will image move us still?

kevin robins

From:

The Photographic Image in Digital Culture

Edited by Martin Lister. Routledge, London. 1995.

The death of photography has been reported. There is a growing sense that we are now witnessing the birth of a new era, that of post photography. This, of course, represents a response to the development of new digital electronic technologies for the registration, manipulation and storage of images. Over the past decade or so, we have seen the increasing convergence of photographic technologies with video and computer technologies, and this convergence seems set to bring about a new context in which still images will constitute just one small element in the encompassing domain of what has been termed hypermedia. Virtual technologies, with their capacity to originate a ‘realistic’ image on the basis of mathematical applications that model reality, add to the sense of anticipation and expectation.

What is happening to our image culture–whatever it may amount to–is generally being interpreted in terms of technological revolution, and of revolutionary implications for those who produce and consume images. Philippe Quéau (1993: 16) describes it as ‘the revolution of "new images"’, claiming that it is ‘comparable with the appearance of the alphabet, the birth of painting, or the invention of photography’. It constitutes, he says, ‘a new tool of creation and also of knowledge’. The notion of techno-cultural revolution has been widely accepted and celebrated by cultural critics and practitioners, and such ready acceptance has tended to inhibit critical engagement with post-photography. Indeed, it has encouraged a great faith in the new digital technologies, based on the expectation that they can empower their users and consumers. A great deal of what passes for commentary or analysis amounts to little more than a simple and unthinking progressivism, unswerving in its belief that the future is always superior to the past, and firm in its conviction that this superior future is a spontaneous consequence of technological development. The fact that technological development is seen as some kind of transcendent and autonomous force–rather than as what it really is, that is to say embedded in a whole array of social institutions and organizations - also works to reduce what is, in reality, a highly complex and uneven process of change to an abstract and schematic teleology of ‘progress’. The idea of a revolution in this context serves to intensify contrasts between past (bad) and future (good), and thereby to obscure the nature and significance of very real continuities.

From such a perspective, old technologies (chemical and optical) have come to seem restrictive and impoverished, whilst the new electronic technologies promise to inaugurate an era of almost unbounded freedom and flexibility in the creation of images. There is the sense that photography was constrained by its inherent automatism and realism, that is to say, by its essentially passive nature; that the imagination of photographers was restricted because they could aspire to be no more than the mere recorders of reality. In the future, it is said, the enhanced ability to process and manipulate images will give the post-photographer greater ‘control’, while the capacity to generate (virtual) images through computers, and thereby to make images independent of referents in ‘the real world’, will offer greater ‘freedom’ to the post-photographic imagination. What is supposed to be superior about the post-photographic future becomes clear, then, through contrast with what is seen as an inferior, and obsolete, photographic past.

The new technologies are associated with the emergence of a wholly new kind of visual discourse. This, it is argued, has profoundly transformed our ideas of reality, knowledge and truth. For William Mitchell, ‘an interlude of false innocence has passed’:

Jonathan Crary conceives of the new order in terms of a new ‘model of vision’:

We are, says Crary, 'in the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective’ (ibid.).

The technological and visual revolution associated with new digital techniques is understood, furthermore, to be at the very heart of broader cultural revolution. There is the belief that the transformation in image cultures is central to the historical transition from the condition of modernity to that of postmodernity. Digital imaging is seen as ‘felicitously adapted to the diverse projects of our postmodern era’ (Mitchell 1992: 8). The postmodern order is considered to be one in which the primacy of the material world over that of the image is contested, in which the domain of the image has become autonomous, even in which the very existence of the ‘real world’ is called into question. It is the world of simulation and simulacra. Gianni Vattimo (1992: 8) writes of the erosion of the principle of reality: ‘By a perverse kind of internal logic, the world of objects measured and manipulated by techno-science (the world of the real, according to metaphysics) has become the world of merchandise and images, the phantasmagoria of the mass media.’ In the face of this ‘loss of reality’, we must come to terms with ‘the world of images of the world’ (ibid.: I17). The discussion of post-photography is caught up in this projection of the world as a post-real’ techno-sphere–the world of cyberspace and virtually reality. Within this postmodern agenda concerning reality and hyperreality, it is again philosophical questions (of ontology and epistemology) that are the focus of attention and interest. The sentiment that postmodern sophistications have now overtaken modern ingenuousness brings with it the sense of cultural and intellectual ‘progress’.

What I have outlined here, in schematic form, constitutes the conceptual and theoretical framework for most accounts of the ‘death of photography’ and the birth of a post-photographic culture. It is the story of how the image has now progressed from the age of its mechanical production to that of its digital origination and replication. It is the story of how new technologies have provided ‘a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition’ (Mitchell 1992: 8). In this respect, we can say that the discourse of post-photography has been extremely effective, significantly changing the way in which we think of image and reality. It has managed to persuade us that photographs were once ‘comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world’, and it has convinced us of how unsophisticated we were in such a regard. It has convincingly argued that ‘the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted these certainties, forcing us to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance’ (Mitchell 1992: 225). We are warned against the seduction of naive realism. Now, we have become more reflexive, more ‘theoretical’, more 'knowing’, in our relation to the world of images.

