CASCADES

Sandberg Instituut Fine Arts

Student: Gerard Ortn Castellv
Thesis tutor: Maxine Kopsa
Year: 2015

Table of contents

Introduction

1. Beyond the waterfall

2. The stereoscopic cascade

10

2.1. The set of a set

11

2.2. The haptic

14

3. The interface

19

4. White noise cascade

21

5. The synoptic image

25

6. Our place in nature

29

Conclusions

33

Epilogue

34

Introduction
The motivation of this text arises from the contradictions I have been encountering in my practice,
where I often confront some of the questions that will emerge along the following chapters.
Questions like how do we relate to nature? Or, what do we mean when we state that nature is a
construct? That it does not exist? Which are the political consequences of such statement? How do
we represent what is out there when the medium aects it? What do we mean when we dene
nature as psychic space? Since some time ago I have been dealing with these questions through my
practice. The text will, thus, be used to confront them again with the hope of nding new clues.
The waterfall will appear as a motif leading us along the text. It will be used as a grid, as a speculative
element upon which other references could be projected; as a schema, as a photograph, as a form of
montage, as a mental image, as sound and as noise; as an abstract gure that incite structural
relations rather than metaphorical ones. The waterfall will become a subterfuge to raise questions
about visual and haptic perception, about language, about dispositifs and mediums, about
technologies, about interfaces and communication glitches and, nally, about philosophical
questions that derive into political concerns.
In a similar way, stereoscopy will be crucial to establish contrasts, to enable dualities resulting in
multiple outputs, to dismantle and dissect the dierent case studies into diverse strata; to reveal the
unworkability of a device but also to activate tactile perception. It will also help organizing a
philosophical thought, a system to analyze the way we relate to the world and the way we apprehend
it. Stereoscopy will not only refer to a mere three-dimensional eect, nor to a phenomenological
notion but rather to a structure that can hold a multiplicity of diverging components.
This text looks at a particular notion of nature: that reied, mythical thing over yonder in the
mountains, in our DNA, wherever; that dissolves when we look directly at it1. For that reason, we
will need negative imagery in order to describe what surrounds this notion. Perhaps that will help
distinguish what it is not and be able to speculate around a more specic area.

MORTON, T., Queer Ecology. PMLA, Volume 125, Number 2, March 2010, pp. 179. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015]
URL: <https://www.academia.edu/1050754/Queer_Ecology>
3

1. Beyond the waterfall

Therapist [T]
Esther [E]
T: And this? What is it?
E: Hm...A stone. This is like that Roman thing or something like that.
T: What do you mean by that Roman thing? An aqueduct?
E: Like when they would put this big stones upwards, like something in ruins or... I don't know.
T: No.
E: Some columns in ruins or something.
T: No, it's not a construction at all. Come on! You're the one that focuses on the details and not on
the whole... what colour is this thing here?
E: This is green... but this.... Ah! But this is not really brown: it's a tree!
T: No. It's not brown because it's not a tree. What colour is it?
E: Semi-grey. It has a colour that is very, very...
T: Very whitish no? Pay attention, all this part is vegetation right? All the green...
E: Yes.
T: Here we have the sky, we have more vegetation...
E: Yes.
T: And here, in the middle, a fabulous cascade! Water! Water! it's water falling! And here all the
foam.
E: Well I have the feeling that this is stone.
T: Really? It is a cascade, a waterfall. Do you see it now that I tell you or you still don't see it?
E: ....
This is an excerpt of a dialogue from the last movie by the lmmaker Joaquim Jord (Ms enll del
mirall Beyond the mirror, 20062). In this particular dialogue Esther, the main character, who has
been diagnosed with visual agnosia3, is doing a recognition test consisting of the identication of
certain objects in an image. The therapist shows her dierent images that she has to recognise,
identifying what appears on theme.g., a waterfall, a bread loaf or Clint Eastwood.
The lm was shot when the lmmaker was suering from dierent neurological and perceptive
2

Ms enll del mirall (Beyond the mirror). Dir. Joaquim Jord. Per. Esther Chumillas, Joaquim Jord, Rosario
Villaescusa, Yolanda Caamares, Nria Torrades, Isabel Roca, Elvira del lamo, Paquita Rfols, David Doblas,
Tere Navarro, Jess Valderrama, Doctora Mercedes Velasco, Doctora Teresa Herrero. nicamente Severo Films,
Oviedo TV, 2006. Film. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015]
URL: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOGrNoYKewg&feature=youtu.be&t=55m39s>
English subtitled. URL: <http://gerardortin.com/thesis/beyondthemirror.html>
Agnosia could be summarized as the interruption in the ability to recognise previous stimuli. In the case of visual
agnosia it consists of the brain impossibility to recognize or comprehend visual stimuli.
4

disorders due to a tumour. Along the movie he explores dierent cases of alexia and agnosiaboth
diseases aecting perception in dierent ways. The position of the viewer is always suspicious: we
are watching through the eyes of the one who is unwell, who is also making the movie. The
characters use dierent strategies in order to deal with their twisted perception. Thus, the viewer also
experiences a dierent relation towards the depicted places, objects and persons. The impossibility to
access a common reality through senses becomes a habit for the characters, but also for the viewer.
Their recognition and apprehension of the world is constantly formed by other means.
Among all the things said by the therapist during the conversation, there is one statement that seems
particularly relevant. When Esther asks whether the central gure of the image could be a group of
columns in ruins the therapist answers: No. It's not a construction at all. Let us take this assertion as
a pretext to split up some of the multiple layers that overlap in this conversation, and to cast doubt
upon them.
First of all, there is a strong hierarchical distribution of roles by which Esther is placed inor
displaced toan inferior position. She is the one with a distorted perception that has to be reshaped
in order to understand the image. But also in order to step out of her position in the margin, from
where, against the majority, she would keep describing the water as stone. At rst, Jord allies us
with the therapist although we progressively empathize more and more with the patient: we identify
the depicted object as a waterfall but we also know that it is not. We could say, refuting the therapist's
statement: Yes, it is a construction, socially and culturally dened.
Second of all, we have the photograph as such, with its materiality as an object; at and colourprinted on a piece of paper. One of the rst things Esther does with the photograph is placing her
hand on top of it in order to create a shadow and see if she can perceive it in a dierent way. She also
points to some elements in the picture, and moves it gently while trying to recognize what is in it.
Jord subtly highlights the importance of the object-photograph and creates a shot reverse shot
cutting sequence around it:
Esther holds the photograph with her left handcorresponding to the right hand in the wide shots
(recorded through the mirror). These shots are combined with the close-ups, in which we see the
image from the side of Esther. In the end, when she is given the answer, Jord cuts to a close-up of
the therapist's hand, almost indistinguishable from Esther's hand. What do all these gestures
indicate? What is being told through the mirror?

