The process of virtualisation begins before we are even conscious of it. Whether this is an inherited automatism of some sort (genetic), or otherwise acquired (in childhood) need not concern us. It is certainly related to Peirce's famous categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness. However virtualisation starts prior to these, before there is even an image on which to operate. Now it may not be this way for the newly born infant, but we'll treat Peirce's categories as pertaining to what is otherwise experienced across the interval of one's life, rather than at it's inception. So we can say that, or propose that, there is a virtual reality already constructed (for whatever reason) in which these categories will have a stage on which to act. If we eventually perform an 'othering' which will separate a recognised object from consciousness of it (Cubitt), it's not as if the process of othering had not already begun.
Peircean firstness is an act which begins with the real image - but it begins with that real image having already been virtualised. A virtual image of it. Or at least that is the way I'm defining "virtualisation". We can always propose the Peircean operators as occuring prior to consciousness - as if virtualisation were none other than Peircean operations. In this case we can assume a second round of Peircean perception, that which does take place within consciousness, perhaps recovering or echoing the first round rather than necessarily repeating or adding to it. Either way the virtualisation (of which I'm speaking) is one that would (whether Peircean or otherwise) precede consciousness. It occurs after the real image on which it operates, and before we are aware of it (before consciousness).
At least that is the argument being pursued here.
From the point of view of an audience watching a film there is certainly no conceptual difference, at the level of the real image, between, for example, a hand drawn animation and an otherwise cinematographic one. In the digital age we can say that both, irregardless of origin, end up as pixels.
However I don't directly experience such a real image. I experience a virtual version of such. For example, while the cinema image begins life for me, on my retina, what I physically experience is the image as outside of myself, as up on a screen. Indeed the process of virtualisation encodes my body, as located relative to the screen, as the observer of that image on the screen. I have this powerful, if not magical, sense of being in a space called the cinema and watching a film. Before the film has even started I am objectifying the space in which the film will screen. And I am objectifying the film as if it were there on a screen outside of myself. And in this context the film, even before I see what is in hold, is a virtual image.
Now in relation to the space of the cinema, and the screen, we might say that this process of objectification (virtualisation) is an adequate correction. While the image forming the basis for this objectification occurs on the retina we have learned, in one way or another (Lacanian mirrors?), that the image does not originate with us, but belongs to some process other than ourselves. If our virtual reality acts in a way to delocalise that image, to separate it out from us, then it has a certain bodily intelligence in doing that - assuming of course the images do belong to something other than ourselves.
However we can also end up, consciously or otherwise, objectifying images that do not require it. Or might be an error to do so. On the other hand an entertaining aspect of an animated film is often through allowing the automated objectification have it's way with such images. The effect of motion in an animated (and cinematographic images) occurs through the virtualisation of movement where there is otherwise still images. The motion that might properly belong to other objects becomes ascribed to the film images. But in the case of an animated film the virtualisation would not be a correction since the animated film never had motion in the first place. It is animated by working in concert with the act of virtualisation which will supply that movement. But with cinematographic images the virtualised motion would be a correction. Or at least that is how we're defining the cinematographic. The virtualisation process restores the movement that was otherwise lost during the process of creation. That it can "restore" motion to things that never had it we can choose to allow or deny as we see fit. So while each might be equivalent at the level of a real image (as information, as pixels) the act of comprehension (virtualisation) is able to make ammends in the perception pipeline - to restore motion to things that originally had it, or to allow/deny motion for things that didn't.
Or be misled.
For example one can be misled into believing that cinematographic images are no different from animated images, for example, that since neither have motion and that the act of virtualisation, which otherwise bestows motion on both, must therefore stop entertaining the possibility of any difference at that point. One can be misled into believing that if any perception of difference emerges, no matter how obvious, or even because of it's very obviousness, it must be treated as a some potential defectiveness in one's perceptual apparatus.
But there are also other forces involved. The act of comprehension that occurs in relation to a film can be manipulated by the filmmakers, not necessarily for evil, but not necessarily for good either. The process of objectification which otherwise corrects an image or allows animated films to work, can be (amongst other things) brought to the point of indistinguishability. Not that such is easy to do. Or even evil. There is an appreciation one can allow the efforts of photo-realists (or psuedo-realists for Bazin). A Manovichean universe in which the animated and the cinematographic are the same thing. Here it is not a question of whether a comprehended distinction should be internalised as a sign of error (because the distinction does not exist), but why: why should an absence of distinction here, (where otherwise one might have existed), should become the basis for treating any or all distinctions, which are comprehendable, as not so.
There is a desire here, for a kind of homogenous universe, without any holes. Without inconsistencies. An error free world where the concept of correction becomes redundant.
At some point the process of virtualisation separates a recognised object from consciousness of it. Or attempts to do so. This is the point at which virtualisation either makes it's biggest mistake, or it's biggest correction. But it's not just with recognised objects. The unrecognised can undergo the same operation. I may not recognise an object in a photograph but I would not necessarily retain it as anything different from what I do recognise. I can still perform the act of separation for those, along with the other objects I do recognise.
But what gets exchanged in this process? And how does the capitalist system exploit it? Or is objectification to be exorcised at it's root, as the actual basis for commodity fetishism? But on what basis can a capitalist system claim ownership of this process of objectification? Was this, or is this objectification an invention of capitalism?
I'll leave these as rhetorical questions for now because this talk of capitalism reminds me I have other work to do, if I'm to survive the poverty that capitalism creates.
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In the meantime, since the task of survival never seems completable, we can return to this question of othering. The virtual reality, in which a real image (retinal image) is virtualised, reaches a point where there is a classical compulsion to then separate the virtual object (and/or the framework) from the temporary consciousness (the virtual reality) in which it is otherwise suspended. As if othering had not yet already started. As if the virtual reality was not yet already the other of what it otherwise seeks to comprehend. The classical (and also modern) compulsion is to substitute the partially comprehensible, with it's comprehension, (as part of the act of such) and it necessarily resitu/f/ates the retinal image as having originated, not within the partially comprehensable, but within it's substitute. Within it's comprehension.
If our virtual framework is constructed in terms of an eternal one (the mathematical), in which otherwise interim random forces have no option but to (in the limit) cancel each other out, we should not be surprised to find virtual images evolving towards this. But it should also not surprise us, that an act of comprehension, re-othered as (exchanged for) the universe itself (whatever that may be), as an eternal version of that, should then have fundamental trouble acting as the origin of the image which it otherwise frames.
Carl
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