The death of photography, an image revolution, the birth of a postmodern visual culture: there is the sense of a clear historical trajectory of the image. The significance and implications of the ‘image revolution’ have already been discursively fixed and contained. The certainties of the photographic era have been deconstructed, and we are now ready, it seems, to come to terms with the fragility of ontological distinctions between imaginary and real. What more is there to be said? We could easily bring the discussion to an end at this point. Perhaps we should be satisfied that so much is already known about the future of images and image culture. Perhaps we should be content with this discursive organization and ordering of post-photographic culture. But I am not. So, let us keep the discussion going. Digital culture as we know it is distinctly unimaginative and dismally repetitive. Despite its theoretical sophistication and even ‘correctness’, there is something restrictive and limiting in the organization and order of its theoretical schema. Theoretical structures can work to actually inhibit or restrict our understanding; they may simply confirm and reinforce what is already known; they can function to invalidate or devalorise other ways of understanding and knowing. It is with this in mind that I want now to consider what is being commonly said about the historical trajectory of images.

Whatever might be ‘new’ about digital technologies, there is something old in the imaginary signification of ‘image revolution’. It involves metaphysics of progress: the imagination of change in terms of a cumulative process in which whatever comes after is necessarily better than what went before. Cornelius Castoriadis describes its general logic:

It is a rationalistic schema, concerned with the project of rational mastery and empowerment (over nature and over human nature). In the next part of my argument, I shall be concerned with how the theory of the image is caught up in this teleological vision. In so far as it is implicated in the technological imaginary, I shall argue, it assumes an abstract and deterministic form, closing off alternative lines of inquiry and judgement.

Following this critique, I want to consider other ways in which we might look at what is happening in the culture of images. I take as my starting point, not the question of technologies and technological revolution, but rather the uses of photography and post-photography. Where the prevailing interest is in the information format of image technologies, my concern is with what might be called the existential reference of images to the world. Photographs have provided a way of relating to the world–not only cognitively, but also emotionally, aesthetically, morally, politically. ‘The range of possible emotional expression through images is as wide as it is with words’, says John Berger (1980: 73), ‘We regret, hope, fear, and love with images.’ These emotions, guided by our reasoning capacities, provide the energy to turn images to creative and moral-political ends. Such sentiments and concerns are uncomfortably at odds with the new agenda of post-photographic culture. These uses of photography now seem to mean strangely little to those who are primarily concerned with exposing the aporias of photography’s construction of the visual world. Shall we just forget about such uses? Will they have no place in the new order? Because they are so important, I shall argue, we must begin to find a new basis for making them relevant again.

The progressivist agenda constructs a false polarization between past and future, between photography and digital culture. According to its grand design, the new technologies must be good technologies (it assumes, that is to say, the thesis of the rationality of the real). From such a deterministic perspective, it is no longer relevant to take seriously the virtues of photographic culture, nor is it meaningful to question the virtues of post-photographic culture. Should we not be challenging this affirmative logic? Is not the whole process more complex, and isn’t the appropriate response one of greater ambivalence? What alternative principles are there that would allow us to more critically evaluate and assess the transformations in image culture?

The rationalization of the image

John Berger makes the point that, when the camera was invented in 1839, Auguste Comte was completing his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Positivism and the camera grew up together, and what sustained them as practices ‘was the belief that observable, quantifiable facts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer man such a total knowledge about nature and society that he would be able to order them both’:

Photographic documentations of the world were about its cognitive apprehension. For the positivist, photography represented a privileged means for understanding the ‘truth’ about the world, its nature and its properties. And, of course, such visual knowledge of the world was closely associated with the project for its practical appropriation and exploitation. In this respect, the camera was an instrument of power and control. Photography has other, more creative capacities, as I shall go on to argue in the next section, but this capacity for visual arrogation has been, and remains, a dominant factor.

In his book, The Reconfigured Eye, William Mitchell reflects on this spirit of positivism in the context of his account and analysis of post-photographic technologies and culture. He intends to dissociate them from its legacy. The camera, Mitchell points out, has been regarded as ‘an ideal Cartesian instrument - a device for use by observing subjects to record supremely accurate traces of the objects before them’ (Mitchell 1992: 28). In so far as there appears to be no human intervention in the process of registering and recording an accurate image, photography has been regarded as the model of impersonal and objective neutrality. As Mitchell notes, ‘the photographic procedure, like ... scientific procedures, seems to provide a guaranteed way of overcoming subjectivity and getting at the real truth’ (ibid.). This idea of photographic documents as truthful reports about things in the real world may be seen as functional to the culture that invented it: ‘Chemical photography’s temporary standardization and stabilization of the process of image making effectively served the purposes of an era dominated by science, exploration and industrialization’ (Mitchell 1994: 49). The uses of positivism were directly linked to the objectives of industrial capitalism.

Mitchell, like John Berger, is highly critical of this aspect of photographic history. In considering other possibilities, however, his agenda is quite unlike that of Berger {to whom I shall return shortly). Mitchell’s hopes and expectations are invested in the new digital technologies, which, he argues, are ‘relentlessly destabilizing the old photographic orthodoxy, denaturing the established rules of graphic communication, and disrupting the familiar practices of image production and exchange’ (Mitchell 1992: 223). The point is that they make the intentional processes of image creation apparent, such that ‘the traditional origin narrative by which automatically captured shaded perspective images are made to seem causal things of nature rather than products of human artifice . . . no longer has power to convince us’ (ibid.: 31). Digital images now constitute ‘a new kind of token’, with properties quite different from those of the photographic image. These new images can be used ‘to yield new forms of understanding’, and they can also be made to ‘disturb and disorientate by blurring comfortable boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules on which we have come to rely’ (ibid.: 223). They have subverted tradinona1 notions of truth, authenticity and originality, compelling us to be more ‘knowing’ about the nature and status of images. It is in this particular respect that Mitchell considers digital imaging to be so ‘felicitously adapted’ to the structure of feeling of what we are pleased to call ‘our postmodern era’.

