On Impersonal Speculation, Machinic Détournement and Cyborg Flâneur

Earlier in your presentation, you shared your thinking on ‘subjective city’ and urban space, and now, since we are already speaking about the idea of ‘play’, I think we can use it as a starting point. So, how do you see speculative thinking in your understanding of play and pedagogy?

We might approach this through the lens of play, architecture, and gaming. Then we have to ask the question: What is the game? Is it something more than a video game? Can we view the game within a broader context? Part of that broader context involves speculative thinking, the question of play and pedagogy, dynamic systems, and the idea of openness. New possibilities emerge through play. This reminds me of Kostas Axelos and his philosophy, which you can find in Game of the World (Le Jeu du Monde), along with his Heraclitian philosophy of play and how this might apply to his notion of planetary thinking. That might be one way to approach the question of speculative thinking.

Speaking of architecture theory, I came across your paper on Paul Virilio and the pedagogy of the image, which I found really interesting.[Note 1] From my perspective, it connects to speculative thinking, especially through its links to technology and machinery. I’m curious—how do you position speculative thinking in relation to technological development?

The paper you mentioned took me a long time to write, and it seems to have vanished; few people mention it now, much like Virilio’s work, who for me remains a great phenomenologist and architectural theorist. I’m not sure if you’ve read him, but he was highly influential on Deleuze and held many exhibitions in France. I’ve always admired his work, and by the 1990s, I think I’d read practically everything he wrote. When I was writing that paper, I was also critiquing Timothy Morton’s work, as I don’t agree with his idea of hyperobject, which I find derivative. Morton focuses phenomenologically on how objects withdraw—a concept he borrowed from Alphonso Lingis, a phenomenal writer of beautiful prose. Lingis' work on the demands of the object has influenced both Morton and Graham Harman. Harman, a student of Lingis, acknowledges his influence more clearly. One part I wrote about was how we zoom in and zoom out of phenomena, and I looked at that in terms of scale. I’m fascinated by understanding scale and perspective, particularly in relation to Virilio’s dromology, the philosophy of speed.

Throughout the writing process, I was continually considering perspective. What perspective do we assume when we look at an object? Is it from a solitary ‘I’? Or is it an impersonal gaze? How do we register that? Today, technology could enable this gaze. We can think of a camera in space looking upon the Earth, and as it draws closer, it shows a radically different perspective. It could even be a machinic perspective, like in Building Information Modelling. Or in a virtual environment where the eye of a drone machine offers a unique perspective. Technology provides this perspective; with telescopes, microscopes, and other vision machines, we witness new worlds or 'Universes of Reference' opening before us.

I think Virilio did a lot in his writings to open up entirely new phenomenological perspectives. Technology opens that for us, and I draw on his work because of his influence on Guattari and Deleuze. I’ve read many essays by Guattari and Deleuze and am familiar with Virilio’s architectonic concepts. That’s where that paper originated, I think. 

From my reading of Virilio, he discussed the idea of critical distance being affected by hyperactive engagement with media, especially technology-driven media. I see this as a threat to speculative thinking—this constant interaction with technology-generated images disrupts our ability to fully experience and engage in reflective thought. So, how do we reclaim active thinking and shift from passive media consumption to intuition or speculation? 

Like many others, Virilio’s writing on ecology greatly influenced me when I read it. He talked much about the “pollution of distances.” For example, when we fly from one spot on the globe to another, we miss the vast territory underneath. We don’t see the sea’s beauty or the mountains’ grandeur. We essentially sit motionless, missing the speed and magnitude of the experience. This is a phenomenological disaster. Virilio explains how this dulls our perception of the planet's grandeur, diminishing our appreciation of its boundless beauty. As he rightly puts it, it creates a grey ecology.

One visceral way to shatter that perspective is through the experience of skydiving—plummeting from a plane, racing toward oblivion, saved only by a parachute. The Earth opens up below, revealing the “pollution of distances.” This is somewhat similar to Baudrillard’s concept of “fatal strategies,” which allow us to grasp these ideas. I always liked Virilio. He was very opinionated, grumpy even, but had a unique way of writing. He seemed to give some sense of how to teach perception, how to teach perspective. He gave us a counter pedagogy of grey ecology.

When I was writing about Virilio, I was thinking about Baudrillard and the first Gulf War. He famously said we didn’t really experience the war; we experienced it cinematically through the media. Think of the cameras attached to rockets which created a cinematic reality, a detached perspective, even as those missiles killed innocent people below.

