Published on Bezalel journal (http://journal.bezalel.ac.il)

The Futurality of the Spectator ­ Subject(An Eschatological Critique)

— Itzhak Benyamini

We are currently at the beginning of a process culminating in the screen apparatus (the eye of theimage) – in both its physical and mental manifestations – merging with the spectator­subject (theviewing eye) into a single entity, leading to the future dissolution of the subject. This essay exploresthe notion of the screen­subject, namely, the conflation of the (Western) spectator­subject and thescreen in the contemporary technological world, whether at the movie theater, on thesmartphone/tablet/television/computer, or while using the Google Glass, which blends with theviewer's eye.It was none other than Lacan who suggested that the root of modern Western subjectivity lies in HolyScripture. I propose considering the Passion, as described by Paul the Apostle in the New Testament,as the core element in the mental infrastructure of the unique subjectivity of Western culture, whichshapes the subject out of a particular relationship with the visual – a very particular axis of visualidentification – namely, with the image of the crucified Messiah. In other words, the Western subjectwas devised out of an image with which it identifies and which returns the believer’s gaze, mirroringevery individual’s existential suffering.This essay outlines methodological research into the affinity between two axes of visualidentification: on the one hand, a bidirectional axis of identification, from the believer­spectator to theimage of the crucified, leading to their ultimate conflation. On the other hand, the axis ofidentification and mutual determination of the modern spectator­subject and of the other­screenimage. This does not refer merely to an image contained within the screen, which offers an infinitenumber of images, but rather to an encounter with the screen as a platform, including the imageprojected from it.

Yair Benyamini, 2015, after Narcissus by Caravaggio, 1597­1599

From the onset of reading ‒ as well as writing ‒ the current text we are immediately overwhelmed by an

external flow, almost alien to us, of question­consciousness: What is the best route for examining the status of

the viewed image today? An examination undertaken from a certain perspective, of the investigation into the

point of view in the image; or in other words an examination of contemporary subjectivity ­ a subjectivity entirely

involved in, evolved from and enthralled with image viewing.

Should we formulate this argument as critical­reason (in the sense that the investigative subject actively

explores the passive object­image) and then in what sense? Are psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses

enough? Or should we invoke theology? Or are these archaic discourses, as those which have infused and

maintained our discussions until now, constrained in their ability to comprehend the image as it will be viewed in

the future? What does critical thinking mean in this regard, in relation to the contemporary image; can it even be

analyzed with critical tools? For the logic of viewing an image is tied to the past of the image, a past which is

always viewed as part of a forward motion, an image propelled towards and by a futurality, an imminent promise

of an epoch in which the idea of viewing will no longer be comprehensible (and by the same token, neither will

the concept of the viewing subject). Will this future even permit visibility ‒ seeing and being seen? Can the

critical­academic discourse with all its anal­compulsive tendencies fulfill the prerequisite methodological

demands or can we with fear and trembling offer a different paradigm, a paradigm open to this persecuting

futurality from a position of determination and trepidation as well as suspicious apprehension? This

methodological paradigm will suggest a suspicious analogy regarding the transformations of the screen, like the

transformations in the otherness of God in monotheism.

The current proposal for logically understanding the contemporary image assumes that a radical change is

currently taking place in the mode of existence and operation of the image. This is manifest in two paradigms:

first in the relations between the subject (the viewing eye) and the other (the eye of the image) in which the

relation between subject and other are constantly reversing, with the viewing subject at one moment viewing the

other and at another viewing the subject. This formulation stems from a psychoanalytic understanding of the

unconscious dynamics between these two forces: in the Freudian­Lacanian discourse consciousness is aware

only of its viewing of the image and the other, while at the unconscious level the inverted relation takes place.

We shall denote the subject as S and the Other (Autre in French) as A: in consciousness: A < S; and in the

unconscious: S < A. But this not restricted to the psychological. More and more humans live under the field of

the external gaze, in the sphere of the Foucauldian social panopticon (Foucault 1975). As will be highlighted in

the second part of the text, the internal­psychological relation is an allegory for the political relations found

between the different eyes populating and constituting the sphere of images,

In the second paradigm, the movement’s future­orientation ­ its futurality ­ is always towards a post­

human/matricial world, a unification between subject and other: S = A ∨ A(S). As the relations between thesubject and the other as the (big) Other is rooted in psychoanalytic discourse, we shall have recourse to it, but

even more so, we will broach this discourse’s foundations in Jewish and Christian theology, which are also

concerned with the relation between subject and the Other ­ God. We will delve into the work and thought of

Paul, who wandered the short (if not infinitesimal) highway leading from Second Temple Judaism to the

establishment of Christianity; in which God is turned human and then divides again, a movement which

radically changed the logic of the other and the logic of its gaze at the subject. When, if ever, did this

paradigmatic shift take place, or rather have they always coexisted?

These questions are tied to my attempt to formulate a theoretical position regarding contemporary visuality.

With this end in mind, my work attempts to formulate a befitting methodology, a methodology which attributes

significance to the temporality of visuality. To understand imagery and visuality in general, especially that found

in the encounter between screen and subject in the contemporary present, a methodology emerged with two

branches growing in conflicting directions but with an identical logic: One is a genealogy which turns to the

“past” as a term and an essence and the other an eschatological turning to the “future” in much the same way ‒

both for the purpose of making sense of an incoherent “present”.

