mobile – effects a different mode of embodiment, a different way of “having a body.”

In Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual and what I would call artifactual epistemology, the corporeal schema, or our lived experience of perceptual reach and bodily boundaries, is always-already “extendible” through artifacts and technologies. Tools are not conceived as merely perceptual attachments or extensions, but rather our corporeal schemata dilate to make room for instrumentality. This coupling of tools and bodies is effectively articulated by the term intercorporeality, a word that describes the irreducible relation between technics, embodiment, knowledge and perception. As Merleau-Ponty famously claimed, the body “applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument” (Primacy of Perception 5), an “application” that depends as much on the specificities of perception and bodily movement as it does on the materiality of the tool-in-use. It is our somatic openness to the “stuff” of our environment that allows us to incorporate technologies and equipment into our own corporeal organisation.

Yet the incorporation of screens into our corporeal schemata is also determined in part by cultural, environmental, spatial and historical specificities – by the habitudes of practice that have developed within the contextures of everyday life. Thus, for example, as television theorists such as David Morley have argued, “television” and “home” have redefined each other (Morley, in Jenks). Early conventional television architecturally transformed the living area of the home into a “viewing space,” requiring modifications to how the body was habitually positioned and mobilised, while over the past decade the proliferation of televisual entertainment technologies within the home has effected new ways of carpentering the built environment, to literally “make room” for new media spaces, by way of open-plan design or the designation of a cinematic “niche” for the home theatre or entertainment centre. As media theorists Silverstone and Hirsch suggest, the actual location of the TV set has implications for our embodied and spatial experience of both the interface and immediate environment, including our placement and proximity among other viewers and domestic objects. Such studies have shown that the televisual medium dynamically transforms the environment of reception and the embodied experience of domestic screen perception.

More recently, a number of mobile phone theorists have provided deep ethnographic and comparative analyses of mobile phone cultures and practices, and the way that the mobile screen, as a media content, gaming and communications interface, is deployed (and embodied) differently in countries such as Japan, China, Korea and Australia (Hjorth; Choi; Bell). As Choi notes, drawing on the work of Ting-Toomey and Kurogi, there are significant cultural disparities in the performance of self – and the correlative “face-negotiation” strategies required – that become embedded in mobile media cultures and mobile phone practices. Thus, for example, in Japan, there is an explicit distinction between honne – “true feelings” that are kept to oneself – and tatemae – one’s public face, while in Korea, nunchi – the ability to “read” and interpret others’ faces and social cues – is regarded as an essential skill. Choi argues that such face-negotiations and customs (among other techno-cultural specificities), are intrinsic to mobile phone use, revealed by both the subtle and more palpable cultural differences evident in the everyday “work” of image sharing, texting and gaming. Although cultural differences pertaining to screen engagement is not the purview of this paper, there remains much interpretive analysis to be done identifying such disparities in the micro-practices of mobile phone embodiment, and the way both collective and personalised mobile media practices are in fact a complex coalescence of cultural, cognitive, material and somatic factors.

As Don Ihde suggests, the body-technology relation is our fundamental ontological condition, yet each of these relations that define and transform our techno-perceptual experience is non-neutral, specific to context and culture. In his analysis of our prolific visualising technologies – from domestic, personal and public screens to highly sophisticated scientific apparatuses – Ihde documents how the body and instrument form a temporary collusive entity that apprehends or handles the world in specific ways. In each case, he writes, the mediation must be made to “fit” the body, and in particular there exists a consonance between the device and our “face-to-face capacities”:

The mediated presence… must fit, be made close to my actual body position and sight.… What is seen must be seen from or within my visual field, from the apparent distance in which discrimination can occur regarding depth, etc., just as in face-to-face relations. But the range of what can be brought into this proximity is transformed by means of the instrument. (Technology and the Lifeworld 72)

Ihde’s analysis allows us to consider the ways in which different media and screen interfaces effect different kinds of perceptual and communicative reach, though for the most part our apprehension and orientation to the interface is determined by the need to see and therefore “face” it. As I will suggest, however, while our perceptual engagement with screen interfaces is often predicated on this face-to-face configuration, contemporary televisual and mobile screens frequently work to confound or at least problematise this relation.

This distinction between various body-screen modalities explicitly acknowledges the concept of medium specificity, a term originating from the work of technological determinists Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media) and Harold Innis (Bias of Communication). Medium specificity describes the fact that specific media have specific spatial, temporal and socio-cultural effects, determining particular conditions of possibility for the way meaning is made. While Innis is concerned with the historical breadth and evolving political effects of communications technologies on cultural formation and social organisation, McLuhan claims that all media are extensions of the body: they alter our sensory access to the world, determining and organising our experience, our forms of knowledge, indeed the very structure of perception. In McLuhan’s understanding of medium specificity, each communication medium works to “fix” particular sensory ratios, stipulating forms of knowledge and orchestrating the structure of perception by “attuning” our sensory equipment to absorb reality in medium-specific ways (Carey284). While acknowledging McLuhan’s insights, rather than use the idea of “sensory ratio” I would describe the screen-body coupling in more relational terms as technosomatic involvement, a concept which can recognise the medium-specific ordering of sense-perception and bodily orientation, but goes beyond the confines of “sensory ratios” applied to specific media, to include the way in which the body-media relation is also moored by sedimented cultural habits, body-metaphors and tropes surrounding our engagement with screens, and the impact of the situated or built environment upon that engagement.

Thus, for example, we often refer to the difference between our engagement with conventional broadcast television screens and interactive computer screens in terms of how we choose to position the body when attending to the screen; that is, when watching television we “lean back” in contrast to the “lean forward” body posture demanded of interactive screen media, where there is an imperative to face the screen more proximally and directly. This describes the variable embodied orientation we have towards different kinds of media interfaces, and the immersive investment of the eyes, ears and hands required of interactive screens. That is, the location of screens and bodies in the built environment, and the dimensionality, functionality and interfacial specificities of such screens, partially determines our degrees of attention, practices of viewing, the spatial arrangements of screen engagement, and one’s mode of technosomatic involvement and facial posturing within it. In what follows, I will futher explore the body’s involvement with screen media as quite literally mediatropic, suggesting that both body and screen are imbricated in a number of complex ontological and embodiment metaphors. If we remember that the combining form –trope indicates an affinitive turn towards something, then screen interfaces can be said to have had significant “tropological” effects on our corporeal schematics; our modes of embodiment “turn towards” specific technologies and media interfaces. When we use the expression “glued to the screen,” for instance, we interpret our eyes as facial and sensory limbs entering into an intimate and tele-tactile relationship with the screen. Indeed, the explicit goal of media designers in general is to render the screen “sticky” as a measure of viewer adhesion (Manovich 161).

The embeddedness of corporeal metaphors in our perception and experience of the world is investigated in some detail by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their two collaborative works Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh. Lakoff and Johnson claim that a range of embodiment and ontological metaphors are embedded in all our experiences. They categorise these metaphors as ontological metaphors — or more specifically as entity, substance and container metaphors. They write:

We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world — as containers with an inside and an outside. We also experience things external to us as entities — often also as containers with insides and outsides. We experience ourselves as being made up of substances — e.g., flesh and bone — and external objects as being made up of various kind of substances — wood, stone, metal, etc. (Metaphors 58)

In identifying the crucial work of metaphor upon the body in The Production of Space, Lefebvre suggests that metaphors are not simply figures of speech, but rather they decipher the world into that which is “sayable” or “susceptible to figuration”; in so doing, acts of metaphorisation take as their point of departure a “body metamorphosed” (Lefebvre 139-140). Thus all bodies are caught within a complex web of analogies and conceptual metaphors. Metaphors, then, are the extension of our corporeality into the world: only that which can be metaphorised qua embodiment — interpreted in terms of our complex body-model — is realised or made real. The way in which Lakoff and Johnson consider the figural and material projection of our bodies in-the-world is also conceptually akin to the Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of being which posits a plastic and changeable relationship between body-subject and the equipmental environment.

For Lakoff and Johnson, humans (and animals in general) have a front and a back, or a face and behind, and we embed this ontology or understanding of being-in-the-world into the constitution of spaces and objects in our worldly environment (Philosophy in the Flesh 34). There are many instances of this frontal ontology in our use of technologies and the way in which we navigate them. For example, the standard GUI on a computer screen such as Windows Explorer is configured in such a way that we experience our progression through directories as forward and back, in and out, up and down. These common navigational and browser spatialities, along with other body metaphors adapted to virtual spaces are clearly and quite simply based in our bodies’ engagement with the world. Importantly, although not of apparent relevance to Lakoff and Johnson, these somatological schemas are not just outcomes of physiology, they are also culturally specific, and vary from culture to culture (Hefferon). [1] Yet it seems that in a more general sense, as humans we project fronts and backs onto objects, and habitually designate the “face” as the aspect with which we interact, because we ourselves face them. Lakoff and Johnson write:

The concepts front and back are body-based. They make sense only for beings with fronts and backs. If all beings on this planet were uniform stationary spheres floating in some medium and perceiving equally in all directions, they would have no concepts of front and back. But we are not like this at all. Our bodies are symmetric in some ways and not in others. We have faces and move in the direction in which we see. Our bodies define a set of fundamental spatial orientations that we use not only in orienting ourselves, but in perceiving the relationship of one object to another. (Philosophy in the Flesh 34)

Clearly most of our communication technologies are oriented in this way, and moreover, even when their purpose is not to provide visual images, they more often than not still have “faces” from which to read information displays. While there is no doubt that we have a primarily “frontal” relationship with the screen, this is not to say that we have no association with the “backs” of such devices, although these interactions are for the most part brief and functional, that is, for the purpose of connection, or negotiating an effective relationship with the front. We thus have an affinity with the body of the screen simply by virtue of the fact that human bodies and screens have “fronts” and “backs” and “face” each other. It is this screen-face consonance which perhaps best explains the phenomenon of parasociality, and the common behaviour of reacting towards televisions and computers “as if” the latter represent “real people” and “real places” (Reeves and Nass). [2] Indeed, the similitude of the TV and computer box with the human head or eyes (see figures below) is another clear example of this perceived consonance at work.

