“When the air shimmers, distorting perception, this impacts on our access to reality and thus on our understanding of ‘sense-certainty’, on our understanding of truth in terms of correspondence theory, etc.” (Arthur Roesler referring to Plato) Every question about perception, about a reality of perception or a reality through perception, must be reduced to the question of a medium. “There is no way that we could circumvent language or representation and penetrate into reality, into the unshaped traces of matter behind things or our experience.” (Joel Snyder) What we are able to conceptualize as perception is aimed primarily at giving an order to a “world in constant change and confusion” (Aaron Siskind), at ascribing meaning to it, at giving structure to the “vast disorder of objects” (Roland Barthes), at performing an appropriation, a transformation. “Realistic depiction is conceptually and historically based upon the adoption of a model that permits (…) to demand, and indeed, to find systematic relations between picture and object of depiction. But this ‘object’ is not simply ‘the way the world is,’ ‘the way the world looks,’ nor even ‘the ways we use our vision,’ it is rather a standardized, or characterized, or defined notion of vision itself.” (Joel Snyder) In other words: there is no “natural” perception but rather only a constant comparison with models of perception. Since the seventeenth century at the latest, these models have been primarily models of media, initially of optics, then later – since Goethe – a model of a perception-based body that is also conceived as a kind of medium.

On this premise, we may conceive perception as a specific “order through visuality” that exists solely within the framework of these models – as a systematization between perception, picture and object. But this order produces not only perceptions or pictures, as an arrangement of modelled physis it always also produces a power that reveals things – that reveals things in a very specific manner, that shapes the discourses through which things are revealed: hence, perception is not so much a matter of physiology but rather of cultural power relations – the power to ascribe meaning to an appearance or perception. Media, especially, are not found “mediators”, nor ingenious or obscure technical inventions, but rather systematic operators that are positioned at very specific places in discourse and produced in complex cultural exchange relations. Media testify to the extent to which perception is encoded in culture, to the extent to which every perception is bound to processes of its discursification and culturalization. Media, in particular, highlight the necessity and unavoidability of mandating perception to a cultural hegemony, a hegemony in which this power of revealing is inscribed. In this sense, media are potentials of distinction, they allow us to create a meaningful, significant (ideological?) form of processes of representation and communication. Media, then, embody above all and first and foremost possibilities for cultural practices of creating meaning. The object of perception is owed to this subsequent reconstruction through culturally encoded media (language, writing, picture): without a medium there can be no “object”, but without an object there can be no perception. And without meaning there can be no “phenomena” of a real world.

And finally, it is not only a matter of constructing seeing, perception or a view, it is equally about constructing a subject as a point of departure for perception, for every view, and for every picture. The “constitutive inclusion of the viewer (…) is not to be seen as a mistake to be overcome, but rather as a condition of observation itself (…).” (Elena Esposito) This condition of observation, in turn, is not only the point of departure for seeing, but also the “place” of an identity: the power ascribes and inscribes a certain subjectivity and identity into every point of departure of perception. Perception as the ascription of such a relation of representation – the definition of a “place” at which perception takes place and is translated into meaning – thus represents a powerful social system of signification that, at the same time as it communicates its ostensible ‘content’ (by constructing a picture, an object), also produces the ideological subject. (Victor Burgin) Every perception, then, in addition to its object also produces a place of making visible, of becoming visible, of per-ception of a created visibility; perception is the ascription of a cultural ability to act that is not limited to seeing pictures, but which rather culminates in decoding their meanings. Even if the place of perception coincides with the place of production of an identity, this coincidence once again reveals both the artificiality of every conception of per-ception of phenomena, as it revises every assumption of a “natural” identity. Just as perception does not fall to us as a natural function of our body, but rather may always only be experienced in a cultural construction of visibilities and meanings, identity does not fall to us as the “natural” production of our subject, but equally only becomes imaginable as a construction of cultural contexts of description. In the maelstrom of a general mobilization of the signs and meanings and of an ineluctability of representation, these considerations would appear both obvious and outrageous: obvious, as the profound influence of media-technical processes and apparatuses on everyday life would seem to render any thought of “naturalness” completely obsolete; outrageous, as a criticism of these conditions cannot open up a path to “sense-certainty” or any manner of reality. We must admit that “we are irrecuperably estranged from a supposed ‘origin’ to which we nonetheless continue compulsively to refer.” (Steven Shaviro) But the question is whether this compulsion brings us closer to an understanding of what could be described as a process of perception.

Translation: Richard Watts