Axes of Identification

These words describe their author’s suspicions that an analogy exists between two axes of identification: on

the one hand, the axis of a two­way identification, between the believer­subject and the image of the cross:

imitatio Christi and vice versa ­ an imitatio ego of sorts, towards the promise of a future remerging of the self

with the image of God. On the other hand, an axis of identification and mutual determination between the

(modern) subject­viewer and the image of the screen­other. This structure manifests initially in the cinematic

screen and more coherently in the screen­apparatus of the Google Glass, which merges with the eyes of the

viewer. This is a subject which exists in the act of viewing, a subjectivity which takes place during this time

and responds to the Ego­Ideal which is as its base. This is true not just for the image portrayed on the screen,

but rather in the actual encounter with the screen as a platform for images. The Western dynamic between the

viewer and his narcissistic framework which is the screen ‒ whether it is real, personal, social or internal ‒ is, I

suspect, a cultural expansion of the Christian situation of gazing upon the cross and the crucifixion, as was first

articulated in his Paul’s radical epistles, and was preserved in the New Testament’s Gospels which generally

accepted and continued with his post­Jewish and ultravisual orientation, thus laying the basis of Western visual

culture.

The crucifixion was first and foremost a Roman spectacle, a forceful lesson for the empire’s subjects to see

and to internalize. It was a show no different in its logic from that of the ethos of Roman gladiators (on this

matter see Hengel 1977). As such, it is a principle image, well beyond any concrete death of this or that

Spartacus.

The Roman scene of the crucifixion is in fact an imaginary format with real world historical implications and

ramifications on the teleology of the Gospels’ narrative, the history of Christian art and the imaginary core of

Western subjectivity. Traumatic­real aspects of blood and gore are contained within this format and governed

by it: a fixed picture of the body of a man nailed to a cross, his body exposed for all to see.

It is well known that Jacob Taubes (2004) considered Paul to be primarily a Jewish messianic apostle who

dissented against the heavy handed control of the brutal Roman master. In response to this position, I will

claim that the visual spectacle of the crucifixion served as the cornerstone in formulating the new faithful’s

subjectivity. Thus, ironically, Paul, with all his dissent, fortified and enforced the role of subjugation in faith for

the subject vis­à­vis this specifically Roman image of the crucifixion.

The design is new but it does not dispel the magic shrouding the single image. Paul did not make explicit the

details of Christianity’s cross, but rather what was important for Paul was the actual visual­imaginary situation,

an image of which believers take into their heart where it serves as the fundamental situation: the crucifixion.

It is important to take into account the historical context when we attempt to discuss early Christianity’s

embrace of the crucifixion: 1. We are dealing with a ‘ready­made’ image which Christianity took over from the

culture of the times for its own purposes, while maintaining its initial meaning; moreover, we must also

remember that at that time crucifixions were commonplace, an omnipresent threat for many of the empire’s

subjects and citizens. 2. We are dealing with a phantasmatic entity (like the community of sons or the

crucifixion) and its phantasmatic offspring: different cultural positions, which themselves are not realistic, but

are built on the backdrop of real historical situations. The conceptual entities which we will focus on, such as

the screen­subject, are theoretical metaphors of different cultural situations and of the subject’s location within

those frameworks.

We might see in the Passion a mental infrastructure unique to Western­Christian subjectivity, a subjectivity

constituted from a special relation with the field of visuality, a relation of both symbolic and imaginary

identifications.

The spiritual or symbolic aspect of Paul’s conception of faith (mostly associated with the transcendent figure of

God the Father) stands on the shoulders of compulsive identification with the imagined situation, the inner

picture of the act of humiliation unto death of the archi­Son Jesus of Nazareth. The symbolic or spiritual

identification transcends narcissistic identification with the body image. In other words, the symbolic or the

spiritual aspect of the resurrection (which is under the aegis of the Father who resurrects, so that the

resurrection is connected to symbolic identification with the figure of the Father) is entirely premised on the

image of the crucifixion.

In this regard, I wish to note that even though Alain Badiou (1997), like many other scholars, saw the

resurrection as the key real event in Paul's doctrine, I suggest that it is better to consider the more fundamental

imaginary event ‒ imaginary in the sense that it is primarily visual ‒ of suffering and humiliation in the

crucifixion as central. There are indeed two different stages concerning the death of Christ and its implication

for the believer, but the violent image is the more decisive of the two ‒ it is the psychological core of the latter's

subjectivity. It is worth mentioning that for Jacques Lacan the imaginary (as the narcissistic order) is the order

that colors the other two dimensions of the real and the symbolic. The difference between my conception and

that of Badiou and maybe Agamben is in a way not a matter of correct understanding, but of orientation;

specifically a psychological perspective combined with a theo­political outlook. Badiou (the Marxist thinker)

embraces a narrative which focuses on the resurrection as he claims the ‘proto­Lenin’ Paul did, while I attempt

to work within a framework of a critical­theology (see Benyamini & Hotam 2015), which takes the resurrection

as an ideological element based on, and concealing, the imaginary event of the crucifixion.

