Essay by Jerome Bertrand 2005-2025

Summary

Understanding Alternative Interpassivity: A New Way of Seeing

1. Introduction: Drowning in Images, Searching for Meaning

We live in a hypermodern world, one characterized by an overwhelming “proliferation of images” and a relentless push for “hyper-interactivity.” This constant, flickering stream of visual information can lead to a profound “alienation of the viewer,” fostering a culture of “text atrophy” where deep reading gives way to fleeting glances. In this environment, it often feels as though “writing is almost definitively dispossessed by the image – which has become a curtain.”

But what if there were another way to relate to the world around us? What if, instead of passively consuming or frantically interacting, we could find a more deliberate and meaningful mode of engagement? Here, the author proposes a distinct concept, one they term ‘Alternative Interpassivity’, born from a personal intellectual journey. It offers a critical response to our contemporary condition—a different way to think about our relationship with images, with architecture, and ultimately, with our own experience.

2. The Default Setting: When the World Experiences for Us

To understand alternative interpassivity, we must first grasp the standard definition of the term, most famously articulated by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In its standard form, interpassivity is the act of delegating our feelings and experiences to an external object or entity.

The classic analogy is the canned laughter on sitcoms. We do not have to laugh ourselves; “we let the show laugh for us,” and yet we feel as though we have participated in the enjoyment. A more contemporary example can be found in consumer culture. Imagine feeling virtuous simply by purchasing eco-friendly products. In this case, you are letting the object perform the ethical action for you; the feeling is outsourced to the product itself.

In essence, standard interpassivity involves a “delegation of consumer enjoyment” to an object ‘without limits’ such as a physical, digital entertainment product (i.e Apple’s iPod ) or service (Google’s Google Earth, or later, virtual worlds and social media ).
It is the passive consumption of a curated reality, much like how one might consume a news “reportage,” letting the reporter do the experiencing on our behalf. Yet this model of delegation, of outsourcing our engagement, is not the only way to conceive of our relationship with the world. What if there was a way to engage that was not about delegating our experience, but about deepening it?

This is where ‘alternative interpassivity’ offers a different path to our possible ever growing loss of human agency – AI and machine learning in the 21st century just being its last observed instances.

3. Defining ‘Alternative Interpassivity’

Here, the author proposes a distinct concept that moves beyond Žižek’s model of passive delegation (his coined concept of “interpassivity”). Instead of outsourcing our experience in a “pseudo objectivity”, the author coined ‘Alternative Interpassivity’ in this differently functioning proposition that is framed as a “state of shared liberation and creative opening.” Quite the opposite alternative?

This is not a pre-existing theory but a personal, critical position that grew from the author’s “early experiences of emptiness and stillness” and an “intense experience of permanence.” Unlike the experiential consumerist passivity of the Žižekian model, it is an active, “subjective engagement” with the world—a critical stance that one chooses to adopt and live through. Its intellectual lineage is one of synthesis; the author notes that the concept finally found its place not in opposition to interactivity, but existing “simultaneously alongside” it, a crucial insight that emerged from a re-reading of the architect Louis I. Kahn. This is not a retreat from the world, but a more contemplative and profound way of seeing within it.

While these ideas are rooted in a personal journey of discovery, they find powerful expression through analogies drawn from the worlds of theatre and architecture in a true swirl of changing societal contexts – from the antique, modern, postmodern to the hyper modern worlds.
These ideas are intrinsically founded or rebutted by the epistemology of the time period and a wide variety of philosophy currents.

Epistemology definition
The science and theory of knowledge, concerned with the mind’s relation to reality: what is it for this relation to be one of knowledge? Basic questions are: Do we know things? And if we do, how and when do we know things?

4. Thinking in Metaphor or The Live Theatre of Architecture

Theatrical historical concepts and a base of behavioral science ( e.g. in Psychology such as the modernist Gestalt laws of perception) provide a rich framework for understanding how we frame and mediate our experience of the world—principles that are directly applicable to photography, architectural as well as social representation (i.e. in the Media context with French theorist Guy Debord’s best known works as The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle).

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
? Guy Debord (1931-1994), The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

4.1. The Curtain: What is Revealed from What is Hidden

In the theatre, the curtain is a powerful device. It separates worlds, creates anticipation, and mediates our experience by revealing a scene at a precise moment. This idea found a revolutionary parallel in modern architecture with the “curtain wall” (mur-rideau). Pioneered by figures like Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier, this non-load-bearing glass façade “dissolves the traditional distinctions between interior and exterior, much like the lifting of a theatrical curtain reveals a new world.”

In our hypermodern condition, it is argued that the “image itself is seen as having become a ‘curtain’.” It stands between us and reality, a flickering veil that simultaneously reveals and obscures. Alternative Interpassivity seeks a way to render this curtain transparent, or even to make it disappear entirely.