When we see a gesture lmed, another gesturenot visibleis revealed: the one of the lmmaker
that is observing it, maybe even causing it, and willing to touch itor perform it, like a musician
with his vision.4
This is possibly what we are witnessing here. The lmmaker is emphasizing how the image is
constructed by building up another, much more complex, construction in which we are, somehow,
thrown in the middle. The invisible gesture is like a low latency, an impulse that drives us through
the exercise of recognition. Esther is being tested but we are being tested as well. It is not only a
gesture lmed but also a gesture inferred thanks to the montage. 5 The image exceeds what we are
seeing; it becomes a mental image, a speculative image performed by the director, by the therapist,
by us, by the camera, by the editor and, above all, by Esther. We are all in the same room willing to
touch the image, to enter it; we just have to choose who do we want to take us by the hand. If we
choose Esther, we perceive all what's omitted by the therapist:
The signied uctuates and appears unstable. The waterfall morphs quickly into a stone, a menhir,
an aqueduct, some ruins or a tree. Hence, focusing on the details, all those signieds seem to point
not only to the signier cascade but also to the signier photograph; In other words, the limitations
of the medium become explicit through Esther's scepticism (could it really be a stone?). Moreover,
Esther seems to be forced to project a particular signied upon the object; one that could t in a
symbolic, arbitrary language by which we all agree that what she names as cascade is indeed a
cascade.
She is not in front of a cascade but in front of a photograph of a cascade, a dilemma that becomes
explicit while Esther, through her description, seems to resist assuming that the latter is equal to the
former.
4
5

DE LUCAS, G. 2013. Poticas del gesto en el cine contemporneo europeo (Poetics of gesture in contemporary
European cinema). Barcelona : Intermedio, 2013. p.139.
The film was edited by Nria Esquerra.
6

Third of all, there is the content of the image, what is supposed to be at the other side of the frame,
an idea that precedes photography. And it happens to be another well-known construct:
landscapeand ultimately nature. Again we encounter two notions that had been historically,
socially and culturally dened. The objection (Yes, it is a construction) points now to landscape and
nature. The framed views derived from the romantic tradition, from the plein air waterfalls of the
American paintersCole, Church, Bierstadt, Moran, etc.and their European predecessors, the
ones that reasserted its virginity and its wilderness, presenting it as something untouched and
uncontrollableeven sublime. The landscape that became strongly loaded with concepts. Concepts
that trigger the idea of gateway, of religious assurance; the promise of the new colony; a more
holistic approach, bordering on a New Age system of beliefsvisible even today in the default
desktop background or the last update of the screensaver. The same spectre crosses all these
references embodied by the icon of the cascade; Nonetheless, wethe therapist, the social majority
tend to assume that the cascadein the photograph, in the lmis portrayed as a cascade,
without any ambiguity. Esther, through her derive, her disease or talent, might not access the
conventional meaning of the image, but whenever she does hold a photograph in her hands she casts
doubt upon it, dissecting its components.
Finally, the impossibility of understanding the whole could be read as a possibility of understanding
the details, the fragments, without the necessity to connect them. Like the story of Virgil, told by
Oliver Sacks, the man who after recovering his sight from cataracts could not recognize his cat: He
would pick up details incessantlyan angle, an edge, a colour, a movementbut would not be able
to synthesize them, to form a complex perception at a glance. This was one reason the cat, visually,
was so puzzling: he would see a paw, the nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together,
see the cat as a whole.6 We could argue here that a complex perception is not a synthesized one but a
fragmentary one, that allows us to apprehend objects as amalgams rather than as whole things. But
that would lead to a shift in subjectivity by which our answer Yes, it is a construction would refer not
only to our perceptive apparatus but to our social and cultural assumptions. The threshold between
things as they are and our version of things emerges and compels us to a turn. This threshold
6

SACKS, O. 1995. An anthropologist on mars. London : Picador, 2012. pp. 116-117.

Virgil was suffering from cataracts, a clouding of the lens inside the eye which leads to a decrease in vision
(cataract. Wikipedia [online]. [citied 16.01.2015] URL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract> ).
Its ethymology could also be compelling in order to trace a ligne de fuite leading to some of the notions explained
along the following chapters (e.g. the interface or the white noise):
cataract (n.). early 15c., "a waterfall, floodgate," from Latin cataracta "waterfall," from Greek katarhaktes
"waterfall, broken water; a kind of portcullis," noun use of an adjective compound meaning "swooping, downrushing," from kata "down" (see cata-). The second element is traced either to arhattein "to strike hard" (in
which case the compound is kat-arrhattein), or to rhattein "to dash, break."
cataract. Online Ethymology Dictionary [online]. [citied 16.01.2015]
URL: <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cataract>

becomes also evident with the mismatch between our version of things and Esther's version of
things. Ultimately, this switch seems to resonate with Latour's Politics of Nature when he states that
Without this division between ontological questions and epistemological questions, all moral and
social life would be threatened7 a concern that goes through this essay.

LATOUR, B. 1999. Politics of Nature How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, Massachussets,
London, England : Harvard University Press, 2004. p. 12.
8

Standard Scenic Company.

Horseshoe Falls from Goat Island, Niagara Falls, N.Y., 1906
Photographic print on stereo card : stereograph.
[online][citied 16.01.2015] URL:
<http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93503753/>

2. The stereoscopic cascade

Niagara Falls is considered to be one of the rst three-dimensional motion pictures ever projected to
the public8. It was projected the 10th of June of 1915, almost one century ago, at the Astor Theatre,
New York. Recorded and developed by Edwin S. Porter and W.E. Waddell it was shown as a redgreen anaglyphic projection: It seems likely that Porter and Waddell used a twin interlock projector
system with two black-and-white lmstrips projected through red and green lters. The audience
wore anaglyph spectacles to view the lms9.
The last 1,000-foot reel consisted of scenes of Niagara Falls. The cascade seemed to be the best motif
to complete the reel, an ideal travelogue to display such an outstanding technology, a landscape
constantly in motion: The audience at the Astor Theatre was frequently moved to applause by the
beauty of the scenes which gave one the impression of looking at actual stage settings and not the
shadowy gures of the ordinary picture wrote the correspondent for the New York Dramatic
Mirror; Trees and shrubbery stood out boldly... and the eect, to one accustomed to the ordinary
pictures, cannot be described. The branches of trees, for instance, have the mystifying appearance of
standing out from the screen and hanging over the stage.10
In another review by Lynde Denig11 on the 26th of June for the Moving Picture World magazine, it is
explained how the eect of the technology worked during the screening. There were two separate lms
running together and the viewer was able to watch both lmsone with each eyeat the same time and
compound a three-dimensional mental image. The technology imitated our binocular vision providing
the eect of depth12. The functioning of the technique becomes more obvious when Denig explains
some of the errors of the projection. Apparently, in some parts of the screening there was a lack of
synchronization, a mismatch between the two projectors, causing the images to shimmer like a
reection on a lake. It is interesting to see how the rst three-dimensional screening slightly revealed
the interface through a glitch, showing how there were two lms running together with their respective
idiosyncrasiesone could imagine scratches, dust and spots interfering in the stereoscopic mirage.
8
9

In the same screening as Rural America, Oriental Dancers and Jim the Penman.
ZONE, R. 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema. Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky,
2012. p. 248
10 ZONE, R. Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952. Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky,
2007. p. 98.
11 DENIG, L. Stereoscopic Picture Screened. Edwin S. Porter and W. E. Wadell Show Remarkable Three-Dimension
Photography to Audience at the Astor Theatre. Moving Picture World. New York : New York, Chalmers Publishing
Company, 1915. No. 24. (April-June). p. 2072.
12 CRARY, J. Techniques of the Observer. October, vol. 45 (Summer 1988), p. 28. quoting: Hermann von Helmholtz,
Handbook of Physiological Optics, vol. 3, trans. George T. Ladd, New York, Dover, 1962, p. 303.
Helmholtz could write, in the 1850s: These stereoscopic photographs are so true to nature and so lifelike in their
portrayal of material things, that after viewing such a picture and recognizing in it some object like a house, for
instance, we get the impression, when we actually do see the object, that we have already seen it before and are
more or less familiar with it. In cases of this kind, the actual view of the thing itself does not add anything new or
more accurate to the previous apperception we got from the picture, so far at least as mere form relations are
concerned.
10

