(DIS)ORIENTATION AND POV GENESIS, PROLIFERATION AND APOCALYPSE A meta-cinematic inquiry on the edges of philosophy and cybernetics By Mitra Azar The adventures of orientation Departing from this philosophical background, this work aims at bringing forth a notion of (dis)orientation and POV capable of bridging the divide between the organic and the inorganic (both in its technical and non-technical form), providing the preliminary elements for a new philosophical infrastructure which brings into focus the blurred shadow of orientation projected by Western philosophy, while building new instruments for critically addressing computational media and algorithmic culture, such as the notions of archi-POV and (dis)orientation laying at the root of Stiegler and Deleuze’s philosophy. In this context, this work aims at sketching the first steps towards the construction of a philosophical architecture designed to investigate the ontogenesis of the concept of orientation through its “adventures” (its polymorphic becoming, from Big Bang up to machine vision), along few vectors of inquiries, or series, which show the infiltration of the notions of (dis)orientation and POV within the domains of: - A genealogy, defined by Stiegler as the “cosmo-ontogenesis of the archi-cinema and of the archi-POV”1. This genealogy is grounded on Deleuze’s implicit cosmology 2, and approaches the universe as a meta-cinematic machine composed by regimes of light and matter projecting and reflecting photons through a system of archi-POVs and archi-screens3. - An organology investigating regimes of light and perception on the basis of Deleuze’s 1 Stiegler, B. (2018). Master Class with Bernard Stiegler. Aarhus University. 2 Deleuze, G. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema I. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 3 The notion of archi-screen, declined here in a cosmological sense (in terms of the formation of the first screens of matter obstructing the diffusion of light described by Deleuze in Cinema I, comes from Mauro Carbone. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 63; Carbone, M. (2019). Philosophy-screens. New York: Suny Press. 1 notion of deterritorialization4, Stiegler’s notion of locality, and Bergson’s implicit notion of POV-image, departing from a revision of von Uexküll’s Umwelt (ecological niche). - An exo-organology of the archi-POV, which surveys regimes of light and technics, departing from Stiegler’s notion of originary technicity 5 on the basis of LeroiGourhan’s evolutionary anthropology6 and in relation to cinematic POV shot, Lacan’s mirror stage and Winnicott’s transitional object. - A technogenesis, which approaches the relation between regimes of light and technics in cybernetics terms, and turns the question about the ontogenesis of (dis)orientation and POV into their cybernetic technogenesis. A cybernetic of affects: the shortcircuiting of the archi-POV by new regimes of truth and visibility defined as POVopticon and structured around algorithmic POV, such as the Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI)7. * 4 The only time Deleuze uses the expression disorientation is to describe deterritorialization as traversed by “lines of disorientation”. Deleuze, G. (1987). A thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 486. 5 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 6 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and Speech. MIT Press, Cambridge. 7 Azar, M. “The algorithmic facial image and the relation between truth value and money Value”. APRJA, A Peer Review Journal About, Volume 7, Issue 1, June 2018. 2 (Dis)orientation and POV cosmo-ontogenesis “It is the universe as cinema in itself, a meta-cinema”8 (G. Deleuze, Movement-Image) This series investigates the “cosmo-ontogenesis of the archi-cinema and of the archi-POV”9. This genealogical and genetic work is grounded on Deleuze’s Bergson-inspired implicit cosmology10, and approaches the universe as a meta-cinematic machine composed by regimes of light and matter projecting and reflecting through a system of POVs and screens, where (dis)orientation and POV turns into vectors of differentiation and individuation 11. Deleuze recasts cinema as the cosmological process through which oriented matter emerges from “flowing-matter” and from the “cooling down of the plane of immanence [in the cosmology of the Big Bang, the quantum fluctuations]” which provides “the first opacities, the first screens obstructing the diffusion of light”12, allowing, in turn, the formation of more solid matter in an accelerating process of concretion13. This flowing-matter finds its physical counterpart in the quantum fluctuations⁠14 (the probabilistic change in the amount of energy 8 Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema I. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 59. 9 Stiegler, B. (2018). Master Class with Bernard Stiegler. Aarhus University. 10 Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema I. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 11 Azar, M. (2021). “(Dis)orientation, POV and the Virtual”. Humanities 10: 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010033. 12 Ibidem, p. 63. 13 The expression is used in a Whiteheadian sense, to refer to the process where “the coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of anyone actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components”. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, p. 7. 