While Taubes, Agamben and Badiou view Paul as a kind of key for breaking with the stagnation of

postindustrial late capitalist culture and society, I claim that Paul is in a sense one of the factors that facilitated

its initial conditions of possibility in his formulation of the disciplined Western subject. On the one hand he

embraced the Roman imagination to establish faith, and on the other, Paul’s subject, captivated by the

imagined spectacle, laid the foundation for the contemporary Western subject as a blankly staring and enslaved

spectator. We may ask ourselves whether this basic imaginary substructure of the Western subject is all that

remains of the subject in the period of late modern despiritualization and desymbolization (due to the

disappearance of the big Other and death of the paternal God).

It seems we are left with a spectator­subject, a subject focused obsessively on the screen, beginning in the

early days of the cinematic spectacle. Our analysis is in accord with with the notion of the shocking effect of

the cinematic screen found in Walter Benjamin's (1968) famous essay on mechanical reproduction, while

opposing the sense of its emancipatory potential; and concurs with the sense of Guy Debord's (1995) concept

of the spectacle. We follow the cinematic spectacle with its capitalistic logic of consuming more and more

gazes within a cavernous cathedral space, up through and to the contemporary and almost childishly fascinated

subject who gazes at the smartphone screen; until finally, in the near or far future a symbiosis will obtain

between our eye and the screen apparatus (for an alternative – and possibly optimistic – take on the spectator,

see Rancière 2014). My work attempts to follow the line of thought initiated by Jacques Derrida in his

provocative lecture A b o v e A l l , N o J o u r n a l i s t s ! on the manner in which television’s obsession with LIVE

broadcasting is an extension of the Catholic logic of recreating the event of the incarnation of the divine Logos

in Christ and his crucifixion, Derrida 2001).

Even at this early stage, the reader might feel discomfort at the almost outrageous methodological situation we

find ourselves in – we have suggested connecting, in a way that might have initially seemed superficial and

ahistorical, two subjective situations far removed from one another – one born in a religious age and the second

in the technological age (two definitions which can anyway be taken ironically). But as Jacques Lacan (who can

be said to be the founding father of outrageous psychoanalysis or at least he who who stressed the outrageous

in the psychoanalytical) taught us, the roots of modern Western subjectivity are found in the birth of the biblical

subject. As Lacan suggests in Seminar III on the psychoses (Lacan 1993), the Western­Christian subject is

faced time and time again with the absolute Other, unlike early Western subjects, who were caught up in

countless small and mundane interactions with small others.

I want to make a theoretical addition to this point about Western subjectivity, and say that its encounter, in its

Christian orbit, is not necessarily with some absolute Other, a spiritual Being (according to the Oedipal

phantasy regarding the Jewish God the Father), but rather an encounter with the Master on the Cross, who

maintains a narcissistic relation with the subject’s internal image. Nevertheless, we must take into account that

the Christian ethos, from its first foray into the world, is forced to deal with the Jewish dictum forbidding the

representation of the Absolute­Fatherly God, as opposed to the image of the new divinity, which the believer is

called to emulate, and which has been actualized in the flesh by taking on human form. This has important

ramifications for the imaginary base of the Western­Christian subject.

How does this question of representation continue to play a role in the interpellation of the Western subject?

What are its implications for the subject, or should I say spectator­subject, whether in the church in which one

gazes at icons (regardless of whether this is in Eastern Orthodox or Western Catholic churches), or in the

cinema and with contemporary smartphone screens that hijack our eyes. This is not just the question of the

real viewer­subject, but also of perceptions of such a subject, even if they are stereotypical, precisely because

such perceptions can have implications for such a subject’s formation and developmental path.

And thus, in the initial stages of the development of the (Western­Christian) film theater there were already

those who understood, even if unconsciously, at the end of the 19th century, that the spectator­believer sitting

in the Catholic cathedral, gazing at the image of the Cross in the dark and ominous space, must surrender to

the infinite aspects of God, precisely as a direct result of a faith rooted in the divinity of the image of the

crucifixion. This type of prismatic space encourages the subject to stand in awe of the infinite nature of the

image he is faced with, but it also forces him to demand of his pitiful and lazy self to merge with this impossible

and real, infinitely infinite image, until blood is shed. This type of presentation of the cathedral is overly

simplistic, but we should ask if such a simplistic image is not after all manifest almost perfectly in the design of

the cinema auditorium?

And another point we must make as part of the current methodology, outrageous as it is, is that we are not just

talking about Christian faith in medieval times and subsequently, because this faith involved an abundance of

icons extending far beyond just that of the crucified Christ. For our purposes, we are focused on the internal

state of faith, a state of internal identification with the figure on the cross, the psychic being of the subject with

ramifications for Christian faith itself in all its manifestations. And so to Western art and visuality in general, up

until our day

The reader might at this stage imagine the weirdness of the situation in which some pitiful theoretician tries to

radicalize our conclusions to the limit, saying that the whole of Western imagery, in and of itself, is nothing but

variations on the founding image of the crucifixion! (This in paraphrase of the statement that Western

philosophy is nothing but a system of footnotes to Plato). In response to that uncanny situation I wish to

moderate the vulgarity of such a claim. It is not our goal to reduce understanding of the Western subject to a

single dimension, but rather to attempt to understand the significant core at its heart; a core which has

undergone and continues to undergo countless changes, transitions and reversals, and even negations of past

attempts to erase the past. And nonetheless…

“Know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”

Was Flusser (2000) correct in saying that a revolution of consciousness only took place in the wake of the

material­technological events of the invention of the printing press and photograph? Or rather, as my current

research tries to claim, was there an additional and earlier moment of the spiritual technology of identification,

involving an instrument no less powerful, that which we find in Paul’s 'mad' letter? The commonplace outlook

focuses on the constant presence of images of the cross in the everyday faith of Western Christianity and

hides the perhaps more basic fact that Christianity’s moment of foundation as a separate religion introduced an

idea that inspired a massive transition in consciousness, one that is visually motivated and uniquely focused.