I would concede that there is a certain justification for this idea of progression to a higher stage of visual sophistication and reflexivity, but only in the limited terms of what must be seen as essentially a scientific teleology of the image. Mitchell is concerned centrally with philosophical and formalist issues, with questions of theoretical and methodological ‘progress’. In this respect, he makes his point. But images do not and cannot exist in a pure domain of theory. New images are, of course, substantively implicated in furthering the objectives of what is now called post-industrial or information capitalism (for it was the needs of this system that effectively summoned them into existence). The ‘image revolution’ is significant in terms of a further and massive expansion of vision and visual techniques, allowing us to see new things and to see in new ways. In this context, the teleology of the image may be seen precisely in terms of the continuing development of ever more sophisticated technologies for ‘getting at the real truth’. The objective remains the pursuit of total knowledge, and this knowledge is still in order to achieve order and control over the world. (What would give us grounds to think that it was otherwise?) Though he does not pursue its real consequences, it is something that Mitchell is actually quite aware of:

More than the Encyclopaedists dreamt of, indeed! Wouldn’t the positivists have jealously understood this? Doesn’t it suggest the continuing desire, by scientists and experts, to record observable, quantifiable facts?

It is in the context of this teleological worldview that I would accept that the scientists and the experts now have a far more sophisticated attitude to what used to be called ‘the facts’. The process of getting at the truth is considered to be vastly more complex than was assumed in the nineteenth century. New technologies have massively extended the range and power of vision, and also the techniques for processing and analyzing visual information. They have also blurred the boundaries between the visible and invisible. Fred Ritchin (1990:132) describes the advent of what he calls ‘hyper-photography’: ‘One can think of it as a photography that requires neither the simultaneity nor proximity of viewer and viewed, and that takes as its world anything that did, does, will, or might exist, visible or not–anything, in short, that can be sensed or conceived.’ New dimensions of reality are opened up to the powers of observation. With computer-graphics work stations, it becomes possible to ‘see’ things that are otherwise inaccessible to the human gaze: ‘The procedure is to employ some appropriate scientific instrument to collect measurements and then to construct perspective views showing what would be seen if it were, in fact, possible to observe from certain specified viewpoints’ (Mitchell 1992: Il9). In this way, simulation technologies massively enhance scientific endeavor. It is now actually possible ‘to visualize the interior of a dying star or a nuclear explosion. The mind can go places where no physical being will ever be likely to go’:

New technologies are not only amplifying the powers of vision, they are also changing its nature (to include what was previously classified as invisible or unseeable) and its functions (making it a tool for the visual presentation of abstract data and concepts). Techniques and models of observation have, indeed, been transformed in ways the positivists could scarcely have imagined.

On this basis, it is possible to construct a logic of development which is about the shift from a perceptual approach to images (seen as quotations from appearances), to one more concerned with the relation of imaging to conceptualization. The representation of appearances is ceasing to be the incontrovertible basis of evidence or truth about phenomena in the world. We are seeing the rapid devaluation of sight as the fundamental criterion for knowledge and understanding. Of course, this questioning of photographic meaning and veracity is by no means an entirely new occurrence. Allan Sekula (1989: 353) reminds us that even at the high point of nineteenth-century positivism there was always ‘an acute recognition of the inadequacies and limits of ordinary visual empiricism’. None the less this questioning has now reached a critical stage, opening the way to a new and more sophisticated model of vision and knowledge. Jean Louis Weissberg (1993: 76) argues that we are in fact moving from an era of ‘knowledge through recording’ to one of' ’knowledge through simulation’. In this latter case, he argues, ‘the image no longer serves to re-present the object . . . but, rather, signals it, reveals it, makes it exist’. The aim is to create a ‘double’ of the reality, one that approximates to the referent, not only in terms of appearances, but also in terms of other (invisible) properties and qualities that it possesses. Through progression from simulation of the object by means of digital images to the higher stage of ‘simulating its presence’, it becomes possible ‘to take the image for the ob1ect’ (ibid.: 77-8). It is possible, that is to say, to experience it and to

Interact with it as if it were an object in the real world. And when this becomes the case, we can say that we ‘know’ the object in a more complex and comprehensive sense. Experiential apprehension is grounded in conceptual and theoretical apprehension.

We should consider this logic in relation to the evolving accommodation between empiricist and rationalist aspects of Enlightenment thinking. The point, which Ernest Gellner makes very forcefully, is that there has always been a powerful symbiotic relationship between empiricism and rationalism in the modern world: ‘The two seeming opponents were in fact complementary. Neither could function without the other. Each, strangely enough, performed the task of the other’ (Gellner 1992: 166). Visual empiricism was no exception in this respect. If, in the history of photographic observation, there has always been the danger of a naive empiricism, there has also been an acute awareness that visual experience and evidence could only perform its task, for certain purposes at least, if it were incorporated within systems of rational procedure and analysis (this is precisely Allan Sekula’s point). The advent of post-photography has simply served to make this all the more clear. Within the broader scientific and philosophical context, we have come to recognize that the compromise between rationalism and empiricism is increasingly on the terms of the former. Horkheimer and Adorno (1973: 26) described it as ‘the triumph of subjective rationality, the subjection of all reality to logical formalism’. In the particular sphere of postphotography, too, it is apparent that rationality is the ascendant and dominant principle. We can describe its logic of development in terms of the increasing rationalization of vision.

