“Archives are the product of a process which converts a certain number of documents into items judged to be worthy of preserving and keeping in a public place, where they can be consulted according to well-established procedures and regulations. As a result, they become part of a special system, well illustrated by the withdrawal into secrecy or ‘closing’ that marks the first years of their life. For several years, these fragments of lives and pieces of time are concealed in the half-light, set back from the visible world. A ban of principle is imposed upon them. This ban renders the content of these documents even more mysterious. At the same time a process of despoilment and dispossession is at work: above all, the archived document is one that has to a large extent ceased to belong to its author, in order to become the property of society at large, if only because from the moment it is archived, anyone can claim to access the content.”

“Unlike Locke and Condillac, Schopenhauer rejected any model of the observer as passive receiver of sensation, and instead posed a subject who was both the site and producer of sensation. For Schopenhauer, following Goethe, the fact that color manifests itself when the observer’s eyes are closed is central. He repeatedly demonstrated how ‘what occurs within the brain,’ within the subject, is wrongly apprehended as occurring outside the brain in the world. His overturning of the camera obscura model received additional confirmation from early nineteenth-century research that precisely located the blind spot as the exact point of entrance of the optic nerve on the retina. Unlike the illuminating aperture of the camera obscura, the point separating the eye and brain of Schopenhauer’s observer was irrevocably dark and opaque.”

As we are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding wavefronts of calculation, all we are willing to ask from it is to detect patterns or to recover artifacts whose existence is derived from financial models built on technologies of miniaturisation and automation. As a result, techne is becoming the quintessential language of reason, its only legitimate manifestation. Furthermore, instrumental reason, or reason in the guise of techne is increasingly weaponised. Life itself is increasingly construed via statistics, metadata, modelling, mathematics.

If my description of current trends is accurate, then one of the questions a planetary curriculum must ask is the following: What remains of the human subject in an age when the instrumentality of reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation?

The second is: Who will define the threshold or set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable?

The third is whether we can turn these new instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. In other words, will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet?

“Most dictionaries make little semantic distinction between the words ‘observer’ and ‘spectator,’ and common usage usually renders them effectively synonomous. I have chosen the term observer mainly for its etymological resonance. Unlike spectare, the Latin root for ‘spectator,’ the root for ‘observe’ does not literally mean ‘to look at.’ Spectator also carries specific connotations, especially in the context of nineteenth-century culture, that I prefer to avoid-namely, of one who is a passive onlooker at a spectacle, as at an art gallery or theater. In a sense more pertinent to my study, observare means “to conform one’s action, to comply with,” as in observing rules, codes, regulations, and practices. Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations. And by ‘conventions’ I mean to suggest far more than representational practices. If it can be said there is an observer specific to the nineteenth century, or to any period, it is only as an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observing subject prior to this continually shifting field.”

“The basic theme of De radiis stellarum is the universal activity of nature, exercised through the radiation of power or force. “It is manifest,” al-Kindi asserts, ‘that everything in this world, whether it be substance or accident, produces rays in its own manner like a star….Everything that has actual existence in the world of the elements emits rays inevery direction, which fill the whole world.’ This radiation binds the world into a vast network in which everything acts upon everything else to produce natural effects. Stars act upon the terrestrial world; magnets, fire, sound,and colors act on objects in their vicinity. Even words conceived by the mind can radiate power and thus produce effects outside the mind.”

“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.”

“The term ‘personal equation’ slowly gained currency in the broader culture. Its meaning expanded to include a broader set of personal differences that went far beyond the differences noticed by astronomers in thetiming of star transits. Through the course of the century it became a term used to describe personal opinion and bias. The following definition from Webster’s dictionary reveals the complex meaning of the term, ranging from astronomy to everyday judgments:

Personal equation: The difference between an observed result and the true qualities or peculiarities in the observer; particularly the difference, in an average of a largenumber of observations, between the instant when an observer notes a phenomenon,as the transit of a star, and the assumed instant of its actual occurrence; or, relatively,the difference between these instants as noted by two observers. It is usually only a fraction of a second;—sometimes applied loosely to differences of judgment or method occasioned by temperamental qualities of individuals. ”

“Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. Where was I.”

