At the beginning of the twentieth century, a German horse gained fame the world over. Supposedly, the animal could perform mathematical calculations. The horse achieved reknown as “Clever Hans.” With a move of the hoof or head, he provided correct answers to simple exercises. When asked, “What is three plus five?,” he stamped eight times, for instance. To clarify this wondrous phenomenon, a committee of scientists was appointed; it’s said that its ranks included a philosopher. The committee determined that the horse could not, in fact, perform calculations. Instead, the animal was able to interpret subtle nuances in the facial expressions and body language of its human counterparts. With his keen senses, Clever Hans recognized that people attending the show involuntarily assumed a tense bearing before the stamp of the hoof that would prove decisive. When he felt this palpable tension, he stopped stamping. In this way, he always gave the right answer.
The verbal component of communication is very slight. Nonverbal forms of expression such as gestures, facial expressions, and body language constitute human communication. They lend it tactility. In this context, tactility means not physical contact but the multidimensionality and multilayeredness of human perception, which involves both the visual field and other senses. The digital medium strips communication of tactility and physicality.
The efficiency and convenience of digital communication are leading us to avoid direct contact with real people. Increasingly, we avoid contact with the real, in general. Digital media are making our real counterparts fade more and more. Accordingly, digital communication is becoming more and more bodiless and faceless. Digitality radically restructures the Lacanian triad of real, imaginary, and symbolic. It dismantles the real and totalizes the imaginary. As a digital reflector, the smartphone serves to renew the mirror stage after infancy. It opens up a narcissistic space—a sphere of the imaginary—in which one encloses oneself. The other does not speak via the smartphone.
The smartphone is a digital apparatus that works with an input/output mode that lacks complexity. It erases negativity in all its forms. Consequently, one loses the ability to think in a complex fashion. The smartphone also degrades forms of behavior that demand temporal range or distance vision. It promotes the short term and shortsightedness, and it covers up what is slow and slow in coming. Seamless liking produces a realm of positivity. Experience as irruption of the other—because of its negativity—interrupts imaginary self-mirroring. But the positivity that is inherent in digital technology minimizes the possibility of having any such experience. It prolongs only the same. The smartphone, like the digital in general, undermines our ability to encounter and work with negativity.
We used to perceive a more pronounced countenance or gaze in whatever we encountered—let’s call it our counterpart [das Gegenüber]—an image, for example. That is, something that looked back at me, that persisted in its own life, that withstood and counterbalanced me. Now, this self-possessed counterpart—which looks at, concerns, or implicates me—is vanishing. Earlier, there was more of the gaze through which, according to Sartre, the other announces itself. Sartre did not associate the gaze exclusively with the human eye. Rather, he perceived the world itself as gazing. As the gaze, the other is omnipresent. Even things look at us:
Of course what most often manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.1
Digital communication is visually poor communication. The author of an essay written on the tenth anniversary of Skype observed:
Undoubtedly, the video-telephone creates the illusion of presence, and it has made it easier for people in love to endure separation. However, the remaining distance still is palpable—and it is felt most clearly, perhaps, in a slight displacement. When Skyping, one cannot exchange glances. If you look into the eyes on the screen, the other party will think you are looking down a little because the camera is installed at the upper edge of the computer. The charming peculiarity of an unmediated encounter—where looking at someone always means being seen, as well—has yielded to asymmetrical gazes. Thanks to Skype, we can be close to each other twenty-four hours a day, but we are constantly staring past one another.2
Camera optics alone are not responsible for the fact that we are staring past each other. Rather, it points to a fundamentally missing gaze—that is, to the missing other. The digital medium is taking us farther and farther away from the other.
The gaze also represents a central category in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the image: “certainly, in the picture, something of the gaze is always manifested.”3 The gaze is the other within the image: it is what looks at, captivates, and fascinates me. As the punctum, it tears apart the homogeneous tissue of studium. The gaze of the other offers resistance to the eye, which feasts on the image. It undermines the feast for the eyes and calls the beholder’s freedom into question. But now, the mounting narcissification of perception is making the gaze, the other, disappear.
Tapping around on the touchscreen has consequences in regard to the other. Such motion eliminates the distance that constitutes the other in its otherness. One can swipe or tap the image—touch it directly—because it has already lost its gaze, its countenance. Pinching the touchscreen places the other at my disposal. We tap, swipe, or flick the other away so that our own mirror image will appear instead. Lacan would say that the touchscreen is different from the image as screen [écran], which simultaneously screens one off from the gaze of the other and lets it shine through. The touchscreen on a smartphone could be called a transparent screen. It does not look.
There is no such thing as a transparent countenance. The countenance that one desires is always opaque. Literally, opaque means “shadowed.” The negativity of the shadow is integral to desire. The transparent screen does not admit any desire, which is always the desire of the other. Where there is shadow, a glance—or gleam—exists, as well. Shadows and glances inhabit the same space: they dwell in sites of desire. Things that are transparent do not glance. Glances and gleams arise where the light breaks. If there is no break—if nothing is broken—then no eros, no desire, can arise. Uniform, flat, and transparent light is not a medium of desire. Transparency means the end of desire.
Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have said of a covered portrait: “Non iscoprire se liberta t’è cara ché ’l volto mio è carcere d’amore” (“Do not unveil me, if freedom is dear to you, for my visage is love’s prison”).4 These words give voice to a particular experience of the countenance, which is no longer possible today, in the age of Facebook. A face that exhibits itself and vies for attention is not a countenance. No gaze inhabits it. The intentionality of exhibition destroys the interiority, the reserve, that characterizes the gaze: “In fact, he is looking at nothing; he retains within himself his love and his fear: that is the Look.”5 A face on display does not belong to a counterpart with a countenance—one who casts a spell on, and captivates, the beholder. And so, today, the chains of love have given way to the hell of freedom.