14 Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation. Quantum fluctuations are the universe without organs, to paraphrase Deleuze & Guattari’s “body without organs” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 149-167): “the intense egg [is] defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements”. Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 153. 3 of a point in space) that follow the cosmic inflation and precede the formation of the first forms of stable orientation from a universe with no point of anchorage nor center of reference, and yet characterized by very high energy density, temperatures, and pressures. In Deleuze’s jargon, quantum fluctuations are “a state of matter too hot […] to distinguish solid bodies in it […], a world of universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling: there are neither axes, nor center, nor left, nor right, nor high, nor low”15. Universal acentered variation is the immanent status of the quantum fluctuations before the formation of the first quarks which enable the structuring of the first protons and neutrons. Matter assumes proto-stable orientations surfacing from the universal variation during a process of cooling that enables the formation of the first oriented particles. After the cosmic inflation (the exponential expansion of the proto-universe, happening between 1036 to 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang), the first quarks and electrons combine into protons and neutrons few millionth of a second after the Big Bang, and start producing the first proto-stable forms of orientation. This process seems to have been activated by the rupture of the symmetry between matter and anti-matter, a symmetry which affirms that particles and anti-particles have both left and right chirality or handedness – a property that defines the direction of the particle’s spin in relation to the direction of the particle. This symmetry breaks because of the different properties emerging from the handedness of neutrinos: left-handed neutrinos (neutrinos with a left spin) decays faster than their counterpart, because the force responsible for nuclear decay (weak force) has an effect only on particles that are left-handed. Decaying faster, left-handed neutrinos violate CP symmetry (which states that the laws of physics are the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle), and allows matter to form faster than anti-matter, making all neutrino’s particle left-handed and their counterpart righthanded. In a sense, it is as if the universe emerges because a left hand appears without its counterpart, as in Kant’s though experiment – although Kant claim the hand would be nor left or right whereas the existence of right-handed anti-neutrino allows to define neutrinos as left-handed, and appreciate their functional difference. Thus, orientation manifests as an intrinsic property of elementary particles (or spin, an intrinsic property of elementary particles, rendered mathematically via vectors defined by 15 Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema I. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 58. 4 magnitude and direction) within electromagnetic fields since the formation of the first protons and neutrons few millionth of a second after the Big Bang. Atoms function simultaneously as POVs and screens because they not only project their orientation but also reflect the orientation of the surrounding field, or of other atomic POVs. Inorganic oriented matter is POV-matter (point of view-matter). Deleuze’s meta-cinematic cosmo-ontogenesis is thus deployed together with Simondon’s theory of inorganic individuation (crystallization) and Barad’s onto-epistemology to reinvent Spencer-Brown’s notions of distinction and indication, as outlined in The Laws of Form, the book that provides the epistemological foundation of second-order cybernetics. * 5 (Dis)orientation and organology: biological locality and POV-image “Which way, which way?” 16 (Alice in Wonderland, Louis Carroll) This series proposes to think about biological matter as the simultaneous process of polarization of the individual and disparation of the ecological niche, as suggested by Simondon’s implicit theory of perception, inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Orientation instantiates first into inorganic-oriented-matter,⁠ later into organic-orientedmatter (carbon-based compounds) and then into living-organic-oriented-matter (for simplicity, living-oriented-matter, or living-POV-matter), from the simplest living organisms appearing on Earth between 4.3 and 3.5 billion years ago to Homo Sapiens between 300 and 200 thousand years ago. This endeavor is developed on the basis of: Deleuze’s notion of deterritorialization 17, conceived as the tendency of matter to produce “lines of disorientation”18 or “continuous variation in direction”19; Bergson’s notion of centers of indetermination qua living images “formed in the acentred universe of movement-images”, and emerging from “the interval between a received and an executed movement” 20, in relation to the missing notion of POVimage, the pluripotent or stem image implicitly driving Bergson’s cosmology , from where Bergson’s image-movement, image-perception and image-affection emerge from, inspired by Leibniz’s notion of center of envelopment, conceived as an inflection or a recursive function of orientation appearing across the organic and the inorganic; Stiegler’s notion of locality, defined in relation to the emergence of a POV and an oriented ecological niche, structured around Schrodinger’s definition of life as anti-entropy; Simondon’s critic of cybernetic, grounded on the incompleteness of individuation against the supposed circularity of 16 Carrol, L. Oxenbury, H. (2003). