Poesis of Objecthood - Part Four

The legs remain motionless when the headset comes alive. Muscular limbs slide through lush foliage while the stomach churns the remains of its last meal. Saliva, hormones, and bacteria continue their ancient negotiations as the surf washes around manicured feet, blazing a fiery trail on tropical sand. Jump to a cozy corner to share a cocktail with friends, the skin against the vinyl of the ergonomic chair waiting in vain for the warmth, pressure, and moisture of a touch. The uninterrupted torrent of images herds the somnolent body parts, sending its joints, muscles, and organs out to pasture in temporary limbo. Sight reigning supreme assumes the function of the other senses, translating the setting, the exertion, the libations, and intimacy into a visual lingua franca. The audio enhances the visuals as idle muscles ripple through rustling leaves, and exotic dishes are recited in code to an alimentary tract that does not swallow a bite. All the while, the visual cortex has been reporting abundant sensations, yet the sensorium, like the submerged chunk of an iceberg, experiences only frozen absence. The body is gradually persuaded to inhabit a world where sight speaks for every other sense, until it no longer accompanies experience. The sovereign sense replaces it, establishing itself as the imperial administrator of proprioception, funneling the body’s polyphony of touch, taste, and smell into a pixelated stream of data. Just as a single paradigm, culture, or economy claims to represent reality in its entirety, the faculty of sight, prized for apprehending distant surfaces quite rapidly, deploys its tendency towards universalization in a reductive manner. In Downcast Eyes (1993), Martin Jay, a scholar of European intellectual history, exposed how Western culture not only set apart vision because of its usefulness but intently elevated it into the model of truth itself. From Plato through Cartesian perspective, phenomenal reality became increasingly laid out before a detached observer, available for measurement, classification, and ultimately control. Jay demonstrates how thinkers from Bataille to Derrida mounted a sustained critique of this “ocularcentrism”. Although in another context, French theory falls into its own linguistic trap, these authors’ critique of the homogenizing scopic regime did much to erode vision’s claim of innocent perception. In Ceci tuera cela (2021), co-authored by Annie Le Brun, the diagnosis is pushed into the digital age to scrutinize the industrialization of visibility. It exposes how Images proliferate with the pixel until everything becomes immediately accessible, transparent, and consumable. In a continuous spectacle of availability, the atomization of the icon into the science of pixel control becomes a tool of Capital from which nothing remains hidden. In a parallel to this collusion of the pixel with capital, and although there isn’t always a causal thread between them, the tendency to universalize also arises in the contexts of empire, religion, language, and monoculture. At its most elementary, universalization begins as a failure to preserve the irreducibility of another object. It is a structural tendency of relation that turns access into annexation. An object’s mode of encountering a foreign agent ceases to behave as a relation among others and presents itself as the world’s own structure. Thus, instead of responding to the object’s specificity, the encountered object is overwritten by a preferential mode of relation, one that is subsequently claimed by the exceptionalist subject. Issued from the same ontological register, Capital universalizes exchange into the common denominator of heterogeneous objects. Empire performs an analogous operation politically, monoculture repeats the process biologically, and so does vision at the level of perception by acquiring the authority to stand for the entire sensorium and establishing a universal substrate with the condensed technology of the pixel.

The reduction of heterogeneous reality is not new, but its consequences are not likely to be exhausted. Universalization is a reduction that pairs capital to equivalence, logocentrism to intelligibility, monoculture to optimization, the pixel to digitization, and perspective to absolute visibility. Every universal begins as a provincial encounter that forsakes its locality, as when a market relation becomes the origin of value or a visual association becomes the essence of perception. The same mechanism is at work when a computational grid captures the nature of reality, and a political jurisdiction is touted as the beacon of civilization. As Capital levels everything to a single metric of exchange, Empire forbids territorial logics to coexist, extending one juridical, linguistic, or ecumenical framework across landscapes that were once maintained by ecological relations but get reorganized for the optimization of production. Territories cease to convey their historical specificities and become the provinces of a preordained order, in a parallel manner to how a field no longer responds to the reciprocal demands of soil, fungi, and plants when they are reduced to variables at the service of one dominant organism. Likewise, when the world gets shrunk to what can be seen, every image, regardless of its provenance, is duplicated into a lattice of luminous units that continuously update the inventory of the real. Total visibility interferes with the object’s intermittent appearance, which is the pulse of its social interactions. Objects interact by appearing and disappearing from each other, implying that a panoptic regime spells the death of the object and initiates its post-partum commodification. What is it that makes the eye so prone to universalization, when it is patently blind to chemical exchanges, countless histories, potential, and microbial relations? What is the occurrence or event responsible for the structure adopted by power and capital to apply the same reductive principle in law, ethics, and politics, to culturally infuse language and overtake the image? And finally, why does an object’s mode of access so often mistake itself for the structure of reality? While there are no immediate or easy answers, and as draconian surveillance systems implement the logic of total visibility, the universal project of reduction continues to condemn all appearance to its monistic hub.

