Toward an Anthropology of Screens: Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting 3031308166, 9783031308161

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Toward an Anthropology of Screens Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting Mauro Carbone · Graziano Lingua

Toward an Anthropology of Screens

Mauro Carbone • Graziano Lingua

Toward an Anthropology of Screens Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting

Mauro Carbone Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University Lyon, France

Graziano Lingua University of Turin Turin, Italy

ISBN 978-3-031-30815-4    ISBN 978-3-031-30816-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30816-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Translation from Italian: Sarah De Sanctis Cover illustration: Marta Nijhuis, Faire écrans: l’écran positif-négatif [Screening out: The Positive-Negative Screen], installation detail, 2017, photo credits: H.J. Nijhuis This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Toward an Anthropology of Screens “Towards an Anthropology of Screens is, at once, an elegantly condensed 10-point double ‘manifesto’ and an incredibly expansive challenge to disciplinary boundaries. Reading it is a transdisciplinary, trans-historical, and non-teleological ‘adventure’ into the realms of a variety of past, present, and future screens that are always also in the process of becoming. The encompassing concept of the ‘arche-screen’ and its foundational structures of ‘showing and hiding, exposing and protecting’ enable travel across a breadth of space-time in Western cultures. Balancing this breadth is the authors’ fine-grained attention to the rhizomatic by-ways of screens and their connections with each other and with us, these entailing etymological, ethnological, and phenomenological description and analyses of our screen concepts and experiences. In its sum, this extraordinary book argues—and demonstrates—that screens were never either merely ‘surfaces’ for display or ‘interfaces’ mediating our autonomous interactions with them and others, but, from the first, we have always lived and incorporated them as ‘relational thresholds’ between our embodied being and our social worlds.” —Vivian Sobchack, Cinema and Media Theorist, Cultural Critic, Professor Emerita UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media “Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua take the global Covid-19 pandemic event as a starting point to theorize the role of screens in our daily life. They explain how, despite the dramatically increased prominence of digitally networked screens in our recent pandemic social interactions, all screens operate according to trans-­ historical principles that can be identified across multiple time periods. The theoretical acumen and intellectual scope of their unfolding of these principles is impressive. Tracing out a double logic of screenic remediation as both transparently showing/exposing and materially hiding/protecting, the authors persuasively undertake ‘an anthropology of screens,’ which ranges from our body as the proto-screen, to the screens of cinema and television, to the ‘Transparency 2.0’ of our contemporary ‘screen new deal.’ Carbone and Lingua move comfortably through preclassical, classical, and Judeo-Christian thought and are equally at home discussing Quattrocento, Enlightenment, modern, and postmodern arts, technology, and culture. Toward an Anthropology of Screens offers an important and provocative framework for scholars interested in understanding how human interactions with our screens have functioned throughout history and how screen objects will continue this adventure into the future.” —Richard A. Grusin, New Media Theorist, Cultural Critic, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

“At once situated in the immediacy of our post-Covid world and rooted in the prehistory of human practices of image making, Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua’s Towards an Anthropology of Screens argues that screens are not just surfaces but are, and always have been, ‘apparatuses of action’ that simultaneously both show and hide, expose and protect. Carbone and Lingua provide a new perspective on the long history of image-text relations that repudiates their alleged opposition in favor of a more complex inter-imbrication, the fruition of which can be found in contemporary multimedia and digital culture. With their crucial claim that the body is a proto-screen, the very source of the concept and operation of the arche-screen, the authors open a new avenue for rethinking the variety of ways that screens nourish and have always nourished human life and culture from the very advent of our species. This book will both complement and complicate recent challenges to ideas concerning the immateriality of images and digitality; by situating the materiality of the image in its diverse anthropological functioning rather than its artifactuality, it shifts the very terrain of media theory in consequential ways.” —Mark B.N. Hansen, Philosopher and Media Theorist, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature, Duke University

Acknowledgments

The present book brings together and intertwines the research paths—in many ways more complementary than akin—taken by the two authors, at first individually and then while elaborating this common project. What propitiated the transition from the first phase to the second was the context offered by the Project of Excellence of the Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences of the University of Turin, Italy, and the activities of the Département Humanisme numérique of the “Collège des Bernardins” in Paris, France. This framework fostered not only the scientific collaboration between the two authors but also the partnership between those two institutions and the International Research Group “Vivre par(mi) les écrans,” active within the “Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon” and Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, France. We will not dwell here on the many scholarly and editorial activities to which this partnership gave rise, but though we cannot mention the names of all those who were involved, we would like to thank each and every one of them, whose reflections helped to stimulate and substantially enrich the present work. Let us therefore simply remember with gratitude those who over the years have assured us repeated opportunities for dialogue and collaboration on the issues addressed here: Emmanuel Alloa, Dudley Andrew, Simone Arcagni, Andrew Ball, Renato Boccali, Jacopo Bodini, Giovanna Borradori, Annarosa Buttarelli, Gael Caignard, Enrico Carocci, Francesco Casetti, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Dominique Chateau, Franck Chouraqui, Isabel Colón de Carvajal, Michele Cometa, Lucia Corrain, Stanislas de Courville, Matteo Cresti, Michel Dalissier, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Luca vii

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De Biase, Alex de Campos Moura, Anelise De Carli, Alessandro De Cesaris, Roberto De Gaetano, Pina De Luca, Juan Carlos De Martin, Christine Develotte, Marida Di Crosta, Roberto Diodato, Mabrouka El Hachani, Diego Honorato Errázuriz, Ruggero Eugeni, Ericson Falabretti, Maurizio Ferraris, Antonino Firenze, Vittorio Gallese, Tristan Garcia, Roberto Gelini, Bernard D.  Geoghegan, Guillaume Giroud, Barbara Grespi, Richard Grusin, Michele Guerra, Mark B. N. Hansen, Geneviève Henrot Sostero, Paolo Heritier, Giulio Iacoli, Manlio Iofrida, Galen Johnson, Takashi Kakuni, Rajiv Kaushik, Raoul Kirchmayr, Masaki Kondo, Kwok-yin Lau, Thierry Lenain, Massimo Leone, Federico Leoni, Luca Lo Sapio, Antonio Lucci, Giovanni Maddalena, Angela Maiello, Rita Messori, Pietro Montani, Paolo Monti, José Moure, Marta Nijhuis, Andrea Osti, Maurizio Pagano, Francesco Parisi, Xavier Petit, Federico Maria Petrucci, Giacomo Pezzano, Andrea Pinotti, Paola Prestes, Leonardo Quaresima, Andrea Rabbito, Marie Rebecchi, Joséphine Rémon, Marion Roche, Alberto Romele, Nicola Russo, Danilo Saretta Verissimo, Sara Scalzaretto, Chiara Scarlato, Gemma Serrano, Antonio Somaini, Francesco Striano, Vivian Sobchack, Luca Taddio, Ana Taís Martins Portanova Barros, Stefano Tani, Gian Maria Tore, Steven Umbrello, Luca Vanzago, Federico Vercellone, and Marcello Vitali-Rosati. A very special thought goes out to the memory of Bernard Stiegler, an invaluable interlocutor. Many thanks are also due to Lina Aboujieb, the executive editor of Film and Television Studies at Palgrave Macmillan, who, on the occasion of the NECS Conference held in Paris in 2017, contacted Mauro Carbone and discussed with him an initial idea for this book. Moreover, we are grateful to Sarah De Sanctis for her professionalism and patience in securing the English translation of the entire book except for the Introduction. The latter, later revised by Sarah herself to ensure overall consistency, was instead translated by Marta Nijhuis, who had already produced an earlier English version of that text, written by Mauro Carbone and first published in Italian under the title Dieci cose che so degli schermi dopo un anno di pandemia in the online magazine Atlante, for the Speciale ACT Arti, Covid-19, Tecnologie, edited by G. Puglisi, A. Rabbito, V. Catricalà, and L. Maccalini, March 2021. This was translated as Ten Things I Know About Screens After A Year Of Pandemic in “Internet of ThinKs,” no. 1, April 2021, dedicated to “Post-Coronial Studies,” and on May 5, 2021, in the “Thinking C21 Blog” by the Center for 21st Century Studies. Thanks to the editors of these publications for allowing them to be taken up in the form presented here.

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In the same capacity, thanks are due to the editors and publishers of the following texts previously published under individual signatures and reworked here in a shared form. Regarding Mauro Carbone, they are “Per un’antropologia degli schermi,” in La Galassia Casetti. Lettere di amicizia, stima, provocazione, edited by R. Eugeni and M. Fanchi, Milan: Vita e Pensiero 2017, 57–60; “Dei poteri dell’archi-schermo e dell’ideologia della “Trasparenza 2.0”, Between, vol. VIII, 16, November 2018, issue dedicated to “Schermi. Rappresentazioni, immagini, transmedialità,” edited by F. Agamennoni, M. Rima, and S. Tani, http://www.betweenjournal.it/, translated in French as “Des pouvoirs de l’archi-écran et de l’idéologie de la “Transparence 2.0,” in Des pouvoirs des écrans, edited by M. Carbone, A.C. Dalmasso, and J. Bodini, Paris: Mimésis 2018, 17–34; “Da corpi con protesi a corpi come ‘quasi-protesi’?”, Ágalma, 40, issue dedicated to “Ripensare l’inorganico,” October 2020, 28–35, translated in French as “Devenir des écrans. Des corps avec prothèses aux corps comme ‘quasi-prothèses’?”, in L’avenir des écrans, edited by J.  Bodini, M.  Carbone, G.  Lingua, and G.  Serrano, Paris: Mimésis 2020, 47–59; “L’ombre et le corps: pour une anthropologie des expériences écraniques,” in «Re-». Répétition et reproduction dans les arts et les médias, edited by M.  Colas-Baise and G.M.  Tore, Paris: Mimésis 2021, 151–166; and “L’archi-schermo made easy. Tra ombra, pelle, veli e schermi,” in Cultura visuale in Italia. Immagini, sguardi, dispositivi, edited by M.  Cometa, R. Coglitore, and V. Cammarata, Milan: Meltemi 2022, 75–100. As for Graziano Lingua, the texts are “Transparence numérique et frontières de la désintermédiation politique,” in L’avenir des écrans, 193–205; “Immagini e parole. Per una critica del ruolo del visuale nella società contemporanea”. In Educare ai processi e ai linguaggi dell’apprendimento, edited by Roberto Trinchero and Alberto Parola, Milano: Franco Angeli 2017, 238–250; “Parola, immagine, scrittura. Passato e futuro delle immagini come Biblia pauperum,” in Immagine e memoria nell’epoca digitale, edited by N. Russo and J. Mutchnick, Milan-Udine: Mimesis 2020, 39–50, later expanded in French under the title “Actualité de la métaphore de la Biblia pauperum. Passé et présent du rapport entre image et écriture,” in Technologies de la visibilité, edited by A.  De Cesaris and G. Lingua, Paris: Mimésis 2021, 31–50; and “Parola, scrittura e regimi di visibilità,” aut aut, 396, December 2022, 95–112. Instead, the two authors cowrote the paper entitled “Fare schermo, fare schermi. Funzioni e oggetti tecnici,” appeared in Italian in Fata Morgana, 42, 2021, 23–41, and published in English, in an expanded

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version, as “Being Screens, Making Screens. Functions and Technical Objects,” Screen Bodies, vol. 6, issue 2, winter 2021, 1–22. Again, we thank the editors and publishers of the respective journals. The list of people we are indebted to would not be complete if it did not include—in an ideally prominent position due to their profession and professionalism—Prof. Claudio Tondo of the Monzino Cardiology Center in Milan, Italy, and Dr. Carlo Quaglia of Polyclinique Lyon-Nord, France: inevitably, our thanks to them can only come from the heart. Finally, a special thanks goes to our families (Marta, Ginevra, and Marianna Carbone, as well as Barbara, Eleonora, and Federica Lingua) who supported us at all times. Somewhat against the intention and sense of this book, we clarify that Mauro Carbone wrote the initial draft of the introductory chapter, the second and third (except parts of the second section of the latter), as well as the sixth; Graziano Lingua instead wrote the initial draft of the fourth chapter, the fifth (except the first section), and the Conclusion, except point no. 8. The final version, instead, is the result of a joint reworking of the entire text.

Contents

1 A  Ten-Point Introduction: Relearning to See Screens—The Effects of the Pandemic and a Phenomenological Epoché  1 References 13 2 On  the Powers of the Arche-screen 17 2.1 Toward an Anthropology of Screen Experiences 17 2.2 In the Beginning Was the Body 20 2.3 The Adventures of Screen Objects in a Compendium 23 2.4 Empathy for Shadows and Shadows as a Spectacle 31 References 39 3 Screens  as Prostheses of Our Bodies 43 3.1 The Skin as a Screen 43 3.2 From the Biblical Veil to Alberti’s Veil 46 3.3 The Term “Screen” in the Scientific Sphere: The Case of the Solar Microscope 57 3.4 The Film or Pellicle as a Technology Related to the Past, and the Present Hybridization of Analog and Digital 63 References 65 4 Images  and Words: Screen Functions and Technologies of Expression 71 4.1 Books, Screens, and “Culture Wars” 71 4.2 Logos, Flesh, and “Screen Thinking” 76 xi

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4.3 Words Seeking Their Images: Pictures as a “Book for the Illiterate” 84 4.4 Images Seeking Their Words: Regimes of Visibility and Regimes of Speakability 89 4.5 Digital Screens and Technologies of Expression 92 4.6 Writing, Code, and Visualization 95 References100 5 The  Ideology of “Transparency 2.0”107 5.1 The Cultural Hegemony of the Visual and the Ideology of “Transparency 2.0”107 5.2 The “Ocular Power”113 5.3 The Illusion of Disintermediation118 5.4 Desire for Exposure and Subjugation121 5.5 Surveillance Between Control and Protection126 References128 6 Screens’r’us: From Bodies with Prostheses to Bodies as “Quasi-Prostheses”?135 6.1 We, Quasi-Prostheses of Our Technologies135 6.2 Our Retina as a Quasi-Prosthesis and the Market of Gazes137 6.3 A “Quasi-Return” to the Primary Interface: The Skin as a Quasi-Prosthesis141 6.4 Speaking in Terms of “Quasi-Prostheses” to Name New Agencies143 6.5 “Quasi-Prostheses” and the Dividual Condition146 References156 7 A  Ten-Point Conclusion: For a Screen Ethics161 References178 Index181

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 6.1

Chiasmic table of screen functions 19 Marta Nijhuis, Shadow Portrait (Bénédicte), 2019. (Photo © Marta Nijhuis. Courtesy of the artist) 46 Anonymous, “Holy Face”, Property of the City of Genoa, in the care of the Church of St. Bartholomew of the Armenians in Genoa, Italy. (Photo by B.N. Marconi, Genoa) 51 Eden Paredes, The “intersection” or “veil”, drawn according Leon Battista Alberti’s illustration in Della Pittura [On Painting], 1435 54 Martin Frobenius Ledermüller, The solar microscope and the conditions of its use in a dark room, in Id., Amusemen(t)s microscopiques, Winterschmidt, Nuremberg 1764–1768. Digital reproduction from the collections of Strasbourg University Bibliothèque numérique patrimoniale. (Source: www.numistral.fr) 60 Google Glass Infographic (CC-BY by Martin Missfeldt, https:// www.varifocals.net)139

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CHAPTER 1

A Ten-Point Introduction: Relearning to See Screens—The Effects of the Pandemic and a Phenomenological Epoché

It was March 5, 2020, and Italy had already fallen into the COVID-19 emergency when, during an online video forum, the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco suggested considering the pandemic as the first major crash test of the digital era. At the end of the same month, The New York Times published an article which sketched out an initial interim assessment of how, in the meantime, our relations to the most emblematic technological components of the dawn of the digital era—namely, screens—had changed. The title sounded certain: “Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won” (Bowles 2020). Amid other statements, the article reported a meaningful allegation by the techno-repentant psychologist Sherry Turkle, who nine years earlier had denounced our technologically alienated condition in Alone Together (Turkle 2011),1 and five years earlier, in Reclaiming Conversation (Turkle 2015), had pleaded with us to talk to each other instead of staring at our smartphones. Well, in the light of the perpetually lit screens in lockdown times, Turkle admitted that the concern over the time spent facing that light was “a misplaced anxiety” and found that “now, forced to be alone but wanting to be together, so many are discovering what screen time should be” (Bowles 2020). Indeed, only a few nights prior to reading Turkle’s allegation, one of us had a most enriching Zoom dinner with a 1

 As for Turkle’s previous explicitly techno-enthusiast attitude, see Turkle (1995).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Carbone, G. Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30816-1_1

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couple of London friends with whom, before the lockdown, he never had the opportunity to hang around. Didn’t this screen experience account exactly for the conversation Turkle had hoped for? Therefore, the terrible shock produced by the pandemic on our living together made us discover—this is the verb used by Turkle—things that were not crystal clear neither to her nor to anyone else. Besides, only two days before the New York Times article reporting her statements, the effects of such a shock had prompted the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris to announce the birth of what he baptized as “post-coronial studies” (Ferraris 2020). For our part, we immediately found that not only did this phrase invite us to think of what would happen afterward, but it also marked an extraordinary opportunity to cast a retrospective glance on what had happened before then and to thus put our established knowledge in brackets. Such an exercise might allow us to “relearn to see” some perspectives on the previous thirty years of digital revolution—that is, since the beginning of the spread of the Internet—that increasingly reshaped our “lifeworld.” Differently from a simple laboratory-designed crash test whose aim is to verify context-specific previsions, our feeling as the authors of this book was that the shock of the pandemic had provoked an unexpected sort of “phenomenological epoché,” forcing most people to reconsider the changes that the previous thirty years had produced in our daily lives—particularly on our relations with screens—and allowing us to “relearn to see” at least some features of such relations. Obviously, it is not for us to know neither how long the effects of such an epoché will last nor what their consequences will be. Actually, in some ways, the shock seems to have already turned into habit. This makes it even more important to take notice of some of the aforementioned features that appear most relevant. 1. If what a crash test can teach us is, as we said, the possible confirmation of a pre-vision, the COVID-19 pandemic shock made us all face a totally unexpected situation, which obliged us to cast a different look on the technological practices we had collectively acquired in the previous thirty years, often assuming either uncritical techno-friendly positions or prejudicial techno-phobic attitudes. Moreover, on the basis of the sanitary needs that have occurred since then, such a shock taught us to see the usefulness of certain potentialities that were already implicit in those technological practices, but which had hitherto remained underexplored. Thus, thanks to screens, we no longer just share snapshots of our meal before even tasting the food, but we eat it together with those who are not

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physically present. This is what makes Turkle say that we are “discovering what screen time should be.” And yet, the technological possibility of spending it that way was already available. Why didn’t we exploit it before? For our part, we feel it is culturally relevant to look into the reasons behind this. In this regard, a Freudian formulation comes to our mind which synthesizes the emergence of something repressed via its negation: “I didn’t know, I have always known it” (Freud 1923–25: 217–221).2 Could it not be the case that, rather than in screens themselves, the problem resides in our old metaphysical prejudice according to which we think we can separate “reality” from what we consider an illusion and we call, from time to time, “appearance,” the “imaginary,” or the “virtual?” We act as if the two sides were not constantly referring to one another and thus denying their division. It is very hard to remove that prejudice.3 Could it not be, in other words, that we unconsciously repressed the possibility of introducing further technological mediations in our interpersonal relations, fearing this would once and for all unsettle the frame—already compromised by the advent of the digital—of what we had gotten used to naming “reality?” Besides, some French studies remind us that “the social use [of Information and Communication Technologies] is elaborated over time because it collides with the resistance of the social body, and the weight of habits and traditions, which are in contrast with the quick spreading of innovation” (Jouët 2000: 500). However, after various pandemic lockdowns, it will not be easy to return to the idea of screens understood as cave walls or of prisons bound to lock us in a trap of images, hence excluding us from the so-called reality. 2. The lockdown experience has taught us that screens are not—and never were—mere surfaces for showing or hiding portions of the visible— in order, perhaps, to trap us, as our “magical, premodern attitudes toward […] pictures” (Mitchell 1996: 72) continue to make us fear. Think of the 2  For a deep analysis of this formulation and its implications, see, in particular, Chap. 5 of Carbone (2010: 59ff.). 3  Moreover, there have been authors who proposed an explicitly dualistic conception of the digital, understanding it as a different and separate dimension with respect to the real. An example is the explicitly “Platonic” model posited by Philippe Quéau, who isolates the virtual in a dimension he does not further describe apart from situating it “next to the real world” (Quéau 1993a: 71). See also Quéau 1993b. For a critique of this metaphysical layout, see Vial (2013).

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hedgerow that the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi observed from the hill evoked in his poem The Infinite, written in 1819: I always did value this lonely hill, And this hedgerow also, where so wide a stretch Of the extreme horizon’s out of sight. But sitting here and gazing, I find that endless Spaces beyond that hedge, and more-than-human Silences, and the deepest peace and quiet Are fashioned in my thought; so much that almost My heart fills up with fear. (Leopardi 2003: 53)

The hedgerow screened out the landscape below, stimulating the poet to imagine what he could not see. In a sense, in every age, screens have operated like this hedgerow, creating a certain (historically, culturally, and technologically variable) distribution of the visible and the invisible, exposing us to that distribution and at the same time protecting us from its exceeding reach. 4 In any case, screens would, on each occasion, establish relations and thus enable or prevent actions and anyway found mediated experiences. In short, rather than being mere surfaces, screens have always functioned as interfaces, if that is what “establishing relations” implies (Hookway 2014: 14–15). 3. With the electronic and, later, the digital revolution, screens have gradually become the main interfaces of devices allowing us to communicate with others and with the world. In the meantime, such devices have been technologically developed in a multimodal sense, by combining in multiple ways texts, images, sounds, and including looks, gestures, voices, as well as tactile operations. This very development is subject today to a growing momentum. This is evident in the diffusion of cultural products that are designed to be listened to through connected devices equipped with touch screens, such as audiobooks, podcasts, ASMR videos, or even voicebased social networks. However, significant examples concerning other sensorial fields come from the video game industry or from the domain of physical rehabilitation through virtual reality, where tactile, taste, or olfactory sensations are reproduced. 4  Concerning the connection of the gaze and what exceeds the mere “factual immanence,” see Taminiaux (1978: VII). Regarding an attempt to broaden that very connection to the whole of the sensorial by attributing to it the capacity of indirectly presenting the supersensible that exceeds it, see Carbone (1996).

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Such screens hence appear as the main arena of an epochal hybridization process concerning the aforementioned means of expression—a process that urgently demands to be understood via a new transdisciplinary approach. 4. Obviously, the cultural delay mentioned in the first point does not concern just our collective experience. Spurred in their development precisely by the digital revolution, certain “screen studies” have been focusing mainly on their study object’s status as a surface for showing and hiding. Thus, they have been investigating it through archaeological and genealogical researches that are both suggestive and erudite but often not equally helpful in the understanding of what characterizes current or upcoming screen experiences and how they affect our way of being-in-the-world.5 5. Even certain visual culture studies were not able to truly grasp and point out the interface status—no longer simply visual, as we said—that electronic and then digital screens were progressively highlighting. Thereby, too often such studies have focused on a narrow understanding of visuality and its mutations. They even showed the trend to separate this area of investigation from the complementary one concerning the mutations introduced by the use of screens in our relations with written and spoken language, which led to a “resurgence of words” (Kelly 2016: 90). In short, such studies have mainly considered screens as surfaces that show or hide those portions of the visible that we call images—as if the written words they convey were not “a modulation of visual space” (Merleau-­ Ponty 2012: 145) in their own right and as if writing was not moving toward the “syncretism” pointed out by Pietro Montani to indicate the increasing integration of pictograms, still and moving images, as well as orality and other sounds in writing itself (see Montani 2020: 9). Instead, by assuming a strictly imagocentric perspective, visual studies have often rushed to predict which visual device would supplant screens, 5  In turn, the “Introduction” to the collective volume Screen Genealogies blames screen studies for generally being submitted to a “largely dominant optical conception of the screen” (Buckley et al. 2019: 9). In order to react to such an imprint, the volume broadens its screen genealogies to their function in space and in the environment. However, this “ecological” interpretation fails to fully account for the overall anthropological scope of screen experiences, both because it still leaves in the dark screens’ operational plurality and because it does not go into the various practices which they initiate. On the contrary, concerning computer screens, a genealogy that cares for the integration of visualization technologies and information processes is posited by Geoghegan (2019).

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invariably finding it in virtual reality devices, as already indicated by Manovich in 2001 (see 2001: 101). All in all, the logic that leads to these conclusions seems rather linear: the digital revolution produced the “pictorial” or “iconic turn,” generally understood as “a turn from language to the image,” which gave rise to a “newly invented proto-discipline called ‘visual culture’ or ‘visual studies’” (Mitchell 2008). Certainly, it is true that, in a letter he had written two years earlier to Gottfried Boehm, Mitchell had claimed to agree with him in considering that turn not as a contradiction but rather as a “direct outgrowth” (Boehm and Mitchell 2009: 117) of the previous linguistic turn announced by Richard Rorty at the end of the 1960s (Rorty 1967). Still, when directly approaching the “screen culture” (Mitchell 2015: 234), Mitchell is content to just warn that “the screen […] must not be regarded as merely a support for the projection of images. It must be regarded as a peculiar sort of image itself” (Mitchell 2015: 233). In other terms, in both cases, he places the screen in a reductively imagocentric perspective. According to such a perspective, on the one hand, the evolution and proliferation of screens caused by the digital revolution are seen as simple effects of the new status of images and of their proliferation. On the other hand, future technologies featuring a more immersive image experience are expected to eclipse the use of screens themselves. Herein lies the risk of considering screens exclusively from the perspective of images, as Steven Spielberg or Alejandro González Iñarritu do when they identify the overcoming of the cinematic frame with the end of screens as such.6 6. A vision of screens developed not from the perspective of a film director but from that of people confined in their homes during the pandemic has hence helped us to “put in brackets” the former point of view and distinguish it from the one we usually address to the screens through which we communicate in our daily lives. This latter point of view consists in looking at images and, at the same time, “reading words, but also watching words and reading images,” as Kevin Kelly (2016: 86) pointed out, hence implicitly pushing us to abandon imagocentrism with regard to screens that have long since drifted away from it. Still, although no longer imagocentric, Kelly’s description is likely to appear ocularcentric, that is, such as to reduce a broader number of screens functions—altogether 6   Concerning Spielberg, see Gallese and Guerra (2020: 200). About González Iñárritu’s  statements, see, for instance, his interview at the Cannes Film Festival 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z143yMKx3fc, last accessed 18/4/2022.

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consisting in their mediation of human relations and actions—to the mere visual field, albeit expanded to include texts as well as images. Nevertheless, Kelly highlights that, in his acceptation, the verb screening, which he points out as one of the twelve defining the typical trends of the digital era, designates a “new activity, [which] has new characteristics” (Kelly 2016: 89). He eventually declares it likely that just as it seemed weird five centuries ago to see someone read silently […], in the future it will seem weird to watch a screen without some part of our body responding to the content. (Kelly 2016: 103–104)

Hence, the peculiar meaning proposed by Kelly concerning the verb screening does not seem to imply a reduction to the visual field but rather a more general involvement of our bodily experience. However, what’s striking is that he announces such an involvement as forthcoming novelty, while what we mean to show here is that it has always been a fundamental—or better still foundational—component of our relations with screens. 7. Besides, looking at screens from the pandemic perspective has also allowed us to relearn to see the function evoked in the etymology of the word “screen,” which Leopardi himself implicitly echoed in The Infinite, namely to protect. We all have come to recognize this function in many situations experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Significantly, in several of these situations the protective function was not focused on images, nor was it necessarily connected to the visual dimension in general. Indeed, it was rather experienced in the use of face masks as well as of the so-called barrier gestures (such as coughing or sneezing in the crook of our elbows), thus revealing that the protective function is performed first of all by our bodies, which hence affirm their status as proto-screens even in this way.7 We thus realized that such a function, in one way or the other, had not ceased to be constitutive of our relations to the screens, nor did it apply only to the visible and the invisible, but still gave us a protected exposure to the surrounding context and to whatever exceeds us.

7  In order to measure the distance that separates us from the approach of one of the founders of screen studies, namely Erkki Huhtamo, it suffices to remember that he designates as “proto-screens” the ones that, between the second half of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, “provided new surfaces for displaying images in the home” (Huhtamo 2006: 46).

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8. From this perspective, the very use of screens as interfaces for connected digital devices couldn’t help but be reoriented. After all, in order to get a glimpse of the novelty of the perspective we are adopting, it suffices to read another article on screens that the same author of the piece mentioned in the opening of this introductory chapter had published in The New York Times just a year earlier. At the time, she recalled that whereas once “screens used to be for the elite,” avoiding them had later become a status symbol, because, as she explained on March 23, 2019, “human contact is now a luxury good” (Bowles 2019). At present, a stable return to such a condition does not seem granted. Of course, one obviously hopes that the prediction according to which “the world is likely entering an ‘age of pandemics’” (Global Health Summit 2021: 2)—made by a panel of 26 scientists from all over the world gathered in Rome on the occasion of the Global Health Summit in May 2021—will never come true. But even if this were not the case, despite the spread of new pathogens, it has to be kept in mind that, in an article published in The Guardian on May 13, 2020, the journalist and social activist Naomi Klein already described the post-COVID-19 scenario she felt was awaiting us as “a living laboratory for a permanent—and highly profitable—no-touch future”: such is the new “luxury good!” Klein called this post-COVID-19 scenario “Screen New Deal” (Klein 2020). In both cases it seems likely that in the years to come, strategic political-­ economic-­technological—no doubt socially discriminatory—choices will be made that will preferably focus on screens to enable forms of communication (in the fields of work, medicine or health, trade, education, and so on) protected from direct and indirect physical contact with other human beings. Significantly, it is with fresh eyes that we went back to reading the news, which has been around since a few years, about experiments underway in Germany for the development of contactless touch screens, which work by means of sensors capturing the movements or humidity of their users’ bodies (see Mayer 2015). Evidently, this urges the hypothesis that, even as far as social practices are concerned, the consideration of our mutual physical distance could show signs of mutation destined to sediment.8

8  The political and economic system in South Korea is betting on such a change, which is considered inevitable due to its benefits in terms of productivity and the reduction of bureaucracy compared to its social and ethical disadvantages, according to Rashid (2020).

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Moreover, one wonders if a more effective response to the need for protection from the aforementioned contacts could not come from specific smart glasses or from wearable head-up displays (HUD), that is, lightweight visors sharing images and other audiovisual information digitally, without the user looking away from the physical world. In fact, these kinds of devices both use technologies that, instead of isolating us from the physical world, as virtual reality (VR) headsets do, promise to open us up to the participatory and multimodal horizons of augmented reality (AR) and even mixed reality (MR), in which physical and virtual objects coexist and interact with each other and with us even haptically, thus opening us up to the no-touch future pointed out by Naomi Klein. The so-called metaverse—whose name suggests its (yet to be defined) physiognomy of a digital “ultra-universe” with the predictable scope of a “meta-polis”—seems to be leading us precisely toward digital horizons that will be participatory and multimodal but physically non-touch. This is why the interest in its construction has been strengthened by the pandemic experience, even before Facebook’s announcement that it was betting on it to the point of changing the name of its parent company to “Meta” at the beginning of 2022. However, precisely because this announcement and the related publicity campaign led one to believe otherwise, it is important to reiterate that, as yet, “there is no single universally accepted definition of the metaverse” (Vorobyeva 2021). It  currently takes the form of a galaxy of interconnected 3D worlds, which in the future are expected to require established identities and not fictitious ones. Despite the substantial indefiniteness just mentioned, it seems clear that the metaverse will have to combine, among other elements, virtual and augmented reality. As earlier we compared the performances proposed or promised by both technologies and stressed some of their divergent features, it is worth emphasizing that many experts are already converging to explain “why AR, not VR, will be the heart of the metaverse” (Rosenberg 2021). Louis Rosenberg, author of the article whose title is the phrase just quoted, does so no less than Jared Ficklin and Mark Rolston, who accordingly title theirs by warning that “the metaverse will not look the way Facebook imagines it” (Ficklin and Rolston 2021). In fact, they explain that, unlike what Zuckerberg’s company claims in its advertisements, the metaverse will mainly offer us, rather than a virtual immersion, a presence

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in the physical world interactively augmented by multimodal information shared digitally or mixed with 3D computer-generated objects.9 According to their predictions, the metaverse will operate through “surfaces” working as “shared interfaces”—hence the “Screen New Deal” heralded by Naomi Klein—“rather than behind screens,” as well as through head-up displays instead of virtual reality headsets, which Rosenberg, for his part, ironically likens to “scuba masks” (Rosenberg 2021). Besides, Ficklin and Rolston wonder: “We already feel like our devices capture too much attention. Why double down?” This question must be linked to the reasons for the preferability and the probable affirmation of AR in the metaverse as indicated by Rosenberg, who explains them precisely through the need to avoid perceptive doubling. This argument can be linked to the Gestalt characterization that Merleau-Ponty offers of our perception as a spontaneous apprehension of a synesthetic “form” endowed with a unitary sense: an apprehension that AR can support because it tends to merge, writes Rosenberg, “real and virtual worlds into a single consistent experience,” whereas with VR the “brain is forced to maintain two mental models” (Rosenberg 2021), one internal and the other external to the “scuba mask.” 9. For the reasons set out above, we believe it is both important and urgent to develop a transdisciplinary research focusing on the study not of screens but of our present and forthcoming multimodal screen experiences, in the conviction of their persistent centrality and their decisive influence on the wider range of our social interactions. Indeed, it is impossible to study screens without accounting for what we experience as operating as a screen. In this sense, it is also impossible to study screens without accounting for the relations that our screen experiences involve and for the functions that whatever operates as a screen assumes within such relations. This implies, on the one hand, the insufficiency of ocularcentrism—which we criticized in point 6—and, on the other hand, precisely the importance of

9  This is what also emerges from the experts’ enquiry promoted by the Pew Research Center and by the Elon University Imagining the Internet Center, in which we read what follows: “a notable share of these experts argued that the embrace of extended reality in people’s daily lives by 2040 will be centered around augmented-reality and mixed-reality tools, not in the more-fully-immersive virtual reality worlds” (Anderson and Rainie 2022).

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a pragmatics of screen experiences,10 which therefore needs to assume a relational approach, by focusing not only on the visual aspects of such experiences but also on their overall bodily, communicational, and performative implications. The switch will thus be from an objectual to a functional11 understanding of screens—an understanding that will imply recognizing that screens work as peculiar “quasi-subjects,”12 as such featuring no less peculiar perceptual-affective characteristics, which of course are historically, culturally, and technologically variable. Such an approach will hence prompt the emergence, from the examined experiences, of elements that have too long been disregarded by the dominant orientations of screen studies and visual culture studies. Hopefully, it may even avoid some Taletian gazes—alas impervious to any phenomenological epoché reconversion—which, in attempting to predict a forthcoming screen eclipse, were unable to see how screens in many ways prevented a great deal of humans from falling into the pit of the COVID-19 pandemic. 10. So far, the scholars who reflected on the proliferation of screens and on the evolution of our experiences with and through them came mainly from the fields of film, media, literature, or aesthetics studies and were inevitably influenced by their training in these areas. It seems to us that the 10  Here we obviously use the term pragmatics in the sense in which Paul Watzlawick and his collaborators of the Palo Alto School spoke of a Pragmatics of Human Communication, highlighting that it concerns the “behavioral effects” (Watzlawick et al. 2011: 22) of such a communication—in turn meant “as an interaction process” (Watzlawick et al. 2011: 14)— and explaining that “the data of [such a] pragmatics are not only words, their configurations and meanings, […] but their nonverbal concomitants and body language as well” (Watzlawick et al. 2011: 22). 11  In this respect, see, in particular, the section titled “The Notion of Function and Relationship” of Pragmatics of Human Communication, in which it is pointed out that “There exists a suggestive parallelism between the emergence of the mathematical concept of function and the awakening of psychology to the concept of relationship.” (Watzlawick et al. 2011: 25). Nonetheless, the meaning we ascribe here to the notion of “function” is broader than its mathematical sense of correlation between magnitudes, for it also aims at indicating the specific operational force that the screens assume on a case-by-case basis, by functioning as devices that distribute the feasibility of experiences and actions. So indeed screens are not screens because they belong to a specific class of optical objects but because they mediate our relations with the world and perform a series of functions, among which that of showing and concealing is just the most commonly acknowledged. 12  On the characterization of screens as “quasi-subjects,” see Carbone (2019: 81–86, in particular, 83–84). It should be remembered that the notion of “quasi-subject” was introduced by Mikel Dufrenne in order to characterize the “aesthetic object” as equipped with a “sort of interiority” and “capable of expression” (Dufrenne 1973: 329).

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sort of “phenomenological epoché” the COVID-19 pandemic has produced on our consideration of screen experiences has allowed us to realize that seeing them from the standpoints of cinema and media studies, as well as those of literature or aesthetics, induces the risk of missing some of their most crucial elements, which are decisively shaping the mutation of our anthropological structures. Through the approach described so far, our position here is to consider the transhistorical experience of screens as it runs through the prehistory and history of humankind, taking on different configurations over time. For this reason, we feel that any attempts to retrace their archaeologies or genealogies cannot be separated from the elaboration of what could rightly be defined as an anthropology of screens or rather an anthropology of screen experiences, to be included in the broader perspective of a “paleontology” of screens suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell (2015: 232).13 Concerning the need for such an anthropology, we think it is important to highlight how, several years ago, Hans Belting posited an “anthropology of images” (Belting 2011) and a consequent “iconology,” aimed, he wrote, at “bridging past and present in the life of images,” in order to avoid an “archaeology [...] whose meaning no longer applies to contemporary experience” (Belting 2005: 303). Similarly, outside of an anthropological perspective, not only does the “archaeology” of our screens risk remaining a sterile exercise in erudition—perhaps with a touch of collector’s mannerism (there is no shortage of examples in the sphere of the so-called screenology, see Huhtamo 2006)—but also some “genealogies” of our screens risk being confined to narrow horizons or even missing the questionings on the contemporary condition that, according to Michel Foucault, should prompt its “diagnostic” excavation. This happened in philosophy starting with Nietzsche, he believe, but we think it should not apply only to philosophy: What are we today? What is this “today” in which we live? Such a diagnostic activity entailed a work of excavation beneath his [i.e.: Nietzsche] own feet in order to establish how this world of thought, of discourse, of culture which was his world had been formed before him. It seems to me that Nietzsche had ascribed to philosophy a new objective which has been 13  W.J.T. Mitchell characterizes such paleontology also as “natural history of the screen, the screen as something that predates the emergence of the human species” (Mitchell 2015: 241). Note that throughout this article Mitchell speaks, in essentialist language, of “screen” in the singular.

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s­ omewhat forgotten, even though Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences in his turn attempted a “genealogy.” (Foucault 1999: 96–97)

With respect to the anthropology proposed here, “to relearn to see screens” is to make the effort of allowing the precious teachings of a somewhat collective “phenomenological epoché” to sediment before they gradually begin to fade away. This is what the present book aims to do, by putting them at the service of a genealogical perspective of screen experiences that may take on the contemporary condition and develop the consequent critical implications—as indeed phenomenology itself has always wished. Meanwhile, the “Screen New Deal” is upon us.

References Anderson, Janna, and Lee Rainie. 2022. The Metaverse in 2040. Pew Research Center, June 30. Accessed August 14, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/ internet/2022/06/30/the-­metaverse-­in-­2040/. Belting, Hans. 2005. Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology. Critical Inquiry 31 (2): 302–319. ———. 2011. An Anthropology of Images. Pictures, Medium, Body. Translated by T. Dunlap. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. Boehm, Gottfried, and William J.T. Mitchell. 2009. Pictorial Versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters. Culture, Theory and Critique 50 (2–3): 103–121. Bowles, Nellie. 2019. Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good. The New  York Times, March 23. ———. 2020. Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won. The New York Times, March 31. Buckley, Craig, Rüdiger Campe, and Casetti Francesco, eds. 2019. Screen Genealogies. From Optical Devices to Environmental Medium. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Carbone, Mauro. 1996. Il sensibile e l’eccedente. Mondo estetico, arte, pensiero. Milano: Guerini e associati. ———. 2010. An Unprecedented Deformation. Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas [2004]. Translated by N. Keane. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2019. Philosophy-screens. From Cinema to the Digital Revolution [2016]. Translated by M. Nijhuis, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Dufrenne, Mikel. 1973. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience [1953]. Translated by E. Casey et al. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2020. Virus, echi del mondo che verrà. Il manifesto, “Alias domenica”, March 29.

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Ficklin, Jared, and Rolston, Mark. 2021. The Metaverse Will Not Look the Way Facebook Imagines It. VentureBeat, August 15. Accessed January 10, 2022. https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/15/the-­metaverse-­will-­not-­look-­the-­way-­ facebook-­imagines-­it/. Foucault, Michel. 1999. Religion and Culture. Selected, edited and translated by J.R. Carrette. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1923–25. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. Vol. XIX. London: Hogarth Press. Gallese, Vittorio, and Guerra, Michele. 2020. The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience [2015]. Translated by F.  Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geoghegan, Bernard D. 2019. An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen. Representations 147: 59–95. Global Health Summit. 2021. Science and Innovation for a Safer World: Report of the Global Health Summit Scientific Expert Panel. Rome: European Union, 21 May: 1–12. Accessed July 31, 2021. https://global-­health-­summit.europa. eu/panel-­scientific-­experts_en. Hookway, Branden. 2014. Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2006. Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen. ‘Navigationen: Display 1—Analog.’ Ed. Jens Schröter, and Tristan Thielmann. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften 6: 31–64. Jouët, Josiane. 2000. Retour critique sur la sociologie des usages. Réseaux. Communication-Technologie-Société 100: 487–521. Kelly, Kevin. 2016. The Inevitable. New York: Penguin Books. Klein, Naomi. 2020. How Big Tech Plans to Profit from the Pandemic. The Guardian, May 13. Leopardi, Giacomo. 2003. The Canti With a Selection of His Prose. Translated by J.G. Nichols. New York: Routledge. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mayer, Nathalie. 2015. Un écran tactile mais sans contact grâce… à la transpiration des doigts. Futura Tech, October 5. Accessed October 23, 2020. https:// www.futura-­sciences.com/tech/actualites/technologie-­ecran-­tactile-­mais-­ contact-­grace-­transpiration-­doigts-­60002/. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Translated by D.A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Mitchell, William J.T. 1996. What Do Pictures ‘Really’ Want? October 77: 71–82. ———. 2008. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Bezalel. Journal of Visual and Material Culture, 10. Accessed May 16, 2020. https:// journal.bezalel.ac.il/en/protocol/article/3636.