Computer Head wallpaper for the Blackberry Storm [3]

Image from Weinberg-Clark photography client website [4]

Image from Security Reality website [5]

This front-to-front relationship is one that we have with screens in general. In most if not all cases the screen is a frame of limited dimensions within our own physical space, while the body’s frontal relationship with the apparatus varies between media depending on what Manovich calls “viewing regimes” (96). With cinema, for example, the viewer is at the outset fully frontal to the exclusion of all diversions, focusing entirely on the screen. In the optimum situation the boundary or interface between body and cinematic apparatus dissolves, a merger which manifests a change in orientation from being “in front of” to being “within,” an effect which is achieved by several factors: the size of the screen, the darkness of the theatre, and not least by surround sound. Front-to-front orientations are therefore not achieved by vision alone; in many situations, when facing a moving image we would expect that sound would also approach us from this direction, but the effect of surround or stereophonic sound is to embrace the body in such a way that the frontal relationship with the screen is at least partially compromised. In the case of television — with perhaps the home theatre an exception — the face-to-face relationship between the body and the set is somewhat more informal and less disciplined; viewers can look away to the familiarity of their domestic surroundings, move about or leave the room, or they can be visually and aurally attentive or inattentive to varying degrees, by muting the sound, zapping through channels, talking on the phone or conversing with co-watchers, and reading or engaging in other activities. In other words, the facial and sensory dedication we apply to media screens varies according to the mode of technosomatic involvement demanded by both the interface and the cultural, experiential and material contextures.

Thus although in a general sense as-bodies we clearly have a frontal and gravitational ontology that impacts upon the way in which we perceive and navigate screens, the emergent body-tool relation we have with mobile screens has seen a number of adjustments to this corporeal schematic. For example, the various postures surrounding mobile phone photography, the practice of “sharing” one’s screen with others, or more simply developing habitual skills, such as becoming adept at texting while walking. In these cases the often dedicated frontal orientation we have towards larger screens becomes compromised both by our own mobility, the size and resolution of the screen, and the interrupted nature of mobile phone use. In their study “Everyday Practices with Mobile Video Telephony” Kenton O’Hara, Alison Black and Matthew Lipson [6] examine the medium specificity of video phoning, revealing that a different set of somatic adjustments is needed.

Of most interest in O’Hara et al’s study is the ergonomic incompatibility between moving bodies and mobile video phones, and the often uncomfortable fit between facial and visual attention, voice/video communication, macromobility (walking) and micromobility (adjusting the position and orientation of the phone). For example, using the videophone feature requires a return to a more visually determined face-to-face orientation with the screen, i.e. holding the phone out at arm’s length with the screen directly – and fixedly – in front of the face. This necessitates use of the speaker phone, such that both the screen display and the usually private voice communication becomes public (875-876). In some cases this means that the proper boundaries between public and private cannot be maintained – both in terms of intruding voices and images into another’s personal space (on a bus, for example), and in terms of exposing both sides of one’s own private communication by varying the customary (aural) and intimate somatic mode of mobile phone communication. O’Hara et al note that while recipients of a video call could put the phone down and use the hands-free speaker “it was considered rude” to create a visual asymmetry between speakers such that they were no longer communicating screenface-to-screenface (878). For these reasons participants in their study used videophoning only in particular situations – for the most part, video calls were made when the phone would be “shared” amongst a group of friends, or for consolidating “special relationships” that required dedicated face-to-face time even when not co-present (873). In other words, unlike the casual brevity of the text message or spontaneity of voice calls, it would seem videophoning is often designated for calls of some import that require a more deliberate attentiveness to one’s somatic involvement, and the displaying of one’s face to another.

Another interesting entry-point into the body- and face-screen relation is by considering one of the more common metaphors of the screen — that of the frame or “window-on-the-world.” The ontological and cultural significance of the window and the frame cannot be overstated; as Anne Friedberg comments, the frame is perceived as “the decisive structure of what is at stake” (The Virtual Window 14), while for Vivian Sobchack it is both a “lived logic” and itself “an organ of perception” (Address of the Eye 134, cited in Friedberg 16). The comparison between screen and window as framing devices is easily made and understood — the frames of window and screen are similarly rectangular, they can be similarly interpreted as membranes between “inside” and “outside,” and what one sees through the frame is a portion of the world in space and time (in the case of television, for example, this is often aimed towards a “realistic” depiction of a place/event in a parody of the scene-through-a-window). It is worth examining in some detail the portrayal of the screen as frame or window, and how such a rendering clearly instantiates a particular kind of relationship to the body, its orientation, and its somatic involvement with/in the medium.

The window-on-the-world is a trope emergent from linear perspective. In the space of linear perspective the observer looks at the world as if through a window. The “tropological effect” of linear perspectival vision and the “window-on-the-world” can be characterised by the way visibility and light have come to stand for truth, belief and knowability. The corporeal effect here is clearly one which elevates visual perception and the eyes as those organs which can most accurately deliver the truth of something. As Romanyshyn argues, this put the hegemony of the eye firmly in place, such that “Alberti’s window, which begins as an artistic device, thus becomes a style of thought, a cultural perception, a way of imagining the world… The window as membrane becomes the boundary, the place where the world is divided into exterior and interior domains” (Romanyshyn 69). Romanyshyn insists, then, that the window of perspectival vision set up an ontological boundary and distance between the space of the observer and the space of the observed. Significantly, in the case of Alberti’s window (see figure below), the viewer’s bodily movement is restricted or even absented by the device, in that the grid needs to remain directly between the scene and the line of sight: the body is at the service of vision and facial orientation; it is an eye-body, with every other perceptual register absent.

Alberti’s Grid – c.1450 [7]

In technosomatic terms, we might consider the window, frame and screen as perceptually inter-familiar, exhibiting a kind of ontological consonance; that is, as Friedberg notes, like the window, the screen and its frame “holds a view in place”; it becomes, like the window, a transformative aperture in architectural space, altering the materiality of our built environment and opening surfaces up to a new kind of conceptual and metaphoric “ventilation” (Friedberg 1). The screen-as-window, then, sets up a particular kind of corporeal trope: to look out a window and to view a screen, at the imperative of the eyes and face one’s body must be turned towards the apparatus. As such, to remain visually attached the body is rendered immobile. Indeed for Manovich, this fixedness typifies a bodily inertia and sensory deprivation that has been and remains a predisposition of “the Western screen-based apparatus” in general (Manovich 104). This tendency can be traced from Alberti’s perspectival window and Renaissance monocular perspective, through to Kepler’s camera obscura, nineteenth century camera lucida and contemporary cinema: in all of these interfaces, he argues, the body is fixed in space (Manovich 104-105). Although the dynamic screens of cinema and television might be said to virtually transport the viewer, Manovich argues that this mobility is had at the cost of the “institutionalised immobility” of the body of the spectator (107), in the form of the silent seated rows of movie-goers or the domestic couch-reclining TV viewer. [8] Importantly, this distinction between the virtually mobile or tele-active eye-body and the stationary physical body is made by way of the screen-as-window metaphor. Within this metaphor the eyes alone must remain mobile, to traverse and visually “handle” the surface space of the screen, while the face and body are held captive by the eyes’ attachment. The rectilinear dimensions of the media window — and its immobilisation of the body in front of the screen — is an instance of the epistemological containment of knowledge in perspectival vision, today most familiar through the ubiquitous frame of the screen. Thus by tracing a lineage from Alberti’s window to contemporary screen technologies such as television and cinema, we can see the medium specificity of our understanding, our spatial and somatic perception, and what is often termed our frontal ontology.

While it is the case that the frontal or frame-ontology of windowed perception remains as one of the most tenacious interfacial tropes influencing our understanding of contemporary media today, I would argue that Manovich both overstates and oversimplifies the resemblance between cinematic and domestic or personalised screen interfaces (such as television, computer and mobile media device). Indeed, he suggests that our relationship to the screen has remained static – that the fictional window of the filmic interface and its technosomatic requirements can be simply translated into the datascape window of the computer screen. Although we may move from a public cinematic space to a domestic space, or from a large screen to a smaller and more isolated personal screen, our fundamental orientation to the interface and its framing properties has, for Manovich, remained unchanged.

Yet if we are to understand the technosomatic specificities of contemporary screen engagement, we need to develop a more nuanced or granular interpretation of such experiences, with particular insight into the altered somatic, haptic and facial relations to emerge from our engagement with smaller and sometimes portable screens. As Friedberg and others have suggested, the perspectival tropes of window and frame cannot be applied unproblematically to the computer. In particular, the computer screen is “fractured” and layered, providing a multiple windowed format that remakes our “visual vernacular” (Friedberg 3), invoking what Ihde (Postphenomenology) calls a plurivisual mode of perceptual engagement.