I have described these developments in terms of a ‘logic’, because that, it seems, is how our culture can make best sense of them. The idea of necessary (and inevitable) progression appeals to us, and our culture finds it entirely reasonable to interpret this trajectory in terms of increasing rationality. The project of rationalism, initiated by Descartes, has been about the pursuit of cognitive certainty and conviction. This entails, as Ernest Gellner (1992: 2) observes, that we must ‘purge our minds of that which is merely cultural, accidental and untrustworthy’. In so far as culture is associated with ‘error’ - ‘a kind of systematic, communally induced error’ the Cartesian ambition involves ‘a program for man’s liberation from culture’ (ibid.: 3,13). Reason must dissociate itself from cultural accretion; to realize its potential for enlightenment it must become self-sufficient and self-valorizing.

We can make sense of the pursuit of photographic truth in the context of this rationalist program, though we would have to acknowledge photography’s spontaneous and desirous affinity with the cultural, the accidental and the untrustworthy. As John Berger (1982:115) argues, the Cartesian revolution created a deep suspicion of appearances: ‘It was no longer the look of things which mattered. What mattered was measurement and difference, rather than visual correspondences.’ Its complicity with appearances, and thereby with the meanings cultures attach to appearances, always put photography on the side of 'error’. We may then understand developments in photographic technology and culture in terms of the ongoing struggle to purge the medium of its ‘impurities’. Positivism may be seen as a preliminary attempt to rationalize the image (though now we will say that it lacked the means, and that its ideas of cognitive truth were simplistic). The ‘digital revolution’ (with its new means and new approach to cognition) takes the Cartesian project in image culture to a ‘higher stage’. This is what Mitchell’s ‘reconfigured eye’ represents. In characterizing this supposed revolution, Jonathan Crary (1990: r–2) describes how the new technologies are ‘relocating vision to a plane severed from a human observer’. The idea of a ‘real, optically perceived world’ has been undermined, he argues, and ‘if these images can be said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data’. What are these new - de-personalized, de-contextualised - ‘techniques’ of observation but the fulfillment of the rationalist program? The rationalization of the image has been a dominant force in the development of photography and post-photography, and accounts of that development (only) in terms of this particular 'logic’ have come to seem both coherent and compelling.

In most recent discussion, digital culture has generally been accepted on its own terms. There has been broad assent to its agenda of progress, and growing interest in the new techniques of observation made possible by post-photographic technologies (because this coincides with what we expect of ‘technological revolutions’). This has meant that it has not been considered as a culture. To do so would involve the de-familiarization of the Cartesian program. What is it, we would have to ask, that drives the rationalization of vision (assuming that it surely cannot be reason alone)? We would have to consider not only what is positively desired and pursued, but also what is at the same time being denied and repressed. In general terms, how are we to understand the hostility to what is ‘merely’ cultural, accidental and untrustworthy? What does it mean to seek ‘liberation’ from our culture? More particularly in relation to digital culture, how are we to make sense of the distrust of appearances, the ‘look of things’, and ultimately, perhaps even the visual itself?

Looking at the world again

In posing such questions, I want now to change the focus of the discussion. The debate on post-photography has become obsessed with the ‘digital revolution’ and how it is transforming epistemological paradigms and models of vision. The overriding concern is with formal and theoretical issues concerning the nature and the status of the new images. Strangely, we seem now to feel that the rationalization of vision is more important than the things that really matter to us (love, fear, grief...). Other ways of thinking about images and their relation

to the world have been devalued (we are being persuaded that they are now anachronistic). There is even the danger that the ‘revolution’ will make us forget about what we want to do with images–why we want to look at them, how we feel about them, how we react and respond to them. In the discussion that follows, I want to identify some other possibilities inherent in a changing image culture. I shall begin from experiences of images (rather than from new technologies and techniques), and from ways of thinking about image culture that are grounded in such experiences. Then I shall seek to locate these in the broader contexts of those aspects of modern culture that have been concerned, not with scientific and technological rationalization, but, rather, with imaginative and political freedom. If the idea of postmodernity really means anything at all, surely it must be around such concerns of creative and democratic emancipation. It is in the context of these (modern and postmodern) agendas that w-e should now be thinking about the uses of images.

Are there ways, then, of proceeding constructively against the digital grain (without just becoming a counter-revolutionary, that is to say)? For me, this is a matter of whether it is possible to introduce, or re-introduce, what might simply be called existential dimensions into an agenda that has become predominantly conceptual and rationalistic (‘severed from a human observer’). It is about our capacity to be moved by what we see in images. Let us begin with a deliberately ‘primitive’ view of photographic images. For Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, the preliminary question is ‘what does my body know of Photography?’ (Barthes I982: 9). Cognition is experienced here as a complex process, mediated through the body and suffused with affect and emotion. Where some images have left him indifferent and irritated, important others have ‘provoked tiny jubilation’s, as if they referred to a stilled center, an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself’ (ibid.: 16). Barthes’ project is to explore the experience of photography ‘not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think’ (ibid.: 21). One is in love with certain photographs, and one may be ‘pricked’ by pity at the sight of others. For Barthes, understanding the representational nature of these images cannot be separated from understanding the sensations–the touch - of desire or of grief that they provoke.