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Somerville: Candewick Publisher. 17 The only time Deleuze uses the expression disorientation is to describe deterritorialization as traversed by “lines of disorientation”. Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizofrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 486. 18 Ibid, p. 196. 19 Ibid, pp. 486, 488. 20 Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema I. The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 62. 6 cybernetic systems – as in the standard second-order cybernetic naïve reading of SpencerBrown’s Laws of Form. This series argues for a revision of von Uexküll’s Umwelt (ecological niche) conceived as an oriented fragment of space-time framed by the organism’s POV, and for the addition of a third functional circle beside Merkwelt (perception circle) and Wirkwelt (action circle), named Müllwelt (waste circle). The Müllwelt opens von Uexküll’s closed notion of the Umwelt and prompts its reticulation with other Umwelten, giving shape to the Biosphere since the appearance of the first proto-cells and their metabolic waste products from the prebiotic soup, as proposed by Kauffmann and Vernadsky21. This operation allows to reframe Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis22, a word coined to describes how living organisms “transform matter into themselves in a manner such that the product of their operation is their own organization”23. Autopoiesis is thus framed as an intermediate moment of a wider process of heteropoiesis, specifically defined in relation to the metabolic residual and its deterritorialized, alien nature – and thus declined as odd-poiesis (poiesis of the remnant) or xeno-poiesis (poiesis of the alien). The opening of von Uexküll’s Umwelt conceived as the proto-cybernetic coupling between a system and an environment characterized by operational closure, allows von Uexküll’s notion to comply with the thermodynamic openness of the coupling, and its ability to transform entropy into anti-entropy – in a process specifically characterized by the endogenous inversion of entropy at the level of the organic body via the selection and interiorization of oriented fragments of environment, and by the exogenous secretion of residuals of interiorization (Müllwelt), that are ejected as entropic for the organic body and yet eventually transformed into the anti-entropic locality of different organisms such as colonies of bacteria 24. Deterritorialization is thus proposed to understand the movement of the metabolic waste circle in heteropoietic terms, and provides an additional conceptual tool to contrast a strict cybernetic reading of von Uexkull’s functional circles in 21 Vernadsky, V. (1998). The Biosphere. New York: Springer. 22 In his introduction to Autopoiesis and Cognition, a book written together with Varela, Maturana recalls how the word autopoiesis – “a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems”, came to his mind. Cf. Maturana and Varela (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition. Dordrecth: Reidel Publishing Company. 23 Ibidem, p. 82. 24 Cf. Stiegler, B. (2021). Bifurcate. There is no alternative. London: Open Humanity Press. 7 terms of closed feedback loops sustaining the organism’s autopoiesis. This new open, heteropoietic and deterritorialized definition of Umwelt allows to add the notion of transductive feedback, inspired by Simondon’s notion of transduction conceived as the expression of an orientation 25 emerging as a resolution of a primordial heterogeneity 26, beside positive and negative feedback loops, prefigured by von Uexküll’s functional circles. * 25 Simondon, G. (2020). In light of the Notion of Form and Information. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 14. 26 Ibidem. 8 (Dis)orientation and POV exo-organology “In originary disorientation, this differential of forces-as-potential is the difference of rhythms between human beings and organized inorganic being (technics), as well as the de-phasing brought about by technics’ structural advancement, in its differentiation, on the living being it constitutes and differentiates by bringing it into being”27 (Stiegler, Technics and Time II) This series tackles the problem of orientation and POV in relation to the production of external organs, or in the frame of an exo-organology, and surveys regimes of light and technics, departing from Stiegler’s notion of originary technicity 28, on the basis of LeroiGourhan’s evolutionary anthropology29 - according to which the notion of originary technicity is triggered by bipedism and the changing of the horizon’s line as a result of upright orientation. Bipedism is the result of millions of years of evolution and the production of a relatively limited number of divergent functional types30: on the one hand, sessile and radial organisms, functionally oriented homogenously in relation to their ability of accessing nutrients; on the other hand, mobile and bilateral symmetrical organisms, functionally oriented by an anterior and a posterior side (with the former characterized by the presence of the organs deputed to nourishment). The fundamental evolutionary role of orientation in terms of the constitution of an anterior and posterior field in the structuring of the organism’s morphology, and its relationship with the notion of mobility, inspired by Bergson’s philosophy, are at the center of Leroi-Gourhan’s understanding of evolution. Bipedism reorients the evolution of the first anthropoids, which found themselves with hands for crafting and a mouth for speaking 31. Otherwise said, the technical ability acquired by the hands proceeds simultaneously to the possibility of articulating sounds to signify things, thanks to the new orientation of the erect body. Stiegler calls the specificity of the human 27 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and time II. Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 11. 28 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 29 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and Speech. MIT Press, Cambridge. 30 Ibidem, p. 30. 31 Ibidem. 9 condition a “de-fault of and at the origin” 32, and frames it as a “disorientation” connected to its originary technicity. The new definition of Umwelt proposed above allows to read the disorientation produced by human’s originary technicity as an acceleration of the disorientations already traversing the structure of inorganic, organic and living matter. Technics transforms the Müllwelt artefactually and turns it into a techno-Umwelt which retroacts with the Umwelt from where the Müllwelt is originary coming from. Technical disorientation disrupts the equilibrium between the functional circles of the Umwelt, as well as the one between different Umwelten, and inaugurates the technical disorientation at the foundation of hominization. Yet, similarly to biological disorientation, technical disorientation is capable of generating new ecological niches and re-orient previous ones. As we will see, the very ability of technicity of simultaneously orient and disorient is at the root of Stiegler’s pharmakological understanding of technicity, or its ability of being simultaneously poison and cure33. Otherwise said, technics catalyzes the tendency towards both deterritorialization (disruption of a milieu) and reterritorialization (creation of a new milieu) already inscribed into the functioning of biological locality. The conversion of dry wood into a source of energy to produce fire for hunting or cooking is an example of the role that technicity plays on biological Müllwelt and of its pharmacological nature. Dry wood can be considered as the Müllwelt coming from the Umwelt of a tree once detached from the tree’s trunk. This Müllwelt is re-activatated by technics and transformed into a source of energy (fire) driving the formation of new social and cultural localities. Here, technicity appears as a form of disorientation which operates over the metabolic waste of the biological Umwelt of a tree, enabling the transition from a non-human Umwelt to non-inhuman – Umwelt. At the same time, newly formed technoUmwelten produce new types of Müllwelt which are not immediately metabolizable into new Umwelten, turning into technical necro-mass which eventually disrupts the Umwelt from where they are coming from. This is what happens when the production of fire becomes combustion at a planetary scale and impact the biosphere producing an ozone hole in the atmosphere which compromise the life conditions of both humans and other non-human 32 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 33 Cf. Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. London: Athlone Press, pp. 61-156. Cf. Stiegler, B. (2013). What makes life worth living. On pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity Press. 10 species. This happens because technicity amplifies the qualitative and quantitative changes of scale inherent to an open notion of Umwelt or biological locality, accelerating them and in so doing reversing the biological conversion of entropy into anti-entropy: technicity increases the production of new entropy in the form of a technological necromass or techno-Müllwelt and produces what Stiegler refers to as anthropy34. Anthropy affects not only the human techno-Umwelt but the biosphere at large, especially now that the biosphere is enveloped by a technosphere which fully conditions the reticulations between the Umwelten that compose it. * 34 Stiegler, B. (2018). Hangzhou Seminar, China Academy of Art. 11 Exorganology and archi-POV This series proposes the introduction of the notion of archi-POV at the root of Stiegler’s philosophy, conceived as the implicit engine at work between Stiegler’s notions of cinematographic consciousness and archi-cinema, capable of accounting for the processes of interiorization (corticalization) and exteriorization (exorganology) that characterizes human life as an extended phylogenetic mirror-stage35, since the appearance of the flaked pebble 36. According to Stiegler, cinema has always existed – before its invention, and at least since rupestrian painting which “appeared during the Upper Paleolithic, [and] brought about the emergence of what the archaeologist Marc Azéma describes in La préhistoire du cinéma as the origin of cinema, insofar as it was the discretisation and proto-reproduction of movement”37. For Stiegler, the inscription of memories through primitive technical supports, or “mnemo-technical traces”38, are archi-cinema. In fact, archi-cinema goes well beyond the rupestrian paintings highlighted by Azéma and reaches the anthropoids’ flaked pebble or the flint conceived as the first stereotypical attempts to discretize time into space and establish a proto-mirror stage of projection and reflection between POVs and screens. For Stiegler, then, there is a “double emergence of cortex and flint”39, a “double plasticity”40 in the transductive structural coupling between “living matter / inert matter”41 grounded on the flint’s ability to preserve experience. In other words, the flint promotes a process of corticalization “upon this constitution of the past that the flint is qua the registering of what has come to pass, a conservation that is itself already, qua trace, a reflection”42. The trace supports a reflection which constitute a new relation between the organism and its environment 43 on the basis of a new form of memory called epiphilogenetic, and defined as a “recapitulating, dynamic, and 35 Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 36 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and Speech. MIT Press, Cambridge. 