There is no doubt that both our tele-somatic and physically embodied relation to the personal computer screen is quite different to our experience of both traditional televisual and cinematic screens in terms of proximity, orientation and mobility, and not least because we are no longer “lean-back” spectators or observers but “lean-forward” users. In particular, our face-to-face relation to the computer and mobile screen is intimate, up close, and involves the negotiation and manipulation of a networked screen-space via the keyboard, mouse, touchscreen or other device (Friedberg 231), setting up both a “distributed presence” and an interactive circuit of eyes, ears, hands and interface with a range of “handy” peripheral devices. Moreover, laptops and handhelds can be carried with us, in our hands, pockets or bags or on our laps, effectively mobilising the body- and face-screen relations into the workspace, pedestrian space, vehicular space and the numerous public spaces of the urban environment. As Toni Robertson points out, many new kinds of digital media depend on the phenomena of human motility and mobility, such that we ourselves become their “intimate mobile hosts.”

Nevertheless, it seems that what has remained consistent through all these screen modalities is the mediatrope of the window, vis-à-vis the model of the frame and its frontal ontology. Friedberg writes: “the metaphor of the window has retained a key stake in the technological framing of the visual field. The Windows interface is a postcinematic visual system, but the viewer-turned-user remains in front of (verstellen) a perpendicular frame” (Friedberg 232). Yet I would argue that the vacillating degree of attention and distraction particular to many contemporary screens – particularly mobile handheld screens – problematises the frame ontology and the perception, eye-behaviour and facially determined body posture proper to the window metaphor. Indeed, I have already noted that televisual screens often work to confound the focused attention usually ascribed to the screen-body relation; the televisual eye is frequently distracted, both by the exo-televisual environment – the activities and communicative acts that disrupt the practice of dedicated watching – and in the latent lateral but ever-ready possibilities of remote control devices and multiple channels. Rarely is TV enveloped by a zone of inattention — it is always-already surrounded by other domestic objects and zones of practice within the collectively realised domestic spaces and spatial topography of the home. In what follows I will explore this departure further in terms of the oscillating technosomatic registers of attention, inattention and distraction enacted when engaging with small mobile screens, and suggest that such engagement undermines both the facial dedication of the immobilised body deemed typical of our embodied relation to larger screens, and consequently the frontal ontology of window and the frame.

In considering the technosomatic registers of attention and distraction particular to the screen-body relation, it is useful to determine some general ontological properties of what Introna and Ilharco call “screen-ness.” In contemporary life screens are often a primary focus of our attention and concern: they literally display that which is relevant or worthy of notice. This property of relevance has little to do with the specific content of any particular screen display; it rather indicates:

a particular involvement in-the-world in which we dwell and within which screens come to be screens. It is not up to anyone of us to decide on the already presumed relevance of screens; that is what a screen is — a framing of relevance, a call for attention, a making apparent of a way of living. (Introna & Ilharco 227)

Introna and Ilharco suggest that screens of all kinds enter our involvement-in-the-world at the moment we turn them on, at which point we reposition our attention and “sit down, quit — physically or cognitively — other activities we may have been performing, and watch the screen” (225). Yet this “frontal” relationship which is typical of our engagement with most screens — where the mediums of cinema, television and computer can be said to discipline the body more or less into a face-to-face interaction — is thoroughly disintegrated by the mobile media screen. Our interaction with mobile screens is rarely marked by such dedicated attentiveness; indeed, our “turning towards” them is usually momentary (checking for a text or missed call) or at most can be measured in minutes.

Eugénie Shinkle offers an interpretation of our “turning to” screen media across a spectrum of attention, inattention and distraction, allowing us to consider screens outside of the strictures of relevance suggested by Introna and Ilharco. She argues that media and communication technologies institute “material parameters,” proportions of attention and inattention, by which we measure varying degrees of “perceptual reach” from objects and others in the world. She writes:

[T]echnologies are material parameters in the world, embodied praxes…. Functioning as an embodied agent in the world requires attention — maintaining objects within the confines of perceptual reach, holding them at the “correct distance.” At the same time, however, it also calls for a certain kind of inattention — a persistent openness to the world, a subsidiary awareness that is different from reflection as such. Inattention is not the same thing as distraction — a scattering or absence of attention — rather, it refers to the different distances at which we hold the rest of the perceptual field, including the body. (Gardens, Games and the Anamorphic Subject)

Thus different types of body-technology relations set up different medium specific proportions of attention and inattention, including (in)attention to one’s own body. In the case of perspectival vision, Shinkle suggests, the working or perceiving body is concealed in the interface, as the subject is rendered a disembodied eye/I; by contrast, and against the notion that the body is an immobilized eye-body in its engagement with contemporary screens, we could argue that the face-screen, hand-eye-ear-mouse-screen interface or the hand-eye-ear-remote control arrangement work as the preferred modalities of televisual, computer and mobile screen use. In particular, our use of handheld screens when we are on-the-move further complexifies the body-tool corporeal schema particular to screen and televisual media; our relationship with the mobile phone as a multi-sensory device which can be used either as a dedicated aural or visual medium, for example, can effectively shift eye-behaviour from a continual fixed-ness on the screen to a sporadic, oscillating and context-dependent mode of viewing. In such circumstances the dedicated frontal orientation we have towards screens becomes compromised by our own mobility, the screen size and resolution, and the interrupted nature of mobile phone use.

There are many examples of the ways that mobile media screens challenge conventional screen-body and screen-face relations, including image-sharing practices, location-based and casual gaming, the practice of posting text or image content to urban screens, or simply the more mundane activities of talking and texting. In an environment of proliferating handsets it is relevant to examine the perceptual specificity of our interactions with, and experiences of, the mobile phone, and the ways in which the prioritisation of modes of use (listening to music, watching TV, film-making and editing, photography, web browsing, gaming, video-phoning, texting and media-messaging) reflect different relationships between users, bodies, content, handsets, and the physical environment or spatial context. Indeed, if each new mobile media device can be considered in Merleau-Ponty’s (Phenomenology of Perception) terms a “fresh instrument” which dilates our corporeal being accordingly, are we learning a new range of collective bodily skills, spatial perceptions, postures and habits? Although in a general sense we may have a frontal and gravitational ontology that impacts upon the way in which we perceive and navigate screens, the emergent body-tool relation we have with mobile screens has seen adjustments to this corporeal schematic; mobile phone photography, for instance, could be said to have impacted on the nature of face-to-face communication across both screen and co-present interactions.

It has been noted that the mobile camera phone has altered everyday photographic practices in terms of its informal status as a camera and perpetual photo-readiness, enabling the capture of immediate and often intimate objects and events (Okabe and Ito). Users will often share photos just taken or received with others in face-to-face interaction, by physically showing or passing around one’s phone to friends, rather than sending them through the mobile phone network. This practice effectively creates a hybridised mode of communication that cuts across mediated and co-present or face-to-face contexts. Indeed, mobile media is increasingly cross-platform, such that the mobile device can be used to browse the web, check email, post messages to screens in cafes and pubs around the world (see, for example Wiffiti [9]), or more recently, the Twitter [10] phenomenon allows the mobile user to either contribute to or access an “ambient flow of information” – primarily via “what-are-you-doing?” updates concerning friends, coworkers or celebrities. Each new mobile application, it seems, works to further coalesce urban, online and mobile screens, effecting increasingly hybridized, networked, distributed and mediated modalities of interaction.

Mobile media also elicit variable levels of attention and inattention that shift between actual and telepresent space, partially depending on the demands of the immediate environment and the extent to which the interface becomes ready-to-hand in a Heideggerian sense (i.e. its function and usability recede from explicit awareness). Thus one’s own technosoma may “behave” in ways that accord with (or deviate from) consensual and recognised modes of being-on-the-phone, such as stopping, bowing the head to conceal the face and reduce audibility, shielding one’s mouth with the hand to define a provisional private space, or deliberately not altering one’s trajectory or visual/facial orientation, and directing one’s gaze into the middle distance, as is the case with the more blatant Bluetooth pedestrian. To borrow from Erving Goffman’s useful analysis of pedestrian traffic, in such responses the mobile phone pedestrian articulates a specific and recognised type of “gestural prefigurement” or “body-gloss,” which intentionally displays to others a state of being-on-the-phone (Relations in Public 31-32). The various postures and embodied actions particular to mobile phone use in public places, and the correlative dynamics of attention-inattention, are quite specific to the body-mobile relation which has emerged throughout the last decade. Here, the typical “phone-face” we customarily adopt when on the phone (eyes looking into the middle distance, with attention focused on the interiority of one’s aural sensory perception) becomes also a public face with which the gestural body is aligned, a face-and-body that says “I’m on the phone.” Similarly, the activity of casual gaming or noodling with one’s mobile media device while waiting for a friend or at a bus stop becomes another way of managing one’s alone-ness in public spaces, enacting a particular kind of “face-work” in Goffman’s (Interaction Ritual) sense, while at the same time maintaining an “environmental knowing,” or crucial peripheral awareness of one’s spatial surroundings in readiness for the busy-ness of life to resume. The transient and non-dedicated attentiveness required by the small screen and casual game – you can “switch off” but “not totally” – allows the user to avert their gaze from others and so cooperate in the tacit social agreement of non-interaction among strangers. As I have suggested, the micromobilities of the body here quite literally enact a mobile-specific mediatrope – inclined metaphorically, corporeally, communicatively and gesturally towards the mobile media device.

