COULD DEEP FAKES UNCOVER THE DEEPER TRUTH OF AN ONTOLOGY OF THE NETWORKED IMAGES?

CAN ONE RESPOND TO A QUESTIONNAIRE WITH QUESTIONS? In the questionnaire he sent us for a special issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Jacob Lund asks: “To which extent do the advent of operative images and machine vision and the increasing number of images that become networked change the ontology of the image?” If we agree with the statement that we can no longer “think of images as relatively individualized or delimited phenomena,” but that, increasingly, “images seem to gain meaning and significance through their relationships with other images, and from being networked,” what philosophical, political and aesthetic consequences should we draw from this (new?) state of affair? While genuinely attempting to address such issues, I will rather do so by formulating further questions than by bringing assertive answers.


CAN ONE RESPOND TO A QUESTIONNAIRE WITH QUESTIONS?
In the questionnaire he sent us for a special issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Jacob Lund asks: "To which extent do the advent of operative images and machine vision and the increasing number of images that become networked change the ontology of the image?" If we agree with the statement that we can no longer "think of images as relatively individualized or delimited phenomena," but that, increasingly, "images seem to gain meaning and significance through their relationships with other images, and from being networked," what philosophical, political and aesthetic consequences should we draw from this (new?) state of affair? While genuinely attempting to address such issues, I will rather do so by formulating further questions than by bringing assertive answers.

CAN ONE EXPLORE THE SOCIO-POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF IMAGES BY REMEMBERING POPULAR SONGS?
Instead of looking at images, the following pages will listen to popular songs, mostly drawn from the (white) (indie) rock tradition.
Their lyrics have occupied our minds over the last half-century.
Levering my reflection on their haunting persistence in our social memory goes beyond a mere rhetorical gimmick. It is meant to raise a more serious question: can these hits be retrospectively assessed as "true" because they stuck in our heads? In other words, can the sociopolitical valence of a semiotic object be measured to its poetical effectivity? And if so, shouldn't we consider songwriters (along with scriptwriters and filmmakers) as the main agents of socio-political transformations in our intensely Television, here taken as a metonymy for the media at large, is denounced as a screen, insofar as the screen necessarily hides something (behind it) whenever it shows something (on its surface). 2 With the Slime hypothesis, we remain firmly anchored in an indexical re-presentational approach, wherein the representing surface can be said "true" or "false" depending on its fidelity towards the deeper represented (absent) reality it claims to refer to.
Up until now, with only marginal and narrowly circumscribable lapses, we thought we could rely on the self-evident indexicality of most photo-and videographic images circulating in our mediaspheres. 3 The advent of deep fakes-i.e., of forgeries The evolution that led from local lapses of trust towards photographic evidence (Stalin's administration erasing Trotsky's presence from the historical archives) towards an overall distrust of any form of documental evidence is usually explained through a positive reference to the improvement of the technosciences (ever more efficient in their capacity to simulate reality), balanced by a negative reference to dangerous tendencies in the social sciences (ever too hasty to discard reality as "a social construct"). This collapse of trustworthiness is well expressed by Tim Kinsella, poet-singer-composer of many Chicago bands over the last three decades, in a chorus that could qualify as an anthem of our much bedeviled "relativism": "Anything I can / Mistake in the dark / For being what I am looking for / Is good enough for me." 4 Not only is our access to "reality" made uncertain (or impossible) because of the walls of screens that multiply perfectly simulated forgeries (deep fakes) all around us. The collapse is made hopeless by the fact that we satisfy ourselves with experiences acknowledged to be illusionary: the "real thing" I was actually looking for no longer has any privilege over the simulated substitute I happen (to be led) to mistake for it in the dark.
