The Eyes of Unconscious Objects

All of us, as a result of the scientific spirit haunting our utterances, think of sight to be one of the five senses with its seat in our eyes. It wasn’t always like that, in God is reported to say: “Indeed, it is not the eyes that are blind, but it is the hearts in the chests that grow blind” (Quran 22:46). Sight and blindness are not necessarily characteristics of the eye. It doesn’t have to be the heart either. For example, in what way does the state see its dependents? It sees them through their NIDs. Now the grandeur of the individual throws him into the assertion that he is the only conscious entity. It makes him blind to the actuality of sight and its functionality and its mechanisms of pointing out, revealing, and establishing meaning. This article is nothing but an attempt at demonstrating sight as a certain kind of involvement with the world which doesn’t necessarily rely on individual consciousness. For this end, we will look into traffic radars as seeing entities which point-out, reveal, and create meaning.

We humans see, and methods of computer vision or cameras and the likes obviously do not see the same way we do. Taking radars into consideration, one has to ask the question that necessarily precedes the question regarding whether they see or not: how do they work? They capture radio waves reflected by a moving vehicle, and calculate the time they take to be received again from which speed is calculated easily. This is called the “Doppler Shift.” However, these radars come to have an image of the cars which are identified as speeding. At the end of the day, the basic statement which this tool makes is: “This vehicle has exceeded the speed limit.” The main characteristic of this assertion is a pointing out, the radar points out a car and adds to this pointing out a judgment. This judgment has an aura of objectivity, similar to that of sight. Imagine a red table in front of you, and try to claim or verbalize a judgment claiming its blueness. If you do that, you will immediately feel the absence of the aura of objectivity and you would feel ironic and you will experience falsehood first hand. The table is red, and it is red because I see it and we all see it as red; it must be red and cannot be otherwise. This is the strength of sight; it dictates your judgment absolutely.

The radar makes a judgment and it produces an image representing this judgment for all of us to see just like it saw. If we wear the cape of the blinding grandeur, we will say that radars imitate our way of seeing and that, obviously, they do not see and the simplest proof for this is that if it was a human in the place of the radar, they would see speeding and non-speeding cars and he/she would have an image of all of them alike in their memory. In that case, sight is uninhibited (i.e. sight precedes judgment and isn’t dependent on it) by definition but a radar’s sight is inhibited (i.e. it is dependent on the preliminary judgment of speeding) by definition. Thus, radars do not see. However, this is completely out of line. Radars do see, but the question remains: “How do they do so?

Radars in their entirety make this statement: “This vehicle has exceeded the speed limit.” As established, they provide a pointing-out through the image they take for which the “This” stands. Obviously, this statement reveals the truth about a world-affair. Try to deny this. Try to deny the fact that the vehicle was exceeding the speed limit. Didn’t your claim about the blueness of the red table provide enough deterrence from defying sight? You simply can’t deny it. This is not an appeal to realism about truth or objective epistemology, this is an appeal to the insurmountability of the dictations of sight. Sight in its dictations include the seeing subject in the creation of what is seen; sight is always already a sight-of as seen-by. It is of something (i.e. it always intends an object) and it is by somebody (i.e. sight comes to being as sight by somebody seeing). The statement “I see a red table” always includes the seer of the table as “I” and the object of sight as the red table. Hence, there is no need for objectivity here to speak of truth. At the event of sight where a truth is revealed, meaning is created. The only gateway for the blinding grandeur to win this battle is to establish the meaninglessness of the radar’s assertion. This is the last resort, if the radar creates meaning then one can attribute sight to the radar and vice versa. For that end, however, let us ask the question: what is a meaningless assertion/thought?

Try to think a meaningless thought. You will very shortly realize the futility of such an endeavor; where any thought you have will end up in either of these three categories a) a contradiction, b) an impossibility, or c) an emptiness. Let’s assume you thought: “this thought is meaningless.” Now this thought means that this thought will not convey meaning. Notice how this thought initially means something and this something happens to be its meaninglessness. This would make this thought a contradiction. Let’s assume another thought: “I am immortal.” This thought can be understood to be meaningless because a human must die, however this thought, as an assertion of an impossibility, means that you are simply delusional. It still doesn’t escape meaning. For fun, let’s assume you didn’t think of anything at all. Let’s assume you are one of the enlightened few who are able to look nothingness in the eye and think it. I hate to break it to you, but what you are thinking is indeterminacy (i.e. non-characterization) and it means the absence of a determination of Being (i.e. the lack of characterization of an existing substance). It still doesn’t escape meaning. If you get to think an actually meaningless thought please share it with me on: khaledhamza@aucegypt.edu. If it is still not obvious to you what causes this to be the case, I would like to let you know that the linguistic formulation that captures and communicates whatever you think makes it meaningful ipso facto at the moment of utterance. Any thought or assertion will necessarily have meaning by virtue of its linguistic structure. Now, when the radar asserts: “This vehicle has exceeded the speed limit,” who in their right mind is able to say that this assertion is meaningless? A very smart person, indeed. It is obvious that a radar doesn’t make this statement, this statement is rather the human interpretation of the information this unconscious non-seeing object provides.

It is clear now that the radar doesn’t provide meaning rather it is interpreted as making a statement. But let’s ask this very smart person one simple question, what is the non-human interpretation of the radar like? Now, if this smart person said anything it would be false because he would be claiming a non-human way of knowing. Thus, the radar will always say the same thing for us humans. It will always say that “this vehicle has exceeded the speed limit.” If a table is always seen as red, why does what it actually is essentially matter? If the information interpreted from a radar always is formulated in: “This vehicle has exceeded the speed limit,” for what reason exactly is the radar not actually making this assertion? And why is that question relevant? It just occurred to me that it is not actually clear that the radar is not making this assertion, and it doesn’t matter! In fact, every linguistic expression is interpreted by virtue of its reliance on meaning containers generally described as words and meaning structures generally called grammar. Words and grammar are non-uniform and dynamic, and they rely on general consensus whereby every assertion, so long as it is in language, is interpreted.

But to be completely honest, do we actually understand what constitutes a meaningful assertion or proposition? Take the statement “I want 5 oranges,” what makes this statement meaningful? Imagine you saying this to a construction worker on-site amidst his work, he would be completely perplexed by this statement and he would most likely ignore it completely. The construction worker definitely has an understanding of desire, the number 5, and of oranges. Still, the statement is completely meaningless at the time. Now make the same statement in a grocery store regardless of whether your audience were vendors or customers. If it was a customer, he/she will respond by pointing out where the vendors or the oranges are or would simply say I don’t know. If it was a vendor, he/she would bring you 5 oranges. Here it is very obvious that meaning is created out of use and relevance no matter what the words themselves mean. What use does the radar’s assertion have? Well, this is very obvious and we don’t need the very smart individual who told us that the assertion isn’t the radar’s but ours to help us here. The radar enforces the law, watches, and allows for punishment.

Recall Focault’s Panopticon, the central tower in a prison which sees all individuals in their cells but no one in the cells sees anybody watching. The panoptic (all-seeing) tower through its capability of sight and surveillance creates a milieu of meaning, which means that it sets the scene for a certain behavior through a certain social organization that allows for a set of allowed and not-allowed usages of world-things. The rationale behind the Panopticon is that “he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” How is the radar any different?