On a macro-perceptual scale, location-based games integrate play and game interaction into the patterns of quotidian life and peripatetic movement. In location-based gaming ventures such as Mogi [11] in Japan and Cipher Cities [12] in Brisbane, Australia, pedestrian gamers integrate their game-play with their everyday trajectories through the city as they hunt and trade virtual objects, build do-it-yourself mobile adventures in their own neighborhood or familiar streetscape, and message other active users. Such games create a network or connective sensibility in which the mobile phone, web, community of participants and built environment merge, and potentially work to seamlessly combine the corporeal schematics of actual and virtual spaces as they are actively negotiated on-the-move. Friedberg (173) comments that the visual systems of the pedestrian viewer and the cinema or television viewer are entirely different – the first is itinerant and in-the-world, requiring “bodily, haptic, phenomenological perception” whereas for the second the “itinerary becomes framed,” and the body’s immobility is “compensated for” by the moving images on the screen. In contrast, the mobile phone – and in particular, location-based gaming practices – effect a new technosomatic arrangement which brings together the peripatetic mobility of the user, the mobility of that which is framed, and the mobility of the frame itself. Here, the face-to-face or frontal ontology of the screen is quite literally minimised, and the face-screen relation is intermittent and partial; attentive, inattentive and distracted in varying degrees, and absorbed within the broader technosomatic arrangements of the urban environment.

Given the increasing prevalence of screens in everyday life, it is critical that we understand the corporeal dynamics of contemporary screen use, the historical legacy of the larger screen, and especially the more recent technosomatic effects of the now ubiquitous mobile device. Throughout this paper I have considered the various body-metaphors attributable to screens, and the problematic assumption that the window and frame are perceptually homologous to either the televisual, computer or itinerant small screen. The “telic inclination” of the screen is not uniform, linear or continuous, or necessarily determined by the perspectival trope and its demands for a fixed face-to-face relationship. With a more nuanced phenomenological analysis of the micro-practices surrounding our experience of contemporary screens, we can more effectively interpret the way mobile devices in particular modify our communicative and playful practices, remediate our experience of media content, and insinuate themselves into our ways of being-in-the-world. The mobile media device, to a degree at least as significant as the cinematic, televisual and computer screen, presents a significant shift in the relational ontology of body and technology. This relation is perhaps more intimate, ever-present and affective than any we have thus far experienced. In a very fundamental way the mobile interface modifies what we pay attention to, what we “turn to” and face (and turn away from) in the everyday lifeworld, and the modalities and durée of that attentiveness. What we need, then, are ways of thinking through new body-screen metaphors that more effectively capture the distracted, discontinuous, motile, peripatetic and tangible nature of mobile media engagement.

In this paper I have sought to provide a history, method and context for such interpretive work. As theorists such as Don Ihde and Anne Friedberg have pointed out, ways of encountering the world, both mediated and unmediated, entail conventions of sense-perception and collective corporeal habits that are not innate or given, but culturally, materially and somatically specific. Each new interfacial modality stipulates its own gathering of soma and technique, its own technosomatic routines. In this light, I have suggested that our contemporary media experience unhinges preceding face- and body-screen couplings. That is, the particular technosomatic configurations of screen experience across televisual, computer and mobile interfaces, when critically examined in terms of their medium specific effects, can offer some insight into how such effects work to confound and reshape historically sedimented face-to-interface conventions.

Endnotes

1. Culturally specific body-orientations are often instilled at a very young age; for example, in contrast to the dominant Western habit of facing a new-born baby toward the holder, “Kaluli mothers tend to face babies outwards so that they can be seen by and see others that are part of the social group,” habituating a particular orientation to both the maternal and wider environment (Woodhead et al. cited in Donald and Richardson).
   [return]

2. The social and behavioral aspects of this affinity between humans and television (and more generally computers and new communications media) is explored in some detail by Reeves and Nass in their study The Media Equation.
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3. See http://bbstormwallpapers.com/2008/12/04/computer-head-wallpaper
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4. See http://www.weinberg-clark.com
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5. See http://securityreality.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/real-world-network-security-and-hacking-1st-edition/
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6. O’Hara et al studied 21 participants (13 male and 8 female) in the UK over five weeks.
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7. See Russell Naughton (2003) “Drawing Aids to Perspective”  http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/DRAWING_MACHINES.html
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8. Interestingly, Manovich claims that this condition of the body’s immobility can also be traced through the history of communication: “In ancient Greece, communication was understood as an oral dialogue between people. It was also assumed that physical movement stimulated dialogue and the process of thinking… In the Middle ages, a shift occurred from dialogue between subjects to communication between a subject and an information storage device, that is, a book. A medieval book chained to a table can be considered a precursor to the screen that “fixes” its subject in space” (Manovich 104-105, note 48). The mobile phone and video phone, although mobilising the communicator according to the imperatives of push media (the desire for perpetual connectivity), are devices that perhaps return us to the practice of walking and talking.
   [return]

9. See http://www.wiffiti.com/
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10. See http://twitter.com/
    [return]

11. See http://www.mogimogi.com/
    [return]

12. See http://ciphercities.com/
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Works Cited

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O’Hara, Kenton, Black, Alison and Lipson, Matthew. “Everyday Practices with Mobile Video Telephony.” CHI 2006 Proceedings, Everyday Use of Mobiles, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

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Shinkle, Eugénie. “Gardens, games and the anamorphic subject: tracing the body in the virtual landscape.” Digital Arts Conference::streaming worlds, May 19-23, 2003, Melbourne, Australia.

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Dr Ingrid Richardson (Acting Director)

Ingrid is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Technologies and Media. Her broader research interests include philosophy of science and technology, new and interactive media theory, phenomenology, visual ethnography, haptics and embodied interaction. She is currently a member of the ARC Cultural Research Network, editor of Media-Space Journal, and on the editorial committees of Fibreculture Journal, Transformations and Continuum. She has published book chapters and journal articles on the cultural and corporeal effects of mobile media, video phoning, digital and mobile games, blogging, urban screens, virtual reality, biomedical imaging, and technologies for sustainability. More recently, Ingrid’s published research has focussed on the way mobile media have infiltrated and impacted upon screen cultures, and in particular, the emerging interconnectivity between mobile phones and both online and urban screens

Nicholas Carr

Since we have explored in some detail the implication of attention dispersion in Information Societies especially, in relation to Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, we present three articles that address the controversial subject, in context of the evolution of human consciousness.

The first article is from Laura Miller of Salon.Com and includes a review of the book “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr, who is also the author of the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The second article -also from Salon- is a review of Winifred Gallagher’s book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The last piece is an excellent essay from By Sven Birkerts entitled Reading in a Digital Age. All three essays explore the diminishing of several important neural and cognitive functions that seem to correspond to the increasing omnipresence of communication technologies.

Radio Open Source Interview with Nicholas Carr

Excellent interrogation of Carr’s ideas especially, in context of an Emersonian Universal Mind.

Yes, the Internet is rotting your brain
And Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” has the evidence to prove it

by Laura Miller

Salon.Com

Two years ago, Nicholas Carr, a technology writer, published an essay titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Despite being saddled with a grabby but not very accurate headline (the defendant was the Internet itself, not just its most popular search engine), the piece proved to be one of those rare texts that condense and articulate a fog of seemingly idiosyncratic worries into an urgently discussed issue in contemporary life.

It turned out that a whole lot of people were just then realizing that, like Carr, they had lost their ability to fully concentrate on long, thoughtful written works. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do,” Carr wrote. “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” At first assuming that his fractured mental state was the result of “middle-age mind rot,” Carr eventually concluded that his heavy Internet usage was to blame. His article about this realization instantly rose to the top of the “most-read” list on the Atlantic’s website and stayed there for months.

“The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” is Carr’s new, book-length version of the Atlantic piece. It expands on the points he made in 2008, but it addresses some of the responses he got, as well. In addition to the usual moronic japes (“This article is too long!” — can anyone really be witless enough to believe that joke is clever?), commenters, bloggers and pundits asked if Carr wasn’t confusing the medium with how people choose to use it. Still others dared to argue that the value of what Carr calls “literary reading” has been inflated.

While “The Shallows” does contain significant chunks of the Atlantic essay, this isn’t one of those all-too-familiar annoyances, the book that should have remained an article. In the brief period between the writing of the original piece and the publication of “The Shallows,” neuroscientists have performed and reviewed important studies on the effects of multitasking, hyperlinks, multimedia and other information-age innovations on human brain function, all of which add empirical heft to Carr’s arguments.

The results are not cheering, and the two chapters in which Carr details them are, to my mind, the book’s payload. This evidence — that even the microseconds of decision-making attention demanded by hyperlinks saps cognitive power from the reading process, that multiple sensory inputs severely degrade memory retention, that overloading the limited capacity of our short-term memory hampers our ability to lay down long-term memories — is enough to make you want to run right out and buy Internet-blocking software.

Above all, Carr points to the past 20-some years of neurological research indicating that the human brain is, in the words of one scientific pioneer, “massively plastic” — that is, much like our muscles, it can be substantially changed and developed by what we do with it. In a study that is quickly becoming as popular a touchstone as the Milgram experiment, the brains of London cab drivers were discovered to be much larger in the posterior hippocampus (the part of the brain devoted to spatial representations of one’s surroundings) than was the case with a control group. These masses of neurons are the physiological manifestation of “the Knowledge,” the cabbies’ legendary mastery of the city’s geography. The drivers’ anterior hippocampus, which manages certain memory tasks, is correspondingly smaller. There’s only so much space inside a skull, after all.

References to the cabbie study don’t often mention this evidence that cognitive development may be a zero-sum game. The more of your brain you allocate to browsing, skimming, surfing and the incessant, low-grade decision-making characteristic of using the Web, the more puny and flaccid become the sectors devoted to “deep” thought. Furthermore, as Carr recently explained in a talk at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, distractibility is part of our genetic inheritance, a survival trait in the wild: “It’s hard for us to pay attention,” he said. “It goes against the native orientation of our minds.”

