Irreversibly visual: a technical perspective

Abstract

This paper explores some works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Marie- José Mondzain under the assumption that it is the notion of ‘reversibility’ which is in every case responsible for structuring the experience of visual perception. Whether one takes the incessant switching of the gaze direction between myself and the Other in Sartre; or the ‘overlaying’ (l’empiétement), coincident with ‘dissecting’ the flesh of the world, in the writings of Merleau-Ponty; or even the nonstop traffic of meanings in course of an exchange of opinion about things seen in Mondzain, it can be shown that at the heart of mechanism implied in all such ideas there always is the working of reversibility or, to put it more precisely, of reciprocating movement within the visible field. Since, however, for all the three listed types of analysis of fundamental structures of human perception reversibil­ity appears to be merely ‘technical’, the author proceeds to explicating the said operation by assigning to the technological category a place of its own as the additional necessary requirement of today’s thinking. Basing on data collected through a study of contemporary technological art, she advances the hypothesis that reversibility, once secured by technical means, is bound to put the hermeneutically endless reversibility, typical of the previous period, into the mode of irreversibility. This inevitably has a bearing on the subjective interaction with technology, since it is highly probable that, being endowed with an ability to see ‘all at once’, the one who sees would come into contact with anything new to him.