Instead of praising our technical capacity to simulate, the better to scold the social sciences' complacency towards fakeness, what it we turned the tables around? What if we mobilized the social sciences in order to find a positive explanation for our precious ability to deal with fakes? We may thus be led to account for an epistemic drift of trustworthiness. This drift would relocate the grounding of our trust away from individual objects or scenes secured in their objectivity through a (bygone) indexical contract. It would bring it closer to a relational commonality that anchors our agency in pragmatic entanglements. Couldn't the ever more fragile objectivity of our ever more luring mediated world be positively compensated for by the ever more entangled agency of our ever more interdependent individuations? Could the collapse of our indexical ontology of the image be redeemed by the emerging evidence of our agential commonality? The "networkedness of the image" alluded to in Jacob Lund's questionnaire can find a good illustration, as well as a promising leverage effect, in an analysis of the Internet's infamous "filter bubbles" recently presented by Ophelia Deroy. After the potent description provided by Eli Pariser 5 a decade ago, it has become common practice to blame the rise of "populist" political agendas on the stultification of the multitudes caused by the individuals' isolation within algorithmic "filter bubbles" that imprison them in the "homophilic" reinforcement of a narrow set of redundant, congruent, and gregarious beliefs. Since we are prone to pay attention to what we can recognize and feel comfortable with, and since the recommendation algorithms are designed by platform capitalism 6 to maximize the attraction and capture of our commodified attention, our screens tend to be fed and fitted with contents that filter out whatever would be significantly different from (and repulsive to, because perceived as potentially threatening to) our previously ingrained ideological assumptions.
As a consequence, the "public sphere" would be fragmented into tightly separated sub-spheres, each of them marinating in its own self-congruent worldview, generally intolerant and aggressive towards the other sub-spheres, with which the possibility of dialogue and understanding would rapidly shrink.
While in no way denying the reality of such tendencies, nor the risks associated with them, Ophelia Deroy invites us to rather measure the functional necessity of filter bubbles, apart from their drawbacks. 7 Her main points are that: 1° trust and truth are always collectively constructed so that a population can roughly agree on what it considers as a "shared reality;" 2° thousands of years of social evolution based on the practice of face-to-face conversation have led us to develop an extremely fine sensibility of joint attention which is suddenly challenged by our new technologies of massive remote communications; 3° the Internet should not so much be considered as a depository of information, but rather as "an epistemic recommender system," whose first and main achievement is to allow for the construction of some amount of "shared reality;" 4° what is generally denounced as "filter bubbles" is in fact constitutive of the systemic working of the "echo chambers" that are necessary for a population to homogenize and synchronize its perceptions and activities so that issues can be targeted and responded to in a coordinated fashion-whereby the Internet is currently taking over the tasks previously performed by "the mass media," as described by Niklas Luhmann. 8 This systemic approach echoes in significant ways the Slime hypothesis shared by Frank Zappa and Noam Chomsky: analogue or digital, the mass media have, indeed, existed for years, they tend to operate as the tool of the Government and industry too, by being destined to rule / And regulate our attentions. Even if our mind is not totally controlled, it has been stuffed into their mold, and we tend massively to do as we are told. While this crude and overly simplistic statement of "mediarchy" 9 corresponds to very different modes of operations, from the televisual landscape If "media determine our condition," as Friedrich Kittler famously stated, 10 one never fully knows in which measure our supposedly "free" actions result from intentional foresight, clumsy identifications "mistaken in the dark," or cynical manipulations "pushing" us to believe and do things against our grain. Once the Internet is no longer seen as merely a depository of information, but rather as an "epistemic recommender" and as an "attentional curating system, 11 " algorithmic governance 12 fully manifests the constitutive ambivalence of its accounting operation. And this is precisely what Thom York repeats in the chorus: We think the same things at the same time / There are too many of us so you can't / There are too many of us so you can't count. 13 Since Plato and throughout the long history of this discipline we call "philosophy," it has been the nightmare of "opinion" to see a "false" statement taken as valid simply because of the great number of people believing in it. "Truth" differentiates itself from opinion precisely insofar as it is supported by something else (more "objective") than the quantitative aggregation of ("subjective") beliefs. In the nightmarish world of Harrowdown Hill, images, ideas and stories become wirklich (i.e., true because efficient) as soon as enough of us think the same things at the same time and there are too many of us so you can't count-and this, independently of the factor that pushed us to aggregate around a particular belief (argumentative debate, algorithmic curation or deceptive manipulation). The "objective" adequacy between the representative image/idea/story and the referent it is supposed to represent is literally discounted within an echo chamber where all that counts is the count itself. If you hold a marginal belief, which you may have good reason to defend as true, your belief does not matter: there are too many of us so you can't count.
Rather than pitting "philosophy" against "sophistry," we could instead listen to what social psychology, cognitivism, and the neurosciences bring to light when they stress the importance of the intersubjective framing of our truth judgement. Knowing (or assuming) that we think the same thing at the same time and that there are many of us doing so undoubtedly plays a crucial role in the daily constitution of our "shared reality": it is "our reality" mostly insofar as it is shared among many of us, insofar as certain issues "matter" for enough of us, in a tightly-knit entanglement of mattering and meaning. 14 Up to a certain point, it is indeed the count of the beholders-believers that counts, as much as the adequacy of the representation to the represented.
