Re-enriching the Real

If we admit that consciousness’s access to the real is, at least partially, mediated by technics, reflecting on the possibilities of technics amounts to considering those of the real itself. From the theories of the apparatus there emerges a vision of technics which, when it acts in the direction of alienation, carries out a uniformization of the real that contributes to its impoverishment. This tendency can be reversed by the impetus of the artistic gesture, thanks to which technics can initiate a movement from the homogeneous toward the heterogeneous, capable of restoring, within an artificially uniformized real, more natural forms of multiplicity. We find in Adorno the idea that technics, when it becomes culture industry (Kulturindustrie), operates in the direction of a standardization, a normalization – all things considered, a homogenization – of the entities of the real, including the human itself¹. In this, technics, alienated and alienating, impoverishes the real by distancing it from the original richness that Adorno sees in nature. The philosopher considers “the idea of art as the restoration of oppressed nature²,” for rather than representing the real, art presents to the real its possibilities of transformation³. Moreover, the liberation of technics as described on the basis of Simondon in the previous part in fact operates through the injection, by way of the work of art, of a residue of the original “magical thought⁴,” which manages to make other situations, other possible realities, sensible⁵. In the Simondonian conception, the work of art arises from a demand that responds to the presence in the real of “voids that must be filled⁶”: the work is produced “in addition to the already given reality⁷.” For Simondon, art makes “the universe bud, [it] extends it⁸.” In this, artistic creation preserves technics, diverting it from its tendency to objectify the real so as to enclose it “in the tool or the instrument⁹.”

In Flusser, too, one can infer the possibility of an enrichment of the real when art seizes technics. Indeed, for the philosopher, the technical image in its “default” functioning does not show the real but translates onto the visible the conceptual program of each apparatus¹⁰:

[…] in these universes [that of the apparatuses], to each point, to each element of the universe, a concept is effectively coordinated, an element of the program of the apparatus. This is what is revealed most clearly in computers and in their universe¹¹.

What follows from this is a version of the real distorted by technics. However, as we have seen, Flusser’s artist-player experiments, struggles against his apparatus to force it to function outside its intrinsic program. In this liberating process, vision transcends the “machinized” universe to give way to the gaze, in which a human intentionality can find expression. The redundant technical image then becomes informative: it manages to (re)submit itself to “the law of representation¹².” What is at stake in this process is an enrichment of the real through a constructive restructuring of its representation¹³.

Some of the works we have considered bear witness to this counter-movement of technics when it is affected by art, which manages to re-enrich the real, whether or not this passes through its representation.

Indeed, we saw in Predictive Art Bot a universe of multiple and varied content unveiled on the web, counter to the algorithms that try to provide each Internet user with a uniform landscape of opinion. This movement finds an echo in the action of the deranged GPS of Random GPS, when it virtually proposes an infinite number of alternative routes, turning into a flâneur a traveler who would otherwise have followed the single optimal route between a point A and a point B.

The two works we will examine next enrich our apprehension of the real by making sensible forms of materiality of the technological system, whether intangible (such as electromagnetic waves) or tangible (such as data centers and transmission cables). Through these creations, essential links, otherwise concealed, emerge between the technological, military, economic and social spheres.

1. See Marc Jimenez, Adorno, esthétique (A), op. cit.↩︎

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, op. cit., p. 187.↩︎

3. Ibid., p. 188.↩︎

4. This research has observed this process at work within digital creative processes, as considered in chapter 3, for this residue of ”magical thought” can also be apprehended as what subsists of the preindividual in every individual, whether human or technical.↩︎

5. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit., p. 248↩︎

6. Ibid., p. 253↩︎

7. Ibid.↩︎

8. Ibid.↩︎

9. Ibid., p. 252.↩︎

10. A terminological reminder is called for. Indeed, whereas in Déotte the notion of dispositif is opposed to that of apparatus, Flusser does not establish this difference: for him, the two terms are equivalent.↩︎

11. Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, op. cit., p. 93↩︎

12. Emmanuel Brassat, «L’intrusion de l’image technique dans le réel à l’âge des appareils: ». Essaim [en ligne]. December 2009, vol. n° 23, n° 2, p. 37–50.↩︎

13. We mention Flusser here as an example of a mode of thought that sees, associated with the making of the apparatus-based arts, the possibility of an enrichment of the real. Nevertheless, the distance separating Flusser from this research remains relevant: here, the notion of information could not take such a central place, and the image is rather to be grasped as the material expression of a “quasi-organism” (to use Simondon’s words) than as a transparent instance of representation.↩︎