Nonetheless, despite the mismatching of the projection, this new eect seemed to challenge any
previous form of representation: Holding these glasses before the eyes one gains a truly stereoscopic
eect that is nothing short of startling in lifelikeness. The screen seems to be brought to within a few
feet of the onlooker and the objects, animate and inanimate, stand out in correct perspective, quite
as though the vision were centred on an actual room, a landscape, or whatever the subject may be.13
2.1. The set of the set
The staging of the waterfall seems to be equal to the staging of the medium. At rst, it seems that the
object-waterfall could just be a pretext to stage the technology but let us assume that there is an
equal reciprocity by which this object becomes necessary. The waterfall could thus be the screen, the
curtain of the theatre, the lm running synchronized with the water ow, an interposed lter, a
mirrorto be crossed beyondor a gate leading to a cave behind; one of these objects that becomes
a cinematic entity like the traina speculative device by which the static trip of cinema is activated.
The waterfall possesses the hybrid quality of embodying both the lm and the tableaux vivantor
what Barthes respectively denes as the hysterical activity and the fetish object14. It is animated and it
expresses temporality and change but at the same time it is contemplated and framed, it is a dynamic
scenography, both fetish and hysterical.
If we analyse Denigs and the correspondents remarks we notice how they equally enumerate
elements that allude both to the medium and to its resulting eect. The insistence on listing features
to explain how the image is built and which are the qualities of the image itself could simply be
motivated by the fact that a new technology was being displayed. But there is an exchange of
qualities between the medium and the contentthe spoiling eect of a reection on a lake or the
branches standing out of the screenby which the boundary between them appears permeable.
Let us try to distil what constitutes this permeable zone.
In the book Le corps du cinma: hypnoses, motions, animalits, Raymond Bellour exposes how
cinema was born absorbing a variety of previous dispositifs that dened its functioning (from the
guillotine to the train, the magnetism sances, the prestidigitation shows, the morgue, the wax
museum, the phantasmagories or the peepshows)15. All these dispositifs established the way the
13 DENIG, L. Stereoscopic Picture Screened. Edwin S. Porter and W. E. Wadell Show Remarkable Three-Dimension
Photography to Audience at the Astor Theatre. Moving Picture World. New York : New York, Chalmers Publishing
Company, 1915. No. 24. (April-June). p. 2072.
14 BARTHES, R. 1976. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1989. The
tableau vivant despite the apparently total character of the figuration, is a fetish object (to immobilize, to light, to
frame, means to cut up), whereas film, as function, is a hysterical activity (the cinema does not consist in animating
images; the opposition between photography and film is not that of the fixed and the mobile image; cinema consists
not in figuring, but in a system's being made to function) (p.154).
15 BELLOUR, R. Le corps du cinma: hypnoses, motions, animalits. Paris : P.O.L., 2009. pp. 42-43 Among other
kinds of dispositives explained by Bellour (kinetoscope, panorama, kaiserpanorama, praxinoscope, zootrope, etc.)
11

audience would relate to the motion picture. According to Bellour, one of the most important
practices that reverted to cinema was hypnosis. The author explains how hypnosis constituted a
practice that dened the cinematic experience in western countries; in cinema, the machine could
have progressively replaced the gure of the hypnotizer: hypnosis uses machines, without the
presence of the hypnotizer. [] The presence of the other could become phantasmal or
imaginary16. What is relevant of his approach is the way the cinematic experience is conceived not
as a dream state but as a hypnotic state in which the machinethe dispositif, the devicebecomes
necessarily presentin opposition to a dream in which the dreamer doesn't know that is dreaming
the spectator knows that he or she is in the cinema17.
Bellour continues analyzing dierent notions of hypnosis, dening cinema as an experience of
tranceeven hallucinationin which the spectator never loses the connection with the
surroundings: hypnosis works with the normal exterior conditions of perception. Besides the
dissociation that hypnosis provokes, the connection with the environment is never broken.18 The
audience enters a light-trance; during the movie we are still aware of what is around usscreen,
theatre seats, lights, strangers, food, temperature, projector, sound system, etc.and nonetheless we
also enter the festival of aects that we call lm19 as Barthes describes it, that lasts until we exit the
theatre experiencing the recovery, the oldest of the powers of hypnosis.20
In the same way, the experience of the anaglyph projection could have driven to a trance, not a deeptrance but a light-trance, a state in which the audience would enter the image without really breaking
the connection with the theatre room. The stereoscopic dispositif would guide the audience through
an in-between wakefulness-dreaming state in which the boundary between the medium and the
content would had became more and more blurry.
It is precisely due to this blending of both states that a feedback process occurs: a sort of double
deception21 by which the original locatione.g., Niagara Fallsis displaced. It is a double
performancea representation of a representationwhere the three-dimensional waterfall gets
enclosed in a mise en scne of a mise an scne: the three dimensional projection gave one the
impression of looking at actual stage settings and the branches of trees had the mystifying
16
17
18
19
20
21

Ibid. p. 80.
Ibid. p. 92.
Ibid. p. 128.
Ibid. p. 130. quoting BARTHES, R. En sortant du cinma. Psychanalyse et cinema. p. 104.
Ibid. p. 130. quoting BARTHES, R. En sortant du cinma. Psychanalyse et cinema. p. 104.
DERRIDA, J. 2006. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York : Fordham University Press, 2008. The Lacanian
notion of feinte de feinte [pretense of pretense], that differentiates humans from animals, seems to resonate here.
Nonetheless Derrida points the distinction between pretense [feinte] and deception [tromperie]: There is,
according to Lacan, a clear distinction between what the animal is quite capable of, namely, strategic pretense
(warrior, predatory, or seductive suit, pursuit, or persecution) and what it is incapable of and incapable of
witnessing to, namely, the deception of speech [la tromperie de la parole]. [] but more precisely deception
involves lying as what, in promising what is true, includes the supplementary possibility of telling the truth in order
to lead the other astray, in order to have him believe something other than what is true. (p. 128).
12

appearance of standing out from the screen and hanging over the stage. Therefore, the lifelikeness
mentioned by Denig is always referring to a realistic recreation that happens in the theatre, within its
walls. The branches, far from taking one back to the original place, seem to hang on the stage,
forming a setting that resembles a real stage setting. The audience did not brake the connection with
the environment, with the theatre room but rather reinforced it. The waterfall was so realistic that it
looked like a real stage setting.
Again, we encounter the landscape as a construct and its spectre reappears. It is a twofold recreation:
on the one hand we have the stage setting, a lifelike reproduction of a landscape as the background
of, for instance, a theatre play and on the other hand we have the stereoscopic image by which we
mentally recreate the hologram of a supposed stage setting. What, then, does exactly mean to startle
in lifelikeness? Which kind of lifelikeness is being experienced? What do we understand by a
mystifying appearance? Could the anaglyphic waterfall potentially displace its original referent?
Where is the original waterfall?

Josep Maria Salvany i Blanch.