Concentrated, linear thought doesn’t come naturally to us, and the Web, with its countless spinning, dancing, blinking, multicolored and goodie-filled margins, tempts us away from it. (E-mail, that constant influx of the social acknowledgment craved by our monkey brains, may pose an even more potent diversion.) “It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net,” Carr writes, “but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages or rewards.” Instead, it tends to transform us into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

A good portion of “The Shallows” is devoted to persuading readers of the truth in Marshall McLuhan’s famous pronouncement, “The medium is the message.” This includes potted histories of such mind-altering “intellectual technologies” as the map, the clock and the printed book. To anyone moderately versed in this history, it may feel unnecessary, but the response to Carr’s original article suggests that many people remain perilously sanguine about our ability to control the technology in our lives.

“The Shallows” certainly isn’t the first examination of this subject, but it’s more lucid, concise and pertinent than similar works by Winifred Gallagher and Sven Birkerts. Carr presents far more scientific material than those writers do, and avoids both the misty Spenglerian melancholia of Birkerts and Gallagher’s muddled efforts to inject Buddhist spirituality into the debate.

What the book doesn’t do, unfortunately, is offer a sufficient rejoinder to Carr’s most puckish critics, people like Clay Shirky, who responded to one Web addict’s complaint that he “can’t read ‘War and Peace’ anymore” by proclaiming Tolstoy’s epic novel to be “too long and not so interesting.” While Shirky was no doubt playing the provocateur, he speaks for a very real anti-authoritarian cultural impulse to dismiss the judgments of experts, of history, even of a majority of other readers when they clash with the (often half-baked) evaluations of the individual. Shirky effectively asserted that, as far as Tolstoy is concerned, the emperor has no clothes — at least not by the standards of today’s multitasking digital natives. And why shouldn’t their opinions be just as valid as anyone else’s?

Carr sensibly replies that anyone who lacks the time or the cognitive “facility” to read a long novel like “War and Peace” will naturally find it too long and not so interesting. But in that case, how would we persuade such a person that it’s worth learning how? For someone like Carr, the value of the intimate, intellectually nourishing practice of “literary reading” (and by extension, literary thinking) may be self-evident. Yet he’s able to quote apparently intelligent and well-educated sources (including a Rhodes scholar who claims to never read books) who simply don’t agree.

While “The Shallows” does present a good case for the richness of organic, biological memory over the crude information storage of digital media, I would have appreciated a more concerted effort to show the advantages of linear thinking over the scattered, skittering, browsing mind-set fostered by the Internet. What will we lose if (when?) this mode of thought passes into obscurity?

Carr and I (and perhaps you) may know that reading “War and Peace” can be a far more profound experience than navigating through a galaxy of up-to-date blog postings, but to someone who can’t or won’t believe this, what else can we point to as a consequence of the withering of such a skill? What will we lose socially, politically, civilly, scientifically, psychologically, if a majority decides that the intellectual “shallows” are the proper habitat for the 21st-century mind? This needs to be spelled out because as Carr’s critics have demonstrated, fewer and fewer people take it for granted. But with that caveat, “The Shallows” remains an essential, accessible dispatch about how we think now.

Note: The conventions of Web journalism dictate that I post links to related stories — such as Carr’s original piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”; a definition of the Milgram experiment; an earlier Salon review of Winifred Gallagher’s book, “Rapt”; a Salon essay by Rebecca Traister about Internet-blocking software; Sven Birkerts’ essay “Reading in the Digital Age”; and Clay Shirky’s Tolstoy-negative response to Carr’s essay — in the text of my review. But Carr argues that such links are at the very least subconsciously distracting, causing you to think, however briefly, “Should I leave this and come back, or just go on?” So I’m including them here and encourage readers to leave a comment on which format they prefer.
(Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller)

…….

Why can’t we concentrate?
by Laura Miller

Twitter and e-mail aren’t making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book explains why learning to focus is the key to living better.

Here’s a fail-safe topic when making conversation with everyone from cab drivers to grad students to cousins in the construction trade: Mention the fact that you’re finding it harder and harder to concentrate lately. The complaint appears to be universal, yet everyone blames it on some personal factor: having a baby, starting a new job, turning 50, having to use a Blackberry for work, getting on Facebook, and so on. Even more pervasive than Betty Friedan’s famous “problem that has no name,” this creeping distractibility and the technology that presumably causes it has inspired such cris de coeur as Nicholas Carr’s much-discussed “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” essay for the Atlantic Monthly and diatribes like “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future,” a book published last year by Mark Bauerlein.

You don’t have to agree that “we” are getting stupider, or that today’s youth are going to hell in a handbasket (by gum!) to mourn the withering away of the ability to think about one thing for a prolonged period of time. Carr (whose argument was grievously mislabeled by the Atlantic’s headline writers as a salvo against the ubiquitous search engine) reported feeling the change “most strongly” while he was reading. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” he wrote. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.” For my own part, I now find it challenging to sit still on my sofa through the length of a feature film. The urge to, for example, jump up and check the IMDB filmography of a supporting actor is well-nigh irresistible, and once I’m at the computer, why not check e-mail? Most of the time, I’ll wind up pausing the DVD player before the end of the movie and telling myself I’ll watch the rest tomorrow.

This is no mere Luddite’s lament. A couple of years ago a craze for “full screen mode” writing software like WriteSpace and WriteRoom swept through the Web’s various digital communities devoted to productivity tips and tricks favored by technology workers. These applications reduce a computer’s display to a simple black screen with a column of text running down the middle. My colleague Rebecca Traister wrote recently of her love affair with Freedom, a program that locks her computer off the Internet for a preset block of time so she can “get some goddamn work done,” a desperate measure she characterized as a bid to “protect me from myself.”

What this commonplace crisis comes down to is our inability to control our own minds. You may, like Traister, need to buckle down and write, or you may, like Carr, pine for the deeply engaged style of reading we bring to books and New Yorker profiles. You may, like me, realize that your evening will be more enjoyable and more enriching if you commit to the full 110 minutes of “Children of Men” instead of obsessively checking out your friends’ Facebook updates or surveying borderline illiterate reader reviews — or, for that matter, browsing through the “Seinfeld” reruns in your Tivo Suggestions queue. In many cases, the thing we wish we would do is not only more interesting but ultimately more fun than the things we do instead, and yet it seems to require a Herculean effort to make ourselves do it.

What to do? For most people, bailing on the Web or e-mail or cellphones isn’t even feasible, let alone practical or ultimately desirable. (I shudder at the thought of living without my beloved Tivo.) Besides, modern life really isn’t making us stupider: IQ tests have to be regularly updated to make them harder; otherwise the average score would have climbed 3 percent per decade since the early 1930s. (The average score is supposed to remain at a constant 100 points.) And IQ measures problem-solving ability, rather than sheer data retained, which has grown even faster over the same interval. Each of us knows many more people and facts than our counterparts of 100 years ago; it’s just that the importance of those people and facts remains somewhat uncertain. Knowing a little bit about Lindsay Lohan and Simon Cowell (two people I recognize despite having no active interest in either one) can’t really be equated with knowing a bit about Marie Curie or Lord Mountbatten. We have more information, but it isn’t necessarily more valuable information.

Winifred Gallagher’s new book, “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” argues that it’s high time we take more deliberate control of this stuff. “The skillful management of attention,” she writes, “is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.” Because we can only attend to a tiny portion of the sensory cacophony around us, the elements we choose to focus on — the very stuff of our reality — is a creation, adeptly edited, providing us with a workable but highly selective version of the world and our own existence. Your very self, “stored in your memory,” is the product of what you pay attention to, since you can’t remember what you never noticed to begin with.

Gallagher came to appreciate this while fighting “a particularly nasty, fairly advanced” form of cancer. Determined not to let her illness “monopolize” her attention, she made a conscious choice to look “toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or energizing and away from the destructive, or dispiriting.” Her experience of the world was transformed. This revelation naturally led her to wonder why she’d had to exert herself to do what made her feel better. Why didn’t she turn to it as naturally as a thirsty woman turns to a glass of ice water? Why do we reflexively award more attention to negative or toxic phenomena like disasters and insults, while neglecting to credit small pleasures and compliments with the significance they deserve?

A good part of “Rapt” explores this puzzle, identifying both biological and cultural causes for our sometimes self-defeating habits. The book belongs to a school of nonfiction — Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” is the model — that aims to walk the line between social science and self-help. Despite the title, disappointingly little of “Rapt” is concerned with the state Gallagher describes as “completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even ‘carried away,’” that is, precisely the experience Carr thinks is becoming ever more inaccessible. Ironically, for a book about focusing, “Rapt” can be frustratingly scattered, self-contradicting and platitudinous; do we really need more hand-wringing about families who don’t have dinner together or reheated summaries of scientific studies demonstrating the power of positive thinking?

Still, Gallagher deserves credit for calling our attention to attention itself, specifically to the way it works neurologically. In essence, attention is the faculty by which the mind selects and then zeroes in on the most “salient” aspect of any situation. The problem is that the brain is not a unified whole, but a collection of “systems” that often come into conflict with each other. When that happens, the more primitive, stimulus-driven, unconscious systems (the “reactive” and “behavioral” components of our brains) will usually override the consciously controlled “reflective” mind.

There are excellent reasons for this. In the conditions under which humanity evolved, threats had the greatest salience; individuals who spotted and eluded dangers before they went chasing after rewards tended to live long enough to pass on their traits to future generations. As a result, we inherited from our distant ancestors the tendency to pay greater attention to the unpleasant and troublesome elements of our surroundings, even when those elements have evolved from real menaces, like a crocodile in the reeds, to largely insignificant ones like nasty anonymous postings in a Web discussion.

