Technovisuality

Cultural Re-enchantment and the Experience of Technology

Helen Grace, Amy Chan Kit-Sze, Wong Kin Yuen, Helen Grace, Amy Chan Kit-Sze, Wong Kin Yuen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784530341
• eBook ISBN: 9780857739193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

How should we regard the contemporary proliferation of images? Today, visual information is available as projected, printed and on-screen imagery, in the forms of video games, scientific data, virtual environments and architectural renderings. Fearful and anti-visualist responses to this phenomenon abound. Spread by digital technologies, images are thought to threaten the word and privilege surface value over content. Yet as they multiply, images face unprecedented competition for attention. This book explores the opportunities that can arise from the ubiquity of visual stimuli. It reveals that 'technovisuality' - the fusion of digital technology with the visual - can work 'wonders'; not so much dazzling audiences with special effects as reviving our enchantment with popular culture. Introducing a new term for an entirely new field of academic study, this book reveals the centrality of 'technovisuality' in 21st century life.

Section 1
Wondering

1
The ‘Thousand-Mile Eye’ and the Image-less Elephant: Imag(in)ing the Universe in Eco-poetics and Philosophy

Wong Kin Yuen

The concept of ‘technovisuality’ does not have to be limited to modern times. Yes, all of us must have been fascinated by the wonders that modern technology such as cinema can do to our way of seeing things. So a sense of ‘cultural re-enchantment’ should already be in place, if we care to look back at the very virtuality embedded in the history of human perception, and how it has always been made possible by technology itself. This chapter, therefore, proposes to reconstruct a ‘plateau’ on which the classical ‘seeing’, as attested to by Chinese landscape poetry, can be ‘precessed’¹ together with the contemporary philosophy of cinema, and particularly with Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image in his two cinema books.

This chapter argues that the classical Chinese concepts of technology, perception, imaging and so on, all have characteristics pertaining to a cinematic process, which can in turn contribute to our further understanding of Deleuze’s philosophical cinema.² Deleuze’s theory of the cinema can also be read into his ecoethics, which can be further substantiated by its counterpart in a Chinese cinematic poetics of nature that I will outline here. By ‘highlighting’ (here as an image of physics, image and thought) such an odd coupling – indeed, a monstrous cross-breed³ – between, say, the Daoist and Buddhist philosophy of the natural wilderness, on the one side, and Deleuzian becomings, primordial difference, intensive science, territory-milieu, affects and so on, on the other, my ultimate aim in this chapter is to extract an ecological problematic ‘field’ of certain ‘transversal communication’ between the human and the nonhuman.

We may start by remarking that there is nothing unnatural about technology, or we can say that there is actually such a thing as ‘natural technology’ in the world; as Deleuze writes, ‘Artifice is fully a part of Nature.’⁴ To a certain extent, visuality has always been technological since the beginning of time, if we take technology to mean primordially ‘machinic’ in the Deleuzian sense. Visuality is possible only by a process in which the mechanism of perception, body, object, the Bergsonian image, light and movement all have a part to play within the perceptual ‘field’. From Bergson, Deleuze thinks of cinema as a machine that can make use of the matter of the brain (memory) to construct a better brain, to ‘make a machine to triumph over mechanism’.⁵ In terms of modern science, the ‘natural link’ between vision and light can be seen as a source of amazement; we can be re-enchanted by the enigma of quantum physics where the visual field becomes an ocean of forces, particles, molecules, action at a distance, non-locality and wave-function.

This enigma has now succeeded in reminding us of the existence of ‘natural technology’ which has always been there. After all, the whole of Deleuze’s geophilosophy focuses on ‘machinic thinking’, since his ‘ethics aims to vitalize technology’ in order ‘to open up and potentialize science and technology to the internal evolution of matter all the way down’.⁶ It would be too linear for us to say that humans invented tools and language, since it is in fact a kind of non-linear, ‘nuanced’ dynamics that has been at work. After Heidegger delineated it as the essence that has a revealing power of things, technology is now taken as something that is not on a par with ‘the technological’. It may not be life itself, but it can be considered at least as ‘both an extension of life’s potential – so that writing is an extension of the brain – and a transformation of life’.⁷ After all, ‘the mechanic is the cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb’.⁸

As for the Chinese ji 機, technology seems to be the fundamental technicity of all things. Signifying the very Dao of life, its intensive and obscure ‘distribution’ of cosmic energy and life-forces could well be something like Deleuze’s desiring machine. In both Zhuangzi 《莊子》 and Liezi 《列子》, we already have the phrase ‘species have ji’ 種有幾, designating a process of biological transmutations with technicity, hence the famous phrase, ‘the myriad things all come out of ji and all go into ji’. This is followed by the Confucian Commentary (Xici Zhuan)《繫辭傳》 of Yijing 《易經》 where we see ‘by ji, it’s the minuteness of motion’ 幾者, 動之微; and then ‘knowing ji, what a wonder’. 知幾其神乎! Besides tianji 天機 (heavenly technicity) and shengji 生機 (life machine), all have retained the element of ji as a cosmic pattern or tendency as the primordial mechanism of life-giving force, not unlike the Deleuzian sense of cutting and imaging. Here, for both the Chinese ji and Deleuze’s desiring machine, technology is ‘any repeatable or regular practice that maximizes the efficiency of life itself ’.⁹