View of the rst act of Maruxa at Theatre of Nature in Vallvidrera
(Barcelona, Spain), 1916.
Stereoscopic glass (converted to red-cyan anaglyph)
6 x 13 cm.
[online][citied 16.01.2015] URL:
<http://mdc.cbuc.cat/cdm/singleitem/collection/bcsalvany/id/3584>

13

The stereoscopic picture above, taken in 1916one year after the projection at the Astor Thatre
portrays the stage of Teatre de la NaturalesaTheatre of Naturea very peculiar show that became
popular during the second decade of the XIX century in Catalonia within Modernisme, the famous
art and literature movement. The photograph corresponds to a play named Maruxa, a rural Zarzuela
lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes. Without entering in the
particularities of the play or the genre, the example seems to be appropriate and compelling to
explain further the notion of the set of the set.
In this case it is the stage that meets the location; in order to recreate rural scenes, the stage
incorporates the environment as a set. It frames a piece of forest and turns it into a landscapeit
frames it but also gives it a point of view and loads it with narrative. Again, we are confronting a
landscape that resembles a real stage settingor maybe a stage setting that resembles a real
landscape. The Theatre of Nature seems to activate, once more, a strong feedback between a
supposedly original place and its representation blurring, making permeable, the boundary between
the former and the latter. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that in this example reality invades the
stage, we are still facing the same questions: were is the original waterfall? Could the stage set
replace its original referent? When did it become a set of a set?

2.2. The haptic

Consider the two, the pair, this is not two acts, two syntheses, it is a fragmentation of being, it
is a possibility for separation (two eyes, two ears: the possibility for discrimination, for the use
of the diacritical), it is the advent of dierence (on the grounds of resemblance. . .).22
(Merleau-Ponty, 1968)
The stereoscopic anaglyph seems to rely on a haptic perception, a switch by which touch is
performed by our binocular vision. Deleuze takes the concept from Alois Riegl and expands it as an
essential aesthetic quality of some paintings:
"Haptic" from the Greek verb apto (to touch), does not designate an extrinsic relation of the eye to
the sense of touch, but a "possibility of seeing" a type of vision distinct from the optical: Egyptian
art has not yet made up its mind with regard to the gaze, which it thinks must see things from
close-up. As Maldiney says, "in the spatial zone of closeness, the sense of sight behaves just like the
sense of touch, experiencing the presence of the form and the ground at the same place".23
22 VASSELEU, C. 1998. Textures of Light Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. London and
New York : Routledge, 2002. p. 30. Quoting MERLEAU-PONTY, M. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, trans.
Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. p. 217.
23 DELEUZE, G. 1981. Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation. London and New York : Continuum, 2003. p.189.
14

What is presented as pure haptic perception derives, paradoxically, from a at surface. The anaglyph
of the waterfall is projected on a at surface and comes from a at stripe of celluloid through which
the light travels to reach the viewer's eye. Yet, we cannot be assured that it relates to a haptic
perception since it is still based on a purely optical phenomenon. It neither shows the form and the
ground at the same place like in the Egyptian paintings but rather it evidences their dierent
positions through an eect of depth.

2014 Gerard Ortn. Stereoscopic Photograph. Camera: White Stereo Realist 1041. In this stereoscopic pair we see how
the scratches and dust on the celluloid aect dierently to each pair. Such marks are out of the stereoscopic threshold,
interrupting the eect of depth.

The process of creating a haptic image seems to dier from the way the stereoscopic image is
constructed. The relation between gure and ground seems to be multiple, to provide a speculative
space for us to imagine dierent depths, like layers that are set to be disassembled and nally form a
new space. According to Deleuze the haptic perception is based on an interstice between two, between
opposite colours, between gure and ground or between positions. To distinguish between gure and
ground on an Egyptian painting we probably need to establish much more extreme associations than
we do with basic stereoscopy; associations in which the pair is not only separated by the distance
between the two eyes and where the threshold turns into a productive space of speculation. If an image
is the relationship of me myself looking at it and dreaming of a relation with something else, thinking an
association24 then the haptic perception provides the space for this association to happen.
Quoting RIEGL, A. Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (2nd edn.; Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore,
1985).
24 GODARD, J.L. 2006. Pensar entre imgenes (Thinking between images), Ed: Nria Aidelman and Gonzalo de
Lucas. Barcelona : Intermedio, 2010.
Godard mentions interesting ideas in relation to spatial montage when he talks about filming with two joined
cameras two different aspects or when he suggests that cinemas should project two films in the same theatre
room. Ideas that he seems to put in practice at Adieu au langage (2014) France : Wild Bunch, CNC, Canal + his
15

The haptic perception does not correspond to the stereoscopic eect that captivates the audience at
the Astor Theatre but rather to its glitch, to the reection on a lake produced by a mismatch
between the two projections, to the device turned into a dysfunctional perceptive apparatus that no
longer provides the eect of depth. It is precisely when the glitch appears that we realize that there
are two projections running at the same time, two dierent movies with their own particularities. It
is the dierencethe rupture, the mismatchwhat could potentially create a haptic space where the
simple eect of stereoscopy would turn into a form of spatial montage; the relation between the two
images could provide not only a three-dimensional eect but also a space of associationor
dissociationby means of divergence; a space where I would perceive objects with my left eye that
would be divergingeven temporally and spatiallyfrom the ones perceived by my right eye.

Still from the video Nueva Sonora (2014) - Gerard Ortn. Stereoscopic Photograph. Camera: White Stereo Realist 1041.

Precedent devices like the Wheatstone Stereoscope25 can help understand the idea of spatial montage
and its relation to the haptic. Looking at the device one can see a primitive version of a
contemporary scriptoriumLatour would call it screentorium26resembling some contemporary
interfaces, like the screens that function as multiple windows allowing us to establish associations
between their contents. The Wheatstone Stereoscope, or the anaglyphic lm of Niagara Falls,
embody the idea of spatial montage, of a montage compound by two very similar images that are
nonetheless very dierent, and that can be as dierent as one can imagine. Spatial montage implies
simultaneity and allows real-time analogy. It creates a dierent relation with the viewer who is no
last film in which he explores stereoscopy for the first time.
25 CRARY, J. Techniques of the Observer. October, vol. 45 (Summer 1988), p. 30.
26 LATOUR, B. Convention on Digital Humanities, Lausanne, Switzerland from July 8, 2014. (00:47:00) [online].
[citied 16.01.2015] URL: <http://dh2014.org/videos/opening-night-bruno-latour/>
16

longer following a timeline because he himself is integrated in a space; he is embedded in the

dispositif. The point of view is eradicated. Spatial montage is haptic.
In his book The Interface Eect Alexander Galloway coins the homonymous concept, a term that
could be summarized as the range of imperceptible processes through which we apprehend the
world. It does not focus on interfaces themselves but on their indivisible eects. Galloway tries to
trace the antecedents of the language of new media in order to understand the interface eect and
draw its genealogy. The language that he proposes as the basis to understand the logics of interface
eects and new media is no other than cinemaand more specically montage:
New media did not begin in the 1980's in Silicon Valley; it began a hundred years prior at
Etienne-Jules Marey's Station Physiologique in the outskirts of Paris. The reason for this is
that cinema is the rst medium to bring together techniques like compositing,
recombination, digital sampling (the discrete capture of photographic images at a xed rate
through time), and machine automation, techniques that, of course, are present in other
media, but never as eectively as the singular synthesis oered by the cinema. [] the icker
of lm was always already a digital icker.27
One of the main critiques that this theory, based on Manovich's Language of the New Media, has
received is that it is strictly focused on the rectilinear cinematic frame. A statement that Galloway
considers to be unconvincing given Manovich's argument about the waning of temporal montage
and the rise of spatial montage, or what is often simply called windowing. What the author is trying
to say is that the antecedents of new mediaultimately, the antecedents of the interface eectrely
upon cinema in general and upon spatial montage in particular. If we take this assertion as valid, we
would have to anticipate even more the precedent of new mediaeven before cinemaand nd it in
another medium. A medium that established a complex relation between two dierent images and,
as Crary explains, implied an eradication of the point of view around which, for several centuries,
meanings had been assigned reciprocally to an observer and the object of his or her vision. This
medium is, indeed, stereoscopy.