37 Stiegler, B. (2014). “Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema”. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics No. 47, p. 14. 38 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time I. The fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 35. 39 Ibid, p. 155. 40 Ibid, p. 142. 41 Ibidem. 42 Ibid, p. 176. 43 Ibidem. 12 morphogenetic (phylogenetic) accumulation of individual experience (epi)”44 which the flint as trace and support preserves, turning into a vector of epiphylogenesis45, or exteriorized memory46. For Stiegler, “the epiphylogenetic history […] addresses the elements required for a genealogy of this disorientation”47. This is the "paradox of exteriorization"48 whereby “it can never be determined whether the cortex makes the flint possible or the reverse”49, so that “the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by it” 50. Otherwise said, their “mutual coming-to-be”51 turns into “anything but a phantasmatic identification”52, a proto-mirror stage where the who qua archiPOV simultaneously collapses and emerges from the what qua (archi-)screen – as a “mirage”53 of this reversible projection. Here Stiegler expands Leroi-Gourhan’s intuition about the mirroring quality of the relation between the who and the what by referring to the work of Jacques Lacan and his notion of the mirror stage, which will need to be reconsidered in relation to Winnicott’s transitional object, and reinvented accordingly. if for Lacan the I is “precipitated in a primordial form prior to be objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other”54, Stiegler insists on how this primordial form is emerging from the other conceived as what or tool of an “instrumental maieutic” 55 which allows the projection to begin with. Stiegler pushes Lacan’s understanding of the mirroring mirage into an exteriority 56 without 44 Ibidem. 45 Ibid, p. 175. 46 https://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis. 47 Stiegler, B. (2009). Technics and Time II. Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 65. 48 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 175. 49 Ibid, p. 176. 50 Ibidem. 51 Ibid, p. 141. 52 Ibid, p. 157. 53 Ibid, p. 141. 54 Ibid, p. 95. 55 Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time I. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 158, 176. 56 A word Lacan also uses to refer to the “mirage […] as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority”. Lacan, J. (1977). The mirror stage as formative of the I function as Revealed in psychoanalytic experience, in Lacan, J. (2005). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, p. 95. 13 which the process of interiorization (individuation) of an I wouldn’t be at all possible. For Stiegler, Lacan’s primary identification is the identification with the technical object – with the mirror itself, before than with the mirrored image – the point being exactly that the mirrored image and the mirror are in a sense indistinguishable, and one does not exist without the other. We argue that this identification is a form of tertiary identification qua identification that allows the passage between primary (narcissistic) and secondary (social) identification, with a conceptual move that reminds how Stiegler generates the notion of tertiary retention from within Husserl’s philosophy, necessary to explain the play between primary retention (perception) and secondary retention (memory). In a sense, Stiegler reads Lacan through Winnicott, who identifies a transitional space occupied by a transitional object – such as the pacifier or the Linus’s blanket – to explain the process of detachment between the child and the mother, and the consequent progressive establishment of the child’s autonomous point of view and its Umwelt. Finally, it is the exteriorization of memory into technical supports that transforms consciousness cinematographically and allows it to produce a “montage through which a unified flux is constructed (as “stream of consciousness”), […] which is identical in form to the cinematic flux of an actual film, as a temporal object and as a result of a constructed montage”57. Thus, archi-cinema describes the functioning of what Stiegler calls “cinematographic consciousness” 58 – a consciousness that works cinematographically because it “projects its object [and] its projection is a montage” 59, of which mnemo-technical traces “form the fabric, as well as constituting both the supports and the cutting room” 60. This work argues that the relation between archi-cinema and cinematographic consciousness is brought forth by the notion of archi-POV conceived as the variation of a generic dispositive of reflection and projection composed by machinic folds and bodily folds, and as the implicit interstitial engine at work between archi-cinema and cinematographic consciousness. * 57 Stiegler, B.