Propuestas de cambio

its use in the same way as a tool. The screen in its context seems to show a different kind of relation to use than the ready-to-hand tool. To explain this difference more thoroughly, I refer back to the tool relation. The withdrawal of the tool into its relation of use – or, perhaps more consistently with the structure of a relation-based analysis, its failure to surface as a thing separate from the use to which it is put – is part of human directedness toward the world.5 _{The tool is seen through as intent}

focuses perception on the task at hand – the product of the relation. The negation of the screen is of a different order – it is not only looked through (as the hammer is toward the hammering of a nail), but looked at (as the smartphone is while held in hand). The more the tool is looked at rather than used, the less we know of it.6 _{At this point the tool}

becomes accessible as a relatum – a thing with properties that determine how it is useful. But this is not so for the screen. Looking at

the screen is part of its use, and the more the screen is looked at, the more it is negated: the perceptual terminus remains in the object and the space at the same time. Hammering

Equipment has a type of being related specifically to its use and responsible for its

use. It is because a thing can be used that it is called it a thing. In other words, the thing is a material expression of the use context in which it arises; it is something ‘for’ something. Using things thus helps us discover the world of our involvement, and, along with it, ourselves as

involved and equipment per se. Heidegger describes readiness-to-hand as a withdrawal of the thing from perception in order to be put to use.

4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 98.

5. Heidegger outlines the nature of equipment as “something in-order-to…” so that a “totality of equipment is constituted in various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability.” The use context thus constitutes the thing itself in perception: “In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the ‘in-order-to’ which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time.” Heidegger,

Being and Time, 97-8.

6. “No matter how sharply we just look… at the ‘outward appearance’… of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 98.

The ‘disappearance’ of the screen was discussed in similar terms to ‘withdrawal’ in the last chapter, as a negation. In this sense, readiness-to-hand could be considered as the relation that allows the screen to be contextually placed. The ‘withdrawal’ of the ready-to-hand could explain the negation of the screen relatum. However, it was not clear from chapter one that this is how the screen withdraws. The various impacts and actions

identified in the last chapter mean that what

the screen is for is not reflected in its material.

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In order to be present, any being must persist in time.

This means the form of the thing – that which makes it

actual – must be identifiable as the same throughout all possible repetitions. But this iterability implies that any presence is in its very constitution always

riven by a radical alterity that makes it impossible even as it makes it possible.

Pheng Cheah7 Relata arise from an encounter as the pulling out of a ‘thing’ from a relational field, then referring it back to that field – something that happens momentarily, continuously and iteratively. This is a kind of reversal of the

construction of the object, a bottom-up move where relations spawn things.

Meaning is carried by these things, and the shared terms that describe them: ‘virtual’, ‘real’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Meaning persists in the sedimentation of the field of relations, the things begin to stand in for the field out of which they arose. This is a top-down move where relations happen between pre-existent things. If the relata are pulled out, what is left behind? How are things when they are just their potential?

Design has a strange task in this a-posteriori-a-priori perceptual process ‒ the thing I am interacting with

arises out of the interaction itself, but has to be brought back in to the beginning of that interaction to form

Relational design

exists between the body, hammer, and nail. Screening exists within the screen, as the screen-as-relatum and space-as-relatum are held by the same object anchor. In other words, the hammer never becomes the nail; it becomes a part of my intentionality toward the world. But a television can become a landscape, or a building, or another person through which I move and to which I respond. In other words, the screen always shows what it is not – what it shows is outside of its own context.

The implications of considering the screen as ready-to-hand are that it can be used,

within the context of equipment, towards a

human aim. But when the screen is ‘used’, it is

conflated with the space it produces, which lies outside of its equipmental context. The human

is displaced from this production of space. The screen does not reveal the world of concern for a person, but for itself.

What relations, then, reveal the screen? Looking at the character of the relations entered into by relata cannot reveal the character of the screen in a relation-based analysis. The

use relation too easily slips into a reflexive

relation in which I use something. Although the use relation can potentially occur in both directions (from the subject to the object, and from the object to the subject), it could only do so by virtue of the pre-existence of points of the relata. An a priori relation needs to be capable of generating the very directionality that

is defined by the relata. The qualities of the

generative relation will occur in all directions at once – not as a multi-directionality of things caught in a network and acting toward each other, but in the sense that directionality surfaces from within relations themselves.

7. Pheng Cheah, “Non-dialectical Materialism” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics ed. Dianna

Coole and Samantha Frost (London: Duke University Press, 2010), 74.

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its basis in the first place; just as I do, as the reflexive subject. But if I am designing a thing for someone else to interact with, I am trying to fix this process for them. I am trying to call forth a thing for them, and am giving the thing itself the task of communicating this intent.

Design is, conventionally, a relata-based discipline. I design for the form or function of a thing, and so I assume a predetermined subject, object and space. I have already overtaken the point at which the thing is effectual.

a space. Within this first distinction, a second

doubling occurred – into the screen effective and affected, and into the screen subsumed into the virtual and the screen stubbornly

real. Rather than being an action unique to

the screen and its ontology, this doubling was connected to the method of analysis, which

the screen made uniquely apparent. Distance

was introduced between relata by virtue

of finding these relata across a difference.

When considered in terms of the screen, this distance had a certain character. In both of the dichotomies discussed, issues of materiality

and agency defined the difference between

relata. But this distance was part of the assumption of the analysis; it was taken for granted.

Rather than approaching distance as an a

priori entity, a process of distancing can be found which corresponds to the creation of a difference within relations. The last chapter discussed Baudrillard’s idea that simulation threatens the relata-based system of

meaning – of defining a relata according to its

dichotomous other – by collapsing the real into the virtual. Baudrillard seems to approach this as a negation of pre-existent difference, a difference that itself accounts for meaning.8

If the relation pre-exists and constitutes the relata, then the relata are revealed by the relation together. The relations that are responsible for the screen appearing as such in perception, then, need to be able to generate the subject and object, real and virtual concurrently. The relation is, in this sense, a difference out of which the two poles of the relata are generated.

Finding what creates this distance involves considering how the relata of the previous chapter were different from one another, then looking for how this distance is created. Two differences repeatedly arose in descriptions of the oppositions of relata – agency and materiality. This section will carry these relations forward and understand them as generative. That is, rather than approaching agency and materiality as properties of relata, they will be considered as forces which produce

a difference, thereby distancing and defining

relata.

The first step in this process is to find how the difference between the relata is defined.

The previous chapter found that the screen- as-relatum was doubled, then doubled again.

This doubling first occurred into a screen that

opposed a subject and a screen that opposed

8. Baudrillard remarks that the TV must be conceived “as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish, according to a nuclear contraction, retraction, of the old

polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance

between cause and effect, between subject and object: precisely the distance of meaning, the gap, the difference… irreducible under pain of reabsorption into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation,

trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 31.

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Here, of course, the underlying assumption was that they had some fundamental characteristics that could be described independently of their relations

to one another.

Brian John Martine10 Relata are defined by what they are not. But I can never know this thing that things are not. All sorts of things are not a screen – coffee cups, water, hammers, Pluto. But what is a non-screen?

Determinacy makes the indeterminate its own abstract entity. I have no access to this entity. The otherness of the screen, all the things it is not (and so, conversely, what it is) is not accessible in its own right. I can meet a sort-of screen, something that looks like a screen or acts like a screen or has a screen along with other things. These aren’t really screens, but they have screen-like tendencies. They are close to the screen, they are related. The screen is defined by what it is not: the non-screen. But everything that others the screen is

related to it.

I can never meet a non-screen.