John Berger, who is similarly concerned with the nature of the relation between seer and seen, also works to (emotionally) deepen our understanding of photographic apprehension and cognition. Berger wants to explore other kinds of meaning than those valorized by reason. He is intent on reconnecting photography to ‘the sensuous, the particular, and the ephemeral’ (Berger 1980: 61). Against the grain of rationalism, Berger puts great emphasis on the value of appearances: ‘appearances as signs addressed to the living . . . there to be read by the eye’ (Berger I982: 115). Appearances, he insists, are oracular in their nature:

The image reveals new possibilities: ‘Every image used by a spectator is a going further than he could ha`-e achieved alone, towards a prey, a Madonna, a sexual pleasure, a landscape, a face, a different world’ (Berger 1978: 704). What Berger emphasizes is the relation between sight and imagination. ‘Appearances’, he argues, ‘are both cognitive and metaphoric. We classify by appearances and dream with appearances.’ It is creative imagination that illuminates and animates our apprehension of the world: ‘Without imagination the world becomes unreflective and opaque. Only existence remains’ (Berger 1980: 68).

Yet another aspect and quality of visual knowing is made apparent in Walter Benjamin’s small history of photography. ‘With photography,’ Benjamin (1979: 242) argues, ‘we encounter something new and strange.’ Photographic technology can give its products ‘a magical value’. Its beholder ‘feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject’ (ibid.: 243). Benjamin understands the nature of this visual magic with the help of Freud. ‘For it is another nature’, he says, ‘that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious’ (ibid.). Benjamin thinks of the ‘optical unconscious’ as being in continuity with the ‘instinctual unconscious’ discovered by psychoanalysis. His well-known formulation remains tantalizingly brief and elliptical. We can appropriate it, I think, to explore the conflictual nature of knowledge and of feelings about knowledge. Consider Thomas Ogden’s concise and lucid observation on the nature of unconscious processes:

We can see visual experience in terms of these processes of division. Visual cognition is grounded in feelings of both pleasure and displeasure: the desire to see coexists with the fear of seeing. The ambivalence in all object relations is, of course, apparent in our relation to the objects of visual knowledge.

These various and different meditations on the nature of photography all serve the present argument in so far as they contradict any idea of purely rational seeing and knowing. In their distinctive ways, they aim to show us how vision also serves psychic and bodily demands, and how much it is also needed in the cause of sublimation and imaginative transformation. These existential aspects of image use have been most keen, no doubt, in the encounter with death and morality. Images have always been linked with death, and a particular kind of meditation on death has been a consistent theme in modern reflections on photographic culture. ‘All photographs are 'memento mort,’ says Susan Sontag (1979: I5). ‘To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.’ Death is ‘what is utterly mysterious for man’, Pierre MacOrlan observed, and the power of photography resides in its relation to this mystery:

Roland Barthes (I982: 92) describes photographers as ‘agents of Death’, and photography as corresponding to the intrusion into modern societies of ‘an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death’. Photographs relate to anxieties and fears in the face of mortality, and may then enable the imaginative possession and modification of those feelings.

But it can be otherwise. Another kind of response, which has been closely associated with the project of modern rationalism, can be to deny or disavow our mortal nature. As Horkheimer and Adorno (I973: 3) argue, the logic of rationality and rationalization aimed at ‘liberating men from fear’ through the imperious force of reason: ‘Nothing at all remains outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear .... Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown’ (ibid.: I6). Through rational control and mastery (over both nature and human nature), rationalism and positivism, ‘its ultimate product’, have sought to occlude the sources of mortal fear. We may consider digital technology and discourse as being in continuity with this project of rational subjection. Electronic images are not frozen, do not fade; their quality is not elegiac, they are not just registrations of mortality. Digital techniques produce images in cryogenised form: they can be awoken, re-animated, brought ‘up to date’. Digital manipulation can resurrect the dead. William Mitchell (I994: 49) thinks of dead Elvis and the possibility now that we could be presented with ‘a sharp, detailed "photograph" of him in a recognizably contemporary setting’. ‘Bringing back Marilyn’ is the example that occurs to Fred Ritchin (I990: 64).

Death-defying simulation is linked to powerful fantasies of rational transcendence. ‘To lose sight of the unbearable,’ says Regis Debray (1992: 33), ‘is to diminish the dark attraction of shadows, and of their opposite, the value of a ray of light.’ ‘The death of death’, he suggests, ‘would strike a decisive blow against the imagination.’ Of course, there is reason to believe that the rationalist dream will always be cloyed. With Roland Barthes (1982: 92), we must inquire as to the anthropological place of death in our culture: ‘For Death must be somewhere in society ....’Do we really think it could be nowhere?

