when someone knows nothing he learns something

The ontological shift from sign to topology

To understand movement in space, to grasp change and transformation and to see one’s body in space has been a theoretical and artistic endeavor 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 separates them at the same time.  But what is it that we seek to capture? From Leibniz to Munster, through postwar French philosophy, the study of photographic images and the architectural shift in the 70′s and 80′s, we became more interested in movement and potential transformation instead of fixed images. Munster also identifies this tendency both in architecture and philosophy (Munster 2006: 53). However, 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[1]. By looking at himself in a videotaped event actor Ronald Reagan, for the first time, does not recognize himself in the scene he is acting[2].

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 19th century[3], when Eadweard Muybridge realized a several number of photographic plates as part of a study on animal locomotion, during which he analyzed the movement of (also human) animals (see fig.1).

Fig. 1, Man running by Eadweard Muybridge (1880)

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, rather than just another way of organizing information. Trying to grasp movement and the changing nature of things is not solely a rejection of the modern ideals of knowledge and progress. This new way of interpreting reality offers a possibility to acknowledge that the virtual is part of the real, and can never be fully understood or 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 comprehend. As a matter of fact, the opposites 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. As mentioned above, what we see is an addition to reality (Massumi 2002:155). 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 what 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. I argue that what we see, hear, or taste might 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 is the result of the propagation of these multiple overseen actualities, dressed up as real objective representation of what is. Although Massumi and Baudrillard’s two studies arise from two distinct areas of inquiry and belong to two different levels of interpretation, they become related to each other through the role of new media in our perception of reality. Baudrillard’s hyperreality is based on how our consciousness can be shaped or at least influenced by different media. Massumi offers a useful model to identify where exactly in the process new media act on our perception, where it is not only a bodily experience but also a cultural one.

What is the relevance of these observations to our perception of space and to our relation to the body today? In my opinion, in our predominantly visual culture it is necessary to reflect on the sensorial interconnections demonstrated by Gestalt psychology and exhumed by Massumi.  This field of thought draws 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 brings us a step beyond Gestalt psychology by highlighting the role of proprioception and interoception, and so offering a different interpretation of perception as 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 other situations that relate to the current sensory episode. Massumi uses these somewhat outdated observations to reflect on how actual experience emerges from the virtual. Proprioception and interoception affect our actual experience of reality in addition to the complex relations that take place between exteroceptive states. 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 below, the interplay between body and spacetime is described as a powerful accumulation of the virtual.  Here 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 additive 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: 57)

Different perspectives of the body, both as subject and object[5] and what exists in between, accumulate over each other. Still, they remain separated. This accumulative experience creates a new spacetime, where the body is neither subject nor 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 in the body without an image becomes in a spatiality that is only its own; Massumi calls it also incorporeal interval of change, the event (2002: 57).

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, while technology has always played an important role in our cognitive process[6] (Heim 1993). Technology can be seen as an extension of our body, mostly functioning as a supporting agent during the completion of a given task[7]. For instance, technology has shortened distances while we travel or communicate; it has filled our homes with material goods and lightened the load of daily tasks. In order to integrate technology in our lives we have adjusted our bodies, adapted and refined our skills and learned to cooperate with machines. In the technological landscape, new digital media are mostly considered to be 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, smell and taste and their lack thereof, 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 the senses, as described by Massumi (2002) and by Gestalt psychology before him, might be weakened or altered by the digital re-mediation of reality that we experience today, thus upsetting 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?