Digital Scopic Regimes: Invention, Knowledge & Critical Visualities

"About 85 per cent of my 'thinking' time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so"
- J. C. R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis"

" Information networks need to be studied not only at the level of the front-end, that is, the human-understandable signs appearing on a screen, but also at the level of the back-end; the many layers of software that are needed, from transmission protocols to computer languages and programs, to transform data into signs"
- Ganaele Langlois, "The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning"

"In the wonderment of [...] taxonomy, the things we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of fabe, is demonstrated as the exotic chram of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that"
- Michel Foucault, "Preface" to The Order of Things

How does visual organization, depiction, and observation act as knowledge-production in the digital informational economy? This is a question that is tacitly asked by Ganaele Langlois' brief interrogation of alternative web browsers in her text The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning, and in is a thread that I would like to follow up on, engaging her impetus for a 'critical visuality studies' by employing Michel Foucault and J.C.R. Licklider. It is my belief that both of these early texts represents two theoretical trajectories, or what Delueze & Guattari might call
"lines of flight" which are hybridized by Langlois. On the one hand, Foucault is fascinated by the system of knowledge, and the production of informational systemicity. On the other hand, Licklider sees what might be termed a "cultural imperative" for the optimization of informational depiction and exploration. The site of unification of these two "lines of flight" is the space of the browser (which is central to Langlois' study) as it creates an interface for the optimization of informational analyses, and firmly articulates a distinct systemicity (with a distinct potential to be radicalized or made into "fable" as Foucault argues).

I would like to take up the idea of the browser as the site of a new critical visuality that I will examine through these three theories. I feel that each is in aa position to offer insights (pun intended) on how the visual interface of the web browser operates to construct specific knowledge systems, optimized towards certain consumption patterns and preventing others. Jonathan Crary's "Techniques of the Observer" may also be pulled in, as a way of examining how technologies of vision situate and construct their viewer, thus complimenting the study of system, by considering the subject.