(2011). Technics and Time III. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 17-18. 58 Ibidem. 59 Stiegler, B. (2014). “Organology of Dreams and Archi-Cinema”. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics No. 47, p. 8. 60 Ibidem. 14 Exorganology and cinema One of the main stakes of this investigation consists in conceiving Stiegler’s cinematographic consciousness according to a concept of archi-POV structured around a new understanding of subjective cinematic POV and of its genetic role in the history of cinema. Within the specific field of film and media theory, the construction of the notion of the archi-POV qua generic form of the subjective POV shot is developed by adopting Crary’s Technics of the Observer seminal work as the backbone for a discourse structured around the idea that since the beginning of the technological and physiological discoveries that in the 18th and 19th century prepare the invention of cinema61, new forms of imbrications between organized-inorganic POVs qua machinic fold and human POV qua bodily fold emerge in relation to the ability of the former to act over the latter in increasingly more transparent ways. In our unorthodox way of reading Crary, the supposed indexical screen which frames the images produced by these technologies is ultimately over-framed if not constituted on the basis of the subjective framing function generated by the human POV qua retinal imaginary screen, which is then simultaneously objectified while also structurally implicated in this objectification. Furthermore, Crary implicitly shows how the objectification and systematization of the eye qua its abstraction happens as a process of technical dividuation. On the one hand, this process exploits and replicates the organic dividuation characterizing the retinal imaginary screen function (as we will see in a moment on the machinic side; on the other hand, it aims at recomposing it, rendering it invisible together with the dividual technical operation that makes it invisible in the fruition of the visual artifact. In a sense, this double process of dividuation allows to show how the kaleidoscopic notion of the observer pushed forward by early modernity contains already some of the elements that prepare for its algorithmic fragmentation enabled by the advent of the computer and of digital technology, giving shape to a dividual observer structured around a new definition of Point of View. Ultimately, this approach brings into question some of the basic assumptions of Crary’s work – namely, the alleged abstraction of the observer and its progressive disembodiment into algorithmic flows of information, prepared by the alleged analog abstraction brought forth by modern technologies since at least 1820s, as already critically noticed by Hansen. The notion of POV in cinema is then analyzed in relation to linguistic. Before becoming a 61 Crary, J. (1990). Technics of the Observer. Cambridge: MIT Press. 15 technical expression referring to a specific type of cinematic image, then, the notion of cinematic POV is first approached in its generic status of selective framing, a status that bears some resemblances to that of POV in literature. In fact, the problem of POV emerges in relation to the technology of writing as a narratological (semantic level) and grammatological (syntactic level) problem. In this context, Branigan treats cinematic POV in its genetic pluripotency qua differential framing function able to move between the framing capacity of authors, characters and narrators. In this sense, Branigan defines POV less as an attitude of a person than as a technical process shifting between “set of frames within larger frames leading to a frame which cannot itself be framed within the boundary of a text”62. Branigan’s reflection allows to pose the problem of POV in differential terms: generic cinematic POV becomes a necessary orientational device characterized by its emptiness or residuality, a differential framing function working as a foundational connective narratological and grammatological tissue in its very defaulting as empty signifier. Branigan’s position is inspired by Benveniste63. Shortly, Benveniste applies Sasseurian’s differential structure of language into the differential structure of pronouns conceived as enigmatic blind spots at the root of language, implicitly posed by its differential structure, a structure that somehow needs to precede them in order for them to appear, but that can only appear once they are established to begin with. Benveniste believes that the I-you polarity and reversibility works as the invisible retro-active origin of language, and poses the third person as derivative of this polarity64. Yet, the defaulting status of the I-you pronouns, established clearly by Benveniste as simultaneously supported by and supporting linguistic structures here conceived as a third element cutting across the I-you polarity, points towards a triadic structure and then towards a missing element in the formation of the enunciator (I)/receiver (you) polarity which in a way allows their emergence while simultaneously emerging together with them. Whereas Benveniste understands language as a syntactic and semantic structure necessary for supporting the I-you polarity, Stiegler insists on the technical quality of this structure, and, in a sense, on the presence of a third non-person mediating the constitution of the I-you polarity: a “it” which functions as the hidden engine not only at the root of the I-you polarity 62 Branigan, E. (1984). Point of View in Cinema. New York: Mouton Publisher. 