The End of Appearance
How does Ivan Sutherland's text "The Ultimate Display" help us understand representation at the limit of its appearance?
In Jacob Gaboury’s Image Objects, an arresting history of computer graphics, he points to a short text from 1964 by the computer scientist Ivan Sutherland, called The Ultimate Display:
After a breathtakingly prophetic litany of future computer interfaces, including keyboards, mouses, styluses, kinetic feedback controllers and cameras, Sutherland finally reaches the culmination, “the Ultimate Display”, the point where virtual reality and material existence coincide perfectly. This is one of the many ideal forms that underlie our concept of the image, so it presents an opportunity to see what this specific kind of Ultimate Display would mean, both for representation and for an understanding of the corpse-image.1 The question is this: in what sense is this a display? To answer that, we need to attend to several crucial words in this passage.
What does it mean for the display to be ultimate? Here, Sutherland is not merely listing possibilities of the coming interfaces, he is listing progressions. These move from more short-term developments or adaptations of existing technology up toward this special room, an abstraction that combines all earlier forms of interface. To be ultimate means that it comes after all the other displays and to have none come after. In this circumstance, we could not, or perhaps would not, become more displayed because the room is able to display all the lesser interfaces within itself. In this sense, the Ultimate Display is epochal; everything that comes before it is leading up to it and whatever exceeds it will no longer be a display but will have become something else.
But why is the display a room? A room is not a Matrix, an interior manipulation of perception where we experience a sittable display that is not really there. Nor is it a Holodeck, where matter is effective but simulated. Neither is it a Natura naturans, the actual unfolding of Nature Itself in its unlimited breadth. Instead, this display is closer to a speed-of-light 3D printer. For the room aspect, the “ultimate” quality is in the total mastery of each particle within the room, while the “display” quality is the real difference between the phenomena inside the room, controlled by the computer, and the phenomena outside the room.
The gap between the object outside and the display inside is captured by this phrase, good enough. Good enough is a contextual characteristic. The chair is sittable because that is the activity being enacted. To ask the device, “Computer, make me a chair” is to really request a seat, or the activity, the sit-down. Were the computer to provide a chair blasted to pieces or a chair glued to the ceiling or a chair that smells like disgusting sewage, it would not be “good enough” at all. This leads to some interesting implications.
First, it adds another dimension to this definition of display. The chair in the display room does not have a chair’s full being because it does not have the whole complex of ways to appear that a real chair has, including the virtual, impossible, useful, and non-human appearances. This can be understood in one of two ways. In the first way, “good enough to sit on” means the Ultimate Display produces a quality-complex, a permanently fluctuating swarm of qualities, bundled by the intentionality and perceptual sensitivity of the operator. This version of the Ultimate Display produces the chair ready for the sitting manner intended by the computer’s design and does not have to produce even the tiny real pungency of a chair if the sitter does not have enough nose to perceive it. Or more precisely, it does not produce the chair at all, but the sitting, with the chair-appearance arising only in order to accomplish that sitting. We have a hint of this in the text as well; the computer is not said to control matter but to control the existence of matter. Existence here is not the thing but the activity of being a thing, or put differently, the thing only is its activity and nothing more.
In this move, display as the room’s insideness and outsideness is now reflected into the things contained within the room. These things manifest only a front-sidedness, the small portion of features that could be sensed by the computer or the subject of the Ultimate Display. In this sidedness, the only existence that the computer would manifest is that which faces the intentional subject, while the rest hides behind the back, the storehouse of all the novel or expansive appearances and qualities that are born by every object in what we often call real things.
There is a second interpretation of this good enough concerns a further meaning of the ultimate. This interpretation considers these three beings, chair, handcuffs, and bullet, as teleological objects, objects defined by their ultimate form. That is, they exist for some purpose and this purpose is so embedded in them that without it, they would not exist even in their non-purposeful modes. This interpretation relies on a close reading of the second sentence, the one where the good enough vanishes:
Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal.
The display has suddenly turned and presented us with fatality. In one sense, we have arrived back in the realm of the ultimate. This time, the ultimate is not just the pure abstraction of that which encompasses what came before it and forecloses anything coming after. Now, it has a particular quality, the quality of fatality.
What is the nature of this fatality? One answer rests on the way we interpret the word would. Would can be the anterior future where would be confining means that when this future arrives, the handcuffs will be used, they will be doing the work of confining something. Would can also be the subjunctive, indicating that in this future, this Ultimate Display, the handcuffs that appear will have the possibility of confining. In this example, it seems clear that both Sutherland’s intention and the plainface meaning of the sentence leans toward the second interpretation: the cuffs will be good enough to do the work of confining.