More than the epistemic drift of trustworthiness away from objectal indexicality (truth) towards agential commonality (count), the main issue, then, is our capacity to compose a stable and just common world on the basis of such an ontology of counting and mattering. In other words: how can we understand, select, steer, and regulate the production and the circulation of networked images so that the adherence and revulsion they encounter in our  15 What is the "pre-individual?" Simondon often presents it as a reserve, an accumulated metastable stock of potential developments from which the process of individuation will draw its resources, its raw materials, its energies. 16 The pre-individual is not to be understood as that which precedes individuation, but as a meshwork of yet-unspecified relations which will accompany individuation throughout its process.
More crucially even, the pre-individual is not to be conceived as a reserve one would carry within oneself: it is rather to be identified with the milieu within which individuation takes place.
The classical conundrum opposing an individual subject to the set of objects present in her environment is radically reconfigured and overcome by Simondon, insofar as the pre-individual and the environment can be considered as co-extensive.
The individuation framework, as it can be drawn from Simondon's work, suggests a Copernican turn which provides an alternative, or at least a complement, to the Slime hypothesis.
We no longer need to add a slimy glue in order to keep together members of the public imagined as made up from originally isolated individuals. On a whole range of superposed scales (selfhood, families, classrooms, neighborhoods, associations, cities, regions, nations, mankind, planet), we can observe processes of individuation, whereby the pre-existing entanglements of relational interdependencies are constantly (even if discontinuously) reconfigured in order to adapt to their metastable inner drives as well as to their evolving context. Even if the punctual addition of some form of glue may be welcome in certain cases, the pre-individual hypothesis invites us to consider the "subject" and the "objects" composing her "environment" as always-already bound together within multi-layered relational processes of individuation.
What does such a Copernican turn alter in our ontology of The pre-individual hypothesis thus invites us to raise our approach to a higher and larger scope: from the subjective psyche in contact with iconic objects to the socio-political, as well as physical-biological, milieu which individuates itself through the related individuation of its composing entities. This elevation, in its turn, allows us to identify a crucial dimension of the networked images that currently circulate among us: their spatial scale.
In order to understand what is at stake with these issues of scale, one needs to remember that Simondon constantly refers to the notion of déphasage to characterize the metastability of individuation processes. The dynamics of such processes principally rest on the "phase differences" that can be observed between them. These phase differences, put under the pressure of the entanglements that make them dependent upon each other, is the main reason why they are "meta-stable," and unpredictable to our best efforts at modelling. I want to stick to the French word used by Simondon because déphasage suggests an active and interventionist process that is not limited to dealing with insufficient coordination between phase differences: it suggests that certain processes which may have been previously attuned happen to be de-phased. This, I believe, provides a good intuition to understand what is at stake in our current circulation of networked images.
In the logistics of commodities as well as in the distribution of images, sounds, discourses, ideas and stories, globalization has de-phased countless processes of individuation that had previously settled in different forms of relative stability. Our ontology of images must crucially address the many dephasings The second moment of the cycle puts our body in contact with an external object, whose a praesenti image becomes a locus for a rich exchange of information. It is during this second stage that the cognition adjusts its perceptions, categorizations and responses to the feedback it receives from the object it has isolated in the external world. Through perception and interaction, the a praesenti image is progressively cut out, corrected, tailored to fit as closely (i.e., as truthfully) as possible to the evolution of the object in relation to which it is constructed-or from which it receives its imprint, since the exchange can be apprehended as going both ways.
The third moment of the cycle continues after the object is no longer in the subject's perceptive or agential field. An a posteriori image remains imprinted in the body's memory, where it continues to be active by resonating, affectively and cognitively, with other co-existing images (during activities like recollection, reflection, dreaming). Simondon insists upon a certain agential autonomy of the a posteriori image within our psyche: the memorial imprint acts as a "sample of a situation," "an analogon of external reality," which is imported into our worldview, and which constantly has to renegotiate its place with the other occupants, in order to maintain a minimal level of consistency in this worldview.
