The Empire of Data: Chronicle of an Amputated Sensibility
Each morning, the wrist stirs before waking. Not under the effect of blood, but of a sensor. This is the promise of the screenless bracelet: to offer a "pure" connection to the body – following, measuring, anticipating.
Where the smartwatch pretended to play, mixing performance and distraction, this object assumes its own gravity; it does not distract, it does not play. Without a screen, it does not guide the gaze, it extinguishes it. From then on, nothing stands between the body and the data. This small connected object fashions a calculating body: gesture, stride, breath become data; effort becomes a curve.
This technological talisman – for some – reflects the world into which we are propelled by the most absurd technological liberalism: delegating to machines the task of knowing the real. This promise of total transparency, of a linear and objective reading of oneself, aligns with what Michaël Foessel calls a "dissection of our living being for personal use". In this constant observation of oneself through the spectrum of "data", variation runs dry: digitised life has become a norm.
It is, moreover, difficult to resist the authority of data, almost indisputable, entirely prescriptive. The jogger who compares their heart rate is already preparing to improve their future performance. Data pushes towards an endless updating of performance.
What is an existence placed under the sign of a flow of information that claims to determine the nature of the subject?
Repetition is a way of apprehending the real; it re-enacts a gesture in order to feel it again, to sense its nuances. Habit, in its living dimension, transforms accumulated past into present reflex – the immediate response to the world does not abolish a space of difference, of novelty: one discovers the same, differently.
Yet mechanical repetition, carried by these objects, has detached itself from experience. These connected devices produce information that confuses reality presented as objective, even though it is oriented by an arbitrary decision: only what is measurable exists. In other words, it is not measurement that is false but the confusion between measurement and the real itself.
A simple glance at one's bracelet does not suffice to access what is given in the real. Sensible givenness always exceeds what our habits of thought and our instruments can grasp.
In this respect, connected objects are machines that do not extend our perception: they hinder access to a more abundant, protean reality. We no longer incorporate, we reproduce; we leave the field of the living and enter that of calculation. Repetition, emptied of its trial-like charge, becomes mere maintenance of the living. Habit no longer binds; it automates.
What, in Deleuze, belonged to a "passive synthesis" – the transformation of past into present reflex – becomes today a mechanical operation: a transfer of data between the human and its prosthesis. The fluidity of the living – that discussed by Heraclitus, πάντα ῥεῖ ("everything flows") – fades in favour of a calculated fluidity, falsely dynamic. The Heraclitean flux becomes a hydraulic system: repetition no longer generates transformation, but flattening.
The man obsessed with his "data" passes by the "phenomena"; he becomes a body without memory, incapable of receptivity to the sensible. The bracelet knows everything about us, but we no longer remember anything.
This electronic bracelet is a hand watching itself beat – and in that beating, one no longer feels life: one counts it. And if we wish to prevent this language from becoming that of all our experiences, we must relearn how to perceive the infranumerical – those minute, spontaneous variations, those tenuous discrepancies where the real still lives.
Miradores (2008) – Francis Alÿs
One thinks of Francis Alÿs' Miradores (2008): on both shores of the Strait of Gibraltar, men repeat the same gesture, that of gazing into the distance. Nothing passes, and yet something is felt. The atmosphere, the breath of the wind, the trembling of the waves establish a curious silent dialogue between two worlds that everything separates. This contemplative act, devoid of purpose, nonetheless offers the possibility of human alliance, of tacit contact. Where the digital world freezes us, Alÿs restores value to contemplation, to the power of waiting, of nothingness, to a slowing-down that escapes calculation; a gesture which produces nothing except the possibility of the sensible.
These motionless gazes, these human presences suspended over the blue line of the sea, actualise what connected objects abolish: the experience of intimate time as opposed to the physico-mathematical, linear, abstract model.