“The ideal of transparency places a tremendous burden on individuals to seek out information about a system, to interpret that information, and determine its significance. Its premise is a marketplace model of enlightenment—a “belief that putting information in the hands of the public will enable people to make informed choices that will lead to improved social outcomes” (Schudson, 2015). It also presumes that information symmetry exists among the systems individuals may be considering—that systems someone may want to compare are equally visible and understandable. Especially in neoliberal states designed to maximize individual power and minimize government interference, the devolution of oversight to individuals assumes not only that people watch and understand visible systems, but that people also have ways of discussing and debating the significance of what they are seeing. The imagined marketplaces of total transparency have what economists would call perfect information, rational decision-making capabilities, and fully consenting participants. This is a persistent fiction.”

“In the 1790s, Bentham saw “inspective architectures” as manifestations of the era’s new science of politics that would marry epistemology and ethics to show the ‘indisputable truth’ that ‘the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.’ Such architectures of viewing and control were unevenly applied as transparency became a rationale for racial discrimination. A significant early example can be found in New York City’s 18th century ‘Lantern Laws,’ which required ‘black, mixed-race, and indigenous slaves to carry small lamps, if in the streetsafter dark and unescorted by a white person.’ Technologies of seeing and surveillancewere inseparable from material architectures of domination as everything ‘from a candleflame to the white gaze’ were used to identify who was in their rightful place and who required censure.‘’

“The transit of Venus also promised to be scientists’ best hope for solving the problem of standards since it was expected to close a century of debate surrounding the most important constant of celestial mechanics, the solar parallax. A reliable figure for the solar parallax would enable astronomers to determine the distance from the earth to the sun, set the dimensions of the solar system, and using Newton’s law, deduce the masses of the planets. Camille Flammarion, an astronomer and important popularizer of science, argued that with it astronomers would have ‘the meter of the système du monde.’ The astronomer Hervé Faye agreed. The solar parallax was ‘the key to the architecture of the heavens’ and an ultimate ‘touchstone, a precise verification of the theories of celestial mechanics.’ At stake in this moment was nothing less than the determination of ‘the scale of the universe’ and the problem of the plurality of worlds. Still more important, it was connected to philosophical debates about the value of geometric methods in astronomy and the nature of space and time—all lofty issues tied to earthly concerns of governance, national prestige, and military might.”

“The personal equation and reaction time were two controversial terms whose exact meaning would be debated for decades. The term ‘reaction time’ was mostly used by experimental psychologists to describe a lag time, of the order of the tenth of a second, between stimulus and response; the term ‘personal equation’ was mostly used by astronomers. Different astronomical observers assessed time differently, and while these assessments showed a remarkable constancy within the same person, when individuals were compared against each other, results often varied by a few tenths of a second. Many astronomers believed that one reason why observers differed in these estimations was due to their different times of reaction. As the terms reaction time and personal equation gained currency, their definitions nonetheless remained in flux well into the twentieth century.”

“Even before the problem of individual differences in observation leaked to the general public, governments across the world became concerned. Napoleon III’s positivistic empire was the first in France to preoccupy itself with these strange divergences. In 1869 the minister of public instruction, Victor Duruy, addressed a letter to the academy charging ‘scientific missionaries’ to go to the end of the world in 1874 ‘to rid observations from the causes of error which so strangely affected those of 1769.’ Despite the ‘sorry state of the country’s finances,’ the French government was able to amass an impressive amount of money and resources to overcome the obstacles that had haunted the observations made in the previous century. The problem, [the French astronomer Hervé] Faye explained, should be solved no matter the cost.

