From Panopticon to POV-opticon: Drive to Visibility and Games of Truth.

Abstract

The paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand the emergency of the post-truth era in the specific realm of Internet visual culture, and analyses the aesthetic and technological conditions that allow a new form of post-truth to emerge. The paper argues that Internet post-truth could be addressed as the jeu de la vérité (game of truth) emerging from the transformation of the Panopticon -the form of visual governamentality of modernity -into the POV-opticon. The POVopticon is a regime of visibility outlined by the explosion of POV (Point of view) technologies of vision -mobile phones, VR and AR technologies -which are transforming POV from a cinematic aesthetic and technical format into one of the most controversial political-aesthetic battlefields of our time. The capability of cinematic POV to produce the seamless overlapping between body and technology is re-invented in relation to new technological devices that re-defines human and machinic agency within new regimes of visibility and new games of truth. The paper tries to understand the POV-opticon by looking at the development of a new type of selfie aesthetic and of a new imagery coming out of the ongoing machinization of the face operated by facial recognition technologies -what I've tried to define elsewhere as the Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI). Especially by defining POV-opticon and AFI, the paper expands the notion of regime of visibility proposed by Dutch art critic Camel van Winkel, and relates it to the notion of games of truth elaborated byMichel Foucault. If, according to Winkel, the regime of visibility is more about the drive to make visible rather than the visible itself, the drive presents a peculiar relation with truthfulness which seems to fit well with the games of truth generated by the POV-opticon. Games of truth is Foucault's attempt to rethinking the concept of regime of truth defining the Panopticon, in relation to distributed forms of governamentality and emerging forms of subjectivity. The paper argues that POV-opticon provides the technological strata for explaining post-truth as the hermeneutical reality emerging from the proliferation of POV games of truth. POV games of truth are assembled into new POV micro-regime of truth algorithmically generated by the extraction of data from the subject and by the creation of a POV data double that works as the algorithmic answer to the drive to visibility and offers a solution to the ambiguities of the games of truth. Panopticon, POV-opticon, games of truth, regime of truth, Algorithmic Facial Image (AFI)"Faire l'histoire de la vérité, faire l'histoire de jeux de vérité, faire l'histoire de pratiques, des économies, et des politiques de veridiction, faire cette histoire [suppose qu'on ne puisse aucunement] se contenter de dire: Si on a dit telle vérité, c'est que cette vérité étiat réelle. Il faut dire au contraire: Le reel étant ce qu'il est, quelles ont été les conditions improbables, les conditions singulières qui ont fait que, par rapport à ce reel, un jeu de la vérité a pu appar...