In that moment a new technology was born, an inner pictorial fixation of man to the unique and singular Image.

All this comes after a clear prohibition of gazing at images of the one and only (regardless of whether such an

image could accurately render his Majesty or not). And this is now the exclusive image. This ‘invention’

contains five steps:

1. Fixation

2. Imagined fixation

3. Imagined fixation on the exclusive image

4. A visual fixation of the bloodiest and goriest kind.

5. A visual fixation of the bloodiest and goriest kind, a founding narcissism.

In my fundamentalist book, N a r c i s s i s t U n i v e r s a l i s m (Benyamini 2012, ch. 2) I claim that Paul forces the

developing subject to face the screen­mirror image which turns it into a servant of the ecclesiastical faith

apparatus.

This is the power of the ethos of the Passion as put forward by Paul, Christianity’s founding supplement, an

appendix to the initial community which bore universal Christianity from an eschatological­apocalyptic fervor,

and whose letters still find their way to new addresses throughout the Christian world. This entailed regulating

the Jewish­Hellenistic origin so as to make it the most radical form of identification ‒ to the point of religious

furor ‒ with the image of God’s servant as humiliated (in the Book of Isaiah). This image packs a punch for the

viewer, gazing at the future eschatological wounds while merging with them. Then the viewer, from a position of

identification with the wounds, is constituted as a subject whose being is towards a futurality whose roots are in

the nail­studded cross.

I will then suggest seeing the Passion as central aspect of the mental infrastructure of the unique subjectivity

of Western culture, a culture that shapes and constitutes the subject out of a special relation with the visual

field, a relation which far exceeds any human relation to any image. Even if there is truth in the counterclaim

that the subject being constituted is not a full one, we shall then claim that this partial subject overlaid history

with a certain recurring motif of a very specific kind of visual identification ­ an image of a crucified messiah.

This is the material image of that visual identification (which is a meeting point of Jewish, Hellenistic and

messianic identifications; a junction of different ways of identifying with the internal nucleus of human suffering,

without a clear distinction between them, a prism of sorts that encompasses beams of light from diverse

origins, projecting a very specific image at the other end of the prism). For the Christian gaze both pities and

identifies with the image of Jesus on the cross, as was formulated exclusively visually by Paul, with the

internal aspect seeing just one single event:

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. (1 Cor 2:2)

What we have here is nothing but a picture in words (Mitchell 1986, ch.1). There is no need for an underlying

message behind the cross except the cross itself ­ the spectacle of Jesus wounded on the cross. In this

respect, the icon of crucified Jesus is not meant to convey some additional message ­ it's all there – the key

image of the Son sacrificing himself for the salvation of us, the sons. This medium, this icon, is Christianity.

The medium is the (messianic) message.

For Paul, the community is supposed to focus on the image of its Lord, the consummate Son, Jesus the

Messiah. It is a congregation of believer sons standing before God, the Father, while escaping his harsh Nomos

(He is a previous but still relevant God). In the crucifixion complex, the sons experience loss as a result of the

death of their love object and identify with his image, with their Ideal­Ego, until it merges with their subject­in­

process. In other words, through the imagined loss of the crucifixion, the figure of Jesus becomes the source of

narcissistic idealization for the believer – for his self­image – which is but an inferior reflection of the imagined­

ideal icon. This does not necessarily mean that the imitation is solely practiced by the community towards

Jesus, for the Jesus figure also emulates the sons – their existential, social, economic and political suffering.

We can see in the crucified figure a structural and ahistorical reflection of the miserable human condition (as it

is manifested in the lives of the believers and Paul himself at the hands of the pagans and Jews).

Paul presumes to establish a Christian community of sons complete with its demarcation vis­à­vis old Judaism

and Hellenistic paganism. This is a congregation characterized by internal harmony, revolving round the figure

of Jesus nailed to the cross. Accordingly, Paul, who sets out against the Jewish tradition of the Fathers, to

which he used to belong, establishes the narcissistic community of sons, which constitutes its identity through

an image that emulates it in return, until the future unification with that icon.

The gaze is one of identification with the pitiful figure nailed to the cross and its imitation of the messiah, and

conversely, the image gazes emptily back at the believer and emulates the existential suffering of every man

and woman. This reverberation serves as the foundation of the ideal of humility and suffering and Christian

adoration around them, bringing about the creation of ecclesiastic pictures of the crucifixion. These images, like

the image of the family and apostles lowering their savior from the cross, consistently address the Western

subject as one not born from the word, but from the image, a very specific image, which attempts to cross the

subject’s internal suffering with the internal image of humility.

The psycho­theological dynamics in Paul can be understood as a pivotal part of a cultural shift that occurred at

that time. It seems that there was a move from the Jewish or Hellenistic internal mono­theism (a religious

fixation on the One, like the Father­God or the abstract­infinite One Being) to an internal mono­imagism (a

religious fixation on a single image, which is the framework for a seemingly endless world of other images ­ the

father, Mary, the Saints, the different scenes of the New Testament and so on).

