Flusser's camera

Thought processes in reading the Arcades Project move onto a Benjaminian 'track,' and the digital gives us the ability to record those processes out in the open, away from the book; there's no reason to ever stop taking notes, no matter where one is, a constant dictation from the universe, effectively feeding right back into the universe. The digital gives us the ability to constantly be reading, but an entirely different kind of reading, an experiential reading, a seeing through. Maybe yes Benjamin is the philosopher of photography par excellence, since the photograph is so purely a citational machine, even though of course we know the apparatus of the camera is effectively dominated by subjectivities. But you could also theorize the camera itself as a manifestation of the citational impulse, especially via Flusser but here we would flip his prioritizing of the camera on its head and say that the control of the camera is just another way for language, purely citational, to take priority; so technology is seen as purely an extension of language. And this would not necessarily be a humanistic, Pollyannaish criticism of technology, but one that hypothesizes that any given object of perception is necessarily an object embedded within history in just the same was as any other. For instance, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Flusser writes "While the human being is more and more sidelined, the programs of apparatuses, these rigid combination games, are increasingly rich in elements: they make combinations more and more quickly and are going beyond the ability of the human being to see what they are up to an control them." I think that this prioritizing of the apparatus, which echoes Benjamin's critique of the mechanical modes of production, could be reassessed if we theorize as a formative element of technology a citational or allegorical impulse that would originate in more foundational linguistic structures.