i have mixed feelings about this book. but it keeps haunting me. i’m quoting an early part from the third chapter where he mentions debord, worker’s councils and face-to-face communication. crary starts this chapter with an alexander kluge quote, and follows up:
There is no joy or sorrow, no beauty or exuberance on the internet. One can find poems, but no poetry.
Readers of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle often pass over his admiration for workers’ councils and his advocacy of the council form as a vital element of revolutionary struggles. In the concluding paragraph, he writes that the power of the councils was “the realization of that active, direct communication which marks the end of all specialization, all hierarchy and all separation.” Debord was one of many for whom the encounter (rencontre) was essential for resisting the spectacle’s suspension of a common lifeworld. The spectacle, he wrote, produces “a systematic organization of a breakdown in the faculty of encounter and the replacement of that faculty by a social hallucination, an illusion of encounter.” It’s not difficult to see the internet complex as continuous with developments that were well underway in the 1960s, but today’s social media perform an even more sweeping eradication of community.
While forms of mediated communication have existed for millennia, it’s only recently that tele-phonic and tele-visual apparatuses have become fully integrated extensions of the ways we communicate. Most of these developed in response to the needs of a growing global economy and a modernizing military, but, until the mid-twentieth century, they remained supplemental to long-standing patterns of direct meetings and encounters between human beings. As Debord and others noted, spontaneous or unprogrammed forms of being together became irreconcilable with the rationalization of consumer society. This led to the suppression of uncontrolled political or popular assemblies and to the commodification of the urban spaces and temporalities of everyday life in which ordinary forms of personal interaction occurred. The techno-modernists have long disparaged any attachment to in-person interaction, insisting on its irrelevance amid all the new tools for “communicating.” But the unspoken truth is that face-to-face encounters entail too much wasted time to be compatible with the speeds and financial efficiencies of online exchange and no data can be extracted from them and instantly put to use.
The value of a face-to-face encounter has nothing to do with some misplaced sense of its authenticity compared to telematics or other kinds of remote contact, which have their own authentic features. Rather, the direct encounter between human beings is something other than and incomparable with the exchange or transmission of words, images, or information. It is always suffused with non-linguistic and non-visual elements. The value of a face-to-face encounter has nothing to do with some misplaced sense of its authenticity compared to telematics or other kinds of remote contact, which have their own authentic features. Rather, the direct encounter between human beings is something other than and incomparable with the exchange or transmission of words, images, or information. It is always suffused with non-linguistic and non-visual elements. Even when unexceptional or unmindful, the face-to-face meeting is an irreducible basis of the lifeworld and its commonality; it is charged with the possible emergence of something unforeseen that has nothing to do with normative communication. An encounter does not occur in empty space, nor is it bounded by the frame of a screen. It is an immersion, an inhabiting of an atmospherics, affecting every sense, whether consciously or not. This kind of meeting, this proximity, is literally a con-spiracy, a breathing together.
Yet the stifling of our propensity for encounters and their responsibilities unfolds on many levels. One of the forces exacerbating this debilitation is the pervasive use of biometric procedures and related techniques to reconfigure human behavior and responses into quantifiable information. There is little in the body and brain that is not now subjected to extraordinary forms of monitoring and analysis, and an important goal of this data acquisition is to maximize and habitualize our use of network technology. During the last decade, biometrics have been debated and critiqued extensively but mostly around questions of surveillance, consumer profiling, and digital policing. My concern in this chapter, however, is the fate of what makes possible and sustains an intersubjective lifeworld: the voice, the face, and the gaze. Capitalism requires their appropriation and utilization as part of the weakening of an individual’s capacity for caring, empathy, or community. Biometrics furthers the comprehensive habituation of human beings to interfacing with machine systems. The reductiveness of its operations, especially when these target vision and speech, leads to a splintering of the interhuman basis of a shared social reality.