December
“An Odd Couple: Vision and Truth” – Tamalone van den Eijnden
Frank Kessler’s session of Transmission in Motion on the 13th of January, the topic was “Media and the Reconfiguration of the Senses” with a special focus on vision. During the session, we were presented with several philosophers who somehow engaged with the topic such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Béla Balázs, Vilém Flusser, and most notably Marshall McLuhan. We also discussed different forms of mediation as used for phantasmagorias, the stereoscope but also film, all of which were speaking to the senses, predominantly vision. I was especially fascinated by this constant negotiation of whether what we see is true, whether we can trust our eyes or whether our vision should be deeply mistrusted. However, because it is not only that we may have serious doubts about what we see is true, but could additionally join Nietzsche in his deep scepticism of the Will to Truth, I chose for this blog post a rather unorthodox way of sharing my thoughts.[1] I will tell a story of the relation between Vision and Truth. It is a story of love, so keep on reading.
Let me skip the awkward first date and start immediately when Truth and Vision are madly in love. When Truth looks into Vision’s eyes so closely that she can see her own reflection in the eyes of Vision. It is the phase when both marvel: We have so much in common, we are hand in glove, simply inseparable. The empirical sciences give their blessings to their marriage, so do the followers of Panopticism, the believers of surveillance cameras, the crusaders of drones. Truth and Vision also found themselves almost indistinguishable in the presence of hallucinating shamans or prophets who were predicting the future.
St. Paul’s Vision on the Road to Damascus, by George Kordis
However, Truth and Vision are sometimes deeply conflicted and seemingly opposite poles and some great men thought very disapprovingly of their relation. Nietzsche writes that people “are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees “forms”; their feeling nowhere lead into truth”[3]. In de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince the fox tells the Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”[4]. The disapproval of their marriage remained not only verbal but sometimes demanded human blood. Think for example of aniconism, particularly characteristic for the Abrahamic religions.
And as so many couples do, Truth and Vision raised a child whose name was Media. As can be read in Bivar’s account of the senses, “McLuhan contends that the medium is the message”, meaning that “use and content are irrelevant in so far as the medium’s efficiency is concerned”.[5] For example, when amateur videos are used in official news broadcasting it is often done so because they are thought to be more ‘authentic’, even though they are also sometimes found to depict other events, (see e.g. the reporting of the Iranian protests 2018).[6] In such moments the authenticity of the medium equals the truthfulness of what can be seen, the real event. And as many parents wish, Vision and Truth see themselves fulfilled (or shall we say reconfigured?) in their child. Media is the object of Vision and the container of Truth.
[1] See e.g. Prejudices of Philosophers (1)
[2] see Lucas Cleophas
[3] see On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
[4] see The Little Prince
[6] see False Iranian Protest’ Video Surface Online