The Chinese ji, scientifically speaking, is also a threshold, a ‘critical’ or ‘tipping point’ of phase transition in a complexity moment where order and disorder transform each other at the edge of chaos. It works parallel to the Chinese concepts of shu 數 、 (numbers), li 理、(reason), qi 氣、(breath), xiang 象 (phenomena); all of these reach back to the xiang shu 象數, expounded in Yijing. Ji can actually be the technoscientific approach to ecoethics within Dawkins’ idea of memeplexes. Ji refers to those minute changes at a critical moment of divergences and bifurcations where living and nonliving things interact in what biologists call ‘intercellular oscillations’.¹⁰ By and large, ji can finally be considered to echo Deleuze’s idea of ‘dark-precursor’, ‘abstract machine’, ‘line of flight’ and ‘quasi-causal operator’,¹¹ and Deleuze is clear on this when he says:

This state of affairs is adequately expressed by certain physical concepts: coupling between heterogeneous systems, from which is derived an internal resonance within the system, and from which in turn is derived a forced movement, the amplitude of which exceeds that of the basic series themselves.¹²

Remember Fenollosa and Ezra Pound and their fascination with the Chinese ideographs? Along with the modernist poetics of imagism, Chinese poetry became known to the West for its being remarkably pictorial and imagistic, with spot-lighting, using super-positions on overlapping planes within one single character and among characters, arrayed say, between couplets. Remember the character ma 馬 (horse), and how the Orientalists were amazed by its dynamic rendering of both form and movement all at once? Well, they would have been truly enchanted, had they been informed about the visual perspicuity of the character xiang 象 here in our case. Xiang in ancient forms started out as vividly pictorial, as one looks at an elephant on the side. Xiang retains the montage cuts of imaging for both shape and action, forming the kind of cinematic technology that so inspired Eisenstein.¹³

Xiang xing 象形 (from elephant form to resembling form) as a term points back to itself as the origin of the ideograph, the kind of drawing or inscription approximating the myriad things. It expressively demonstrates the very act of constructing Chinese language in a technical way, on the one hand, and directly relates itself to the montage structure as imaging forth the universe and the emergence of thought, on the other, since things, lines and colours are the roots of thought. With its pictorial and sound systems, the Chinese ideogram should be qualified as Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘sign’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Stephen Zepke points out:

Signs do not, on this account, appear as signifiers or as representations, but as particular assemblages of material forces and functions stratified into relations of content and expression. This understanding of the sign is therefore ontological, because it puts the sign back into contact with the material and vital plane of consistency that constitutes it.¹⁴

When the Chinese think of thinking, they can go back to the process where a heart (心 xīn) is always fashioned as the base support of appearance or form (xiang 想).

But how did an elephant enlarge its reference to such a cosmic dimension? What was the path of transition for xiang to mean both an elephant as a noun, and as a verb, comparing, analogizing and symbolizing at a later stage? Finally, together with ying as ying xiang 影象, how are we going to turn this Chinese image of imaging, or rather image of becoming-image, into both movement-image and time-image as expounded by Deleuze? For answers, we would need to refer back to two different versions of the familiar proverb of the ‘Four Blind Men Touching an Elephant’. This popular story unjustly puts down affects and percepts by assuming the reliability of affections and perceptions, by having the blind men volunteer their opinion on the ‘whole’ of an elephant too hastily. Ironically, this proverb unwittingly touches on the possibility that with things that get too big for human comprehension, imagination (virtual images) can come to perception’s aid. In fact, in the classic Han Feizi 《韓非子》,¹⁵ it is noted that, since ancient people rarely got to see the living elephant, they had to resort to conjecture of its form from its dead bones, hence what they did in their imagining was from then on called ‘xiang’ (translation mine). Two elephants put together, as it were, as in the expression xiang xiang 象象, now come to mean ‘to describe by analogy the universal phenomena, the former being a verb and the latter, hsien xiang 現象, the noun, phenomenon itself. What is more interesting is that the analogical nature of such has been made clear by the concept of xiang wăng 象罔 in Zhuangzi (shapeless or formless Image).¹⁶ In this parable, the personified ‘Knowing’, ‘Seeing’ and ‘Debating’ all failed to retrieve the Dark Pearl (truth) that the Yellow Emperor had left behind. Finally, the Fuzzy Image was sent, achieving what the other greater powers had failed to do.

Here, the elephant-becoming-image is transformed into the Dao itself, becoming imperceptible as a zone of indetermination. As we will see later, this Daoist concept is close to Deleuze’s simulacrum as an image of, say, human art, since as a copy, it ‘harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and reproduction’.¹⁷ Rodowick explains that ‘Simulacra are better understood as heterocosmic forces rather than utopian worlds. Between each measure of time there is an infinite movement, so many possible worlds and immanent modes of existence, that we must recover from time’s passing.’¹⁸

Xiang Wăng has been annotated by scholars as an image...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction: Experiencing Wonder: Technovisuality and Cultural Re-enchantment
• Section 1: Wondering
• Section 2: Perceiving
• Section 3: Experiencing
• Bibliography