This is an irony of sorts, which offers an answer to the question of how Christianity maintained its monotheistic

position, attempting to respect the Second Commandment’s demand (or to be more exact, how the demand is

understood) not to represent God, without giving up the religion's unique nature, connected to the eventful

temporality of Christ the divine man on the cross. (See Assmann 2009 regarding the Bible’s relation to the

issue of representing divinity, and Hamburger 2012 on the roundabout ways Christian mysticism dealt with this

dilemma regarding the visual.)

In any case, this one image serves as a giant filter through which the countless images supplied by the world

stream through, with the endless wealth consolidating into one, the one God, the spiritual ideal or singular

image. From the unique one sprout a countless wealth of other images, but these are subsets bound to the

hierarchy of the one in face of the many (and from then on, there are no longer any other singular images like it,

but only those in relation to the one; and henceforth all forms of relativism will unite around the unity of the

Western­democratic­liberal ideal).

And thus the subject’s pathological fixation on the screen is born; the very same screen which can host the

infinitude of images. In this way, reading Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians allows us to jumpstart our

discussion regarding the historical plausibility of what we have called the screen­subject, a possibility

addressed in these letters of the Passion with their obsession with the visuality of death. And although

historically Christianity is more diverse than just the Pauline tradition, this visual core is there, albeit in terms

which not even Paul’s contemporaries could fully comprehend (as is said by the head apostle in the Second

Epistle to Peter 3:15–16). It is worth noting that if one reads the other epistles in the New Testament it

becomes clear how much less they are obsessed with the issue of the messiah's death and crucifixion.

Although the crucifixion of the messiah, who promised salvation only to be found dead, instilled cognitive

dissonance in the apostles, from that moment on this tension succeeded in devouring their doubt and enforcing

their faith. These apostles found strength in recalling the words of truth Christ had sounded in their ears, speech

for which Paul was not present in the flesh, but only in its image of truth­death.

The subject’s highway to the future

In light of the chaos­abundance engulfing us in the age of high technology, which shoots us towards an

unknown future – unknown except in metaphysical sci­fi films which seems to watch us more than we watch

them ­ we seek to focus a question about our everyday reality: what is the essence of the “subject” (as a

concept and an existence consequent to as well as going beyond the concept), the subject characterizing our

age; or in other words, what is the subject found at the basis of our presentness and that moves towards the

future, that is to say whose whole essence is movement towards the future?

Though the Western subject has an eschatological­progressive bedrock which is always moving towards a

future, it now seems that this futurality no longer permits any being in the subject beyond a structural relation to

the future. We will attempt to address this new form of subjectivity while taking into account the being of every

subject as conceptualized (that is, one whose very existence, for each and every one of us, is already scripted

in a spiritual notebook which precedes us and places us under a certain concept, a certain idea, as part of a

philosophical, religious or other cultural construct.)

This conceptualization describes the subject and its being, but also constitutes it within the confines of that

description, and what is this description and being if not: existentially in movement, from the present to the

future? This is a movement in which the past is erased, not even dialectically, for the pastness itself of the

subject is erased, as the past per se.

Although the monotheistic subject (in its Jewish metamorphosis, as well as en route to Christianity and Islam)

is commanded to remember and honor the traditions of its fathers, this is a past always serving the present and

future, and the past as such is not preserved, except as a past which is processed and repressed dialectically

through resistance to it. This is a kind of erasure of the repression or forgetting of the past where a measure of

violent energy towards it remains; a kind of play of tradition that is pseudo­faithful to that past while looking to

its own future.

No hint of this will remain in the future: there where there is total apathy towards the past ­ no negation, no

denial, no repression of the past. The past is simply not, because even the present is no longer, and then by

the same token the future will disappear within this future futurity, in which only the screen event, the

instantaneous drug­like pleasure of the screen will exist, without need of the distinctions of time and tense. The

terms “uni­time” or “uni­space”, in the sense of one­dimensional, seem to apply here. And what about the

situation in which even entertainment cinema, from pornography to the most highbrow, as well as 3D cinema

and the computer game industry, move in a direction in which the spectator experiences the virtual world in

three dimensions through the use of virtual reality glasses? It seems that in these cases the elimination of

different dimensions of time and space grow ever more extreme in scope, approaching a temporal experience

which can be called “periodic” (to the extent that time and space are reduced to the infinitesimal?) (See Virilio

1983 for more on the various changes the concepts of time and space are undergoing today). This is already

happening within the subject­screen, that is going in this direction. Moreover, this motion, from the present

toward the future, contains a conservative echo and protects the past, a dialectic echo of the foundations of the

past. All this is a dialectical negation which preserves the past but actually leads towards its complete

negation, where the erasure of the past is forgotten.

The Remote Controlled Subject

To adumbrate a theoretical analysis in the contemporary modes in which the viewer­subject encounters the

screen (television, cinema and computer), we will make use of psychoanalytical discourse which will allow us to

better understand the aspect of identification; as well as hermeneutic discourse, to understand how the reader

and viewer constitute a text. Together they are supported by Sigmund Freud's theory of narcissism, Lacan’s

way of understanding the reality of the gaze (regard), Althusser's concept of interpellation following Lacan, as

well as the cinematic critique led by Metz and the academic journal S c r e e n following Althusser; as well as

Stanley Fish’s idea of reader response (see Fish 1980; Metz 1986; Althusser 2008).