63 Benveniste, E. (1971). Problems in General Linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press. 64 Ibid, pp. 217-231. 16 but of language as such, as shown in the previous series through the technically-driven process of hominization described via Stiegler’s reading of Leroi-Gourhan. If for Benveniste subjectivity consists in the very capacity of posing oneself as a subject65, or point of view – in a way that recall Austin’s speech act66 –, for Stiegler this capacity is structurally contaminated by the presence of an alien element that allows the mirroring between subject and language, and thus the emergence of both, to take place, namely (originary) technicity. Thus, Branigan is close to understand that in cinema the generic POV function resides in the fact that the emptiness of the pronominal marks highlighted by Benveniste is subsumed by a transparent camera equipped with the ability of shifting between pronominal functions seamlessly, giving technical consistency to the defaulting origin of any language. The issue of the camera invisibility is chiefly highlighted by a specific kind of cinematic POV, the subjective camera shot qua simultaneously apex of the camera’s invisibility and its ability to subsume seamlessly the viewer’s body qua organic fold of its functional structure, thus embedding bodily the spectator into the filmic space and making him an invisible presence within it, together with that of the director. The specificity of the subjective camera shot has been undervalued and somehow misunderstood mainly because of Metz’s appropriation of Lacan’s mirror phase 67 and its application to film theory68. As we will see, Metz downplays the role of the identification between the camera and the viewer – similarly to how Lacan downplays the identification between the subject and the mirror – as conditio sine qua non for the identification between spectators and characters. Whereas Metz believes that in cinema, Lacan’s primary identification qua identification between the subject and his reflected image is suspended, and this suspension allows the viewer’s identification with the character on the screen, we argue that both Lacan and Metz forget that primary identification happens, instead, between subject and mirror or camera, and that this identification is primary and necessary for all other identifications to happen. The undervaluation of the identification between subject and camera as primary, affects the history of film studies at large and the understanding of generic cinematic POV and specifically of subjective POV shot. 65 Ibid, pp. 223-231. 66 Austin, J. L. (1975). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 67 Lacan, J. (2005). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. 68 Metz, C. Film Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 17 Stiegler would define the identification between subject and camera as tertiary – in reference to a missing retentional circuit in Husserl’s understanding of time-consciousness69 – although, in fact, this identification happens before all others and activates them in the first place, as already shown in the proto-mirror stage at work between the Zenjanthropians and their flaked pebbles. * 69 Husserl, E. (1990). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Amsterdam: Springer. 18 Exorganology and cybernetic of affects If the functioning of cinema is rethought by insisting on the figure of the subjective POV shot conceived as the hidden and forgotten genetic element of cinema as such, and deployed as an instantiation of the archi-POV, new technologies of vision are approached in terms of their ability of re-inventing the cinematic figure of the cinematic POV, turning it from a technical and aesthetic format into one of the most contested politico-aesthetic battlefields of our time. Once approached in relation to the cinematic notion of POV, the ability of both cinema and new technologies of vision to short-circuit70 Stiegler’s archi-cinema consists in fact in their ability of short-circuiting Stiegler’s implicit notion of archi-POV. This is because, in fact, archiPOV functions similarly to subjective POV shot. Subjective cinematic POV is a technical and aesthetic format that allows the seamless overlapping between the camera (machinic fold) and the viewer and character (bodily folds) – so as to achieve the seamless superposition between the viewer’s body and the character’s body via the camera’s machinic body, producing the immersion of the viewer into the image, or over the screen. New technologies of vision bridle organic orientations and POVs by constituting algorithmic POVs (such as Algorithmic Facial Images, or AFIs) structuring a new regime of truth and visibility defined as POV-opticon. POV-opticon replaces the Panopticon understood as the form of visual governmentality of modernity71, and exploits algorithmic technologies which constitute POV-data-selfie retroacting on the organic POV they’re generate from and reorienting their perceptual and affective apparatus, enforcing a surveillance-assemblage founded on data-veillance conceived as the ability of constituting algorithmically POV able to orient disoriented and amorphous fluxes of data, and, as a consequence, the organic POVs that are exposed to them. This series argues that the algorithmic dispositif can be properly addressed by the neologism POV-opticon conceived as the regime of visibility of algorithmic governamentality 72 70 The concept of short-circuit (opposed to the concept of long-circuit) is approached by Stiegler in various texts, from Technics and Time to Neganthropocene. For an overview please see Stiegler, B. “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-economy”. New Formations 72, (2011), pp. 150-161. 