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———. 2015. Screening Nature (and the Nature of the Screen). New Review of Film and Television Studies 13 (3): 231–246. Montani, Pietro. 2020. Emozioni dell’intelligenza. Un percorso nel sensorio digitale. Milano: Meltemi. Quéau, Philippe. 1993a. La pensée virtuelle. Réseaux. Communication-Technologie-­ Société 61: 67–78. ———. 1993b. Le virtuel. Vertus et vertiges. Paris: Champ Vallon-INA. Rashid, Raphael. 2020. South Korea Cuts Human Interaction in Push to Build ‘Untact’ Society. The Guardian, May 13. Rorty, Richard, ed. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenberg, Louis. 2021. Why AR, Not VR, Will Be the Heart of the Metaverse. VentureBeat, December 28. Accessed February 10, 2022. https://venturebeat. com/2021/12/28/future-­augmented-­reality-­will-­inherit-­the-­earth/. Taminiaux, Jacques. 1978. Le regard et l’excédent. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 2011. Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2015. Reclaiming Conversation. The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press. Vial, Stéphane. 2013. L’être et l’écran. Comment le numérique change la perception. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vorobyeva, Olga. 2021. As Meta Pushes for the Metaverse, It May Be a Better Fit for Some, Not All. VentureBeat, December 11. Accessed February 10, 2022. https://venturebeat.com/2021/12/11/as-­meta-­pushes-­for-­the-­metaverse-­it-­ may-­be-­a-­better-­fit-­for-­some-­not-­all/. Watzlawick, Paul, Janet H.  Beavin, and Don D.  Jackson. 2011. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes [1967]. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

CHAPTER 2

On the Powers of the Arche-screen

2.1   Toward an Anthropology of Screen Experiences The proliferation of electronic and digital displays, as well as their evolution into wearable technology, urgently raises practical and theoretical questions about the relationship between screens and the human body. But is this relationship really a novelty? There are good reasons to think not. Indeed, exploring what this relationship has been like in the past is crucial to understand the shape it is taking today and what it might turn into in the future. Our experiences of screens, understood in the broad sense, are in fact trans-historical—they run through the prehistory and history of humankind, taking on different configurations over time. We refer the notion of “arche-screen” (Carbone 2019: 66ff.) precisely to this fundamental anthropological dimension. Of course, talking about “arche-screen” means emphasizing the centrality of screen experiences as a constitutive component of all cultures—not only in reference to humankind.1 Still, in this essay we aim at focusing on the latter. 1  For reference to nonhuman screen practices, see W.J.T. Mitchell (2015: 239), where he gives the example of mimetic ocelli. For our part, we wish to emphasize the latter’s oblique function of showing (round spots mimicking mammalian eyes) in order to protect against possible predators. On the meaning of such obliquities, we shall dwell shortly. On the subject of mimetic ocelli, Mitchell refers to Lacan (1981), who in turn refers to Caillois (1964).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Carbone, G. Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30816-1_2

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In this regard, the notion of “arche-screen” is outlined in the reciprocal differentiation between the various historical-cultural configurations that have been gradually taken on by the related screen experiences. In fact, the “arche-screen” should be understood as a (musical) theme—or, according to the meaning of the Greek arche ̄, as a “principle”—which, however, is not found “in the beginning,” as traditionally happens in the “theme and variations” musical form. Rather, the “arche-screen” is a theme that never ceases to form and transform itself with and through its prehistorical and historical variations. In this capacity, time after time it retro-jects2 itself as a “principle”—as a theme, indeed—that claims to establish once and for all the variations that would follow it.3 However, it is rather the variations that never stop reconfiguring it historically, variously expressing its functions. For their part, these functions, contrary to what is usually thought, do not consist only in showing and hiding at the same time but exceed the visual dimension to mediate our overall bodily relationship with the environment. For this reason, in this essay we will try to characterize the arche-­ screen as a trans-historical principle that involves not only the pair of functions just mentioned, with which screens are normally identified, but also that of exposing and protecting at the same time—a pair of functions that is equally constitutive of the nature of screens.4 The two pairs of functions, in short, inextricably imply each other. They do not simply overlap but instead obliquely articulate more complex chiasmic relationships (Fig. 2.1). After all, this is already the case whenever we shield our eyes from the sun with our hands in order to see better: this gesture not only reveals the

2  We owe this term to Gilles Deleuze (1990: 265, where the French retrojetée is translated as “thrown back”), and we use it to designate the peculiar retrograde temporal movement of eidetic production. Triggered by an experience that somewhat recalls a previous one, it unconsciously elaborates the essential trait that these two have in common while considering it preliminary to them both. In this regard, see Carbone (2010). 3  An emblematic example is the claim of having identified, for the term screen, “the inaugural occurrence of the word’s optical meaning,” made by Buckley et al. (2019: 8, note 4, italics added). 4  On this pair of functions, see De Cesaris (2020).

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Fig. 2.1  Chiasmic table of screen functions

proto-screen status of our body but also establishes an oblique relationship between protecting and showing. We will then see how the historically variable cooperation of these chiasmic relationships can help understand the fundamental medial function of screens, making them much more than “an intriguing phenomenon” typical of the “visual culture of the modern period,” as Manovich put it (2001: 95). Let us stress once more that we are referring to a specific way of practicing the “theme and variations” musical form. The tradition of that kind of music has accustomed us to expect first the theme, then its variations, and sometimes the theme again, as happens in Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But psychiatrist and philosopher Erwin Straus, comparing this habitual way of conceiving the connection between theme and variations to common human experience, already objected: “in music a theme is presented and pursued by variations. We cannot express the theme itself directly, we can only represent it by means of its variations: it is from the variations that one identifies the theme” (Straus 1963: 323). With these words he wanted to emphasize that, contrary to what happens in music, in our experiences we never start from a well-defined theme, which we can then easily recognize in the sequence of its variations. We always encounter nothing but variations. Yet, among the Goldberg Variations, which do not seem to follow a genealogical line, we are able to recognize “a common feeling.” Glenn Gould put it very well when commenting on his own interpretation of Bach’s piece: “the variations [are] circumferential, not rectilinear” (Gould 1994: 28). Well, our trans-historical study of some human screen experiences, which form and transform the notion of “arche-screen,” wishes to avoid straight lines, too. It refrains from using the genealogical idea in

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ways that risk attributing a progressive tendency to historical dynamics, transforming it into historicist evolution.5 Understood this way, the anthropology of screens certainly feeds on historical-genealogical work. However, this genealogy cannot be conceived either as a search for an origin, for some past event from which what is happening in the present would derive, or as a historicist process that diachronically distributes the evolution of meanings. It is attentive to historical recurrences, to revivals and ruptures of meaning, but it is only interested in identifying paradigmatic affinities, even beyond explicit causal links. In this sense, as we already stated above, the arche-screen should therefore be understood as a trans-historical principle in which the power to distribute the visible and the invisible interweaves with other powers that not only involve the presentation of figures,6 images, or other signs but also imply one’s exposure to the environment and one’s ability to mediate the relationships that this exposure involves, protecting oneself from the excesses it may bring.

2.2  In the Beginning Was the Body In the beginning, therefore, what was given was not the principle of the arche-screen. What can retrospectively be said to have been there since then is the ambiguous human experience of the body as both Körper (i.e., “body-object”) and Leib (“living body”). As Körper and as such visible, my body can intercept a light source and be seen, thus exposing itself to the Leib of anyone who can see while at the same time hiding what is immediately behind it, thus implicitly protecting it from their view. Concurrently, my visible body, precisely by intercepting that source of light, screens it and projects a dark “smudge” onto a  In addition to the authors just mentioned, we draw elements for this foundational characterization of the variations on a theme from some pages of Merleau-Ponty’s second course on Nature. In these pages, interweaving references to Uexküll and Proust, Merleau-Ponty combines the biological and musical meanings of the term “theme” and thus comes to see in the different manifestations of zoological behavior “a variable thematism that the animal does not seek to realize by the copy of the model, but that haunts its particular realizations” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 178), on this side of causalism and finalism. About these pages by Merleau-Ponty, see Carbone (2010: 14ff.). With regard to Uexküll’s approach, Deleuze and Guattari have also stressed that “This is not a teleological conception but a melodic one” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 185). 6  Here we use the term “figure” in the nonrepresentational sense thematicized by JeanFrançois Lyotard through the notion of “figural” (Lyotard 2020). 5

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surrounding surface which, in turn, shows it. In that smudge my own body, as a Leib able to see, will recognize its shadow. This ambiguity of the human body finds a different but convergent expression in the experience of the touched and touching hand, on which both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty have dwelt.7 This convergence shows how the ambiguity of the body as both visible and viewing is inscribed within the broader, synesthetic ambiguity of being both sensible and sentient, which in turn further highlights the mutual implication of the screen functions of showing and hiding with those of exposing and protecting. Indeed, the shadow itself is a highly synesthetic phenomenon: the dark smudge it projects can become a space of protection from the excess not only of light but also of heat. So let us dwell on the experience of the shadow for a moment. The latter can be broadly characterized as a “negative entity” (Stoichita 1997: 8) related to the body that projects it, which therefore reaffirms its function as an interposing screen, that is, a “negative” screen. Indeed, it reveals itself as the “negative” proto-screen, something that we will also find later in Pliny the Elder’s myth of the birth of painting. However, as our description shows, one needs two screens in order to see a shadow: one that casts it by intercepting the light source, and the other that presents it by receiving the projection and thus situating it in the surrounding space, inscribing it in the environment. We will therefore call them, respectively, “negative” and “positive” screens, likening these expressions to those of “negative hand” and “positive hand,” coined in the context of studies on Paleolithic images to designate, respectively, the hand that exhibits its contours on the rock like a stencil and the hand that exhibits its imprint directly. Besides, it seems legitimate to speculate that the inseparability of “negative” and “positive” screens, which is necessary for the shadow to show itself, constitutes the earliest basis of the supposed inseparability of images and screens, which still dominates our thinking, even though there is certainly no lack of examples, both historically and presently, of the relative autonomy of the latter from the former. Other phenomena involving our body’s role as the “negative” proto-­ screen and a “positive” screen that makes its projection visible also include X-rays. Coincidentally, their discovery was announced by the German  The experience of the touching-touched hand is described by Husserl in the second book of his Ideas (Husserl 2000: 153ff.). Husserl’s work contributed decisively to pushing Merleau-Ponty’s reflection toward elaborating the theme of reversibility between sentient and sensible (see at least Merleau-Ponty 1964: 159–181, 1968: 9, 13ff.). 7

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physicist Wilhelm Röntgen on December 28, 1895, that is, the same day on which the first paid public projection of the cinematograph invented by the Lumière brothers was held in Paris. It should be emphasized, however, that unlike the light rays involved in both shadows and the cinematographic device, X-rays can penetrate the human body, thus turning some of its internal organs into the negative screen that will be displayed on the positive screen of a monitor.8 It should also be considered that the function of shadow casting can be detached from the body and assigned to a “technical object,”9 which will in turn become a “negative” screen. The same can be said of the shielding function. This dynamic thus seems to be part of the much broader “exosomatic” (Lotka 1925) process that our evolution has outlined by means of technology. André Leroi-Gourhan summarizes it as “the uniquely human phenomenon of exteriorization of the organs involved in the carrying out of technics” (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 257), but many other thinkers before and after him have addressed this subject. In this context, it seems possible to affirm that the ambiguity of the body as both sensible and sentient is thus extended to the ambiguity of the screen as an object that both hides and shows, protects and exposes. This opens up bodily possibilities that Gilbert Simondon would call “techno-aesthetic” (Simondon 2014: 379–396): screens can be seen as prostheses of the body, in the specific sense of artifacts that externalize and extend certain capacities of it, such as that of shadowing or that of shielding. These artifacts, however, are not necessarily experienced as detached from the body—as Merleau-Ponty pointed out with regard to the blind man’s cane (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 144ff.)10—since the habit of their use may allow the plastic capacities of the body itself to incorporate them and at the same time reinvest them in shaping the sensory relationship with the world, which in this sense is originally techno-aesthetic.

8  On the concurrence between the invention of the cinematograph and the announcement of the discovery of X-rays, see at least D. Chateau and J. Moure (2016, 3 and 273, note 3). 9  In this regard, it is important to note that, for Gilbert Simondon, “a technical object is produced when it is detachable” from the person who produced it (Simondon 2014: 28). 10  More generally, Lambros Malafouris sees the relationship between the blind man and his cane as a metaphor for the “thoroughly relational and sensuous prosthetic becoming by which humans learn to identify, attend to and transform their world” (Malafouris 2020: 118).

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After all, this retroactive incorporation is evidenced precisely in expressions such as “shielding,” in which the supposed “after” of human culture—which makes and names “technical objects” like shields—retroacts on the mythical “before” of nature, coming to designate a certain action exerted by ourselves on our bodies with the name of the technical object produced to exercise it in our place. Such a dynamic evidently does not prevent us from attributing to the screen as a specific “technical object” what Simondon writes about it in general: The ability to become detached from the initial human operator—artist or producer—marks, for the produced object, the beginning of an adventure full of freedom, which involves many dangers as well as many possibilities of survival and transmission through the ages. (Simondon 2014: 27)

On the other hand, the retroaction we have mentioned implies that the screen functions, by becoming autonomous from the body in the form of a specific technical object, establish the latter as a prosthesis of the body while at the same time affirming itself as a theme common to both.

2.3   The Adventures of Screen Objects in a Compendium To borrow the term used by Simondon, what “adventures” have the screen functions had after becoming autonomous from the body? Some of the most important ones, as well as an indirect reference to the body itself, can be found in the definition of the technical object named “screen” provided in 1709 in the first volume of the Nouveau dictionnaire françois contenant généralement tous les mots anciens et modernes, et plusieurs remarques sur la langue françoise etc. [“New French dictionary containing generally all ancient and modern words, and several remarks on the French language etc.”] The work was written by Pierre Richelet, the author of one of the first dictionaries of the French language, originally published in 1680 and later revised and updated several times. Unlike the previous editions, the 1709 version has the term écran followed, in square brackets, by the Latin umbella: this word, the diminutive of umbra, could designate either a parasol or a rain umbrella. This entry thus evokes the protective function of the shadow (see Richelet 1709: 430), whereas it does not differ in other respects from the entry contained in the edition dated 1694.

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The latter characterizes the screen as a fireguard that could be large (“écran à pié [foot-screen]”) or portable (“écran à main [hand-screen]”), then lists phrases that were evidently of common use at the time: “A beautiful screen; a pretty screen; screens are usually decorated with paintings, verses, stories, tales, etc.” (Richelet, 1694: 353).11 These expressions are extremely interesting because they show how those screens, while maintaining the function of exposing people to fire and protecting them from its excesses, also exploited their showing function to display not only images but also words; in this sense, they acted as hybridization surfaces for both. Obviously, the complementary concealing function, in a peculiar variation, was also present, as we can read in the words of Abbot Jean Saury, “professor of philosophy, doctor of medicine, astronomer and physicist” (Rizzoni 2019: 60). Indeed, a few decades after the above definition was published, the Abbot provided the following account of the use of fire screens in his Histoire naturelle du globe ou Géographie physique [“Natural History of the Earth or Physical Geography”] (1778): A person who arrived at the apartment would be given one of these screens. Shortly afterwards she would be very surprised to see drawings, figures of monsters and animals on it that she had not seen at first, so she would immediately throw the screen away in horror. The mistress of the house would then pick up the screen, which was already cold enough to make the figures that had been outlined on it disappear. The frightened lady was shown the screen and told that she had certainly had an attack of vapors, that there was no reality to her vision, and that she had not seen what she thought she had perceived. (Rizzoni 2019: 60)12

Presumably introduced in the culture of thirteenth-century French feudal courts in the sense of a “technical object aimed at shelter and defense,” as its metaphorical use also suggests (see Avezzù 2016: 31ff.), the term “screen” generally designated artifacts in charge of mediating the excesses 11  These common phrases, without the related explanation, were already included in the first edition of the same dictionary published in Geneva by Wiederhold (1680: 265). 12  It should also be pointed out that when Abbot Saury describes these special effects (obtained with invisible ink), on the one hand he refers to an invention that was already in vogue twenty or so years earlier (see Rizzoni 2019: 60), and on the other hand he is situated in the same cultural atmosphere in which the technical evolution of the magic lantern “cheerfully leans toward the side of the demonic […], in spite of the materialistic philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment,” foreshadowing the boom of “phantasmagoria” shows (Mannoni and Pesenti Compagnoni 2009: 123).

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of certain relationships between our body and the environment: typically the atavistic ones with fire,13 as we have just seen in Richelet’s Dictionnaire. In this regard, it is particularly significant to note how fire itself—which Simondon defines as “the most important technical means” (Simondon 2014: 144) of human cultures—is an indivisible source of heat and light, with respect to which screens were therefore assigned the equally indivisible functions of exposing (to heat) and protecting (from burning), as well as illuminating and obscuring, or more generally of showing and hiding.14 Therefore, it does not seem far-fetched to speculate that the “prehistory of fire” (Perlès 1977) did not predate the “prehistory of screens” by much (admittedly, according to temporal measures quite different from those we attribute to such an expression today), nor did it proceed too independently of the latter. In fact, as Catherine Perlès explains, as early as the time of the Mindel glaciation (between 450,000 and 300,000 years ago), humans, not yet part of the Homo sapiens species, kept hearths in their dwellings for warmth, light, and defense against wild animals, and these hearths often involved the “construction of stone or bone shelters” (Perlès 1977: 199), that is, screens. In short, the indivisibility of the pairs of screen functions indicated earlier seems to go hand in hand with the indivisibility typical of sources of both heat and light, like indeed fire, which has accompanied all  human cultures since its domestication. But this also applies to another indivisible source of heat and light: the sun. Human relations with both the latter and with fire therefore turn out to have introduced particularly fraught variations on the theme of the arche-screen. In this regard, it is also decisive to consider how the practices of screen production and use are inseparable from the emergence of what Anna-­ Marie Christin (2009) has thematized as “screen thinking,” a concept that, at least for its anthropological implications, seems to indirectly anticipate precisely the notion of arche-screen. In an article in which they

13  “One uses […] a screen [écran] when one is in front of the fire; but one must say ‘wind screen’ [paravent] when it comes to the piece of furniture one puts in a room to shelter oneself from the draft coming through a door,” reiterates Jean Desgrouais, “Professor at the Collège Royal” (1766: 101). 14  “In addition to their main purpose, decorated hand-screens were—like fans—also objects of fashion, aesthetic pleasure, and erotic play. Veiling one’s face behind a hand-screen incited desire and curiosity, like a mask; hiding and revealing were indistinguishable aspects of this ‘screen-play’” (Huhtamo 2006: 35–36, italics added).

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reconstruct Christin’s elaboration of this concept, Karine Bouchy and Béatrice Fraenkel (2020: 14) explain that it also constitutes a genetic hypothesis: the screen came before the invention of the image and of graphics, “screen thinking” came first, it made the image and later writing possible. But this hypothesis is speculative, it appeals above all to a logical reasoning which is not based on attested data. It is based on the idea that the starry sky was the first screen used by humans.

The latter idea, however, seems to be dictated by the fact that Christin still thinks of the screen in the mere (ocularcentric) terms of a visual support, on which the image would have metamorphosed into writing, as happens in the case of ideograms. But if we think of the arche-screen as a notion that also implies the pair of functions of protecting/exposing—and thus hypothesize our body, which we have seen encompass such functions, as the proto-screen, rather than the sky—this then allows us to go back at least to “attested data” of “screen thinking” such as the “stone or bone shelters” found in hearths as early as the Mindel glaciation era. Moreover, this allows us to see Christin’s idea of the starry sky as a screen in a different way from how she does, namely as the primeval screen. Rather, we could see that idea as the echo of atavistic experiences relating precisely to the use of “shelters” to protect/expose oneself from/to fire. Indeed, the relationship between such experiences and the idea of the starry sky as a screen seems to reoccur in Anaximander’s hypothesis that the sun, moon, and stars are holes through which we can see their respective circles of fire (Hippolytus 1995: 14). In short, such atavistic experiences would be the basis of the cognitive practice of considering the sky not as a mere background surface on which we see the stars (which seems to be reflected in the idea of the sky as the first screen advanced by Christin) but rather as an interface that hides and at the same time shows, through its holes, the circles of fire behind it, which it thereby exposes us to while simultaneously protecting us from. In the next section, moreover, we shall see how the notion of arche-­ screen and the body as the proto-screen, experienced and acted out in the synesthetic multiplicity of its functions, co-operate with fire in the creation and fruition of performative-multimedia forms of expression—not merely

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representational-spectatorial—which at least some Paleolithic caves are hypothesized to have been the scene of.15 These considerations should be supplemented by remarks on the multifaceted metaphorical significance gradually taken on by fire and the sun, which charge the theme of the arche-screen with the value of an arche-­ interface tasked with mediating not only relations with the excesses of the environment but also with powers exceeding the human, symbolized by the abovementioned indivisible sources of heat and light. In this regard, as is well-known, the latter emblematically recur in Heraclitus’ fragments, where typically the “reversals of fire” (Kahn 1979: 46–47, fr. XXXVIII) symbolize the passing of opposites into one another (1979:  84-85, fr. CXXIII) before returning to the in-distinction of the form-less (1979: 82-83, fr. CXXI). Fire therefore symbolizes the in-finite (Leopardi’s consonance is telling here), which as such exceeds human beings, exercising on them, at the same time and indivisibly, attraction and terror, the promise of a return to the divine and the threat of annihilation in death. In order to have such experiences at least indirectly, humans have always had to resort to variations of the arche-screen: from the Apollonian in relation to the Dionysian for Nietzsche to the spectator’s distance from the shipwreck for Lucretius, from the aesthetic experience of the sublime as evoking the supersensible destination of mankind for Kant to the “imaginary” as opposed to the “real” for Lacan and to the images of the “jumpers” with respect to the event of 9/11/2001.16

15  Substantially “representational-spectatorial” forms of expression, on the contrary, are those imagined by Marie-José Mondzain (2013: 15–70). Through those, she in turn refers to prehistory through a narrative that, claiming no historical-documentary foundation, is explicitly qualified as a “phantasia.” Its aim is to describe the “inaugural imaging” of the relationship between the human being and the world, in which a decisive role is played by the human body, fire, and the cave wall-screens on which the first graphisms were inscribed. Much like the starry sky in Christin’s works, those walls are conceived primarily as background surfaces for the images to appear on. However, Mondzain, referring to image-realization techniques on which we will dwell in the first section of the next chapter, places special focus on bodily interventions, such as those involving the hands and mouth: these implicitly reveal a richer interweaving of screen functions, which is unavoidable in the operations of symbolization that instead, according to her, make the primitive human being the original spectator. 16  On this last topic, see Carbone (2017).

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In short, what Siegfried Kracauer (1960: 305) teleologistically restricted to the link between horror and cinema in the following passage, quoted by Francesco Casetti (2019: 31), can be extended to all of the above: we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and [...] we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance […] Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life.

But let us return to the history of the dominant screen experiences in the West. Screens progressively spread from “the domestic sphere” to the worldly one (Rizzoni 2019), even in the form of hand-screens. Indeed, according to Erkki Huhtamo (2006: 35), the latter were already recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in a text from 1548. Moreover, in the words of their greatest scholar, namely Nathalie Rizzoni, hand-screens became fully inscribed “in the heart of the daily life of 17th and 18th century Europeans” (Rizzoni 2008). This is when screens began to be explored also for their optical performance in the scientific sphere—well before they were adopted in “the world of public entertainment”—despite what Huhtamo himself tends to suggest (see Huhtamo 2006: 36). On Huhtamo’s same wavelength, more recently, Craig Buckley et al. (2019: 8) have maintained that it is only in the early nineteenth century that the word screen was bound to the optical, in connection with the emergence of spectacles like the phantasmagoria.

In support of this assertion, they refer to what they present as “the inaugural occurrence of the word’s optical meaning” (Buckley et  al. 2019: 8, note 4, italics added). This was allegedly found by Casetti (2019: 33, note 20) in “two notices,” both dating back to January 1802, in which the term was used in reference to a “transparent” surface used in a phantasmagoria whose patent had been registered a few months earlier. The fascination with the discovery of these documents thus exposes the authors to the temptation of attributing a first-time value to this formulation, pushing them to reintroduce an exact starting point into the genealogical approach theorized in the volume in question.

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The authors also claim that it is in the aforementioned historical and cultural context that “the visual connotations of screen emerged” (Casetti 2019: 33, note 20). Reading this assessment, it seems inevitable to recall, without wishing to attribute any “inaugural” connotation to it, Dante’s much older metaphor of the “screen-woman,” already neglected by Huhtamo’s Elements of Screenology. A few years ago, Giorgio Agamben (2014: 109) very appropriately underlined its “certainly optical” value, which is fully consistent with the ocularcentric poetics of Stilnovism; Giorgio Avezzù (2019: 3ff.), for his part, has noted its absolute centrality in the elaboration of an “archaeology of the screen,” as well as its implicit reference to the body understood, to use the term we proposed, as the “proto-screen” (Avezzù 2019: 1). In addition to these aspects, it should also be emphasized that Dante’s metaphor indirectly contains an implicit protective value with respect to the topos of Love as a destructive force conveyed by the gaze of the beloved woman, typically found in Dolce Stil Novo. Dante uses that metaphor of the “screen-woman” in chapter V of La Vita Nuova (i.e., The New Life, composed in Italian vernacular probably between 1292 and 1293) to characterize the screening role involuntarily taken on by a gentlewoman during a religious function. Indeed, this lady’s spatial location made her appear as the recipient of the glances that Dante was actually exchanging with Beatrice, thus hiding from the eyes of onlookers the person who really aroused in him a love that, inevitably, “destroyed” him.17 Casetti (2019: 33) is certainly right to recall “the process of ‘visualization’ that […] so deeply transformed Western culture from the sixteenth 17  “It happened one day that this most gracious of women was sitting in a place where words about the Queen of Glory were being listened to, and I was positioned in such a way that I saw my beatitude. And in the middle of a direct line between her and me was seated a gracious and very attractive woman who kept looking at me wondering about my gaze, which seemed to rest on her. Many people were aware of her looking, and so much attention was being paid to it that, as I was leaving the place, I heard people saying, ‘Look at the state he is in over that woman.’ And hearing her name I understood they were talking about the woman who had been situated midpoint in the straight line that proceeded from the most gracious lady, Beatrice, and reached its end in my eyes. Then I felt relieved, confident my secret had not been betrayed that day by my appearance. And immediately I thought of using the gracious woman as a screen for the truth, and I made such a show over it in a short amount of time that most people who talked about me thought they knew my secret. I concealed myself by means of this woman for a number of years and months” (Alighieri 2012: 6–7).

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century onward.” In the case of screens, however, it seems legitimate to hypothesize that this process was not a complete innovation with respect to the past but rather the resurfacing and reconfiguration—in other words, the thematic variation—of practices, ideas, and therefore also metaphors that had never been completely abandoned but were redefined in the context of the “scientific revolution.” And it is precisely in this framework that one of us was able to find the term screen (and its French equivalent écran) designating technical objects with a mainly optical function in texts dating back not to the beginning of the nineteenth century but as early as the mid-eighteenth century. We will dwell on this in the next chapter. Before we get to that, however, it seems appropriate to question the emphasis that the editors of Screen Genealogies place on such an optical function. Of course, in their volume this function is variously articulated with the screen function as an “environmental medium,” that is, as an object already used also to protect from fire and air currents. The authors are primarily interested in underlining precisely this articulation, as the subtitle of the volume indicates. Nevertheless, in focusing on it, they end up neglecting two elements. First—as we observed above—that already in the late seventeenth century the screens destined to those protective uses displayed not only images but also words, thus offering a hybrid experience closer to the present than one might have imagined. Second, that the protecting function, in its chiasmic link with the showing one, was already exercised even by the human body as the proto-screen. Perhaps emphasizing the search for the strictly optical meaning of the term “screen” turns out to be subordinate to the very imagocentric perspective that they try to escape by articulating this meaning with the environmental one.18 Besides, in his own contribution, Casetti shows a more general ocularcentric attitude. The author offers an interpretation of what he considers to be three “primal scenes” in the genealogy of the screen: Perseus’ shield, Butades’ wall (on which we will focus in the next section), and Alberti’s metaphor of the window. His thesis is clear: all these scenes show that the emergence of the screen is always a “conversion,” that is, the

18  On the purported “strictly optical” use of a visual medium or device and the term for them, it is also worth reporting what Jonathan Crary (1990: 28–29) writes about the camera obscura: “This highly problematic object was far more than a simply optical device. For over two hundred years it subsisted as a philosophical metaphor, a model in the science of physical optics, and was also a technical apparatus used in a large range of cultural activities.”

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transformation of the characteristics of a certain object into others, which allow it to take on the screen function of mediating the relationship with the visible. However, by way of example, let us dwell on the case of Perseus’ shield. In the version of the myth reported by Ovid, the shield given by Athena to Perseus is transformed, according to Casetti (2019: 32), “from being a rejecting surface to a reflecting surface,” because it allows the hero to see the reflection of Medusa’s face while not looking at it directly and thus avoiding being petrified. In short, the shield becomes an “optical device” (33), and the whole story is read by Casetti as if the original protective function of the shield were to be replaced by an exclusively visual one.19 In reality, throughout the scene, the shield is a “technical object” that protects Perseus’ entire body no less than his gaze, concealing the latter from Medusa’s own gaze while also allowing him to see her indirectly and therefore to expose himself by beheading her. In short, it is precisely the chiasm between the screen functions of protecting and exposing and those of showing and hiding that grants Perseus his victory.

2.4  Empathy for Shadows and Shadows as a Spectacle Relating his Allegory of the Cave—one of the founding texts of Western ocularcentrism, which however stages a humanity only paradoxically condemned to being exposed to nothing except the protected vision of the reflections of things—Plato describes shadows as the first images we experience, as Victor Stoichita points out.20 Indeed, Plato describes the freed cave prisoner’s initiation to sunlight as follows: To start with (pro ̄ton), he’d find shadows (skias) the easiest things to look at. After that, images (eidōla)—of people and other things—reflected in water. The things themselves would come later. (Plato, Republic, 516a, 2000: 221–222, trans. modified)

 A criticism of this reading was developed by De Cesaris (2020: 83ff.).  “At this stage of his philosophy, it is clearly Plato’s intention to place the shadow at the origins of the epiphenomenal duplication, before the image in the mirror” (Stoichita 1997: 23). For the allegory of the cave as “the philosophical inventing of a culture that, for centuries to come, was to be ‘oculocentric’,’” see Stoichita (1997: 22). 19 20

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In the physical phenomenon of the shadow one may recognize an image—that of one’s own body, for example—or perhaps a generic figure or anyway a sign. When this happens, it means that one is implicitly over-­ signifying that physical phenomenon by promoting it to an image, a figure, or another sign, while implicitly over-signifying the very surface onto which it is projected, promoting such a surface to its “positive screen.” In other words, this surface is being recognized as having the power to receive and present not only simple “smudges” but indeed figures, images, or other signs. It is being recognized as having the extraordinary power to make them as such. In other words, it is being acknowledged as a specific variant of the arche-screen. According to Pliny the Elder, this is something that the daughter of the potter Butades did spontaneously. The girl, recognizing the dark silhouette of her beloved standing in front of her, “drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp” (Pliny the Elder 1952: 373). With that gesture she intended that shadow as an image on the background of the illuminated wall that was in turn intended as a “positive” screen, thereby opening the surrounding space to an at least implicit medial sharing. It is not by chance that Pliny considers that gesture to be the mythical origin of painting. Immediately afterward, this sharing becomes intermedial: Butades places clay within the contours traced by his daughter, so as to model the face of her lover, thus following up the mythical origin of painting with that of sculpture. Only by implicitly over-signifying the physical phenomenon of shadow, therefore, is it possible to see in it the relatively sketched reproduction of the contours and movements of a body. From here, we can eventually come to understand the meaning of the shadow’s gestures, as well as the intentions and motivations that drive them or even the emotions and feelings that accompany them and that can in turn arouse our own. The very gestures of our own body and their meaning teach us to recognize them in our shadows and thus to similarly seek meaning in the shadows cast by the bodies of others.21

21  “Our body is not merely one expressive space among all others, for that would be merely the constituted body. Our body, rather, is the origin of all the others, it is the very movement of expression, it projects significations on the outside by giving them a place and sees to it that they begin to exist as things, beneath our hands and before our eyes” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 147).

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But don’t the dynamics just described imply that shadows are empathically connoted? And isn’t it such a connotation that plays a decisive role in promoting shadows to—perhaps monstrous—figures? For the same reason, shadows may come to be seen as reflections of bodies, and, at the same time, the “positive screen” that presents them may come to be seen as their peculiar “infra-world” or “quasi-world” (Mondzain 2015: 16), in which we can pour out our feelings without getting irretrievably lost. In short, we believe those dynamics refer to the different semantic meanings of the German term Einfühlung and to the philosophical questions that have been historically raised around them (Pinotti 2011: 47). The empathetic connotation of the shadow and the reciprocal constitution of a figure or image and of an arche-screen’s variation are exemplarily recalled, in their correlation, by Gallese and Guerra with reference to our experience of the cinema screen: those shadows on the screen make the same gestures, feel the same sentiments and emotions, and are driven by forms of intentionality, all of which faithfully reproduce the workings of the real world. (Gallese and Guerra 2020: 44, trans. modified, italics added)

However, this fidelity does not always prevail. In fact, the over-­ signification of the shadow as a figure or as the image of a body can even lead to its becoming autonomous—through Simondon’s “detachment”— from the physical phenomenon that defines it. This is underscored, in the history of cinema itself, by numerous examples of shadows that cease to project the movements of the bodies that are supposed to produce them, that is, that stop “faithfully reproduc[ing] the workings of the real world.” One example among the numerous ones available strikes us as particularly significant, in addition to being well-known: that of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadows  to the song “Bojangles of Harlem” in Swing Time (USA, 1936) by George Stevens. A European director like Werner Herzog—who more than anyone seems distant from the idea of filmmaking expressed by the American musical—describes and comments on this sequence as follows: Fred Astaire is dancing, casting a very big shadow against a white wall behind him. He stops, the shadow stops. He starts again, the shadow starts again. Then all of a sudden he stops and the shadow starts to dance on without him. At the end I think he catches up with it and it follows him again.

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He must have pre-recorded the shadow and projected it against the wall, dancing with the utmost precision to match it. Normally this kind of trick is done by technology—back projection or double exposure—and once it has been deciphered it loses its magic. But here it’s all accomplished through the human precision of Fred Astaire, and when you guess how it was done it becomes even more mysterious and awesome. It’s the purest, most total movie sequence I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s very strange because Fred Astaire has the most stupid face on screen and his movies have the most insipid stories. But everything ever filmed with him has some sort of greatness. And the purest of the pure, the finest of the fine for me is this sequence from Swing Time. It’s cinema, nothing else. (Herzog 1992, italics added)

As Herzog points out, it is only when Fred Astaire freezes in a semi-­ split (“all of a sudden he stops”) that the spectator can actually see that his body was reproducing the movements of the shadow rather than the other way around. The viewer can thus understand that the great technical virtuosity of the sequence lies in having given the illusion that the opposite was happening. With respect to the issues under discussion here, it would therefore seem possible to affirm that, up to that moment, having empathized with the shadow as such contributed to deceiving the viewer’s actual perception, thus safeguarding the “impression of reality” that would have the shadow reproduce the body’s movements. More generally, and more profoundly, the sequence shows that, once empathically connoted and thus promoted to images presented on certain peculiar variations of the arche-screen (on a particular “infra-world” or “quasi-world”), shadows cease to necessarily and mechanically depend on the bodies that produce them. Indeed, they become able to simulate this dependence or even to overturn it in order to exert it upon the bodies themselves (after all, this is what the shadows do with Fred Astaire). In either case, they can thus enter the realm of spectacle (as well as that of childhood nightmares), establish interactive relationships with those bodies, and transform the spaces in which they appear into medial environments. Eighteen years later, Herzog’s choice to include the first part of the abovementioned sequence of Swing Time in his film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) seems to underline precisely the entry of shadows into the world of spectacle. Indeed, Herzog interrupts the scene right when Fred Astaire freezes in a semi-split while his shadows give an autonomous performance, instead of showing it until the end when the shadows have left

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the scene, renouncing to compete with the dancer’s body, so as to indicate his unparalleled ability. But Herzog’s choice to cite Fred Astaire’s performance in his movie is worth mentioning for another reason, too—one that particularly concerns the themes at hand here. In fact, eighteen years after stating that nothing but cinema can offer a sequence like that (“It’s cinema, nothing else”), by inserting the first part of it in Cave of Forgotten Dreams Herzog intended to show a possible continuity between two elements: on the one hand the dance of the body and its shadows as presented by the sequence and on the other the dancing possibly staged in the extraordinary paleolithic cave discovered in France in 1994 to which the film is dedicated—the Chauvet Cave. Indeed, the discovery of traces of small fires at the foot of its walls, which host amazing kinetic images dating back to about 31,000 years ago, leads us to suppose that those fires had the function of projecting the shadows of the dancers’ bodies onto the cave walls, thus turning those bodies into “negative” moving proto-screens. This way, the latter happened to produce forms of expression that, in the previous section, we defined as performative-multimedia, while Herzog’s film insists on describing them “almost like a form of proto-cinema” (Herzog 2010). It is clear, after all, that such a definition can legitimately lead to accusations of teleologism akin to those mentioned above with regard to Kracauer’s quotation. Similar criticisms have also been made of Marc Azéma’s (2011)  book dedicated to the Chauvet Cave and significantly titled La Préhistoire du cinéma: well, these are precisely the criticisms that the notion of arche-screen would like to help avoid. Indeed, as François Amy de la Bretèque (2013) wrote in his review of Azéma’s book, choosing such a title means embracing a retroactive vision of the kinetic art of past centuries, entirely aimed at its supposed fulfillment in cinema. For a long time now, film historians have abandoned this linear and teleological conception which, as Laurent Le Forestier wrote, “seems to induce a retrospective outlook which, since the advent of cinema, has been searching in a borderless past […] for clues […] that prefigure that invention.”

This criticism can also contribute to showing in what sense, in our opinion, it is misleading to speak of a “body dancing with its shadow,” as Herzog’s film does regarding the rituals hypothesized in the Chauvet Cave. In fact, doing so means proposing a dual characterization—the

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body on one side and its shadow on the other—and therefore a definition (in Herzog’s own terms of “representation”) that superimposes the modern use of this category on the prehistoric experience. Of course, it seems plausible that, even within this latter experience, self-imaging involves what Modzain describes as “separation” from oneself, exemplified in the gesture of pulling one’s hand away from the cave wall after leaving one’s mark on it. But this separation—Mondzain (2013: 30) continues—never occurs without “a connection between this sign and what it separates itself from.” Echoing precisely this connection, the rituals hypothesized in the Chauvet Cave could then reveal that prehistoric dancers already desired not so much to dance with their shadows but to see themselves among the images on the cave walls—that is, to “enter the screen” that the latter constitute—at least through the image produced by their own dancing bodies (i.e., through their shadows), giving rise to an experience in which the production and visualization of images would be indistinguishable.22 In short, this would be the desire to see oneself reunited, at least through one’s shadows, with the “infra-world” or “quasi-world” of images from which human beings remained separated ever since they inaugurated it. With respect to such expressions of that desire, we should then not speak of homo spectator, as Mondzain (2013) does, but rather—and literally—of homo spectactor, taking up (in a non-dual sense) the term coined in the theatrical sphere by the Brazilian theorist, director, and activist Augusto Boal (1988). In any case, such a desire would not be unrelated to the one that, according to Jean-Louis Baudry, recurs in the relationship between the spectator and the cinematic apparatus: the latter, as Baudry defined it in his famous article dedicated to it, “solely concerns the projection and […] includes the subject [to] whom the projection is directed” (Baudry 1992: 693). In this regard, it should be remembered that the “Apparatus theory” was put forward by Baudry in the 1970s—the same years when Foucault proposed his own meaning and use of the same French term dispositif 23—in order to define the specificity of cinema at a time when the seventh art was threatened by other media, such as television and video. Indeed, that theory strives to characterize the specificity of the experience of a spectator who attends a cinematographic projection, taking into account “the darkness of 22  On the desire to “enter” screens, with reference to cinema and the digital revolution, see the chapter titled “Come Live with Me: The Seduction of Screens Today” of Carbone (2019). 23  As a paradigmatic example, see Foucault (1980).

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the movie theater, the relative passivity of the situation, the forced immobility of the cine-subject, and the effects which result from the projection of images, moving images” (Baudry 1992: 703). Referring precisely to such an apparatus, Baudry (1992: 697) suggests that “there was never any first [inaugurale] invention of cinema” in human culture, as the cinematic apparatus finds a surprising anticipation already in the Platonic cave. Moreover, Herzog also implicitly affirmed something similar, characterizing the rituals that were probably staged in the Chauvet Cave as forms of “proto-cinema.” Thus, the latter may have already been the expression of the recurrent human desire that Baudry (1992: 705) describes as “an archetype for all that which seeks to connect with the multiple paths of the subject’s desire. It is indeed desire as such, that is, desire of desire.” This desire, Baudry then hypothesizes, is the wish to “rediscover archaic forms of satisfaction which in fact structure any form of desire” (Baudry 1992: 702, trans. modified, italics added), since they characterize a certain “phase of the subject’s development, during which representation and perception were not yet differentiated” (Baudry 1992: 705).24 Baudry is thinking here of the so-called “oral phase in which the body did not have limits of its own, but was extended undifferentiated from the [maternal] breast” (Baudry 1992: 701). He combines this with the thesis, put forward by American psychoanalyst Bertram D. Lewin, of a “dream screen” (Baudry 1992: 701),25 a white screen onto which all dreams would be projected and which, according to Lewin, would represent the mnestic trace of the maternal breast (besides, this way he, too, suggested the idea of the body as the proto-screen, “positive” in this case). Baudry hypothesizes that human beings would like to regress to this phase of their psychic development and to the “forms of satisfaction” connected to it, even if only in a simulated way, by means of visual apparatuses that make it possible, such as cinema or Plato’s “proto-­ cinematographic” cave.

24  A few lines above we have criticized Herzog for superimposing the modern category of “representation” (to which we will return in the next chapter) on the prehistoric rituals hypothesized in the Chauvet Cave. In order to avoid any misunderstandings, it should be pointed out that Baudry here uses the same term in the psychoanalytic sense of “unconscious representation,” by which Freud indicates “that which, of the object, is transcribed in ‘mnestic systems’” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968: 415). 25  See Lewin (1946a, 1946b).

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It seems legitimate, then, to wonder whether one of these forms of satisfaction might consist precisely in seeing one’s own image immersed among the others that inhabit a screen, thus finding oneself in the indifferentiation between perception and representation. In fact, Baudry (1992: 704) connects these forms of satisfaction to a “mode of relating to reality which could be defined as enveloping and in which the separation between one’s own body and the exterior world is not well defined.” We believe Baudry’s reflections are full of suggestions that should be taken up and further explored in the perspective of the anthropology of screen experiences that we are proposing here. We think it would be necessary, however, to problematize the psychoanalytically ahistorical and univocally regressive characterization of desire that Baudry evokes. In fact, this approach gives rise to the teleological characterization of cinema as the apparatus that has been historically awaited to produce a successful simulated satisfaction—something that had proved impossible for painting or theater.26 Problematizing such aspects, one could then admit that the historical-­ cultural variations of this sort of “arche-desire”—understood in the non-­ essentialistic but thematic sense specified by the theoretical approach we have proposed so far—modify certain aspects of Baudry’s perspective. In particular, such modifications could lead one to abandon or at least attenuate features like the incompatibility between “impression of reality” and “motoricity” reaffirmed by Baudry.27 It is precisely the abandonment of such a feature that the hypothesis of the dances practiced in the Chauvet Cave as well as certain present-day screen experiences seem to prompt, each in its own way. In other respects, in both of them one seems to glimpse the search for the satisfaction that, according to Baudry (1992: 705), consists in “obtain[ing…] from reality, a position, a condition, in which what is perceived would no longer be distinguished from representations.” Returning to Herzog from such a perspective, it is inevitable to reiterate that he does not succeed in describing the rituals supposedly celebrated

26  Baudry (1992: 697): “Would it be too risky to propose that painting, like theatre, for lack of suitable technological and economic conditions, were dry runs in the approximation […] of what […] only cinema is in the position to implement?” 27  Baudry (1992: 700) recalls that, in the light of the Freudian hypothesis on “hallucinatory satisfaction,” “the reality test is dependent on ‘motoricity.’”

