The sensory fold: philosophy of perception and the media
This is the conclusion of my thesis’ chapter that I have posted so far. Below you can find the previous parts of the same chapter:
The Body and the Senses: The Perception of Space
Agent Netwok Theory of Social Space
Virtual Space: What Is It All About?
Narrowing Down the Definition of Space
The sensory fold: philosophy of perception and the media
Although less in detail, this point is made by Anna Munster also, to explain how immersive virtual environment can challenge our body and space awareness by altering the “recognizable rhythms” that we learn over time. In her book, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006), Munster also explores the complex relations that exist between actuality and virtuality, and how actual experience emerges from the ungraspable virtual, through movement and perception.
She refers to Leibniz’s mathematics and to his baroque idea of a vibrating world that is partially captured by human perception. Leibniz’s idea of vibrating continuous change, and his conjunction of “marginal perceptions” with “moments of illumination and clarity” constitutes a break with the strict Cartesian distinction, within affect, between confused sensations and clarity of reasons (Munster, 2006). Leibniz, despite his use of a different terminology, already saw the distinction between virtual and actual, by stating that the “material soul” is able to qualitatively discerns one particular aural perception from the variety of “infinite variation” that exists. His understanding of human perception of space impressively resembles Massumi’s study of perceptive layers, culminating in the event. Munster takes Leibniz as a starting point for her introduction of the concept of fold:
“The baroque universe of Leibnizian perception is one of vibrating events and murmurs impacting upon one another, one in which distinction occurs as a result of bodies contracting particular and clear perceptions into their local spheres.” (Munster, 2006; p.42)
The fold described by Munster constitutes the interaction between the separated though intertwined levels (or moments) of perception and sensation. For Leibniz, these two separated moments are not a unit, but take place in a continuum and do not differ in value, for they depend on each other. This point is essential to Munster’s analysis of perception, for she adopts the metaphor of the fold, also referring to Massumi’s topology, to explain how our experience of reality (that is, the actual concretizations of reality) emerges from the virtual.
The ontological shift from sing to topology
To understand movement in space, to grasp change and transformation and to see one’s body in space has been a struggle for a long time. Massumi explains it with the impossibility of capturing his own movement with the eyes without stopping it and so making it turn into an image. Munster abstracts the idea of movement by describing it as a fold, something that brings two entities together and separate them at the same time. Something, like virtuality, that is not concrete but in its effects. But what is that we seek to capture? From Leibniz to Munster, through post war French philosophy and the architectural shift in the ’70 and ‘80, we become more and more interested in movement and potential transformation instead of fixed images. Munster also identifies this tendency both in architecture and philosophy (Munster 2006; pp. 53). But it does not concern buildings and moving images only, it also reflects on human perception of the body. Our identity (and our self-image) is increasingly defined by changes and in-folding experience, instead of by permanent attributes and fixed images. While Munster refers in her book to Leibniz’s theory of perception, outlining the path that philosophers have taken towards the understanding of space and human perception, we observe that media of representation like photography and video have facilitated the study of our body through the investigation of movement in space. It is just by looking at himself in a videotaped event that Reagan, for the first time, doesn’t recognize himself in the scene he is acting[1].
This tendency, whose starting point Munster identifies in the break between classic and baroque for what concerns philosophy, took over in the media in the XIX century, when Eadweard Muybridge realized a several number of photographic plates as part of a study on animal locomotion, during which Muybridge analyzed the movement of (also human) animals (see fig.1).
Fig. 1, Man running by Eadweard Muybridge
Muybridge is considered the pioneer of motion pictures, but what his work represents is more than a mere technological step forward from fixed image to film. With his photographic technique, he was the first able to capture bright images of a moving animal, which show in a row how the changes in position over a very short period in time compose the action. Probably from that moment, it was possible to observe human body from a different perspective. Finally, through photography techniques that were being developed in that time, a person was able to see his body performing one single action, simultaneously photographed from different perspectives. Also, a very fast movement could be decomposed and analyzed by framing every instant constituting it. This new fashion of representing (and so looking at) the body and movement probably played a significant role in the successive evolution of media of entertainment and communication, but also in other domains like urban architecture, technological experimentation, science and philosophy. In this respect, I want to mention again that Munster, as well as Massumi, observes today a shift in our focus from “position” or “sign” to “topology[2]”. A greater contemplation of change and evolution, instead of the static image, also manifests in the digital media that we use and in the way we deal with information. Information in new media is no longer classified according to fixed ontologies. Instead it is distributed and networked, changeable and always rearranging itself, with no permanent structure. We confer more value on information newness and ephemeral relevance, then on reliability and preservation over time. We lose interest in signs and we move our attention to their topology (Massumi 1998). This new behavior towards information is at the same time a consequence and the generator of an idea of truth that resides in change and interactions between different actors within a network. Within social studies, this idea is well reflected in the further affirmation of ANT.
