2-8: breakdown, exposure, (sk)interface, continued
But at the same time, it is not that simple. Contrary to my earlier critique of the dematerialization at the heart of Benjamin's thinking, Bill Brown notes that Benjamin also believed that film and photography "had the capacity to enrich the perceptual field, disclosing 'physiognomic aspects' of the material world," "hidden details in familiar objects," "new structures of matter that lay beyond quotidian consciousness."[21] Benjamin surely meant for this quote to be interpreted in terms of a more existential phenomenology along the lines of Andre Bazin or Siegfried Kracauer, but what if we were to read this attention to ontological dimensions along more political lines? For, although viruses are exemplary, dematerialized network objects, gesturing towards the dream of pure information without a body, might they also provide, or better, expose views of the computer which are typically beyond the perception of the human user, and thus "beyond or beneath the experiential?"[22]
To the typical user, computer viruses most often make their presence known through their effects, rather than through perception of them as machinic objects in themselves. In fact, one can never "see" a computer virus, and one can never really know when their computer is infected until the damage is already done. This non-human invisibility characteristic of the computer virus is certainly related to the Cartesian separation of information and matter, software and hardware that is characteristic of the ontology of the computer, but this separation is also intimately related to the notion of ideology. For, as Wendy Chun notes, in the computer's separation of mind from body, we also have a disconnect between surface and depth: to Chun, "software represents our imaginary relationship to hardware," just as ideology (following Althusser) represents our imaginary relationship to the real.[23] In other words, although software as the interface to our digital machines purports to stand in for the computer as a whole, this obfuscation of the machinic body, its hardware, can only be conceptualized as an ideological operation.
![[21]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-21.jpg){kind=link}
![[22]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-22.jpg){kind=link}
To the typical user, computer viruses most often make their presence known through their effects, rather than through perception of them as machinic objects in themselves. In fact, one can never "see" a computer virus, and one can never really know when their computer is infected until the damage is already done. This non-human invisibility characteristic of the computer virus is certainly related to the Cartesian separation of information and matter, software and hardware that is characteristic of the ontology of the computer, but this separation is also intimately related to the notion of ideology. For, as Wendy Chun notes, in the computer's separation of mind from body, we also have a disconnect between surface and depth: to Chun, "software represents our imaginary relationship to hardware," just as ideology (following Althusser) represents our imaginary relationship to the real.[23] In other words, although software as the interface to our digital machines purports to stand in for the computer as a whole, this obfuscation of the machinic body, its hardware, can only be conceptualized as an ideological operation.
![[23]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-23.jpg){kind=link}
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