I am concerned that we should hold on to a sense of the complexity of image cultures, and, particularly, that we should continue to recognize the significance of other than rational uses of the image. In the context of the emerging digital culture, however, such concerns can only appear to be perverse and problematical. From the austere perspective of post-photography, they will seem ‘innocent’ and nostalgic. This version of a ‘postmodern’ image culture is devoted precisely to the critique and deconstruction of such dubious notions. The new information format is understood in terms of the emancipation of the image from its empirical limitations and sentimental associations; it is a matter, that is to say, of purifying the image of what are considered to be its residual realist and humanist interests. This is, in fact, the program of rationalization masquerading in the drag of postmodernism. What is so striking about it is its arrogance (in the sense intended by W. R. Bion (1967: 86) when he speaks of ‘the arrogance of Oedipus in vowing to lay bare the truth at no matter what cost’). With its singular commitment to the rationalization of vision, digital cultural has tended to deny or to devalue other uses of the image. It is no longer concerned with the image as transitional between inner and outer realities. If imagination means anything at all in this progressivist scheme, it is certainly not what John Berger (1980: 73) calls ‘the primary faculty of the human imagination - the faculty of being able to identify with another person’s experience’ (which is all that could help Oedipus in his suffering). Belief in ‘perfect’ images seems to be inhibiting our relation to ‘good enough’ images. Consider Barthes’ (1982: 53) observation that ultimately ‘in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes’. In a context of change (arrogantly called ‘progress’), can we now sustain a vital culture of images?

The first question is whether we can see possibilities in this historical moment. Are we able to re-describe the context in which our image culture is being transformed, in such a way as to achieve a more radical understanding of what we could mean by ‘postmodern’? It is a question of subverting the ideology of modernity (and postmodernity) as the progressive emancipation of rationality. We might begin from Dialectic of Enlightenment–in some ways a founding text of postmodernism - and its exploration of how, from the primordial ‘cry of terror’, a history of fear has shadowed the history of reason. The fear that is repressed returns as a cultural malady. For Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘Enlightenment behaves like Sophoclies’ tragic hero, Oedipus: it surely did liberate the species from the awful power of nature but also brought with it a new plague’ (Rocco I994: 80). The logic of rational mastery is always defeated by what still remains ‘outside’. And mastery itself, moreover, may be associated with an (irrational) sense of loss, and with cultural undercurrents of melancholy and apocalyptic depression (Jay 1994). To say that we are postmodern would then involve recognition of how Enlightenment has failed by the same token that it has succeeded. We might understand postmodern sensibility in the way that Mladen Dolar (T991: 23) intends, when he says that ‘it doesn’t imply a going beyond the modern, but rather an awareness of its internal limit, its split ...’ Following his insight, we might see postmodernity, imagined in a fundamentally counter-teleological sense, in terms of possibilities for allowing the return of what modern culture has repressed or disavowed. The real question then is whether we could look those possibilities in the face. The story of Oedipus is one of the struggle to evade painful realities through ‘turning a blind eye’ and of the retreat into omnipotence (Steiner I985). There is a need to live with the unhappy conclusions that realistic insight would demand. A postmodern culture would have to look back at the repressed fears and unconscious forces that have haunted reason’s progress.

And it should then be about their imaginative and political transformation. The modern world was not shaped by reason and Enlightenment alone. Johann Arnason reasserts the cultural and intellectual significance of Romanticism, emphasizing the importance of the interrelation and interaction between these two cultural currents, and arguing that it is precisely ‘this cultural configuration (rather than an irresistible logic or an uncompleted project of Enlightenment alone) [that] should be placed at the center of a theory of cultural modernity’ (Arnason 1994: 156). And of postmodernity, too. This other current is important in terms of the critique of Enlightenment (though, of course, there are as many problems with Romantic culture as with Enlightenment culture; each has come to our century in a debased form). It has been concerned with rationality’s Other, with what was repressed by, and what remained ‘outside’, reason’s comprehension. It also drew attention to our embeddedness in human cultures (and consequently in the cultural, accidental and untrustworthy). We can only come to terms with our human ‘condition’ in the context of particular human cultures. As David Roberts (1994: 172) argues, where Enlightenment pursued the principle of 'radical abstraction from the given’, Romantic thinkers held on to that of cultural and historical ‘incarnation’. And where Enlightenment aspired to rational transcendence, the Romantic emphasis was on the powers of creativity and imagination necessary for the achievement of human and political emancipation.

It is in this spirit that Cornelius Castonadis counters the openness of radical imagination against the closure of rationalist empire. What makes us human, he maintains, is not rationality, but ‘the continuous, uncontrolled and uncontrollable surge of our creative radical imagination in and through the flux of representations, affects and desires’ (Castoriadis Iggo: 144). Castoriadis seeks a productive accommodation between unconscious, imaginative and reasoning powers (which also involves confronting the fear of death) in the cause of human autonomy. It is a matter of achieving ‘a self reflecting and deliberative subjectivity, one that has ceased to be a pseudo-rational and socially-adapted machine, but has on the contrary recognized and freed the radical imagination at the core of the psyche’ (ibid.: 145). This, of course, involves recognizing the existence of other people, whose desires may be in opposition to our own. Consequently, the project of autonomy ‘is necessarily social, and not simply individual’ (ibid.. 147). For Castoriadis, the project of bringing forth autonomous individuals and the project of an autonomous society are one and the same. What if we conceive the possibilities of postmodernism in this tougher and more radical way?