The bullet is much less straight ]forward. A displayed bullet is not at all the same as a fatal bullet. Not only is there no guarantee that it will be fatal, but probability suggests it will almost definitely not be fatal. Were someone to break it out of its display and load it into a gun and fire it, it would likely suffer the fate of almost every bullet ever made and miss. On its own, it is hard to avoid the interpretation that in this clause, a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal, display ceases to mean rendered in appearance. It returns to its old meaning, contained in Latin dēplicō: to unfold. The display of the bullet is then its activity, its fulfillment of itself, its inner logic run through to the End.
It is not surprising that in the End, we find a corpse. Corpses are very much ultimate kinds of things, and routinely operate as the tools we use to think about finality and depiction, the embalming of our old selves in an old photograph. But is this a corpse-image, and if so, what does it contribute to a theory of the corpse-image as the articulation of absolute mimesis?
For this, let’s remain with the fatality. In this interpretation, the Ultimate Display would combine both the appearance and the activity of an existing thing. However, it is not any old activity that can happen to a bullet, like sitting inert on the ground or having mass. A bullet does not especially express inertia or heft. Nor is it one of the many activities that are necessary for a bullet to be the kind of thing that it is, things like projectileness or being-able-to-withstand-firing. If a bullet’s Ultimate Display is in killing, then it becomes be a combination of the unique and the essential, forged together by an ideal purpose. Bullets exist in order to kill. That is why they were conceived and why they are produced. The bullets that miss their target or are expended in shooting ranges, are fired for the sake of developing in oneself the capacity to kill with a future bullet.
It is as if, in the Ultimate Display, we can see that the ideal purpose of the bullet is not separate from its material existence. To produce a bullet in the room is to produce also that ideal, and the tendency that it encompasses. The other meaning of fatality raises its head: the quality of being fated. Because in the Ultimate Display, fate and future unfold in perfect simultaneity, as the activity and purpose of the bullet collapse into a single point.
So where have we gotten for our trouble? What is display and what remains of the question? Display is a sidedness. This means it is a thing with only a front face. Its appearance and existence have become identical. This thing only manifests a small cluster of the perceptible qualities that a real object would have in reserve.2 Intention determines which cluster appears at any given moment. What is being generated is, therefore, not a thing but an intentional activity that the thing is needed to accomplish. Once transformed into an intentional activity, the problem shifts decisively toward the Ultimate. Activities are purposes. The Ultimate nature of this display is therefore teleological. The chair is made only in order to be sat on. Just as the display winnows down the breadth of plausible and possible appearances to only that front-sidedness, so too does the Ultimate turn the focus of the end not just to any end whatsoever, or even an important and necessary end, but to a final end, the purpose for which all objects of that class were conceived and produced.
In this collapse of depiction and depicted, there comes a point where the reduction becomes so intense that it gives way to an explosion of possibility. This room would be one where each thing and configuration of things would operate on its most general purpose, the purpose that caused it to come to be in the first place. If this kind of causality reigned in the world, in the outside of the room, it would be a nightmare. Every atom would strain in a perfect harmony of unfreedom. Our manifold desires would be reduced to a single purpose so strong that we could not do anything but obey. But in the room, things are very different. It is not a clockwork but a roiling stew. Activities and their objects are introduced into the room, each carrying with it an incommensurable and enormously complex arrangement needed for the fulfillment of its purpose. Having been created rather than emerging from nature, the room becomes a war of contradictory necessities, bullets that have to find their fatality, chairs that demand a sitting, and cuffs on the hunt for wrists to bind. These necessities can only sort out the order and hierarchy of their enactment through the degree of power of their actuality. How fatal is your bullet, how seated is your chair?
Here, we have reached Wonderland. As with Alice, our Wonderland could not exist as a world undivided from itself. There needs to be a mirror, a divide, in order for there to be something called a display. It equally cannot be a place of absolute chaos, where being flows in and out of existence, or it would never be able to stand on its own two ontological feet. It is rather a place where the rules are so rigid that they unspool and release anarchy, where the smiles do the cat rather than the other way around, and where the corpse is not just the arrival of a self to its own portrait, but also the passing away of all identity whatsoever.
By corpse-image, I mean the ideal point where represented and representation are fully identical and coincident. The image and that which the image depicts are exactly the same. One is the image of oneself. Before such a point is passed, it may appear that greater accuracy and fidelity will ground an image more securely in the depicted subject. However, the instant of this reconciliation gives rise to a paradox. Is the corpse the image of the living being that once animated its form, the remains of the life and the actions lived? Or is it the absence of that life, its total negation, not an image of the one who is passed but an image of itself? If, as seems likely, it is impossible to conceive of representation without this ideal moment, and if this ideal moment is, contrary to its self-description, a radically destabilizing, degenerating and ontologically creative moment, then we can move beyond the moralism of critiques of representation and take up mimesis, or literality, or the identical as particularly exuberant instances of nonidentity.
In its lopsided frontness and backness and in its reduction of complexity for the visible story, it is very much like a photograph, that other thinged appearance.