Re: <documenta X><blast> Visual Commodity/Kernel
Jordan Crandall (xaf@interport.net)
Tue, 15 Jul 1997 17:24:57 -0400
I'm thinking about Serge Daney's distinction between "the image" and
"the visual." He refers to the visual as the optical confirmation of a
purely technological function. The visual is a loop, a confirmation
that the visual faculty still functions, a confirmation that the body is
in order. In this sense, to talk about the technological mediation of
vision is to talk about vision pure and simple, because there is no
vision outside of the technological. Would this mean that what we
regard as the visual is a kind of system-check, or a way of locating and
embodying a subject, or of offering an illusion that the perceiving
subject is still "together" (according to current conceptions of what it
means to be together, of course -- conceptions that the visual helps to
figure)? Or it might provide a map or trajectory of study, because to
locate the visual and its orientations is to locate a subject and then
to embody and situate that subject. But of course we wouldn't want to
see this as uni-directional, since the visual is a product too. But in
either case it is a corrective measure of some sort, a policing, a
seeing what you're supposed to see, a confirmation of power. The visual
is linked to reading, scanning, summing up in one fell swoop: one "gets
it" by stepping into the calculus, stimulus=response in its variability.
The image, on the other hand, holds out against the visual. It is held
in tension, fleetingly at the borders. Is it the object of the visual?
Not necessarily, because the object of the visual is very often "the
visual" (a kind of normative, recursive measure, a mirroring or
diffraction as regulation). The image escapes, slips out, always more
and less than itself, irreducible and lacking. Ultimately an "empty
slot," it eludes what the visual always fulfills. Where is "the image"
in the network?
It seems to me that the visual trains its subject through techniques and
forms of mobilization and restriction. The visual object moves, in
order to immobilize its subject (think of your physical position right
now), or the visual object is frozen, in order to catapult its subject
into motion. This implicates a "vehicle," a device that mediates this
dance. Forms of mobility have physical implications, and the vehicle
presses up against that physicality, helping to mold it (as it is
molded). Sequences of frames are registered as movement, or movement is
instituted in relation to a fixed frame. A movement might be perceived
as bodily motion, or a form of transport that does not necessarily move
the body as it is understood (on the web we say we "go" to a site, we
speak in travel metaphors). The visual is material and materializing,
enmeshed in dynamics of motion (as motion is defined in a culture, and
we know that one does not have to physically get up to "move"). The
visual appears as if it were highly mobile (advertising always seems
somehow to find you, and follow you), but it is in fact often very
fixed, while pregnant with mobilizing-effects. It compels you to move
and to invent new forms of movement to "keep up" with its demands (and
here online mobility is clearly a result). And reality itself - as the
sum of the visual - is an effect of these demands: the pace of the
outside world is itself a function of the demands of the visual
(Virilio).
What is the vehicle, what is the visual, and where is the image?
Contextualization: "space."
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