Am I an active subject, presiding over passive objects? Or does the object preside over me as well? Can it only afford, or can it assert?
Perhaps, instead of affording mobility, the phone
suggests mobility. Perhaps it is not just that I can pick
it up, but that I’m invited to pick it up. Perhaps I’m even persuaded, or forced. I might find myself holding my phone out of habit, without any intentional action toward it. Why did I pick up the phone, my phone, instead of something else? Did it make me? I might find that its positioning in relation to my body, “always accessible, ready to hand,”53 acts as
more than an affordance. I can trust it, as it’s always near me. It responds to my requests in predictable ways, it acts for me in a space I can’t get to without it. It’s by my side and on my side.
Trust, response, action. Is this a ‘real’ change, or simply a change in language? It might be that the object is no longer passive, that it holds a sort-of
agency. Or at the very least that I perceive in it a sort-
of agency. And, if I do, would I then begin to treat it as some sort-of other, something that I might have to negotiate with rather ‘use’?
I acknowledge that my phone has a role in our relation. If I ‘give’ this role to the phone, though, it becomes less ‘mine’. It is removed a little from the relation of ‘use’, just by means of expressing its role in this use. Is it still a screen, then, if it is removed from our relation of use?
The screen as object
Examination of the subject-object dichotomy within relata-based analysis reveals a doubling of the screen relatum into the nonmaterial screen that can act; and the individual, material screen that is acted upon. This internal split in the screen is needed to maintain the separateness of the dichotomous pairing along with the potential for a reciprocal relation. This split correlates to an embedded methodological difference between a screen as encountered and a screen as a generalised understanding. On the one hand, the screen is revealed as highly effectual – an effectivity which negates the materiality of the screen-as-relatum. The screen here is a nonmaterial container: a site, a repository, a mediator or, indeed, nothing but an effect itself. On the other hand, the screen acts as a suggestion of the use to which it could be put, triggering
the subject into recognising potential needs and desires that could be fulfilled by the object. In
this second case, the screen is considered materially; it is dissected into parts and expresses its role in the use relation by means of these parts. On the one hand, an effect without materiality, on the other hand a materiality without an effect.
In discussing the subject—object dichotomy, agency and materiality have reoccurred as important to the ontology of the screen. These two relations will be considered further in the discussion of the second dichotomy pivotal to understanding the ontology of the screen: the virtual—real dichotomy.
52. Verbeek, What Things Do, 171.
53. Kirsty Best describes the “handiness” of portable devices such as smartphones as being linked to their success in the marketplace. The devices are “technical actors,” worn on and subsumed into embodiment relations so that they “easily become appendages.” Kirsty Best, “When Mobiles Go Media: Relational Affordances and Present-to-Hand Digital Devices,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34, no. 3 (2009): 404.
The virtual and the real
The second dichotomy I will discuss is that between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. I will begin by examining the screen’s role in mediating the real and the virtual before establishing the
difference between the real and the virtual as a question of materiality. I will then examine two
roles for the screen between these spaces – as a separator and a connector – and what each of these implies for screen ontology.
Simulation and the threatened real
Jean Baudrillard notes the screen as having a distinct action on the ‘real’. In the opening of
Simulcra and Simulation, Baudrillard describes Borges’ single-paragraph fable in which the Empire creates such a perfect map of itself that the meanings and effects of the thing and its
representation collapse into a single form. Baudrillard is quick to point out that Borges’ tale
relies on a direct relation between the ‘imagined’ map and its ‘real’ referent; one that he believes no longer underpins reference in his time. Simulation, for Baudrillard, threatens the real rather
than describing or abstracting it; it “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’.”54
Simulation, for Baudrillard is a technology or force that works upon society by ‘realising’ the
imaginary and consequently threatening the ‘real’. The challenge that simulation poses means
that the ‘real’ is unrecoverable, because the differences between this ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’ have been eroded through processes of realising the imagined, and vice versa. As Baudrillard
puts it, “the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as
the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer
possible.”55 The dichotomy itself is what is at stake in this analysis – the loss of the other through which meaning is defined. Baudrillard anchors his conception of meaning in the determinate
‘othering’ of one term with another, and takes the oppositions between these others as granted – the real is graspable because it is not imagined; the imagined is graspable because it is not real. But importantly, both the real and imagined pre-exist any interaction between them. When the imagined becomes realised (a term that is read here as materialised) as a simulacrum, the
distinctions between the terms are negated and meaning is lost: “Nothing separates one pole
from another anymore, there is a kind of… collapse of the two traditional poles into each other…
an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins.”56
54. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 3. 55. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 19.
Baudrillard looks upon this lack of distinction negatively– finding it untruthful in the face of
a predetermined reality. Importantly, ‘realisation’ is only possible because the imagined, as
a relatum, holds predetermined or innate qualities that make it imagined. ‘Realisation’ must
therefore be an act of force, something that intentionally alters the relata from its innate position. This act not only threatens the imagined by not letting it remain imagined; but it also
threatens the real through the loss of its other – “the real… is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore.”57 The ‘real’ has lost the other by which it is defined.
Materialising the imaginary
So what role do screens play in this spatialisation and materialisation of the imaginary? Baudrillard discusses two types of screen media – TV and cinema – and takes a different view on their respective roles in simulation’s collapse of meaning. I say ‘screen media’ here because, following McLuhan, Baudrillard does not separate the screen from the systems that perpetuate it, the objects that hold it, nor from the content that is shown.