As I said, Baudrillard proffered a theory of fatal strategies, suggesting that to break through our usual logic and perspective, chaos or rupture needs to enter. Similarly, Bernard Stiegler discusses how cinema can either dull or guide our attention, which sometimes acts as a soporific or liberates us. Stiegler discusses how, even in states of exhaustion, images can guide us, opening new realms of possibility. For instance, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, watching a film can lead to a new sense of time and possibility. Stiegler explores this phenomenological-pharmacological interpretation of images, while Virilio is more pessimistic, suggesting that liberation is a nigh impossibility.

I find the notion that you were using about the skydiver quite interesting because it links to the movement-image, the motor-image, it's moving first and then perception, like steps. It resonates with our approach in this broader project of Speculative Urban Future, which is sensing, intuiting, imagining as a model for design education. We draw on Gilbert Simondon’s ideas from his book Imagination and Invention, where he describes four types of images. These progress from the motor image (linked to movement) to the perception image, then the symbolic image, and finally the object image. Between the symbolic and object image is where invention takes place.

Our goal is to guide students through this process—encouraging them to feel in the movement and find their own problems rather than just accepting pre-assigned ones. We emphasise perception as an individual process, helping students develop their own subjectivity. That’s why we linked this to your mention of skydiving, which we saw as a motor image. It also reminded me of Ronald Bogue’s writing on Deleuze and Proust, particularly the idea of ‘swimming through the sea’ as a metaphor for learning and experiencing. How do you see this approach fitting into our previous discussions about design education?

Two things come to mind in response to your project. First, in using Simondon’s framework, why not instead use semiotics to explore this concept? Listening to your description, I was reminded of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), particularly the 3-minute long shower scene which took a week to create, and which used no dialogue. The way the camera moved, from the eye to the plughole and back to the eye, then towards the newspaper, suggests the performative symbolic work of the camera. As you know, Hitchcock was not a fan of dialogue; he felt the camera should do the work. I’m unsure how this maps onto Simondon, but it’s fascinating to consider how the motor-image might work in terms of semiotics. In Psycho, we see how an idea is created through movement from one object to another in the mise-en-scène.

I think what we're trying to achieve is to break out of representational logics because our discipline is so dominated by that, and, instead, trying to introduce vectors, you know, direction flow, which. Bringing it back to Deleuze, I mean, it's that kind of notion of tracking them and then understanding how they become symbols and then how that allows for innovation or transfer sort of the adjacent possible.

The second point I wanted to make concerns drone technology and how it affects our perception. As you mentioned, this might disrupt orthodox ways of understanding images. For the past two years, I’ve been wandering through cities globally, like a mad Forrest Gump with a 4K camera capturing scenes as they unfold. I simply place the camera and let it capture whatever catches my initial attention. When I returned to Japan, my friend took those sounds and images and combined them, adding his interpretations, which I found fascinating and transformative. This was simply a gift; I was just recording people in places like Mumbai or Buenos Aires, unaware of the final effect. Exhaustion and loneliness were themes that came through, but my friend added an unanticipated layer by incorporating synthesised sounds. The disruption, perhaps, came from the dissonance between what the images conveyed and what I intended. This altered my understanding of the images.

My two-year project has included short films inspired by the Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō. I stayed in his summer house, exploring the sounds of Tokyo, the sea, the trains, and the silence of the corridors. It’s a project I’ve been deeply engaged with.

I love the concepts of détournement, errands, wandering, which I treat as a disruption and a counter tendency. Images can do this, as long as they don’t dictate our thought, in the sense that we are mere passive receptors. 

From this experience, I started reading François Laruelle, particularly his Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics(2012). As you mentioned, he challenges the idea that images represent something. According to Laruelle, images do something on their own, independently of authorial intention. My experience with the camera has led me to try to address time, exploring a non-photography or non-video approach. This might be something to consider.

That’s intriguing! It seems we have two ways to approach “speculation.” Our pilot project focused on speculation through human sensing, intuiting, and imagining, while your approach suggests letting the image act independently, creating speculation through its effects. Am I interpreting this correctly?

Well, it sounds like you interpreted much of what I did. That wasn't my intention, but that's what the video experience allowed me to do. So, as I said, this is a really experimental thing I was doing, but I found something out; the images, as you very well put, the images somehow took us over our original intention and that I found very interesting. I remember I was in Seoul a lot at the time and I was listening to Laruelle’s talks, and that idea, just my video experiments, emerged from me. That's what I've always been interested in, the idea that the images of the video images are doing something very different.

