On Visibilization. Sight, Living Matter, and the Self

The epistemic and aesthetic privilege accorded to vision shapes our «natural attitude» and is reflected in the perspective from which the processes of subjectivization are studied even in the most up-to-date cognitive sciences, such as 4E Cognition. A fresh materialist and medial understanding of the entire human sensorium, its way of interacting with bodily and technological environments, and its entanglement with epistemic and aesthetic processes is required to pose the very question of how to conceive of the self. Such a need is made apparent by examining brain-imaging, which underwrites the current conception of personhood as brainhood. I argue that in vivo brain images result from visibilization practices, which translate material (here neurobiological) becomings into pictures through the interplay of research strategies, tools, and visual habits deployed by a plurality of programmers, practitioners, and experts. Visibilization practices differ from visualization ones primarily insofar as they are independent of the physical medium in which vision is grounded – light – and are distributed in a «visual agentive situation» (Cappelletto 2022b) in which numerous human agents and devices collaborate and conflict, constituting a scene that encompasses the outside/inside dichotomy of visible/invisible and therefore the outer/inner notion of the self as enclosed within the skin/skull boundary