Television, for Baudrillard, reaches the limit of indeterminability in the “indifferentiation of the active and passive.” This same lack of differentiation is not apparent to Baudrillard in the more direct references of the cinema, which is said to retain an “intense imaginary.”58
Baudrillard conducts a strange discussion of the material here. The TV, an object placed in interior space, enclosed and three-dimensional, presents content that bypasses the imagination and, along with it, any sort of material engagement; either with image or object. In place of this engagement, a form of hypnosis. In this sense, in a similar way to Debord’s analysis, the material instance of a television is reduced to a support for the image, and the socio-political system that perpetuates it.59 The cinema, by contrast, whose screen consists only of incident light
projected onto a plane, becomes material and ‘honest’ by virtue of retaining engagement with the imaginary, and so retaining the simple image-referent relation that Baudrillard establishes as primary. Technological materiality is concisely set up here as unconnected to material effect. 57. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2.
58. Baudrillard writes: “It is necessary to speak of the cold light of television, why it is harmless to the imagination… because it no longer carries an imaginary and this for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. By contrast with the cinema, which is still blessed… with an intense imaginary – because the cinema is an image. That is to say not only a screen and a visual form, but a myth, something that still retains something of the double, of the phantasm, of the mirror… nothing of this in the ‘TV’ image, which suggests nothing, which mesmerises, which itself is nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head.” Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 31; 51.
59. Debord’s spectacle makes material the immaterial; but any materiality that supports it is merely a support, not tangible in its own right. In this sense, “the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 36.
Baudrillard makes this lack of definable materiality even clearer when discussing
hypercommodities, where he also pulls this totalising relation into the screen per se: “no relief,
no perspective, no vanishing point where the gaze might risk losing itself, but a total screen
where, in their uninterrupted display, the billboards and products themselves act as equivalent and successive signs.” The screen qua screen is now shown anywhere the image lands, and its tangible properties (as relatum) are almost indefinable, such that “the hypermarket cannot be separated… from the whole town as a functional screen of activities.”60 In this sense, it is the
image that is active. The power of the image to turn anything on which it lands into a screen negates the real, as the real object (as plane or commodity) that preceded the screen condition is rendered non-present.
A negation
There are echoes here of the ‘disappearance’ of the screen that were found in the subject— object analysis. However, the process described by Baudrillard is more active process. It doesn’t involve a perceptual mechanism but an active negation of material ‘realness’ by something nonhuman. The power to negate is given to the image, which overrides the materiality of that onto which it falls. The image negates the wall, the furniture object, the device by actively replacing their materialities with its own. The negation described by Baudrillard is well marked in the discussion of screens. McCarthy cites television particularly as central to debates about placelessness and virtuality in Modernity, with its impacts being described using terms such as
“derealisation.”61
Using this rhetoric, it is not only the screen-as-relatum negated by the virtual, but the condition of the material itself. The effects of the screen, then, are not limited to the subject—object relation, but are also concerned with spatial relations. The encounter now occurs instead through the screen and towards the spatial.
This distinction is, perhaps, an arbitrary one, as it could well be argued that space is a component of all interactions of people and things.62 Heidegger’s conception of Being involves
an inseparable play of spatiality and temporality within the discovering of things within the
world. Things, Heidegger states in his lecture “The Thing,” are disclosed in the bringing-near
60. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 75-76. 61. McCarthy, “From Screen to Site,” 95.
62. Ihde’s discussion of technological relations always involve three entities rather than two: technology, person, and ‘world’ or the person’s external relations. This is the sense in which I use ‘space’ – spatial relations for the person are an external relation to the world, outside of an immediate person-object interaction. Heidegger speaks of three entities in his relation of perception: “the world and dasein and entities-within-the-world are the ontologically constitutive states which are closest to us.” Martin Heidegger,
of the world. ‘Nearness’, here, is not intended in the sense of a proximity in extended space, but in an involvement in the world. Spatiality comes about within a concerned involvement
with the world and its references. However, the screen makes spatiality specifically at issue by
marking a difference in its constitution, separating spatiality from personal involvement. That is, spatiality is not generated as part of an ongoing involvement in the world, but something that happens to a person.
Heidegger acknowledges spatiality being at issue with the screen in stating that “the peak of the abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television.”63 The qualities of the
television that allow this impact on space is its severance of spatiality from the human. Rather than allowing distance to be brought near in circumspection, the television presents distance as closeness. It thus eliminates distance – not purely by means of showing it as close, but by means of taking the process of nearing away from the person, eliminating their spatiality. For Heidegger, the space disclosed by the television is not properly spatial, because it does not allow a person to draw the world near, thus revealing its references. The space given by the television, and the space which Baudrillard discusses, exists as a relatum before the encounter between
person and screen. Although not quite a Cartesian space, its pre-existence to the encounter is
what allows it to be fundamentally shifted as a result of the encounter. A ‘real’ space is ‘de- realised’. The spatial is split through this derealisation, founded on a pre-existing sense of space – into the ‘real’ and the ‘not-real’, or the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. The fact of a difference between these spaces is then taken as granted.
Mediating the real and the virtual
The term ‘virtual’ is often used to refer to the image; a visual, digitally produced space. Rather than accepting the term in this contemporary usage, Friedberg follows the term’s origins in optics, arriving at an understanding of virtuality as a perceptual condition involving materiality.
She defines ‘virtual’ as “of, relating to, or possessing a power of acting without the agency of matter,” noting that the term ‘virtual’ describes a representation that “’functionally or effectively but not formally’ of the same materiality as what it represents.”64 The real, then is according to its inverse – the ‘real’ becomes that which possesses a power of acting specifically through
matter.
63. Heidegger, “The Thing,” 163. Nearing, for Heidegger, is a way of situating ourselves within our involvement. By drawing things near, things are revealed according to how they concern us. This reveals our concern along with the things, and contextualises us in relation to those things. It is in this sense that the spatial is generated – by drawing things near, a world unfolds as things distributed according to our concern.
64. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 8, 11. Note here that Friedberg refers to the agency of matter rather than the subject per se. The
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