[left] Diagram of the Weahtstone Stereoscope, 1840. From CRARY, J. Techniques of the Observer. October, vol. 45
27 GALLOWAY, A.R. The interface effect. Polity Press. Cambridge : 2012, p. 3.
(Summer 1988), p. 30. [right] Multi screen display set-up for PC or what Latour coined as Screentorium.
17

Hence, through media archaeology, we are connecting a device from the early XIX century to the
XXI century. The waterfall could now morph from the anaglyphic hologram of celluloid and light to
a much more abstract entity of data like a cascade virusthe old-fashioned virus from the 1980's
where the MS-DOS system collapses and the characters fall down like in The Matrixor a white
noise signala random signal with a constant power spectral density that resembles the sound of a
cascade. In any of the cases, even in the case of Esther's test, we are facing the same dilemma, the
dilemma of the perceptive worlds:
There does not exist a forest as an objectively xed environment: there exists a forest-for-thepark-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a
forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter, and nally a fable forest in which Little
Red Riding Hood loses her way.28
Maybe the last forest is the one that concerns us; we know it is out there but we cannot access it
through the senses.

28 AGAMBEN, G. 2002. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2004. p. 45. In relation to
the notion of Umwelteach animal's perceptive worldby Jakob von Uexkll.
18

3. The interface
Ideology relies upon a very particular functioning of the interface eect. The self-erasing condition is
what makes the eect untraceable. Again, only a glitch, a bug or a crash would reveal the interface,
otherwise it is unworkable:
As technology, the more a dioptric device erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually
delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate29
Hearing the sound of the keyboard keys being pressed by my ngers, unfolds a complex chain
reaction that goes from my brain into the laptop and back into me through the computer screen, as if
it was a neurological chain, I cannot think of a better way to explain such eect. Of course: We are
not aware about that fact while performing that gesture. We are not aware about the act of writing
while writing but about what we are writing (which is, if you consider it, a dubious statement)30. But
still I'm aware of my ngers hitting the plastic keys. They are digitus, they are part of this feedback
looping process in which the computer becomes an interfaceof graphics, of light, of data
transformed into information.
All the elements mentioned are conguring the eect: the screen, the word processor, the keyboard,
my ngertips, my neurons or the gesture of writing itself. It is a complex amalgam of all these
elements interacting. We have seen how the stereoscopic interface appeared thanks to its deviation in
a mismatched projection. We have seen how a set of a set could have displaced the original referent
a supposedly real waterfall. We have also seen, through Jords movie, how our perception is as
dysfunctional as Esthers. We are taking advantage of the unworkability of a number of eects to
make visible their functioning. Nonetheless, the unworkability implies a paradox:
Serres rightly observed in his meditation on
functional "along sidedness": "Systems work
because they don't work. Non-functionality
remains essential for functionality. This can be
formalized: pretend there are two stations
exchanging messages through a channel. If the
exchange succeedsif it is perfect, optimal,
immediatethen the relation erases itself. But
if the relation remains there, if it exists, it's
because the exchange has failed. It is nothing
but mediation. The relation is a non-relation."31
29 GALLOWAY, A.R. The interface effect. Polity Press. Cambridge : 2012, p. 3.
30 FLUSSER, V. The gesture of writing, 1991. p. 1.
31 GALLOWAY, A.R. The interface effect. Polity Press. Cambridge : 2012, p. 3.
19

If a problem cannot be resolved, it is not a problem; if a problem can be resolved then it is not a
problem32. What seems like another tautological paradox is nothing more than a process of selferasing, a sequence where the relation becomes invisibleself-deletedor even nonexistent. If there
is a solution or if the channel is visible, then we are not really talking about a problem nor about an
exchange. Both the exchange and the problem require a certain unworkability. There is a
contingency in the process that seems unavoidable, that is to say, we need to assume that it might or
it might not succeed in order to draw the relation, to be able to think it.

32 MUNARI, B. 1981. Como nacen los objetos. Apuntes para una metodologa proyectual (Da cosa nasce cosa.
Appunti per una metodologa progettuale.). Barcelona : Gustavo Gili, 2010. p. 37.
20

4. White noise cascade

I shall look for noise in the parting of the seas. There then is the origin. Noise and nausea,
noise and nautical, noise and navy have the same etymology. We shouldn't be astonished for
we never hear white noise [bruit de fond] better than when at sea. This noise, be it calm or
vehement, seems to have been established for all time.
On a strict horizontal plane, stable or unstable ows of water constantly exchange places.
Space is completely invaded by noise; we are completely occupied by the same noise. The
agitation is everywhere to be heard, beside the signals, beside the silence. The silent sea is
misnamed. Perhaps white noise [bruit de fond] is at the heart [fond] of being itself. Perhaps
being is not at rest, perhaps it is not in motion perhaps it is agitated. White noise never stops,
it is limitless, continuous, perpetual, unchangeable. It has no grounding [fond] itself, no
opposite. How much noise has to be made to still the noise? And what fury orders fury?
Noise is not a phenomenon, all phenomena separate from it, gures on a ground [fond], as a
light in the fog, as any message, cry, call, signal must each separate from the hubbub that lls
the silence, just to be, to be perceived, sensed, known, exchanged. As soon as there is a
phenomenon, it leaves noise, as soon as an appearance arises, it does so by masking the
noise. 33
If in the previous excerpt we have seen how Serres explained the self-erasing condition of systems,
how the relation between two messages is a non-relation and how an optimal exchange implies no
mediation, in this case he seems to direct all the attention to the unworkability rather than to a
perfect functioning; to the perpetual presence of the unworkability, to the noisy, anarchic,
clamoring, mottled, striped, streaked, variegated, mixed, crossed, piebald multiplicity34. To do so,
not by chance, he uses the example of white noise.
White noise embodies the unworkability of a communicationwhite noise is a failed radio message,
a signal that reveals the medium (like it does the reection on a lake), a parasite, an in-between
zone that appears while we are tuning the TV, the hubbub that lls the silence. Scientically it has
been dened as a random signal with a constant power spectral density. That is to say that the signal
contains all the frequencies with the same powerlike in the white light, that contains all the
frequencies or colorsproviding a at spectrum. The randomness is precisely what makes it chaotic
and multiple: On a strict horizontal plane, stable or unstable ows of water constantly exchange
places. This explanation could refer to visual white noise; the plane could be the surface of a screen,
out of tune, and the stable or unstable water ows could be the pixels, randomly changing positions.
That is one reason why the water and the sea are compelling for Serres; Like a waterfall, the sea could
33 SERRES, M. Noise. SubStance, Vol. 12, No. 3, Issue 40: Determinism (1983), pp. 50, 57. [online]. [citied
16.01.2015] URL: <http://seansturm.les.wordpress.com/2011/11/serres-noise.pdf>
34 Ibidem.
21

be considered a source capable to cause an accumulation of random sonic noise resulting on an

almost at spectrum. Either the sea or the waterfall are enough complex to generate almost all the
audible frequencies at the same time.
White noise's bandwidth is theoretically innite: it contains all the frequencies. But that, of course, is
almost an entelechy since we can only dene it within our audible range of sound frequencies35. We
therefore assume that something is white noise if it has a at spectrum between 20 and 20,000 Hz.
We are limited, not only by our own perceptive apparatus but also by our generative systems and
observation capabilities.