Actual, virtual, and the infra-empirical space
The tendencies that I described in this chapter are interrelated and can be interpreted as a step forward toward the investigation of reality, a “next move” in exploring the reality of things that are, rather than just another way of organizing information. Trying to grasp movement, the changing nature of things is not solely a negative refusal of the modern ideals of knowledge and progress. This new way of interpreting reality offers a possibility to acknowledge the virtual that is part of the real, and can never be fully understood or even perceived. A result of this ontological view is not only the denial of absolute knowledge, but the acceptance of a reality that is more complex and manifold than we can ever perceive or comprehend. As a matter of fact, the opposite virtuality and actuality refer to the multifold complexity of reality that we can never perceive at once, and the singular concrete experience that we are able to encounter and conceive. Like I mentioned before, according to Massumi (2002; pp. 155), what we see is an addition to reality. This would mean that what we perceive as real is a product of the encounter between the flow of sensation and our body moving and acting in it. Vision, he argues, gives back more than is actually given in the first place (and at the same time excludes all other possibilities by producing one single actual experience of reality). So, the real in its totality is somehow impossible to grasp. What we see (or hear, taste, etc.) can be considered as a hyperreality, because it is never only what is, rather what we think it is, and therefore it varies from context to context, from time to time and from person to person. Consequently, if we relate Massumi’s idea of overseen to the concept of hyperreality as theorized by Baudrillard, we could see the latter as the result of the propagation of these multiple overseen actualities, dressed up as real objective representation of what is.
What is the relevance of these observations to our perception of space and to our relation to the body today? In my opinion, in the predominantly visual culture that we witness now, a reflection on the sensorial interconnections demonstrated a long time ago by the Gestalt psychology and exhumed by Massumi is exactly what we need to draw our attention to the entire body as a perceptive entity, instead of focusing only on visuality. This concerns the realm of the media, but also architecture, art and other cultural domains.
Massumi evidently brings us a step forward than Gestalt psychology, by highlighting the role of proprioception and interoception, which are particularly relevant to an analysis of space-time perception, and so offering a different interpretation of perception, distributed over interacting layers rather than centrally synthesized by the brain. Moreover, with his reflection on human perception Massumi addresses the subject-object relation between spacetime and the body, and adds new depth to the discourse on virtual vs. actual reality. Experiments realized in the context of the Gestalt psychology have shown that even when we seem to rely on one of our senses alone, or on one of the layers that constitute our perceptive experience (for example vision or sound) the rest of our body is also actively shaping our perception of what we see, and is building up experience and storing information that will eventually be used again in others situations that somehow relate to the specific episode that we are dealing with. Massumi uses this somewhat outdated observations to reflect on how actual experience emerges from the virtual. Not only the complex interrelations that take place between exteroceptive senses, but also proprioception and interoception affect our actual experience of reality. So, movement becomes an essential element of our perception, because through movement actuality emerges. Moreover, the role of memory and experience define the intensity of perception, for the event is enriched the more it is stratified. In the quote reported below, the interplay between body and spacetime is described in his powerful accumulation of the virtual, where the fold described by Munster appears in its greater complexity, produced among others by the back and forward oscillation between actual experience and suspension of spacetime, a gap that Massumi also calls the infra-empirical space.
“The body without an image is an accumulation of relative perspectives and the passages between them, an addictive space of utter receptivity retaining and combining past movements, in intensity, extracted from their actual terms. […] In its spatial aspect, the body without an image is the involution of subject-object relations into the body of the observer and of that body into itself.” (Massumi, 2002; p. 57)
Different perspectives of the body, both as subject and object[3], and what exists in between, accumulate overlaying each other. Still, they remain separated. This accumulative experience creates a new spacetime, where the body is nor subject or object, because all the distinct moments of actuality relate to each other instead of relating to the actual reality that produced them. The process of transformation then, the body without an image, becomes in a spatiality that is only its own; Massumi calls it also incorporeal interval of change, the event.
New media technology today constitutes a significant portion of our experience of the world and of the activities that our body performs on a regular basis. Therefore, new media interfere in the dialogical relation that we constantly maintain and adjust with the sensorial flow produced by the environment and with ourselves, through our senses, our proprioception and our visceral experience. New media have evidently changed our behavior in (physical) space, and technology has always played an important role in our cognitive process[4] (Heim 1993). Technology can be seen as an extension of our body, mostly functioning as a supporting agency during the accomplishment of a given task[5]. For instance, technology has shortened distances while we travel or communicate; it has filled our homes and lightened the load of several daily tasks. In order to integrate technology in our lives we adjusted our body, we adapted and refined our skills and we learned to cooperate with the machines that we produced. In the technological landscape, new digital media are mostly considered as two-dimensional, concentrated on the auditory and visual channels. However, their presence in space and their influence on our body cannot be excluded from the user experience. Proprioceptive sensations of the body lying or sitting, hands typing or scrolling, temperature, amount of movement, (lack of) smell and taste, even visceral reaction to remediated signals become part of the experience and affect our performance even if we are not fully aware of it. Some of the basic relations between senses, as described by Massumi (2002) and by Gestalt psychology before him, might be weakened or altered by the digital remediation of reality that we experience today, and so upset our functioning in space. But more importantly, what role do the media play in the process of unfolding actualities? What is their place in the infra-empirical space? Do the media make this process more or less evident? Do they constitute an obstacle or accelerator of this process? And how does this affect our experience of space and time, and our self-image?
[1] Brian Massumi explain this example in detail in chapter 2 (Massumi 2002)
[2] This term is used here to indicate the continuous deformations of objects.
[3] It is almost impossible to avoid the parallel with Muybridge’s multiple simultaneous perspective of the human body, that becomes explicit here. Massumi’s body without an image could be seen as an evolution of a research domain that has been initiated more than a century ago.
[4] I am not stating that technology shapes society more than society shapes technology. Since it is clear that technology is produced by humans, with this affirmation I want to draw my attention to the less evident inverse process. Technology too has a part in shaping human behavior and cognition.
[5] Although it has been often considered as opposed to human nature (Heim 1993; p. 60-61)