The current discussion is also an elaboration of a theoretical term I have developed in my work ­ subjectext.

The concept describes the two­way process of identification and determination of subject and text: on the one

hand the reader­subject constitutes the text­other through the act of interpretation (according to Fish), and on

the other hand the text and the other gaze back at the gazing subject, addressing him in the Althusserian

sense, as an open book, an interpolating address. The other does this by inspiring in the subject a process of

identification with the other’s gaze within him, perceived as addressed only to him. The subjectext is a

compound of identification which takes place during reading.

From this position we can clearly articulate a similar theory regarding the subject and the screen, in which I

would like to present the screen as the Other which gazes back at the subject. For Lacan, following Sartre

(1943) in this regard, the subject sees the object but unconsciously feels the object­other’s gaze:

In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way—on the side of

things (des choses), there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one

should understand those words, so strongly stressed, in the Gospel, They have eyes that they may not see.

That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them.[...] What we see here, then, is that

the gaze operates in a certain descent, a descent of desire, no doubt. But how can we express this? The

subject is not completely aware of it— he operates by remote control. Modifying the formula I have of desire as

unconscious—man's desire is the desire of the Other—I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the

part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner­à­voir). (Lacan 1973, p. 109, 115. Emphasis in

the original.)

According to Lacan, the screen make the subject undergo a process of both identification and objectification,

which turns the subject into an object for the other­object. This double movement is manifest in the fact that the

screen projects its truth into the subject’s plot, an external truth that lives in the other but is not recognized as

external and controlling, while also screening out the Real, hiding it with the help of the plot’s phantasms of the

subject's self.

The Screen­subject and beyond

Moreover, such a psychoanalytic theory belongs to a very specific historical period and context, and might be

less valid for explaining future circumstances. I will attempt to claim in what follows that contemporary

circumstances signify rather the beginning of a process (apocalyptic and destructive while also simultaneously

liberating) in which the screen, in both the physical and mental sense, increasingly merges with the viewer­

subject into a single entity, a future dissolution of the distinction between them tending towards a world of

simulacrums in which it is likely that the field of language, the field of representation, will disappear into the

technological experience of telepathy. Moreover, could it be that this is no longer just a new aspect of reality

which the subject experiences but the continuation of a certain logic of control which has long been in power in

Western culture, and perhaps in all of human culture? To understand this transfusion between screen and

subject, we should understand the relation between eye and screen as encapsulating the larger problem in play

here; an allegory (but not just) that will give us a terminology to help clarify the future state, so that later it will

be possible to deconstruct it ­ until eye and screen are no longer distinct (in much the same way Lacan in

S e m i n a r X I analyzes the aspect of the gaze and sight as an allegory for the relation between the subject and

the otherness of the unconscious).

We shall call this being the subject­screen, especially in light of the unique gaze that obtains from the subject

to the apparatus and back. Phenomenologically we can claim that the eye encounters the apparatus while

encountering the eye of the screen. The following description of the process, taking place at two levels, can

serve to clarify this point:

First level: The main organ through which man contends with the world is through the eye > the eye gazes atthe world > the most significant objects for wo/man (as with most other creatures) in the world are other wo/men

> one’s eye is predominantly occupied with gazing at others > in such gazing, the main focus is the other’s eye

> man is predominantly occupied with eye contact > such eye contact is structurally repeated in the eyes’

contact with the screen > the screen is the end of an apparatus projecting light towards the eye > in the most

advanced technological developments of the screen (like that of the smartphone) there is a camera on top of

the device, serving as an eye of sorts.

Second level: the eye is exposed to an infinitude (of images) of the world > the (internet) screen increasinglyreproduces this infinitude > this infinitude is concentrated and contained within one screen, one center,

confronting the private individual > the eye is fixated on the one screen in which an entire world dwells > thus

the two­level encounter between man and screen takes place: an inflation of visual simulations opposite the

narcissism of the relation between the eye and an interactive mirror > the eye gazes at the screen and

experiences it as an eye gazing directly back at him. The gaze at the eye and the viewer constitutes a being

which is on the one hand open to the endless stream of images and on the other hand to reinforcing his

narcissism: on the one hand the self’s passion is created by the screen and on the other hand the screen

constantly feeds this passion while preserving a pinch of frustration which will continue to keep the self­desire

cycle moving.

This frustration does not create an unbearable anxiety, because the levels of tension between screen and

subject are constantly decreasing due to the ingenious reproduction between the spectator and the screen

producing the cyborg merge. What was once an unbearable Angst, in the Lacanian sense, found in the

frightening encounter with one’s likeness in the mirror (Lacan 2004), or in the Freudian sense of the Das

Unheimliche (Freud 1919), is now mitigated by Capital’s insatiable needs (Capital which seems to be extremely

well read in the works of Karl Marx and Max Weber).

According to the understanding put forward here, the apparatus­subject is a being constantly­becoming in a

process that destroys its personal desire (if such a personal desire can be really said to exist). This (possibly

mystical) convergence takes place as the dualistic Cartesian formulation of the computer takes over our own

formulation regarding our ‘wetware’ human brain, and thus facilitates the ideology which attempts to lead us

towards such a merger, at which time the logic of the wetware ‒ the software/hardware analogy for mind/body ‒

will become only natural. In light of the repeated cries heralding “Here comes the Day of Yehova!”, first by the

biblical prophets, and then in the “Jesus, come!” of John of the Apocalypse, the question arises whether the

pressing call is now “apparatus, come!”

