eivind rossaak, more than an image – discourse
eivind rossaak, more than an image
2025 · 1,028 wordsas a result, often times technology doesn't give you a replacement, nor does it give you something of a parody or whatnot, instead it gives you disappointments.
prompt sensibility → biometric readability · turn technological gain → irreversible diminution · residue post-driving
- prompt
- sensibility → biometric readability
- turn
- technological gain → irreversible diminution
- residue
- post-driving
- scale
- source → 1,028 words
rossaak wants to see the truth in sensibility, subjectivity and the present moment in technology, and is hopeful to work on these projects in an attempt to get us one step closer to the newly introduced phenomenological economy brought on by the technodigital. without going into or even knowing what he's up to nearly fifteen years later, he raises way more anxieties and questions than he was originally trying to answer or serve as the mediator for, which isn't bad at all for such a short and promotional speech
rossaak resurfaces the claim that we're giving away our data in return for the ability to communicate or share our information in a way that gives us advantages, akin to the concept of derrida's now half-beaten-to-death concept of the pharmakon, which will not be referenced here again so don't click away - or otherwise that technologies artificially replace what they take away with new capacities. rather, it can be thought of as more like, they diminish a certain aspect of our being semi-permanently by putting us into a newly constructed subjective environment, and that's final, and there's no payoff for that. whatever happens as a conceptual gain from technology only works to be compared with what was lost in retrospect but never directly or back to back.
rossaak uses the example of being able to read the haptic data of your body and its attunement to have a biometric read on your enjoyment of reading agamben, or to understand how bodily comportment harms or aids in business negotiations. but what is lost with reading data and repositioning yourself to act in a different way prior to how you would beforehand is not just the way you would have organically moved previously - so in a certain way, schiller's concept of grace is impossible with the contemporary bio-feedback-hacked mover, but also the idea of cheating the inside world over the outside world is a fundamentally false compartmentalization, so to say, when you start messing with the build of the inside world and its habits, you're tempering with very sensitive arrangements you may not be able to replace later.
this reminds of me u/caffeinehell, one of the few real clinical zombies, who has permanently tempered with the inner aspect of their bodies metabolism, leading them to desperately announce that they have realized how superficial emotions are, when they depend entirely on physical processes like hormones, essentially that they are not as essential nor as organically meaningful as they appear to someone who has not felt the inside of their metabolic activity. the inside of the biometric activity, the world of how you react to things - the moment you start to fiddle with this aspect, you are losing things you don't understand or yet know about, unable to replace, and essentially unable to even replicate, meaning they are both instrumental mysteries (helpful, irreplaceable) but also functional mysteries (the moment you do try to fuck with them, they show how you how useless they were - but then you are left without a root).
as a result, often times technology doesn't give you a replacement, nor does it give you something of a parody or whatnot, instead it gives you disappointments. they are originary - their functional novelty and "differential yet replicating" nature is their most proud aspect, but thats unfortunately about where it ends for them.
there is no need to go all the way to byung chul han's walterianism when considering how technology warps our viewpoints, nor something along the lines of considering artifacts the way winner does as potentially colliding with different forms of ontological logic - different unexpected ways of interacting with the world - it is simply a matter of noticing that sensibility of the kind that rossaak describes, such as using the data of browsing habits on platforms to create singular and unique sculptural objects, although it is immensely valuable both as a piece of phenomenological reality turned empirical deity, and as a floating artifact on its own, is only harkened back to the anxious space within which browsing habits and algorithmic predispondency lay - in the sense that - the algorithmic and browsing experience, and habits of thinking patterns are themselves unnatural products of a machine that deterritorializes and alienates desires, away from the subject possessing the psychoanalytic unconscious drive or to the earlier one which posessed a divine connection to the greater spirit above, communicating through subtle nazianzusian energies, but back to the logic of some type of primal search (but with an infinite field) that is no longer a question of the origin of desire
desire was lost all the way back at the moment in modernity where there was an instrumentalization not of desire (which resulted in "propaganda", the idea that specific messaging could influence thinking patterns that could influence voting logics and economic policies such as francissco valla's situation) but rather lost at the moment where sensibility itself became anxious, in the sense that there is no longer any single messenger with a propagandistic mindset, neither is there any goal to be achieved, which puts the human agent back in the position of the pre-civilizational subject enamoured with the world around him - the digital world is kind of like bogna's dark forest, but more-so in the sense that its a desubjectified plane.
this is where rossaak is right to mention depresencing, digital spheres create their own version of a parasympathetic drive where essentially the drive to search and the will to seek (kind of proto schopenhauer mixed with proto nietzsche) are found colliding in this space where depresenting is used to an otherwise equally anxious and intensified subject to create artificial zones of peace and mindfulness, not literal mindfulness (where its functional qualities would be missing) but only a defunctionalized equivalent - such as doomscrolling - which fits the prerogative of a de-initialized or temporary unconscious experiential replacement for the seeking-willing complex, which puts it outside of the dilemma of desire - and in this sense, the entire internet is a giant sort of post-driving phenomenon, and in a sense post-messaging as well, as it communicates nothing, since it is unable to will an intensive nor intentional predispossesion towards conscious, husserlian acting-in-the-world.