Likewise, our interest is grabbed by movement, bright colors, loud noises and novelty — all qualities associated with potential meals or threats in a natural setting; we are hard-wired to like the shiny. The attention we bring to bear on less exciting objects and activities, where the payoff may be long-term rather than immediate, requires a conscious choice. This is the kind of attention that opens into complex, nuanced and creative thought, but it tends to get swamped by the more urgent demands of the reactive system unless we exert ourselves to overcome our instincts. The reflective system flourishes best when the environment is relatively free of bells and whistles screaming “Delicious fruit up here!” or “Large animal approaching over there!”

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives. When the physical limitations on print and broadcast media kept the number of competitors for our attention relatively few, some candidates could afford to appeal to our reflective side. Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is “eyeballs.” As more options crowd the menu, direct appeals to the reactive mind in the form of bright colors or allusions to sex, aggression, tasty foods and so on, take over.

The machinations of late capitalism aren’t the only things driving the incessant pinging on our reactive attention systems, either. If you’re like most people, you will keep checking for new e-mail despite the unresolved messages that await in your inbox. The already-read messages may even deal with urgent matters like an impatient question from your boss or appealing subjects like possible vacation rentals, yet there’s something lackluster about them compared to what might be wending its way to you over the Internet right this minute. Despite the fact that the incoming messages are probably not any more compelling than the ones you’ve already received, they’re more attention-grabbing simply by virtue of being new. When Carr complains of the compulsion to skim and move on that possesses readers of online media, a major culprit is this instinct-driven craving for the novelties that lurk a mere mouse-click away.

The fact that sensationalism sells is hardly news, but less well-known is the fact that a constant diet of reactive-system stimuli has the potential to alter our very brains. The plasticity of the brain, scientists concur, is much greater than was once thought. New brain-imaging technologies have demonstrated that people consistently called upon to use one aspect of their mental toolbox — the famously well-oriented London cabbies, for example — show enhanced blood flow to and development of those parts of the brain devoted to, say, spatial cognition. In “The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory,” Torkel Klingberg, a Swedish professor of cognitive neuroscience, argues that careful management and training of our working memory (which deals with immediate tasks and the information pertaining to them) can increase its capacity — that your data-crammed noggin can essentially build itself an annex.

But while it’s one thing to accommodate more information, it’s another to engage with it fundamentally, in a way that allows us to perceive underlying patterns and to take concepts apart so that we can put them back together in new and constructive ways. The early human who was constantly fending off leopards or plucking low-hanging mangoes never got around to figuring out how to build a house. Because leopards and mangoes were for the most part relatively few and far between, most of our ancestors found it easier to summon the kind of attention conducive to completing projects that, in the long term, make life measurably better. Ironically, while immediate threats and fleeting treats are comparatively much rarer in our complex social world, the attention system designed to deal with them has been kept on perpetual alert by both design and happenstance.

As long as we remain only dimly aware of the dueling attention systems within us, the reactive will continue to win out over the reflective. We’ll focus on discussion-board trolls, dancing refinancing ads, Hollywood gossip and tweets rather than on that enlightening but lengthy article about the economy or the novel or film that has the potential to ravish our souls. Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold! Over time, our brains will adapt themselves to these activities and find it more and more difficult to switch gears. Gallagher’s exhortations to scrutinize and redirect our attention could not be more timely, but actually accomplishing such a feat increasingly feels beyond our control. I can’t speak personally to the effectiveness of meditation, Gallagher’s recommended remedy for chronic distraction, but the effectiveness of meditative practices (religious or secular) in reshaping the brain have also been abundantly demonstrated.

Knee-jerk Internet boosters like to argue that the old ways of thinking are both obsolete and less wondrous than fuddy-duddies make them out to be. The next generation of citizens, they insist, will happily inhabit a culture composed of millions of small, spinning, sparkly bits and, what’s more, they will thrive in it. Tell that to the kids who spent all weekend holed up with the last Harry Potter book. As exhausting as it can be to fight off the siren call of the reactive attention system, some part of us will always yearn to be immersed, captivated and entranced by just one thing, to the point that the world and all its dancing diversions grows dim, fades and falls away.

(Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller)

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Reading in a Digital Age
Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary

By Sven Birkerts

The American Scholar
The nature of transition, how change works its way through a system, how people acclimate to the new—all these questions. So much of the change is driven by technologies that are elusive if not altogether invisible in their operation. Signals, data, networks. New habits and reflexes. Watch older people as they try to retool; watch the ease with which kids who have nothing to unlearn go swimming forward. Study their movements, their aptitudes, their weaknesses. I wonder if any population in history has had a bigger gulf between its youngest and oldest members.

I ask my students about their reading habits, and though I’m not surprised to find that few read newspapers or print magazines, many check in with online news sources, aggregate sites, incessantly. They are seldom away from their screens for long, but that’s true of us, their parents, as well.

But how do we start to measure effects—of this and everything else? The outer look of things stays much the same, which is to say that the outer look of things has not caught up with the often intangible transformations. Newspapers are still sold and delivered; bookstores still pile their sale tables high. It is easy for the critic to be accused of alarmism. And yet . . .

Information comes to seem like an environment. If anything “important” happens anywhere, we will be informed. The effect of this is to pull the world in close. Nothing penetrates, or punctures. The real, which used to be defined by sensory immediacy, is redefined.

FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF HINDSIGHT, that which came before so often looks quaint, at least with respect to technology. Indeed, we have a hard time imagining that the users weren’t at some level aware of the absurdity of what they were doing. Movies bring this recognition to us fondly; they give us the evidence. The switchboard operators crisscrossing the wires into the right slots; Dad settling into his luxury automobile, all fins and chrome; Junior ringing the bell on his bike as he heads off on his paper route. The marvel is that all of them—all of us—concealed their embarrassment so well. The attitude of the present to the past . . . well, it depends on who is looking. The older you are, the more likely it is that your regard will be benign—indulgent, even nostalgic. Youth, by contrast, quickly gets derisive, preening itself on knowing better, oblivious to the fact that its toys will be found no less preposterous by the next wave of the young.

These notions came at me the other night while I was watching the opening scenes of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, which has as its premise the active presence of angels in our midst. The scene that triggered me was set in a vast and spacious modern library. The camera swooped with angelic freedom, up the wide staircases, panning vertically to a kind of balcony outcrop where Bruno Ganz, one of Wenders’s angels, stood looking down. Below him people moved like insects, studying shelves, removing books, negotiating this great archive of items.

Maybe it was the idea of angels that did it—the insertion of the timeless perspective into this moment of modern-day Berlin. I don’t know, but in a flash I felt myself looking back in time from a distant and disengaged vantage. I was seeing it all as through the eyes of the future, and what I felt, before I could check myself, was a bemused pity: the gaze of a now on a then that does not yet know it is a then, which is unselfconsciously fulfilling itself.

SUDDENLY IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE a world in which many interactions formerly dependent on print on paper happen screen to screen. It’s no stretch, no exercise in futurism. You can pretty much extrapolate from the habits and behaviors of kids in their teens and 20s, who navigate their lives with little or no recourse to paper. In class they sit with their laptops open on the table in front of them. I pretend they are taking course-related notes, but would not be surprised to find out they are writing to friends, working on papers for other courses, or just trolling their favorite sites while they listen. Whenever there is a question about anything—a date, a publication, the meaning of a word—they give me the answer before I’ve finished my sentence. From where they stand, Wenders’s library users already have a sepia coloration. I know that I present book information to them with a slight defensiveness; I wrap my pronouncements in a preemptive irony. I could not bear to be earnest about the things that matter to me and find them received with that tolerant bemusement I spoke of, that leeway we extend to the beliefs and passions of our elders.

AOL SLOGAN: “We search the way you think.”

I JUST FINISHED READING an article in Harper’s by Gary Greenberg (“A Mind of Its Own”) on the latest books on neuropsychology, the gist of which recognizes an emerging consensus in the field, and maybe, more frighteningly, in the culture at large: that there may not be such a thing as mind apart from brain function. As Eric Kandel, one of the writers discussed, puts it: “Mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, much as walking is a set of operations carried out by the legs, except dramatically more complex.” It’s easy to let the terms and comparisons slide abstractly past, to miss the full weight of implication. But Greenberg is enough of an old humanist to recognize when the great supporting trunk of his worldview is being crosscut just below where he is standing and to realize that everything he deems sacred is under threat. His recognition may not be so different from the one that underlay the emergence of Nietzsche’s thought. But if Nietzsche found a place of rescue in man himself, his Superman transcending himself to occupy the void left by the loss—the murder—of God, there is no comparable default now.

Brain functioning cannot stand in for mind, once mind has been unmasked as that, unless we somehow grant that the nature of brain partakes of what we had allowed might be the nature of mind. Which seems logically impossible, as the nature of mind allowed possibilities of connection and fulfillment beyond the strictly material, and the nature of brain is strictly material. It means that what we had imagined to be the something more of experience is created in-house by that three-pound bundle of neurons, and that it is not pointing to a larger definition of reality so much as to a capacity for narrative projection engendered by infinitely complex chemical reactions. No chance of a wizard behind the curtain. The wizard is us, our chemicals mingling.

“And if you still think God made us,” writes Greenberg, “there’s a neuro chemical reason for that too.” He quotes writer David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God (!): “Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free stories. . . . This propensity for narrative creation is part of what predisposes us humans to religious thought.” Of course one can, must, ask whence narration itself. What in us requires story rather than the chaotic pullulation that might more accurately describe what is?