This a posteriori image operates towards our environment in the same manner as what the Ancient Greeks called a symbolon, the broken part of a pottery shared between friends which was used as an identifier in primitive forms of blockchains: if a person claims to be sent by the friend, the perfect matching between the two parts of the broken pottery testifies of the authenticity of the claim. Similarly, the mental image we construct in contact with certain objects of our external environment should be considered as a symbolon, insofar as it marks (and sometimes scars) our body with the imprint of certain encounters, and insofar as it binds us to certain relations and obligations. This is why Simondon is recurrently led to consider the mental image as a "voult," i.e., as a spell endowed with some of the powers we associate with witchcraft and sorcery.
Here again, the mental image is not subjective, nor objective: it is both and neither at the same time. Just as the pre-individual hypothesis led us to consider our (external) environment as a reserve from which we draw opportunities and resources to further our (internal) individuation, while simultaneously contributing to the individuation of our milieu, similarly, the mental image should be considered as a part of the external reality injected into our body, as an app we host in order to relate to our world better, and as a map we use to orient ourselves in.
[The image is] a synthesis in equal proportion of endogenous motor energy and information coming from the milieu, it is a concrete symbolon of the relation between the subject and the milieu; this particular mix represents a point of insertion of the mental activity in the milieu; it condenses a situation, it preserves it with its network of forces and of tendencies, and it allows for its resurgence. 26 As early as 1966, Simondon's mental images are therefore already conceived as "networked images": they attach us to past encounters, to constantly evolving cognitions, as well as to social obligations with human and other-than-human entities. One of the most strikingly recurring words used by Simondon  Seeing the images distributed and redistributed in our digital networks as spells and symbola may be much more realist, accurate, adequate-"true"?-than trying to judge them by the sole standard of their correspondence with the reality they claim to represent. The networked images should not only be conceived as images that circulate within digital networks but, much more importantly, as images whose main purpose is to build, maintain, and hone a relational network of sympathizers. If there is a lesson that the alt-right has learned better than anyone else, it certainly is that images function first and foremost as recruiting devices.
No less than accurately depicting the outside world, they must powerfully attach us to each other. The broken halves of pottery exchanged in Ancient Greece did not represent anything: they validated friendships and secured obligations.   29 Deerhoof just cannot sound dystopian: whatever ontology of networked images may come to surround us with deep fakes, their song suggests we will be able to shake our head, step outside, take a break, look up and say yeah way. In a deep-faked world, our life may never (really) start, we may never be in a position to make a (wise) decision, constantly balanced between yesterday's detestations and today's likes, we may never know whose side will be much harder, however, to neutralize the strategies and propensities that instrumentalize images (fake or true) towards goals that are damaging to our common good.
Paradoxically, deep fakes may help us identify more realistically the factors that expose networked/networking images to nefarious forms of instrumentalization-upstream and downstream from their adequacy or inadequacy to the referent they claim to represent.
The deeper truth revealed by deep fakes is that the effective power of an image is to be located in the needs it fulfills in those who believe in it, as well as in the social relations it strengthens in those who recruit or are recruited through its circulation.
More interestingly, deep fakes could be resituated within a longer history of illusionary media, going from the trompe-l'oeil wall paintings of Pompeii all the way to our 3D virtual reality gaming devices. Their originality is not to be seen in their capacity to fool us into "actually seeing" something that does not exist, but in disqualifying a mode of indexical certification we were used to trust almost "blindly." By being grounded in the immediacy of the perceptive experience they offer to our senses, 32 deep fakes lead us to question more systematically any impression of immediacy.
In other words, they force us to suspect (and see) the mediation we spontaneously ignore (neglect, scotomize) when we look "through" our screens, rather than looking "at" them. What if deep fakes were the perfect recruitment vector for hyperstitional activism? Why haven't you heard of "hyperstition," a concept Nick Land defined as "semiotic productions that make themselves real?" 33 [Hyperstition] can be defined as the experimental (techno-) science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions-by their very existence as ideas-function causally to bring about their own reality.
[…] Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation […]. The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of 'social construction,' but it is in a very real way 'conjured' into being by the approach taken to it. […] Capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic 'speculation' into an effective world-historical force. 34 What if, instead of discrediting hyperstitional deep fakes as "lies" or "fictions," we considered them as forms of "premediation"?
What if the dynamics of hyperstitions, operating as "coincidence intensifiers," 35 powerfully espoused the dynamics of the a priori