The point, let me reiterate, is to contest an overly rationalistic and imaginatively closed understanding of our changing image culture. It is to find other meaningful contexts in which to make sense of and make use of images. My suggestions of possibilities are intended to be brief and indicative only (and, surely, there are other lines of flight). What they aim to do is to (re)validate a world of meaning and action that is not reducible to rationality. Recall Barthes’ individual encounter with the photographic image, moving from seeing and feeling, through attention and observation, to thought and elucidation. If you like, I am thinking of this kind of open sensibility in a social context, in terms of a broader culture of images. As Johann Arnason (1994: 167) argues, in the terms of Merleau-Ponty, such a project would be about recovering an openness to the world about ‘relearning to look at the world’. Visual perception would be linked to ‘a rediscovery and articulation of the opening to the world that is constitutive of the human condition’ (ibid.: 169). How we look at the world relates to our disposition towards the world.

At this point, we must finally come back to the question of how new images and new technologies fit into this. We should consider again whether or how they might change the way we look at the world. One possibility is opened up by those art and visual historians, working in a Foucauldian tradition, who have sought to identify significant discontinuities and disjunctures in regimes or models of vision. Thus, in relation to the birth of photography, Geoffrey Batchen (1990: 11) argues that we must address ourselves ‘not just to optics and chemistry but to a peculiarly modern inflection of power, knowledge, and subject’. Now we are facing the imminent demise of this photographic ‘assemblage’: ‘The desiring assemblage that incorporates both photography and the modern subject is by no means fixed and immutable. Indeed it may already be reconstituting itself along yet another line of flight’ (ibid.: see also Crary Ig90). The death of photography now augurs a wholly new assemblage. This is what Batchen calls the ‘postmodern prospect’. This kind of approach remains rather narrow in its focus, concerned almost exclusively with the relation between vision and knowledge/power (though, in inscribing epistemological change in some kind of social context, it provides us with a meaningful way of looking at the rationalization of vision). Within these terms however, it does show us how the look of things can be transformed, through the development of new forms of technological vision and new techniques of observation. At critical moments, it is argued, and usually through the advent of new technologies, the relation between vision and subjectivity can be dramatically changed. Older ways of seeing the world (in Mitchell’s terms, ‘sclerotic pictorial traditions’) are dislodged, and at the same time new kinds of visual description become possible. There are possibilities for creative disruption. But at the same time, I would argue, these ‘localized’ shifts in techniques of observation may also make sense in the ‘global’ context of the developing rationalization of vision. New ways of seeing may not be at odds with existing forms and relations of power in the visual field.

That is one way of thinking about the possibilities that may be available to us now (though it is still, I think, caught up in modernist notions of development and progress). Let me suggest another (which may be more postmodern, in the sense I am trying to elaborate). In this case, what are significant are not new technologies and images per se, but rather the re-ordering of the overall visual field and reappraisal of image cultures and traditions that they provoke. It is notable that much of the most interesting discussion of images now concerns, not digital futures, but, actually, what seemed until recently antique and forgotten media (the panorama, the camera obscura, the stereoscope), from our postphotographic vantage point these have suddenly acquired new- meanings, and their re-evaluation now seems crucial to understanding the significance of digital culture. In this context, it seems productive to think, not in terms of discontinuities and disjunctures, but, rather, on the basis of continuities, through generations of images and across visual forms.

In his critique of Foucauldian analysis (Crary’s version), David Phillips (1993: 137) recommends that we ‘take into account the persistence and durability of older modes of visuality’. Against the idea of a sequential narrative of succeeding image cultures, and against the narrative logic of successive epistemological breaks, Phillips argues that ‘vision operates instead as a palimpsest which conflates many different modes of perception - a model which applies both to the history of vision and to the perception of a singular observer’ (ibid.). This seems to me a very productive metaphor (and one that can help us to resist both technological progressivism and epistemological evolutionism). Rather than privileging ‘new’ against 'old’ images, we might then think about them all–all those that are still active, at least - in their contemporaneity. From such a perspective, what is significant is precisely the multiplicity and the diversity of contemporary images. In working against the grain of progressivist or evolutionary models, we can try to make creative use of the interplay of different orders of images. The coexistence of different images, different ways of seeing, different visual imaginations, may be seen as an imaginative resource.

This was the fundamental issue in the exhibition, Passages de l’Image, held at the Center Georges Pompidou in 1990. As Raymond Bellour (1990a: 37) expresses it in his contribution to the exhibition catalogue, it is ‘the diversity of image forms that is now our problem’, and the problem, by which he in fact means the solution, concerns the proliferation of ‘passages’ or ‘contamination’s’ between images. The mixes. the relays, the passages or movements between images, he suggests, are taking shape in two ways: ‘on the one hand, an oscillation between the mobility and immobility of the image; on the other, between maintaining photographic analogy and a tendency toward de-figuration’ (Bellour 1990b: 7, cf. Bellour 1990a: 38). There is a sense in which ‘we are now beyond the image’ (Bellour 1990a:s6); a sense in which it is now more productive to think in terms of the hybridity of image forms. We must come to terms with new ways of ‘seeing’ through what might be called an-optical technologies. We can also recognize the potential of digital manipulation for effecting new forms of hybridization (this is what William Mitchell (1992: 7) refers to as ‘electrobricollage’). The artist, Esther Parada (1993: 445–6) talks about her attraction to digital technology in terms of the possibilities it offers for the ‘shifting and blending’ and the ‘layering’ of images (and texts); it allows, she says, ‘the materialization of linkages in time and space that enhance understanding’.

