Media technologies expose unconscious dimensions of perception that the eye and mind miss

Evidence

According to Walter Benjamin, the movie camera affords access to the ‘optical unconscious’: … With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended … clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious … We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 146

Categorization

• DEFINE: Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ is captured here as the way mechanical recording reveals action-microstructure invisible to awareness.
• XREF: Benjamin’s concept resurfaced earlier in Han’s argument about Big Data as a magnifying glass for micro-actions. — connects to: Data-mining reveals a digital unconscious akin to Benjamin’s optical unconscious — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 148; Tele-technologies dismantle the body’s unified synthesis of action, perception, perceptibility, and vulnerability — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 953; Visual mass media shift character understanding from inwardness to external optical signals — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 323 (+1 more)

Related

• Data-mining reveals a digital unconscious akin to Benjamin’s optical unconscious (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Data-mining reveals a digital unconscious akin to Benjamin’s optical unconscious #corroborates (0.90) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 148
• Tele-technologies dismantle the body’s unified synthesis of action, perception, perceptibility, and vulnerability #expands (0.82) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 953
• Media’s lasting effect is an interpretive frame, not blurred perception #contradicts (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 342
• Visual mass media shift character understanding from inwardness to external optical signals #exemplifies (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 323