Empty Digits
In an essay entitled “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable” Lyotard is concerned with the growth of photography and its negative impact upon ‘painting’. Lyotard’s text was written in 1988 and thus we can say that with the digitalizing of photography the situation has become furthermore complicated because with the click of the button we now instantly can frame reality without the need for ‘development’. The camera is no longer a unique apparatus, as with the explosion of wireless communication we also find the rise of camera cell phones, with which anyone can instantly frame reality an ‘share’ it with someone else at almost any conceivable distance.
Painting becomes philosophical as realistic painting no longer has a viable meaning to it since the camera can capture much greater realism and realistic depths; this also can be done independent from the user as is evident from space exploration through photographic probing. There is no longer the possibility of a great painting of this or that landscape because with a single click the landscape become ‘instant’. The greatness of Da Vinci is meaningless in the digital age because his great anatomical precision is pointless since we have greater realization (representation) through high definition lenses and macro photography etc. Best of all, there is no worry about missing anything because the instantiation of digital photography is almost as close as one could literally get to ‘now’.
To this we may now also add digital videography, especially since technologically there is no longer any real difference in production since almost every digital camera is capable of capturing video; by far the greatest limitation one may encounter these days is that of available memory and of course the higher the demand on quality (the more highly defined we wish to be the capturing of ‘reality’) the greater the demand on memory. The thoughts expressed by Lyotard in his 1988 essay remain the same however, namely that all becomes a matter of techno-science and as such aesthetics (properly speaking) becomes a neglected issue.
The whole of the representation of the real inevitably impacts the whole of epistemology, so what is problematic about the ‘nounification’ of ‘the digital’ is that truth becomes distorted: truth becomes that which can be captured within the framework of digitalization. With this we thus find that the question of truth and the whole field of epistemology becomes reduced to fit within techno-scientific paradigms and methodologies. The danger here, is that more and more there is the danger of forgetfulness, that reality becomes nothing but those instances of digits and we come to forget/neglect the dwelling of those digits; or the emptiness which lays between them.
But what would life be without emptiness? And not just life, but even the rigor of physics is impossible without the virtue of the empty, since there would be not much left if we were to take away all the emptiness residing between particles, atoms, molecules etc; so in a rather unforeseen manner there is a virtue to be found in Heidegger’s notion of the nothing as expressed in his “What is Metaphysics?” because it is indeed through the empty that there can be physical unfolding, particular interaction etc.
Even if we just think in terms of our digital pragmatics, that ever increasing need for memory and storage is precisely due to the need for emptiness; unfortunately we tend to dwell in zones of comfort so we tend to forget the notion of the empty. That which enables us however to capture reality is the presence of emptiness and as such when we buy a new memory card or hard drive etc what we are truly purchasing is emptiness. The increasing demand for higher storage is nothing but an increasing demand for expanded emptiness and as such the irony is, that with all the consumerist ‘fillings’ driving all of our ontological awareness to oblivion, we have this constant subconscious drive for that in which truth truly resides, namely the empty.
The greater the demand for ‘realistic representation’ (?), the (even) greater demand for emptiness, an issue of techno-scientific comfort often makes us neglectful about, especially because technology is always in anticipation of possible demand (and limitation) and as such for the most part we are never aware of limitations because we never truly encounter them; there never is the appearance of a horizon but just some passing flux catching us unaware.
Where does art fit in these digital times? Concerning painting, the answer given by Lyotard is that with the rise of the Avant-Garde we have this new question: “what is painting?” so inevitably what is implied by Lyotard is that artistic resurrection relies on the meaning of representation. The whole idea, not just behind Avant-Garde but behind all of art is simply put an inquiry as to what is the image (any image in whatsoever form); and what is the production of the image, how does it arise? From what? What we thus find, is the doctrine of the empty in which an image can only arise where previously there was none; so it is not just a question of hermeneutical depth, it is not about a particular interpretation or a theory of correct interpretation; rather in the vain of Derridaen Deconstruction, it is an issue of constant re-creation and re-actualization; so the idea is not of interpretation but rather of continuation. This is not just an affirmation of Heidegger’s “where do we stand today?” but rather we have an addition: Where do we go from here?