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in the Chauvet Cave in such immersive terms as to be able to fully express the dynamics of desire that we have outlined above. However, eighteen years after the abovementioned statement concerning Fred Astaire’s sequence in Swing Time, Herzog seems to have at least changed his assessment: not only cinema but even certain complex prehistoric audiovisual apparatuses may have already staged what he describes as the bodies’ dance with their shadows, by then promoted to proto-images. That is to say: it is not only the cinema screen that can make such a dance visible and immerse us in it, but also much more ancient types of screens such as the walls of certain prehistoric caves—indeed, not only the cinema screen, but the arche-screen as such.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2014. Il fuoco e il racconto. Roma: Nottetempo. Alighieri, Dante. 2012. Vita Nova. Translated by A.  Frisardi. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Amy de la Bretèque, François. 2013. Marc Azéma, La Préhistoire du cinéma. Origines paléolithiques de la narration graphique et du cinématographe, 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 69. Accessed May 2, 2019. http://journals. openedition.org/1895/4624. Avezzù, Giorgio. 2016. Intersections between Showing and Concealment in the History of the Concept of Screen. In Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship—A Historical and Theoretical Reassessment, ed. Dominique Château and José Moure, 29–41. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2019. The Deep Time of the Screen, And its Forgotten Etymology. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 11 (1), 1–15. Accessed January 31, 2020. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004214.2019.1610296. Azéma, Marc. 2011. La préhistoire du cinéma. Arles: Errance. Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1992. The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema. Translated by B. Augst. In Film Theory and Criticism. Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, Leo Braudy, 690–707. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Boal, Augusto. 1988. Teatro do Oprimido e outras poéticas políticas. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Bouchy, Karine, and Béatrice Fraenkel. 2020. La notion d’écran chez Anne-Marie Christin. Enquête sur l’histoire du mot dans son œuvre. ‘La pensée de l’écran’. Écriture et image. Cahiers du CEEI 1: 3–25. Buckley, Craig, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti. 2019. Introduction. In Screen Genealogies. From Optical Devices to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig

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Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti, 7–26. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Caillois, Roger. 1964. The Mask of Medusa. Translated by G. Ordish. New York: C.N. Potter. Carbone, Mauro. 2010. An Unprecedented Deformation. Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas [2004]. Translated by N. Keane. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ———. 2017. Falling Man: The Time of Trauma, the Time of (Certain) Images. Research in Phenomenology 47: 190–203. ———. 2019. Philosophy-screens: from Cinema to the Digital Revolution [2016]. Translated by M. Nijhuis. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Casetti, Francesco. 2019. Primal Screens. In Screen Genealogies. From Optical Devices to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti, 27–50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Chateau, Dominique, and José Moure. 2016. Screen, a Concept in Progress. In Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship—A Historical and Theoretical Reassessment, ed. Dominique Château and José Moure, 13–22. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Christin, Anne-Marie. 2009. L’Image écrite ou la déraison graphique [1995]. Paris: Flammarion. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. De Cesaris, Alessandro. 2020. Exposition et médiation. De l’écran à la fonction écranique. In L’avenir des écrans, ed. Jacopo Bodini, Mauro Carbone, Graziano Lingua, and Gemma Serrano, 81–92. Paris: Mimésis. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense [1969]. Translated by M.  Lester and C. Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1994. What is Philosophy? [1991]. Translated by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Desgrouais, Jean. 1766. Les Gasconismes corrigés. Toulouse: Robert. Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh [1977]. In Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Translated by C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. Gallese, Vittorio, and Guerra, Michele. 2020. The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience [2015]. Translated by F.  Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press Gould, Glenn. 1994. The Goldberg Variations. In The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page, 22–28. New York: Random House. Herzog, Werner. 1992. Director’s Cut / Just Me and My Shadow: Werner Herzog Watches Fred Astaire Dancing with His Shadow in George Stevens’ Swing Time of 1936. The Independent, September 17. Accessed February 19, 2017. http:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/directors-­cut-­just-­me-­and-­my-­

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shadow-­w erner-­h erzog-­w atches-­f red-­a staire-­d ancing-­w ith-­h is-­s hadow-­ in-­1551997.html. ———. 2010. Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Canada, USA, France, Germany, UK. Hippolytus. 1995. Refutation of All Heresies. Translated by J. H. MacMahon. In Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian, Appendix (ANF05), ed. Philip Schaff, 14–405. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2006. Elements of Screenology. Toward an Archaeology of the Screen. ‘Navigationen: Display I – analog.’ Ed. Jens Schröter and Tristan Thielmann. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften 6 (2): 31–64. Husserl, Edmund. 2000. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution [1952]. Translated by R. Rojcewicz, and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Kahn, Charles H. 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus.  An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book 11 [1973], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. 1968. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: P.U.F. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech [1964-1965]. Translated by A. Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lewin, Bertram D. 1946a. Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15: 419–434. ———. 1946b. Reconsideration of the Dream Screen. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 22: 174–199. Lotka, Alfred J. 1925. Elements of Physical Biology. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Company. Lyotard, Jean-François. 2020. Discourse, Figure [1971]. Translated by A. Hudek, and M. Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malafouris, Lambros. 2020. What Does the Stick Do for the Blind? In Thinking in the World, ed. Jill Bennett and Mary Zournazi, 115–128. London: Bloomsbury. Mannoni, Laurent, and Pesenti Compagnoni, Donata. 2009. Lanterne magique et film peint: 400 ans de cinéma. Paris: La Martinière. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs [1960]. Translated by R.  McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible [1964]. Translated by A.  Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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———. 2003. Nature. Course Notes from the Collège de France [1995]. Translated by R. Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Translated by D.A.  Landes. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, William J.T. 2015. Screening Nature (and the Nature of the Screen). New Review of Film and Television Studies 13 (3): 231–246. Mondzain, Marie-José. 2013. Homo Spectator. Paris: Bayard. ———. 2015. L’image peut-elle tuer? [2002]. Paris: Bayard. Perlès, Catherine. 1977. Préhistoire du feu. Paris: Masson. Pinotti, Andrea. 2011. Empatia. Storia di un’idea da Platone al postumano. Roma-­ Bari: Laterza. Plato. 2000. The Republic. Translated by T.  Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pliny the Elder. 1952. Natural History vol. 9. Translated by H.  Rackman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richelet, Pierre. 1680. Dictionnaire françois contenant les mots et les choses, plusieurs nouvelles remarques sur la langue françoise. Genève: Wiederhold. ———. 1694. Dictionnaire françois contenant les mots et les choses, plusieurs nouvelles remarques sur la langue françoise. Köln: Galliard. ———. 1709. Nouveau dictionnaire françois contenant généralement tous les mots anciens et modernes, et plusieurs remarques sur la langue françoise etc., volume one (A-L). Amsterdam: Jean Elzevir. Rizzoni, Nathalie. 2008. Les écrans à main et l’éventail de Blaise et Babet (1783). Fondation Collectiana. Accessed March 16, 2021. http://www.collectiana. org/nathalie-­r izzoni-­l es-­e crans-­a -­m ain-­e t-­l -­e ventail-­d e-­b laise-­e t-­b abet-­ 1783.html. ———. 2019. «On embellit mon corps pour l’exposer aux flammes, / et souvent on le peint de diverse couleur». (L’écran à main). Dix-huitième siècle 51 (1): 49–61. Simondon, Gilbert. 2014. Sur la technique (1953–1983). Paris: P.U.F. Stevens, George. 1936. Swing Time. USA. Stoichita, Victor I. 1997. Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books. Straus, Erwin W. 1963. The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience [1935, 19562]. Translated by J. Needleman. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.

CHAPTER 3

Screens as Prostheses of Our Bodies

3.1   The Skin as a Screen With regard to the body as the “negative” proto-screen, let us note that— in his study of wall images from the French cave of Pech Merle, dating back 29,000 years—the French prehistory specialist Michel Lorblanchet evokes the use of hands “as a screen to guide the pigments in the creation of  [some of those images]  using the crachis technique” (Lorblanchet 2010: 114, italics added). In other words, hands were used to screen off those parts of a rock wall that were not to be reached by the pigments that the artist blew toward it through a cane or a hollow bone. The case described by Lorblanchet thus makes it possible to highlight at least another element of fundamental importance for an anthropology of screens: the peculiar position that the hand occupies as the synecdochic part (pars pro toto) of the whole body understood as the proto-screen. This position also gives the hand a peculiar expressive function1—one that art and entertainment have soon been able to make use of, turning the hand into the primary medium of shadow theater.2 1  In 1877 Ernst Kapp, also a theorist of technology as an externalization of corporeality, wrote: “the human being […] finds himself beholding something of his own being in the creation of his hand, his world of representation embodied in matter, a mirror or after-image [Nachbild] of his interior, a part of himself” (Kapp 2018: 24, italics added). 2  On this subject, see Grespi (2017), in particular, the third chapter, titled “Hand Magic [Magie delle mani].”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Carbone, G. Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30816-1_3

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Lorblanchet also hypothesizes that the “crachis technique” was accompanied by the “use of a leather (or skin) screen perforated in the center,” observing that “perhaps it allow[ed] for greater precision than the hand-­ screen” (Lorblanchet 2010: 119). In that case, it could be said that such a screen operated as a sort of prosthesis (again in the sense specified above) of the hand-screen itself. It is also important to note that the screen in question would have been made—as we have just seen—of leather or skin. This can only refer to the prosthesization of the skin as one of the most evident forms of technological externalization of human bodily capacities. This is an absolutely central theme for the issue at hand. Marshall McLuhan, another theorist of this externalization, recalled the status of clothing “as an extension of our skin” (McLuhan 1994: 119). The etymology of the Greek term peplos, which in its most general meaning indicates any fabric that serves to cover and therefore to protect, also points in the same direction. The term is said to derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *pel- and is related to the Anglo-Saxon word filmen, which, like the root, means “skin.”3 Considering the different meanings of the term peplos, this etymological thread leads us from the skin to screen forms such as the tent, the curtain, and above all the veil. But the semantic area in which these terms gravitate is also found in the etymological traces of another vector of prosthetic externalization of corporeality, one that once again refers to the shadow. Indeed, it should be remembered that skia, the ancient Greek term for shadow, has the same etymological root as the word ske ̄ne ̄, which primarily means “tent,” but also indicates the background building of the theater “stage.”4 In particular, it originally indicated the place where actors changed costumes in Greek classical theater. It should also be said that ske ̄ne ̄ is connected in

3  On this etymology, see the entry peplos in Liddell et  al. (1940), http://www.perseus. tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=pe/plos, accessed 23 February 2021, as well as in Rocci (1993), which refers to the Latin word pellis (=skin) and the Anglo-Saxon filmen. As for the Proto-Indo-European root *pel-3b from which the Latin pellis would derive, see J.  Pokorny (1959), https://indo-european.info/pokorny-­ etymological-­dictionary/index.htm, accessed 23 February 2021. As for the etymology of the Anglo-Saxon term filmen, see https://www.etymonline.com/word/film. Accessed 23 February 2021. 4  See L. Rocci (1993), s.v. skēne  ̄ (also for the reference to skia).

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turn to ske ̄nos, a term that, for its part, could designate the body itself, if understood in the figurative sense of “casing of the soul.”5 Thus, if these etymological relations seem to echo the detachment of the “shadowing” function from the bodily experience observed in the previous section, the linguistic roots mentioned earlier, in line with Lorblanchet’s research, point to a similar technical dynamic of detachment of the skin from the body. Another observation is appropriate here. We previously stressed that it takes two screens to create a shadow: well, this structural ambiguity seems to find its first particular evidence precisely in the uses of the skin as a screen. Indeed, Lorblanchet refers to the skin as a “negative” screen, because it stops whatever hits it and prevents it from reaching what is behind it. However, another important human cultural phenomenon, that of tattoos, presents the skin as a “positive” proto-screen, as such used “certainly before cave walls” (Cometa 2020: 89). With this function, the skin thus shows forms and colors on its surface,6 which, by covering it, can be said to act in turn as “negative” screens (Fig. 3.1). Once again, the skin manifests two fundamental screen dynamics: the very organ that, as François Dagognet (1993) wrote, constitutes the body’s fundamental shell of defense and containment becomes the screen on which shapes and colors can be inscribed, connoting the way in which the body exposes itself to others and to the world. In its double function of negative and positive screen, the skin therefore is itself a pars pro toto (part for the whole) of the body understood as the proto-screen. Moreover, the dual negative and positive sense of the body as the proto-screen grounds the co-implication of the two pairs of functions—showing and hiding, exposing and protecting—that characterize the notion of “arche-screen.” 5  See L. Rocci (1993), s.v. skēnos, italics added. According to H.G. Liddell et al. (1940), this meaning of the term skēnos is already recorded in Hippocrates, as well as in Democritus. With respect to what will be said in the next paragraph, it is interesting to note that such a meaning is rendered as “tabernacle of the soul” in this Lexicon. In later centuries, it is frequently found in the vocabulary of Christian literature as a metaphor for the body as the dwelling of the soul. See also Schleusner (1824), (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id= uc1.$c32429&view=1up&seq=949). Accessed 10 March 2021. 6  In this regard, Barbara Grespi also points out that, “although flat static patches of skin make the illustrator’s task easier, many tattoos are specifically designed for mobile areas of the body, and aim to produce a dynamic principle: for example, think of the classic fluttering wings or a flickering flame” (Grespi 2017: 37).

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Fig. 3.1  Marta Nijhuis, Shadow Portrait (Bénédicte), 2019. (Photo © Marta Nijhuis. Courtesy of the artist)

3.2   From the Biblical Veil to Alberti’s Veil The screen form that best highlights this co-implication is undoubtedly the veil. In the many cultural narratives in which it continues to play a leading role, the function of exposing and protecting, which regulates actions and relationships, clearly manifests its essential link with that of showing and hiding, which distributes the visible and the invisible. We certainly cannot dwell here on the details of any of these stories. However, in some cases, other scholars have already done so in a masterly way. One example is the book that Pierre Hadot dedicated to the veil of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the mythical peplos of Mother Nature, which no mortal is said to have ever lifted (Hadot 2006: 252).7 What we are going 7  With regard to these multiple cultural narratives about the veil, the most recent works worth mentioning include Nassim Aboudrar (2014), Corrain (2016a), the bilingual collection of essays edited by Leone et al. (2016), Pellegrin (2017), and Prezzo (2017).

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to do is rather briefly recall the genealogical line that—according to the French literary theorist Stéphane Lojkine (2021a, 2021b)—starts with the role played by the veil in biblical Judaism and, through Christianity, arrives at Leon Battista Alberti’s “intersection.” Our goal is to suggest some reconstructive elements different from those proposed by Lojkine while also referring to more recent screen forms developments. In his On Painting (1435), written and published in Italian vernacular and later in Latin, Alberti famously describes the “open window” as the optical tool to adopt as a model of the surface to be painted.8 On the other hand, however, he suggests painting using what he considers to be his own invention, that is, a checkered veil, which he calls an “intersegazione [intersection].” This veil is meant to be placed between the painter and what he intends to paint, in order to represent it as accurately as possible. It is a veil woven of very thin threads and loosely intertwined, dyed with any color, subdivided with thicker threads according to parallel partitions […]; which [veil] I place indeed, between the object to be represented and the eye, so that the visual pyramid penetrates through the thinness of the veil. (Sinisgalli 2006: 176)

This description cannot but bring us back to other veils that are crucial in our culture. The first one we will focus on here is located inside the “Tabernacle” described in the Bible: this was the portable place of worship for the Jews during their wanderings in the desert after leaving Egypt, until Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem. In relation to the theme at hand, it is particularly important to note that one of the terms used to designate the Tabernacle was ‘ōhel, which means “tent” and which in the Septuagint, the oldest Greek translation of the Old Testament, is rendered as ske ̄ne ̄, to whose etymology we referred above. More generally, it should be noted that the book of Exodus (25–31 and 38–40) contains a detailed description of the forms, measurements, and furnishings of the Tabernacle, which was considered the “dwelling place” (mishkān) of Yhwh, God of Israel. It consisted of a covered structure, internally divided into two parts by a veil called pārōket (literally “division”). In the Septuagint, this veil is called katapetasma, a term meaning in turn “curtain” or “tent cloth.” Priests had access to one part, which 8  “I trace as large a quadrangle as I wish, with right angles, on the surface to be painted; in this place, it certainly functions for me as an open window” (Alberti 2011: 39).

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was called “the Holy Place”; the other, called “the Holy of Holies” or “the Most Holy,” was exclusively reserved for the High Priest, who could access it once a year. This was the site of the Ark of the Covenant, which housed the Tablets of the Law, whose second commandment—note well—forbade making any images: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Ex. 20: 4–5). 9 Coming back to the veil system, these are the instructions that Yhwh gave to Moses: And you shall make a veil [pārōket] of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen. It shall be made with cherubim skillfully worked into it. And you shall hang it on four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold, with hooks of gold, on four bases of silver. And you shall hang the veil from the clasps, and bring the ark of the testimony in there within the veil. And the veil shall separate for you the Holy Place from the Most Holy. […] You shall make a screen [māsāk] for the entrance of the tent, of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, embroidered with needlework. (Ex. 26: 31–36)10

In addition to the inner veil (pārōket), the biblical Tabernacle therefore included an outer veil (māsāk) that acted as a screen inserted into the further veil of the tent resting on the scaffolding of the Tabernacle itself.11 It is evident that the main function of these veils was to circumscribe and organize access to places, albeit only visually, based on their sacredness. In this sense, the pārōket, with its embroidery of cherubs, was a veil that screened off the view of the space beyond it. Some theophanies of the Exodus use veils in a similar fashion: to conceal that which could not be seen, because, says Yhwh, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Ex. 33:20). One need only recall the theophany of the burning bush (Ex. 3:1–6), known to be the moment when God revealed his name but no less significant if read in the light of the screen functions of exposure and protection that regulate the relationship between the human and the divine. In that episode, when Moses veiled himself in the presence of Yhwh, he obviously did not do so in order to hide from him, for that  Here and below we refer to the English Standard Version of the Bible.  On the analysis of this text and the role of veils in the book of Exodus, see Volli (2016: 229–261) and Prezzo (2017: 15ff.). 11  For a historical analysis, see Légasse (1980). 9

10

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would have been impossible, but rather to protect himself from direct eye contact with his excessive glory. Such a contact would not have been humanly sustainable, so it had to be drastically weakened by a mediating device, by a “regulator of relations” (Volli 2016: 234ff.),12 that would balance the relationship with transcendence so as to make it adequate and accessible to a human being. In the case of the dividing veil of the biblical Tabernacle, however, there is a further decisive element to consider: while protecting the space behind from view, as we read above in the book of Exodus, it was adorned with “cherubim,” that is, it showed images, thus distributing both the visible and the invisible. It should also be remembered that the divine command to draw such figures on the pārōket, as well as the injunction to place two cherubim on the propitiatory of the ark, would be used as an argument in favor of images13 and their worship during the iconoclastic controversies: it was God himself who wanted those images, it was said, despite the already mentioned commandment of Exodus 20:4 and the suspicion of idolatry that surrounded every visual representation in biblical Judaism.14 Indeed, in biblical Judaism, veils are generally employed to deal with the otherness of the divine and the forms of the possible relationship between transcendence and immanence. It is therefore extremely significant that the Synoptic Gospels refer to the veil of the Temple in Jerusalem at the central moment of their narrative—the death of Jesus (Mt. 27:51; Mk. 15:38; Lk. 23:45)—as if to indicate how this event redefined that very relationship. In the Synoptics, Christ’s death on the cross is in fact connected with the tearing of that veil “from top to bottom.”15 Since the origins of Christianity, this laceration has been understood as a symbol of the new economy inaugurated by the Incarnation, which put an end to the absolute otherness between God and humanity, inaugurating a new closeness and a new visibility of the divine, as well as implicitly

12  See also Prezzo (2017: 16): “This encounter requires a twofold movement: distancing, which allows for acceptance, but also for self-protection, since such an encounter can be dangerous.” 13  See, e.g., John of Damascus (Kotter 1975: 95–96; 158, trans. 2003: 33; 51). 14  On this, see Ouellette (1967: 510–513). Interesting observations on the role of this commandment in Byzantine iconoclastic and iconophilic thought can be found in Barber (2002: 54–59). 15  On the episode of the velum scissum, see Gurtner (2006: 97–114).

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laying the foundations for a new iconomy.16 The Letter to the Hebrews already viewed the Incarnation as the replacement of the veil of the temple with that of the body of Christ (Heb. 10:20). The Son’s flesh remained a veil, but it marked a new distribution of the visible and the invisible, because God was incarnated in a body that everyone could see. One can easily follow this change by looking at the process that gradually led Christianity to accept the use of religious images and to legitimize their worship. The prohibition to produce images, contained in the commandment of the Exodus, was in fact directly linked to the transcendence of Yhwh. So how was it possible for Christianity to overcome this injunction? Certainly, a fundamental contribution was made by the idea that Christ’s flesh was the new place of mediation between the human and the divine and that the new distribution between the visibility and invisibility of God had to be measured against it. If God has made himself visible in his Son who, as the Letter to the Colossians reads, is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), then it is also legitimate to make images of him.17 In the story leading to the legitimization of their cult, however, veils were once again of decisive importance: we are talking about the so-called “acheiropoieta”, that is, images “not made by human hands” which, according to legend, were produced on cloths of different sizes through direct contact with the body of Christ.18 The role played by these cloths in the legitimation of images depends directly on the fact that it was Jesus himself who decided to leave his image on them, thus explicitly overcoming the Old Testament prohibition and implicitly establishing his representability in images. For this reason, the tales surrounding the acheiropoieta constitute a veritable “founding myth” of the Christian image (Lingua 2006: 57). If we consider the legend related to the most famous acheiropoietic veil, the Mandylion of Edessa (Fig. 3.2),19 we’ll notice the same pairs of screen functions that we pointed out as paradigmatic aspects of the 16  We use this neologism in reference to Marie-José Mondzain, who talks about the iconic economy as the “organization, administration and management of all visibility” (Mondzain 2005: 82), as well as in reference to Szendy (2019: especially 7–8). 17  On this, see Lingua (2023: 109–112). 18  For a more comprehensive analysis of the role of acheiropoieta in the discussion of images in the early Christian millennium, see Lingua (2011: 113–128). 19  For an overview of the historical and legendary material relating to the Mandylion, see Cameron (1998) as well as Belting (1994: 208–215). For the sources, see Guscin (2009).

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Fig. 3.2  Anonymous, “Holy Face”, Property of the City of Genoa, in the care of the Church of St. Bartholomew of the Armenians in Genoa, Italy. (Photo by B.N. Marconi, Genoa)

arche-­screen. According to it, the Mandylion is a piece of cloth that Jesus wore on his face to offer his own image to King Abgar of Edessa who, having fallen ill, had sent a messenger to ask for Christ to come and heal him. On that same occasion, Abgar had also requested a portrait of Jesus. In the version reported by John of Damascus in Expositio fidei (Kotter 1973: 206–208; trans.  1958: 372–373),20 the artist commissioned to paint the portrait was unable to do so because of the brightness of Christ’s face. Jesus himself, therefore, fulfilled Abgar’s wish to see him by putting  On the text, see Guscin (2009: 152).

20

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a cloak (imation in ancient Greek) over his face and transferring his image onto it. In this case too, the veil has the function of shielding the exceeding presence of transcendence, but it does not preclude vision: it rather deflects it, directing it toward an image. Now the protective function operates through the transposition onto a screen which mediates the relationship with excess. On the one side, the miraculous form in which the trace of Christ’s face is produced stresses that such an image could not be created by an artist’s hands. On the other side, it determines the screening function of the veil as a mediation that, using a theological term, we could define as kenotic, that is, “weakened” and therefore accessible to human beings. It is precisely this kenotic mediation that marks the transition from the Old Testament dynamic, in which the protection of human sight from divine excess tended to be identified with its concealment, to a specifically Christian redistribution of these functions, in which the showing function of the screen becomes not only possible but also predominant. Like the veil of the Temple, acheiropoietic veils were also used as an argument by iconophiles during the iconoclastic crisis of the eighth and ninth centuries.21 Their use in those discussions thus recalls the importance that the screen’s dual function of showing and hiding had in the formation of Christian image theory. A good example of this is the idea of the visible as a pathway to the invisible, which in Eastern Christianity played a central role in the elaboration of the theology of icons. Even before the iconoclastic debate, the justification of the icon of Christ was based on the idea that it was possible to pass from the visible image to its invisible prototype. When the Second Council of Nicaea (787 CE)22 established the legitimacy of the veneration of sacred images, it relied on the idea of translatio ad prototypum, which had been formulated by Basil of Caesarea in the fourth century.23 However, it was not that Council that offered the most precise definition of the theory of icons: it produced a guideline to regulate the practice of the Christian community, but it did not outline a definitive solution to the issues at stake, so much so that the  See, e.g., John of Damascus (Kotter 1975: 114; trans.  2003: 41) and Nicephorus of Constantinople (Migne 1857–66: PG 100, 461A-B; trans. 1989: 97; 246–247). 22  An English translation of the proceedings is available in The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (Price 2018). 23  See Basile de Césarée  (1968: 406; trans.  1996: 28). On the role of this passage, see Ladner (1953: 1–8). 21

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iconoclastic struggles resumed even after it. Rather, the general ­formulation of the status of the iconic image would be sought in the various theological proposals that emerged during the two centuries of the iconoclastic confrontation and not only in the arguments of the Council of Nicaea (see Lingua 2006: 102–103). Leaving aside subsequent historical events and the specificities characterizing the legitimation of Christian images in the Latin tradition, however, let us return to the question raised at the beginning of this section: how do these veils connect with Leon Battista Alberti’s “intersection?” First of all, because of its position with respect to the beholder, Alberti’s veil recalls that of the Jewish Tabernacle. On the other hand, in contrast to the latter, it evidently benefits from the iconophilia established in Christian theology. Nevertheless, one should not think that the “intersection” has therefore lost its function of protection and concealment in favor of pure display. Certainly, it does not impede sight, nor does it divert it toward an image which in turn refers to an invisible prototype. Made of “very thin threads,” stripped of the cherubs embroidered on the biblical veil and of the imprint of Christ found in the acheiropoieta, Alberti’s intersection finds its transparency (in the etymological sense of this term) recognized and legitimized, allowing the painter’s gaze to go through it (Fig. 3.3). Once again, however, this is a new form of articulation between the different functions we have analyzed. Alberti’s transparency is far from a pure and direct access to the world. In fact, it is at one with the grid of parallel lines that it highlights: a lattice that, in turn, allows for the geometrization of vision and hence for its more exact transfer into the two-­ dimensionality of the pictorial surface. In this sense, if the veil now shows what is on the other side of it, it is because it is given a scientific function and connotation. It should also be noted that this idea of a geometric decomposition-recomposition of three-dimensional space in the two-­ dimensionality of the image does not cease to underlie the pixelation of digital screens today (see especially Kittler 2001), which have ceased to point beyond their surface. In short, by placing the veil between the painter and the visible object that he intends to paint, Alberti “radically secularizes” this veil (Lojkine 2021a) and inaugurates a new status for it, offering a decisive contribution

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Fig. 3.3  Eden Paredes, The “intersection” or “veil”, drawn according to Leon Battista Alberti’s illustration in Della Pittura [On Painting], 1435

to the affirmation of the primary “scopic regime of modernity.”24 In it, art and science converge to produce a representation of the visible whose ideal exactness guarantees a “profane” truth-value, not necessarily in competition with the religious one. Indeed, the category of “representation” is explicitly referred to in the Latin version of Alberti’s treatise, precisely in the aforementioned passage describing the veil acting as “intersection.” Here, the “cosa veduta [thing seen]” of the Italian vernacular version becomes in fact the “corpus repraesentandum [object to be represented]”25 (Sinisgalli 2006: 176). Moreover, in the same passage, that version adds a new, important detail, specifying that Alberti’s veil is to be understood not only as 24  Martin Jay notes that we can identify such a “scopic regime” “with Renaissance notions of perspective in the visual arts and Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality in philosophy” (Jay 1988: 4). 25  Rocco Sinisgalli’s recent edition of Alberti’s treatise (Sinisgalli 2006) overturns the traditional chronology according to which the Latin version preceded the Italian vernacular version.

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checkered but also as “telario […] distentum,” that is, “stretched by a frame.” Indeed, this veil comes with a frame: that was not the case for the biblical Tabernacle, whose veil, according to the instructions contained in the book of Exodus and quoted above, should rather hang like a curtain. With respect to the latter, the fundamental element of the frame, already implied in Alberti’s metaphor of the window, is thus summoned to the modern pictorial device.26 As Louis Marin puts it, in fact, “the background, the plane and the frame” are the three elements that “constitute the general framework of [modern] representation” (Marin 1988: 64). In particular, he explains that “the frame autonomizes the work in visible space; it places the representation in the situation of exclusive presence; it gives the right definition of the conditions of visual reception and contemplation of the representation as such” (Marin 1988: 64). As a distinct “artifact” (Marin 1988: 64) added to the showing surface of the canvas (“the background”), the frame constitutes a peculiar element of this variation of the arche-screen outlined by Alberti’s double and complementary model of the window and the veil. As a representation enclosed in a frame, this model secularizes the Jewish-Christian veil not only because it no longer proposes itself as a site of transition to the sacred and the invisible but also because it constitutes a technological device functional to the central perspective, that is, a peculiar organization of pictorial space that inaugurates a new way of relating to things. In fact, as Charles Taylor argues, the Renaissance perspective conveys “a quite different framework understanding of what it is to be a thing, of what is important in thinghood” (Taylor 2007: 96). Indeed, it makes it possible to conceive of represented reality as purely immanent. In this way, images constructed in perspective contribute to the dynamic of the progressive “disenchantment of the world”27 that accompanies the development of modernity. In other words, the intersecting grid, surrounded by the frame, geometrifies reality, makes it calculable, and strips it of all magical and spiritual forces. The painter can thus represent the world in a fully organized space and offer it to the eye as a coherent whole of entities that seem no longer to refer to anything other than themselves 26  “Like the window, the screen is at once a surface and a frame,” writes in essentialist (i.e., nonhistorical) language Anne Friedberg (2006: 1, italics in the original). 27  Here we refer to Max Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt as a process of “demagication” of the world that would accompany the rationalization dynamic of modernity. See especially Weber (2004: 13).

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or to be influenced by anything outside their purely perceptible nature (see Lingua 2020b: 73–75). In short, while the Jewish-Christian veils served to mediate an invisible transcendence, Alberti’s veil, through its transparency, seems to only reproduce visible immanence. In this sense, the showing function of the veil would seem to reach its apex here, to the detriment of concealment and protection. However, as already mentioned above, the transparency of the intersection does not imply the full exposure of the world to the gaze but rather a specific form of technological mediation of the visible, which is reproduced according to precise geometrical canons. Moreover, by interposing itself between the artist’s eye and “the thing seen,” the intersection exposes the gaze itself to the world at the same time as it contributes to disenchanting the world, reducing it to an object and thus immunizing the artist from direct contact with it. The exposure phenomenon we are examining therefore also reveals an essentially ambiguous character, which is active and passive at the same time (but mediated in both cases) and thus intimately questions the traditional opposition between those two poles. Through the medium of intersection, in fact, not only is the world exposed as “representation” to the gaze of the observers, but the observers themselves are constituted as such and as such are exposed to the world. Thus, Taylor describes the birth of the modern subject—of which the spectator of the perspective image would be a paradigmatic figure—as the transition from a “porous self,” exposed to the influences of divine powers, to a screened-off self, a “buffered self” protected from external “magical” influences and therefore in control of the world (Taylor 2007: 37–41). Nevertheless, we wish also to stress that protection is always the other side of exposure, however mediated, so neither is ever to be considered an absolute. In any case, we can say that the entire technology of perspective incorporates the screening function of protection from excess that we found in the Jewish-Christian veil, albeit as part of a different strategy. Here, the surface showing the images does not serve to mediate transcendence in order to adapt it to a human scale but rather to administrate visible immanence, framing it in a scopic regime that integrates the scientific gaze into artistic practice. Alberti’s veil is no longer meant to shield vision, like Moses’, but rather has to frame the world, making it comprehensible through a mathematical knowledge that allows us to control it and gives us a sense of mastery over reality. It is therefore the very showing function of the veil that makes it immunizing: by means of the image it offers of the

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world, it intends to reduce it to an object within our reach, free of that excess of transcendence with which the biblical veils were instead called upon to negotiate. Thus characterized, this model would contribute decisively to the establishment of the modern conception of representation, based on the separation and frontal opposition between seer and seen. In this conception, in fact, Alberti’s theory of perspective would combine with Descartes’ subject-object dualism, providing modern Western thought (and, more generally, the modern Western way of being-in-the-world) with the foundations on which to base the mathematization of nature, as Heidegger (2002) summarized it. Thus, every entity would be reduced to an object placed before the subject, with truth being the certainty of its exact representation.

3.3   The Term “Screen” in the Scientific Sphere: The Case of the Solar Microscope It is in the context of the Enlightenment developments of this approach, too complex and articulated to be retraced here, that the term “screen” seems to have penetrated the scientific sphere. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, the—widely significant— findings one of us has gathered date back to the mid-eighteenth century. They are located in the treatise titled The Microscope Made Easy, published for the first time in 1742 (with a second edition the following year and a third the year after) by Henry Baker, a naturalist, scholar, polygraph, popularizer, and member of the Royal Society of London.28 According to the use of the time, the long subtitle details the contents of the treatise: The nature, uses, and magnifying powers of the best kinds of microscopes described, calculated, and explained: for the instruction of such, particularly, as desire to search into the wonders of the minute creation, tho’ they are not acquainted with optics. Together with full directions how to prepare, apply, examine, and preserve all sorts of objects, and proper cautions to be observed in viewing them. An account of what surprising discoveries have been already made by the microscope: with useful reflections on them. And also a 28  Our quotations come from the 1743 edition. The third edition of Baker’s treatise (dated 1744) is available at https://archive.org/details/microscopemadee01bakegoog/page/n5. Accessed February 10, 2020. We owe the discovery of this work to the reference made to it by Gleizes and Reynaud (2017: 63, fn. 46).

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great variety of new experiments and observations, pointing out many uncommon subjects for the examination of the curious. (Baker 1743)

As announced by its title, the sixth chapter of the treatise is dedicated to “The Solar, or Camera Obscura Microscope.” In this regard, an additional table would be inserted in the second edition of the treatise, translated into French by the Jesuit Esprit Pezenas and published in 1754. Moreover, in 1765 a sort of paraphrase of that chapter would appear in the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert under the heading Microscope solaire, signed D. J. (Louis de Jaucourt). The chapter begins as follows: This microscope depends on the sunshine, and must be made use of in a darken’d chamber, as its name implies. It is composed of a tube, a looking-­ glass, a convex lens, and Wilson’s single pocket microscope before described […]. The sun’s rays being directed by the looking-glass through the tube upon the object, the image or picture of the object is thrown, distinctly and beautifully, upon a screen of white paper, or a white linen sheet, placed at some distance to receive the same; and may be magnified, to a size beyond the imagination of those who have not seen it. (Baker 1743: 22, italics added)

From the very first page, the term screen (rendered in French as écran) is used (twice) to indicate one of the fundamental components of the optical device described, whose name, as we saw above, also explicitly refers to the camera obscura.29 It should be emphasized that neither the English author nor his French translators felt the need to provide particular warnings regarding the use of the term screen in relation to an optical device, thus leading us to suppose that this usage was by then established in both languages.30 29  For an introduction to “the camera obscura model of vision in terms of its historical specificity” and to its dominant role between the late sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century, see Crary (1990: 25ff., here 27). 30  Instead, it should be noted that a century before the publication of Baker’s treatise, Descartes, describing the camera obscura in the Dioptrique (1637), spoke simply of “white sheet [linge blanc],” whereas in the New Essays on Human Understanding (completed in 1704) Leibniz talked about a “cloth or membrane [toile ou membrane].” For the two quotations, to which we have supplemented the French original here, see Crary (1990: 47; 51, respectively).

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From the cited page we learn that the screen in question, on which the image of the object under examination appeared enlarged, could be made of “white paper” or “a white linen sheet.” We can therefore hypothesize that English-speaking readers might be reminded of the veil of the Jewish Tabernacle: in the English version of the book of Exodus, God instructs Moses to have it woven precisely in linen. On the other hand, when this screen is described in more detail, Baker specifies that it is “strained on a frame”31—a detail that inevitably recalls the one added by Alberti in the Latin version of his treatise—and that, thus stretched, it can be fixed to a rotating pin, Baker explains, “in the manner of some fire-screens”: precisely those that Huhtamo cites as an example of a screen used as a “piece of furniture” (Huhtamo 2006: 35). The description goes on to say: Larger screens are likewise made sometimes, with several sheets of the same paper pasted together on cloth, and let down from the ceiling with a roller, like a large map. (Baker 1743: 25)

Louis Marin refers precisely to the map as one of the paradigmatic examples of modern representation (see Marin 1988: 71). The fact that Baker, too, refers to it indirectly reminds us that, in spite of the religious echo and the domestic heritage mentioned above, the screen of the solar microscope had by then taken on an explicitly scientific function with strong informative purposes. These goals were to be attained also through a certain spectacularization of nature, of which the screen could propose a collective observation magnified and at the same time protected from the dangers of a direct experience (Fig. 3.4).32 It should be added that, if on the one hand this screen allows one to observe the enlarged image of an object, on the other hand it makes it 31  As Marin notes (1988: 63), the term frame usually also translated the Italian cornice and the French cadre. In this case, however, the latter language prefers to render it with châssis. 32  In such a sense, this is an example of what Francesco Casetti (2021) calls “the projection/protection complex, i.e. the convergence of sensorial deprivation and safe access to new worlds.” Besides, he defines phantasmagoria shows as “an early instantiation” of this complex, although they are actually later than the optical device examined here. Moreover, we feel that what Casetti defines as a “projection/protection complex” is a particular dynamic within the broader framework of interactions between screen functions described in the present book. Casetti’s theses are taken up and developed in his book Screening Fears (2023), whose “Introduction” is precisely titled “The Projection/Protection Complex.”

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Fig. 3.4  Martin Frobenius Ledermüller, The solar microscope and the conditions of its use in a dark room, in Id., Amusemen(t)s microscopiques, Winterschmidt, Nuremberg 1764–1768. Digital reproduction from the collections of Strasbourg University Bibliothèque numérique patrimoniale. (Source: www.numistral.fr)

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possible to trace the contours of that image thanks to its transparency (again, to be understood in the etymological sense of the term) and thus to obtain a copy that adheres to the model. In short, it is inevitable to find in this screen a modern representative intention that shares certain fundamental aspects with Alberti’s veil, despite the many differences in conception and use between the two. Lucia Corrain (2016b: 43ff.) acutely insists on the differences between Alberti’s veil and the camera obscura, which we have seen echoed in Baker’s treatise under the other name of “solar microscope.” She tends to place these differences in a relationship of reciprocal opposition: the camera obscura also involves a frame but not a grid as Alberti’s veil does; the image proposed by the camera obscura can be moving rather than static; in the production and fruition of that image the contribution of corporeality appears drastically reduced33; furthermore, “the durability of vision is opposed to the mise en scène of a specific image, narration is opposed to description” (2016b: 85). Nevertheless, there is a fundamental continuity of intentions between the camera obscura and Alberti’s veil, even though in the first case such intentions are directed toward the reproduction of the visible, whereas in the second they can also be extended to the imaginary.34 Moreover, as we have tried to show above, a subsequent development of the principle of the camera obscura, such as that proposed by the solar microscope, tends to attenuate the divergences and indeed to highlight certain points of contact or even fusion between Alberti’s veil and the camera obscura and more generally between the “veil” and the “screen,” which therefore we believe exemplify the differential sense implied by their characterization as variations on the notion of the arche-screen. A similar differential sense would later find further autonomous modulations in experiences such as those of the cinema screen or digital displays. It is important to emphasize, however, that these new experiences do not completely erase from our relationship with these screens and with the images they present the echo of the sacred character or, in any case, of the claim to truthfulness flaunted by their more or less distant ancestors. This 33  See, in particular, Corrain (2016b: 84). However, Jonathan Crary notes that “the camera obscura is synonymous with a much broader kind of subject-effect” (Crary 1990: 34). 34  “The problem was how to construct perspectival drawings on paper geometrically, especially when these drawings were pure fantasy or—in the case of new building plans—pure dreams of the future” (Kittler 2012: 60).

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is one of the reasons for the demand for attention and acknowledgment of their truth-value that they never cease to address to us, as well as for the credit that we never cease to give them. Moreover, these elements are inseparable from the seduction strategy (see Carbone 2019: 81–96) that the different forms of screens exert on us, including the “violation” 35 of the interdiction on images inevitably implied by the veil’s transparency or by its opening to the presentation of images themselves—a seduction feature that, according to Lojkine, is not foreign to Christian culture. Certainly, at a closer look, the pārōket, the dividing veil of the biblical Tabernacle and then of the Jewish Temple, also exercised a very precise seduction strategy, offering the images of the cherubim embroidered on it to those who were in the “Holy Place” and thus protecting their gaze from the truths kept in the “Holy of Holies.” But when that veil was torn—as happened, according to the Synoptics, with the death of Christ— together with the new distribution of the visible and the invisible that we have already underlined, a new seduction strategy was obviously inaugurated for the screens and the images presented by them. This strategy was well announced, in the Greek of the New Testament, by a term of the caliber of “apocalypse” (apokalypsis), which literally indicates the removal of the veil in order to disclose what it previously concealed and which in this sense designates the supreme “revelation.” Thus, this new seduction strategy could even become functional to the transmission of truth: as we will see in the next chapter, medieval Christianity understood this very well, using the metaphor of the Biblia pauperum to affirm not only that images are more accessible than the scriptures but also that they are able to attract the uneducated faithful, pushing them to imitate what the images represent. However, it must be reiterated that, in Christianity, “revelation” never coincides with the total unfolding of the truth but maintains within itself a constant prophylactic dialectic between manifestation and concealment.36 This dialectic is precisely what, in the culture of Christian roots, continues to nourish the seduction strategy that assigns to what is 35  “This constitutive violation of the image will remain a fundamental and persistent feature of all iconic devices in our culture, even outside of any Christian context or meaning” (S. Lojkine, 2021b). See also Lojkine (2004). 36  In this regard, see the interpretation of the Latin term revelatio given by the theologian Bruno Forte (1996: 35–54), according to whom the particle re- would signal a dialectic between the removal of the veil and its thickening, which would instead be lacking in the German translation of the term as Offenbarung.

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presented on screens the value of a desired unconcealment and, to our gaze, implicitly, “a voyeuristic relationship” (Blumenberg 2010: 51).

3.4   The Film or Pellicle as a Technology Related to the Past, and the Present Hybridization of Analog and Digital The philological connections between peplos, *pel-, and filmen recalled in the first section of this chapter suggest the possibility of finding a further example of prosthesization of the body as the proto-screen in the analog systems of photographic and cinematographic image reproduction. Indeed, these systems do not only include the “positive screen” understood as the surface on which to display such images, consisting of the photographic paper or the silver screen, respectively. On closer inspection, they also encompass the “negative” screen that, like the body, is interposed between the light source and the surfaces just mentioned. In both cases, very tellingly, this negative screen takes the name of film, to which the neo-Latin languages have imprinted correspondents such as the French “pellicule,” that is, as Jean-François Lyotard notes, “petite peau” (Lyotard 1978: 57). Definitely such a connection between the terms “skin” and, indeed, “film” or “pellicle” turns out to be significant and rich in implications. However, it was left surprisingly unexplored by both Lyotard and Laura U. Marks in her book titled The Skin of the Film (2000). On the other hand, it should be noted that this way of exteriorizing the body as the proto-screen currently seems to have come to a halt or at least suffered a major setback with “the almost complete disappearance of celluloid film stock as a recording, distribution, and exhibition medium,” as David Rodowick (2007: 8) already pointed out several years ago. Rodowick summarized the issue as follows: the analogical arts are fundamentally arts of intaglio, or worked matter—a literal sculpting by light of hills and valleys in the raw film whose variable density produces a visible image. But the transformation of matter in the electronic and digital arts takes place on a different atomic register and in a different conceptual domain. (Rodowick 2007: 9)

In fact, we know that, in the case of both cinema and photography, film is a more or less transparent flexible material coated with photosensitive

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emulsion. The latter, when exposed to ambient light, records the traces of this exposure on the film itself—traces that Rodowick likens to “hills and valleys.” These will then act as a negative screen for the light beam of the enlarger or projector, which will present them in the form of “visible images” on the positive screens of the photographic paper or the movie theater. We also know that, although some filmmakers are fighting to maintain the use of film, today almost all cinemas around the world screen films digitally. Whether there will be a return to film like there has been a resurgence of the vinyl, another analog reproduction medium previously supplanted by the advent of the digital, is hard to tell. Conceptually, however, film technology remains designed for the reproduction of previously recorded images, whereas radar, television, and then computers have started using technologies and adopting screens that allow the real-time transmission of images as well as other kinds of information.37 However, so far, between analog and digital image reproduction systems, we have not witnessed the opposition announced by Rodowick but rather various forms of hybridization.38 Taking up Bernard Geoghegan’s words, we can even say that, in general, “the ‘actually existing digital,’ is a hybrid or mixed medium” (Galloway and Geoghegan 2021: 3), as it does not cease to interweave digital computation with a screen visualization whose genealogy makes it difficult to establish a clear dividing line between analog and “pixel-based.”39 37  The “new type of screen” inaugurated by the massive use of radar by the United States during World War II is “the screen of real time,” writes Manovich, pointing out that “television is founded on the same principle but its mass employment comes later” (Manovich 2001: 99). Drawing on Manovich’s emphasis on the breakthrough role of radar and its type of screen, Olivier Aïm emphasizes that “radar contains all the values we currently expect from our digital screens, whether fixed, portable or mobile. The first being the remote vision of a reality encoded in the form of data (‘datafication’) that updates itself according to the evolutions of the situation observed, verified, monitored. Radar contains the substratum of our most recent screen-monitors and thus the core of the gaze that dominates the cultural field of digital visibility: monitoring” (Aïm 2022). 38  After all, already in the 1990s Bernard Stiegler predicted that digital images would not obliterate but rather incorporate analog ones, mostly generating products due to the “discretization of analog continuity” through digitization (Stiegler 2002: 157). 39  This is how Geoghegan (2021: 3) justifies his assessment: “First, in the 1960s and ’70s, both kinds of screens existed in similar ecologies that diminished the importance of that particular material embodiment in practice. Second, I’d follow Flusser in noting that cathode-­ray tubes and pixel screens belong to a single genealogy of technical images assembled from molecules, such that the opposition between the two is easily overblown.”