[left] Spectrogram of a white noise signal. [right] Spectrogram of a brownian noise sample.
We can see how the powercorresponding to the color gradientof the white noise is equal in any frequency of the
bandwidth (vertically displayed) providing a at spectrogram. Nonetheless, in the brownian noise the power
progressively decreases (6dB per octave) as long as the frequency increasesgetting darker at the top.
Software visualization: Izotope RX3.
Colors of noise. (n.d.). in Wikipedia. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015] URL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise>

Let us now, return to the rst chapter, to the moment when Esther was trying to identify the image
trying to remove all the noise in it in order to perceive the waterfall. What would have happened if
the object of analysis would have been a sample of an innite bandwidth sound signal? What would
we infer through her exercise of recognition? Would we nd again a socially and culturally dened
construct? A disconnection between signier and signied? The limits of representation through
sound? The limits of sound itself?
Here the answer seems much more complex than we have seen before. In this case it implies
recognizing an objectwhite noisethat, beforehand, exceeds containment and overows our
capacity to apprehend itabove and below human audible range it is unperceptive. Nonetheless we
know, at least theoretically, not only that it exists but also that possesses innity as an essential
qualitythe frequency bandwidth is endless.
At this point Serres would remind us that white noise is geometrizing. Geometrizing was the
35 White Noise. (n.d.). in Wikipedia. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015] URL: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise>
22

inaccessible object of metaphysics and still is36. Again, we encounter the forest were the little-red
riding hood lost her way and so we do. How to access a forest that it is out there and we cannot
apprehend through our senses. If there would be a waterfall in this forest and no one would be there
to hear its sound... The question would not be if it makes sound but what does this sound consist of.
We would possibly have to take the side of the therapist and admit that this time it is not a
construction but rather an object that exists in a dierent temporal and spatial scale than ours. The
noise of the sea, the white noise that was there before any manifestation37 and had been incessantly
moving, limitless, continuous, perpetual, unchangeable. Like the sound of a perfect waterfall that
could produce innite random numbers38, or like the noise in the white noise of the atmospheric
noise39. There is a need for a conciliation between the scientic representation of the waterfallthe
geometrizing white noiseand its sensible manifestation:
Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning,
forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and
noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of
noise. [] By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their
calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.40
In this excerpt, Jaques Attali draws on a very
political denition of noise dening it as a
castrated, inhibited, masked or even erased object,
not only for science but also for society, culture
and history. Noise is dismissed as long as it implies
chaos and multiplicity, as long as it is unstable and
unpredictable, limitless and unbound. But it is
precisely the chaotic condition of noise that
connects it to life, that invades life and makes it
full of noise.
Noise drives us to a sonic original in pure state,
that which in geology is called primordial soup,
the shapeless mass of matter from where live

White noise machines such as HoMedics SoundSpa

are commercialized to create a peaceful sleep
environment, fall asleep faster and wake up completely
rested. Equipped with six soothing, natural sounds, our
SoundSpa allows you choose from white noise, thunder,
ocean, rain, summer night and brook, while unwinding
from your day.

36 Ibidem. p. 56.
37 The notion of manifestation in relation to the Wilfried Sellar's manifest image will be further explored in the
following section The synaptic image.
38 Or the atmospheric noise used to generate true random numbers in the online site random.org [online]. [citied
16.01.2015] URL: <https://www.random.org/audio-noise/>
39 Ibidem.
40 ATTALI, J. 1977. Noise: the political economy of music. Minesota : University of Minesota, 2009. p. 3.
23

comes from and towards which live is headed41. Among many other functions, white noise has been
used to mask other sounds, to help people sleep, relax or concentrate but also to disorientate, to
mask sounds in the war and even as a torture method. Perhaps white noise is the bruit de fond of the
embryonic state. Perhaps, as Attali suggests, listening to noise is fundamental to speculate about
where are we headed to.
At the end, we might nd what hopes it still possible to have but we might not. We might be
headed towards a primordial soup in a sort of retrojective trip to the future. If that is the case, we
know what came before the primordial soup (or maybe we should now admit that we don't know it?
That there is no possibility to access the ancestral time? That the latter remains and will necessarily
remain excluded to-us?). Maybe, in order to nd the conciliation we are looking for we have to fuse
the scientic image of the worldthe innite numerical noisewith its manifest imagethe
waterfall with which we are getting soakedto achieve a stereoscopic view.

41 FERNNDEZ PORTA, E. Homo Sampler. Tiempo y Consumo en la Era Afterpop. Homo Sampler: Time and
Consumption in the Afterpop Era) Ed: Anagrama. Barcelona: 2008. Talking about different extreme music bands
such as Sunn O))), or Napalm Death: Each of these variations follows a sonic original in pure state, which we
should interpret as the musical modality of what in geology is called primordial soup, that is, the shapeless mass of
matter from where live comes from and towards which live is heading. p. 64.

24

5. The synoptic image

A leading challenge for contemporary philosophy consequently becomes to show how that
tension can properly be resolved, not by asserting the exclusivity of one image or the other
but by a "stereoscopic understanding" in which the two images come to be "fused" into a
single synoptic vision of man-in-the-world.
[...]
Reaching a "stereoscopic understanding" of the possibility of reconciling and combining
competing "manifest" and "scientic" images of man-in-the-world into a single "synoptic
vision" of persons and their place in nature.42
Wilfrid Sellars's work has recently been revisited; his philosophical thought is now reexamined and
put in relation with contemporary currents. Along years he built up a very complex philosophical
schema that provided signicantly valuable contributions to dierent branches of philosophye.g.
epistemology, behaviorism, ontology or philosophy of mind. One of the most important concepts he
coined was the idea of the stereoscopic view of man-in-the-world (he also referred to it as the fused
image, the synaptic image or the stereoscopic understanding). It is not by chance that Sellars uses a
technology to unfold his thought (he does not talk about binocular vision but about stereoscopic
view). This notion seems to embody some of the main concerns of the text commanding thus our
attention.
The stereoscopic view is congured by two images fused in one, by two dierent conceptions that in a
sort of spatial montage, of haptic stereoscopic view, would congure a synoptic vision of persons
and their place in nature. The rst of the two nerves crossing the optic chiasma of this synoptic
vision is called the manifest image. The manifest image is the image that delineates the framework in
terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world43. It is, thus, the sensible
image, the thought image, the image of the manifestation of the waterfall, the white noise as-wehear-it, as it appears. This image echoes what Quentin Meillassoux refers to as the correlational
circle. The impossibility of thinking the world dissociated from the relation to the subject, a vicious
circle in which philosophy has been falling in its various attempts of conceiving things-inthemselves: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self
insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself [] 44. As Sellars
states, it is an image where persons are primary objects, the image of the world; an inescapable image
that is always for-us.
42 ROSENBERG, J.F. Wilfrid Sellars: fusing the images. Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2007. p.
23, 164.
43 SELLARS, W. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, in Frontiers ofScience and Philosuphy, ed. Robert
Colodny (University ofPittsburgh Press; Pittsburgh, PA; 1962); repro in [SPR], 1-40. quoted in:
ROSENBERG, J.F. Wilfrid Sellars: fusing the images. Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2007. p.
13.
44 MEILLASSOUX, Q. After Finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. Bloomsbury academic, 2009. p. 14.
25

The other nerve that converges producing the synopsis is the scientic image. It is literally a
theoretical image of the world, the image that is being built through sciencethrough various
scientic discourses, including physics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology and, more recently,
cognitive science45. It is the image of the white noise as an innite bandwidth signaldespite the
fact that we don't have tools to empirically prove its existence nor we possess senses through which
we could physically feel it. But at the same time it is the complex projection of man-in-the-world on
the human understanding still in the process of emerging from the fruits of theoretical reasoning, in
particular, from the processes of postulational theory construction46 where postulational is opposed
to correlational. Nonetheless, the correlational circle is somehow unavoidable even when trying to
conceive the scientc image, and Sellars doesn't escape this paradox. The same thing happens the
other way around. We see it when Sellars describes how a pink cubehe would call it a cube-ofpinklycould be apprehended through a stereoscopic view47:

*Where physical-2 states are denable in terms of theoretical predicates necessary and sucient to describe non-living matter. (To
be "physical-I", in contrast, is simply to belong in the space-time network).