4.2. The Frame: The Limits of Our Vision

The traditional theatrical stage is bounded by the “proscenium arch,” which acts as a “window” or a picture frame, focusing the audience’s attention and defining the boundaries of the action. A photograph functions in precisely the same way; the edges of the print or the screen create a frame that dictates what we see and what is excluded.

This concept was deeply informed by the author’s transformative encounter with the renowned photographer Lucien Hervé at a vernissage in Rotterdam. Hervé, a true “maître,” possessed a philosophy that was not merely to document a building, but to find the “signification of signification”—the deeper meaning behind the form. His critical interventions, “engraved in the spirit” of his apprentice, emphasized the importance of “teachings transgressing the concrete limits of the photographic frame.” This encouraged a way of seeing that understands the image not as a self-contained object, but as a gateway to a larger reality.

While these theatrical analogies provide a theoretical lens, the concept of Alternative Interpassivity only truly crystallizes when we witness its application—when the subjective gaze, the architectural form, and a moment of profound stillness converge in a single work of art.

5. A Concrete Example: The “Eternal Wandering” Photograph

The “quintessential example” of Alternative Interpassivity is a photograph titled “ETERNAL WANDERING / ERRANCE PERPÉTUELLE,” taken at the ancient Chephren Temple in Giza, Egypt. The image is not merely a document of a place; it is the culmination of a deeply subjective process, an attempt to create a specific kind of experience for the viewer.

Its creation embodies the active engagement at the heart of this concept. The photographer recounts a prolonged wait for the opportune moment, an exercise in patience amidst the chaos of tourism. After some 40 tourists suddenly cleared the scene, there was a “seemingly eternal 10 seconds of framing” as the photograph “fabricate[d] itself before my eyes.” In that brief window, a conscious choice was made to “retain a fleeting piece of fabric, a symbol of escape,” a final trace of human presence before it vanished.

This act—this deliberate, patient, and subjective choice—transforms the image. The photographer’s intention was not simply to capture the scene, but to immerse the viewer at the “center of their own experience”; to transform the subjective act of movement into an “abstraction of the act of wandering”; and to force a “stronger, closer visual confrontation with the granite blocks.” The crucial insight here is that to fully comprehend the image’s meaning, the viewer must mentally “escape from the image” and participate in this wandering. This directly connects to the architectural analysis of Christian Norberg-Schulz, who described the experience of Egyptian temples as a “staccato movement of the Egyptian man into the architecture”—a form of “Eternal Wandering.”

It is in this photograph that the metaphor of the curtain finds its ultimate expression as the “volatilisation du rideau de scène“—the volatilization, or evaporation, of the stage curtain. Through the photographer’s active and subjective engagement, the curtain of the image dissolves, collapsing the barrier between the viewer and a direct, almost physical sense of presence. In retrospect, the photographer recognized that the image possessed “interpassive qualities” that reveal a kind of creative void, inspiring new ways of seeing and creating.

6. The Philosophical Core: Reconciling Piety and Virtue

Alternative Interpassivity is also presented as an attempt to navigate a modern dichotomy between two concepts that have evolved in contradictory ways: Piety (Piété) and Virtue (Vertu).

The framework presented contrasts them as follows:

Piety (Piété)	Virtue (Vertu)
Linked to the reality of existence.	Linked to the virtuality of presence.
Represents social humanism.	Represents the autocracy of media.
Connected to the moral citizen.	Connected to the liberal citizen.

This framework positions piety as a grounding force, connecting us to the tangible, shared reality of social humanism and the moral duties of a citizen. In contrast, it argues that modern virtue has become unmoored, pulling us toward a “virtuality of presence” driven by the performance-oriented “autocracy of media” and the detached perspective of the liberal citizen.

Alternative Interpassivity is therefore a subjective, critical approach that seeks a more authentic engagement with reality. It is an attempt to bridge this gap, to find a way of seeing that honors the tangible existence of things without falling prey to the passive consumption of a virtualized world.

7. Conclusion: A More Interior Way of Seeing

Ultimately, Alternative Interpassivity offers a critical and subjective approach to engaging with the world, one that stands apart from both simple documentation and the passive consumption fostered by hypermodern media. It is born from a desire to look beyond the surface of things and to find the “immanent qualities of architecture” that are often hidden.

At its heart, this concept is a search for “interiority.” It is an active, contemplative process that turns the act of seeing into a form of critical thinking. It proposes a methodology of “subtraction”—a stripping away of superfluous layers of visual noise and conventional representation to reveal an essential, almost “archaic” truth. In a world saturated with fleeting images, Alternative Interpassivity provides a valuable framework for finding deeper meaning, reaffirming the vital role of the engaged, subjective mind.