In 1866 the astronomer Charles Delaunay, an opponent of Le Verrier who would replace him as director of the Paris Observatory in 1870, inaugurated the debate in France with an article designed to point out the ‘embarrassment’ of previous observations. According to Delaunay, a ‘black drop’ that mysteriously appeared between Venus and the sun, combined with the problem of irradiation and personal errors in observations, contributed to the astronomers’ ‘embarrassment in trying to determine the precise instant of contact’ and caused an alarming ‘defectiveness of observations.‘’”

“Bergson’s earliest criticisms of the cinematographic method arose in the context of astronomy – precisely where these machines were first used and most desired. Janssen had built his photographic revolver to study the transit of Venus, and almost two decades afterwards, Bergson became engaged in a discussion about how precise the timing of these kinds of events could actually be. A common view held that ‘An eclipse, or even better, the transit of Venus across the sun, is an interesting and instructive fact because it is very precise.’ But Bergson offered a different perspective. This moment was set apart from the rest of moving reality by the scientist: ‘It is the astronomer that catches the position of the planet from the continuous curve it traverses.’ The apparent precision in timing this event was simply a construct.”

“Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we mark off the boundaries of bodies. Each of these bodies really changes at every moment. In the first place, it resolves itself into a group of qualities, and every quality, as we said, consists of a succession of elementary movements. But, even if we regard the quality as a stable state, the body is still unstable in that it changes qualities without ceasing. The body preeminently – that which we are most justified in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it constitutes a relatively closed system – is the living body; it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition. Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning of a single mean image, or as the deformation of this image in different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the essence of a thing, or of the thing itself.”

“In March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a ‘Law for Regulating Negro & Indian Slaves in the Nighttime’ that declared, ‘no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets’ of New York City ‘on the south side of the fresh water in the night time above one hour after sun sett without a lanthorn and a lighted candle…’

We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable, and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. In situating lantern laws as a supervisory device that sought to render those who could be, or were always and already, criminalized by this legal framework as outside of the category of the human and as un-visible, my intent is not to reify Western notions of ‘the human,’ but to say here that the candle lantern as a form of knowledge production about the black, indigenous, and mixed-race subject was part of the project of a racializing surveillance and became one of the ways that, to cite [Katherine] McKittrick, ‘Man comes to represent the only viable expression of humanness, in effect, overrepresenting itself discursively and empirically,’ and, I would add, technologically.”

“‘It’s a chance to show our side of the story,’ he said, noting residents often record their own footage of police interactions. ‘That way, if anything goes to court, they have their footage and we have our footage.’

Partee, echoing the stance of Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, said he sees the body cameras as a ‘win-win’ for residents and officers. Kim told the officers, ‘If you do something wrong, that’s what it’s going to catch. If you do something right, that’s what it’s going to catch.‘’

He added, ‘You might change how you talk with that camera on. Everybody does.’”

“Transparency is thus not simply ‘a precise end state in which everything is clear and apparent,’ but a system of observing and knowing that promises a form of control. It includes an affective dimension, tied up with a fear of secrets, the feeling that seeing something may lead to control over it, and liberal democracy’s promise that openness ultimately creates security. This autonomy-through-openness assumes that ‘information is easily discernible and legible; that audiences are competent, involved, and able to comprehend’ the information made visible — and that they act to create the potential futures openness suggests are possible. In this way, transparency becomes performative: it does work, casts systems as knowable and, by articulating inner workings, it produces understanding.”

“For television audiences, the [Rodney King] tape’s indexicality was implicitly established and the tape’s vision implied a subject with a common sensibility. In court, the tape did not function as an index that the police involved had broken with authorized procedure. The tape functioned as proof that the beating occurred only insofar as it appeared as a seeing detached from any seeing subject, allowing those present in court to see the beating for themselves. Yet the very marks of historical trauma on the tape, the limitations that give the image its power on television, imply a subject embedded in the situation in which the tape was shot. Entering the tape into evidence rendered those marks irrelevant. The materiality of vision disappears in the process of translating the image into a set of facts. The defense controlled the translation of the tape into facts through the use of testimony. Because the prosecution offered the tape to prove something that was not entirely visible (i.e., the use of excessive force), the defense was able to solicit testimony that the image suggested something else.”

