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Tuesday, 25 October 2016



The virtual 'I' is located a small distance behind the eyes and, being single, in the space between them. When you shut your eyes and go into subjective awareness it is as if a screen has been unrolled a little way in front of an observer who floats in a dark and empty space about the size of a small watermelon. You are that observer, but you are also another observer who observes him and is located off to one side, so that you can see his gaze helplessly bringing about and absorbed by the meanings with which he endows the shadows flitting on the screen. This second ironic gaze is always a sideways one because it sees both the naive gaze, which still defines the central axis, and its object, but it occupies the same intimate enclosure at the rear of the space of the entire event as if to remind us that it is never absent, that it is an integral part of every appearance. The various subject positions that constitute a theatre come to mind, of which the audience member and the figures on stage are only the latest parts, while at least equally essential are the projectionist, and the effects manager, and the ushers, and the others who may no longer even be present, the writer and the director, the theatre manager, impresario and even the ticket seller, or again in the cinema, the names that slide by in an enormous roll at the end of the credits and whose individual functions you can barely guess but of which you know that each one of them was immunised against the illusion to which you have just been surrendered by being privy to its creation out of quite heterogeneous materials. In drawing such analogies between technologies of appearance and consciousness the possibility remains open that the technologies were shaped by the latent analogy with consciousness as much as that our notion of consciousness was suggested by the structure of the technology. The camera is like an eye, and the mammalian eye is like the independently evolved eye of the squid.

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