Needless to say that the immediacy of the answer is always singular: to future! Yet as common sense as the noun ‘future’ may be, it is an idea far from understood because to begin with, the concept ‘future’ always implies a suspension of the instant, a suspension which cannot be grasped through ordinary means of representation. What future demands is precisely this allowance of the empty. At first hand we might be tempted to think this means a suspension of ‘to live’ but on the contrary what is meant is a full submerging in the grammar of living because the true meaning of ‘to live’ always implies a temporary suspension of being-at-hand and as such the problematic situation posted by the digital age is this mistaken notion of ‘the instant’, or placed within more techno-pragmatic terms, the problem is the forgetfulness of ‘the click’. But what goes on in a click? What is the meaning (actual precision) of the instant?
Especially in the world of nutrition we deal more and more with this word ‘instant’, we deal with it so often that we have become unaware of its meaning; more precisely, we tend to be unaware of the process of the instant, we forget that the custard still needs a little stir, yet this stir (simplicity of procedure) is of vital importance, since otherwise you will have a liquid with a powdery bottom. The techno-science of comfort, however, makes men oblivious to any such ‘stirring’ (or clicking; and the blame is not just against the capitalizing of the ‘consumerist tradition’ but more importantly it lays with the consumer who buys into it all). We could say, that perhaps we have come to a state of too much capital sublime-sation, in which we have come to a comfortable state of forgetting direct action verbs such as ‘to click’ or ‘to stir’.
What we like to forget is that there is no such thing as self-evidency! Instantiation is useful because it may lead to immediate politicization; in his essay on representation, Lyotard does not really go deeply into surrounding socio-political issues concerning the immediacy of ‘framing’ the now, but such implications should be obvious enough. The politically viable (the deliberate etc) is nothing but the immediate topic of concern and as such in the landscape of modern day politics we find little room for philosophy because essentiality philosophy never does deal with such immediate framing, rather in all honesty philosophy deals with the ‘act-ion’ of framing, thus philosophy is always about the grammar of ‘acting’ (the conglomeration of language and living); so in essence, to be philosophical means to go to the utmost depths and distances found within a verb such as ‘to write’, ‘to paint’ or ‘to think’.
The affirmation of philosophy is that it does not necessarily presuppose the interlocutory situation in the same way as other arts; so ‘to think’ tends to stand apart from ‘to compose’, ‘to paint’ or ‘to write’. As a result however, there is the mistaken notion that thinking is mere leisure; it is easy to fall into such a trap for even Einstein got his ‘inspiration’ from a simple and leisurely thought. So perhaps we are mistaken concerning the deeper meaning of leisure and we can even ask if we can ever truly be at leisure. So what does it mean to be at leisure? With this in mind we find ourselves in a sphere mentioned by Husserl called the ‘life-world’; the pity is of course that Husserl himself never witnessed the techno-scientific postulations of the period following his own.
The life-world of Husserl is an understanding of direct intuition; what Husserl has in mind is a Nietzschean re-understanding of philosophy, a movement away from systematization and hence in all honesty a movement back to nature. By all means however, the concept of nature goes back to Spinoza, nature is not just that which is present, that which is physical, but more importantly nature is the entirety of Being (or for Spinoza, the concept of God is identical to the concept of nature), so ultimately there is no difference between existence and essence, and as such the aim of Spinoza’s thought was to re-introduce a ‘rightness’ of thought, a movement away from mere consciousness. Strictly speaking, what this means is that never is there anything separate, but all of reality is always a whole, as such the problem of mankind (the problem of consciousness) is one of inadequacy; the ‘rightness’ of thought as such, is the emergence of thinking as a true activity of both mind and body. The problem of consciousness is that it tends to be prone to emotional upheaval, something from which true thought should steer clear, thinking should be pure and hence should not linger on sadness and impulsive reactivity.
The problem arising through photography and digitalization, the idea of ‘framing’, is identical to the problem of consciousness and the forgetfulness of techno-science as such is the act of framing, of theoretical constructions which take precedence over what Husserl’s thought is the intuitively given. What we thus find is the neglect of intuition if favor of a global consciousness; a specific mode of framing which tries to prevent the formation of thoughts (of thinking).
The relationship between the empty and the questions of ‘writing’, ‘thinking’ ‘painting’ etc is thus simple put as follows: what does it mean for anything to arise?
Every image always implies emptiness! The idea of emptiness is twofold, first there is the act of inscription, something arises where previously there was nothing; secondly the very idea of framing gives rise to a dualism of the inside and the outside. The frame is in a certain sense symbolic for the surrounding emptiness and gives rise to the becoming of the question as to what remains outside. The image never comes to an end because the emptiness of the outside brings forth the continuation of the inside; if we have a picture of half an object, then this object finds its continuation in the emptiness found outside. The problematic of the digital imposed upon the epistemological is thus the mistaken notion that there can be such a thing as a framing of reality.
