“Yes, we see you Thierry, but we don’t hear you, activate your microphone!” This sentence, now entry to the pantheon of the classics, embodies the burlesque of our time: that of the colleague who speaks without being heard while being seen, involuntary pantomime of contemporary communication. Formerly, a simple phone call was enough. Now it is no longer enough to be heard: you have to be seen. The telephone call becomes systematically replaced by a videoconferencing. The paradox is strong: after the enthusiasm for telework, this conquest of invisibility acclaimed by 70 % of employeeshere is a new permanent visibility. Where the phone left the freedom to walk, to dream, to look away while speaking, the “visio” besieges, retains, immobilizes. She nails on the spot and fixes the eye in a face-to-face which is not one. But why this imperative need to see? What does this obsession of the visible reveal, if not a last illusion of presence, a last simulacrum of the link?
Of course, we rightly praise the advantages of videoconferencing: the end of endless journeys for an hour meeting, the abolition of distances, the inclusion of distant and prevented, continuity assured in a world suspended from crises. All this is true and very useful. But behind the technical evidence, it is our relationship to the real and the other which is redefined. First, a relationship with the other democratized. Television and Visio share the same ambition: that of remote presence. But where television imposes aristocratic verticality – the spectator receives without responding, sees without being seen -, the Visio wants to be democratic. She promises new equality: everyone can see and be seen, speak and be heard, become both actor and spectator. The remote meeting is thus perceived as a remedy for the asymmetry of the media world, a face-to-face simulacrum where the egalitarian exchange seems restored.
Second, the Visio makes reality a protocol. She does not show, she frames. She does not relate, she stages. Behind each screen, a part transformed into a decoration, a skilfully refined background or a tropical trompe-l’oeil tropical beach, a camera adjusted to the millimeter. Scrutinized by others and by themselves, everyone plays their role in this great ritual of productive transparency. Apotheosis of the contactless link, of all together-chacun-chez-so, promise of a fluid interaction, it produces on the contrary a frozen dialogue, where everyone becomes a floating vignette in a digital mosaic.
Seeing is not just receiving an image
Finally, videoconferencing achieves an ontological paradox by producing a reality without substance. Just as there are realities that exist objectively without matter, such as shadow, time or wind, the Visio makes the other objectively appear on my screen without making it consistent. The other is not apprehended or apprehended as a substance, a being, a singular reality but reduced to an objectification. From substantial subject, it becomes objective image.
In this sense, online meetings show without making exist, show without ever showing. Because seeing is not just receiving an image. Seeing is a sensitive experience is to feel the tiny variation of a face, the movement of an expression, the density of a look. It is to experience matter, this grain of the real behind which Proust revealed the essence of beings: “It is under little things that reality is contained.” But here everything is frozen. The other, reduced to a thumbnail, is no longer a moving and changing being, it is a static icon. Where the flesh lives, the screen freezes. Where the eyes meet, avoid each other, seek, the image frames and encloses. Thus, it is not enough to be visible to be present. Visioconference confuses visibility with the relationship, the image with the incarnation. It shows us a face, but never the depth of a being. So, behind the screen, only one desire often remains: that of finding invisibility or, better still, a face that is not only shown, but encountered.
* Julia de Funès is a doctor of philosophy.
.