At the same time, we can acknowledge the persistence of photographic vision, and recognize that it will continue to actually replenish itself. Simply because I like it, take the work of Genevieve Cadieux, some of whose images featured in the Passages exhibition. Referring to its ‘monumentality’, Ingrid Schaffner (1991: 56) has argued that Cadieux ‘deploys the conventions of sculpture to upset the passivity of our encounter with the plane’. Her photographic images revitalize our sense of seeing, and re-position it in relation to the sense of both touch and hearing (Hear Me with Your Eyes is the title of one of her pieces). Regis Durand (1989) emphasizes the continuing possibilities - often, again, through the use of large-scale and ‘heroic’ formats, once associated with the ‘fine arts’ - for giving the ‘force of evidence’ inherent in the photographic image a renewed power to move and affect us. Where we might easily be drawn into thinking in terms of ‘emergent’ versus ‘residual’ image forms, a cultivated sense of ambivalence may be more imaginatively productive. We should aspire to be open to the force of all modes of visual representation and presentation.

In re-describing the transformation of photography in terms of the layering of images or in terms of passages of the image, perhaps we can take a stand against the arrogance of (technological and cultural) modernity. Perhaps we can work towards a better context in which to explore the emotional, imaginative, moral and political aspects of a changing image culture. In an essay on ‘Psychoanalysis and Idolatry’, Adam Phillips considers the significance of Freud’s great collection

of graven images. ‘So what was Freud telling his patients and himself by displaying his collection in the rooms where he practiced psychoanalysis ...?’ he asks (Phillips, A. 1993: Il9). There are two speculative responses. Freud was saying that ‘culture was history, and that this history ... could be preserved and thought about’ (ibid.: 120); ‘the dead do not disappear’ (ibid.: 118), and on the recognition of this our psychic and cultural well-being may depend. And, second, Freud was also telling his patients and himself that ‘culture was plural.... The figurines underlined the fact that there are all sorts of cultural conventions and worlds elsewhere, as many as can be found’ (ibid.: 120). Is not Freud’s relation to his idols suggestive for how we might now think of our own relations to images? The archaeology of images is linked to psychological excavation. And images are a means of being open to cultural diversity; they represent Freud’s ‘wishful allegiance to alternative cultures’ (ibid.: Il9).

We might inflect this disposition in more social and political ways. In contemporary political theory (of the anti-foundationalist kind) the idea of an absolute Truth is also called into question. In such a perspective, neatly summarized by Glyn Daly (1994: 176 7), the world can only be described through competing language games; it is ‘permanently exposed to competing redescriptions’, and, consequently "‘truth" will always be conjecturally put together as the result of a struggle between competing language-games/discourses’. What is significant is precisely the interplay between these competing descriptions, all originating from particular (and limited) positions. Fundamental issues ‘will be conjecturally settled by those narratives - novels, ethnographies, journalist writings, etc. with which we identify and express our solidarity’ (ibid.: 177). In this context, we could give some kind of political (rather than epistemological) meaning to the recognition that images can no longer be ‘comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world’ and that they might, in fact, be like ‘more traditionally crafted images, which seemed notoriously ambiguous and uncertain human constructions’ (Mitchell 1992: 225). ~~e would then consider our image culture in terms of its productive diversity, and we would be concerned with the possibilities (creative and also technological) for originating ‘new’–insightful, open, moving–descriptions of the world.

There is a prevailing tendency to think of digital technologies as being ‘revolutionary’, and to suppose that they are so in their very ‘nature’. Throughout this chapter I have been arguing against such a position, suggesting that digital culture may, in fact, be seen in terms of the continuing rationalization of vision (bringing this ‘logic’ to a new level of sophistication, and effecting a new accommodation between the rationalist and empiricist aspects of modern culture). I have endeavored to move the discussion away from this predominantly

theoretical and philosophical perspective, and to open up a more cultural and political agenda concerning the changing image culture. This has meant reasserting the importance of vision (appearances) in cultural experience–beginning from the uses of vision, that is to say, rather than from technological novelty. In emphasizing the symbolic importance of images, we can consider their development in the context of the counter-rationalistic tendencies in modern culture (now being critically re-examined by those who are concerned to revalidate imagination and creativity in our culture). I think we can then go further, to consider the increasing multiplicity and diversity of ways of seeing in the context of new (postmodern) ways of thinking about political and democratic life. These ideas remain tentative and exploratory. They are intended to suggest pretexts and contexts through which to find more open and meaningful ways to reappropriate our culture of images. I am not denying the formidable capacities of the new technologies; I am trying to give them some more relevant cultural and political location.

The future of images is not (techno-logically) determined. Different possibilities exist - as long as we can resist the comforts of determinism. To make them exist, we must think very carefully about what it is that we now want from images. The ‘death of photography’ is one of those rare moments in which we are called upon to renegotiate - and to re-cathect - our relation to images (old ones as much as new ones). In the end, images are significant in terms of what we can do with them and how they carry meanings for us. For some, this will indeed be a matter of exploiting the extraordinary power of the new technologies to ‘see’ the births and deaths of stars. Most of us, however, will have more mundane and personal concerns, because image culture - to adapt Raymond Williams’s phrase – remains ordinary. Images will continue to be important – ‘technological revolution’ notwithstanding–because they mediate so effectively, and often movingly, between inner and outer realities.

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