We can therefore infer from the example above that the fusion already implies that the scientic
image would somehow prevail as long as the perceivers themselves are complex systems of microphysical particles that are thus embedded in the image. But, paradoxically, it is by means of the
manifest image that we conceive the scientic oneit is ultimately a rational process, a thought
process. The result is a sort of intermittent fusion in which one image methodologically leads to the
other and then self-erases to, later on, perhaps reappear.

45 BRASSIER, R. Nihil Unbound. Enlightenment and extinction. Palgrave macmillan. 2007. p.3.
46 ROSENBERG, J.F. Wilfrid Sellars: fusing the images. Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2007. p.
13.
47 In the following example the categorization manifest image/scientific image is mine.
48 SELLARS, W. The Carus Lectures for 1977-78, published in Monist 64/1 (1981). p. 66-67. Quoted in:
ROSENBERG, J.F. Wilfrid Sellars: fusing the images. Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2007. p.
24-25.
26

Sills from Ms enll del mirall (Beyond the mirror). Joaquim Jord. nicamente Severo Films, Oviedo TV, 2006. Film.

According to Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and extintion, Sellars concludes
that, ultimately, none of the two images should devour the other, specially advising that a dominance
of the scientic image would deprive ourselves of what makes us humans49. This dehumanization
could, perhaps, be sketched in the examples that follow Brassier's argumentation. Paul Churchland's
neurocomputational alternative, is one of the turns towards the scientic image that Brassier analyzes.
The neurocomputational process would push the brain coding activity out beyond the physical
boundaries of the organism so that they become constitutive features of the world. It seems that
Churchland proposes to break a vicious circlethe correlational circlewhilst he enters another
circle ruled by the dichotomy brain-world: the brain represents the world but cannot be
conditioned by the world in return because the latter have been always already neurocomputationally
represented.50
On the one hand, Churchland's approach seems compelling as long as it provides answers to the
problematics of representation that have been examining along the rst chapters of this text. If
desires, believes and intentions are constructs, we are therefore as far from reality as Esther could be.
On the other hand, if humans rely on neurocomputation to objectify reality then quite possibly we
are more close to a displacement of what makes us humans, and there will be an increasing need
for a politics. Perhaps it is even too late to create a stereoscopic image of persons and their place in
nature. Perhaps the very notion of nature is as dubious as any other construct and it has to
49 BRASSIER, R. Nihil Unbound. Enlightenment and extinction. Palgrave macmillan. 2007. p.8.
50 Ibidem. p. 21.
27

disappear. Perhaps nature is the inapparent object that Brassier describes when explaining the
appearance of appearance: the more we stick to describing pure appearing qua appearing, the more
we realize that we invariably have to assume something inapparent within appearances in order to be
able to describe them at all51. Again, we are possibly confronting a set of a setappearance qua
appearancethat could have displaced a supposedly real waterfall.

51 Ibidem. p.28.
28

7. Our place in nature

The two images conforming the synoptic vision could easily be identied with what Bruno Latour, in
an appropriation of the famous Platonic allegory, describes as the two houses of the Myth of the
Cave. Latour uses the metaphor in order to describe the tendency and the logics of the prevailing
ecological discourse52. At rst, the author will point the political problematics of such dichotomy:
The rst [house] is the obscure room depicted by Plato, in which ignorant people nd
themselves in chains, unable to look directly at one another, communicating only via ctions
projected on a sort of movie screen; the second is located outside, in a world made up not of
humans but of nonhumans, indierent to our quarrels, our ignorances, and the limits of our
representations and ctions.
[...]
The rst house brings together the totality of speaking humans, who nd themselves with no
power at all save that of being ignorant in common, or of agreeing by convention to create
ctions devoid of any external reality. The second house is constituted exclusively of real
objects that have the property of dening what exists but that lack the gift of speech.53
On the one hand there is the rst house, were
we encounter the Assembly of humans, that is,
Society; in Sellarsian terms this house would
depict the manifest image of man-in-theworld. An image built through social sciences,
through culturally dened constructs and
through appearances of things. On the other
hand, there is the second house, where things- The political model with two houses, nature and society, is
based on a double split. The model of the collective is based,
in-themselves are, where real objects exist, conversely, on a simple extension of the human and
where we meet the Assembly of things, that is, nonhuman members.
Nature; this house would be depicted by the LATOUR, B. 1999. Politics of Nature How to Bring the Sciences
scientic image. The rst house has the gift of into Democracy. Cambridge, Massachussets, London,
England : Harvard University Press, 2004. p. 50.
speech but does not have the authority to
speak whereas the second house is lacking speech but has the legitimacy to speak. Latour describes a
privileged minority that have the power to travel from one house to the other:
The subtlety of this organization rests entirely on the power given to those who can move
back and forth between the houses. The small number of handpicked experts, for their part,
presumably have the ability to speak (since they are humans), the ability to tell the truth
52 The book was written in 1999.
53 LATOUR, B. 1999. Politics of Nature How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, Massachussets,
London, England : Harvard University Press, 2004. p. 26.
29

(since they escape the social world, thanks to the asceticism of knowledge), and, nally, the
ability to bring order to the assembly of humans by keeping its members quiet (since the
experts can return to the lower house in order to reform the slaves who lie chained in the
room).54
We can infer that this technocratic minority corresponds to the scientic community. There is, thus,
a need for a redistribution of powers by which speech has to be brought to the second house where
the objects cannot speak but possess agency. Otherwise there is only a minority that can potentially
refer to the second house. In order to do so the whole dualistic schema needs to be reassembled and
reformulatedif not abolished. Latour suggests a system in which there are spokespersons, actants
like in his famous actor-network theoryand propositions; where the logic is not dichotomousa
two-house collectivebut rather revolves around one single collectivewithout outside recourse. It
is, ultimately, a system that provides speech to non-humans.
In the rst chapter of this text we have seen how Esther, from her marginalized position, had to
adjust her deviated perception to t in the socially agreed language. We have criticized how there is a
hierarchical distribution of roles by which she is left with no option but to accept what she is being
toldto, ultimately, take part in daily public life. But we have also casted doubt upon the idea of
nature, existing as a construct, as an idea that has been culturally and socially dened (we could add
anthropologically, psychologically, historically, etc.) and that should not become a precept, an
assumption, neither for Esther nor for us. Let us now, in an exercise of self-countering this
argument, try to analyze the possible consequences of such a quarrel in relation to a politics of
representation, ultimately, a politics of nature.
The rst thing we should pinpoint is that the idea of constructed nature derives from the same
dichotomous allegory of the Cave, a reference that seems to be dicult to surpassas long as
politics are being used to follow the same schema instead of questioning it:
The idea that nature does not exist, since it is a matter of social construction, only
reinforces the division between the Cave and the Heaven of Ideas by superimposing this
division onto the one that distinguishes the human sciences from the natural sciences.55
In an attempt to dismantle the myth of nature, ecology becomes Neoplatonic and seems to embrace
it. Ecology has been attributing the problematics of inheriting the notion of nature to the latter's
conceptual articiality, enclosing the quarrel in the same dualistic schema of the Cavethe schema
of representation, of manifestation. While there is a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-thehunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for54 Ibidem. p. 14.
55 Ibidem. p. 33.
30