71 Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la Prison. Paris: Gallimard. 72 Cfr. Rouvroy, A. Berns T. “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d'émancipation. Le disparate comme condition d'individuation par la relation?” Réseaux: 2013/1 n°177, p. 163-196. 19 characterized by contemporary games of truth73 enabling so called post-truth to emerge. This governamentality is outlined by the proliferation of POV technologies of vision such us mobile phones, smart watch, fitness trackers, VR and AR technologies, Google Gaze circuit or the ensemble of Google technologies of vision such as Google Maps, Google Car, Google 360, security apps for face recognition and entertainment apps for face swapping, and more 74. The capability of cinematic POV to produce the seamless overlapping between actor’s body, camera, and spectator’s body 75 – so that viewers see what the character sees from the character’s perspective –, is re-invented by these new devices in ways that rearticulate the relation between body and technology and redefine human and machinic agency within new regimes of visibility and new games of truth. On the one hand, we argue that analog POV technology of vision harnesses organic POV on the side of perception, shrinking the distance between technological and organic POV – such as in the case of cinematic POV, a type of image able to generate the seamless overlapping between camera, actor’s body and spectator’s body, or between technological POVs and organic POVs. On the other hand, algorithmic POV technologies, attempt to harness organic POV on the side of affection, colonizing the affective gap between action and reaction which defines organic POV and, in a very peculiar way, human (non-inhuman) POV. In this context, the notions of (dis)orientation, POV and arche-POV carved out at the very root of Stiegler and Deleuze’s philosophy, are mobilized in the understanding of the new processes of dividuation behind the formation of the new regimes of visibility and regimes of truth brought forth by the computational revolution76. 73 Philosopher Daniele Lorenzini argues that Foucault moves towards the implicit distinction between regime of truth and games of truth in his writings between 1975 and 1980, right before his course Subjectivité and Vérité at the College de France in 1981. Cf. Lorenzini, D. (2017). La Force du Vrai. De Foucault à Austin. Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau. Lorenzini, D. “What is a regime of Truth?”. Le Foucaldien 1/1. Open Access Journal for Research along Foucauldian Lines. 2015. 74 Azar, M. (2019). “The shrinking between CCTV and POV regimes of visibility”: from Bryce Williams to machine vision. LUNE 3-Display Issue. 75 This is what happens in Lady in the Lake by Montgomery (1947), as much as in contemporary experiments of POV movies since at least The Blair Witch project by Mirick & Sanchez. Montgomery, R. Lady in the Lake. USA: Metro Goldwin-Mayer, 1947. Mirick D. & Sanchez E. The Blair Witch project USA: Artisan Entertainment, 1999. 76 Azar, M. “POV genesis, proliferation and apocalypse: cinematographic consciousness and refrains via the figure of (archi-)pov between cinema and POV-opticon”. La Deleuziana Journal of Philosophy. The Schizoanalytic 20 POV technologies attempt to prehends the affordances defining the relation between organic POVs and their Umwelten by designing POV-data doubles retro-actively producing the affective and noetic subjects they’re generated from. This is the only way algorithmic POV technologies can currently and vicariously access organic affects despite their incapability of producing the gap at the core of the formation of organic POVs and from where organic affects emerge from to begin with. Finally, the functioning of the POV-opticon is especially analyzed in relation to GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks, a type of algorithmic network), structured around algorithmic POVs: a POV generator produces new data that the POV discriminator evaluates in relation to the assigned (or original) data distribution, trying to discriminate the generated copies from the data set of originals. GANs turn out to be extremely good at generating realistic human faces from a dataset composed by real human faces77. These new algorithmic regimes of visibility produce new regimes of truth where the notion of the copy (or the simulacrum, here the algorithmically generated face, referred to as Algorithmic Facial Image, or AFI 78) and the original (the essence, here the supposed ontological singularity of the human face) is suspended in new ways (post-truth). clinic. Issn 2421-3098 n. 9 / 2019; Azar, M. “POV-Data-Doubles, the Dividual, and the Drive to Visibility”. In Natasha, L. (ed). (2019). Big data—A New Medium? Routledge, London, pp. 177–190. 77 Azar, M. “POV-Data-Doubles, the Dividual, and the Drive to Visibility”. In Natasha, L. (ed). (2019). Big data—A New Medium? Routledge, London, pp. 177–190. 78 Azar, M. “ Algorithmic Facial Image: Regimes of Truth and Datafication ”, APRJA – Research Values, vol. 7 , no. 1, 2018, pp. 26 – 35. 21