Greenberg also cites philosopher Karl Popper, his belief that the neuroscientific worldview will gradually displace what he calls the “mentalist” perspective:

With the progress of brain research, the language of the physiologists is likely to penetrate more and more into ordinary language, and to change our picture of the universe, including that of common sense. So we shall be talking less and less about experiences, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, purposes and aims; and more and more about brain processes. . . . When this stage has been reached, mentalism will be stone dead, and the problem of mind and its relation to the body will have solved itself.

But it is not only developments in brain science that are creating this deep shift in the human outlook. This research advances hand in hand with the wholesale implementation and steady expansion of the externalized neural network: the digitizing of almost every sphere of human activity. Long past being a mere arriving technology, the digital is at this point ensconced as a paradigm, fully saturating our ordinary language. Who can doubt that even when we are not thinking, when we are merely functioning in our new world, we are premising that world very differently than did our parents or the many generations preceding them?

What is the place of the former world now, its still-familiar but also strangely sepia-tinged assumptions about the self acting in a larger and, in frightening and thrilling ways, inexplicable world?

LET ME GO BACK to that assertion by Linden: “Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free stories. . . . This propensity for narrative creation is part of what predisposes us humans to religious thought.” What a topic for surmising! I would almost go so far as to say that it is a mystery as great as the original creation—the what, how, and whither—the contemplation of how chemicals in combination create things we call narratives, and how these narratives elicit the extraordinary responses they do from chemicals in combination. The idea of “narrative creation” carries a great deal in its train. For narrative—story—is not the same thing as simple sequentiality. To say “I went here and then here and then did this and then did that” is not narrative, at least not in the sense that I’m sure Linden intends. No, narration is sequence that claims significance. Animals, for example, do not narrate, even though they are well aware of sequence and of the consequences of actions. “My master has picked up my bowl and has gone with it into that room; he will return with my food.” This is a chain of events linked by a causal expectation, but it stops there. Human narratives are events and descriptions selected and arranged for meaning.

The question, as always, is one of origins. Did man invent narrative or, owing to whatever predispositions in his makeup, inherit it? Is coming into human consciousness also a coming into narrative—is it part of the nature of human consciousness to seek and create narrative, which is to say meaning? What would it mean then that chemicals in combination created meaning, or the idea of meaning, or the tools with which meaning is sought—created that by which their own structure and operation was theorized and questioned? If that were true, then “mere matter” would have to be defined as having as one of its possibilities that of regarding itself.

We assume that logical thought, syllogistic analytical reason, is the necessary, right thought—and we do so because this same thought leads us to think this way. No exit, it seems. Except that logical thought will allow that there may be other logics, though it cannot explicate them. Another quote from the Harper’s article, this from Greenberg: “As a neuroscientist will no doubt someday discover, metaphor is something that the brain does when complexity renders it incapable of thinking straight.”

Metaphor, the poet, imagination. The whole deeper part of the subject comes into view. What is, for me, behind this sputtering, is my longstanding conviction that imagination—not just the faculty, but what might be called the whole party of the imagination—is endangered, is shrinking faster than Balzac’s wild ass’s skin, which diminished every time its owner made a wish. Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum. Each time we get another false inkling of agency, another taste of pseudopower.

READING the Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr on the effect of Google (and online behavior in general), I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered. This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well

This idea of the novel is gaining on me: that it is not, except superficially, only a thing to be studied in English classes—that it is a field for thinking, a condensed time-world that is parallel (or adjacent) to ours. That its purpose is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself. Enhancement. Deepening. Priming the engines of conjecture. In this way, and for this reason, the novel is the vital antidote to the mentality that the Internet promotes.

This makes an end run around the divisive opposition between “realist” and other modes of fiction (as per the critic James Wood), the point being not the nature of the representation but the quality and feel of the experience.

It would be most interesting, then, to take on a serious experiential-phenomenological “reading” of different kinds of novels—works from what are seen now as different camps.

MY REAL WORRY has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking—their demotion, as it were. I mean reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. I mean, in my shorthand, intransitive thinking. Contemplation. Thinking for its own sake, non-instrumental, as opposed to transitive thinking, the kind that would depend on a machine-drive harvesting of facts toward some specified end. Ideally, of course, we have both, left brain and right brain in balance. But the evidence keeps coming in that not only are we hypertrophied on the left-brain side, but we are subscribing wholesale to technologies reinforcing that kind of thinking in every aspect of our lives. The digital paradigm. The Google article in The Atlantic was sub titled “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” ominous in its suggestion that brain function is being altered; that what we do is changing how we are by reconditioning our neural functioning.

For a long time we have had the idea that the novel is a form that can be studied and explicated, which of course it can be. From this has arisen the dogmatic assumption that the novel is a statement, a meaning-bearing device. Which has, in turn, allowed it to be considered a minor enterprise—for these kinds of meanings, fine for high-school essays on Man’s Inhumanity to Man, cannot compete in the marketplace with the empirical requirements of living in the world.

This message-driven way of looking at the novel allows for the emergence of evaluative grids, the aesthetic distinctions that then create arguments between, say, proponents of realism and proponents of formal experimentation, where one way or the other is seen as better able to bring the reader a weight of content. In this way, at least, the novel has been made to serve the transitive, goal-driven ideology.

But we have been ignoring the deeper nature of fiction. That it is inwardly experiential, intransitive, a mode of contemplation, its purpose being to create for the author and reader a terrain, an arena of liberation, where mind can be different, where mind and imagination can freely combine, where memory and sensation can be deployed, intensified through the specific constraints that any imagined situation allows.

THE QUESTION comes up for me insistently: Where am I when I am reading a novel? I am “in” the novel, of course, to the degree that it involves me. I may be absorbed, but I am never without some awareness of the world around me—where I am sitting, what else might be going on in the house. Sometimes I think—and this might be true of writing as well—that it is misleading to think of myself as hovering between two places: the conjured and the empirically real. That it is closer to the truth to say that I occupy a third state, one which somehow amalgamates two awarenesses, not unlike that short-lived liminal place I inhabit when I am not yet fully awake, when I am sentient but still riding on the momentum of my sleep. I experience both, at times, as a privileged kind of profundity, an enhancement.

READING A NOVEL involves a double transposition—a major cognitive switch and then a more specific adaptation. The first is the inward plunge, giving in to the “Let there be another kind of world” premise. No novel can be entered without taking this step. The second involves agreeing to the givens of the work, accepting that this is New York circa 2004 as seen through the eyes of a first-person “I” or a presiding narrator.

Here I have to emphasize the distinction, so often ignored, between the fictional creation “New York” and the existing city. The novel may invoke a place, but it is not simply reporting on the real. The novelist must bring that location, however closely it maps to the real, into the virtual gravitational space of the work. Which is a fabrication.

THE VITAL THING is this shift, which cannot take place, really, without the willingness or intent on the reader’s part to experience a change of mental state. We all know the sensation of duress that comes when we try to read or immerse ourselves in anything when there is no desire. At these times the only thing possible is to proceed mechanically with taking in the words, hoping that they will somehow effect the magic, jump-start the imagination. This is the power of words. They are part of our own sense-making process, and when their designations and connotations are intensified by rhythmic musicality, a receptivity can be created.

The problem we face in a culture saturated with vivid competing stimuli is that the first part of the transaction will be foreclosed by an inability to focus—the first step requires at least that the language be able to reach the reader, that the word sounds and rhythms come alive in the auditory imagination. But where the attention span is keyed to a different level and other kinds of stimulus, it may be that the original connection can’t be made. Or if made, made weakly. Or will prove incapable of being sustained. Imagination must be quickened and then it must be sustained—it must survive interruption and deflection. Formerly, I think, the natural progression of the work, the ongoing development and complication of the situation, if achieved skillfully, would be enough. But more and more comes the complaint, even from practiced readers, that it is hard to maintain attentive focus. The works have presumably not changed. What has changed is either the conditions of reading or something in the cognitive reflexes of the reader. Or both.

All of us now occupy an information space blazing with signals. We have had to evolve coping strategies. Not merely the ability to heed simultaneous cues from different directions, cues of different kinds, but also—this is important—to engage those cues more obliquely. When there is too much information, we graze it lightly, applying focus only where it is most needed. We stare at a computer screen with its layered windows and orient ourselves with a necessarily fractured attention. It is not at all surprising that when we step away and try to apply ourselves to the unfragmented text of a book we have trouble. It is not so easy to suspend the adaptation.

WHEN READING Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, I am less caught in the action—there is not that much of it—than the tonality. I have the familiar, necessary sense of being privy to the thoughts (and rhythmic inner workings) of Hans, the narrator, and I am interested in him. Though to be accurate I don’t know that it’s as much Hans himself that I am drawn to as the feeling of eavesdropping on another consciousness. All aspects of this compel me, his thoughts and observations, the unexpected detours his memories provide, his efforts to engage in his own feeling-life. I am flickeringly aware as I read that he is being written, and sometimes there is a swerve into literary self-consciousness. But this doesn’t disturb me, doesn’t break the fourth wall: I am perfectly content to see these shifts as the product of the author’s own efforts, which suggests that I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension. It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source or location. Sometimes everything else seems a contrivance that makes this one connection possible. It is what I have always mainly read for.