“Photography compensated for an observer’s attention deficit by permitting astronomers to consult records ‘at ease’ His efforts to eliminate the effects of nervousness, distrac- tion, excitement, and surprise led Faye to discard ‘the ancienne method based on our senses’ and to instead advocate ‘automatic observation’.

Photography should be employed by scientists precisely because it elimi- nated nervous feelings: ‘Here the nervous system of the astronomer is not in play; it is the sun itself that records its transit.’ With photography, Faye claimed, ‘the observer does not intervene with his nervous agitations, anxieties, worries, his impatience, and the illusions of his senses and nervous system.’ Only by ‘completely suppressing the observer’—as photography purportedly did—could astronomers have access to nature itself: ‘[With photography] it is nature itself that appears under your eyes.’”

“The astronomer Adolph Hirsch complained that ‘each nation had come up with their own solar parallax.’ And the popular science writer Wilfrid de Fonvielle, who had alerted the general public to the discordances of the previous transits of Venus, mocked the astronomers’ hopes. In Le Mètre international définitif he commented cynically on the host of solar parallax values that had resulted from the British, American, French, German, and Russian expeditions: ‘There are as many great nations as there are distances from the sun to the earth. It is terribly irritating that each nation cannot have its own special planet for its own individual use and is obliged to prosaically receive heat from that banal celestial body which illuminates all the others.’”

“The problem of determining inaccessible distances in astronomy, such as deriving the distance from the earth to the sun through observations of the transit of Venus, was militarily pertinent. New artillery proved the need for determining the distance of barely visible and inaccessible targets, and the efforts placed on transit of Venus observations were seen as a subset of this great and mundane concern. In his public lectures on the transit Faye explained how astronomers acted like ‘artillerymen who need to determine the distance of the target if they want to aim in a way to hit it’ and compared the telescope to a ‘cannon.’ The astronomer Charles Wolf also explained the transit in the same military terms. ‘You know,‘’ he wrote, ‘how in the battlefield an officer deduces the distance of the enemy battalion from the angle at which he sees a man, whose average height he knows. This angle is, for the enemy battalion, the parallax of the officer.’ The sentiment of extending scientific and military cooperation resulted in a profound col- laboration between the navy and the Académie during the 1874 transit of Venus expeditions. These concerns continued for decades. The astronomer Janssen, for example, worried about determining inaccessible distances after the Boer war: ‘New infantry and especially artillery weapons’ could reach ‘the enemy in places where he is sometimes barely visible.’”

“The camera as phallus is, at most, a flimsy variant of the inescapable metaphor that everyone unselfconsciously employs. However hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is named without subtlety whenever we talk about ‘loading’ and ‘aiming’ a camera, about ‘shooting’ a film.

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff—like a man’s fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs.

Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

“Now, [Ross] McNutt wants to bring his plane back to Baltimore—with an unusual new pitch. He’s working with residents frustrated with a notoriously corrupt police force in a city that the FBI declared one of the nation’s most violent to drum up support for the surveillance plane’s return.

‘We hold police accountable. We provide unbiased information as to police activities. We can go back in time and see what happened at the scene of an incident,’ McNutt said at a recent public hearing. ‘Just as we can deter potential criminal misconduct, we can also deter potential police misconduct.’”

“But how to link this obsessive policing, division, and representation of ground to the philosophical assumption that in contemporary societies there is no ground to speak of? How do these aerial representations—in which grounding effectively constitutes a privileged subject—link to the hypothesis that we currently inhabit a condition of free fall? The answer is simple: many of the aerial views, 3-D nose-dives, Google Maps, and surveillance panoramas do not actually portray a stable ground. Instead, they create a supposition that it exists in the first place. Retroactively, this virtual ground creates a perspective of overview and surveillance for a distanced, superior spectator safely floating up in the air. Just as linear perspective established an imaginary stable observer and horizon, so does the perspective from above establish an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground.”

