technical images and linear text

“Apparatuses are… not superhuman but subhuman — bloodless and simplistic simulations of human thought processes which, precisely because they are so rigid, render human decisions superfluous and non-functional” (Flusser 74).

In honour of Vilém Flusser, who in his later years refused to purchase any books, instead quoting from memory and the books that were given him as gifts, this shall be a sparsely cited essay on the nature of the human condition. My goal is not to respond to Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, but rather to undertake a certain sort of exegetical expansion, whereby I shall be using some snippets of his work to trace the framework for my own thoughts. Flusser’s notions of the system and the apparatus are incredibly useful ones, and yet their implementation in this work might make these very concrete and analytically distinct categories seem quixotic and ambiguous. And so, in the tradition of Flusser’s own philosophical investigations, as well as Deleuze’s philosophical technique of ‘buggery,’ I will be employing Flusser’s concepts in a more analytically specific fashion that is at once implicit in Flusser’s text and altogether my own.

When Flusser states that the photographic ‘universe’ functions as a “feedback mechanism for the reprogramming of society,” it becomes immediately clear that his interest in photography extends well beyond the basic issues of artistry and mimesis spoken to by theorists of the photographic content like Sontag, Barthes, or most others. His text is one which, rather tellingly, contains no images; the ‘content’ of the image is entirely bracked in Philosophy of Photography. This is in part a McLuhanesque move, in that Flusser is seeking to ‘bracket’ the question of content in order to interrogate more thoroughly the nature of the photographic form and its social context; to consider the place of photography at what McLuhan, following Bernard Lonergan, called the ‘empirical level of perception.’ This is necessary because of the same classic opposition of form and material to which Flusser speaks in The Shape of Things. As creating beings, humans are necessarily posed to ignore form in favour of content; the particular table simultaneously obscures the tableness of the table, and its table-function — it becomes a wooden platform for putting things on, and the change in patterns of human existence marked by this form, ‘table,’ are obscured as somehow ‘natural.’ But the table is the furthest thing from natural, indeed, as opposite to nature as a ‘thing’ can be. And this leads us to the implicit question of Philosophy of Photography, which is the relation of the human being to the apparatus.

The table is no apparatus, however, but instead a structure. And the system, it seems, is something of an entirely different character. And so before we can begin to consider the relation of the human to the apparatus, we must situate these disparate but similar concepts in a more coherent framework.

The first premise of that framework is this: that the condition of humanity is a condition of precarious balance between Nature and the System, two poles which (like all binary oppositions) are not in fact opposite. This is to say, that the distinct nature of human Being, rather than Being-as-such, comes from the fact that our Being is not entirely reducible to Nature. Rather, human history is the story of naked apes carving out an Other to Nature, that first and totalizing system which accepts no such Otherness. The structure and the apparatus are both distinct subsets of the larger set of systems.

First, though, the system itself requires definition. The system is simply put, a human strategy which overlays nature and regiments an organic chaos according to the functions and positions of its component parts. The human in a biological sense is merely a complex of systems, with the endocrine and central nervous systems being themselves merely the functions of the system of evolution, itself dependent on a position within the solar system, and ultimately the system of the universe itself. The system is a natural order; one must recognize first, however, that the system as such is not the product of Nature, but the product of the human encounter with Nature. Nature itself has no systems, or types of being, but merely is; all order which is supposedly seen ‘in’ nature comes from a human systematization of the precession of natural states. The significance of the system is that humankind is compelled to impose meaning on nature; we cannot relate to nature qua nature, but must regiment it according to our own notions of order. The system is therefore an organic development, the primary instantiation of which was language, or more specifically parole or speech, whereby humanity ‘naturally’ regimented an array of utterances into a system of intersubjective signification, which is the foundation for all future systematization.

If parole is the primary instance of the system, however, then langue is the primary instance of the structure. The system is an organic human construct overlaid upon a natural state of affairs, and although the system of language provides the foundation for both system and structure (the system of parole represents the metaprogram by which all systems are programmed), structure has its own distinct character. Structure is a synthetic human construct with no relation of equivalence to any natural state, exemplified of course by writing — graphein. Parole is an organic system which is nevertheless too chaotic for the needs of a centralized and regimented society, and which thereby needs to be supplemented by the inorganic rigidity of the structure of writing. And so, as the system of speech underpins the systematization of the natural world, so too does the structure of writing underpin the structuration of the human world (to borrow Giddens’ useful term). The structural equivalents to the nervous system and solar system are the structures of medicine and commodities, respectively. Of course, this does not imply that the two worlds are in any sense hermetically sealed; indeed, as I will be going on to show, cross-pollination between these two realms is in fact the problem.

The last concept at issue is that of the apparatus, the definition of which is quite simple: an apparatus is a functional structure. So whereas structures like language, commodities, or medicine are generalized structures which we as human subjects effectively inhabit (to paraphrase Le Corbusier) and which enable a wide array of activities, apparatuses are specific structures to which we relate in a capacity of use, or equipment (Zeug). The apparatus is a teleological structure, one which serves to make ready some object in the world. This of course begs the question — to ‘make ready’ for what? This is the problem which Flusser seeks to address in Philosophy of Photography.

The answer, it seems, is that the apparatus serves to make the world ready for further structuration; “as they extend they reach further into the natural world and tear objects from it more powerfully and quickly than the body could do on its own.” (23) There is at once something tremendously underwhelming and tremendously problematic about this discovery. The underwhelming part is that this ‘tearing-from-nature’ is what defines the human condition; our very ‘unnaturalness’ is our natural place within the world. To be human is to systematize and construct meanings from the chaos of the natural world, and to propose that we should somehow allow ourselves to be determined by ‘our nature’ is in this sense delusional. And yet to propose the opposite is perhaps even worse.

This is why I say that the human condition is one of a precarious balance. The anxieties expressed in our postmodern parables about robot uprisings and the like stem from a realization that in a world governed by the logic of the structure, the robot is the ideal. And so while none of us pine for the days of swinging from trees and picking lice from our acquaintances, and thus ought not to argue for a regression to a natural system, we must recognize that human conduct is increasingly governed by structural logic. As Flusser states, “previously the tool was the variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the variable and the machine the constant” (24).

The image which opens this piece is Matthew Barney’s Field Emblem, a symbol which he uses throughout his work. The oval bisected by a straight line represents the culmination of Barney’s almost Lettrist drive toward symbolic purity; the line in effect represents the imposition of a human conception of order onto a natural state of affairs. I use the symbol here for its profound evocation of the overall human condition as described by Flusser. That is, the human condition is one in which we must walk the middle path between the monkey and the robot, a condition of balance between our organic nature and the Other to nature we have carved out for ourselves. The structure is a subordinate form of system, constructed by humans for instrumental purposes; when the contingent structures of human organization are elevated above the organic systems from whence they came, we run the risk of making the entire system of human beings subordinate to its own structures.

I will get into photography stuff more specifically in my paper, using these preliminary definitions as my starting point.