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In this regard, Geoghegan refers to the history of the emergence of interactive computer screens through the development of military defense and control systems deployed in the United States between the end of World War II and the early 1960s (see Geoghegan 2019). On the one hand, Geoghegan’s example urges us to place questions about the continuity or discontinuity between analog and digital in the context of a reconstruction that pays phenomenological attention to the implications that their joint use historically produced on the pragmatics of screen experiences, avoiding the temptation to reduce those questions to the mere technological-ontological consideration of the two data reproduction systems. On the other hand, this example is intended to show how the history reconstructed by Geoghegan has ended up having a decisive impact on our current screen experiences, reshaping them according to a strategic-military “attention economy”40 characterized by a specific perception of space and time. In it, the call for vigilance, quick reactions, and teamwork (but also, of course, surveillance, control, competition, destruction of the “enemy”) cannot but be associated with peculiar experiences of anxiety, stress, or, conversely, monotony (see Geoghegan 2019: 88), as well as emulation or hatred. Thus, we have now come to a radical transformation with respect to our modern experience of screens, where the latter are once more revealing themselves as “real operational thresholds” (Lingua 2020: 124), irreducible to a representational or, in any case, imagocentric paradigm that tends to emphasize their sole function of showing and hiding. This transformation, in short, attributes new importance and new evidence to screens’ concomitant functions of protection and exposure, in which one inevitably recognizes a component of strategic-military ancestry.

References Aïm, Olivier. 2022. Sur les traces de “L’avion de Bernard”: six leçons sur la surveillabilité numérique. AOC, July 11. Accessed July 29, 2022. https://aoc. media/analyse/2022/07/10/sur-­les-­traces-­de-­lavion-­de-­bernard-­six-­lecons-­ sur-­la-­surveillabilite-­numerique/. Alberti, Leon Battista. 2011. On Painting [1435]. Translated by R.  Sinisgalli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Henry. 1742, 17432. The Microscope Made Easy. London: R. Dodsley. 40  A valuable summary of the international reflection that has been produced on this topic since the 1990s is offered in § 1 of Carocci (2020: 191–194).

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Leone, Massimo, Henri de Riedmatten, and Victor I. Stoichita, eds. 2016. Il sistema del velo. Trasparenze e opacità nell’arte moderna e contemporanea. Roma: Aracne. Liddell, Henry G., Robert Scott, Hugh S. Jones, and Roderick McKenzie. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lingua, Graziano. 2006. L’icona, l’idolo e la guerra delle immagini. Questioni di teoria ed etica dell’immagine nel cristianesimo. Milano: Medusa. ———. 2011. Le achiropite e i fondamenti della teoria dell’immagine cristiana. In Sacre impronte e oggetti “non fatti da mano d’uomo” nelle religioni, ed. Adele Monaci Castagno, 113–128. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. ———. 2020. Che cosa c’è di nuovo nell’immagine digitale? In Vite digitali. Essere umani nella società del XXI secolo, ed. Alessandro De Cesaris, 113–127. Milano: FrancoAngeli. ———. 2020b. Immagini, schermi e forme della razionalità. In I poteri degli schermi. Contributi italiani a un dibattito internazionale, ed. Mauro Carbone, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, and Jacopo Bodini, 67–78. Milano-Udine: Mimesis. ———. 2023. Le origini della teoria cristiana delle immagini. Incarnazione e regimi di visibilità. In Studiare le immagini. Teorie, concetti, metodi, ed. Krešimir Purgar and Luca Vargiu, 103–126. Roma: Carocci. Lojkine, Stéphane. 2004. De l’allégorie à la scène: la Vierge-tabernacle. In L’Allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, ed. Brigitte Pérez-Jean and Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, 509–531. Paris: Champion. ———. 2021a. Intersecteur. Utpictura18, April 14. Accessed May 25, 2021. https://utpictura18.univ-­amu.fr/rubriques/critique-­theorie/intersecteur. ———. 2021b. Entre économie et mimésis, l’allégorie du tabernacle. Utpictura18, May 4. Accessed February 11, 2023. https://utpictura18.univ-­amu.fr/ rubriques/critique-­theorie/entre-­economie-­mimesis-­lallegorie-­tabernacle. Lorblanchet, Michel. 2010. Art pariétal. Grottes ornées du Quercy. Rodez: Éditions du Rouergue. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1978. Acinema [1973]. Translated by P. N. Livingstone and the author. Wide Angle 23: 52–91. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marin, Louis. 1988. Le cadre de la représentation et quelques-unes de ses figures. Les cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 24: 62–81. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man [1964]. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Migne, Jacques-Paul, ed. 1857–66. Patrologiae cursus completus: Series graeca. 161 vols. Paris: Migne. Mondzain, Marie-José. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy. The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Translated by R.  Franses. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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CHAPTER 4

Images and Words: Screen Functions and Technologies of Expression

4.1   Books, Screens, and “Culture Wars” As we already noted in point 5 of our introductory chapter, it is not easy to avoid the prevailing imagocentric framework that still identifies and reduces the experience of screens to that of images. Powerfully reinforced by the electronic-digital revolution, since the 1990s this system has driven many media theorists to set screens against books as an emblematic synthesis of the clash between image and word, encompassing the ongoing reversal of their power relations. Friedrich A. Kittler could then inaugurate the following decade by stating that writing in general, and the book in particular are said to have been played out, while the image, powerful and more able to unite humanity than ever, is reclaiming its birthright. (Kittler 2001: 39)

After all, in the early 1960s, when Marshall McLuhan (1962) claimed that the advent of the “electric age” was bringing with it the crisis of the “Gutenberg galaxy,” he was implicitly thinking in terms of that reversal. The typographic culture on which the modern “grammars” of thought and science had been built was being replaced by something new. Mind you, for McLuhan the emerging media, and television, in particular, were fundamentally oral, while typographic culture was essentially visual. Thus,

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he did not see the main clash as being played out between image and writing but on another level. Nevertheless, he too did not fail to point out that a child who grew up with television images “encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to literacy” and that “the mosaic TV image” is a “disaster” for alphabetical culture as “it blurs many cherished attitudes and procedures” (McLuhan 1994 : 335). Later, other authors were more drastic in formulating the opposition between image and word, whether oral or written. One of these was Vilém Flusser in the later 1980s, when he defined writing as an “iconoclastic” (Flusser 2011a: 14) gesture in itself and considered the invention of the alphabet as the event that liberated humanity “from pictorial, magical thinking” (Flusser 2011a: 34).1 The book in which he defended this thesis could therefore open with a peremptory statement: “Writing, in the sense of placing letters and other marks one after another, appears to have little or no future” (Flusser 2011a: 3). For Flusser, this realization meant not only that the technology of writing, as it had been known up to that point, was dying but also that its crisis would drag with it some of the most significant achievements of alphabetic culture.2 Before him, an even more radical figure had been Jacques Ellul, who had vigorously denounced the “triumphal progress” of images and the inevitable “regression of the word” (1985: 114). The title of his book, The Humiliation of the Word, originally published in 1981, already contained the core meaning of his position: the triumph of sight, produced by the multiplication of images, was having devastating effects on speech. For Ellul, the “humiliation of the word” also corresponded to the devaluation of an entire cultural world founded on articulate and reflective reasoning (1985: 155–182), making even new forms of orality such as the radio insignificant. “The recorded, mechanized word no longer has any living 1  The direct identification between pictorial and magical, as well as the iconoclastic function of writing, according to Flusser, applies essentially to prehistoric images, because the alphabetic mentality later changed the situation: “Images of our time are infected with texts; they visualize texts. Our image makers’ imaginations are infected with conceptual thinking” (Flusser 2011b: 13). 2  In order to rise to the challenge introduced by the proliferation of “technical images,” according to Flusser, it is necessary to recognize their radical foreignness to literate culture. In doing so, however, one is forced to acknowledge that they now belong to a new form of consciousness that “has developed codes that are not alphanumeric and has recognized the gesture of writing as an absurd act and so something from which to be free” (Flusser 2011a: 95).

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weight, it is an empty sound without necessity” (Ellul 1981: 17). As such, Ellul considered it doomed to be overtaken by iconic communication, which in his view lacks the analytical depth provided by verbal language. In these analyses—which showcase a sensibility that was very much present in the late twentieth century, not only among media scholars— screens and images were thus lined up in the same trench of a veritable “cultural war” against books, that is, writing and thus speech. Described with Flusser’s and Ellul’s polarizations, today that clash may look like an oversimplification because, as we can all ascertain, the now-­ dominant digital media mostly deploy multimodal forms of communication, in which orality and textuality, on the one hand, and still and moving images, on the other, effectively interpenetrate rather than oppose each other. However, the belief that there is a conflict between iconic and logical-­ discursive systems has not at all waned—not even when digital screens have fully brought out (as we observed at the end of the previous chapter) their nature as operational thresholds, through which the entire human sensorium interacts with machines and the world around them. Besides, the narrative of the “culture war” mentioned above is no stranger to a simplified and interchangeable use of the notions of “iconic” or “pictorial turn”; this is often done to describe the current alleged dominance of the “visual” over the verbal. It should also be noted that such alleged dominance is posited neglecting that “the word that is read” is itself “a modulation of visual space,” as Merleau-Ponty (2012: 145) reminded us in point 5 of our introductory chapter. Of course, as we highlighted in the same point 5, according to Gottfried Boehm and W.J.T. Mitchell, their two paradigmatic expressions should not be read in contrast to the “linguistic turn.” It should be noted, however, that, despite this clarification, Mitchell himself believed that one could speak of the pictorial turn in all historical contexts in which images constitute “a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry” (Mitchell 1992: 90)—therefore anytime there is a clash between the pictorial and other forms of expression. On the other hand, in his 1986 book, Iconology, he had already remarked that Western culture is primarily permeated by a “protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs” (Mitchell 1986: 43). Returning to the proclaimed clash between book and screen, we find it significant that W.J.T. Mitchell identifies the particularity of the

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contemporary pictorial turn in the fact that “a culture totally dominated by images, has now become a real technical possibility on a global scale” (Mitchell 1992: 91). There is no doubt that contemporary screens have contributed decisively to the emergence of such global domination of images, becoming key players in what Jacob Gaboury called “a contemporary collapsing of computer and screen, such that computer as a discrete object has become indistinguishable from its pixelated surface” (Gaboury 2021: 197).3 This way, screens ended up appearing as essential components of the culture clash that would produce today’s “turn” toward images. From such a perspective, technology and the digital, in particular, would only amplify a long-standing conflict based on the belief that word and image give rise to opposing symbolic systems, such that they can only relate in hierarchical terms. It is either the word or the image that prevails, where the former is marked by linear and classificatory rationality, emblematically expressed in alphabetic writing and book culture, and the latter is characterized by associative and fusional immediacy. As Kittler put it, thanks to an irresistibly seductive force, the image seems more able to bring humanity together, precisely because of the global expansion of the new technologies of visibility. In its disarming simplicity, this contraposition certainly prompted a recognition of the stand-alone importance of visual culture, regardless of the various waves of suspicion historically directed against images in the West.4 At the same time, however, the confrontational context in which this recognition occurred also generated the belief that the values emerging from the “screen civilization” were necessarily at odds with those of the “book civilization,” opening up apocalyptic scenarios. Thus, the fear, expressed by McLuhan at the time, that children raised in a TV-image-saturated environment might lose essential cultural skills seems to resurface today. In fact, developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf wonders whether the ease of access to vast amounts of data on screens does not end up inhibiting the development “of attentional, inferential, 3  Gaboury highlights this collapse by analyzing the Apple Watch launched in 2014. He recalls the effort that many digital media scholars have made to divide computation from visualization, when in fact the two are now inseparable (2021: 200). 4  On this, see Mirzoeff (2016: 10–15). The large amount of image studies recorded since the second half of the twentieth century goes in this direction, much like the emergence of the new field of research of visual studies. In this regard, see Purgar (2021) and Heywood and Sandywell (2017).

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and reflective capacities in the present reading brain” (Wolf 2007: 214). Similar echoes are found in Nicholas G. Carr’s well-known denunciation5 of how the Internet diminishes our ability to concentrate, accustoming us to such superficiality as to produce a veritable “disappearance of thought,” in the words of Ermanno Bencivenga.6 Despite the many forms taken by this cultural criticism, however, it remains impossible to maintain a simple contraposition between words and images today. Kelly himself, who in 2006 predicted a definitive victory of  digital screens over  paper books,7 in his mentioned The Inevitable— which we shall come back to—is forced to admit that the “People of the Screen” haven’t replaced the “People of the Book” but have rather blended with them, so to speak (Kelly 2016: 86–90). Today’s all-­ pervasiveness of screens has by no means obliterated writing: it has revived it, fueling new expressive articulations. And although the cultural formation of digital natives has increasingly shifted toward screens, as emblematically shown by the lockdowns during the pandemic, writing has certainly not suffered from it. In fact, digital natives themselves are writing more than ever before. In short, these elements only highlight why we believe that the idea that screen and images are inseparable, as well as the imagocentric reductionism that has fostered it, must be abandoned. Rather, against this reductionism, we intend to support a thesis that may appear counterfactual: instead of perpetuating the culture war between screens and images on the one hand and books on the other, the proliferation of digital images today highlights the groundlessness of the opposition between images and words, bringing to the surface other less conflicting conceptions of the relationship between iconic and verbal. Indeed, although speech and writing have historically been the preferred technologies in the transmission and sharing of knowledge, this has not necessarily implied their radical opposition to image technologies. Mitchell himself, who extensively studied these relationships in Iconology, shows that even when the contrast was more radical, there was still a link between the different forms of expression and between the symbolic systems that were built on them (Mitchell 1986: 49). 5  We are referring to the famous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Carr 2008), later expanded by Carr (2010). 6  Bencivenga (2017). For further articulation of the problem see Bencivenga (2020). 7  “In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail” (Kelly 2006: 43).

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From our point of view, we cannot but find this co-originality to be deeply inscribed in Western culture as a whole, mainly thanks to its Judeo-­ Christian matrix. This religious tradition and the resulting secularization dynamics, in fact, contain not only the grounds for conflict between iconic and verbal but also the prerequisites for a different approach to how they relate—one that may bring to light the very inseparability between image and word that digital screens place before us every day. To gain a deeper understanding of how screens manifest such a different articulation, we will take a step back from the present day to focus on the contribution to the question at hand that comes from Christian reflection in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

4.2  Logos, Flesh, and “Screen Thinking” It is now well established that Western culture, in its dominant canon, has developed a—more or less covert—suspicion of images. Although humankind has always dealt with images, the symbolic systems that rely on them have struggled to gain epistemological legitimacy and have often been relegated to a realm closer to irrationality than knowledge. According to Francesco Antinucci, the history of the relationship between image and word, in the West, has been punctuated by a series of divorces and non-­ lasting pacifications, in which the word has ended up “taking on predominantly cognitive functions, [while] the image [took on] emotional functions” (Antinucci 2011: VI). This outcome is not unmotivated: the image comes with an indeterminate nature, far less controllable than the word. As Gottfried Boehm notes, no science of images has emerged that is “conceivable in analogy to a general linguistics” (Boehm 1994: 11),8 nor has their precise grammar been codified, as was the case with verbal language.9 Images are polysemic, implying a “floating chain” (Barthes 1999: 37) of meanings, the decoding of which has undetermined rules, made up of multiple associations that make the images themselves difficult to use for precise and governable knowledge. 8  On this and other issues that we address later we refer to Lingua (2017, 2021, 2022) which we partly take up in this chapter. 9  Efforts have certainly been made in this regard, such as the iconological research inaugurated by Panofsky (1939, 1955) or the works on the psychology of perception by Gaetano Kanizsa (1997), but they are far from having resulted in a shared cultural framework on the issue.

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A given scene, when depicted, can be interpreted in different and even opposite ways, creating uncertainty and sometimes even uneasiness. On the other hand, images are dangerously similar to reality, so they trigger “mechanisms of identification and  emotional participation” (Antinucci 2011: 111). It is no accident that they have often been conceived as an imperfect and diminished doubling of reality that creates confusion between simulation and truth. Thanks to this ambiguity, images enter human life with an oblique force, exerting a persuasive power that is capable of modifying behavior. Strength and weakness, participation and disorientation thus paradoxically coexist in them. Perhaps the suspicion of images mentioned at the beginning of this section stems precisely from the copresence of these elements or, even more so, from the genuine fear that has fueled the history of all iconoclastic tendencies in the religious, political, and social spheres. Even just considering the cultural matrices that have affected Western thought, it is not difficult to find traces of this unease. In this sense, it is telling that the very origin of Western philosophy coincides with the distancing from images enacted by Plato, who conceived of mimetic art as a sensible representation of intelligible forms endowed with an entirely different ontological status and excluded artists from his ideal state.10 Another significant element is the unmistakable rejection of images in biblical Judaism, which, as we shall see, left a profound mark on Christian thought and, more generally, did not fail to influence the opposition between word and image in later visual culture. Yet, if we look at the issue from a paleoanthropological point of view, we realize that this opposition between iconic and verbal symbolic systems seems to be unfounded. In fact, as Fiorenzo Facchini points out, we cannot forget that the production of objects with some iconic function and the emergence of articulated language are both connected to the human capacity for symbolization (Facchini 1999: 202–212). Moreover, Horst Bredekamp (2010: 55) reminds us that, in the hominization process, the ability to produce images predated the emergence of articulate language by many millennia. 10  An example of criticism of mimetic art is Plato, Republic X 598b1–604e6, (trans. Plato 2000: 317–326). For the exclusion of artists, see: Republic. X 605a7–c4, (trans. Plato 2000: 326–327). However, more recent criticism has amply shown that the Platonic discourse on images turns out to be less univocally iconophobic than traditionally believed. In this regard, see Poetsch (2019). Still, the fact that many contemporary authors continue to emphasize the aversion to images in one of the founding fathers of philosophy shows how deeply rooted that belief is.

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Therefore, the fact that the image came first is even more unequivocal in relation to writing, which is “a very late development in human history” (Ong 2012: 82)—so much so that the earliest accomplished form of it that we know of is the Sumerian cuneiform script, the origin of which can be dated to around 3500 BC (Ong 2012: 83). In short, we can say that, from the point of view of their paleoanthropological genesis, no reasons can be found to justify a conflict between the two symbolic systems. Rather, what emerges is their original complementarity. If we focus on the relationship between images and writing in the light of André Leroi-Gourhan’s seminal studies, it becomes clear that the earliest graphisms produced by man were not a mere depiction of reality but rather a “symbolic transposition” of it (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 190). According to Anne-Marie Christin (2009: 18), this very symbolic function is the factor that unites prehistoric images with primitive forms of writing. Therefore, the latter would not have a verbal origin but an iconic one: it would constitute a specific form of the human animal’s graphic ability, initially used to symbolize objects and then, progressively, to produce texts (Christin 2009: 33–48). This thesis about the iconic origin of writing may appear counterfactual, because the latter, in its alphabetic form, has accustomed us to the idea that what matters is the relationship between the sounds of words and the signs that represent them.11 According to Christin, however, isolating the verbal and phonetic origins of writing from the iconic one means failing to recognize two constituent elements of the latter: its fundamental graphic-visual matrix and the importance of spatiality in it. In her view, both of these elements link writing to images rather than to the sound of voice and speech. As Walter Ong also recognizes, the act of writing— whether engraving a surface or distributing pigments of various kinds on it—implies “a coded system of visible marks” (Ong 2012: 83). Writing and drawing are thus two gestures that belong to the same world, so much so that, in line with John May, the former could be called “as a kind of

11  On the reduction to the phonetic dimension of alphabetic writing, one cannot neglect to recall the pages Jacques Derrida devotes to “logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism” (Derrida 1997: 11–12), and Stiegler’s critical take on it, particularly in the first chapter of Technics and Time, titled “The Orthographic Age” (Stiegler 1998: 12–64).

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alphabetic drawing” (May 2019: 66).12 Besides, it is no coincidence that ancient Greek sealed this kinship by using the same verb—graphein—for both “draw” and “write” (Sahas 1986: 14). Moreover, it should not be forgotten that without a medium that holds the screen function of showing, that is, without a “positive screen”—in this case a physical one—it is impossible to inscribe anything at all. The very words that make up a text owe the meaning they acquire to their placement on this surface: the transition from the free distribution of forms in drawing to their linear distribution in writing thus responds to a different modulation of space—to a different “spacing [espacement]” (Christin 2009: 26)—and not only to a logical necessity related to the consequentiality of language. Yet many scholars, according to Christin, do not sufficiently recognize this graphical-spatial component of writing, thereby perpetuating the “commonplace of a logocentric civilization” (Christin 2009: 18): the prejudice whereby the verbal has a higher value than the imago-visual. Conversely, paralleling the Derridean concept of “arche-writing” (Derrida 1997) and the notion of “arche-screen” in its first theorization (Carbone 2019), Jordan Willocq concluded: “Thus, there would be no inscription without the possibility of an ‘arche-screen’ […]. The arche-screen appears then as the carnal counterpart of any inscription, and therefore of any image as well, and as the necessary visibility and corporeality of any spacing” (Willocq 2018: 320). From an anthropological point of view, therefore, the common iconic matrix of writing and image is not only relevant because it points to a single origin of the two most important technologies of human expression, which have since become radically differentiated to the point of conflicting with each other. It also represents a significant emergence of the role that what we have termed “arche-screen” has played even in the development of paleoanthropological media experiences. As we saw in the second chapter, it was Anne-Marie Christin herself who drew attention to the importance of “screen thinking” (Christin 2009), considering it a “prodigious […] invention” (Christin 2009: 27) that made both the first cave images and writing possible. For prehistoric humans, screen thinking meant taking a space assumed to be “neutral” 12  May believes that the discovery of writing produced a split in what Stiegler, in the wake of Derrida, had called the “the orthographic age.” This split determined “the unrecoverable division between phonetics (now always already the speech of linear written thought) and everything that exceeded the dictatorship of lucidity imposed by phonetics” (May 2019: 66).

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from the appearance of reality, “determining a human field of appropriation, abstracted from the world” (Christin 2009: 31). Thanks to this spatiality, connoted as an abstract background, humans could begin to voluntarily leave traces on various materials, thus endowing them with screen functions. In short, as we already noted in the fourth section of Chap. 2, mobilizing what we have characterized as “arche-screen” has made it possible to attribute to specific portions of the world the ability to become a medium on which figures, images, or other signs can become such, offering themselves to an observer’s fruition. In addition, thinking in line with that notion has allowed us to charge specific objects with symbolic value, transforming them into “a frontier between man and the otherworld” (Christin 2009: 31), that is, into a veritable threshold of contact between different dimensions of reality. We will see later how this mediating function operated in the Byzantine conception of icons: they were understood as thresholds for the distribution of the visible and the invisible, as well as for the transition between one and the other. As we were saying, for Christin, awareness of the spatial dimension of writing has been gradually lost. First the dominance of alphabetical writing and then the invention of movable type printing have in fact contributed to putting the spatial dimension in the background. This has favored the idea that writing should be solely understood from its phonetic-­ linguistic basis (Christin 2020: 147–148) and that its graphic bodiliness is ultimately irrelevant to the content it conveys. As a result, the relevance of the screen function of the relative media has also been put on the back burner, eventually leading, as we have seen, to pitting screens against books—as if the pages of the latter were not also a screen form, that is, a historical variation of the “arche-screen.” Here it is not possible to reconstruct how this shift occurred. As Christin points out, however, it has to do with the parallel development of the Western logocentric mentality and the belief in the superiority of writing, as a supposed “bodiless trace” (Christin 2009: 24), over images, seen as inextricably linked to materiality. As we anticipated at the beginning of this chapter, the Judeo-Christian tradition played a particularly significant role in these dynamics. The Old Testament explicitly emphasizes the superiority of the word and the scripture while manifesting open hostility to images. We have already mentioned the prohibition of images expressed in the second commandment

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(Ex. 20:3–4),13 to which biblical Judaism contrasts the exaltation of the word as the main instrument of Yhwh’s communication with man. In fact, most of the Old Testament theophanies have a verbal form, while the strictly seeable phenomena that come with it—as biblical scholar Gerard von Rad points out—are “always merely accessories” (von Rad 1965: 19).14 Yhwh manifests himself by speaking and writing (the Tables of the Law on Mount Sinai were “inscribed by the finger of God,” Ex. 31:18), but—as we noted in the second section of the previous chapter—no one can survive after seeing His face (Ex. 33:20). In short, the authentic relationship with the divine falls within a clear “phonocentric” framework,15 in which words, and consequently writing and books are the fundamental technologies for the transmission of the Revelation. It should then be considered that, according to the biblical dictate, images are to be rejected because they can prompt a general attitude of idolatrous submission. For this reason, the second commandment does not merely prohibit depictions of a religious character but has a more general polemical objective: according to it, all images tend to attract and confuse (Mondzain 2003: 43–45), if they are not made by the express will of God. It is also worth noting that this rejection of the visual is related to the appreciation of the power—even the violence—of images, rather than the idea of their ontological weakness, because they are believed to closely touch “the relationship between passion and law” (Mondzain 2003: 43). As we know, that power was the reason for an iconophobic reaction that proved capable of erupting into moments of veritable iconoclastic rage (think of the famous episode of the destruction of the golden calf in Ex. 32:20). However, it was also the breeding ground for a conflict between iconic and linguistic signs, in which writing prevailed because it was considered more transparent and devoid of the emotional implication that exposes images to idolatry. Not only that: in this context, speech and writing have an immunization capacity against the power of images 13  On the role of the biblical tradition in the contemporary debate on images, see Shaw (2021: 23–36) and Lingua (2023: 104–109). 14  See also Mondzain (2003: 42–43). 15  It is worth noting that, as many cultural historians have pointed out, the centrality of the voice in theophanies is a typical character of ancient religions that is not only found in biblical culture, see Macho (1993: 226–229). Yet the fact remains that other cultures of the ancient Middle East attributed to images, and in particular to statues, the ability to make divinity present. This attitude was completely foreign to biblical Judaism, see Mettinger (1995: 13–38).

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(Mondzain 2003: 42–43), so that they serve to contain them through a strategy of radical distinction, division, and opposition of values. Yet it was within Judaism that Christianity developed—a religion that would be able, at least in its original theological matrix, to bring the co-­ originality of word and image back to the forefront. “An outgrowth of the Judaic,” as Régis Debray bluntly puts it, “that plant […] will cause things to lean in a direction opposite the Word, towards the Flesh” (Debray 2004: 80). The Word of God—his Logos—is not just a resounding voice or a sign written on a page but is incarnate, becoming a visible body. In Christianity, therefore, the word needs the screening of the flesh, a materiality that distributes the visible and the invisible. However, asserting, as Debray does, that the emphasis on the flesh goes in a “direction opposite the Word” means failing to grasp that, in the doctrine of incarnation, the verbal and the iconic are not opposed but complementary, constituting an inseparable dyad. Both are in fact mediating processes between different dimensions of reality, thresholds of contact, and transition between visible and invisible, and audible and inaudible. It is no coincidence, then, that early Christianity conceived of images primarily in relation to the Son with regard to the Father in the Trinity or in reference to man who, according to the formula of Gen 1:26, was created in God’s “image and likeness.” In this context, addressing images does not mean referring primarily to objects but rather to medial functions that come into play in the very constitution of sensible reality and in the relationship that the human sensorium has with the world and with God. This does not mean, however, that Christianity retained a uniquely spiritual understanding of images. Unlike what Mitchell posits, in fact, it does not go without saying that the Judeo-Christian tradition has a “resolutely non- or even anti-pictorial” (Mitchell 1986: 31)16—and thus, we add, supposedly anti-screen—conception of the image. In its early centuries, Christianity certainly inherited its understanding of images from biblical Judaism, but it did not feel comfortable with a simple 16  Here Mitchell refers in particular to interpretations of Gen. 1:26 according to which “the words we now translate as ‘image’ (the Hebrew tselem, the Greek eikōn and the Latin imago)” are to be understood “not as any material picture, but as an abstract, general, spiritual ‘likeness’” (Mitchell 1986: 31). This would explain why the Judeo-Christian tradition produced a distinction between an inner-spiritual image and an outer-material image, “an original ‘spiritual’ meaning for a word [image] and a later, derived ‘material’ application” (Mitchell 1986: 32–33).

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devaluation of artificial images and indeed made extensive use of them, at least until the third century. In fact, it is precisely in Christianity that the “screen thinking” of which Christin speaks finds one of its most obvious manifestations, thus shaping a new, significant historical variation of the arche-screen theme. We particularly insist on this Christian recovery of visibility because it is from here, in our opinion, that one must understand the identification between logos and eikōn contained in the doctrine of the incarnation. It is undoubtedly true that this identification has produced positions such as that of Clement of Alexandria, cited by Mitchell, in which the “true image” of God does not constitute material visibility (Mitchell 1986: 34).17 However, it is equally evident that, within Christianity, another line developed that instead saw the flesh of the Logos as a legitimization of material images, favoring not only their use but also their worship: this is emblematically the case with Byzantine icons.18 Moreover, it should not be forgotten that discussions about images—which spanned the entire first Christian millennium and turned into a veritable “war” in Byzantium in the eighth and ninth centuries—were not only about the appropriateness of using a particular communicative medium but also about the theological significance of the specific media used (word, writing, and image) and their justifiability as “events” of the revelation of meaning. If, therefore, one takes seriously the claim contained in the doctrine of the incarnation, it is no longer possible to conceive of a totally disembodied logos, because the word metaphorizes itself—that is, literally, transposes itself—into a body. In other words, as we wrote above, it resorts to a screen. In a conception of the incarnation such as the Christian one, the different technologies of expression are thus not merely an instrumental complement to the manifestation of truth but rather become a fundamental component of the event of Revelation. 17  As an example of the spiritualization of the image, Mitchell cites this text by Clement of Alexandria: “For ‘the image of God’ is His Word […] and an image of the Word is the true man, that is, the mind in man” (1979: 214–215). Here it is evident that the eikōn does not coincide with a material image but is rather an inner form of the human being, which cannot be confused with their outward appearances. It should be noted, however, that Clement’s position is symptomatic of the ambivalent attitude that Christianity, at least in its early centuries, had toward artificial images. See in this regard Noble (2009: 12–28), Lingua (2006: 43–47) and Elsner (2012: 371–376). 18  For a first introduction to iconophile thought, see Parry (1996) as well as Pelikan (1990).

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Regarding the word, this is very evident. Logos is sermo, the human speech by which a message is conveyed, but it is also Verbum, divine Logos, the Word hypostatized in a person. As for the artificial image, however, the matter is more complex, because a total incorporation of the divine model depicted in the icon would lead to idolatry.19 Nonetheless, for Byzantine iconophiles even artificial images are a revelatory event: they allow one to relate to the divine world insofar as they contain some presence of Christ or the saints they depict (Elsner 2012: 369). Icons thus become real thresholds of contact with transcendence and have a powerful interface function that activates not only sight but also touch and even hearing and smell, since they are always embedded in liturgical rituality, that is, in a perceptual atmosphere made up of gestures, words, chants, and scents.20

4.3   Words Seeking Their Images: Pictures as a “Book for the Illiterate” For several decades now, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation and the debates on images it triggered during the first millennium have attracted a great deal of attention from those engaged in visual studies. Moreover, it is not surprising that interest in the Byzantine theology of icons21 has prevailed over the positions expressed by Latin theology on the question of images.22 Indeed, thanks to iconoclastic contestations, Byzantine theologians of the eighth and ninth centuries produced a reflection of considerable speculative depth, which makes the debate of that period an extraordinary resource for those who still deal with the theoretical-­ conceptual aspects of the image today. A deeper reason for the disparity of interest just alluded to, however, must be sought in the fact that, in the Byzantine context, images were 19  The main theological argument of iconoclasm centered on the impossibility that the artificial image of Christ could represent his divine nature. From the perspective we are interested in, this meant that the materiality of the eikōn could not correctly represent the spirituality of the logos. On the historical issues of iconoclasm, see Brubaker and Haldon (2011); on the iconoclastic theology, see Barber (2002). 20  On the synesthetic function of Orthodox worship since the Byzantine period, see the extraordinary pages written by Pavel Florensky (2002). 21  Of the extensive literature, by way of example, see Mondzain (2005), Belting (1994), and the more recent Guastini (2021: 455–530). 22  However, there is certainly no shortage of valuable studies in this regard. We will only mention Boulnois (2008) and Noble (2009).

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given unprecedented significance: they were granted a clear autonomy and, in some cases, even superiority over the oral and written word, thus delineating a position that resonates with the cultural hegemony of the visual prevailing today. This was not the case in coeval Latin Christianity, which instead favored the illustrative and didactic dimensions of visual systems,23 avoiding the extreme forms of icon worship practiced in the Eastern church. Conceiving of images as a useful reminder of sacred history, the Latins regarded them as functional to preaching and writing and thus dependent on the latter.24 By contrast, Byzantine iconophile theology had no difficulty in fully equating images with the sacred books, as is clearly attested in the context of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 CE).25 The defenders of images assigned the same screen function of showing to the iconic tablet and to the written page—so much so that Nicephorus of Constantinople, an iconophile theologian of the ninth century, defined the Scriptures as “images of words [eikones tōn logōn]” (Migne 1857–66:  PG 100, 485A; trans. Nicephorus of Constantinople 1989: 264), thus considering the text’s letters a visual form corresponding to the graphic stroke of icons. In some cases, then, iconophiles explicitly acknowledged the primacy of the image over the word and considered the sense of sight more immediate and credible than the sense of hearing. In this latter regard, Nicephorus again argued, for example, that “the graphic inscription leads the intelligence of those who contemplate it to the realities themselves, as if it placed one in their presence and, from the very first glance and contact, offered a clear and perfect knowledge of things” (Migne 1857–66:  PG 100, 381CD; trans. Nicephorus of Constantinople 1989: 188–189). By comparison, the dominant position of Latin Christianity in the first millennium was certainly less in favor of images and staunchly ascribed a clear primacy to words and writing as the privileged instruments for the

23  Consider the famous “via media” of the Libri Carolini which, referring to the iconoclastic Council of Hieria and the iconophile Council of Nicaea II, state: “nec cum illis frangimus, nec cum istis adoramus” (we neither destroy [images] with the former, nor worship [them] with the latter) (Freeman 1998: 102). 24   On the difference between image theory in the two Christian traditions, see Bernardi (2007). 25  See Mansi (1776: XII, 1061D). The same equivalence is found in Nicephorus of Constantinople (Migne 1857–66: PG 100, 381A; trans. 1989: 187).

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transmission of religious truths.26 Yet the claim of interpenetration between the verbal and the iconic arising from the doctrine of the incarnation is not entirely lost in this theological tradition either. On the contrary, in our view, its underlying asymmetry paradoxically allows for a deeper probing of the aspects linking the different technologies of expression, also placing a more articulate emphasis on the multiple screen functions at play in the relationship between image and word. In order to grasp these aspects, we will limit ourselves to considering a text that unquestionably represented a milestone in the Latin reflection on images: the epistle written in the year 600 CE by Gregory the Great to Bishop Serenus  of Marseilles (Gregorius Magnus 1982:  873–876 trans. Gregory the Great 1995: 53–54).27 In this text—which constituted an authoritative reference for the entire Middle Ages with respect to the didactic function of religious images—we believe we can also identify a relationship between verbal and pictorial technologies that goes beyond that function, integrating it into a double movement of mutual attraction between word and image. On the one hand, Gregory explicitly acknowledges that words need images, because the latter play the same role for the illiterate as writing does for the literate. In fact, as he explains in the epistle: For what writing presents to readers, this a picture presents to the unlearned who behold, since in it even the ignorant see what they ought to follow; in it the illiterate read. Hence, and chiefly to the nations [gentibus], a picture is instead of reading. (Gregorius Magnus 1982: 874; trans. Gregory the Great 1995: 53)

26  In order to grasp the difference between the two traditions, it is useful to recall the polemical pages that the Libri Carolini devote to the equivalence established by the Council of Nicaea II between icons and Holy Scripture. They contain a long chapter (Freeman 1998: 303–322) in which the absolute incomparability of writing and image is grounded in the superiority of the act of listening (and thus reading aloud) over seeing, whereby only speech can be considered an instrument of truthful knowledge (Freeman 1998: 309). This text, moreover, represents a strong opposition between verbal and iconic, which would not have a significant following in later medieval reflection. It should be noted that three centuries earlier Augustine of Hippo had already clearly argued for the indisputable primacy of Scripture over religious images. See Lingua (2021: 38–39). 27  On the issues discussed in the letter, see Duggan (1989) and Chazelle (1990).

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In short, images are like a book for those with no special cultural skills, and in them the word finds a screen on which to “project” and give concrete form to its contents. On the other hand, however, the image needs the spoken or written word, for only in this way can it emerge from the indeterminacy to which its polysemic nature condemns it. As we shall see in the next section, in this second sense, the word and not the image has a real screen function, in this case of orientation and protection of the gaze. Indeed, written and spoken words establish a precise “regime of visibility,” determining not only what is to be seen but also how it can be looked at so as not to fall into idolatry. As is well known, Gregory’s epistle owes its fame precisely to the metaphor of painting as a book for the illiterate, which would then be welded to the later metaphor of the Biblia pauperum.28 The latter has long been the most widely used label to describe medieval art, providing, as Jérôme Baschet states, “a formidable alibi for a traditional approach to art history, allowing the latter to inscribe the image into a strict dependence on texts and to justify the extraordinary devaluation of its object” (Baschet 2008: 25). Once again, in the wake of Western logocentrism, this metaphor too would thus have served to legitimize the hierarchical primacy of the verbal over the imago-visual. However, Baschet fails to note that embedded in that metaphor is a profound reflection on the status of the image and its screen functions. While the request to fully abandon it may prove useful to better understand the plurality of art forms in the Middle Ages, the metaphor in question nevertheless remains fundamental to comprehend the legacy of Christian-Latin theories of the image today. Here we want to propose a less univocally logocentric reading of it, highlighting how the illustrative function of images is more than an ancillary complement to the word. In the epistle, the viewing of paintings is certainly referred to as a substitute for reading texts and thus as an aid for the illiterate; however, according to some interpreters,29 Gregory does more than that. Ştefana 28  Moreover, it should be remembered that the expression Biblia pauperum is not found in Gregory, although eminent scholars have attributed it to him. See, for example, Ladner (1931: 19). For a discussion of the topic, see Duggan (1989: 241). 29  See, for example, Mitalaité (2007: 394–395).

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Pop-Curseu, for example, argues that the term litterae in Latin indicates not only writing but also “letters,” that is, words or, more generally, culture; qui litteras nesciunt might then refer to “those who are foreign both to the Latin language and to Christian morals and history” (Pop-Curşeu 2009: 126). These people can thus learn directly from images what they would not be able to understand otherwise, because they speak another language or because they are not accustomed to the Christian message. According to this interpretation, Gregory’s epistle would recognize images as playing anything but a secondary role (Kessler 1985: 76), to the point of legitimizing the idea of a missionary art.30 Even if such a reading is controversial, the fact remains that, in Gregory and in the medieval revivals of his theory of images, their visualization is valued for its broad educational capacity, as they show the content of the stories being represented, making them vivid and thus somehow also more immediately comprehensible to all. As Antinucci points out, the reforming pope thus seems to recognize the pictorial as being able to “greatly simplif[y] the cognitive work of understanding” (Antinucci 2011: 111). This is why Gregory explicitly refers to the ignorantes (1982: 874; trans. 1995: 53), that is, to those who would have more difficulty comprehending texts, not only because they cannot read but also because they have fewer abstraction skills, which are compensated for by visualizing the topics at hand (Antinucci 2011: 110). Finally, it should be noted that this role of images would not be understandable if one did not take into account the greater power of persuasion and attraction they exert compared to words. At the end of the letter, Gregory brings out this further element, albeit briefly. Indeed, he argues that viewing images produces “ardorem compunctionis” (1982: 875; trans. 1995: 54), that is, an ardent contrition capable of impelling one to worship the Trinity.31 The epistle does not develop this dimension of the visual, which will instead be widely taken up in later medieval thought. An example is Bonaventure who, in the third book of his Commentary on the Sentences, attributes to the image not only the ability to docere, to teach, but also that of flectere and delectare (1887: 203–205), that is, to attract attention and generate emotional empathy.32 30  The issue of missionary art in Gregory is the subject of much controversy. See in this regard Chazelle (1990), Mariaux (1994), and Kessler (2006). 31  On the meaning of “compunction” in Gregory the Great, see Mitalaité (2007: 395–398). 32  On the different functions of the image in Bonaventure, see Salvestrini (2023: 250 ff).

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4.4  Images Seeking Their Words: Regimes of Visibility and Regimes of Speakability However, this power of attraction is also the extreme, more risk-prone side of a problematic attitude toward images. On this front, Gregory’s epistle is particularly significant because it is not a treatise on them but an explicitly pastoral—that is, broadly political—text. What interests the reforming pope is first and foremost how to deal with images, because through them one can not only convey a message but also affect collective memory and build or destroy a community. For Gregory, images must be dealt with through the word’s ability to make see, that is, to organize the gazes of the faithful. That is why the pope reproaches Serenus for having “broken images of saints, as though under plea that they ought not to be adored” (1982: 873; trans. 1995: 53) and, in so doing, for “scatter[ing] the collected flock” (1982: 874; trans. 1995: 53). In this rebuke we see how the pope’s objective is twofold. On the one hand, he challenges Serenus’ iconoclastic attitude, because the latter uses idolatry as a pretext and, in order to curb its effects, eliminates the imago-visual en bloc, without due discernment. On the other hand, Gregory’s attention falls on the unity of the community, thus on the political consequences that the destruction of images may entail, jeopardizing social ties. It is with these two concerns that the image-word nexus becomes strategic: Gregory understands that to govern images, one must not destroy them but subject them to the control of sacred texts, the words of preaching and pastoral care. In the epistle he refers to this governing function when he asks Serenus to explain to the faithful “by testimonies of sacred Scripture that it is not lawful for anything made with hands to be adored” (1982: 874–875; trans. 1995: 54), enacting a strategy in which writing serves as a criterion for determining the gaze and as a discriminator of the attitude to be taken toward the visual. Marie-José Mondzain has masterfully captured this role of the word with respect to images, when what is at stake is precisely the management of signs within a community: It is necessary that we build choices and make decisions with respect to images. What images do we choose to see together? We will never all see the same thing, but we can decide together to love or hate regimes of visibility in which the founding issue of all sharing is played out. One does not share something visible without building the invisible place that makes sharing itself possible. (Mondzain 2003: 146)

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What builds that “invisible place” is the set of discourses which decide what in a society should become visible and what should remain in the shadows. Such regimes are indeed an expression of a political control of visibility, but they would not be so effective if they did not respond to a need created by the undecidable character of the image. When Gregory asks Serenus not to leave the gaze of the faithful unprotected by words explaining to them what needs to be seen, he does so—Mondzain would say—precisely because the image is “undecidable” (2003: 10) and “possessing no value of truth or falsity, it awaits the construction of sense from the third party who considers it” (2003: 10). It is not difficult to grasp the link between this way of understanding regimes of visibility and what Gilles Deleuze calls “regimes of light” in what was to be his last public speech, referring to the Foucauldian concept of “apparatus (dispositif )”:33 Visibility cannot be traced back to a general source of light which could be said to fall upon pre-existing objects: it is made of lines of light which form variable shapes inseparable from the apparatus in question. Each apparatus has its regime of light, the way in which it falls, blurs and disperses, distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear. (Deleuze 1992: 160; slightly modified translation)

However, so far we have observed how, just like light, the screens that orient, filter, or conceal it—and which, like it, are to be generically understood here as variously characterizing a certain cultural-historical formation—are decisive in the establishment, affirmation, and modification of such regimes. Therefore, rather than qualifying the latter only in relation to light as Deleuze does in the above quotation, we think it more appropriate to retain the expression “regimes of visibility”—which, moreover, has

33  In this regard, it is worth recalling here the well-known definition of “apparatus” in Foucault’s interview titled Le jeu de Foucault: “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault 1980: 194).

