Sailing to Byzantium - Icons, Apparatuses and The Mind-Body Problem

Resumo

Although our culture has apparently become increasingly immaterial in the last few decades, Victor Buchli argues that “the immaterial is always produced materially”, and that “This apparent paradox, (…) is its generative power and what girds the productive dualisms of social life and sustains the metaphysics that secure our given ontologies” (Buchli, 2016, p. vii-viii). Likewise, Vilém Flusser argues that societies are shaped by the medium that dominates the organization of their cultures - the idea of History, for instance, would be derived from the linear structure of texts. Thus, a culture organized with and through electronic apparatuses – and the apparently immaterial images they produce – would then replicate their inner structure. However, since most of us do not understand how these apparatuses work, we usually settle with a simplified description: apparatuses are a combination of software and hardware, a new dualism that actualizes the ages-old mind/body dichotomy and plays an essential role in contemporary ontologies. Drawing from Buchli and Flusser, the paper argues that it is possible to trace enlightening parallels between the digital apparatuses that shape contemporary culture and the role of religious icons in late Antiquity, focusing on the ontological structures anchored in these apparently widely different media.

Keywords: apparatuses; technical images; icons; immateriality.