The being of the screen­subject has formed and been reinforced over decades, beginning at the end of the 19th

century, through the initial gaze at the Big Other of the cinematic silver screen, a traumatic and violent

experience which engulfs one in a womb­like fashion, developing into the warm family home television screen.

The screen then further penetrated into the personal­intimate sphere, intended for the individual’s eyes only,

and no longer just the family. In the screen­subject’s current development, the interactive smartphones and

tablet screens capture the eye’s gaze, forcing the viewer to become immersed. And the viewer is himself also

an object of these screens’ gazes, which study the subject’s movements to better fit his form, which the

subject himself consolidates, confronted by the technology’s own consolidating subjectivity ­ a circle of magic

mirrors. ‘Selfie’ images express the radical side of the narcissistic (phone) object which interfaces between

subject and screen through applications like Facebook and WhatsApp, but also in the original sense of Ovid

and Freud (and not in the simple sense of the duplication of the photographing me, where the image on the

screen simply makes a one­directional copy of the ego’s body, and the ego falls in love with this image): the

photographed image and the one photographing it recreate and duplicate one another, preserving an echo of

each other. (For a genealogy of how mobile phones influence the world­views of the subject see Wellner 2011).

An example of such a future point is Google Glass. The screen­subject will don special glasses like those of a

fighter pilot or futuristic robot and information will be projected onto the lenses, directly merging with the gaze of

the world through an (information) augmented reality. Gaze­1 of the human eye merges with the apparatus’

gaze­2, the same gaze­2 which is always aimed at the subject – the subject and the apparatus are one and

their gaze, gaze­3, is aimed at the world (a gazed­at­object without being gazed directly at but only through the

apparatus). At this time we find ourselves in an intermediary stage in which the technology of eyes is still

thoroughly differentiated, eyes that have “telepathic” understanding: the car in which I drive enters the parking

garage I see, my car is identified by the eye­camera which clocks its time of entrance and allows me to exit

after payment procured by a credit card interaction, which my eyes inform me has been confirmed on the pay

station’s LED, without a single redundant step, either physical or mental – a streamlined process of visual

confirmation and identification.

Embedded in the Apparatus

In his essay on apparatus, Agamben (2009) notes that the most prominent of apparatuses in human history is

language. This offhand comment by the apocalyptic­messianic thinker, at the end of a theological­political

debate about the Christian foundations of the Western concept of the apparatus (or posed in the earlier terms of

economics and dispositions, which describe divine intervention). Moreover, we can treat language as a

mechanism, as a techne governing the brain, internalized and integrated with the self and conditioning it in life,

while the futuristic apparatus is an external tool which will take over and render impossible the distinction

between the self and the self towards an ocean of subjectivity (in which the internet will contain all of us

embedded within it. And this can already be said to be taking place; each of our subjectivities is embedded

there until such time as all subjectivity will henceforth dwell there, and the respective borders of our different

subjectivities will blend and disappear within this ocean); while the older apparatuses produced the double

action of horizontally creating eyes and vertically creating the distinction between self and self (regardless of

the media in which the imagined self first manifested and was deconstructed in accord with the postmodernist

doctrine).

A viewing of the 2008 film W a l l - E reveals the interpellation of the screen­subject in the form of a future breed

of humans living in a paralyzing utopia on a spaceship run by a mothering apparatus in the form of a

supercomputer with protruding eyes, blocking any possibility of maturing and returning to the home planet

Earth. And indeed through a reversal of the psychoanalytic formula we discover regression, or an onthological­

parody of that regression, from the tension between the subject and the absolute/Big Other on the cinema

screen, to an autoerotic screen­subject in which there is no longer a distinction between subject, screen and

apparatus. An apocalyptic regression, or one aimed towards an apocalyptic experience, in which the subject

undergoes a process of reversal towards a Freudian consolidation of the subject from auto­eroticism (the

internal love devoid of any other) to narcissism (the love of an identical object which exists for the subject as a

possible significant other) and finally away from the subject to the selection of an object (the love of the other

as the other) (See Freud 1904).

To what extent is this process influenced by the fact that these screens developed as part of the Christian

cultural field linked to a Western subjectivity? And how much can be extrapolated to a universal subject through

cultural colonialism? For the core of that very subjectivity was also formulated in the epistles of the thirteenth

apostle, Paul. We take this into account in positing Christianity, like every systematized religion, as much more

than a spiritual framework, but a wider cultural one.

The discussion presented here regarding the relation between the viewer­subject and the screen, a discussion

which has clear eschatological characteristics, is aimed at the trivial in its everydayness, but also at that which

has surprisingly apocalyptic aspects, and even more so at the superficiality of that coincidence which melds

the contemporary with finitude itself. It seems that what is being outlined here is none other than a cultural

paradox, especially valid in our current time. To better point to the structural paradox, I wish to stress the fact

that today academics and laymen as one flatly reject any claim that our time is close to an apocalyptic

futurality; they reject the absurd aspect of the claim, namely the contradictory relation between two radically

different states that also entail a peculiar proximity. Before we clarify the meaning of this paradox, we will focus

on its structure through this rejection which actually paradigmatically expresses it.