Due to techno-science, photography is no longer dependent on precision and measurement, so the feeling of the human photographer is the idea of a greater accuracy in capturing reality; in other words there is the mistaken idea that reality is direct and self-evident, that the act of framing shows all there is. There is however neglect of what happens outside the frame; something brilliantly shown by the filmmaker Michael Haneke in works such as “Benny’s Video” or “Cache”, in which he deliberately ‘shows’ the life outside of the frame by giving a fully fixed frame and have the action take place outside of this frame; thus you can hear something take place but there really is nothing to see since the action is away from the framed reality. This of course brings us back to Spinoza’s devaluation of consciousness in favor of thinking; consciousness is never complete yet enjoys the pretense of totality, thinking on the other hand obeys the Heraclitean flux and always is on the move. If there is a correspondence between Heraclitus and Parmenides, it is precisely this fluctuating move towards something unreachable, or the realization that always there is something elsewhere, something left outside. Consciousness on the other hand grasps something and calls it ‘the real’, so if we have an image, then it’s framing becomes and immediate instant, yet this immediacy bring us to the oddity of a sound traveling from behind us, how does that audible instant work into the visual instant? There is a clear difference concerning the ‘immediacy’ of the instant, a difference which ordinary videographical framing generally does not pick upon (and hence the extra audible gets reduced to being mere background noise) and as such we come to forget the richness of what dwells outside the frame of consciousness and with this we come to forget the fullness of self as presented through the stream-of-consciousness (ironically so called).
Consciousness, as such, is a rather idyllic notion, the framing aspect of consciousness is hence similar to old fashioned aesthetics of ‘beauty’ stuck in a neo-platonic formalism; the philosophy of the stream-of-consciousness on the other hand, is best exemplified by the sudden interruption of an air raid siren; imagine a perfect picturesque landscape and then suddenly traveling from behind there is the intrusion of an air raid siren, gunshots, mortars etc. Yet this idea of ‘intrusion’ is exactly what reality is about, something that can never be captured in the act of framing, because the framing aspect delimits the living pulsations of reality. Reality does not obey a strict formalism but rather keeps itself in balance though the idea (the life) of an abstract quirkiness; an idea best exemplified through atonal music where often one comes to encounter abrupt passages coming seemingly from out of nowhere.
There is another essay by Lyotard which is entitled “Obedience”, which rather than with painting deals with music and composition; especially the compositions of Varese are important here; and what we find here is an idea in which ‘beauty’ becomes a movement away from any kind of Telos; so sound comes to speak for itself and no longer has to obey certain teleological formalism. Needless to say of course that we may transport this same idea to literature, especially to something like Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” where words come to dominate over any kind of coherent story/narrative; a similar idea is to be found in an idea of my own which I call “Fractal Flash”, to have an exponential complexity arising from a simple image; an idea perhaps indebted to Zeno’s paradox, the more we zoom in on the active dynamics of the stream-of-consciousness, the more we move away from the original ‘pulsation’ (or imagination).
In conclusion, the problem facing aesthetics is that we must not become too dependent and fall into technological ecstasy because it makes us forget about essential humanity (a theme most interestingly worked out by Frank Herbert in his landmark Dune saga). By becoming overtly reliant on the digital, we forget the enormous stream-of-consciousness and the true virtue of what it means to express; and it is here we come to find the importance of Modern Art and that world “Avant Garde”, if there is a common idea running through different streams of art, it has to be this moving away from the immediate reliance on constructed reality into an aspect of a plurality, in which the world has many faces. The world is not a sterile postulation but rather is something living which interacts with us as we interact with ‘it’; so the living world becomes a complex dynamics of different actions and interactions which cannot be understood with a mere click of the button.
The image of interlocking cogwheels comes to mind, because the way they operate is precisely by means of the empty insertion between the teeth; with the digitalized construction on the other hand, we often forget there is emptiness in which we may find continuation and extension. Question concerning aesthetics always remains questions concerning the omnipresent transformation of ‘from nothing into being’. What art in general must stand strong against, is the consumerist instant, art must dare to express that which comes in honest and genuine unfolding; and to not be concerned with public reaction. If we are to concern ourselves with a notion as vague as truth, then we should not allow ourselves to be content with the instant, because the truth of the instant is only momentarily, we must transcend the temporarity of framing and have the courage to dwell in the infinity of a living and breathing world in which nothing is ever self-evident but in which all becomes worthy of unfolding thought.
Orlando; January 2008