This is a new thing in my life, but I can see how the video images reveal something about time. And that's. That's from a reading from Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism (2019) from Maurizio Lazzarato, which allowed me to kind of think about what time is doing in the images. That wasn't my kind of representation or something, orchestration, something is being done in those images. That's an impersonal aspect.

Do you think they create time as well, like when you reconfigure them?

I believe so. Through this experiment, the images reveal what time does, and there’s an impersonality to them. For example, Times photographer James Nachtwey takes images in war zones, documenting events, making representational choices. He also placed a video camera on his camera, recording scenes with bullets whizzing past. The video adds something completely impersonal.

Nachtwey has a book of haunting war photographs that helps one understand the grim reality he has witnessed. But the video work is different, and that’s what fascinates me. I’ve made three short videos, my most creative work, which intrigues me because of the images’ impersonality.

Essentially, you let the world affect you without any predetermined ideas. This is a kind of reversed motor-image, moving to sense a different kind of movement.

Right. It may not have been about speed but about movement itself or the disturbance to movement. For example, I recorded the stillness in smart cities on dreary Sunday mornings in Korea and the vibrant life in Mumbai. I’ve only experienced that intensity of life two or three times. Once, I was watching sumo in Tokyo. Had my favourite wrestler, Kotoōshū (琴欧洲), won, he would have claimed the championship. On that day and at that time, at that moment qua haecceity in the Stoic and Deleuzian sense, the atmosphere was literally electric. And in old Delhi one Sunday afternoon, I felt a similar intensity of life. More recently, in Mumbai last year, around 5 a.m. in the morning, my friend and I went to a wholesaler which is only open for a few hours in the north of the city. The life there so early in the morning felt pure, intense. Alive. I now want to explore that sense of intensity in terms of movement and time. Video allows me to somehow explore such a sense through a single lens.

Thank you! We have been really enjoying it because it fits our pedagogical theme perfectly. As Claire Colebrook says, pedagogy is about ‘leading out.’ By experiencing that movement, you’re essentially leading yourself into a new situation, immersing ourselves and letting the experience guide us into knowledge and understanding.

One of the questions that emerged from my talk was about the flâneur. For me there’s something captivating about the flâneur, which I could experience in wandering and in walking. What I want to say is that the city allows itself to be discovered in this exploration. It’s the city showing itself as you wander. You’re not directing or even sure where you want to go. This openness of the city is a definite pedagogy as it’s an introduction to the unknown. I’m absolutely fascinated with something that can’t be calculated. The whole idea behind the smart city is that it’s a vast calculating machine, tracking movements. But I don’t want to be calculated; I want the city to reveal the incalculable, the unexpected. That’s what the city represents for me.

I’m not so interested in the 19^th-century bourgeois type of the flâneur. But you can be a flâneur via technology. Technology can open up a Universe of Reference in the Guattarian sense, allowing you to be a ‘cyborg flaneur’, if you will. I find that fascinating, and I want to learn more about how to experience the city in that way.

Would you consider digital nomads as flâneurs?

Why not? Here’s another approach we could call “linguistic landscaping.” Google Lens is a fantastic tool. Imagine you open Google Lens and explore a place like Beijing. This technology can reveal things you wouldn’t expect—a language change, an advertisement, or something cultural. I’m interested in how technology might reveal something like a techno-animism, where you see life in-between objects or spaces. 

Pokémon GO is a good example. With technology like this, you become a “digital nomad,” wandering and exploring. It’s more than entertainment; it’s also a tool, even a therapeutic tool, to help those who have withdrawn from the world. Psychologists and therapists use games like Pokémon GO to bring young people out into the world and into group settings. I find that incredibly valuable from a Guattarian perspective.

That aligns with something from Patricia Pisters’ keynote. We interviewed her last week and discussed the concept of pharmakon in relation to psychedelics. She mentioned concepts like “set, setting, and matrix,” which made me think about how technology could use a similar structure.

Yeah, her work is fantastic, so I can see how that works. There's a pharmacological aspect of technology, and technology also has to be a therapeutics as well. That's where the pedagogy also comes in. The idea of even the gamification of exercise is an example of the therapeutics. Right. As I say, this experiment I've been doing is also part of a project which is to do with psychiatry, psychotherapy, and phenomenologists in the Czech Republic and in Japan. Today, we know Higaki, Higaki Tatsuya and Bin Kimura, an expert on Japanese philosophy.  So that's a new thing which is developed like Watsuji Tetsurō (風土or climate), and that also gives us an opportunity to look at the environment and about climate, about territory and about milieu and all those things. Yeah. So that's also part of a wider kind of project I'm interested in.