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been used elsewhere by Deleuze himself34—and to include in it the related screen component. We can say then that a certain “regime of visibility” designs the intertwining, in a sociocultural device, of the impersonal powers of directing or averting light and therefore gazes, of showing and hiding, of dislocating surface and depth, of assigning centrality and marginality, and of asserting similarities and differences. To use a term coined by American media theorist Richard Grusin, in short, a “regime of visibility” can “pre-mediate” our vision or even to control it, although it remains to be discussed to what extent. It should also be noted that immediately after the passage quoted earlier, Deleuze points out: “if apparatuses have a historical nature, this is to be found in regimes of light, but also in regimes of enunciation” (Deleuze 1992: 160). In doing so, he implicitly seems to refer to the two “elements” that, in the passage from Foucault we quoted earlier in footnote 33, intertwine in the complexity of a sociocultural apparatus: the “unsaid” and the “said.” In such a dispositif, in short, Deleuze suggests that a peculiar power to make “the unsaid” visible and, complementarily, invisible is historically intertwined and conjugated with a similar power to make articulable (here generically understood as “utterable,” regardless of the distinction between oral and written language) and, in an equally complementary fashion, to make inarticulable. In other words, a certain regime of visibility intertwines with a certain regime of speakability, directing the attention and inattention of our gazes as well as those of our speeches.35 That is why, according to Deleuze, Foucault’s apparatuses are nothing but “machines which make one see and speak” (Deleuze 1992: 160). It follows that within such interweavings, as Jean-François Lyotard warned in 1970, “there are words that are unpronounceable because they lack ‘signification,’ perceptions that are impossible, things that cannot be seen: thus, there are screens” (Lyotard 1984: 69).

34  See G. Deleuze (1985). This course clearly appears to be the source of certain insights into the characterization of regimes of light that Deleuze would develop in What is a dispositif? (Deleuze 1992). 35  On this, see also Deleuze (1988: 47ff.), where Deleuze clarifies: “An ‘age’ does not preexist the statements which express it, nor the visibilities which fill it” (1988: 48). Of course, the historical dynamics of such interweavings tap into Vilém Flusser’s reflection on the prehistoric, historical, and “posthistoric” relationships between images and texts. On this, see at least Flusser (2006).

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Lyotard’s reference to verbal screens is not incidental for us. It allows us to highlight the connection that binds what we have just written about regimes of visibility in Mondzain and Deleuze, on the one hand, with our attempt to interpret the reciprocal reference between image and word in Gregory and, on the other hand, with the screen functions we analyzed in the second chapter. Indeed, as we have pointed out, the metaphor of the “book for the illiterate” highlights the screen function of showing through the need for the word to metamorphose into an image. Conversely, the scriptural explanation of the paintings in churches, which Gregory asks Serenus to provide, pulls the images out of their indeterminacy, bringing the other screen functions into play. In this case, however, it is the word that “screens.” On the one hand, it filters and directs what is to be seen, consequently establishing what is to remain hidden; on the other hand, it protects the gaze and immunizes it from the excess of idolatrous exposure. The discourses that explain images based on the Scriptures thus enliven the political and social dimensions inherent in the screen functions of exposure and protection. The resulting regimes of visibility thus cannot do without specific regimes of speakability, sealing the practical and not just semiotic value of the inseparability between the iconic and the verbal.

4.5  Digital Screens and Technologies of Expression We will address the political dimension of the screen functions of exposure and protection more extensively by dealing with the issue of transparency in the next chapter. For now, it is important to return to the problem from which we started in this one, in order to see how the analysis we have proposed can contribute to overcoming an imagocentric conception of screen experiences. It will thus be possible to understand the overall sense of the thesis advanced here, namely, that at the very moment when a generalized iconophilia, supposedly autonomous from the verbal, would seem to be imposing itself, the inseparable link between technologies of image and technologies of word powerfully resurfaces—as do issues revealing surprising kinships with the iconological theories elaborated by Christianity long before modern transformations.

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In this regard, one can legitimately ask why texts from the first millennium would still have something to say to us today. In fact, we are separated from them by a series of historical and cultural rifts, leading to what Antinucci calls the “resounding divorce […] mutated into a challenge for supremacy” (Antinucci 2011: 166) between word and image. In fact, on the one hand the emergence of what Hans Belting dubbed “the era of art” (Belting 1994) and the subsequent process of the aestheticization of artistic images and on the other the invention of movable type printing contributed to a marked antagonism between verbal and iconic in the modern era. Since then, for centuries writing has become residual in the visual arts: the inscription (epigraphē) about the depicted characters that were central to icons has disappeared, and the cartouches with large portions of text that particularly animated late medieval Western paintings have diminished to the point of near disappearance (Bartoli Langeli 1995: 12). It should then be noted that, along with the role played by words in the overall representation, art images have lost the plurality of sensory feedback that allowed icons to engage the entire bodiliness of the faithful. The various screen functions that images had in ancient and medieval culture have thus been overshadowed in favor of an all-out focus on that of showing. But looking carefully at our current relationships with electronic and digital screens, as well as at the dominant forms of expression in them, it is not difficult to notice the significant changes we already indicated in our introductory chapter. Regarding specifically the relationships between images and writing, as early as 2008 Theo van Leeuwen noted that spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and other kinds of software then on the market led to a blurring of the sharp distinction between text and images (Van Leeuwen 2008: 132). He then added a decidedly poignant observation: this form of writing is at once more visual than the old “page” media, and less pictorial than the old “screen” media such as television and film, in which the written word only played a minor role—for instance, in title and credit sequences. (Van Leeuwen 2008: 132)

Compared to the pages of a printed book, the forms of textuality on digital screens, in short, have accentuated the visual impact of writing, with effects that cannot be compared to those achieved by the “old” analog screens.

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On the other hand, the ease of production, reproduction, and dissemination of digital images has not caused the much-feared death of writing but rather practices of montage between images and words that now represent the dominant communicative form in most social networks and websites. As we already mentioned in point 5 of our introductory chapter, this is what Pietro Montani (2020: 7–12) tries to capture, through the notion of “extended writing,” in order to describe the spread of communicative forms that integrate “some of the most powerful expressive technologies with which human beings have been endowed in the course of their evolution: images, (spoken and written) words, sound reproduction […] and their combination systems” (Montani 2020: 9). Such combinations do not necessarily lead to communicative simplification and uncritical reception as suggested by proponents of the clash between the “book civilization” and the “screen civilization.” According to Montani, they contain relevant creative drives that can go hand in hand with high levels of reflectiveness and discursive articulation. Moreover, along with writing, the way we read is bound to change as well. Much more iconic forms of textuality are inscribed on screens than on paper. Furthermore, the perceptual relationship with them is affected by the speed with which digital devices can graphically process large amounts of information. The traditional practice of reading is thus being replaced by more rapid, mobile, discontinuous, and multimodal modalities.36 According to a suggestive expression of Kevin Kelly’s that we anticipate in point 6 of our introductory chapter, such modes even include “watching words and reading images” (Kelly 2016: 89). We have come back to this expression because of its assonance with the Biblia pauperum metaphor analyzed earlier. However, if in Latin theology “reading images” meant going through a slow and thoughtful process of contextualizing the imago-visual based on the great biblical code, the activity to which Kelly refers would seem to recall rather an accelerated and necessarily much less attentive fruition of words that “zip around” on the screen “and float over images” (Kelly 2016: 89). It is no coincidence then that, as we recalled at the beginning of this chapter, for Maryanne Wolf it is precisely these transformations that raise the question of whether digital natives are not in danger of losing the typical cognitive skills formed in the classical practice of reading, particularly “the secret gift of time to think” (Wolf 2007: 221).  See Wolf (2007: 212–222), as well as Baron (2015).

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Of course, it is inevitable to see that the “screen civilization” has a different speed than the “book civilization,” to resume inevitably schematic categories. However, this difference seems to expose us as much to cognitive losses as to cognitive gains: reading on displays, for example, is more apt “for searching for information rather than analyzing complex ideas” (Baron 2017). Moreover, this difference does not necessarily mean that those cognitive gains will remain incompatible with the traditional skills learned in print reading. Rather, we see their contraposition as a residual symptom of the culture war between screen and book we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and, more broadly, as an outcome of the modern divorce between image and word. Urgently taking on the task of managing the new forms of integration at work between the verbal and the iconic, as part of medieval Christianity had been able to do in its way, is indispensable to avoid “quixotic efforts to prevent the spread of technology”—Wolf herself warns—“whose indisputable worth transforms all our lives” (Wolf 2007: 221).

4.6   Writing, Code, and Visualization So far, we have focused on the phenomenological transformation of the relations between words and images that is currently taking place. This shift would not be possible if the development of computer science had not offered a common language for different technologies of expression, opening up an era in which, as Kittler points out, “a universal medium of binary numbers is able to encode, to transmit, and to store whatever will happen, from writing or counting to imaging or sounding” (Kittler 2009: 24). This structure of the digital enables the ease with which we can now produce, store, and edit images and mix them with texts, sounds, and written words, in a dynamic of increasing multimodal contamination. The role played by the binary code and the computational processes that underlie such contamination, however, leads to a more fundamental probing of the relationship between textual and iconic that touches on the very nature of what we have come to call “digital images,” as well as the material apparatuses that enable their visualization. From this point of view, digital screens offer a peculiar instance of the co-implication of writing and image that we have highlighted, admittedly in a radically different context, in relation to “screen thinking” in Middle Age Christianity. But that is not all: a mention, albeit brief, of the ontology of digital images will enable us to better understand the social and political impact of the digital

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turn and what we will call the ideology of Transparency 2.0, which we will analyze in the next chapter. To usher in this part of the discourse, we believe it is worth referring to the ontological model proposed by mathematician and digital artist Frieder Nake, according to whom what we identify on a screen as an “image” is actually “a pair of a visible surface and a manipulable subface” (Nake 2016: 13).37 Thus, the images we perceive on the pixelated surface of our devices have a twofold nature. They offer themselves to human perception as visible forms, much like all other artificial images, but from an ontological point of view they are not reducible to this manifestation, because they cannot be separated from the computational processes that materially originate them through the work that a program (software) performs in a specific machine (hardware). Nake reminds us that such computational processes are governed by algorithms that “exist as descriptions and are, therefore, semiotic entities, that is signs” (Nake 2016: 21). These algorithms are therefore, we would add, a special kind of writing. It follows then that what appears on the display (surface) of one of our devices is not only an iconic phenomenon but always also the product of text processing. Of course, the user does not normally have access to those algorithms and thus tends to ignore both the complex logical mediations processed by software and the hardware architecture that makes them possible. Yet in Nake’s model, surface and subface describe two dimensions that cannot be disjointed (Nake 2016: 20). If we isolate the former from the latter, not only do we forget the mixed (both logical and iconic)38 nature of digital visibilities, but with it we also lose their specific material constitution and, more importantly, their function as an interface between the user and the machine. Without going more specifically into Nake’s analysis,39 his ontological dyad interests us here because it allows us to better understand not only the specificity of digital images but also the characteristics of the screens that support their sensible manifestation. Indeed, this pair brings into sharper focus both the limitations of the conception of screens as mere display surfaces and the difficulties engendered by the underlying imagocentric reductionism. Thus, Nake’s dyad allows us to grasp in what sense  According to Nake, all digital objects have this ontological duplicity, see Nake (2008).  On this mixed nature, see Striano (2020b). 39  For an in-depth discussion of this model and its possible critical issues, see Striano (2020a: 83–84). 37 38

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screens and the operational elements we perceive on them should be primarily considered interfaces, that is, thresholds that allow the user and the machine to interact with each other. After all, suffice it to think of video games, augmented reality, or virtual reality: such experiences not only entail an action on users, but, as Stéphane Vial points out, they also react to the reactions of the latter (Vial 2013: 158). A fortiori, this dynamic of action and reaction highlights that digital screens cannot be reduced to surfaces displaying images, let alone identified tout court with a particular type of artificial images. To return more directly to the relationship between writing and image that interests us here, a significant example of this operationality involving images on a digital screen is found in graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which have enabled the mass deployment of personal computers, almost completely replacing text-based user interfaces (TUIs). Through a limited set of simple infographics, they allow us to interact with the machine without necessarily knowing the written code or having to type long strings of text commands. By using visual language, GUIs are more user-friendly and allow anyone to operate a computer, precisely by working with the images that appear on the screen.40 They thus save users from having to grapple with the complexities of the language of information technology, offering a playful and convivial dimension of the latter41 that everyone knows how to maneuver thanks to windows, icons, and menus. Furthermore, it is not of secondary importance to note that the visual components of GUIs seem to have the same pedagogical function that Gregory the Great attributed to images, because they simplify cognitive work and translate algorithmic writing into a visual language that can be understood by all. However, this parallel hides some significant differences, which may help to further clarify the relationship between the different symbolic systems at play. In Gregory’s epistle, images refer back to writing, because only the latter can and should determine their meaning: what is of interest is not the image itself but the message it displays, making it accessible to those who cannot read. In the case of GUIs, which are there for the novice user to interact more intuitively with the machine, 40  In fact, the visual language of these infographics is more immediate and “democratic.” As Otto Neurath, an Austrian philosopher who is unsurprisingly considered by many to be the father of contemporary infographics, put it, “words make division, pictures make connection” (Neurath 1936: 18). 41  See Darras (1991: 107). On this aspect, see also Vial (2013: 125).

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what is of interest instead is precisely the image itself and its operational functionality, not the code and algorithms working underneath. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin had already noted in the 1990s, the main characteristic of digital interface design is thus to create a space that is as “natural” as possible in order to hide the various levels of mediation involved in the work of digital devices (1999: 23–24). GUIs must appear transparent, erasing themselves, so to speak, and thus giving the impression of total immediacy. Precisely by keeping in mind the relationship between surface and subface does one realize that this immediacy is only apparent. GUIs enable interaction with the machine because their visible surface incorporates commands and thus conceals a series of mediating processes that ultimately defer precisely to the written code and algorithms operating in the subface. The process that links the machine’s logical language to the visual language that appears on computer, tablet, and smartphone displays consists of multiple levels of mediation. Failure to take these levels into account, as we will see in the next chapter, generates the illusion that digital environments are capable of producing disintermediation on the social and political fronts. What we have said so far about GUIs could be extended to most digital images, especially synthesized images such as digital art images, video game images, and images in VR environments, which are directly produced through writing code and have no analog in reality outside the machine. Among these synthesized images, however, we would like to draw attention to those produced by text-to-image (TTI) models, which seem to bring to the surface even more clearly the connection between writing and the illustrative function of images described in Gregory’s epistle. We are referring to image generators such as DALL-E,42 Midjourney,43 and Stable Diffusion,44 which were made available online in 2022 and immediately went viral, not only in the inside circle. These are machine learning-­ based programs that can automatically generate images based on a natural 42  Launched by AI lab OpenAI in 2021 and implemented in its DALL-E 2 version in 2022. Available online: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/. Accessed December 20, 2022. 43  Launched by independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. in July 2022. Available online: https://www.midjourney.com/home/. Accessed December 20, 2022. 44  Launched by Stability AI in August 2022, available online: https://creator.nightcafe. studio/stable-diffusion-image-generator. Accessed December 21, 2022.

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language text prompt.45 In fact, it is enough to write a text, even a short one, describing the image one wants to obtain and identifying the style in which it should be drawn: the machine produces it through complex combinatorial processes that work on large masses of data stored both on and offline. Again with simple natural language commands, it is possible, depending on the system, to correct existing images by adding and removing visual elements, restore others by inserting missing features, and modify copies of paintings and photographs. As is always the case with the introduction of significant technological innovations, the recent launch of such software was received with mixed feelings. Many are wondering about the effects of AI that can make images of all kinds available so quickly, especially when it comes to graphics and digital art (Knight 2022). There is also much debate about ethical profiling with respect to the danger of such software being used to disseminate violent and biased images (Johnson 2022), which might contribute to the already thriving deepfake market or end up (knowingly or unknowingly) violating rights.46 Beyond these admittedly important discussions, text-to-image generators are of interest to us here because, as mentioned, they seem to respond directly to the “pedagogical” need for easier usability that is entrusted to text visualization. These systems greatly simplify the work of illustration, so it stands to reason that they will find positive applications in many areas, not only in education. It should be noted, however, that the automaticity and speed with which the translation of text into images takes place through the device further accentuate the gap between the apparent immediacy with which images are presented on the screen and the levels of mediation that are required for the machine to go from writing in natural language to the result in visual language. What appears to us to be the direct translation of writing into images is actually the outcome of several processes that totally escape the average user. In the gap between the immediacy of the images we see on screens and the mediations that the machine actually performs, the problem of the so-­ called  digital transparency and their consequent use creeps in. The risk that text-to-image generators may be used to fuel the market for 45  Regarding research on text-to-image systems, a good reference is the summary article by Reed et al. (2016) as well as Zakraoui et al. (2019). For a more general analysis of the impact of AI on contemporary art practices, see Zylinska (2020). 46  On these aspects, see Arora and Soni (2021).

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communicative manipulation shows how the screen function of visualization cannot be isolated from the regimes of visibility and speakability it is embedded in and governed by, opening up a range of new social and political issues that require further consideration.

References Antinucci, Francesco. 2011. Parola e immagine. Storia di due tecnologie. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Arora, Tanvi, and Rituraj Soni. 2021. A Review of Techniques to Detect the GANgenerated Fake Images. In Generative Adversarial Networks for I­ mage-­to-­Image Translation, ed. Arun Solanki, Anand Nayyar, and Mohd Naved, 125–159. London: Academic Press. Barber, Charles. 2002. Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baron, Naomi S. 2015. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Reading in a Digital Age. Phi Delta Kappan 99. Accessed May 25, 2022. https://kappanonline.org/reading-­digital-­age/. Barthes, Roland. 1999. The Rhetoric of the Image. In Visual Culture: The Reader, ed. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, 33–40. London: Sage Publications. Bartoli Langeli, Attilio. 1995. Scrittura e figura, scrittura e pittura (con esempi di età medievale). La Ricerca Folklorica 31: 5–13. Baschet, Jérôme. 2008. L’iconographie médiévale. Paris: Gallimard. Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art [1990]. Translated by E. Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bencivenga, Ermanno. 2017. La scomparsa del pensiero. Perché non possiamo rinunciare a ragionare con la nostra testa. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 2020. Critica della ragione digitale. Come ci trasforma la rivoluzione tecnologica. Milano: Feltrinelli. Bernardi, Piergiuseppe. 2007. I colori di Dio. L’immagine cristiana tra Oriente e Occidente. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. Boehm, Gottfried. 1994. Die Wiederkehr der Bilder. In Was ist ein Bild? ed. Gottfried Boehm, 11–38. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bonaventure. 1887. Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi, vol. 3. Florence: Quaracchi. Boulnois, Olivier. 2008. Au-delà de l’image. Une archéologie du visuel au Moyen Age. (Ve–XVIe siècle). Paris: Seuil. Bredekamp, Horst. 2010. Theorie des Bildakts.  Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

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Florensky, Pavel A. 2002. The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts [1922]. In Beyond Vision. Essays on the Perception of Art, translated by W.  Salmond, 95–112. London: Reaktion Books. Flusser, Vilém. 2006. Towards a Philosophy of Photography [1983]. Translated by A. Mathews. London: Reaktion Books. ———. 2011a. Does Writing Have a Future? [1987]. Translated by N.A. Roth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2011b. Into the Universe of Technical Images [1985]. Translated by N. A. Roth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, translated by C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. Freeman, Ann, ed. 1998. Opus Caroli Regis contra Synodum (Libri Carolini). In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Conc. 2, Suppl. 1. Hannover: Otto Harrassowitz. Gaboury, Jacob. 2021. Image Objects. An Archeology of Computer Graphics. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Gregorius Magnus. 1982. Registrum Epistularum. In Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina (CCSL 140 A), ed. Dag Norberg. Turnhout: Brepols. Gregory the Great. 1995. Selected Epistles of Gregory the Great [1898]. In A Select Library of the Christian Church Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol.  13, ed. Philippe Schaff and Henry Wace. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc. Guastini, Daniele. 2021. Immagini cristiane e cultura antica. Brescia: Morcelliana. Heywood, Ian, and Sandywell, Barry, eds. 2017. The Handbook of Visual Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Johnson, Khari. 2022. DALL-E 2 Creates Incredible Images—And Biased Ones You Don’t See. Wired, May 5. Accessed December 12, 2022. https://www. wired.com/story/dall-­e-­2-­ai-­text-­image-­bias-­social-­media/. Kanizsa, Gaetano. 1997. Grammatica del vedere. Saggi su percezione e Gestalt. Bologna: Il Mulino. Kelly, Kevin. 2006. Scan This Book! The New  York Times Magazine, May 14. Accessed September 20, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/ magazine/14publishing.html. ———. 2016. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. New York: Viking. Kessler, Herbert L. 1985. Pictorial Narrative and Church Mission in Sixth-Century Gaul. Studies in the History of Art 16: 75–91. ———. 2006. Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. In A Companion to Medieval Art. Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 151–172. Malden: Blackwell.

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CHAPTER 5

The Ideology of “Transparency 2.0”

5.1   The Cultural Hegemony of the Visual and the Ideology of “Transparency 2.0” With the acceleration of the digital revolution that has taken place since the 1990s due to the diffusion of the Internet, the so-called visual has come to hold a marked hegemony in our culture,1 changing our experiences in such a profound and at the same time detailed way as to push the verbal sphere to formulate and disseminate the words that can best express those experiences. Such words have thus become emblematic of our Zeitgeist. “Screens” is certainly one of them. On the one hand, this noun was able to originate the peculiar meaning of the verb screening that, as seen in point 6 of our introductory chapter, Kelly indicates as one of the twelve typical trends of the digital age (Kelly 2016: 85–108). On the other hand, that word was able to regain its full metaphorical power. This, after all, had already been revamped in the early 1980s—a decade characterized by the spread of personal computers and their screens within the process of the 1  Here we are obviously using the concept of “cultural hegemony” elaborated by Antonio Gramsci (2011) to characterize the “leading” and not just “dominant” role that, in his view, the bourgeoisie has been able to exercise over the industrial proletariat, thus succeeding in shaping its patterns and aspirations. However, we will try to show that, in the case of interest here, cultural hegemony does not correspond to a position of actual and full supremacy.

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digital revolution—when the cathode ray tube became a fertile metaphor for the theories formulated by Stephen Kosslyn on mental imagery (Kosslyn 1980: 6). In short, already then we can find the screens’ tendency to provide metaphors rather than require them, as had still been the case in the 1970s for theories of cinema, undecided whether to interpret screens as frames, windows, mirrors, or veils (see Altman 1977: 260–264). Since 2011, electronic and digital screens have even become the somewhat eponymous protagonists of a highly successful international television series called Black Mirror, which has elevated their shiny black surface to a privileged mirror reflecting particularly important elements and dynamics of the sociocultural dispositif in which we have set out to live. In that sense, this series does not focus on those screens as such, mind you, but on our experience of them as the pars pro toto of the sociocultural dispositif that we are enveloped in.2 Speaking of words that have become emblematic of our Zeitgeist, the title of the television series under consideration, precisely by evoking the black color of electronic and digital screens, points to screens like displays, which have now become the name of screens par excellence—as if there were no previous and wider uses of that word, whose literal meaning is generally “to show.”3 Within our current regime of visibility and speakability, the now-­ dominant meaning of the word “display,” in addition to eliminating any echoes of the protective function that characterizes the etymon of the term “screen,” seems to set aside the co-implication between hiding and showing sedimented in that term, crediting designated surfaces with the exclusive function of displaying, exhibiting, and exposing. In fact, while the Old Frankish verb skirmjan, which originated the word “screen,” univocally refers to the action of “defending,” of “protecting by fighting”—as we implicitly evoked in point 7 of our introductory chapter—over the centuries the use of that word has been sedimenting a 2  This dimension of screen experiences then falls into a convergent perspective with the one that François Albera and Maria Tortajada (2010) take to characterize audiovisual apparatuses as articulations of technologies, discourses, and sociocultural practices, making use of, among others, the broader and more comprehensive Foucauldian notion of “apparatus” (dispositif). 3  Barbara Grespi recalls, moreover, that the etymology of that word reveals that it “has nothing to do with the word play, it is rather related to ply, from the Old French desploiir (and the modern French déployer), as well as from the Latin plicare and (dis)plicare, i.e. to unroll, to free from an envelope, to exfoliate” (Grespi 2017: 133).

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peculiar ambiguity in its meaning, so that it can indicate both “hiding” and “showing.” That ambiguity is seemingly endangered precisely by the rise of the term “display,” which claims to erase the underlying co-­ implication between the two opposite meanings. In other words, the dominant use of the term display appears as the last stage of a kind of “grand narrative” that—not unlike those criticized by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1984)—suggests the teleological development of the functions performed by the object to which it refers: from the extreme of pure hiddenness and protection, encapsulated in the etymology of the word “screen,” to those of pure showing and exposure, inscribed instead in the meaning of “display.”4 This is why the latter term becomes so significant within the regimes of visibility and speakability that are intertwined in our current sociocultural apparatus, to which the “grand narrative” we have just recalled offers the basis to legitimize itself. In fact, this narrative is precisely the reason for the importance acquired by another term that is emblematic today: “transparency.” Indeed, the latter seems to designate the social imperative translating the claim of full disclosure championed by displays. Thus, Byung-Chul Han is certainly right to open his book The Transparency Society by writing that “no buzzword dominates contemporary public discourse so much as ‘transparency’” (2015: 1). However, he tends to advocate a characterization of the term that is no less ambiguous and partial—leveled and leveling—than that asserted by the thought he purports to criticize. Therefore, to define what we intend to criticize here, we will use the expression “ideology of transparency”, ironically historicizing it as “2.0,” in order to distinguish it from other forms it took before the digital turn. In fact, if the idea of transparency in the West has a long history, which runs alongside that of modernity and to which we will have to return, today it seems to have entered a new phase that celebrates the cultural hegemony gained, in the course of the digital revolution, by the so-called visual over the verbal. The phase we allude to exalts the absolute value of the transparency supposedly brought by that revolution and the spread of

4  Francesco Casetti is also sensitive to the influence of this “grand narrative” when he writes: “The display shows, but only in the sense that it places at our disposition or makes accessible. It exhibits, but does not uncover. […] The display simply ‘makes present’ images” (Casetti 2015: 168).

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social networks:5 a transparency without filters, shadows, or out-of-frame areas but also without those screening effects that, as we saw in the previous chapter, the verbal can produce in the iconic and that a non-­ ocularcentric stance can detect. The consolidation of this phase is not unrelated to the parallel re-­ signification of the screen as a display—supposedly the surface of absolute exposure and therefore absolute transparency. This claim does not only ignore the “principle” that we have identified in the arche-screen, according to which there is no showing without concealment nor exposure without protection. It also overlooks the Latin etymology of the verb transpareo, which by definition implies a medium (a “filter”) through (trans) which the appearing takes place. This term therefore has always inscribed transparency in the forms of mediation, ruling out any “absolute” character in it. In Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting, the transparent checkered veil interposed between the painter and the visible was meant to help the former transpose the latter onto the canvas, giving the illusion that the latter was an “open window” (Alberti 2011: 39). This was, however, a fiction, aimed at a naturalistic rendering of the image. Ignoring the decisive gap in meaning that exists between “openness” and “transparency,” as well as the etymology of the latter term, strikes us as sufficient to highlight how “Transparency 2.0” today is more of an “ideology.” After all, every regime of visibility and speakability has its own. Indeed, in this regard, it is worth recalling what Régis Debray writes: Every culture defines itself by what it agrees to consider real. For scarcely a century we have been calling this consensus that cements every organized group “ideology”. (Debray 1992: 491)

After all, Marx and Engels already described ideology as a sort of complex visual apparatus, through which the power relations within a given society are expressed, sublimated, and perpetuated. It is no coincidence, in fact, that they likened the functioning of ideology to that of a camera obscura, since, in their view, both display “men and their circumstances […] upside down” (Marx and Engels 1994: 111). However, it should be 5  In a sense that broadly converges with the one we assigned to the expression “ideology of Transparency 2.0,” Emmanuel Alloa and Yves Citton speak of the current “ideology of neutrality” that fuels “demands for integral visibility” (Alloa and Citton 2018: 51).

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noted that, at least in principle, such a comparison implies the possibility of reestablishing a correct view of reality through the simple inversion of the image produced by the optical device. 6 This is why we would rather compare the functioning of ideology to that of an apparatus in which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, specific regimes of visibility and speakability contribute to offering a representation of reality and outlining an axiological framework, capable of generating the consensus necessary for this representation to be publicly accepted.7 In the current historical period, this consensus is being dramatically reworked: having entered the digital age, we are indeed in a transitional phase, searching for a new shared definition of what should be considered real. This is why it cannot be said that an ideology cementing such a definition has yet found a stable setup, despite the powerful and insidious spread of the ideology of “Transparency 2.0.” It remains that, by claiming to be the same as “openness,” “Transparency 2.0” aspires to identify with immediacy—literally understood as the absence of all mediation—a notion that today is often invoked in support of that ideology. This contributes to making “the question of mediation […] one of the central intellectual problems in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” as Richard Grusin (2015: 124) rightly pointed out.8 Through his concept of radical mediation, in fact, Grusin seeks to show that “any kind of [mediation] experienced must be accounted [as ‘immediate’]” (2015: 127).9 But if this is true, the reverse cannot but prove true as well, namely, that immediacy is always mediated, that is, “pre-­mediated.” Moreover, the very history of the term “transparency” ties it to the experience of mediation since antiquity: one need to only think of Aristotle’s pages on the “diaphanous”10 or the resurgence of the question of the “medium” in medieval philosophy.11 6  Louis Althusser emphasized the positivist characterization of ideology provided by The German Ideology (1976: 67–125). 7  On the representative character of ideology, see Althusser (1976). See also Kofman (1990: 1–6). 8  On the logic of “immediacy” and the complementary logic of “hypermediacy,” see also Citton (2016). 9  Grusin here is paraphrasing James (1922: 42–43). 10  See Aristotle (De anima, II, 7, 418b9-11; trans. 1995: 1458). On the “diaphanous” in Aristotle and on the fact that in ancient and medieval thought transparency is never absolute see at least Alloa (2021: 76–80; 117ff.). 11  On this, see Alloa (2021: 121–27) and Vasiliu (1997: 15–17).

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Nevertheless, in the contemporary context transparency has lost the depth of intermediation dynamics to propose itself unambiguously as total unveiling and to feed on the conviction that only disintermediation—that is, the active elimination of mediations—can avoid the distorting effects the latter would have in interpersonal and institutional relationships. This conviction is described in the well-known novel titled The Circle by American author Dave Eggers (2014),12 as well as in James Ponsoldt’s film (U.S.A., 2017) of the same name based on it. Both explore the disturbing consequences faced by a Silicon Valley company claiming to be fully built on transparency and actually characterized first and foremost by the all-pervasive presence of displays. The scenario envisioned for the near future is, in short, dystopian in nature, not unlike those presented in the Black Mirror series. The Circle provides an emblematic motto of “Transparency 2.0”: “Secrets are lies” (Eggers 2014: 303), suggesting that, conversely, what is not secret is not a lie. Therefore, it’s true. “Secrets are lies” basically means that the visible is true. Simply and simplistically, I’ve seen it, it’s true—a perspective that’s even less sophisticated than the proverbial Thomas of John’s Gospel (Jn. 20:24–29), who at least invoked the test of touch. Instead, the motto suggests the immediate identification between visibility and truth, intercepting what Régis Debray noted as early as 1992: The equation of the visual age is “Visible = Real = True.” This is a phantasmal ontology, of the order of unconscious desire. But this desire is now quite powerful and well equipped to align its symptoms into a veritable new order. We are the first civilization that can believe itself empowered by its devices to believe its own eyes. (Debray 1992: 499)

After all, Marshall McLuhan already warned us that when new media become dominant, we tend to behave like “technological idiot[s]” (McLuhan 1994: 18) and fail to see that the contents of such media function, we might say, as screens concealing the message of the media themselves. Likewise, Jean-Louis Baudry had made it explicit that, thus disguised, the “basic apparatus” of the media, in his case cinema, produces “ideological effects” that are autonomous but at the same time functional to the “dominant ideology” (1974: 41). 12  According to David Lyon, who has devoted an extensive analysis to the novel (Lyon 2018: 149–172), “if Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four offered us the concepts […] with which to assess twentieth-century state surveillance, The Circle is an apt candidate for evaluating twenty-first century surveillance” (2018: 150).

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5.2   The “Ocular Power” It is not difficult to locate the most apparent ideological effect of the identification between visibility and truth in the political sphere. This is not surprising, given that, at least since the 1980s, the public opinion has been demanding participation in and control of power, in the name of transparency, both in the West and in the then Soviet Union. It was precisely with the term “transparency,” in fact, that some Western languages, such as Italian or French, chose to translate one of the cornerstone concepts of the political renewal introduced in the USSR in the mid-1980s by Mikhail Gorbachev: Glasnost’, a term whose root actually refers to the semantic area of “voice” (from the Russian word golos, of which glas is the ancient form), hence to the verbal rather than the visual domain. Even more significant than the above was the English translation of Glasnost’, rendered directly as openness. Now, although it has become a prevailing buzzword in recent decades, the metaphor of transparency is by no means unambiguous. It should be noted that it plays a predominant role not only in the strictly political sphere but also at a more general social level. In order to guide our discourse, we should therefore start with a distinction: on the political side, we will speak of vertical transparency, meaning the role that transparency plays in the relationship between the social sphere and power, with its institutions, structures, and procedures; on the social side, on the other hand, we will speak of horizontal transparency, in order to refer to the functions it has in the dynamics of intersubjective communication. Nevertheless, this distinction has a merely descriptive purpose, since—as we shall see—the ideology of “Transparency 2.0” seeks precisely to overlap these two levels. Historically, however, it remains true that those two forms of transparency have expressed different, sometimes even conflicting, needs: on the one hand, we have already mentioned that the demand for vertical transparency met the demand for participation in public life and control of power; on the other hand, the wish for horizontal transparency manifested itself in the effort to remove obstacles to intersubjective communication and the dissemination of knowledge. Both demands have been emerging since the Enlightenment, an era traditionally regarded as the historical period in which the assumptions of the metaphor of transparency were first elaborated, even though it was not expressly used. On the vertical side, one thinks of the importance given by

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Kant to the idea of publicity (Publizität), understood as the possibility of access to information of public interest and as a tool to counter the secrets and opacities of power. In Kant’s political thought, publicity is even a transcendental condition of justice according to the well-known maxim: “All actions relating to the rights of others are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity” (Kant 1999: 347). Even if publicity and transparency are only partially superimposable,13 it must nevertheless be recognized that this Enlightenment ideal continues to operate significantly in today’s demands for vertical transparency. No less important for later developments is then the Kantian notion of the “public use of reason,” which can instead be linked to the horizontal level of transparency. According to Kant, human beings can only emancipate themselves from the constraints of tradition and become autonomous actors in the reality in which they live if they are allowed free discussion in all domains, that is, if they are able to truly follow the maxim sapere aude (Kant 1999: 17–22). The work of Kant, but also of other Enlightenment authors such as Benjamin Constant and Jeremy Bentham, thus built the prerequisites for the emergence of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere. In it, the quest for a progressive expansion of the areas of communication of knowledge and reasoned discussion is asserted not only against the secrets  of power but also as a condition for social emancipation. Based on these assumptions, the history of transparency is intertwined with the different stages of media development and with the ambivalence that characterized them from the outset, on the one hand as a means of political criticism and emancipation and on the other as renewed instruments for manipulation and propaganda in the hands of power.14 Already at the beginning of the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas, in his now classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, noted that, thanks to the development of mass media, the Enlightenment ideal of publicity had been progressively transformed from a critical instance into a manipulative support of power. Instead of “subject[ing] a person or issue to rational-­ critical public debate […] it earns public prestige for a person or issue and thereby renders it ready for acclamatory assent” (Habermas 1991: 201). 13  On the differences between publicity and transparency, see Baume (2018) and Alloa (2022b: 146ff.). 14  This issue, as we know, had already been noted just after World War II by Adorno and Horkheimer’s analyses of the culture industry (2002).

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The subsequent dizzying proliferation of electronic and digital forms of communication has contributed to an increasingly complex interpretation of transparency. Emblematic in this regard is the parable that befell a book like The Transparent Society, published by Gianni Vattimo at the end of the 1980s, in which the emancipatory virtues of the media were celebrated for their ability to contribute to the pluralization of values and to the “liberation of differences” (Vattimo 1992: 8), enough to challenge the all-­ encompassing claims of truth and power. However, in the second edition of the work, published in 2000, Vattimo himself added a final chapter (2000: 101–121)15 in which he was forced to acknowledge that his “media optimism” (Vattimo 2000: 101) had been largely contradicted by facts in little more than a decade. At the dawn of the new millennium, instead of the much-vaunted liberation of differences, the vertiginous development of communication had in fact generated even more insidious and pervasive forms of domination.16 In the dynamics that lead to the predominance of visual media and that found in the digital turn their environment of choice, however, we should note an underlying transformation that, at least initially, qualified especially the vertical level of transparency: the progressive shifting of its axis from the verbal, typical of the bourgeois public sphere, to the imago-visual. This repositioning certainly has distant roots, taking place in the wake of a myth that, since the late nineteenth century, had made “glass houses” and “crystal palaces” the architectural symbol of an overall social and political utopia, in which accessibility and the sharing of knowledge were believed to have a sure emancipatory effect.17 However, it became predominant in the second half of the twentieth century, with the spread of television, and took on paroxysmal modes in the context of the digital revolution, radically altering the forms of participation and power. In this context, the political scene is pervaded by what, with Edward Green’s expression, we can call the “ocular power” (Green 2010: 9–11),  This extra chapter does not appear in the English version but was only added to the later Italian edition. 16  For a more detailed analysis, see Lingua (2020), an essay from which we also take other reflections in this chapter. 17  On the role of the myth of transparency in the architecture of the last two centuries, see Donati (2016). It should not be forgotten that positive utopias were counterpointed by authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, in his dystopian novel We (1920–1921), or Sergei Eisenstein, in the never-realized film Glass House (1926–1930), which instead captured the potentially oppressive effects of transparency in glass architecture.  On this see  Di Stefano (2016: 207).  15

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in which the visibility of political actors and the controlling function of the public gaze play a central role. Whereas the classical forms of participation in public life essentially used speech to elaborate the collective will and build consensus around it, today “the organ of popular power [is] the gaze” (Green 2010: 15). The vocal power that fed on discussion and criticism mediated by speech is thus replaced by an ocular power totally based on the conviction that it is vital to keep politicians in the limelight of the “public eye” (Green 2010: 20–22). According to Green, who advocates a plebiscitary approach to democracy, this shift would constitute a form of social and political empowerment. It would provide a renewed ability to monitor the exercise of power and thus a more effective ability to control its abuse. What interests us here, instead, is the notion of “ocular power” as an emblematic figure of the contemporary public sphere and the ideology that governs it. Indeed, this ideology brings the optical matrix of the metaphor of transparency to the surface, generating an obsession with visibility. Gérard Wajcman is right when he writes that “the desire to see has turned into a will to see everything. And this will now impose itself as a law” (Wajcman 2010: 13), thus echoing the shaping of desire that Debray highlighted at the end of the previous section. In short, unlike what Green argues, only in appearance does this political voyeurism implement the capacity to monitor the exercise of power, because in reality it risks reducing participation to a passive form of spectatorship that erodes the propositional capacity and active role of citizens in the construction of the general will.18 The process of forming political opinions, which was typical of the power of the voice and the written word, is thus replaced by a kind of “court of transparency and unconcealment that is more in keeping with demagogy than reasoned deliberation” (Urbinati 2013: 167). On the other hand, the hegemony of the so-called visual certainly does not leave political actors aside. Still, it feeds an overall process of spectacularization, handing over the stage to personalities who base their leadership on constant public exposure. Already at the end of the 18  Many authors have highlighted the reduction of the citizen to a spectator typical of the so-called “audience democracy” (Urbinati 2013: 164–165). See, for example, Rosanvallon (2008: 178–190), which strongly emphasizes the strictly “negative” power of this “passive consent”, which would erase any propositional power on the part of citizens.

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twentieth century, in fact, politics mediated by television and the Internet focused more and more on the visual relationship with the leader’s body, constantly offered to the gaze of the citizens, so as to show that they behaved no differently from ordinary people and therefore had nothing to hide, because they were not part of a caste or an elite (see Moffitt 2022). Subsequently, the development of Web 2.0—which since the 2000s has favored user interaction with sites and with other users—seemed to allow for a less passive attitude on the part of citizens because it generated the feeling of a greater possibility of active intervention in the public arena. This created an open virtual space, a place where ideally everyone should have the same ability to communicate, interact, and hold power in check. This transformation has fueled ambitious e-democracy projects, in which transparency and total visibility are accompanied by the illusion of radical disintermediation. It has undoubtedly enabled new forms of participation and anti-authoritarian resistance, even of bottom-up surveillance of others (“sousveillance”).19 Despite this, there is no shortage of problems: the disappointing results of some online political platforms and the crisis of many movements that use them show that the challenges facing this new model are still many, and the results are still uncertain.20 At the same time, the focus on the visual relationship with the leader’s body is accentuated, as exemplified by a Congresswoman in The Circle: in front of the enthusiastic employees of the company that gives the book and film their title, she announces the decision to wear a small video 19  The term sousveillance, used by Mann et al. (2003), plays on the reversal of “the classical conception of surveillance after Foucault” (Aïm 2020: 181). Examples of this include not only political movements that use online platforms as horizontal decision-making tools but also various forms of surveillance and social criticism of economic powers such as Twitter accounts that track the movements of the private planes of jet setters (sic!) in order to show their negative impact on the climate. On this subject see Aïm (2022), which clearly shows how online platforms become a “place of social reflectiveness” in which, as we shall see later, the pragmatics of visibility trigger a reversal of vertical transparency and its general horizontal diffusion. 20  Of the extensive literature on the crisis and critical aspects of e-democracy, see Bartlett (2018) and Lember and Randma-Liiv (2022: 1–10). As Fabio Chiusi already pointed out in 2014, “the facts show that through digitization in many cases participation does not grow, the voice of those who express themselves is not heard, deliberation falters […] and the technological scaffolding all too often turns into a cool version of traditional party propaganda” (Chiusi 2014: 15–16).

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camera that will constantly broadcast and record her life, enabling her to become the first “entirely transparent” representative of the people (Eggers 2014: 208).

5.3   The Illusion of Disintermediation The difficulties that e-democracy is experiencing are not only conjunctural and technical but highlight deeper problems affecting the overall meaning of what we have called “ocular power.” In fact, the ideology of “Transparency 2.0” plays one of its most insidious cards precisely with respect to the most recent identification between total visibility and truth. It fosters the belief that the increase in horizontal transparency, supposedly enabled by Web platforms and social networks, directly entails a corresponding increase in vertical transparency. “Seeing everything”—since “secrets are lies”—thus becomes the rhetorical support for legitimizing a political system based on the claim that direct access to information and to the (even intimate) life of leaders coincides with a substantial increase in participation and scrutiny of power. The “logic of transparent immediacy” operating in digital media, extensively studied as early as the late 1990s by Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999: 20–31), evidently contributes to this conviction. This perspective tends to pass off immediacy as the absence of any mediation, as we wrote in the first section, and thus to make us forget that computer media, rather than being neutral, are instead programmed—that is, they respond to a series of choices that direct their use. These choices may be driven by economic interests, by state policies, and more simply by the structure of an online platform or the functioning of the software (see Morozov 2011). In any case, they produce opacities in computerized communication systems that are difficult to notice: what immediately appears to users is in fact the access to a more inclusive public space, in which everyone can enjoy previously unthinkable visibility and unlimited possibilities for intervention. While it is true that this new condition has fostered the bottom-up growth of democratization processes, it nevertheless remains ideologically flawed by the claim of producing disintermediation effects, while simply replacing old forms of intermediation with new ones. It thus proceeds to cast suspicion on the information disseminated by traditional mass media by contrasting it with information allegedly provided by citizens but thus ends up increasing, deliberately or otherwise, the quantity of fake news.

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Real-time citizen polling is seen as the tool to voice people’s opinions but without disclosing the algorithms used to process the data or considering the rates of real participation. Or again, new models of political leadership are favored based on the claim of speaking directly to voters according to the codes and rhetoric of the informal public sphere, as if political action did not require articulated processes of negotiation and synthesis of diverse interests, which must necessarily follow precise formal procedures. In short, as Byung-Chul Han wrote, “mediation and representation are viewed as a lack of transparency and inefficiency, as temporal and informational congestion” (Han 2017a: 15). A paradigmatic case in point is the fate of all experts in online communication channels, starting with journalists—often considered “anachronistic and superflous” (Han 2017a: 16) subjects in the era when everyone can search the Web for their own sources of information—to the professionals of scientific knowledge who are denied any authority, as shown by the debates concerning vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Web 2.0 has ended up making a significant contribution to all this, as it has not only fostered the spread of denialist fake news and conspiracy theories but also produced “the collapse of communication between experts and laypeople” (Nichols 2017: 106), making a large amount of data available and thus generating the illusion that anyone could draw scientifically based conclusions from it, even without any specific expertise.21 As we have mentioned, this crisis of expert mediation has certainly not escaped the representatives of intermediate bodies such as political parties, trade unions, lobbying groups, and so on. On the contrary, they have often emerged as emblematic of the barrier that mediation would oppose to the free flow of data. From this point of view, contemporary populist movements are one of the most significant political  expressions of this contestation of experts. Indeed, populists tend to delegitimize classical forms of representation, with their rituals and formal spaces such as parliaments, presenting them as useless and even harmful, as they would prevent citizens from directly expressing their will. In short, those movements appeal to an indefinite entity called the “people”—the expression of a naïve or instrumental metaphysics—while claiming to embody its voice and, in the name of this, also placing themselves above democratic procedures now considered obsolete (Ungureanu and Popartan 2020: 41–42).

