Reconfiguring the Lifeworld: Spatial Experience in the Universe of Technical Images

This paper explores how photography reconfigures the lifeworld, augmenting or displacing its perceptual character. To various degrees, theorists of photography since Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s and 30s to Vilém Flusser in the 1980s and the post-photography theorists of today have argued that the technical image transcends human perception and intentionality. In a world conditioned by the photographic apparatus, even more so in the age of the networked and algorithmic image, space and time turn from being fundamental facticities of experience and become instead, at the extreme, mere simulacra.
What is at stake are the spatiality and temporality of a world in which the embodied subject of perception lives. At several points in his writings, Maurice Merleau-Ponty critiques photography on the basis that it replaces the spatial and temporal horizon of embodied human experience with a static and mechanical frame. His criticism echoes and is clearly founded upon Edmund Husserl's analysis, in his late writings, of the idealisation and mathematicisation of the world promoted by modern science and technology. This analysis was in turn a key influence on Flusser's conception of photography, which he contended, far from serving to represent the world, turns us into its functionaries. This paper traces these arguments and their relationships and seeks finally to identify an element in the lifeworld which might offer resistance to the apparatus’s effects.