The very defensive response confronted by a paradox, expressed in a sneering rejection of its actual presence

or existence ‒ especially in the extreme apocalyptic end situation in which we find ourselves ‒ serves as an

example of the problematic nature of our contemporary logic, in that it highlights how we are facing a problem

that can be taken as either radical or trivial. But the choice of either pole misses the larger point regarding a

condition which is both; both democratic and liberating as well as totalitarian and oppressive. This is not an

issue of different perspectives, but of a phenomenon that is the synchronization of both aspects into an

inseparable mesh! For the anti­dialectical rejection only leaves us with the trivial, and thus arouses suspicion

concerning the apocalyptic way in which the apparatus consumes us.

In the hope that conceptual clarification can serve to elucidate the difficulties in which we find ourselves, we

should focus on the concept of “apocalypse” which should be taken as a tension between its literal and

historical meaning; literal in the sense of a dramatic event which reveals something, like that found in the title

of the final part of the New Testament, “John’s vision" Αποκάλυψη του Ιωάννη; and historical in the most

pragmatic sense, in which the word is imbued with meaning following that very text detailing an eschatological

catastrophe at the end of days. De facto, in a broad domain of cultural phenomena, this relation is perceived as

solely negative, especially to contemporary secular sensitivities, and is no longer a bearable mix of a negligible

negative aspect spiced with positive utopianism. It should be understood that the influence of Hollywood

reinforces this trend with the paranoia which it instills in its viewers. Thus the cinematic renditions of Philip K.

Dick’s paranoid stories, geared towards a dystopian pleasure which grounds the viewer, completely embedding

him in the monadic space created for him and him alone as he ironically returns to his experience of the

T r u m a n S h o w type of heroic masculinity. Moreover, the terrifying aspect of what is imagined is connected to

the manner in which Hollywood productions understand, in their bid to give pleasure in line with the Christian

tradition, the imaginary depth of our relation to a future apocalypse.

Besides those noted above, who reject apocalyptic claims, there are those who accept the ongoing change but

experience it indifferently if not actually positively, and can claim that as part of our attempt to conceptualize

our condition it is preferable to use the term “evolutionary” and not “apocalyptic­catastrophic”, and are

astonished at the stubborn paranoia such as is expressed here, which overly stresses the apocalyptic at the

expense of the liberating.

First and foremost, in response to these claims we must note that from our current perspective on the

approaching future, such as that described by Ray Kurzweil (2005) concerning the point of singularity, it is

indeed a threatening future, or in other words, it seems to entail a threat that the contemporary subject senses

from afar as its own negation and dissolution into the field of computerized automation­robotization. Secondly,

there is not even any possibility of discourse from the yet unknown perspective of future man, for whom the

situation will likely be trivial. Thirdly, we go far back in time to make a statement about the future, the future

whose seed was planted in our present, or so it seems. The very same past which we are inquiring about is

also closely tied to the Judeo­Christian apocalyptic tradition of the destruction of the Second Temple. This

tradition thus ties together destruction and anxious anticipation of the future, an imagined anticipation, a present

tense point of view that is nevertheless also already rooted in the future, a view towards what is insinuated from

the present to the future. This is how Paul perceived messianic time. In this regard, Paul imbues the subject

with an apocalyptic core through visual identification with the image of the crucifixion, an identification whose

final degradation will lead to a mystical merging with the crucified until the two are indistinguishable.

And thus we can ask if we are experiencing the soft and pleasurable attack of a creeping apocalypse, in and

towards us, in which our subjectivity becomes habituated, albeit not completely, to a slippery slope which ends

in annihilation through a merger with the Object­Screen? And this stands in contradiction to the earlier

subjective prophecies, in which the subject deals with a horrible reality, unique and sudden, a situation so dire

that the subject has no choice but to grow accustomed to the catastrophe, to the sudden change. Which

situation is worse: the slow process of growing accustomed to growing accustomed, or the very traumatic not

growing accustomed to growing accustomed? And are we today dealing with the formation of a revolution, a

formative revolution? Will we still be able to define revolution?

This is a revolution whose primary evil is that it contains the process of growing accustomed to it ‒ becoming

habituated to it ‒ which dissolves the very objective “fact” of its historical existence, its very existence as

“past”. This habituation is part of an existence which slowly but surely can no longer make distinctions between

epochs and will not recognize its existence within a revolutionary situation. This is an existence finally

apathetic towards time. An irony of sorts ­ the end of the subject of futurality.

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Itzhak Benyamini

Itzhak Benyamini teaches at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem and Haifa University. He is the

editor of Resling publishing house and the scientific editor of the Series of Freud's works in Hebrew. Author

of: W h a t D o e s t h e M a n W a n t ? 8 P s y c h o - T h e o l o g i c a l E s s a y s (Resling 2003); P a u l a n d B i r t h o f t h e

S o n s ' C o m m u n i t y (Resling 2007); L a c a n ' s D i s c o u r s e − T h e R e v i s i o n o f P s y c h o a n a l y s i s a n d J u d e o -

C h r i s t i a n E t h i c s (Resling 2009); T h e L a u g h t e r o f A b r a h a m : I n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f G e n e s i s a s C r i t i c a l

T h e o l o g y (Resling 2011); in English: N a r c i s s i s t U n i v e r s a l i s m : A P s y c h o a n a l y t i c R e a d i n g o f P a u l ' s

E p i s t l e s (The Library of New Testament Studies, T&T Clark, 2012; in German: Merve Verlag, Berlin 2013).