 On the public role of experts see also Eyal (2019).

21

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This dynamic is particularly true in the communication strategies of populist leaders: they do not represent the people but mirror them and pose hence as a reflective screen onto which an undefined popular will is directly displayed. They thus adopt straightforward, seemingly unsophisticated and unmediated ways to distinguish themselves from their opponents and to convey an image of “authenticity” that the latter would not have (Sorensen 2018: 4). As we have seen, for the Congresswoman from The Circle, totally exposing herself to the view of others would allow her to reveal the hypocrisy of political correctness by contrasting it with full accessibility and the complete absence of secrets. The so-called technopopulism22 then further accentuates these elements, because it makes digital technologies, and Web 2.0 in particular, the political tool par excellence. Consultation platforms, social network posts, and, more generally, the very possibility of access to a permanently public space offer users the impression that they can actually express their will. This apparent immediacy allows the intermediation of professional politicians to be presented as unnecessary, if not harmful, because their intervention seems to overshadow the direct emergence of real collective needs. Thus, the only possible role left for elected representatives in institutions is to act as “spokespersons” for the demands emerging in a supposed online direct democracy, once again by simply mirroring it. That of the mirror is thus the most direct metaphor for this kind of disintermediation: in the face of increasingly distant and self-referential political classes, many citizens, when they can see their own image reflected on screens that multiply the leader’s overabundant visibility or in platforms that enable real-time digital voting, derive the impression of a liberating immediacy.23 But of course the mirror, like any other screen, also has a filtering and distributive function, both hiding and showing at the same time. The purported immediacy thus conceals its opposite: the apparent spontaneity with which political leaders pose is the result of a complex media construction produced by the work of spin doctors and large communication teams. In the digital public sphere, the mirroring function 22  For an overview of the intertwining of populism and technology in contemporary European political powers, see Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti (2021). 23  For an in-depth look at the mirror dimension of populist leadership see Graziano Lingua and Paolo Monti, Parliaments at the Time of Disintermediation: on the Shifting Conditions of Institutionalized Representation (forthcoming), a few passages of which are taken up here. We thank Paolo Monti for agreeing to us using this material. On the same themes see Lingua and Monti (2022)

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rests, in short, on opaque mechanisms of political manipulation and responds to precise “economies of attention.”24 In a space saturated by images and words, what matters is indeed the ability to attract attention, and it is on the latter that political communication works to channel citizens’ opinions through top-down processes of simplification and polarization.

5.4  Desire for Exposure and Subjugation The dynamics that lead from ocular power to “Transparency 2.0” would not be comprehensible, however, if one did not take into account that what first developed vertically is now increasingly based on an imagery of transparency that claims to be absolute even at the horizontal level. Once again, The Circle comes to our aid: the imperative of transparency that leads the Congresswoman to wear the camera also invests the protagonist’s private life. Indeed, in front of the same company meeting, she goes so far as to affirm that “privacy is theft” (Eggers 2014: 303),25 as it robs others of experiences and knowledge they could benefit from. Therefore, the protagonist also decides to wear a small video camera at all times and thus to become “transparent immediately” herself (Eggers 2014: 304). Here one begins to understand why total social exposure is the primary premise of the ideology of “Transparency 2.0” and its political effects. Seeing everything as a rhetorical support to legitimize the claim of a “disintermediated” political system only becomes possible insofar as, at the same time, the social tendency to show everything takes hold, erasing any distinction between private and informal spheres on the one hand and public and professional spheres on the other. After all, as Emmanuel Alloa noted, it is misguided “to think of increased transparency as a one-way mirror like the ones we associate with interrogation rooms: a fully transparent glass, after all, implies the bidirectionality of gazes; whoever sees agrees to be seen in turn” (Alloa 2022a: 11). Ocular power thus spreads horizontally, turning from a supposed right asserted against the opacities of power to a generalized social imposition, where everything should be transparent to everyone. 24  On this aspect, see, among others, Benkler et  al. (2018), Dijk and Hacker (2018), Wihbey (2019), and Jungherr et al. (2020). 25  This phrase seems to be a kind of updated version of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous “Property is theft” (1994).

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This is, however, a very particular social imposition: in fact, it is not the effect of an external compulsion but of an attitude that seems to be voluntarily assumed. Indeed, at the social level we witness the “self-generated need” to “put oneself on display,” which Byung-Chul Han mentions in the last pages of his text on transparency (2015: 46), one of the few cases where this notion is historicized in the sense that we have tried to define as “2.0.” He then points out that “above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves” (2015: 46). Therefore, unlike Bentham’s, Han’s “digital panopticon” is not centralized but rather “reticular” in structure; this is precisely because it is organized according to that “self-generated need” to which Han alludes and which, for his part, Bernard Harcourt defines as a peculiar desire to be seen in his book relevantly entitled Exposed (2015). In it, Harcourt points out that we are willing to share our information on social media because we take real pleasure in showing even the most private aspects of our lives in exchange for instant gratification, such as likes or followers. Thus, while we are increasingly aware that “none of this is ‘free’ and that we pay for it by giving complete access to our personal data” (Harcourt 2015: 16), we voluntarily give in to that sharing and also derive pleasure from it. A decade earlier, working on the concept of exposure, Kirstie Ball (2009) had already noted that the surrender of personal data on social networks satisfies personal anxieties and unconscious participatory desires. This is how “the pleasures of performative display override the scrutinies that come hand-in-hand with self-revelation” (2009: 641). Harcourt, writing in a context where the dangers of generalized surveillance and the related economic exploitation are much more apparent,26 instead links the eagerness with which we expose ourselves online to the “deeper regions of desire” (Harcourt 2015: 227). Drawing on the analyses contained in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, he interprets the drive dynamic that constantly glues us to digital devices as a “desiring machine” (1983: 1–50), which “liberates the flows of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 139) producing the search for constant fulfillment. Digital space fuels this dynamic not only because it becomes the stage where we put 26  Among the many works that are now labeled under Surveillance Studies see, for an introduction, Ball et al. (2012) and more recently Lyon (2018), as well as Aïm (2020). See also the social analysis and ethical issues raised in Lyon and Bauman (2013).

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ourselves on display, but also in that it enables a voyeuristic gaze into the lives of others. In this drive, which generates a genuine addiction in many people, we struggle to recognize the risks inherent in digital transparency and end up becoming “slaves […] to our desires, our desires for shares, clicks, friends, and ‘likes’” (Harcourt 2015: 228). In any case, we can consider the desire for exposure studied by Harcourt as complementary to the wish to see everything and to identify visibility with truth that we have found in Wajcman and Debray, respectively. When denouncing that identification, the latter follows up with a profound commentary: “Servitude is the human reversal of the mediated into the immediate” (Debray 1992: 498). The desire for exposure and, more generally, for disintermediation whose traces we have followed so far would thus involve a desire—that is also “self-generated”—to submit to a form of “servitude.” In turn, such a servitude is literally absolute, as it seems to be without masters, because it feeds on the illusion that there is no clearly identifiable observer nor anyone who can really control us amidst the mass of data circulating online (Ball 2009: 641; Lyon 2018: 139): in short, a “voluntary servitude.” The echo of the title of Etienne de la Boétie’s sixteenth-century treatise (1975)27 is not accidental here, as it had keenly grasped that submission to all forms of tyranny arises from a drive dynamic triggered by the allure of wealth and power that tyrants convey. We might call it a desire for emulative servitude: These wretches see the glint of the despot’s treasures and are bedazzled by the radiance of his splendor. Drawn by this brilliance they come near, without realizing they are approaching a flame that cannot fail to scorch them. (Boétie 1975: 78)

Just as the brilliance of tyrants has a hallucinatory power that induces emulative submission, preventing resistance and revolt, so the drive dynamic of online gratifications triggers similar emulative mechanisms, dulling the capacity for critique and protest. Even if one knows that one is being exploited, there is a paradoxical satisfaction in continuing to be so. 27  As Olivier Aïm recalls, “La Boétie’s text has been widely quoted since the 2010s in that it embodies two interdependent ideas to qualify the new digital governmentality: firstly, the seemingly voluntary participation of individuals in their own situation; secondly, the idea that power rests on its ability to make the dominated adhere to their condition” (Aïm 2020: 137).

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It is in this contradiction that ocular power manifests its own dialectic: instead of being a prerogative of citizens vis-à-vis the ruling class, it becomes a tool of surveillance and exploitation by political, economic, and technocratic powers that can use the data for purposes completely unrelated to the users’ intentions. The desiring machine thus appears doubly ideological: not only does it conceal coercion, but it also clouds the effects of subjugation that exposure produces. In doing so, this machine is facilitated by the logic that guides the recording and profiling of data for the purpose of its exploitation, because the power behind this dynamic is anonymous and apparently “harmless” (Rouvroy and Berns 2010: 97).28 It consists primarily in using data to work on statistical aggregates that have a predictive function regarding behavior. Of course, in some specific situations, extensively analyzed by Harcourt, this data collection responds to a classic form of police power, as is the case, for instance, with the digital monitoring of bailed prisoners or the monitoring of Facebook accounts to identify criminal gangs and terrorists (Harcourt 2015: 237–239; 244). But in most cases, the aim of control is not to normalize people’s actions in order to bring them back to a rule but rather to “nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes” (Zuboff 2019: 8). It is certainly not the individual who hands over their data online who profits but the big companies that control the new behavioral market: as Shoshana Zuboff put it, “they predict our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours” (2019: 11). It is evident that the ideology of “Transparency 2.0” has made a decisive contribution to the effectiveness of virtual mechanisms of exposure and surveillance, as it fuels the paradox on which this effectiveness is built. On the one hand, it encourages our careless dissemination of personal data on the Web. At the same time, on the other, it delivers us into the hands of an oligarchy capable of individually controlling even the most insignificant behavior in order to exploit it economically. This paradox is what reveals the other side—the hidden face whose existence, however, is not entirely unknown to us—of the exhilarating and improbable ideology of “Transparency 2.0.” The price we pay is our privacy, 28  Subjugation works well, therefore, when those who are controlled do not realize or forget that they are controlled. Only if we are not fully aware of what is done with what we share are we willing to continue to do so. The self-gratification mentioned by Harcourt is a mechanism that could jam if surveillance produced resistance. It must therefore intervene in a “gentle” way, by recommending purchases and signaling products, without giving us the impression that we are actively being watched (Rouvroy and Berns 2010: 96–99).

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which becomes the currency with which we gain access to services through an inevitable commodification of our most intimate lives. On the other hand, privacy can only be considered as theft, as the protagonist of The Circle declares, in a context pervaded by the idea that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”29 But, as Jody Dean already pointed out in the early 2000s, it is the increasingly capillary communication and the infinite volume of information that generate “the endless exposure of ever more secrets” (Dean 2001: 643). In this perspective, one is therefore induced by the media environment to complete self-­disclosure: those who are not “out in the open” certainly have something to hide (Dean 2002: 10ff.). At this level, the ideology of total transparency meets Han’s pages (2015: 2, 2017a: 18) on digital transparency as a systemic compulsion that does not produce autonomy but uniformity and standardization (Han 2015: 2–3). Although Han often indulges in apocalyptic tones that end up making his discourse problematic, we can nonetheless share his critique of the link, which he suggests in Psychopolitics, between the accumulation of information made possible by online exposure and the emergence of a “second Enlightenment,” which would hinge no longer on the critical search for knowledge, as the first Enlightenment did, but on “purely data-­ driven knowledge” (Han 2017b: 58).30 The data would speak for itself, and there would no longer be any need for a “theory” or interpretative or argumentative recovery of information.31 Much like the first Enlightenment crumbled into mythology, as denounced by Adorno and Horkheimer, the second Enlightenment seems to manifest a similar dialectic, as the unlimited sharing of data is reversed into “a new kind of violence” (Han 2017b: 59). This reversal manifests itself in what Han calls the “digital panopticon,” within which there is certainly an increase in knowledge and the circulation of information, but there are no emancipatory elements. Together with the Enlightenment ideal of transparency as a force capable of controlling power, the postmodern illusion that the pluralization of information would finally emancipate  On the “Nothing-to-Hide Argument,” see Solove (2011: 11–32).  Han is referring here to the “dataism” extolled by David Brooks in the New York Times (4/2/2013) as “the rising philosophy of the day,” according to which “data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology.” On dataism, see Harari (2018: 371ff.). 31  Think of the famous article by Anderson (2008), according to which the mass of data at our disposal allows for direct knowledge, without having to bother with scientific methods of analysis. 29 30

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us from the obsession with objectivity, putting an end to the unifying claims of power, also falls. What might appear as a new era of sharing at the level of horizontal transparency thus translates vertically into a new form of subjugation. Ocular power, therefore, reveals an inverse dynamic concerning the expectations raised and changes the object of its focus: it is no longer those in power who are under control but all citizens, who now hand themselves over to unlimited exploitation. “Transparency 2.0” thus reaches its ideological apex because subjugation appears to coincide with freedom, and what is believed to be absolute visibility is instead based on the invisibility of the mechanisms that make this visibility possible.

5.5  Surveillance Between Control and Protection The internal dialectic of what we have described as the dynamics of ocular power would seem to be dead in the water. The totalizing conception of transparency’s effects on daily life and social relations seems to lead to a society consigned to exasperated visibility which, at best, develops an exaggerated exhibitionism and at worst puts us in a straitjacket which our own desire for exposure keeps us into. It is worth noting, once more, that screens are not secondary actors in this dystopian vision. To return once again to The Circle, it is telling that, at the beginning of the novel, the protagonist has three screens on her work desk, and by the end of it her workstation includes “no fewer than seven” (Lyon 2018: 160). As in the novel, the multiplication of screens within the current sociocultural dispositif goes hand in hand with an increase in the possibilities of monitoring, surveillance, control, and thus also of violating privacy, disciplining lives, and exploiting them economically. But one may wonder whether the chiasmic dynamic we have identified in the arche-screen does not also apply to the society of transparency. If the principle whereby there is no exposure without protection, no disclosure without concealment has a general anthropological value, might this not point toward a renewed critique of “Transparency 2.0”? Does analyzing the dystopian outcomes to which exposure and surveillance seem to lead necessarily mean settling for an apocalyptic diagnosis of our time? Certainly, the critical effort to detect the ideological traits of transparency helps trigger a realization of the risks of the digital age, but, as David Lyon points out, dystopian visions of the surveillance society are not

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enough (Lyon 2018: 171–72). Lyon himself recognizes in surveillance a two-faced nature that holds together “control and care, proscription and protection” (Lyon 1994: 219). The modern notion of surveillance—one thinks of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (2003) and the course Security, Territory, Population (2007)32—arose in the health field by providing a fundamental tool for large-scale prevention. Thus, the medical gaze is not only directed toward normalization and control but also constitutes the prerequisite for the care and thus protection of those being observed (Mubi Brighenti 2015: 149). The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a reminder of this: the handing over of very personal data (think of contact tracing apps) was certainly useful in protecting us from contagion and saving lives, as were the screens of all kinds that we dotted around our cities. The protective function of health surveillance during the pandemic does certainly not change the fact that it exposed us to constant control of the private sphere as well. On the other hand, the two-faced nature of surveillance also emerges clearly from Foucault’s analysis of Jewish-­ Christian pastoral power and the legacy this has left in the securitarian devices of modern governmentality. Pastoral power undoubtedly exercises a normalizing and repressive function, but it is also a “beneficent power” that “does good” (Foucault 2007: 126). It developed throughout Christian history into a meticulous “government of souls,” administered through veritable systems of observation and permanent examination (from compulsory confession to the so-called parish family books, in which priests meticulously record the conduct of their parishioners) in order to make each individual totally transparent to their pastor. Although such continuous surveillance would not fail to produce repeated forms of resistance and rejection (Foucault 2007: 194–199), it would always be justified by the church as pastoral “care,” hence as a practice for the protection and salvation of the faithful. Indeed, Foucault himself identifies modern medicine as “one of the great powers that have been heirs to the pastorate” (Foucault 2007: 199), precisely because it embodies the same ambivalence as pastoral care: in order to prevent disease and minimize health risks, it must monitor, classify, and thus acquire as much personal data as possible, but in doing so it ends up becoming a power that controls, disciplines, and normalizes. 32  Of particular importance are the analyses that Foucault devotes (2007: 58 ff.) to the smallpox epidemic in the eighteenth century and the safety and risk reduction apparatuses that made health surveillance an instrument to prevent disease. On medicine as a “general technique of health,” see also Foucault (2001).

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All the more so in the digital age, the acquisition of personal data and their processing constitute an indispensable part of our way of life and not only in the health sector, because they are necessary for maintaining specific standards of organization and security that few of us are willing to give up. Indeed, we usually take these standards for granted, even when we are otherwise radically critical of the ideological claims of “Transparency 2.0” and the dangers of surveillance. But this paradox, rather than one of the many incongruities needed to survive, is actually loaded with meaning, because it shows a more profound contradiction: we take for granted the positive outcomes of a society of transparency and surveillance, while we continue to oppose to it forms of privacy and individual autonomy that were born and conceived in a cultural context very different from the present one. It is then necessary to question the compatibility between the new lifestyles and the way modern Western culture originally conceived of individuality, understanding it as uniqueness defined by a determined and stable set of characteristics. Indeed, as we will see in the last section of the next chapter, the mechanisms currently deployed by surveillance, such as profiling, tracking, and quantification, shatter individuals into a mass of “dividuals,” creating highly volatile and ever-changing “digital doubles.” The very possibility of having an online identity composed of multiple profiles, while not necessarily constituting a loss in terms of personal identification, as Giorgio Agamben wrongly posits (2011: 52–53), shows how the processes of subjectivation take place in a composite manner, which is difficult to trace back to the modern paradigm of individuality (see De Cesaris 2020: 64–65). Therefore, if the current technological configuration entails at least a partial erosion of this paradigm, we cannot use it as the sole normative criterion to assess the particular forms that such a configuration takes on. Unless, of course, we believe in an impossible reversal of history.

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Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. 2018. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bickerton, Christopher J., and Invernizzi Accetti, Carlo. 2021. Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boétie, Étienne de la. 1975. Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Translated by H. Kurz. Alabama: Ludwig Von Mises Institute. Bolter, Jay D., and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Casetti, Francesco. 2015. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press. Chiusi, Fabio. 2014. Critica della democrazia digitale. La politica 2.0 alla prova dei fatti. Torino: Codice. Citton, Yves. 2016. Immedialità intra-attiva e intermedialità estetica. Rivista di estetica 63: 99–120. De Cesaris, Alessandro. 2020. Il design dell’individuo. L’utente come figura della soggettività ipermoderna. In Vite Digitali. Essere umani nella società del XXI secolo, ed. Alessandro De Cesaris, 53–72. Milano: Franco Angeli. Dean, Jodi. 2001. Publicity’s Secret. Political Theory 29: 624–650. ———. 2002. Publicity’s Secret. How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Debray, Regis. 1992. Vie et mort de l’image. Une histoire du regard en Occident. Paris: Gallimard. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Di Stefano, Elisabetta, 2016. Il vetro e il velluto. La casa tra opacità e trasparenza. atque 18: 205–218. Dijk, Jan A.G.M. van, and Kenneth L. Hacker. 2018. Internet and Democracy in the Network Society. London and New York: Routledge. Donati, Riccardo. 2016. Critica della trasparenza. Letteratura e mito architettonico. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier. Eggers, Dave. 2014. The Circle. London: Penguin. Eyal, Gil. 2019. The Crisis of Expertise. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel. 2001. The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century. In Essential Works of Foucault (1954–1984). 3: Power, ed. J. D. Faubion and trans. R. Hurley, 90–105. New York: The New Press. ———. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A.M. Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France (1977–1978). Translated by G. Burchell. New York: Picador.

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Gramsci, Antonio. 2011. Prison Notebooks [1975]. Translated by J.A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Green, Jeffrey E. 2010. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grespi, Barbara. 2017. Dis-pl(a)y. In La Galassia Casetti. Lettere di amicizia, stima, provocazione, ed. Ruggero Eugeni and Mariagrazia Fanchi, 133–136. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. Grusin, Richard. 2015. Radical Mediation. Critical Inquiry 42 (1): 124–148. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [1962]. Translated by T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Transparency Society [2012]. Translated by E. Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2017a. In the Swarm: Digital Prospects [2013]. Translated by E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2017b. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power [2014]. Translated by E. Butler. London: Verso. Harari, Yuval N. 2018. Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow [2015]. New York: Harper Perennial. Harcourt, Bernard E. 2015. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, Williams. 1922. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New  York: Longmans, Green & Co. Jungherr, Andreas, Gonzalo Rivero, and Daniel Gayo-Avello. 2020. Retooling Politics: How Digital Media Are Shaping Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Practical Philosophy. Translated by Mary J.  Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Kevin. 2016. The Inevitable. Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future. New York: Viking. Kofman, Sarah. 1990. Camera Obscura: Of Ideology [1973]. Translated by W. Straw. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kosslyn, Stephen M. 1980. Image and Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lember, Veiko, and Randma-Liiv, Tiina, eds. 2022. Engaging Citizens in Policy Making. e-Participation Practices in Europe. Cheltenham UK: E. Elgar. Lingua, Graziano. 2020. Transparence numérique et frontières de la désintermédiation politique. In L’avenir des écrans, ed. Jacopo Bodini, Mauro Carbone, Graziano Lingua, and Gemma Serrano, 193–205. Paris: Mimésis. Lingua, Graziano, and Paolo Monti. 2022. Norme religiose e norme pubbliche nel contesto delle “globalizzazioni multiple”: fra paradigmi giustificativi e identitari. Quaderni di diritto e politica ecclesiastica 1: 25–47.

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Lyon, David. 1994. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2018. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Lyon, David, and Zygmunt Bauman. 2013. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge [1979]. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mann, Steve, Jason Nolan, and Wellman Barry. 2003. Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments. Surveillance & Society 1 (3): 331–355. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1994. The German Ideology. In Selected Writings, ed. and trans. L.H.  Simon, 102–155. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man [1964]. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2022. Taking Account of the Visual Politics of Populism. Polity 54 (3): 557–564. Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs. Mubi Brighenti, Andrea. 2015. Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nichols, Tom. 2017. The Death of Expertise.  The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ponsoldt, James. 2017. The Circle. USA. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1994. What is Property?, Ed. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-Democracy. Politics in an Age of Distrust [2006]. Translated by A.  Goldhammer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. 2010. Le nouveau pouvoir statistique. Ou quand le contrôle s’exerce sur un réel normé, docile et sans événement car constitué de corps «numériques». Multitudes 40 (1): 88–103. Solove, Daniel J. 2011. Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sorensen, Lone. 2018. Populist Communication in the New Media Environment: A Cross-Regional Comparative Perspective. Palgrave Communications 4 (1): 1–12. Ungureanu, Camil, and Alexandra Popartan. 2020. Populism as Narrative, Myth Making, and the ‘Logic’ of Political Emotions. Journal of the British Academy 8 (1): 37–43.

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CHAPTER 6

Screens’r’us: From Bodies with Prostheses to Bodies as “Quasi-Prostheses”?

6.1   We, Quasi-Prostheses of Our Technologies In 1965, André Leroi-Gourhan confessed his fear that human beings, by dint of “exteriorizing” their—primarily bodily—abilities in order to enhance them through technology, would one day no longer know what to do with their own bodies: What is to be feared if only slightly is that in a thousand years’ time Homo Sapiens, having exhausted the possibilities of self-exteriorization, will come to feel encumbered by the archaic osteomuscular apparatus inherited from the Paleolithic. (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 249)

The year before, Marshall McLuhan, another great advocate of the theory of exteriorization, which he preferred to call extension, heralded a much closer end to that millennial process. Indeed, McLuhan—“the first to systematically apply this proposition to media technology” (Taylor and Harris 2008: 95)—opened his Understanding Media with the announcement that “rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man” (McLuhan 1994: 3, italics added). In his view, the era in which he lived— that of electricity—from the technological extension of the human body was now heading toward “the technological simulation of consciousness” (1994: 3).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Carbone, G. Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30816-1_6

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Although he died in 1980, McLuhan thus seems to have been able to foresee the kind of mutations that would later be made evident by the digital revolution, which has taken place mainly since the 1990s. Indeed, there is no doubt that this revolution has greatly intensified our technological exteriorization or “externalization” in the direction indicated by McLuhan. As Michel Serres explained in 2012, The new technologies, finally, externalize the messages and operations that circulate in our neuronal system—information and codes. (Serres 2014: 25)

However, the present phase of the digital revolution, which focuses on developing technologies that are no longer just “portable” but openly “wearable,” seems to run counter to the fears expressed by Leroi-Gourhan: instead of leading human beings to no longer know what to do with their own bodies, it is in fact restoring an unexpected centrality to our corporeal dimension. In this context, the human body is considered (in line with what currents of thought such as phenomenology have always done) as part of what is today called the “body-brain system,” a curious expression that seeks to distinguish what is immediately united in our experience and later to rejoin it—as if it was still possible. It is in this framework that the screen is “no longer just a medium: it becomes a bodily techno-prosthesis” (Gallese and Guerra 2020: 43), where the term “prosthesis” takes on the meaning of an artifact aimed precisely at enhancing, rather than restoring, certain human capacities (Carbone 2011). But the tendency to assign a central role to our body is also due to another dynamic that the digital revolution has been bringing to the fore and which appears to be inverse but not opposite to externalization: using the antonym of the latter term, we would therefore call it, in a general sense, an “internalization” of digital technology itself, a dynamic also aimed at enhancing, or even altering, certain human capacities (Hoquet 2011: 344). To speak of the bodily “internalization” of this technology immediately brings to mind what should more appropriately be described as “endo-­ somatic hybridization,” which consists of implanting technological prostheses in our bodies in such a way as to transform them from “vivant [living]” to “viv@nt,” to use the French expression proposed by Bernard Andrieu (2016: 203).

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But such a form of internalization, requiring some kind of surgical intervention, seems to be physically invasive and inevitably costly.1 Therefore, we believe that another form—much less demanding but, for this very reason, perhaps no less insidious—needs to be carefully considered: it consists in the (much easier and therefore potentially widespread) use of certain organs of our body (the retinas or the skin, for instance) as additional components of technological (more precisely digital) artifacts that are virtually connected and, once again, mainly centered on or at least involving vision. We propose to qualify these organs, when they are subjected to such use, as “quasi-prostheses” of the related artifacts, where the prefix “quasi-” is evidently intended to indicate not a constant property of the organs but their temporary mode of existence, the characteristics, and status of which will need to be specified. The peculiar form of technological interiorization that they constitute is what we intend to focus on here, primarily because it further highlights the aforementioned impossibility of contrasting externalization and internalization, thus challenging once more the fundamental dualism of our categories of thought.

6.2  Our Retina as a Quasi-Prosthesis and the Market of Gazes With specific regard to vision-centered digital devices, the peculiar form of technological internalization to which we are referring found one of its first examples in Google Glass, the well-known augmented reality glasses whose first version intended for the general public was marketed in 2014 and withdrawn from sale in 2015. Later, a first Enterprise Edition was launched in July 2017 and a second in May 2019. Evidently, these products must have achieved very encouraging results from both a technological and a financial point of view, given that in summer 2022 Google announced a program to publicly test the prototypes of a new generalist

 A case in point is the well-known Neuralink project, “an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others, and dedicated to developing implantable brain-­computer interfaces (BCIs)” (Žižek 2020: 33). 1

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version, soberly designated as “AR Glasses.”2 Moreover, this announcement—which anticipates an orientation common to “every ­ major tech company” (Hollister 2022)—indirectly reinforces the hypothesis of a metaverse with “augmented” or “mixed,” rather than “virtual,” traction, whose prevalence among insiders we have already highlighted in point 8 of our introductory chapter. The patent, published in 2013, qualifies Google Glass as a “heads-up display including eye tracking,” which meets the user’s needs by analyzing the movements of their pupils. We will elaborate on this later. In the meantime, here is how the Google Glass patent describes the device as a whole: Heads-up displays allow a user to view a scene while relevant information is overlaid on the scene, so that the user looking through the heads-up display simultaneously sees both the scene and the relevant information. (Raffle and Wang 2013: 1)

This kind of device implies a “prism lens” named “prism-patterned screen.” Despite such a name, Marta Nijhuis (2016: 127) has appropriately made clear that this prism works neither like an average display, nor, properly speaking, like a screen. […] The image is indeed projected (by a mini-device placed on the side of the camera [that is installed in the Glass]). However, instead of welcoming the image on its surface, the crystal implements its refractive—and hence deviating—feature, so as to redirect the projector’s luminous beam toward our eye, and finding its screen directly on our retina. The screen of Glass is thus not the prism. The screen is our eye. No wonder that this technology is also called virtual retinal display. And it is precisely because our eye is the screen that we can focus the information transmitted by Glass as if it were an integral part of reality.

In fact, even if Google Glass implies a physical display—more precisely, a near eye display—the vision it produces does not take place on that display, which is too close to our eye for us to be able to perceive it correctly. Google 2  On this announcement, see Payne (2022), as well as Hollister (2022). For an accurate reconstruction and an articulate “post-media’” interpretation of the “many lives” of the Google Glass, see Eugeni, Algorithmic Images and Post-media Dispositives, forthcoming. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Ruggero Eugeni for bringing to our attention the articles cited in this note. For a media archaeology of Google Glass, in addition to Eugeni’s aforementioned book, see Huhtamo (2016).

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Fig. 6.1  Google Glass Infographic, 2013. (CC-­BY by Martin Missfeldt, https://www. varifocals.net)

Glass exploits a retinal-projection-based technology, which involves the beaming of images directly onto the user’s retina (Fig.  6.1, Missfeldt 2013). This, however, does not mean that there is no screen understood as the necessary background of our vision and thus as a condition of visualization. Instead of a material screen, though, there is a small virtual translucent screen called precisely virtual retinal display (VRD), invented by the Japanese Kazuo Yoshinaka in 1986. It appears at the top right in our field of vision, thereby reproducing, through a sort of perceptual illusion, the conditions that allow the visualization of information capable of “augmenting” our knowledge of perceived reality. In this sense, we can say that the user’s retina temporarily becomes a “quasi-prosthesis” of this device, i.e., an additional component that is indispensable for it to ensure one of its fundamental functions: showing us that information. Of course, we do not consider it secondary that the functioning of this technology also confirms the relevance of the notion of “arche-screen.” Furthermore, to avoid any kind of imagocentrism, it should be stressed that virtual retinal display technology gives us visual access to the world integrating the iconic and the verbal components.

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Such a technology is not only used by Google Glass nor does it concern only optical augmented reality devices. Indeed, we find a similar technology, with the consequent projection of images directly onto the user’s retina, in more complex devices giving us access to a “mixed reality,” in which 3D virtual elements integrated and interacting with the physical world can be experienced thanks to a relatively light visor—not a helmet, in any case—connected via a fiber-optic cable to a processor attached to the user’s side and managed via a portable trackpad capable of haptic feedback.3 As we have observed about our retina in the case of the virtual retinal display, the “quasi-prosthetic” use of our bodily organs is often developed by “arche-screen” technologies. This is also the case with certain eye tracking technologies, such as those mentioned in the Google Glass patent. The most common is in fact the pupil center corneal reflection (PCCR) technology, also known as infrared reflection (IR): in it, an infrared or near-infrared light beam is directed at the center of the pupil, producing a very obvious reflection, detectable both in the pupil itself and in the cornea, which is tracked by an infrared camera. Once again, therefore, our eye is employed to function as a projection screen. Eye tracking technologies make it possible to determine where the tracked person is looking, what they are looking at, and how long their gaze lingers on a point or area. This is why these technologies, which were once used almost exclusively in the scientific field, have been gradually spreading for commercial use in what is called neuromarketing, that is, the application of cognitive neuroscience to market strategies. Indeed, these technologies make it possible to study, support, or possibly try to modify consumers’ reactions based on their eye movements when confronted with a commercial product or an advertisement. It is difficult to think of a more emblematic phenomenon to characterize our visibility regime: in an era in which the number of technical images produced, reproduced, and disseminated immeasurably exceeds the number of views that can be devoted to them, it is inevitable to witness an unprecedented commodification of views themselves. Visibility has

3  Mark Hansen (2006: 3–4) insists that the “mixed-reality paradigm” embraces a “functionalist perspective rooted in perceptuomotor activity,” while the virtual reality paradigm relaunches the “the dream of perfect simulation” (as a 3D representation).

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become the main economic and political issue at stake in globalized capitalism (Szendy 2019: 3ff.).4

6.3  A “Quasi-Return” to the Primary Interface: The Skin as a Quasi-Prosthesis But the quasi-prosthetic use of our organs is not limited to the eyes. Another example, no less telling than those given so far, concerns the skin, the first organ we encountered when examining the externalization of our body’s own screening functions. The physiological characteristics of the skin make it the first and most extensive interface between human beings and their environment: on the one hand, the skin is inseparable from the brain, with which it shares hundreds of receptors; on the other hand, it is equipped with neurons itself and is therefore relatively autonomous from the brain—in short, it is a “peripheral brain” (Dagognet 1998: 18). The digital revolution has also begun to take advantage of these characteristics, primarily through “smart” patches or temporary tattoos. Some of the latter are designed to monitor our health and operate as displays capable of signaling alterations, that is, essentially as showing screens. Others function as trackpads to manage displays or as touch interfaces for the exchange and sharing of data. If, therefore, the expression “touch screens” designates screens that are sensitive to the touch of the skin on our fingers, with those tattoos it is the skin itself that becomes a touch screen, requiring contact with the skin on our fingers, thus marking an “augmented” return—in this case we can speak of “augmented skin”— and therefore a “quasi-return” to the primary interface. In 2017, at the end of her video presentation of some of these tattoos (MIT Media Lab. 2017), Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, then a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and the first signatory of their design, predicted that they would become “an extension of you,” thus relaunching the term used by McLuhan. Rather, what we consider decisive is that the tattoos in question, as mentioned before, exploit certain peculiar physiological characteristics of the skin in order to function, as this makes the skin not the simple 4  In this regard, while not concerning the use of eye tracking, the first images of Harun Farocki’s documentary titled  Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts)  (2000) were already very telling. They showed two paired screens displaying, respectively, the pattern of routes taken by customers in a supermarket and the list of their purchases as they make them.

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supporting basis of an exteriorization dynamic but an indispensable additional component of the device that is applied to it. In short, our body organs can be used as “quasi-prostheses” of various connected digital devices. More specifically, with regard to those devices that are centered on or at least involve vision, it is inevitable to suggest that our organs can temporarily assume the status of “quasi-prostheses” of their main visual interfaces—that is, screens—or even, as we have seen, take on the functions of screens themselves. A good example of the latter is the Skinput Technology developed by Microsoft, which proposes to use our skin as a touch screen via which to interact with all kinds of electronic devices (Microsoft 2010). The visual component of this technology consists in using our skin as a screen on which to project the commands to be typed: in the case of hands—which will inevitably echo their use as screens observed in Paleolithic caves—thanks to a pico-projector tied to the biceps. The tactile component of this technology consists in interpreting the vibrations emitted by the user’s body, when and where it is touched, as digital commands typed on the user’s skin. Of course, Francesco Parisi (2019: 105) is right to trace the notion of “quasi-prosthesis” back to the general tendency whereby, as Lambros Malafouris (2013: 143) puts it, “in the dynamic tension that characterizes the processes of material engagement, sometimes […] it is the person who becomes the extension of the material agent.” Here Malafouris is in fact pointing to the dynamic that we described above as inverse but not opposite to technological exteriorization. Sticking to general trends, it is also crucial to add what Jean Epstein (1957: 18) wrote in 1945 and published the following year, when indicating some of the transformational elements that occurred in the first half-­ century following the invention of the cinema: it is an obvious fact in the history of civilization that any instrument, more or less remodeled, recreates in its own way the spirit that conceived it, that created it.

The notion of “quasi-prosthesis” certainly falls within these general trends. But it does not end there.

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6.4  Speaking in Terms of “Quasi-Prostheses” to Name New Agencies Speaking in terms of “quasi-prosthesis” means trying to refine the description of the aforementioned general dynamics, echoing the many attempts that, first on the French side5 and then also on the American side,6 have been made to force the basic dualism of our modern categories of thought and language through the use of the prefix “quasi-,” in order to express the peculiar agency exercised, within specific relationships, by the pole that is traditionally considered passive in that dualism: the object pole. Compared to these attempts, however, by speaking in terms of “quasi-­ prostheses” we wish to express a different and inverse agency: that which, within specific relationships with certain technological artifacts, is exercised by some elements inscribed in the subjective pole of this dualism, such as certain organs of our body, in ways that once again would be traditionally considered passive, as they are subordinate to the functioning of those artifacts. More precisely, we aim at contributing to describe a different and more complex distribution of roles, interactions, functions, and agencies within the relationships that can be established when certain organs of our body are used as additional components of technological artifacts. To do so, we propose to use the term “quasi-prosthesis” to flag the particular status of “mediators” (Latour 1993: 51ff.)—between the organic and the inorganic, between the human and the nonhuman—that those organs assume within relationships in which the first term tends to lose its centrality in favor of the second. We would like to point out that this dynamic, although it could certainly include earlier examples, seems to have become more specific in the course of the digital revolution. This revolution has in fact contributed to introduce or perfect certain modes of quasi-prosthetic use of our body, primarily for the purpose of “substituting” and then also “enhancing” our capacities. 5  See Dufrenne (1973: 196), who thematizes the notion of “quasi-subject,” as well as Serres (2007: 228ff.), who thematizes that of “quasi-object,” and Latour (1993: 51ff.), who thematizes both and acknowledges his theoretical debt to Serres. For an introduction to such notions within the “actor-network theory,” see Jackson (2015). 6  In the field of visual culture, it is important to mention Vivian Sobchack (1992: 142), who takes Dufrenne’s notion of “quasi-subject” to characterize the configuration of the film in the experience of the cinematic spectator, and W.J.T. Mitchell (2005: 46), who characterizes pictures as “quasi-agents.”

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A particularly emblematic example of the first type is the quasi-­prosthetic use of the human tongue pioneered by American neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita, who installed on it a small grid sprinkled with electrodes capable of transmitting microstimulations to the brain that compensate for certain impaired bodily functions, such as vision. Quite significantly, he gave that grid the synesthetic name of “tongue display unit (TDU)” (Sampaio et al. 2001: 204). As an example of the second type, Francesco Parisi mentions the “VEST (versatile extra sensory transducer),” explaining that “it conveys information through tactile stimulation on the torso of the subject wearing it” and specifying that “the first problem was to identify the maximum ‘bandwidth of the skin’, that is, the biological capacity of our largest organ to convey discriminable information” (Parisi 2019: 100).7 Initially designed to achieve sensory substitution (e.g., for deaf people), this device, as we anticipated above, seems increasingly headed to experimenting with some form of sensory addition. In any case, it employs the skin as a “quasi-prosthesis.” In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty used the typewriter as an example of an empowering prosthesis of certain human capacities. The complementary dynamics of technical exteriorization of handwriting on the one hand and of lived embodiment of the typewriter triggered by the habit of using it on the other were described in the anthropocentric terms of “expansion” of our bodily being-in-the-world and “annexation” of the machine to the body: “The subject who learns to type literally incorporates the space of the keyboard into his bodily space” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 146, italics added). Some twenty years later, but within the same age that we have heard him classify as “electric,” McLuhan (1994: 4) endeavored to draw attention to the other side of this dynamic of the technological “extension of man,” speaking of the latter’s tendency to “self-amputation.” In this sense, he emphasized our becoming “servo-mechanisms” of our own extensions: By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms. […]. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock. (McLuhan 1994: 46)

7

 Parisi refers to the patent of Eagleman et al. (2017).

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While certainly suggestive, that status of “servo-mechanism” seems too univocal and these examples too disparate to allow us to understand and describe in a more nuanced and historically precise way the aforementioned other side of our relationship with technology—the side of decentralization and dispossession of the human. Speaking in terms of “quasi-prostheses” means making an effort to describe more precisely how that other side of the technological extension of humanity is taking shape in the digital era. Speaking in terms of “quasi-­ prostheses” therefore means underlining the specific ambiguity of the status assumed by certain bodily organs when they are temporarily integrated with technological devices that need them in order to function correctly. According to one side of this ambiguity, they obviously remain bodily organs, and therefore it will be necessary to study the relations they have, under such circumstances, with the rest of the organism. Indeed, when they are used as “quasi-prostheses,” the same applies to them as what McLuhan (1994: 45) wrote about a real prosthesis, namely that they “deman[d] new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body”—to put it with Merleau-Ponty (2012: 143), they require a “reworking” of the “body schema.” According to the other side of this ambiguity instead, as we wrote earlier, those organs temporarily assume the status of additional components of connected digital devices that technologically enhance certain human capabilities. To borrow the terms that Gilbert Simondon proposed in the same era as the two authors just mentioned, which express that ambiguity much better, these organs are thus involved in a particular case of “coupling [couplage]” with “self-regulation” between machine and human being (Simondon 2012: 167ff.), taking into account that in general, for Simondon, “there is coupling when a single and complete function is performed by the two beings” (173). This “coupling” will then become the “theater” (Simondon 2020: 7 and 9)8—another Simondonian metaphor replete with suggestive implications—in which at least three “agents,” or even “actors” or “actants,”9 simultaneously play a role, that is, physiological causality, technological 8  In view of the subject of the next section, it is worth recalling that such metaphors of place often appear in the work of those who endeavor to characterize “humans as intrinsically social beings insofar as they [...] coincide with the bundle of relations that form them,” as Remotti (2019: 259–260) points out. 9  Here we are echoing once more the “actor-network theory,” which this chapter is obviously engaged with. For the term “actant,” see Latour (1998).

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causality, and, urged on by the latter, something similar to what Alfred Gell (1998: 17) calls a “kind of second agency which artifacts acquire once they become enmeshed in a texture of social relationships.” Such an agency—Gell (1998: 28) continues—will obviously be “autonomous” with respect to that of the human being, who, at least at the time considered, will become a “patient” of it, possibly capable, however, of offering a (certain) resistance (1998: 34) also depending on the environment in which both are found. In short, a show will be staged in which, rather than mere spectators or absolute protagonists, or even managers of the theater, we are literally part of the theater itself. That is why we should thoroughly study its plot.

6.5   “Quasi-Prostheses” and the Dividual Condition Our experiences of connected screens—be they electronic, digital, or even body organs temporarily employed as such—can subject us to a “partition” of our personal or social identities, including our bodily identity, separating and distributing its parts.10 A very emblematic case, as we said, is that of neuromarketing, which seeks to isolate our eyes from the rest of our organism in order to track their movements and study them for commercial purposes. But experiences related to connected screens can also enable the decentralization and pluralization of one’s psychological self,11 perhaps causing us to encounter various forms of what Bernard Harcourt calls, with Shanyang Zhao (2005), “digital selves”12—sometimes identifiable, sometimes anonymous. In short, the current proliferation of personal and social relationships, due precisely to digital hyper-connectedness, comes with an unprecedented crisis of the modern Western characterization of human beings as individuals (a term that literally means “indivisible”) and harbors the emergence of signs of what might be called a peculiar dividual condition. 10  “Partition […] is the mode of separation, […] of attributing and distributing the parts” (Raunig 2016: 73). 11  Turkle (1995: 14) wrote that the introduction of “windows” on computer screens favored “the daily practice […] of a decentered self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time.” 12  See for instance Harcourt (2015: 128).

