Toward an Anthropology of Screens : Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting

This book shows that screens don’t just distribute the visible and the invisible, but have always mediated our body's relationships with the physical and anthropological-cultural environment. By combining a series of historical-genealogical reconstructions going back to prehistoric times with the analysis of present and near-future technologies, the authors show that screens have always incorporated not only the hiding/showing functions but also the protecting/exposing ones, as the Covid-19 pandemic retaught us. The intertwining of these functions allows the authors to criticize the mainstream ideas of images as inseparable from screens, of words as opposed to images, and of what they call “Transparency 2.0” ideology, which currently dominates our socio-political life. Moreover, they show how wearable technologies don’t approximate us to a presumed disappearance of screens but seem to draw a circular pathway back to using our bodies as screens. This raises new relational, ethical, and political questions, which this book helps to illuminate. Acknowledgments 7 Contents 11 List of Figures 13 Chapter 1: A Ten-Point Introduction: Relearning to See Screens—The Effects of the Pandemic and a Phenomenological Epoché 14 References 26 Chapter 2: On the Powers of the Arche-screen 29 2.1 Toward an Anthropology of Screen Experiences 29 2.2 In the Beginning Was the Body 32 2.3 The Adventures of Screen Objects in a Compendium 35 2.4 Empathy for Shadows and Shadows as a Spectacle 43 References 51 Chapter 3: Screens as Prostheses of Our Bodies 55 3.1 The Skin as a Screen 55 3.2 From the Biblical Veil to Alberti’s Veil 58 3.3 The Term “Screen” in the Scientific Sphere: The Case of the Solar Microscope 69 3.4 The Film or Pellicle as a Technology Related to the Past, and the Present Hybridization of Analog and Digital 75 References 77 Chapter 4: Images and Words: Screen Functions and Technologies of Expression 82 4.1 Books, Screens, and “Culture Wars” 82 4.2 Logos, Flesh, and “Screen Thinking” 87 4.3 Words Seeking Their Images: Pictures as a “Book for the Illiterate” 95 4.4 Images Seeking Their Words: Regimes of Visibility and Regimes of Speakability 100 4.5 Digital Screens and Technologies of Expression 103 4.6 Writing, Code, and Visualization 106 References 111 Chapter 5: The Ideology of “Transparency 2.0” 117 5.1 The Cultural Hegemony of the Visual and the Ideology of “Transparency 2.0” 117 5.2 The “Ocular Power” 123 5.3 The Illusion of Disintermediation 128 5.4 Desire for Exposure and Subjugation 131 5.5 Surveillance Between Control and Protection 136 References 138 Chapter 6: Screens’r’us: From Bodies with Prostheses to Bodies as “Quasi-Prostheses”? 144 6.1 We, Quasi-Prostheses of Our Technologies 144 6.2 Our Retina as a Quasi-Prosthesis and the Market of Gazes 146 6.3 A “Quasi-Return” to the Primary Interface: The Skin as a Quasi-Prosthesis 150 6.4 Speaking in Terms of “Quasi-Prostheses” to Name New Agencies 152 6.5 “Quasi-Prostheses” and the Dividual Condition 155 References 165 Chapter 7: A Ten-Point Conclusion: For a Screen Ethics 170 References 187 Index 190