176: Jean Baudrillard VIII:
The Violence Done to the ImageSummary by: Jeff McLarenTHE VIOLENCE DONE TO THE IMAGE
- “The ultimate violence done to the image is the violence of the cgi—computer-generated image—which emerges ex nihilo from numerical calculation and the computer.” In such an image there is no reality, “the referent no longer exists and there is no place even for the real to ‘take place’, being immediately produced as Virtual Reality.” The real is no longer represented, not even imagined, since it is not even the source of computer generated images. When the virtual cease to have a referent, representation is no longer possible; representation disappears.
- Meaning, being connected to the real world and to human experience, is disappearing in production. “[R]emoving meaning brings out the essential point: namely, that the image is more important than what it speaks about—just as language is more important than what it signifies.”
- An image to be real should have an alien quality to it: it is in the world but not of the world exactly in the sense that it has captured something not entirely real. The image is a mediation of the real but not the real itself. So, it is a fiction of the real. The image becomes trapped when it is assumed to be the real; when it is used as evidence in playback. When an image loses its alien quality it is not really a real image anymore. “The worst thing…is just this impossibility of a world without image-playback—a world that is always caught, captured, filmed and photographed even before it is seen.” In this worst of all worlds the image is the real. “[W]hen it [the image] merges with the real and simply immerses itself in the real and recycles, it there is no longer any image—at least not as exception, as illusion, as parallel world.” In our world bombarded with thousands of images from thousands of channels and everyone carrying a cellphone camera there is no time for a real image to develop (double meaning). Today the real is the illusion but it is no longer alien; no longer truth or objective. “The world producing itself as radical illusion, as pure trace, without any simulation, without human intervention, and above all, not as truth, for, if there is one supreme product of the human mind, that product is truth and objective reality.” For Baudrillard objective reality only exists in agreeing minds.
- “There is great affectation in ascribing meaning to the photographic image. To do so is to make objects strike a pose. And things themselves begin to pose in the light of meaning as soon as they feel a subject’s gaze upon them.”
- “The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning—this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the ‘figure in the carpet’ [the image that is not there]. The Vanishing Point of Language.”
- “May not photography also be said to function as ‘revealing’, in the two—technical and metaphysical—senses of the word, of the ‘image in the carpet’? The Vanishing Point of the Picture.”
- Just like earlier we mentioned the limitless potential of the deployment of technology, “Seriality is something almost inevitable in photography, for the reason that the camera (especially the digital camera) tends towards the infinite exploitation of its possibilities.” But just as the attribution of human meaning is finite and cannot approach infinite (as it is too large for us), photography or “the serial digital image fills the void by self-multiplication. In the limit case, which is our present condition, we arrive at an unstoppable series of shots.” “Shots” in the dual sense of picture shots and bullet shots; the nearly infinite multiplication of digital images cheapens and demystifies (or prevents the mystification) every one of them and contributes to the murder of a true image. “That murder is being perpetrated continually by all the images that accumulate in series, in ‘thematic’ sequences, which illustrate the same event ad nauseam, which thing they are accumulating, but are, in fact, cancelling each other out, till they reach the zero degree of information.” A true image should have a certain sovereignty: “it has to have its own symbolic space….living images…ensure the existence of that symbolic space by eliminating an infinite number of other spaces from it. There is a perpetual rivalry between (true) images. But it is exactly the opposite today with the digital, where the parade of images resembles the sequencing of the genome.” Where a genome is just a several billon long series of letters, today’s image ecosystem is similar in a never-ending sequence of images. In the past image rivalry sought to make an image iconic in its uniqueness; today, the goal is to go viral, that is multiply as much as possible.
- The opposite view sees “A total de-regulation of the image….The ultimate stage of this de-regulation is the cgi…[the] last glimmer of actuality in a virtual dimension where images no longer have the slightest connection with time.” Gone are all the time consuming and delaying aspects of traditional photography such as place, time, and punctum, the striking second element that hits the viewer with a second look. “For its part the digital photo is in real time and bears witness to something that did not take place, but whose absence signifies nothing.” (Unlike what is not shown in a real photo, which does mean something.) “In this digital liberalization of the photographic act, in this impersonal process in which the medium itself generates mass-produced images, with no other intercession but the technical, we can see the seriality in its consummate form, in the field of images this is, as it were, the equivalent of AI.” Digital photography is something entirely different from the photography of the film and this difference is happening in most things. “A new view of the world, globalization’s view of the world: the subjection of everything to a single programme, the subjection of all images to a single ‘genome’. This is why it is a mistake to regard the move to digital as a mere technical advance, as a superior form of auto-mation or even, indeed, a final liberation of the image.” It should not be hard to imagine humans “freed” from the constraints of the real world by being subject to a single program. In the highest from, thanks to this AI, we have achieved a spectral immortality.
- Baudrillard gives the analogy of a/the web as “The symbol of a living dispersion….‘I am the web itself, streaming off in all directions with no centre and no self that I can call my own’.” We have apparently chosen Artificial Intelligence as “the open form of immortality” for the human species.
- At the outer reaches of our consciousness, in this world that is disappearing, a whole set of paradoxical questions start to impinge on us. Among the more important is: “WHY IS THERE NOTHING RATHER THAN SOMETHING?” “Why isn’t everything universal?” “How does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity?” more generally: how are we so accepting of the fascination of the disappearance of the real?
- Anthropological duality is the only way to “avoid these insoluble questions”. Human duality needs to be rediscovered. Duality “is present everywhere: it is what not only leaves the questions posed above eternally in suspense, but also externally thwarts human undertakings”. Our duality makes our potentials broad beyond that of any technology and therefore we as humans cannot ever achieve all our potentials because our duality constantly pulls us in different directions often working against ourselves too. “It is from their primal duality that human beings derive this antagonistic energy. This is the normal human being and everything that sets about reconciling him with himself and finding a solution to the questions raised above is of the order of superstition and mystification.
“The ABNORMAL individual today is the one who now lives only in a unilateral positive adherence to what he is or what he does. Total subjection and adjustment….This raises the whole question of the intelligence of Evil.
“We are simplified by technical manipulation.
“And this simplification goes off on a crazy course when we reach digital manipulation.
“What becomes at this point of the ventriloquacity of Evil? It is the same with the radicalism of yore: when it deserts the individual, reconciled with himself and homogenized by the good offices of the digital, and when all critical thinking has disappeared, radicalism passes into things. The ventriloquacity of Evil passes into technology itself.” For us to be human we must be dual and conflicted. Eliminate that and the technology itself goes crazy—how often do we yell at inanimate computers for failing to do what we want? “If their own duplicity deserts human beings, then the roles are reversed: it is the machines that goes gaga, that falters and becomes perverse, diabolic, ventriloquose. The duplicity merrily goes over to the other side.” In the digital world subjective irony disappears “—then irony becomes objective. Or it becomes silence.”
- Baudrillard ends his book “In the beginning was the Word. It was only afterwards that the Silence came.
The end itself has disappeared…” Perhaps a play on Nietzsche’s “God is dead”? A suggestion that we are past the Christian end times? Perhaps an acknowledgement that we are living in a purposeless world or that Baudrillard’s own life was about to end.
© 2008 - 2024, Jeff McLaren