the-carpenter there is no room left for a non-human-forest, for a possible forest-for-the-forest or,
simply, for a forest. That is what could potentially democratize or redistribute powers in a collective
assembly. According to the author, the task of social sciences would then be of another sort:
We may suppose that the tasks of these sciences will be more inspiring than to prove that
there exist cultural and social lters through which humans must necessarily pass to
apprehend objects out there, while always missing things in themselves. By refusing the
support that the social sciences claimed to be oering it, political ecology frees these sciences
to do other jobs and directs them toward other innitely more fruitful research paths. It is of
the pluriverse that they should speak, of the cosmos to be built, not of the shadows projected
on the wall of the Cave.56
But, who takes part in this collective? What does this cosmos to be built consist of? which are the
non-speaking objects that need to be given a voice in the new assembly?
At this point we encounter that the questions posed by Latour at the turn of the century had become
more and more compelling. The collectivestill being assembledis trying to understand the
current situation in real-time: the Anthropocene is waiting at the doors of the new Geological Time
Scale57. We now have to incorporate not only those non-human actants that have been excluded
from the collective (Latour lists some of them: moons, planets, suns, galaxies, trees that fall in the
forest, stones, animals58) along years but also ones of another sort, of another time-space dimension,
ones that had been coined as hyperobjects59. They are all those objects that are so massively
distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specicity, such as global warming,
styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium.60 Like the white noise, these objects posses such a large
bandwidth that it appears to us almost endless, innite. But, as we have seen, the question is not any
more about what appears to-us:
Consider raindrops: you can feel them on your headbut you cant perceive the actual raindrop in
itself. You only ever perceive your particular, anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isnt
this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate, not
the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system? I can think and compute climate in
this sense, but I cant directly see or touch it.61
56 Ibidem. p. 41.
57 Anthropocene. (n.d.). in Wikipedia. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015] URL:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene>
58 Ibidem. p. 33.
59 MORTON, T. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. London and Minneapolis :
Univesrity of Minesota Press, 2013. p. 19.
60 Ibidem. p. 19.
61 Ibidem. p. 38. Quoting KANT, I. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Boston: St. Martins Press,
1965), 8485.
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Therefore, the key might be what to do with the real waterfallendlessly in motion, endlessly
generating noise, endlessly eroding the stoneand not about the waterfall that has been soaking us.
But perhaps in none of the two will we encounter our place in nature, perhaps there is no place for us
anymore or perhaps, we can no longer talk about nature that reied, mythical thing over yonder in
the mountains, in our DNA, wherever; that dissolves when we look directly at it62.

62 MORTON, T., Queer Ecology. PMLA, Volume 125, Number 2, March 2010, pp. 179. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015]
URL: <https://www.academia.edu/1050754/Queer_Ecology>
32

Conclusions
It is always a dicult task to infer and drawn conclusions out of a process of speculation. All the
questions that have been accumulated could be understood as deposits of gritty reason 63
conguring a conglomerate of sediments, a slow owage that makes one conscious of the turbidity
of thinking64. But despite the limitations, despite the gesture of writing, it has been possible to pose
the initial questions and face thementailing, sometimes, the rising of new questions.
As a result the notion of nature arises problematics and with them a number of processes and
concepts are being towed, infested of these problematics. Some have been explored or have been
intuited along the text and could congure a dense and multiple tag cloud: mediums, interfaces,
images, light, landscapes, technologies, techniques, devices, dispositifs, viewers, messages, sounds,
noises, humans, non-humans, trance, tactility, neuronal processes, ecology, constructs, hypnosis,
manifestations, spectres, scientic representations, climate, hyperobjects, etc., each of them leading to
other tags, drawing more and more complex networks. These concepts are oscillating around a
particular notion of nature that becomes overowing and elusive. Accordingly, this text is just
another update that responds to a necessity for a constant revision and redenition of these
concepts and their relations. It is, ultimately, an attempt to temporarily unblock some of them in
order to be able to question them and in doing so update, if any, a notion of nature.

63 SMITHSON, R. 1968. A sedimentation of the mind: earth projects. Artforum, September 1968, p.44
[online]. [citied 16.01.2015] URL <http://www.glissementsdeterrain.net/pdfs/smithson-robert--a-sedimentationof-the-mind-earth-projects.pdf>
64 Ibidem.
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Epilogue
In some rural areas farmers use an old traditional method to nd water for the crops. This ability to
intuit invisible underground currents is called dowsing (also divining, doodlebugging or water
witching). Using a Y or L shaped rod they can point where the water is. They often use a pendulum
and some cooper coins to predict other features of the current such as its ow, its level, the quality of
the water or how deep from the surface it is.
What is it exactly that makes some people more sensitive for this practice? The predisposition is
probably a very important aspect, almost all the dowsers mention it: When I get the rods I start
thinking that I'm looking for water; if you have it in your hands and you're not thinking, the rods
will not point. The thought is what is more important. The rods only point.65
I would like to understand the writing of this text as a pseudo-dowsing exercise in which I have been
walking on a dry at plain convinced that I would nd an underground current. I might have nd it
or I might have not, but I have tried to keep the thought in mind: I'm looking for water. I have been
feeling underground currents; currents that overlap one another, that collapse, that fuse; tangential
currents that run parallel at dierent levels, haptic currents, currents of sound, of noise, neuronal
and mental currents that have owed and discharged in a cascade.
Far from reaching a clear answer to the initial questions, the text had opened many more and had
brought new uncertainties. I, therefore, consider the text as a preamble for further explorations in
my artistic practice. As an encouraging pretext to rethink it and work with all these uncertainties.
Sometimes the dowsers carry a witness, a sample of what they are searching in a small bottle that
they hold in the left hand while using the pendulum with the right hand: you have to carry the
witness, holding it with your hand. That is how oil could be found, how gold and lead mines were
found.66 I would like to carry this text as a witness, as a sample to dowse further through my
practice, although at the end, the result will not rely upon the witness or the rods but rather upon
the thought itself.

*
65 CANELA BALSEBRE, R. M. Els bruixots de l'aigua. Els saurins a Catalunya. Barcelona : Centre de Promoci
de la Cultura Tradicional Catalana, 2010. p. 49. [online]. [citied 16.01.2015] URL:
<http://cultura.gencat.cat/web/.content/cpcptc/documents_estatics/pe_patrimoni_etno/sd_estudis_1_tot.pdf>
66 Ibidem.
* Josep Gabarra, from Omellons (Catalonia, Spain) showing a bottle containing a witness.
CANELA BALSEBRE, R. M. Els bruixots de l'aigua. Els saurins a Catalunya.
34