“With this assumption of cybernetics into the heavens, we seem to have moved far away from military cinematography. Yet the innovation of eyeless vision is directly descended from the history of the line of aim. The act of taking aim is a geometrification of looking, a way of technically aligning ocular perception along animaginary axis that used to be known in French as the ‘faith line’ (ligne de foi). Prefiguring the numerical optics of a computer that can recognize shapes, this ‘line of aim’ anticipated the automation of perception–hence the obligatory reference to faith, belief, to denote the ideal alignment of a look which, starting from the eye, passed through the peep-hole and the sights and on to the target object. Significantly, the word ‘faith’ is no longer used in this context in contemporary French: the ideal line appears thoroughly objective, and the semantic loss involves a new obliviousness to the element of interpretative subjectivity that is always in play in the act of looking…

From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote-sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon.”

“Linear perspective is based on several decisive negations. First, the curvature of the earth is typically disregarded. The horizon is conceived as an abstract flat line upon which the points on any horizontal plane converge. Additionally, as Erwin Panofsky argued, the construction of linear perspective declares the view of a one-eyed and immobile spectator as a norm—and this view is itself assumed to be natural, scientific, and objective. Thus, linear perspective is based on an abstraction, and does not correspond to any subjective perception. Instead, it computes a mathematical, flattened, infinite, continuous, and homogenous space, and declares it to be reality. Linear perspective creates the illusion of a quasi-natural view to the “outside,” as if the image plane was a window opening onto the “real” world. This is also the literal meaning of the Latin perspectiva: to see through.”

“Transparency concerns are commonly driven by a certain chain of logic: observation produces insights which create the knowledge required to govern and hold systems accountable. This logic rests on an epistemological assumption that ‘truth is correspondence to, or with, a fact.’ The more facts revealed, the more truth that can be known through a logic of accumulation. Observation is understood as a diagnostic for ethical action, as observers with more access to the facts describing a system will be better able to judge whether a system is working as intended and what changes are required. The more that is known about a system’s inner workings, the more defensibly it can be governed and held accountable…

This chain of logic entails ‘a rejection of established representation’ in order to realize ‘a dream of moving outside representation understood as bias and distortion’ toward ‘representations [that] are more intrinsically true than others.’ It lets observers ‘uncover the true essence’ of a system. The hope to ‘uncover’ a singular truth was a hallmark of The Enlightenment, part of what Daston (1992) calls the attempt to escape the idiosyncrasies of perspective: a ‘transcendence of individual viewpoints in deliberation and action [that] seemed a precondition for a just and harmonious society.‘’

“Since I have mentioned video, I ought to point out that the most developed critiques of the illusory facticity of photographic media have been cinematic, stemming from outside the tradition of still photography. With film and video, sound and image, or sound, image, and text, can be worked over and against each other, leading to the possibility of negation and meta-commentary. An image can be offered as evidence, and then subverted. Photography remains a primitive medium by comparison. Still photographers have tended to believe naively in the power and efficacy of the single image. Of course, the museological handling of photographs encourages this belief, as does the allure of the high-art commodity market. But even photojournalists like to imagine that a good photograph can punch through, overcome its caption and story, on the power of vision alone. The power of the overall communicative system, with its characteristic structure and mode of address, over the fragmentary utterance is ignored. A remark of Brecht’s is worth recalling on this issue, despite his deliberately crude and mechanistic way of phrasing the problem:

The muddled thinking which overtakes musicians, writers and critics as soon as they consider their own situation has tremendous consequences to which too little attention is paid. For by imagining that they have got bold of an apparatus which in fact has got hold of them, they are supporting an apparatus which is out of their control.”