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Referring to such an emerging condition as “peculiar”—that is, endowed with its own characteristics—means not considering it an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of human cultures. On the contrary, if “individual” means “indivisible,” the etymology of this term seems to indicate precisely the negation of a condition of dividuality that would somehow precede it (Linkenbach and Mulsow 2019: 234)—and constitute it. For that matter, Gerald Raunig (2016) shows that multiple traditions of “dividuum thought” can also be traced in Greek, Roman, and Christian cultures. For the latter, a particularly eloquent example is the theological debate on the uni-Trinitarian nature of God, in which a conception of divine substance is elaborated starting from a plurality of personae.13 The vicissitudes of Trinitarian thought are thus intertwined, since the earliest centuries of the Christian era, with the development of the notion of persona (Greshake 2007: 74–100). The latter was first conceived precisely in relation to intra-Trinitarian life and only later did it become an anthropological category, meaning, in Boethius’ (1968: 84–85 and 92–93) wellknown definition, “an individual substance of a rational nature.” Raunig (2016: 67) points out how Christian thought—which would play a crucial role in the construction of the concept of individual, precisely starting from Boethius’ definition—contains an equally significant elaboration of the problem of dividuality, as well as a conception of singularity that is not enclosed in individual identity but is constituted by relationships and by the “potentiality of connecting, appending, concatenating.”14 One therefore ought not attribute to the West solely an “individuum thought” while ascribing one or multiple conceptions of dividuum to non-Western cultures alone. In addition, it is important to refrain from the idea that Western thinking concerning processes of “dividuation” 13  The Trinitarian debates of the early Christian centuries highlight the conceptual effort made by Christianity to conceive of plurality and difference within the divine unity. The concepts used to express this non-monolithic nature of God—prosōpon or hypostasis in Greek, persona in Latin—allow the unity of the divine to be understood in relational terms, without breaking the monotheistic framework of that religion. In this tension between unity and difference we clearly glimpse what would be one of the central cores of “dividuum thought.” For an analysis of the conceptual scope of the debates recalled here, we refer to Lingua (2022: 1299–1315). On the Christian origins of the notion of persona from the perspective of a modern relational (albeit non-dividual) ontology, see also Diodato (2021: 27ff.). 14  Moreover, Raunig (2016: 64) points out that Gilbertus Porretanus explicitly uses the expression “unum dividuum” in his commentary on Boethius’ De trinitate, though in relation to human and not divine persons. In this regard, see Häring (1966: 144).

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would lean toward assigning an unambiguous meaning to the term. “Partition, participation, division” (Raunig 2016: 73ff.) but also pluralization, multiplication, and, complementarily, permeability (Linkenbach and Mulsow 2019: 340) or, conversely, singularization (Raunig 2016: 76) are various ways—not necessarily distinct and alternative—of interpreting experiences of dividuality. As is well known, Gilles Deleuze was among the first contemporary philosophers to use the term “dividual [dividuel].” By that word, he meant certain socioeconomic phenomena emerging in the transition from what Foucault called “disciplinary societies,” which thrived in the West from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, to what Deleuze himself proposed to call “societies of control,” which in his view developed after World War II. He expressed this position in a text of rare lucidity and foresight titled “Postscript on the Societies of Control” and published in 1990 (Deleuze 1992), a time already marked by the incipient effects of the digital revolution and the rise of today’s financial capitalism.15 It is in this context that he observes the abovementioned shift from the “disciplinary societies” to the “societies of control.” Listing the characteristics of the latter, he points out that “the corporation has replaced the factory” (Deleuze 1992: 4) and that, indeed, “individuals have become ‘dividuals’” (1992: 5)—term by which he seems to refer precisely to the products of a partition16—while the masses have become “samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (1992: 5). With a transparent (and nostalgic) allusion to Marx’s (1994: 198) metaphor of the proletarian revolution, he concludes that “the coils of a serpent are more complex than the burrows of a molehill” (Deleuze 1992: 7). In this article, the term “dividual” thus seems to take on the unambiguous meaning of “product of a partition,” a no less unambiguously negative value and the equally unambiguous reference to the new type of society just outlined. Its use thus seems to resonate with the denunciation of the loss of a previous condition, which implicitly—and rather

 This last aspect is emphasized by Appadurai (2016a: 104).  “The new medicine […] substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a ‘dividual’ material to be controlled” (Deleuze 1992: 7). It is not difficult to find here the premonition of the current processes of datafication. 15 16

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paradoxically, since it was still the one dominated by industrial capitalism—would thus be deemed preferable to the present one.17 In this context, our notion of “quasi-prosthesis” would then merely denounce a further and peculiar example of the technological-financial dividuation process described so far. However, Michaela Ott (2020: 165) is right to point out that Deleuze— in his aesthetic reflection, particularly in his diptych on cinema—“outlines a positive understanding of the dividual,”18 recognizing in it a specific quality that cannot be reduced to the mere quantitative product of a division (or partition). This must be taken into account. In a sense, we can say that Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of the notion of dividual takes a similar direction. However, in a footnote of his article titled “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity,” published in Public Culture in 2015, he merely highlights that “Deleuze also used the concept of the ‘dividual’ in a late […] essay with a sense much closer to my own, but he never developed his usage of this term systematically” (Appadurai 2015: 222, note 1). Here Appadurai is obviously referring to Deleuze’s article discussed earlier, warning that he would explore “the idea of the dividual more fully in chapter 7” (2015: 235, note 5) of his book Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance, forthcoming the next year. In this way, the Indo-American anthropologist perpetuates a focus on the theme of dividuality that has become central to anthropological studies since the 1970s and 1980s (Linkenbach and Mulsow 2019: 325ff.), when it was employed in particular by the American South Asianist McKim Marriott (1976) and later, with greater resonance, by the British Marilyn Strathern (1988) in her seminal work on Melanesian society. In his book Banking on Words, Appadurai (2016a: 118) takes up that theme in order to compare and contrast certain practices of what he sees as a “progressive” dividuality recently developed in the slums around Mumbai—somehow still linked to a dividual cosmology such as the Hindu—with phenomena of “financialized dividuation of the contemporary West” (2016a: 120). In his view, the latter have started the 17  For an articulate and insightful presentation of Deleuze’s article, which also documents how this unequivocally negative interpretation of dividuality has been embraced by some of his commentators, see Aïm (2020: 75ff., especially 78–79). 18  This is how Deleuze (1997: 217) defines the dividual in the glossary published at the end of The Movement-Image, the first volume of his diptych on cinema: “that which is neither indivisible nor divisible, but is divided (or brought together) by changing qualitatively.”

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“irreversible” (2016a: 102) dismantling of the “crystallized product of many centuries of gradual convergence” (2016a: 102)19 of different cultural and religious traditions constituting the modern Western category of “individual.” As for the communal practices of dividuality studied by Appadurai in Mumbai, they gave him the opportunity to emphasize that dividuals are […] the elementary constituents of individuals (and of other larger social aggregations) rather than mere aspects, dimensions, or “personae” of a foundational individual. This ontological reversal is the very definition of the dividual. (Appadurai 2016a: 114)

We would add that this definition, in turn, explains the dividual’s precession over the individual inscribed, as we have seen, in the etymology of the latter term. To better understand the meaning of this precession, however, it is necessary to specify that dividuals are to be considered “unstable, volatile, contingent and open” elements (Appadurai 2016a: 118), whose relationships constitute precisely, in a metastable manner, both the alleged “in-dividuals” and “larger social aggregations” (2016a: 114). The “ontological reversal” Appadurai speaks of thus spontaneously refers to a relational ontology which, however, he does not make explicit.20 Clearly, such an ontology can take on multiple forms and affect different spheres—certainly not only the anthropological one. As far as the latter is concerned, we will only point out that it cannot but suggest a “migrant” and manifold characterization of identities, insofar as they are assumed time after time based on the relations they entertain with others 19  For a “brief reconstruction of the conceptual history of the ‘individual,’” see the second chapter of Ott (2018: 43–122). 20  With regard to the expression “relational ontology,” without going into the merits of the debates within contemporary cultural anthropology, it is interesting to note how Francesco Remotti (2019: 275) draws attention to the misleading character that the term “ontology” can have, insofar as it literally emphasizes being and entities to the detriment of the relationships between them. This is why it seems to us that Remotti’s idiosyncratic attitude toward “ontology” could fall if one were to characterize the latter precisely in relational terms, subject to multiple forms of cultural-historical becoming. An example of such a trans-­ historical conception of ontology is a passage from Merleau-Ponty’s (2004: 310) last published writing during his lifetime in which he confesses to “a feeling of mutation within the relations of man and Being. Such feelings arise in him when he [Merleau-Ponty himself] holds a universe of classical thought, en bloc, up against the explorations [recherches] of modern painting” (italics added).

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and with the world. In other words, such an ontology affirms that the changing relational context is where  equally changing identities are assigned or assumed, rather than considering the latter as stable essences that may establish any (secondary and accessory) relationship. One of us has reminded of a classic and eloquent example of this: I would perceive myself as Italian coming across the difference of a French person; while facing that of an American, I would rather perceive myself as European, suddenly bestowing that same identity on the French person as well, which will make him or her appear as similar to me, rather than different. (Carbone 2015: 19)21

In this way, a relational ontology overturns the dominant Western conception whereby identities are stable, unique, and foundational—the very conception that has “crystallized,” as Appadurai put it, in the modern category of individual. Instead, a relational ontology aims to show that, since it is in relationships that identities are established, they can be multiple and subject to change over time. This kind of ontology also seems implicit in Appadurai’s description of Indian practices of communal dividuality. Combined with the definition of “dividual” proposed by him, it thus outlines an ontology of dividual relationality. Within it, the meanings of “dividuation” as partition, participation, or division, but also as pluralization, multiplication, permeability, and singularization, clearly do not exclude, but rather imply one another, as anticipated a few pages back. In fact, even when human beings are conventionally represented as “individuals,” they experience a dividual plurality.22 The latter can then further multiply by virtue of the multiplication of its relations—or, rather, of the relationships that the very dividuals making up that plurality entertain with each other and with others populating the surrounding environment.

 See also De Biase (2015: 126).  Consider the well-known opening of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004: 3) A Thousand Plateaux: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” 21 22

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Of course, multiplication means differentiation, but the latter in turn entails the production of similarities between those differences,23 and it is the aggregation of these similarities that makes up what we usually call “identity.”24 A fortiori, this is all the more true in an era characterized by the multiplication of hyperconnected environments such as the digital ones. Moreover, according to such an ontological perspective, it is possible to say that, in a way, we have never been individuals (Ott 2020: 166). The dominant historical crystallization of which Appadurai spoke would thus have obscured the persistent workings of a dividual relationality (think of the typically modern dividuation between public and private, with its ramifications) which current cultural, economic, and technological conditions—having undermined that crystallization—are allowing to reemerge, obviously under peculiar conditions and according to peculiar characters. To try to understand the latter, one must strive to consider the specific feedback that not only the economic-cultural conditions but also the technologies that have brought us to the digital era exert on the structure of an ontology of dividual relationality, shaping it precisely in a peculiar way that exemplifies its trans-historical character. Our era, in fact, does not only involve the “predatory” and “financialized dividuation” that Appadurai traces back to growing datafication (Appadurai 2016a: 109). As the other side of the coin, digital hyperconnectivity produces precisely the hyperdevelopment of a dividualized and dividualizing relationality that fosters not only the partition but also the multiplication of our identities, as well as certain 23  As Deleuze (1990: 261) explains, the “reading of the world” that “reverses” Platonism (which underlies the Western metaphysics that sees identity as stable, unique, and foundational) is the following: “only differences can resemble each other.” 24  Francesco Remotti (2019: 251) points to the presence of a similar approach in the thought of David Hume: “What Hume proposes to see in the experiential area of the Self is […] a ‘bundle’ of relations necessarily consisting of similarities and differences, relations that unfold as much in the present of synchrony as in the development of diachrony. […] Thus, for Hume the I is not ‘identical’ to itself—it is ‘similar.’ It lives in a regime of similarities and differences: its ‘experience’ is made up of these types of relationships” (italics in the original). In turn, we would like to highlight a potentially convergent orientation in the characterization that Merleau-Ponty (1964: 61), borrowing an expression from André Malraux, offers of a person’s style: it would be a “coherent deformation” of one’s relation with oneself, others, and the world. In short, style should be understood as a “system of equivalences according to which each of its elements, like a hundred pointers on a hundred dials, marks the same deviation” (italics added). As we have just read, however, Merleau-Ponty ends up bending the metaphor of multiplicity (“a hundred pointers on a hundred dials”) to the language of sameness (“same deviation”).

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forms of social and political participation whose connotations and limitations we described in the previous chapter.25 In short, as we have already said, using the term “dividual” does not necessarily mean speaking of a “simple division or partitioning” (Remotti 2019: 325). This is why both Gerald Raunig and Francesco Remotti respectively  propose adding the complementary notions of “con-dividuality” and “con-dividual”—meaning cum-[= with]-dividuum—to it, so as to highlight the relational dynamic at work at every level.26 Returning to the ambivalent connotations of the aforementioned forms of participation, then, on the one hand we can agree with Appadurai that in today’s capitalist societies we are represented as individuals in some ways and transformed in a dividual sense in others.27 On the other hand, however, we wish to reiterate that this transformation should be understood not only in the sense of a division and partition effected by datafication and its economic-political use but also as a heightened multiplication of (not only interhuman) relations made possible by the digital revolution. Thus understood, the notion of dividual, rather than merely denouncing the loss of a previous condition, challenges us to positively redefine it in order to allow for a more nuanced and propositional interpretation of the changes we are experiencing in our relations with ourselves, with others, and with the world. Inevitably, such an interpretation will therefore have to take into account—and this is one of its present and future peculiarities—the impact exerted on those transformations by the posthuman agencies exerted by certain digital devices, such as those at work when employing our bodily organs as their quasi-prostheses. To this end, in his book Discorrelated Images, Shane Denson (2020: 52) openly provides an imagocentric analysis within a “Deleuzian framework.” However, his perspective is also stimulating for the phenomenological consideration of non-imagocentric screen experiences. In this way, his book succeeds in its stated intention of “helping us […] to negotiate 25  On the connotations and limitations of such forms of participation according to a dividuation perspective that openly draws on Deleuze, see Ott (2018). 26  See Raunig 2016: 190–192. According to Remotti (2019: 325), the term “con-­dividual” allows one to link those designated by this word “not only to the multiplicity of relations in which they are involved, but also to the unrepeatable or unique character of their manifestations and combinations.” We shall return to this notion at point no. 8 of our Conclusion. 27  Appadurai (2016b: 2) speaks of “a tectonic shift in contemporary capitalism which requires its subjects, as individuals, to operate on hope, aspiration, and images of the good life while its financial, actuarial, and algorithmic instruments increasingly render us dividuals who are indexed by our profiles as bearers of risk, disease, debt, or dysfunction.”

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the transition to a truly posthuman, post-perceptual media regime” (Denson 2020: 52) toward which even the use of our bodily organs as quasi-prostheses seems to be leading us. Denson’s investigation concerns the changes introduced by technologies related to what he calls “post-cinema” in our relationships with images and screens—two elements which he does not separate as we do in this book. Compared to the “individual image of the filmstrip” (Denson 2020: 73),28 he characterizes digital images as technically “dividuated” and increasingly fast and therefore “discorrelated” from our intentionality (more precisely, we would say, from our conscious intentionality). For Denson, the dividuation of the image in turn is “bound up with the dividuation of experience” (2020: 72) insofar as it fragments our perception. In particular, our perceptual experience is subjected to such an accelerated pace that it helps to redistribute what is visible and invisible for us,29 also through the different temporal levels at which screens act both technologically and perceptually (2020: 109). In fact, we do not think that the technical dividuation of digital images described by Denson entails a dividuation of the—unreflected—perception we have of them any more than the dividuation of movement experienced in the still frames composing a film.30 If anything, a good example of perceptual dividuation could be found in VR, where the “brain is forced to maintain two mental models,” one internal and the other external to the helmet that enables those experiences, according to Louis Rosenberg’s (2021) statement (see our introductory chapter, point 8).

28  “Dividuated Images” is the title of the second chapter of the book, in which Denson (2020: 67) explains: “the image on the CRT screen is never stable or integrally individuated.” Such images are therefore “radically dividual in the sense that they are never fully present as integral units on the screen” (66). 29  “The point […] is that the image is—at the outset, and in principle—invisible due to the temporal mismatch between computational and human temporal processing; visibility is optional and ancillary with respect to the more fundamental state of invisibility” (Denson 2020: 70). 30  Unlike Denson, Deleuze (1997: 14) also emphasizes that “the cinematographic image is always dividual.” The topic of our book makes it particularly important to highlight Deleuze’s explanation of this claim: “This is because, in the final analysis, the screen, as the frame of frames, gives a common standard of measurement to things which do not have one—long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single drop of water—parts which do not have the same denominator of distance, relief or light” (Deleuze 1997: 14–15). Clearly, this consideration does not apply only to the cinematic screen. 

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Still, Denson (2020: 73) importantly emphasizes the acceleration of digital images, which, combined with the increasing amount of time spent in front of screens and with the peculiar temporal dynamics of the latter, reshapes our “processes of subjectivation.” The doubt remains, however, that Denson’s insistence on this aspect is linked to the imagocentric perspective he assumes, which in fact leads him to connect the transformations of our temporality to the redistribution of the visible and invisible. Dedicating equal attention to the changes in our spatiality, by considering its dividuation in experiences such as VR or the hybridization between physical and virtual space prefigured by MR, would have led to a more comprehensive analysis. Indeed, it would have brought to light a more general redistribution of the perceptible and the imperceptible—in the fully synesthetic sense of these terms—at work in our current “processes of subjectivation.” In any case, if in a way we can say that we have never been individuals, then we cannot think of a dividual condition in unequivocally negative terms—not even in relation to the condition that seems to be emerging from the crumbling of the “crystallized” modern category of the individual. Heeding to Michaela Ott’s invitation, let us therefore recall how Deleuze characterizes the dividual in The Movement-Image, the first volume of his diptych on cinema. In it he writes: “The set cannot divide into parts without qualitatively changing each time: it is neither divisible nor indivisible, but ‘dividual’ [dividuel]” (Deleuze 1997: 14, italics added). In this sense—“each time,” as we have just read—the dividual entails “a new reality” (92). Transposing these characterizations to the sphere we are interested in here, we might say that those very terms appear to define the experiences in which—starting from our digital interconnections usually mediated by screens—each time the partition and the pluralization of our personal or social identities are variously composed in qualitatively different ways. After all, Deleuze (1997: 105) himself reiterates that “the Dividual […] neither increases nor decreases without changing qualitatively.” We feel that one should start precisely from this point of view in order to elaborate effective means of counteracting the experiences of dividuation that subject us to voluntary servitude or make us the objects of mere data sharing. Indeed, as Raunig (2016: 191) points out, “similarity can be negotiated under the aspect of being-of-the-same-kind, or under the aspect of multiplicity.”

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Such a point of view is therefore incompatible with “the idea of role” that—as Appadurai (2016a: 114) notes—“is itself so deeply anchored in the idea of a prior substrate or ground that we think of as the individual.” That point of view could then allow us first of all to question the increasingly sophisticated role-playing that, combined with “financialized dividuation,” seems to paralyze the development of effective means to counter both phenomena. In short, this perspective might enable us to outline some “lines of flight,” to borrow another expression by Deleuze and Guattari (see for instance 2004): on closer inspection, that is what, in its persistent though not obvious working, the dividual has historically often helped us do in the West too, though we did not quite know how to call it. Therefore, it is necessary—and urgent—to engage in a phenomenology of the emerging experiences of dividual relationality, in order to understand how they are configuring the contours of an arising human condition, be it in an overriding direction or in several possibly conflicting ones. For sure, in such a state persistent individuation and emerging dividualities will coexist while clashing with each other and, at the same time, hybridizing in the ever closer interaction with nonhuman or posthuman agencies produced by digital civilization. The proposed anthropology of screens will thus inevitably be situated in an increasingly anthropo-­ decentered universe.

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Taylor, Paul A., and Jan Ll. Harris. 2008. Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then and Now. New York: McGraw-Hill. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Zhao, Shanyang. 2005. The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others. Symbolic Interaction 28 (3): 387–405. Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. Hegel in A Wired Brain. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 7

A Ten-Point Conclusion: For a Screen Ethics

The path proposed so far has endeavored to trace some basic lines running through our experience of screens in their many historical, cultural, and technological variations. However, the long-term genealogical sketch we reconstructed in the first chapters was not inspired by erudite curiosity but rather by the need to better understand the growing importance that screens have acquired with the digital turn, the unprecedented centrality they came to play during the COVID-19 pandemic, and above all certain fundamental features of our relationship with them that the pandemic crisis revealed. In short, we started from that crisis because the problem of pandemics and their consequences on our social life is likely to retain a dramatic topicality in the future, thus urging us to reflect on what that crisis taught us about our relations with screens, which played a decisive role in it. Indeed, the practices deployed in defense against contagion have resorted to screen surfaces of various kinds to enable, at the same time, mutual protection and communication. In particular, the screens of our digital devices allowed not only many people to keep working but also most of us to preserve a network of social relations that would have been unthinkable in other eras under similar conditions, thus making life a little more livable at the time of that global drama. This is why in our introductory chapter we said that the pandemic, by imposing a shocking massive recourse to screens, highlighted a set of

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functions that screens have actually exercised since the very beginning of human history. This brought out the limitations of the “imagocentric” conceptions, still dominant today, which had accustomed us to seeing screens solely as surfaces displaying images, reducing the interpretation of our relations with them to some more or less sophisticated form of spectatorship. When we found ourselves confined indoors because of the virus, we had to recognize instead that screens are apparatuses of action, capable of globally orienting our social interactions and radically reconfiguring our relationship with the spaces, near and far, with which we relate. In this book, to better emphasize this practical-environmental dimension, we worked on two pairs of intertwined functions—showing/hiding and exposing/protecting—that we feel constitute the fundamental anthropological structure of screen experiences. Analyzing the second of these pairs, which is undoubtedly less usual, also served us to show how our screen experiences have always solicited not only vision but the totality of the human sensorium, involving our bodies in their entirety. Indeed, it is from our body—the proto-screen, as has emerged throughout the book— that we humans have progressively externalized screen functions into technical objects made to expose ourselves to, and at the same time protect ourselves from, the world. Besides, in Chap. 6, the centrality of the body is also referred to in the analyses devoted to how some of its organs—the eyes, the skin, but not only—are today being used as veritable screens, or at any rate as quasi-prostheses of connected digital devices for which they serve as interfaces, a term worth bearing in mind also because of its obvious dividual connotation (Giroud 2023). Stressing this centrality of the body has then led us to acknowledge that, since prehistoric times, screens have always been at the center of differentiated, multimodal experiences of mediation with the environment that not only engage but help guide human behavior and decisions. Indeed, the digital turn has only emphasized this fact, extending and perhaps virtualizing possible screen experiences, thus accentuating their environmental dimension, thanks in part to the rapid development of different extended reality (XR) technologies. Indeed, XR is now becoming central to the debate around the metaverse, which we mentioned in point 8 of our introductory chapter. For example, on October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, during the event

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Connect 2021,1 presented his idea of it by contrasting the limitations of the screen, defined as a “little window” (Meta 2021: 2:12–13), with the dream of a new immersive technology capable of offering a “deep feeling of presence” (Meta 2021: 3:02). Such stark contrast, however, reveals the narrow conception of screens that we tried to criticize in our work. Please note: by this we certainly do not mean to underestimate the innovative scope of the various forms of XR. However, we believe that they fully belong in the history of our relations with screens, without representing their overcoming either from a technological point of view (the devices that make those forms possible also employ screen functions) or in terms of the behaviors they inaugurate. Borrowing the expression used by Alexander Galloway concerning computers, we might indeed say that screens “instantiate[s] a practice not a presence, an effect not an object” (Galloway 2012: 22). This is to say that by investing and reshaping perception and affect, modes of cognition, and ways of thinking, they cannot but intertwine with the everyday practices by which we orient our choices and construct ourselves as individuals and as communities. Screen experiences thus refer to the configuration of the ethos that, as human beings, we are developing toward digital environments. Indeed, as apparatuses of action, they pose questions about our lifestyles, the quality of our conduct, and our responsibilities in the face of technological developments that are often incompatible with a collapsing ecosystem. In this respect, an emblematic case is that of “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs), digital objects rendered non-reproducible as they are recorded on blockchains with a hitherto very high energy impact. Having come to the end of our work, we would like to return to some of the points we have dealt with to suggest some avenues for reflection. We certainly do not intend to venture into the territories of a prescriptive ethics but rather into a region whose transdisciplinary character should facilitate the task of sketching a shared ethos—a task that is becoming

1  Zuckerberg’s talk, entitled The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together-Connect 2021, is available on the Meta YouTube channel (Meta 2021). For a first discussion of the talk, see López-Díez (2021).

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increasingly urgent in the face of the social challenges posed by technology and, more specifically, by our lives lived among and through screens.2 In these last few pages, therefore, we do not intend to propose solutions to the many ethical conflicts raised by those challenges. Such an endeavor is undoubtedly essential and urgent, but it would require different conceptual tools than those we have mobilized in this work. Instead, the ten points that follow circumscribe a series of open questions that stand out on the horizon indicated by the anthropology we have outlined, echoing the need to take charge of the impact that screens have on the everyday life of each and the fate of us all. 1. Screen Time As we have seen since our introductory chapter, in common sense, ethical concerns with respect to screens have often been linked or even reduced to the need to regulate the amount of time we spend on them. In fact, in the wake of the suspicions about the “screen civilization” we mentioned in Chap. 4, people usually think that exposure to screens is in itself a problem, the solution to which lies in imposing time limits on their use. This issue would especially affect the younger generations, who would spend too many hours glued to their mobile devices, smartphones, and tablets, in particular. In short, as Shane Denson reminds us, “screen time calls to mind attempts by parents to regulate their children’s use of screen-based media” (Denson 2020: 74). However, the problem seems to be more than just generational, so much so that in 2018 Apple introduced the Screen Time feature in its iOS 12 operating system, intending to enable “more informed decisions about how you use your device, and set limits if you’d like to.”3 This need for regulation certainly highlights an awareness of the risk that displays may end up “warping our subjectivities by implicating us in addictive behaviors” (Denson 2020: 74). However, precisely because screen-based media are now ubiquitous, a simple immunizing stance 2  Since 2012, the eponymous “International Research Group”—founded by one of us at the Université Jean-Moulin Lyon 3 and of which we are both members—has developed multiple collective and individual scientific activities precisely around this formula, in its French version “vivre par(mi) les écrans.” For an archive of these activities, see the website: http://vivreparmilesecrans.wixsite.com/vivreparmilesecrans. Accessed December 19, 2022. 3  Apple, Use Screen Time on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Accessed January 30, 2023. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208982. See Denson (2020: 74).

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seems to miss what is really at stake, all the more so if it embraces forms of “technological solutionism” (Morozov 2013) by merely delegating to those very media the regulation of our exposure to them. Moreover, we cannot forget that—in a life lived among and through screens—relationships, projects, and expectations unravel that can often be expressed solely because of and not in spite of the time we spend on screens, as the pandemic lockdowns have shown us. Techno-repentant psychologist Sherry Turkle herself came to admit this, as we saw at the beginning of our introductory chapter. The idea of responsible screen use cannot, therefore, be exhausted in setting a dedicated time for it but rather refers back to the quality of the lifestyles with which we relate to screens. Such styles can certainly be corrected through time-limiting practices, so long as the latter, while working on how much, address how we live with screens. An emblematic example in this regard can be found in the French TV series Détox, produced for Netflix in 2022 by Marie Jardillier. The two odd protagonists decide to give up the Internet for a month, engaging their friends and family in a veritable training against addiction and the toxic drifts of the Web, ultimately discovering its dangers and opportunities. Similar Internet detox challenges, which are becoming increasingly widespread, do not arise from a simple rejection of this technology but give a glimpse of real “anthropotechnics,” capable of concretely affecting the quality of the time we spend among and through screens. 2. Pragmatics of Screen Experiences The proposal for an anthropology of screens is motivated precisely by the quality of the practices in which they engage us. That is why—as we suggested in point 9 of our introductory chapter—to develop such a proposal we need to focus not so much on the objects as on the functions that come into play in our screen experiences. Hence the importance of elaborating what we have called a pragmatics that, beginning with identifying those functions, strives to describe the multimodal shifting of the communications we have with and through screens and especially the changing relationships between the iconic and verbal components of those communications. In doing so, as we have observed throughout the book, these various functions of screens highlight their practical-­ environmental scope.

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In the digital age, these aspects of screen experiences have taken on not only peculiar connotations but also an unparalleled degree of evidence. In fact, screens show us daily what they are capable of doing and enable us to do, while also revealing their growing independence in relation to our interactions with images. Even irrespective of the latter, we find ourselves continually called upon to interact with—electronic, digital, and even, as we have seen, organic—screen surfaces operating as peculiar “quasi-­ subjects” (Carbone 2019), endowed with their own composite agency. All this makes the need for a pragmatics of screen experiences increasingly urgent and complex. Indeed, since screens are interfaces that establish relations, such a pragmatics is called to deal with the ontology of dividual relationality, engaged precisely with non- or posthuman agencies, which we outlined in the last section of Chap. 6. 3. Operational Thresholds Screens have always been thresholds of contact and transition, porous borders mediating between different dimensions of our being in the world. In this respect, too, the digital shift has thus accentuated their long-lasting character and made it more evident. At the end of Chap. 3, we noted that this transition has once again brought out the status of screens as real operational thresholds while at the same time enabling them to interact more fully with bodies, machines, and environments. In digital contexts, machines react to the user’s own reaction, triggering an interactive dynamic that lasts as long as the  machines are utilized (Vial 2017: 160). In this way, the user participates in developing and reconfiguring the same technological devices that shape their environment (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003: 3–4; De Cesaris 2020: 68). This peculiarity greatly accentuates the practical-environmental scope of life among and through screens. As interfaces, they represent “a symbolic space in which we constitute ourselves” (Drucker 2019: 147). But there is more: in such a space we are confronted with nonhuman and posthuman agencies that inexorably extend screens’ character of “quasi-­ subjects” to the moral realm. Those agencies, in fact, raise unprecedented ethical and political questions that “will not rest any more on a special, autonomous, or permanent domain for humans, in the manner that most Western forms of reason have taught us to expect and assume” (Appadurai 2016: 147).

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The massive use of AI in many decision-making processes makes this even more cogent. Do algorithms really help us make more informed choices, or do they simply pre-mediate the options on the table and lead us to perpetuate our stereotypes? After all, the suggestion service that Netflix offers on the basis of the viewer’s previous selections would lean toward the second alternative (Alexander 2016: 81–100). On the other hand, it is equally significant that it was Facebook’s algorithm through which the wife of one of us discovered an instrument of artistic expression that is particularly congenial to her work. 4. Immediacy/Mediation Posthuman agencies and the multiple possibilities opened up by AI thus present us with the specific way of being of digital devices. In the concluding section of Chap. 4, using Frieder Nake’s ontological model (Nake 2008, 2016), we showed how digital objects, and in particular what we identify as digital “images,” have a twofold nature (2016: 13). On the one hand, they offer themselves to human perception as visible surfaces; on the other, they are constituted by a non-perceivable logical-machinic subface, in which the computational work that generates the visible surface takes place (see Striano 2020b). Clearly, the less perceptible this work is, the more “transparent” the pixelated surface of our devices appears to us. Borrowing another expression from Alexander Galloway, we are thus confronted with the “iridescence” (2014: 40–46) of digital media,4 which present themselves to our senses without revealing the entire process that generated them (Striano 2020a: 53). This iridescence is precisely what fuels the belief that platforms and social networks give us access to a more inclusive public space. Hence the success of political movements, often populist in nature, that take disintermediation as their banner, against classical forms of political representation and the inefficiency of parliamentary procedures. However, as we saw in our fifth chapter, what we call “Transparency 2.0” hides opacities of various kinds, which risk dissolving the real needs 4  In the paper we refer to, Galloway (2014) identifies three forms of mediation by linking them to three figures from Greek mythology: Hermes, who is “the embodiment of communication in the most normal sense”; Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, who “presides over communication as luminous immediacy, and from her we gain the concept of iridescent communication”; and finally the Furies, monstrous creatures that “stand in for complex systems like swarms, assemblages, and networks” (2014: 29).

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for participation and the sincere political interest to which it claims to respond. It carries with it the weight of new forms of power that exploit the rhetoric of disintermediation while—as we will see in point 5—being often intertwined with the economic interests of the platforms used. Becoming aware of the fundamentally ideological character of the imperative of absolute transparency is thus decisive in order to be less vulnerable to the ethical-political challenges constantly posed to us by the sociocultural apparatus in which we have set out to live. Nonetheless, one should not hastily superimpose the pair of mediation/immediacy on that of awareness/unawareness, as if the digital sensation of presence always concealed a deception. Upon closer inspection, it is precisely the absence of intricate mediations that enables immersion in digital environments, facilitating their interactive enjoyment to the point of making them a kind of “second nature.” This can then positively affect social relations by helping to improve many interhuman practices, as in the educational and caregiving fields, while also creating promising prosthetic forms of heightened sensitivity and embodied human agency (see Hansen 2006). 5. Processes of Subjectivation The ambivalence of today’s dominant imperative of transparency has yet to exhaust its effects on the political and social fronts. Still, it dramatically impacts the ethos we individually construct in our existences lived among and through screens. The self-imposed need to expose our private lives on social networks—often spectacularizing them in forms that increasingly transform them into social media (Bogost 2022)—not only conditions us, making us dependent on evanescent forms of external approval, but also consigns us to political surveillance and economic exploitation by the operators of the most widely used platforms, feeding the interests of what Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism” (2019). However, again we must try to escape a false theoretical alternative that, to use Foucauldian terminology, simply contrasts “subjectivation” and “subjugation.” The sheer volume of personal data we entrust to the Web certainly exposes us to surveillance and economic exploitation dynamics. Still, the very real forms of confessionality adopted on screens can also promote practices of subjectivation that allow us to discursively appropriate our identities. Indeed, being present on social networks

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constitutes for many, especially the young and very young, an important opportunity for socialization, facilitated by the protective function of screens. Thus, the types of expression that emerge online—as we saw in Chap. 4—are not necessarily condemned to “the aggressive and compulsive use of the Web” (Montani 2020: 17) but can come to tune in with high levels of reflexivity (Montani 2020: 9). In short, as Stiegler (2016: 23) put it echoing Derrida (1981: 95–117), screens can be considered pharmaka, as this term designates both poison and cure. 6. Control and Care The protective dynamic of screen experiences should also make us think about the complex relationship between care and control that characterizes today’s dominant regimes of visibility. Every social space is woven with surveillance practices, and the tools made available by digital development certainly contribute to increasing their invasiveness. On the other hand, the debate on the resulting expropriation of privacy and erosion of autonomy of choice cannot ignore the fact that the current technological exercise of surveillance also ensures functions of protection and care (Lyon 1994: 219) within our societies. Indeed, a world now populated by eight billion people requires very high and complex organizational and security standards, which in turn are only made possible by optimizing information flows, production, and exchange processes and even urban planning and transportation. The necessity of these measures requires us to rethink some of the concepts often used to criticize the negative effects of the surveillance society, such as those of individual autonomy and privacy, or the notions underlying the distinction between private and public. Such concepts, in fact, were formed in ages very different from our own, making it difficult to transpose them directly to the present day. Hence, it is necessary to identify precisely where the political confrontation related to digital media lies, outside of any naïve and abstract claims of freedom, but also regardless of any form of technological determinism. Thus, to understand the ethical, social, and political potential and dangers associated with the digital turn, it is necessary to accurately identify the aspects on which work can be done and the emerging trends that, by generating resistance from below or at the institutional level, can support the articulation of realistic alternatives.

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7. Resistance and Surrender Any sociocultural apparatus, even of the kind we are talking about, can produce unforeseen and deviant behaviors, phenomena of resistance, counterpower actions, perhaps subversive acts (think of movements like Anonymous or organizations like WikiLeaks), and inevitable occult zones (today, typically, the deep or dark web). These are the clearest sign of emerging counter-conducts that hint, albeit in their limitations, at alternative ways to mere submission to the excesses of surveillance and data exploitation. Again, however, we must move away from the simple opposition between unconditional surrender and radical opposition. Indeed, as Dave Lyon argues, picking up on a distinction by Étienne Balibar (2016), Internet users are not only “subjects to power” but also “subjects of power” (2018: 185), capable of modifying the behaviors they adopt on the Web and thus some of its dynamics. On the other hand, certain phenomena of resistance to it risk resulting in rearguard positions that end up wasting the transformative potential of their own critique. This risk of sterility arises from a particular form of misalignment: the moral instances that motivate resistance are no longer effectively reflected in the practices by which we operate in digital environments. A paradigmatic example of this misalignment is the debate on literacy, which we addressed at the beginning of Chap. 4, or in general the criticism of “screen civilization,” accused of undermining our reflective capacities at their roots. The problem with these interpretations is that they are often grounded in a “Gutenbergian” conception of intelligence and expertise, still tied—according to McLuhan’s seminal insight—to the linear model characteristic of “typographic societies” that are no longer in place today. At a closer look, however, this misalignment has a very broad scope today, and, as we pointed out in the last section of Chap. 6, it affects the entire way in which modern Western culture thinks about human beings. If this ongoing transformation is not taken into account, resistance practices can only get stuck in regressive attitudes inevitably doomed to failure. 8. The Dividual Narrative It is clearly not enough to diagnose the fragmentation of our present— and, predictably, near future—being in the world, pointing to the

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partition and multiplication of personal and social identities in the proliferation of contemporary screens. Instead, we need to take this opportunity to question the very notion of individual identity as it was normatively postulated and codified in the modern West, becoming dominant almost everywhere, so much as to offer an overall meaning to the lives of most. In short, there is a need to question the narrative—or, as we called it in Chap. 5 with Régis Debray, the “ideology”—of the individual, which appears less and less sustainable within the sociocultural apparatus enveloping us. Certainly, neoliberalism continues to focus on it and indeed to exasperate it, enhancing the prospect of competition between individuals, in turn represented as the ones responsible for the success or failure of their lives. But current financial capitalism and the digital revolution are eroding the foundations of that narrative, as we saw in the last section of this book. Does this mean that the notion of “dividual” we discussed there is more grounded in reality than that of “individual?” Some think so, and not without scientific research-based reasons. Francesco Remotti, for example, refers to studies by epistemologists and scientists influenced by Lynn Margulis’s theory of “endosymbiosis.” Starting from the latter’s idea that the principle of cooperation is no less important than that of competition in explaining diversity in nature (Margulis 1998), these researchers came precisely to contrast the symbiosis of mutualistic species within plant and animal organisms (including humans) with the narrative and the very notion of individual (Remotti 2019: 329–330). However, it is clear that broadening and transposing the results of this research as a criterion for the preferability, even in the psychosocial sphere, of the notion of dividual over that of individual is itself a narrative, albeit based on good reasons. Despite what Deleuze wrote in his Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992), the narrative founded on the notion of dividual then turns out to be worth elaborating on. Of course, this would help to recover and liberate the critical sense of experiences of dividuality that were already widely present in our modern era but have been ignored or underdetermined. More generally still, the notion of dividual can be useful to argue for the need of “living together”—an expression that literally translates “symbiosis”—even beyond the case of humans, emphasizing that it is precisely a matter of “living together” (or dying and letting die alone), now more than ever before. Not surprisingly, in Remotti’s book, the narrative based on the notion of dividual ends up landing on that of “con-dividual” to designate

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pluralities that hopefully cooperate in the organization of living beings, both in the organic and in the psychic, social, and ecological spheres (Remotti 2019: 332). His proposal is one that we, for our part, find persuasive. Moreover, we point out that a “con-dividual” is not only a living being as intimately composite (and thus far from indivisible as the individual claims to be), but it could also be the product of a relationship between the dividualities of different living beings. However, it would still be naïve to think that Remotti’s proposal, or others in its stead, would finally enable one to adhere to some objectively established constellation of facts. Indeed, reality is not already endowed with an autonomous meaning outside of the—more or less convincing and shared—narratives, through which we try to correlate facts. And a convincing and shared narrative is what we lack today, more than anything else. 9. New Forms of Identity One should not be surprised by the negative tone with which Deleuze introduces the notion of dividual when describing our condition in “societies of control”, just as one should not be surprised by Appadurai’s sharp criticism of the predatory logic of “financial dividuation.” Indeed, the notion of individual remains one of the cornerstones of Western culture, and the symptoms of its crisis, despite having been evident for more than a century now, continue to arouse a sense of loss and insecurity (see Bodei 2016: 400–405; Taylor 1991). However, it should be noted that Appadurai cautions the reader against viewing his own analysis of that dividuation as an appeal to a “return to the era of the composite (or canonic, or classical) individual” (2016: 102) or as a radical opposition to the vision of the human being crystallized in the category of individual. Along the same lines, we also find it more productive to enhance the positive potential of the concept of dividual and the contribution it can make to interpreting the new forms of identity emerging in the contemporary context, which sees the individual’s fragmentation and at the same time its pluralization. In particular, we believe that the relationship with digital technologies today requires us to think in terms of a constant integration and negotiation between dividual and individual, rather than starting from their preconceived opposition. In this regard, it is sufficient to consider our profiles on social networks and online platforms or how we identify ourselves through biometric data

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to access certain services. Depending on the situations and the relationships we enact, we turn out to be represented in different manners, sometimes even blatantly contradictory to each other. When we ourselves create these profiles, we can easily conceal certain aspects of our existence, facilitated in this by the protective function of screens, or else we can bring different identities into play, depending on the social practices we are engaged in. Even if, in doing so, we do not relate to our self as if it were an “indivisible nucleus” (see Bruno and Rodríguez 2022: 39), we do not for this reason lose our sense of our own singularity nor, as Agamben mistakenly claims, do we merely multiply our masks infinitely in “second and third lives possible on the Internet, none of which can really ever belong to [us]” (2011: 53). Except in pathological cases, in life lived among and through screens, each user breaks down and recomposes the plurality of their representations without ceasing to relate them, consciously or unconsciously, to the continuity of their own existence. To be sure, this brings out much more unstable and volatile identities, which, however, benefit from such fluidity and openness as to enable unprecedented forms of negotiation between singularity and multiplicity. Raunig captured this perfectly by defining online confessional practices, particularly on Facebook, as acts of voluntary “self-division.” Precisely through such dividuation, they produce in those who experience them a “liberating effect of confession” (Raunig 2016: 120), thus satisfying the desire to express oneself, to break the silence, and to become “someone,” that is, after all, someone else. In the storytelling—verbal and iconic at once—practiced on social media, users thus highlight a real need to establish social ties, and their experience of fragmented individuality proves functional in constructing new identities that compose and recompose the relationships made possible by digital environments. Of course, the data one disseminates online enter predatory dividuation processes, in which they are dissected and organized to be exploited economically or politically. However, we cannot forget the other side of the coin: this same data is returned to each user in the form of “personalized” information that can prove extremely important and sometimes even vital. From this point of view, an emblematic case is that of self-tracking devices that are becoming increasingly popular and that can or will temporarily employ some of our organs as their quasi-prostheses. The

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information that those devices collect directly from our bodies certainly fuels machinic profiling processes, which can potentially be commoditized, but it also gives us back fundamental insights into our health, enabling, for example, precision medicine (see Lury and Day 2019: 28–29) or the optimization of life in highly technological settings. More than that, self-tracking technologies facilitate self-work, fostering paths of personal growth and self-improvement that turn out to be genuine “self-care practices” in the Foucauldian sense (see De Cesaris 2022). Once again, though, it should be noted that such practices are made possible by forms of digital control of one’s body and behavior, which feed into datafication processes and the collection of biological parameters that are at one with those of dividuation of one’s relationship with oneself and the world. On the other hand, Foucault himself, long before digital self-­ tracking developed, had described the dividual nature of all self-care practices, stating: “being concerned about oneself implies that we look away from the outside to […] ‘oneself’” (2005: 10–11). 10. New Forms of Sociality In her seminal study on the cultures of Melanesia (1988), anthropologist Marilyn Strathern uses the notion of “dividual” both to indicate that in those contexts humans are considered inherently social beings and to highlight the stark contrast between that conception and the Western individualist one, which would instead separate individuals from society by characterizing them as unique, unrelated entities. The discourse we developed in Chap. 6 intends to eschew such a contrast, going so far as to agree with the suggestion that, even in the West, we have never been individuals (Ott 2020: 166).5 This “ontological reversal,” as Appadurai (2016: 114) calls it, imposes itself on us not only because of its importance but also because of its topicality. Indeed, as the previous point showed, the digital multiplication of personal and social relations is not understandable if we remain entrenched in the category of individual. Instead, this arises through the dividuation

5  A number of recent works (Carsten 2004; Remotti 2009; Capello 2016) also point in this direction, documenting how in fact the modern Western individual has always been less monolithic and indivisible than what is suggested by dominant conceptualizations, particularly in philosophy and law (see Capello 2016: 57–58).