Appearance has been unfairly accused of superficiality, when it is the articulation of reality between objects. It is the event by which one object becomes available to another while keeping itself in reserve. It is not emitted by one object and received by another, but rather co-produced, like a shadow that belongs neither to the tree nor the ground, a smell delivered by neither the flower nor the breeze, and an echo originating from neither the canyon nor the voice. Appearance is not the object’s disguise but the medium through which objects discover each other. Every encounter begins with an appearance, and every departure leaves one behind. Reflections, scents, pressure, vibration, color, and temperature are not ornaments affixed to objects but the currencies through which they transact their existence. Together, they form a heterogeneous marketplace of fungal signals and bacterial metabolites, in which stars exchange photons, flowers circulate scents, and humans trade words and gestures. Appearance is where novelty emerges, not because it is shallow but because it is where relations become possible. It is a breeding ground where no change rate exists because it is a mutual crossing of fields, like a diffraction pattern of different economies and currencies. Objects interact by appearing and disappearing from one another, making appearance not a thin surface that masks a hidden depth but the rhythm and pulse of an object’s social interactions. Once appearance is freed from representation, it becomes a welter of associations, and if there was any doubt about the profundity of appearance, consider how many people are prompted to attend the occasion of a deceased beloved, to show up and celebrate the departed with a feast and a good meal. The lack of integrity people refer to with the accusation of superficiality has to do with a made-up persona or constructed pronouncement that is essentially mendacious and requires the permanent upkeep of a lie. Appearance, on the contrary, is the bare truth if one can apprehend it as such. A multi-sensory field of interacting entities, no more strictly visual than the window given for the occurrence of their encounter.

It is the order of things that is messed up. Not the ingredients of the recipe per se, but their proportion and cooking time. It’s an issue with the chef, the ethnographer, the anthropologist, and anyone questioning the neutrality of observing a foreign body. There is no disinterested Point of Archimedes because there is no neutral distance from which to assess the situation. The problem starts before judgment, within the framework of observation itself. Anthropology has known this for some time and has, like ethnography, tried to examine prejudices to attain a level of fairness or “symmetry” with those being studied. Although a necessary safeguard, there is something peculiar about symmetry coming from the side proposing it. The anthropologist arrives with the notebook, the institution, the passport, the archive, and the publishing apparatus, speaks the language of a former or ongoing empire, then advocates that the encounter should be on equal terms. The difficulty is that symmetry remains a proposition issued from an asymmetrical arrangement. Edward Said demonstrated how extensively the Orient necessarily begins inside this machinery, how it is produced by the languages, institutions, and fantasies of Europe, but even the critique of Orientalism necessarily begins within this cultural system. Someone is still observing a stranger and wondering what kind of gaze would cause the least harm. But perhaps another interaction has been happening all along, an indirect and transversal exchange that does not wait for permission nor the symmetrical setup of the encounter, an automatic gesture that can be described as contagion. It is not empathy, identification, imitation, or understanding at work when a rhythm enters the body before its meaning is known. Eventually, the observer might find themselves speaking in tongues, not because they delved into the consciousness of a foreign culture, but because it has already started working through them. This is where we return to the realm of appearance, not the superficial coating hiding the reality of things, but the event of their encounter, where what happens does not belong to either participant. The anthropologist definitely impacts the village, but the village also infiltrates the anthropologist, without the prerequisite of understanding. Clothes, smells, microorganisms, grammatical structures, and countless rhythms circulate through the encounter, regardless of the positional setup. The observer eats the food, begins adopting gestures, gets annoyed by previously insignificant things, develops new rhythms of attention, starts dreaming differently, and brings back strange vocabularies because their available language suddenly feels inadequate. Meanwhile, the community being studied toys with the anthropologist’s tools, habits, vocabulary, and odd mannerisms. The two objects having entered into each other’s effective range, some of these transmissions disappear, while others may turn parasitic or destructive, but many find compatibilities and cluster in symbiotic assemblages. This is the moment that reveals the unrecognized feature of appearance and its protean ability to generate new objects. The friction of the encounter brings something into existence that did not belong to either party, and it does so in a marketplace of generative exchange that establishes appearance as the breeding ground of objects.

Something goes wrong, however, when appearance is made to perform according to one particular dictate that gives it jurisdiction over what may cross it. The membrane thickens, and what was an osmotic surface of encounter becomes a checkpoint for the eye that has been promoted from participant to customs officer. The pixel is no longer the innocent square that makes up an image but the metastatic unit of an ocular regime increasingly intolerant of what cannot be presented in full visibility. The pixelated image expands towards the phenomenal world, determined to translate everything it encounters into its own terms. It borders that world precisely where it wishes to appropriate it, pressing against the sensorium to which it has relegated the lost sense of touch. The latter could not maintain the sovereign distance required by the image, as to touch something is to already be touched by it. Touch, therefore, carries something of the contagious structure of appearance that the regime of total visibility suppresses. On the homeland side of the border, the situation is somewhat tragicomic. There, at the cliff-hanging edge of its exceptionalism, stand the enormous billboards advertising the conquest of the sensorium with enormous hamburgers, and giant bodies topped by oversized faces whose skin cannot be touched. The interface of appearance is now lined with the pornographic merchandising of the relations that played freely on its surface. Like metastatic tissue and an aberration of representation, pornography reproduces beyond its organism, invading neighboring territories and compelling them to join its economy. In all these instances, a unitary principle represses the many. It forms a recurring pattern that affects separate domains, both as a metaphor and an operative participant found in all systems of oppression. It is a rehearsal of the same playbook and the deleterious effects of its strategy when touch extends its phantom limb through the billboards that proclaim EVERYTHING IS VISIBLE HERE, behind which lurks a mighty, unruly sensorium that never agreed to the terms.

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