This tension indicates that a different mode of analysis is needed to explore the screen. Although the relata-based approach could explain what the screen represents, it could not explain the gap generated between what the screen is and what it does. This chapter will address the tension between the screen’s use and its object by exploring the screen from the perspective of relations. It will establish materiality and agency as productive forces and key mechanisms in the revealing of the screen, discussing the screen-bearing object as provoking two contexts: the ‘for’, as the use- context that underlies the revealing of the screen; and the ‘not-for’ or ‘for-itself’, which interrupts this use-context and reveals the excess of the screen. This chapter looks at the ways in which materiality and agency as processes can support or contest screening. A relation-based approach has a different structure to a relata-based approach. This
section will begin by qualifying the position
of the relation in this analysis, particularly as it involves the context of use. It will then discuss this positioning against the screen’s
disappearance, and define the relations of
materiality and agency, rather than use,
as responsible for defining the differences
between screen relata. The section will
In this analysis, the primacy of the relata and relations in analysis will be inverted. In the relata-based analysis of the previous chapter, the relata were held as a priori entities that enter into a relation. In this way, the relata, by means of their properties, determine the relation. A relation-based analysis will,
instead, focus on the qualities and peculiarities
of the relations – it will look between the relata rather than at them. These relations, however,
will no longer be considered reflexively as
the product of discrete relata, but instead as generative of the relata themselves.2 This
constitutes an inversion of priority – the last chapter looked at relata as producing relations, this chapter will look at relations as producing the relata. The relation here comes before the screen emerges in perception, so that the screen-as-relata is a perceptual ‘reaction’ to the relations discovered.
Chapter one found that the relation of use had a large part to play in how the properties
of relata are defined, but that the screen’s material lay in conflict with its use. The use
relation, then, is not the most appropriate for
finding a relational ontology of the screen.
This tension can be explored further using the concept of the ready-to-hand.
Heidegger gives a definition of things according
to their relation of use and the context in which they arise, as zuhandenheit or readiness-to-
hand. In discussing equipmentality in Being and Time, Heidegger notes that equipment is always in relation to other equipment. Things
do not show up on their own, rather they are
discovered according to an “arrangement” of equipment; a context of other things to
which they refer. A room, states Heidegger,
is encountered as “equipment for residing,” a hammer as equipment for hammering.
The room itself, or the hammer itself, is encountered within this relational context, so it is discovered in accordance with the uses
and contexts to which it refers: “it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered.”3
Heidegger indicates here that the relation between things occurs a priori to the things themselves. However there is a difference between the ready-to-hand and the type of relational approach that will be demonstrated in this analysis. Readiness-to-hand belongs
specifically to the context of equipment, and more specifically to the context of use. 2. In considering relations as prior to relata, this chapter
focuses on indeterminancy – it tries to find meaning before the determination of relata. Brian John Martine outlines that such an approach conflicts with the “determinately biased models” of common understanding, but that this does not mean that indeterminacy is unintelligible. He suggests that better understandings can be gained from “making a place for a certain indeterminacy.” Brian John Martine,
Indeterminacy and Intelligibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), xiii-xiv.
3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Collins , 1962), 98. Heidegger writes: “this kind of Being which equipment
possesses – in which it manifests itself in its own right – we
call ‘readiness-to-hand’. Only because equipment has this ‘Being-in-itself’ and does not merely occur, is it manipulable in the broadest sense and at our disposal… When we deal with them [things] by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character.”
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The hammering does not simply have knowledge
about the hammer’s character as equipment, but it has appropriated this equipment in a way which could not possibly be more suitable.
Martin Heidegger4 I don’t use it like I use other things. If I pick it up, it becomes something else – a phone, a computer. If I look at it, it becomes something else – an image, a filter. If I dissect it, it becomes a myriad of things – a wall and a motor and a light source and a strip of film or a series of binary notations compressed into an array. I can run the motor, I can contemplate the wall, I can touch the phone or type on the computer or look at the image; but what is the screen for?