This brings me back to the old question, the one I have yet to answer convincingly. What am I doing when I am reading a novel? How do I justify the activity as something more than a way to pass the time? Have all the novels I’ve read in my life really given me any bankable instruction, beyond a deeper feel for words, the possibilities of syntax, and so on? Have I ever seriously been bettered, or even instructed, by my exposure to a theme, some truism about existence over and above the situational proxy-experience? More, that is, than what my own thinking has given me? And how would this work?

I read novels in order to indulge in a concentrated and directed sort of inner activity that is not available in most of my daily transactions. This reading, more than anything else I do, parallels—and thereby tunes up, accentuates—my own inner life, which is ever associative, a shuttling between observation, memory, reflection, emotional recognition, and so forth. A good novel puts all these elements into play in its own unique fashion.

WHAT IS THE POINT, the value, of this proxy investment? While I am reading a novel, one that reaches me at a certain level, then the work, the whole of it—pitch, tonality, regard of the world—lives inside me as if inside parentheses, and it acts on me, maybe in a way analogous to how materials in parenthesis act on the sense of the rest of the sentence. My way of looking at others or my regard for the larger directional meaning of my life is subject to pressure or infiltration. I watch people crossing the street at an intersection and something of the character’s or author’s sense of scale—how he inflects the importance of the daily observation—influences my feeling as I wait at the light. And the incidental thoughts that I derive from that watching have a way of resonating with the outlook of the book. Is this a widening or deepening of my experience? Does it in any way make me better fit for living? Hard to say.

What does the novel leave us after it has concluded, resolved its tensions, given us its particular exercise? I always liked Ortega y Gasset’s epigram that “culture is what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we’ve read.” We shouldn’t let the epigrammatical neatness obscure the deeper truth: that there is something over and above the so-called contents of a work that is not only of some value, but that may constitute culture itself.

HAVING JUST THE OTHER DAY FINISHED Netherland, I can testify about the residue a novel leaves, not in terms of culture so much as specific personal resonance. Effects and impacts change constantly, and there’s no telling what, if anything, I will find myself preserving a year from now. But even now, with the scenes and characters still available to ready recall, I can see how certain things start to fade and others leave their mark. The process of this tells on me as a reader, no question. With O’Neill’s novel—and for me this is almost always true with fiction—the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages

What—I ask it again—what has been the point of my reading? One way for me to try to answer is to ask what I do retain. Honest answer? A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche. Certainly I believe I have gained something important, though to hold that conviction I have to argue that memory access cannot be the sole criterion of impact; that there are other ways that we might possess information, impressions, and even understanding. For I will insist that my reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it. Also, there are different kinds of memory access. You can shine the interrogation lamp in my face and ask me to describe Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and I will fail miserably, even though I have listed it as one of the novels I most admire. But I know that traces of its intelligence are in me, that I can, depending on the prompt, call up scenes from that novel in bright, unexpected flashes: it has not vanished completely. And possibly something similar explains Ortega’s “culture is what remains” aphorism.

In a lifetime of reading, which maps closely to a lifetime of forgetting, we store impressions willy-nilly, according to private systems of distribution, keeping factual information on one plane; acquired psychological insight (how humans act when jealous, what romantic compulsion feels like) on another; ideas on a third, and so on. I believe that I know a great deal without knowing what I know. And that, further, insights from one source join with those from another. I may be, unbeknownst to myself, quite a student of human nature based on my reading. But I no longer know in every case that my insights are from reading. The source may fade as the sensation remains.

But there is one detail from Netherland that did leave an especially bright mark on me and may prove to be an index to everything else. O’Neill describes how Hans, in his lonely separation from his wife and child (he is in New York, they are in London), makes use of the Google satellite function on his computer. “Starting with a hybrid map of the United States,” he tells,

I moved the navigation box across the north Atlantic and began my fall from the stratosphere: successively, into a brown and greenish Europe. . . . From the central maze of mustard roads I followed the river southwest into Putney, zoomed in between the Lower and Upper Richmond Roads, and, with the image purely photographic, descended finally on Landford Road. It was always a clear and beautiful day—and wintry, if I correctly recall, with the trees pale brown and the shadows long. From my balloonist’s vantage point, aloft at a few hundred meters, the scene was depthless. My son’s dormer was visible, and the blue inflated pool and the red BMW; but there was no way to see more, or deeper. I was stuck.

At the very end of the novel, Hans reverses vantage. That is, he pursues the satellite view from England—he has returned—looking to see if he can see the cricket field where he worked on Staten Island with his friend Chuck Ramkissoon:

I fall again, as low as I can. There’s Chuck’s field. It is brown—the grass has burned—but it is still there. There’s no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I’m just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently, with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all—have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere.

I find this obsession of his intensely moving, a deep reflection of his personality; I also find it quite effective as an image device. To begin with, the contemplation of such intensified action-at-a-distance fascinates—the idea that one even can do such a thing. And I confess that I stopped reading after the first passage and went right upstairs to my laptop to see if it was indeed possible to get such access. It is—though I stopped short of downloading what I needed out of fear that bringing the potentiality of a God vantage into my little machine might overwhelm its circuitry.

This idea of vantage is to be considered. Not only for what it gives the average user: sophisticated visual access to the whole planet (I find it hard to even fathom this—I who after years of flying still thrill like a child when the plane descends in zoom-lens increments, turning a toy city by degrees into an increasingly material reality), but also for the uncanny way in which it offers a correlative to the novelist’s swooping freedom. Still, Hans can only get so close—he is constrained by the limits of technology, and, necessarily, by visual exteriority. The novelist can complete the action, moving right in through the dormer window, and then, if he has set it up thus, into the minds of any of the characters he has found/created there.

This image is relevant in another, more conceptual way. The reality O’Neill has so compellingly described, that of swooping access, is part of the futurama that is our present. The satellite capability stands for many other kinds of capabilities, for the whole new reach of information technology, which more than any transformation in recent decades has changed how we live and—in ways we can’t possibly measure—who we are. It questions the place of fiction, literature, art in general, in our time. Against such potency, one might ask, how can beauty—how can the self’s expressions—hold a plea? The very action that the author renders so finely poses an indirect threat to his livelihood. No, no—comes the objection. Isn’t the whole point that he has taken it over with his imagination, on behalf of the imagination? Yes, of course, and it is a striking seizure. But we should not be too complacent about the novelist’s superior reach. For these very things—all of the operations and abilities that we now claim—are encroaching on every flank. Yes, O’Neill can capture in beautiful sentences the sensation of a satellite eye homing in on its target, but the fact that such a power is available to the average user leaches from the overall power of the novel-as-genre. In giving us yet another instrument of access, the satellite eye reduces by some factor the operating power of imagination itself. The person who can make a transatlantic swoop will, in part for having that power, be less able, or less willing, or both, to read the labored sequences that comprise any written work of art. Not just his satellite ventures, but the sum of his Internet interactions, which are other aspects of our completely transformed information culture.

AFTER ALL MY JIBES against the decontextualizing power of the search engine, it is to Google I go this morning, hoping to track down the source of Nabokov’s phrase “aesthetic bliss.” And indeed, five or six entries locate the quote from his afterword to Lolita: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” The phrase has been in my mind in the last few days, following my reading of Netherland and my attempts to account for the value of that particular kind of reading experience. “Aesthetic bliss” is one kind of answer—the effects on me of certain prose styles, like Nabokov’s own, or John Banville’s, or Virginia Woolf’s. But the phrase sounds trivial; it sounds like mere connoisseurship, a self-congratulatory mandarin business. It’s far more complicated than any mere swooning over pretty words and phrases. Aesthetic bliss. To me it expresses the delight that comes when the materials, the words, are working at their highest pitch, bringing sensation to life in the mind.

Sensation . . . I can imagine an objection, a voice telling me that sensation itself is trivial, not as important as idea, as theme. As if there is a hierarchy with ideas on one level, and psychological insights, and far below the re-creation of the textures of experience and inward process. I obviously don’t agree, nor does my reading sensibility, which, as I’ve confessed already, does not go seeking after themes and usually forgets them soon after taking them in. What thou lovest well remains—and for me it is language in this condition of alert, sensuous precision, language that does not forget the world of nouns. I’m thinking that one part of this project will need to be a close reading of and reflection upon certain passages that are for me certifiably great. I have to find occasion to ask—and examine closely—what happens when a string of words gets something exactly right.

WE ALWAYS HEAR arguments about how the original time-passing function of the triple-decker novel has been rendered obsolete by competing media. What we hear less is the idea that the novel serves and embodies a certain interior pace, and that this has been shouted down (but not eliminated) by the transformations of modern life. Reading requires a synchronization of one’s reflective rhythms to those of the work. It is one thing to speed-read a dialogue-rich contemporary satire, another to engage with the nuanced thought-world of Norman Rush’s characters in Mating. The reader adjusts to the author, not vice versa, and sometimes that adjustment feels too difficult. The triple-decker was, I’m theorizing, synchronous with the basic heart rate of its readers, and is now no longer so.

But the issue is more complicated still. For it’s one thing to say that sensibility is timed to certain rhythms—faster, slower—another to reflect that what had once been a singular entity is now subject to near-constant fragmentation by the turbulent dynamic of life as we live it. Concentration can be had, but for most of us it is only by setting oneself against the things that routinely destroy it.

Serious literary work has levels. The engaged reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonance—that which the author creates, deliberately, through her use of language. It is the secondary power of good writing, often the ulterior motive of the writing. The two levels operate on a lag, with the resonance accumulating behind the sense, building a linguistic density that is the verbal equivalent of an aftertaste, or the “finish.” The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.

Sven Birkerts edits the literary journal Agni and directs the Bennington Writing Seminars. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again. He is completing The Other Walk, a collection of short prose.