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of identities and the different distribution and sharing of parts of one’s self, depending on the social practices in which one is involved. Of course, as we have read in Deleuze and Appadurai, specific contemporary dividualizing dynamics contain disruptive potentialities. However, to us they are symptoms of the loss of a common horizon of reality mediation that we hinted at in point 8, rather than its causes. The root of this loss appears to lie in processes such as the disproportionate widening of the global wealth gap between rich and poor. On the other hand, by proposing the notion of dividual relationality to read life among and through screens as well as its broader implications on our sociality, we want to highlight that those dynamics also end up producing significant potential for liberation from certain rigid role attributions that Appadurai sees as complementary to the notion of individual. An excellent example of this is what is happening to “gender binaries” (Butler 2007: viii), which Judith Butler set against “a performative theory of gender” (2007: xxxi) already in the 1990s. According to this theory, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” (Butler 2007: xv). This idea of performativity can clearly be profitably applied to the very notions of individual and dividual, raising decisive questions about “the presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent” (Butler 2007: 22). Furthermore, this example suggests how that liberating potential can originate unprecedented forms of aggregation. Appadurai himself seems aware of this when he contrasts the predatory dividualism of derivative finance with what he calls “truly socialized dividualism” (2016: 102). By this term, the Indo-American anthropologist means a type of sociality capable of overcoming the individual’s fixed and possessive identity to liberate, even in Western societies, “new forms of relationship, identification, agency, and solidarity” (2016: 154). In our view, examples of these forms can be found precisely in the social practices that develop on the Web. Consider the case of digital communities united by beliefs and interests that would not find institutional places of expression or that are too far from the mainstream arena to be recognized on a large scale. Admittedly, in some cases these communities can turn into self-referential “enclaves” (Sunstein 2001) and go so far as to foment disturbing negationist or conspiratorial polarizations, as well as online political-religious radicalization (Whittaker 2022). Nonetheless,

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for some minorities the aforementioned kind of sociality represents an important opportunity for subjectivation, as well as for discussion and sharing of their sexual orientations (communities in the LGBT+ galaxy), their hobbies or passion for specific subcultures (fandom), or their conditions of discomfort and illness, as has been the case since 2004 in the now historic American platform PatientsLikeMe. For better or worse, such forms of sociality are made possible precisely by the partitioning of certain aspects of people’s lives and the amount of information that each can access thanks to the decomposing and recomposing of data delivered to the Web. This is not to forget that certain dividuation processes are precisely what fuels the apparatuses of economic exploitation and political control, bringing us back to what we said in Chap. 5 with respect to the ambivalence of surveillance. Indeed, on the one hand, the predatory logic with which the Web’s large corporations exploit datafication would make us think that our lives among and through screens can only submit to “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019), marginalizing hopes for a “non-predatory” dividualism in the sense proposed by Appadurai. Everyone’s screen time would quantitatively feed this exploitation, adjusting people’s behavior to the economic order created by the Web giants themselves. This being the case, what would be the point then of working on the qualitative aspects of that same screen time, as we proposed at the beginning of these conclusions? Such a proposal might even appear as the excuse of those who lack the courage to denounce the encroaching power of the few and their undisturbed accumulation of wealth. However, the other direction needs to be considered as well. As Jonathan Finn reminded us a decade ago, surveillance today is no longer “the purview of police, the state and corporations but […] it is a constitutive element of life” that “requires a self-reflexive look at our own willingness and desire to watch, record and display our lives and the lives of others” (Finn 2013: 79; quoted in Lyon 2018: 175). Indeed, what we heard Han call the “digital panopticon” in Chap. 5 differs from Bentham’s because it possesses a vertical and horizontal structure together. This means that there is not only a “surveillance capitalism” but, in Lyon’s words, also a “culture of surveillance” (2018), that is, a set of imaginaries and practices through which we participate, consciously or unconsciously, in activities of monitoring, tracking, and datafication, to which we contribute as “surveillors” and not merely as “surveilled” (2018: 16).

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This is suggested by the term sousveillance we discussed in Chap. 5, introduced to describe some of those practices such as tracking the private jets of the superrich, filming police brutality, or recording and archiving all of one’s daily activities (see Mann et  al. 2003; Aïm 2020: 181–182). Playing on the reversal of the Foucauldian conception of surveillance, that term is precisely meant to emphasize the active role of users, who can become the enactors of vigilance from below (sousveillance), controlling controllers. In any case, it indicates a possible different use of data, one that is more democratic and participatory and at any rate self-managed. By recalling the protective functions of surveillance, as we did in the conclusion of Chap. 5, we aimed precisely to describe the traits of an ethos of digital environments that would enable users to progressively assume their role as subjects of power in a society that, because of its organizational complexity, can no longer do without datafication. Considering the potential of dividuation, alongside its limitations and dangers, thus becomes an ethical and political gesture aimed at not giving in to dystopian futures but opposing concretely viable alternatives to them. After all, somewhat echoing what Deleuze says of images, being dividual can help bring to the foreground manners of relating to the world that would otherwise remain in the background, blurred, unexpressed, or even repressed. On closer inspection, this is what happened to us by writing this book together: is not sharing writing a form of con-dividuation? The present work is certainly a con-dividual product. As such, it is far from being an indistinct amalgamation of the dividuals involved. Rather, it retains traces of the various ways in which these dividualities have related to each other— culturally, philosophically, politically, but also perceptually and affectively—over the years. We met in person three or four times at most, and only on public occasions, but we have constantly remained in dialogue thanks to the decisive mediation of screens, through video calls as well as emails. So, this book bears the traces of our dividual relations: overcome tensions, established agreements, reached understandings, victorious and vanquished resistances, and sidelined or imposed idiosyncrasies. Undoubtedly, a relationship between purported individuals—accustomed to asserting their fixed personal and social identities—would have produced a different work. We had not planned to write the book together to produce a dividual narrative, but it turns out we could not have found a better example for it.

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———. 2016. The Disappearing Masterpiece: Digital Image & Algorithmic Revolution. In xCoAx 2016: Fourth Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X, ed. Mario Verdicchio, Alison Clifford, André Rangel, and Miguel Carvalhais, 12–27. Porto: Universidade do Porto. Ott, Michaela. 2020. Dividual Subjectivations in the Society of Control. Coils of the Serpent 5: 163–174. Oudshoorn, Nelly, and Pinch Trevor, eds. 2003. How Users Matter. The Co-Construction of Users and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Raunig, Gerald. 2016. Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution. Translated by A. Derieg. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Remotti, Francesco. 2009. Noi primitivi. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. ———. 2019. Somiglianze. Una via per la convivenza. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Stiegler, Bernard. 2016. L’écran d’écriture. In Vivre par(mi) les écrans, ed. Mauro Carbone, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, and Jacopo Bodini, 19–28. Dijon: Les presses du réel. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Striano, Francesco. 2020a. Through the Screen. Towards a Philosophical Mediology. PhD diss. Turin: University of Turin. ———. 2020b. Log.icona. La co-originarietà di lógos e eikṓn riemerge nel digitale. In Immagine e memoria nell’era digitale, ed. Nicola Russo and Joaquin Mutchinick, 77–95. Milano-Udine: Mimesis. Sunstein, Cass R. 2001. Republic. com. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto: House of Anansi. Vial, Stéphane. 2017. L’être et l’écran. Comment le numérique change la perception. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Whittaker, Joe. 2022. Rethinking Online Radicalization. Perspectives on Terrorism 16 (4): 27–40. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

Index1

A Abgar of Edessa (King), 51 Acheiropoieta, 50, 50n18, 53 Actor-network-theory, 143n5, 145n9 Adorno, Theodor W., 114n14, 125 Agamben, Giorgio, 29, 128, 173 Agency, 143, 146, 153, 156, 166–168, 175 Aïm, Olivier, 64n37, 117n19, 122n26, 123n27, 177 Akata, Zeynep, 99n44 Albera, François, 108n2 Alberti, Leon Battista, 30, 46–57, 47n8, 54n25, 59, 61, 110 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d,’ 58 Alexander, Neta, 167 Algorithm, 96, 98, 167 Alighieri, Dante, 29n17 Al Ja’am, Jihad, 99n44 Alloa, Emmanuel, 110n5, 111n10, 114n13, 121 Alphabet, 72, 79

Althusser, Louis, 111n6 Altman, Charles F., 108 Amalia Salvestrini, 88n32 Amy de la Bretèque, François, 35 Analog, 63–65, 64n38, 93 Anderson, Chris, 125n31 Anderson, Janna, 10n9 Andrieu, Bernard, 136 Anthropology, 5n5, 12, 13, 25 cultural -, 107, 150n20 - of images, 12 - of screen experiences, 12, 17–20, 25, 38, 43, 165 Antinucci, Francesco, 76, 77, 88, 93 Appadurai, Arjun, 148n15, 149–153, 153n27, 156, 166, 172, 174–176 Apparatus (French: dispositif), 30n18, 36–39, 90, 90n33, 91, 108–112, 108n2, 126, 127n32, 162, 163, 168, 170, 171, 176 Archaeology, 5, 12, 29, 138n2

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Carbone, G. Lingua, Toward an Anthropology of Screens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30816-1

181

182 

INDEX

Arche-screen, 17–39, 45, 50–51, 55, 61, 79, 80, 83, 110, 126, 139, 140 Architecture, 115n17 Ardor compunctionis, 88 Aristotle, 111, 111n10 Arora, Tanvi, 99n46 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 99, 99n45, 167 Astaire, Fred, 33–35, 39 Athena, 31 Attention, 29n17, 62, 65, 88, 89, 91, 98, 138n2, 144, 150n20, 155 economy of -, 65, 121 Augmented reality (AR), 9, 10, 10n9, 97, 137, 138, 140 Augustine of Hippo, 86n26 Avezzù, Giorgio, 24, 29 Awareness, 164, 168 Azéma, Marc, 35 B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 19 Bach-y-Rita, Paul, 144 Baker, Henry, 57–59, 57n28, 58n30, 61 Ball, Kirstie, 122, 122n26, 123 Barber, Charles, 49n14, 84n19 Baron, Naomi S., 95 Barthes, Roland, 76 Bartlett, Jamie, 117n20 Bartoli Langeli, Attilio, 93 Baschet, Jérôme, 87 Basil of Caesarea, 52, 52n23 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 36–38, 37n24, 38n26, 38n27, 112 Bauman, Zygmunt, 122n26 Baume, Sandrine, 114n13 Beavin, Janet H., 11n10, 11n11 Belting, Hans, 12, 50n19, 84n21, 93 Bencivenga, Ermanno, 75, 75n6 Benkler, Yochai, 121n24 Bentham, Jeremy, 114, 122, 176

Bernardi, Piergiuseppe, 85n24 Berns, Thomas, 124, 124n28 Biblia pauperum, 62, 87, 87n28, 94 Bickerton, Christopher. J., 120n22 Biometrics, 172 Black mirror (Brooker), 108, 112 Blumenberg, Hans, 63 Boal, Augusto, 36 Bodei, Remo, 172 Body, 19–21, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31–39, 32n21, 43, 45, 45n5, 45n6, 50, 63, 135–137, 141–146, 148n16, 162, 166, 174, 175 Leib/Körper, 20, 21 - schema, 145 Boehm, Gottfried, 6, 73, 76 Boethius, Anicius M.S., 147, 147n14 Boétie, Étienne de la, 123, 123n27 Bogost, Ian, 168 Bolter, Jay D., 98, 118 Bonaventure, 88 Book for the illiterate, 84–88, 92 Bouchy, Karine, 26 Boulnois, Olivier, 84n22 Bowles, Nellie, 1, 8 Bredekamp, Horst, 77 Brooks, David, 125n30 Brubaker, Leslie, 84n19 Bruno, Fernanda, 173 Buckley, Craig, 5n5, 18n3, 28 Butades, 30, 32 Butler, Judith, 175 Byzantine, 83–85, 84n20 iconoclasm, 49n14, 83, 84n19 Byzantium, 83 C Caillois, Roger, 17n1 Camera obscura, 30n18, 58, 58n29, 58n30, 61, 61n33, 110 Cameron, Averil, 50n19 Campe, Rüdiger, 5n5, 18n3, 28

 INDEX 

Capello, Carlo, 174n5 Capitalism financial -, 148, 171 industrial -, 149 Carbone, Mauro, 3n2, 4n4, 11n12, 17, 18n2, 20n5, 27n16, 36n22, 62, 79, 136, 151, 166 Care, 5n5, 89, 127, 169 self-care, 174 Carocci, Enrico, 65n40 Carr, Nicholas, 75, 75n5 Carsten, Janet, 174n5 Casetti, Francesco, 28–31, 59n32, 109n4 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog), 34, 35 Chateau, Dominique, 22n8 Chauvet Cave, 35–39, 37n24 Chazelle, Celia, 86n27, 88n30 Chiasm, 31 chiasmic relationship, 18, 19, 30, 126 Chiusi, Fabio, 117n20 Christianity, 47, 49, 50, 62, 82, 83, 83n17, 92, 95, 147n13 Christian image, 50, 52, 53 Christin, Anne-Marie, 25, 26, 27n15, 78–80, 83 Cinema, 12, 28, 33–39, 36n22, 38n26, 61, 63, 64, 108, 112, 142, 149, 149n18, 155 - screen, 33, 39, 61, 63–64, 154n30 The Circle (Eggers, Ponsoldt), 112, 112n12, 117, 120, 121, 125, 126 Citton, Yves, 110n5 Civilization - book, 74, 94, 95 screen -, 74, 94, 95, 164, 170 Clement of Alexandria, 83, 83n17 Cometa, Michele, 45 Communication, 8, 11n10, 73, 81, 113–115, 118–121, 125, 161, 165, 167n4

183

Computer, 64, 65, 74, 97, 98, 107, 131n7, 163 “- screen,” (Computer screen), 5n5, 146n11 Concealing, see Hiding (screen function) Con-dividual, 153, 153n26, 171, 172, 177 Con-dividuality, 153 Constant, Benjamin, 114 Control, 56, 65, 89–91, 113, 116, 123, 124, 126–128, 169, 174, 176 - of power, 113 Copy, 20n5, 61 Corrain, Lucia, 46n7, 61, 61n33 Council of Nicea II (787 CE), 52, 85, 85n23, 86n26 Coupling (French: couplage), 145 Covid-19 pandemic, see Pandemic Crary, Jonathan, 30n18, 58n29, 58n30, 61n33 Cult, 50 Culture alphabetic -, 72 typographic -, 71, 170 visual -, 5, 6, 11, 19, 74, 77, 143n6 - war, 73, 75 D Dagognet, François, 45, 141 Dance, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39 Darras, Bernard, 97n41 Data - exploitation, 124, 170 personal -, 122, 124, 127, 128, 168 Datafication, 64n37, 148n16, 152, 153, 174, 176, 177 Dataism, 125n30 Day, Sophie, 174 Dean, Jodi, 125 De Biase, Luca, 151n21

184 

INDEX

Debray, Régis, 82, 110, 112, 116, 123, 171 De Cesaris, Alessandro, 18n4, 31n19, 128, 166, 174 Deleuze, Gilles, 18n2, 20n5, 90–92, 91n34, 91n35, 122, 148, 148n16, 149, 149n17, 149n18, 151n22, 152n23, 153n25, 154n30, 155, 156, 171, 172, 175, 177 Democritus, 45n5 Denson, Shane, 153–155, 154n28, 154n29, 154n30, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 78n11, 79, 79n12, 169 Descartes, René, 58n30 Desgrouais, Jean, 25n13 Desire, 25n14, 36–39, 36n22, 57, 112, 116, 121–126, 173, 176 arche-desire, 38 Détox (Jardillier), 165 Device, 4–6, 9, 10, 11n11, 22, 30n18, 49, 55, 58, 59n32, 62n35, 91, 96, 111, 112, 127, 138–140, 142, 144, 145, 163, 167 digital -, 8, 94, 98, 122, 137, 142, 145, 153, 161, 162, 164, 167, 174 Diderot, Denis, 58 Digital, 3, 6, 9, 17, 61, 63–65, 64n37, 64n38, 115, 137, 142, 146, 152, 155, 166, 167, 169 - era, 1, 7, 109, 111, 115, 126, 128, 145, 152, 162, 169 Digitization, 64n38, 117n19 Dijk, Jan A.G.M. van, 121n24 Diodato, Roberto, 147n13 Disenchantment, 55 Disintermediation, 98, 112, 117, 118, 121, 123, 167, 168 Display, 17, 24, 53, 61, 63, 95, 96, 98, 108–110, 109n4, 112, 122, 123, 138, 141, 164, 176 Dispositif, see Apparatus

Dividual, 128, 147–151, 149n17, 156, 166, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177 - condition, 146–156 - relationality, 151, 152, 156 Dividualism, 175, 176 Dividuation, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153n25, 154, 155, 172–174, 176, 177 Dividuum, 147, 147n13, 147n14, 153 Donati, Riccardo, 115n17 Dream screen, 37 Drucker, Joanna, 166 Dufrenne, Mikel, 11n12, 143n6 Duggan, Lawrence G., 86n27, 87n28 E Eagleman David M., 144n7 Economy, 49, 50n16 - of attention, 65, 121 E-democracy, 117, 117n20, 118 Edessa, 50, 51 Eggers, Dave, 112, 118, 121 Eikōn, 82n16, 83, 83n17, 84n19 Ellul, Jacques, 72, 73 Elsner, Jaś, 83n17, 84 Emancipation, 114 Empathy (German: Einfühlung), 31–39, 88 empathically connoted, 33, 34 Endosymbiosis, 171 Engels, Friedrich, 110 Enlightenment, 24n12, 57, 113, 114, 125 second -, 125 Environment, 5n5, 18, 20, 21, 25, 27, 30, 34, 74, 98, 115, 125, 141, 146, 151, 152, 162, 166 digital -, 98, 163, 168, 170, 173, 177 Epoche,̄ 2, 11–13

 INDEX 

Epstein, Jean, 142 Ethos, 163, 168, 177 Eugeni, Ruggero, 138n2 Exposing (screen function), 4, 18, 20–22, 24–26, 31, 45, 46, 162 Exposure, 7, 20, 31, 34, 48, 56, 64, 65, 92, 109, 110, 116, 121–126, 164, 165, 168 Extended reality (XR), 10n9, 162, 163 Extension, 44, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145 Exteriorization/externalization, 43n1, 44, 135–137, 141, 142, 144 Eyal, Gil, 119 Eye tracking, 138, 140, 141n4 F Facchini, Fiorenzo, 77 Face, 7, 25n14, 31, 32, 34, 48, 51, 52, 81, 154n30 Facebook, 9, 124, 167, 173 Fake news, 118, 119 Faris, Robert, 121n24 Farocki, Harun, 141n4 Ferraris, Maurizio, 2 Ficklin, Jared, 9, 10 Figure, 20, 20n6, 24, 32, 33, 49, 56, 80, 116, 167n4 Film, 6, 34, 35, 63, 64, 93, 112, 115n17, 117, 143n6, 154 - technology, 64 Finn, Jonathan, 176 Fire, 24–27, 25n13, 27n15, 30, 35 Fireguard, 24 Florensky, Pavel A., 84n20 Flusser, Vilém, 64n39, 72, 72n1, 72n2, 73, 91n35 Forte, Bruno, 62n36 Foucault, Michel, 12, 13, 36, 36n23, 90n33, 91, 117n19, 127, 127n32, 148, 174

185

Fraenkel, Béatrice, 26 Frame, 6, 55, 55n26, 56, 59, 59n31, 61, 108, 110, 154n30 Freeman, Ann, 85n23, 86n26 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 37n24 Friedberg, Anne, 55n26 Function cognitive -, 76 iconic -, 77 medial -, 19, 82 symbolic -, 78 Furies, 167n4 G Gaboury, Jacob, 74, 74n3 Gallese, Vittorio, 6n6, 33, 136 Galloway, Alexander R., 64, 163, 167, 167n4 Gayo-Avello, Daniel, 121n24 Gaze, 4n4, 11, 29, 29n17, 31, 53, 56, 62, 63, 64n37, 87, 89–92, 116, 117, 121, 123, 127, 137 Gell, Alfred, 146 Gender, 175 Genealogy, 5, 5n5, 12, 13, 19, 20, 64n39 Geoghegan, Bernard D., 5n5, 64, 64n39, 65 Giroud, Guillaume, 162 Gleizes, Delphine, 57n28 Global Health Summit, 8 González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 6, 6n6 Google, 137 - Glass, 137–140, 138n2 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 113 Gould, Glenn, 19 Gramsci, Antonio, 107n1 Graphical user interface (GUI), 97, 98 Green, Jeffrey E., 115, 116 Gregory the Great, 86–90, 87n28, 92, 97

186 

INDEX

Greshake, Gisbert, 147 Grespi, Barbara, 43n2, 45n6, 108n3 Grid, 53, 55, 61, 144 Grusin, Richard, 91, 98, 111, 111n9, 118 Guastini, Daniele, 84n21 Guattari, Félix, 20n5, 122, 151n22, 156 Guerra, Michele, 6n6, 33, 136 Gurtner, Daniel M., 49n15 Guscin, Mark, 50n19, 51n20

Hollister, Sean, 138 Hookway, Branden, 4 Hoquet, Thierry, 136 Horror, 24, 28 Huhtamo, Erkki, 7n7, 25n14, 28, 29, 59 Human body, 17, 21, 22, 27n15, 30, 135, 136 Hume, David, 152n24 Husserl, Edmund, 13, 21, 21n7 Hybridization, 5, 24, 63, 64, 136, 155

H Habermas, Jürgen, 114 Hacker, Kenneth L., 121n24 Hadot, Pierre, 46 Haggerty, Kevin, 122n26 Haldon, John, 84n19 Han, Byung-Chul, 109, 119, 122, 125, 125n30, 176 Hand, 18, 21, 21n7, 27n15, 32n21, 36, 43, 43n1, 43n2, 50, 52, 142 Hand-screen, 24, 25n14, 28, 44 Hansen, Mark B.N., 140n3, 168 Harari, Yuval N., 125n30 Harcourt, Bernard E., 122–124, 124n28, 146 Häring, Nikolaus M., 147n14 Harris, Jan L., 135 Head-up display (HUD), 9, 10, 138 Heidegger, Martin, 57 Heraclitus, 27 Hermes, 167n4 Herzog, Werner, 33–35, 37–39, 37n24 Heywood, Ian, 74n4 Hiding (screen function), 3, 5, 18, 20–22, 25, 25n14, 26, 29, 31, 45, 46, 52, 65, 108, 109, 120, 162 Hippocrates, 45n5 Hippolytus, 26

I Icon, 52, 80, 83–85, 86n26, 93 theology of -, 84 Iconic, 50n16, 53, 62n35, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 86, 92–96, 139, 165, 173 - turn, 6, 73 Iconoclasm, 49, 49n14, 52, 53, 72, 72n1, 77, 81, 84, 84n19, 85n23, 89 iconoclastic theology, 84n19 Iconophilia, 49n14, 53, 92 iconophile theology, 83n18, 84, 85 Identity, 9, 128, 146, 147, 150–152, 152n23, 155, 168, 171–175, 177 multiple -, 128, 151 Ideogram, 26 Ideology, 96, 110–112, 111n6, 111n7, 116, 168, 171 Idolatry, 49, 81, 84, 87, 89, 92 Illusion, 3, 34, 98, 110, 117–121, 123, 125, 139 Illustration, 99 Image, 3–7, 9, 20, 24, 26, 28, 31, 64 cult of -, 50, 83, 85 digital -, 64n38, 75, 94–98, 154, 155, 167 discorrelated -, 154 dividuated -, 154, 154n28 electronic -, 63

 INDEX 

moving -, 5, 37, 61, 73 prohibition of -, 62, 80 religious -, 50, 82, 84, 86, 86n26, 89, 92 static -, 61 technical -, 72n2, 140 theory of -, 52, 76, 81n13, 82, 83, 87, 88 Imagery, 108, 121 Imaginary, 3, 27, 61, 176 Imagocentrism, 5, 6, 30, 65, 75, 92, 96, 139, 153, 155, 162 Immediacy, 74, 98, 99, 111, 111n8, 118, 120, 167–168, 167n4 Immersion, 9, 168 Impression of reality, 34, 38 Incarnation, 49, 50, 82–84, 86 Incorporation, 23, 84 Individual, 128, 146–148, 148n16, 150–153, 150n19, 153n27, 155, 156, 171–175 Individualism, 174 Infrared reflection (IR), 140 Interface, 4, 5, 8, 10, 26, 84, 96–98, 141–142, 166 visual -, 142 Intermediation, 112, 118, 120 Internalization, 136–141 Intersection (Italian vernacular: intersegazione), 47, 53, 54, 56 Invernizzi Accetti, Carlo, 120n22 Invisible (the), 4, 7, 20, 46, 49, 50, 52, 55, 62, 80, 82, 89–91, 155 Iris, 167n4 Isis, 46 J Jackson, Don D., 11n10, 11n11 Jackson, Sharon, 143n5 James, Williams, 111n9 Jardillier, Marie, 165 Jaucourt, Louis de, 58

187

Jay, Martin, 54n24 Jesus Christ, 49–53, 62 John of Damascus, 49n13, 51, 52n21 Johnson, Khari, 99 Jouët, Josiane, 3 Judaism, 49 Jewish-Christian veil, 55, 56 Jewish Tabernacle, 47–49, 53, 59, 62 Jewish Temple, 62 Jungherr, Andreas, 121n24 K Kahn, Charles H., 27 Kanizsa, Gaetano, 76n9 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 114 Kao, Cindy Hsin-Liu, 141 Kapp, Ernst, 43n1 Kelly, Kevin, 5–7, 75, 75n7, 94, 107 Kessler, Herbert L., 88 Kinght, Will, 99 Kittler, Friedrich A., 53, 61n34, 71, 74, 95 Klein, Naomi, 8–10 Knight, Will, 99 Kofman, Sarah, 111n7 Körper, see Body Kosslyn, Stephen M., 108 Kotter, Bonifatius, 49n13, 51, 52n21 Kracauer, Siegfried, 28, 35 L Lacan, Jacques, 17n1, 27 Ladner, Gerhart B., 52n23, 87n28 Laplanche, Jean, 37n24 Latour, Bruno, 143, 143n5 Leadership, 116, 119, 120n23 Ledermüller, Martin Frobenius, 60 Lee, Honglak, 99n44 Le Forestier, Laurent, 35 Légasse, Simon, 48n11

188 

INDEX

Leib, see Body Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 58n30 Lember, Veiko, 117n20 Leone, Massimo, 46n7 Leopardi, Giacomo, 4, 7, 27 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 22, 78, 135, 136 Lewin, Bertram D., 37, 37n25 Liddell, Henry G., 44n3, 45n5 Lifestyle, 128, 163, 165 Light, 1, 20–22, 25, 27, 63, 64, 90, 91, 154n30 sunlight, 31 Lingua, Graziano, 50, 50n17, 50n18, 53, 56, 65, 76n8, 81n13, 83n17, 86n26, 115n16, 120n23, 147n13 Linkenbach, Antje, 147–149 Literacy, 72, 170 Lockdown, 1–3, 75, 165 Logeswaran, Lajanugen, 99n44 Logocentrism, 78n11, 79, 87 Logos, 76–84 Lojkine, Stéphane, 47, 53, 62, 62n35 López Díez, Jaime, 163n1 Lorblanchet, Michel, 43–45 Lotka, Alfred J., 22 Lucretius, 27 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 22 Lury, Celia, 174 Lyon, David, 112n12, 122n26, 123, 126, 127, 169, 170, 176 Lyotard, Jean-François, 20n6, 63, 91, 92, 109 M Machine, 73, 91, 96–99, 124, 144, 145, 166 Macho, Thomas, 81n15 Malafouris, Lambros, 22n10, 142 Malraux, André, 152n24 Mann, Steve, 117n19, 177

Mannoni, Laurent, 24n12 Manovich, Lev, 6, 19, 64n37 Mansi, Johannes Dominicus, 85n25 Map, 59 Margulis, Lynn, 171 Mariaux, Pierre-Alain, 88n30 Marin, Louis, 55, 59, 59n31 Maris, Stéphane, 144 Marks, Laura U., 63 Marriott, McKim, 149 Marx, Karl, 110, 148 Māsāk, 48 May, John, 78, 79, 79n12 Mayer, Nathalie, 8 McLuhan, Marshall, 44, 71, 72, 74, 112, 135, 136, 141, 144, 145, 170 Mediation, 3, 7, 50, 52, 56, 96, 98, 99, 110–112, 118, 119, 162, 167–168, 167n4, 175, 177 pre-mediation, 91, 167 Medium, Media, 12, 28, 30, 30n18, 36, 43, 56, 64, 135, 136, 138n2, 141, 154, 165, 167, 169 social media, 110, 122, 168, 173 Medusa, 31 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 10, 20n5, 21, 21n7, 22, 32n21, 73, 144, 145, 150n20, 152n24 Meta, 9, 163, 163n1 Metaverse, 9, 10, 138, 162 Mettinger, Tryggve N.D., 81n15 Microscope, 57–63 Solar -, 58, 59, 61 Microsoft, 142 Migne, Jacques-Paul, 52n21, 85 Mirror, 28, 31n20, 43n1, 108, 120, 120n23, 121 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 74n4 Mishkān, 47 Missfeldt, Martin, 139

 INDEX 

Mitalaité, Kristina, 87n29 Mitchell, William J.T., 3, 6, 12, 12n13, 17n1, 73–75, 82, 82n16, 83, 83n17, 143n6 MIT Media Lab, 141 Mixed reality (MR), 9, 10n9, 138, 140, 140n3, 155 Moffitt, Benjamin, 117 Mondzain, Marie-José, 27n15, 33, 36, 50n16, 81, 81n14, 84n21, 89, 90, 92 Monitoring, 64n37, 124, 126, 176 Montani, Pietro, 5, 94, 169 Monti, Paolo, 120n23 Morozov, Evgenij, 118, 165 Moses, 48, 56, 59 Moure, José, 22n8 Mubi Brighenti, Andrea, 127 Mulsow, Martin, 147–149 Multimodality, 4, 9, 10, 95, 162 Multiplication, 148, 151–153 Multiplicity, 152n24, 153n26 Musk, Elon, 137n1 Mythology, 125, 167n4 N Nake, Frieder, 96, 96n37, 167 Nassim Aboudrar, Bruno, 46n7 Neuralink, 137n1 Neurath, Otto, 97n40 New Testament, 62 Nicephorus of Constantinople, 52n21, 85, 85n25 Nichols, Tom, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 27 Nijhuis, Marta, 46, 138 Noble, Thomas F.X., 83n17, 84n22 Nolan, Jason, 117n19 Non-fungible-token (NFT), 163 Novich, Scott, 144n7

189

O Ocularcentrism, 6, 10, 26, 29–31, 31n20 Ocular power, see Power Old Testament, 47, 50, 52, 80, 81 Ong, Walter J., 78 Ontology, 95, 112, 147n13, 150–152, 150n20, 166 relational -, 150, 150n20, 151 Openness, 110, 111, 113, 173 Orality, 5, 72, 73 Orwell, George, 112 Ott, Michaela, 149, 152, 155, 174 Ouellette, Jean, 49n14 Ovid, 31 P Painting, 21, 24, 32, 38, 38n26, 47, 87, 92, 93, 99, 150n20 Paleolithic, 21, 35, 135, 142 Paleontology, 12, 12n13, 77 Pandemic, 1–3, 6–9, 11, 12, 75, 119, 127, 161, 165 Panofsky, Erwin, 76n9 Panopticon digital -, 122, 125, 176 Parisi, Francesco, 142, 144, 144n7 Pārōket, 47–49, 62 Parry, Kenneth, 83n18 Pars pro toto, see Synecdoche Participation, 77, 113, 115–119, 117n20, 123n27, 148, 151, 153, 153n25, 168 political -, 153 Partition, 47, 146, 146n10, 148, 149, 151–153, 155, 171 Payne, Juston, 138n2 Pech Merle Cave, 43 Pelikan, Jaroslav J., 83n18 Pellegrin, Nicole, 46n7 Pellicle (French: pellicule), 63

190 

INDEX

Peplos, 44, 44n3, 46, 63 Perception, 10, 34, 37, 38, 65, 76n9, 91, 96, 144, 154, 163, 167 Perlès, Catherine, 25 Perseus, 30, 31 Persona (Latin), 84, 114, 147, 147n13, 147n14, 150, 152n24, 177 Perspective, 54n24, 55–57, 118 Pesenti Compagnoni, Donata, 24n12 Pezenas, Esprit, 58 Phantasmagoria, 24n12, 28, 59n32 Pharmakon, 169 Phenomenology, 2, 11–13, 65, 136, 144, 156 Photography, 63 Pictorial, 53, 55, 72, 72n1, 73, 86, 88, 93 - turn, 6, 73, 74 Pinotti, Andrea, 33 Platform, 117, 117n19, 118, 120, 167, 168, 172, 176 Plato, 31, 31n20, 37, 77, 77n10 Pliny the Elder, 21, 32 Pluralization, 115, 125, 146, 148, 151, 155, 172 Poetsch, Christoph, 77n10 Pokorny, Julius, 44n3 Ponsoldt, James, 112 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 37n24 Popartan, Alexandra, 119 Pop-Curşeu, Ştefana, 88 Populism, 120n22, 167 Porretanus, Gilbertus, 147n14 Posthuman, 153, 154, 156 Power, 113–118, 121, 126 disciplinary -, 148 ocular -, 113–118, 121, 124, 126 pastoral -, 127 technocratic -, 124 vocal -, 116

Pragmatics, 11, 11n10, 65, 117n19, 165–166 - of screen experiences, 11, 65, 165–166 Precession, 150 Prehistory, 12, 17, 25, 27n15, 36, 39, 43, 78, 79, 162 - of screens, 12, 17, 25, 43 Prezzo, Rosella, 46n7, 48n10, 49n12 Price, Richard, 52n22 Privacy, 121, 124–126, 128, 169 Propaganda, 114, 117n20 Prosthesis, 22, 22n10, 23, 44, 136, 144, 145 Prosthesization, 44, 63 Protecting (screen function), 4, 7, 17n1, 18–21, 24–26, 29–31, 45, 46, 49, 52, 59, 62, 108, 127, 162, 169, 173 Protection, 7–9, 21, 30, 44, 48, 49n12, 52, 53, 56, 59n32, 65, 87, 92, 109, 110, 126–128, 161, 169 Proto-cinema, 35, 37 Proto-screen, 7, 7n7, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, 35, 37, 43, 45, 63, 162 Prototype, 52, 53, 137 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 121n25 Proust, Marcel, 20n5 Publicity (German: Publizität), 114 Public sphere (space), 114–120, 167 Pupil, 138, 140 center corneal reflection (PCCR), 140 Purgar, Krešimir, 74n4 Q Quasi-prosthesis, 137–145, 149, 153, 154 Quéau, Philippe, 3n3

 INDEX 

R Radar, 64, 64n37 Raffle, Hayes S., 138 Rainie, Lee, 10n9 Randma-Liiv, Tiina, 117n20 Rashid, Raphael, 8n8 Raunig, Gerald, 146n10, 147, 147n14, 148, 153, 153n26, 173 Reading, 6, 75, 86, 86n26, 87, 94, 95 Real-time, 64, 119, 120 Reductionism, 75, 96 Reed, Scott, 99n45 Regime - of light, 90, 91, 91n34 - of speakability, 89–92, 100, 108–111 - of visibility, 87, 89–92, 100, 108–111, 169 Remotti, Francesco, 145n8, 150n20, 152n24, 153, 153n26, 171, 172, 174n5 Representation, 36–38, 37n24, 43n1, 49, 54–57, 59, 77, 93, 111, 119, 140n3, 167, 173 Retina, 137–140 Revelation, 62, 81, 83 Revolution, 4, 108, 109, 115, 148 digital -, 36n22, 71, 107–109, 136, 141 Reynaud, Denis, 57n28 Richelet, Pierre, 23–25 de Riedmatten, Henri, 46n7 Rivero, Gonzalo, 121n24 Rizzoni, Nathalie, 24, 24n12, 28 Roberts, Hal, 121n24 Rocci, Lorenzo, 44n3, 44n4, 45n5 Rodowick, David N., 63, 64 Rodríguez, Pablo M., 173 Rolston, Mark, 9, 10 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 22 Rorty, Richard, 6

191

Rosanvallon, Pierre, 116n18 Rosenberg, Louis, 9, 10, 154 Rouvroy, Antoinette, 124, 124n28 S Sahas, Daniel J., 79 Saleh, Moutaz, 99n44 Sampaio, Eliana, 144 Sandywell, Barry, 74n4 Saury, Jean (Abbot), 24, 24n12 Schiele, Bernt, 99n44 Schleusner, Johann F., 45n5 Science, 30n18, 54, 71 Scopic regime, 54, 54n24, 56 Scott, Robert, 44n3, 45n5 Screen, 3–5, 5n56, 7–13, 11n11, 11n12, 12n13, 17, 18, 23, 24, 108, 163, 177 digital -, 5, 53, 64n37, 73, 75, 75n7, 76, 92–95, 97, 108, 146, 166 electronic -, 5, 93, 108, 146, 166 ethics of -, 161–177 - experience, 2, 5, 5n5, 10–13, 17–20, 28, 38, 65, 71–100, 108n2, 153, 162, 163, 165, 166, 169 fire -, 59 - functions, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27n15, 30, 31, 48, 50, 59n32, 65, 79, 80, 85–87, 92, 93, 100, 141, 162, 163, 165 - genealogy, 30, 64 negative -, 21, 22, 35, 45, 63, 64 organic -, 166 positive -, 21, 22, 32, 33, 45, 63, 64, 79 - studies, 5, 5n5, 7n7, 11 - thinking, 25, 26, 79, 83, 95 - time, 1, 3, 164–165, 176 - woman, 29

192 

INDEX

Screen New Deal, 8, 10, 13 Second nature, 168 Secularization, 76 Security, 128, 169 Seduction, 62 Self, 56, 146, 146n11, 152n24, 173, 175 digital -, 146 - tracking device, 173 Serenus (Bishop of Marseilles), 86, 90, 92 Serres, Michel, 136, 143n5 Servitude emulative -, 123 voluntary -, 123, 155 Servo-mechanism, 144, 145 Shadow, 21–23, 31–39, 43–45, 90, 110 Shaw, Michael, 81n13 Shield, 18, 23, 30, 31 Shielding (screen function), 22, 23, 52 Showing (screen function), 3, 5, 11n11, 17n1, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24–26, 25n14, 30, 31, 45, 46, 52, 55, 56, 65, 79, 85, 92, 93, 108–110, 120, 122, 141, 162 Sign, 20, 32 Similarity, 152, 152n24 Simondon, Gilbert, 22, 22n9, 23, 25, 33, 145 Sinisgalli, Rocco, 47, 54, 54n25 Skene ̄ ,̄ 44, 47 Skin, 43–45, 44n3, 45n6, 63, 137, 141–142, 144, 162 Skinput, 142 Smart glasses, 9 Smartphone, 98, 164 Sobchack, Vivian, 143n6 Society - of control, 148, 172 disciplinary -, 148 Solomon (King of ancient Israel), 47 Solove, Daniel J., 125n29

Soni, Rituraj, 99n46 Sorensen, Lone, 120 Sound, 4, 5, 78, 94, 95 Sousveillance, 117, 117n19, 177 Spacing (French: espacement), 79 Spectacle, 28, 31–39 Spectator, 27, 27n15, 34, 36, 56, 116n18, 143n6, 146 Spielberg, Steven, 6, 6n6 Stevens, George, 33 Stiegler, Bernard, 64n38, 78n11, 79n12, 169 Stoichita, Victor I., 21, 31, 31n20 Strathern, Marilyn, 149, 174 Straus, Erwin W., 19 Striano, Francesco, 96n38, 96n39, 167 Subface, 96, 98, 167 Subjectivation, 128, 155, 168–169 Subjugation, 121–126, 124n28, 168 Sun, 18, 25–27 See also Solar microscope Surface, 3–5, 7n7, 10, 21, 24, 26, 27n15, 28, 31, 32, 45, 47, 47n8, 53, 55, 56, 63, 74, 75, 78, 79, 91, 96–98, 108, 110, 116, 138, 161, 162, 166, 167 pixelated -, 64, 74, 96, 167 Surveillance, 65, 112n12, 117, 117n19, 122, 124, 124n28, 126–128, 168–170, 176 capitalism of, 168, 176 Swing Time (Stevens), 33, 34, 39 Synesthesia, 21, 26, 155 Synecdoche, 43, 45, 108 Szendy, Peter, 50n16, 141 T Tablet, 98, 164 Taminiaux, Jacques, 4n4 Tattoo, 45, 45n6, 141 Taylor, Charles, 55, 56, 172 Taylor, Paul A., 135

 INDEX 

Technical object, 22–24, 22n9, 30, 31, 74, 77, 109, 162 Techno-aesthetics, 22 Technology, 22, 34, 43, 64, 72, 74, 79, 81, 83, 86, 92, 94, 95, 99, 108n2, 135, 145, 163, 164 digital -, 74, 120, 136, 162, 172 portable -, 136 retinal-projection-based -, 139 wearable -, 17, 136 Technopopulism, 120 Teleologism, 28, 35 Teleology, 35, 38 Television, 36, 64, 64n37, 71, 72, 93, 108, 115, 117 Tent, 44, 47, 48 Text-to-image (TTI), 98, 99 Theater, 38, 43, 44, 145, 146 movie, 37, 64 Theme and variations, 18, 19, 20n5, 25, 27, 30, 32–34, 38, 55, 61 Theology, 53, 84, 94 of icon, 52 Threshold, 80, 82, 84, 97 operational, 65, 73, 166–167 Tongue display unit (TDU), 144 Tortajada, Maria, 108n2 Touch, 9, 12, 81, 84, 95, 112, 141 - screen, 4, 8, 141, 142 Transparency, 53, 56, 61, 62, 109–117, 111n10, 114n13, 115n17, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 168 digital -, 99, 123, 125 horizontal -, 113, 114, 118, 121, 126 ideology of Transparency 2.0, 92, 96, 107–128, 110n5 vertical -, 113, 114, 117n19, 118, 126 Trinity, 82, 88 Turkle, Sherry, 1–3, 1n1, 146n11, 165 Typewriter, 144

193

U Uexküll, Jakob Johann von, 20n5 Ungureanu, Camil, 119 Urbinati, Nadia, 116, 116n18 V Van Leeuwen, Theo, 93 Vasiliu, Anca, 111 Vattimo, Gianni, 115 Veil, 46–57 acheiropoietic -, 50, 52 Alberti’s -, 46–57, 61, 110 - of the Temple, 49, 50, 52 Verbal, 76–78, 81, 86, 87, 92, 93, 95, 107, 109, 115, 139, 165, 173 Versatile extra-sensory transducer (VEST), 144 Vial, Stéphane, 3n3, 97, 97n41, 166 Vigilance, 65, 177 Virtual, 3, 3n3, 9, 10, 117, 124, 138–140, 155 - reality (VR), 4, 6, 9, 10, 10n9, 97, 98, 138, 140n3, 154, 155 Virtual retinal display (VRD), 138–140 Visibility, 49, 50, 50n16, 64n37, 74, 79, 83, 90, 91n35, 111–113, 116–118, 117n19, 120, 123, 126, 140, 154n29 Visible (the), 3–5, 7, 20, 31, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56, 61, 62, 80, 82, 90, 91, 110, 112, 155 Visual, 18, 26, 29, 30n18, 47–49, 54n24, 55, 79, 81, 88, 93, 99, 107, 109, 110, 113, 116, 117 Visuality, 5 Volli, Ugo, 48n10, 49 von Rad, Gerhard, 81 Vorobyeva, Olga, 9

194 

INDEX

W Wajcman, Gérard, 116, 123 Wang, Chia-Jean, 138 Watzlawick, Paul, 11n10, 11n11 Web, 165, 168, 170, 175, 176 - 2.0, 117, 119, 120 dark/deep -, 170 Weber, Max, 55n27 Wellman, Barry, 117n19 Whittaker, Joe, 175 Wihbey, John P., 121n24 Wikileaks, 170 Willocq, Jordan, 79 Window, 30, 47, 47n8, 55, 55n26, 108, 110, 146n11 Wolf, Maryanne, 74, 75, 94, 95 Word/image relationship, 30, 72, 75–78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 86n26, 89, 92, 94, 95 World infra-world, 33, 34, 36 quasi-world, 33, 34, 36

Writing, 5, 26, 71–75, 72n1, 72n2, 78–81, 78n11, 79n12, 83, 85, 86, 86n26, 88, 89, 93–100, 150n20, 177 X X-rays, 21, 22 Y Yan, Xinchen, 99n44 Yhwh, 47, 48, 50 Z Zakraoui, Jezia, 99n45 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 115n17 Zeitgeist, 107, 108 Zhao, Shanyang, 146 Žižek, Slavoj, 137n1 Zuboff, Shoshana, 124, 168, 176 Zuckerberg, Mark, 162, 163n1 Zylinska, Joanna, 99n45