IMMEDIACY AND THE IMAGE Introduction This essay investigates the relationship between immediacy and the image. The image is presented as an immediacy, not as a sign or form of mediation in any simple sense. In other words, the image is never a discrete entity in its own right (even in a digital format) – it is not a thing – despite the fact that the opposite assumption governs media and art studies and many studies of the image in philosophy (cf. Danto), which focus on the ‘artifactual’ aspect of media. In what follows I illuminate the way that the image can be revealed as an immediacy in a variety of contexts ranging from the postcard image and the analogue photograph, where the image becomes the presence of the imaged in its absence, to the image in iconoclasm, as analysed by Marie-José Mondzain (1996), where it occupies the position of the invisible element of the icon and the Trinity. The ‘making present’ of the thing (imaged) also signals that it is not absolutely present, a point illuminated by the play of the trace and différance. The trace can be shown to be a key aspect of the analogue image’s status as an ‘evidential force’, to use Barthes’s expression. As an evidential force and an emanation of the past in the present it is also an evocation of time as such. Although the digital image often evokes a disembodied reality, this image, in the work of certain video artists, does in fact become an immediacy through forms of embodiment triggered by the digital image and its technical apparatus. It is worthwhile bearing in mind here that immediacy means no delay, no temporal gap, no separation between at least two elements which would manifest a delay. In this sense, immediacy is the two becoming one – at least from a temporal point of view. To be
Transcript
IMMEDIACY AND THE IMAGE
Introduction
This essay investigates the relationship between immediacy and the image. The image is
presented as an immediacy, not as a sign or form of mediation in any simple sense. In other
words, the image is never a discrete entity in its own right (even in a digital format) – it is not
a thing – despite the fact that the opposite assumption governs media and art studies and
many studies of the image in philosophy (cf. Danto), which focus on the ‘artifactual’ aspect
of media. In what follows I illuminate the way that the image can be revealed as an
immediacy in a variety of contexts ranging from the postcard image and the analogue
photograph, where the image becomes the presence of the imaged in its absence, to the image
in iconoclasm, as analysed by Marie-José Mondzain (1996), where it occupies the position of
the invisible element of the icon and the Trinity. The ‘making present’ of the thing (imaged)
also signals that it is not absolutely present, a point illuminated by the play of the trace and
différance. The trace can be shown to be a key aspect of the analogue image’s status as an
‘evidential force’, to use Barthes’s expression. As an evidential force and an emanation of the
past in the present it is also an evocation of time as such. Although the digital image often
evokes a disembodied reality, this image, in the work of certain video artists, does in fact
become an immediacy through forms of embodiment triggered by the digital image and its
technical apparatus.
It is worthwhile bearing in mind here that immediacy means no delay, no temporal gap, no
separation between at least two elements which would manifest a delay. In this sense,
immediacy is the two becoming one – at least from a temporal point of view. To be
immediately in being, therefore (cf. Hegel and Heidegger), means that we are always already
part of being.
With Heidegger and Sartre, an image is not reducible to the medium that is the condition of
its possibility: there is no separate image on the one side and the imaged thing on the other.
Rather, it is a matter of being immediately engaged with the image before any positing of the
image as a thing takes place.
With Hegel, we encounter the notion of the immediate as Being. Humanity is immediately
in Being as universal and as the Absolute. Being as nothing is immediately a representation
(image) of Being.
The work of Marie-José Mondzain focuses on iconoclasm and we come to understand that
the image is distinct from the icon (visible entity of perception), and is invisible rather than
visible. In fact, visibility is not here the distinguishing feature of the image (Mondzain 1996:
110).
The trace as différance, articulated by Derrida (Derrida 1972: 1-29), brings out the issue of
presence. Even though Sartre argues that an image is the presence of the thing in its absence,
trace implies that the thing (the imaged) is never entirely present; it is never present in any
simple sense. To this extent, Derrida would seem to problematise the notion of immediacy.
‘Delay’, rather than immediacy becomes the point at issue. However, immediacy is not
absent from the trace, but describes our relationship to it. The delay we are confronted with is
an immediate delay within which we are immediately inscribed.
Taking the trace as différance as his point of departure, Bernard Stiegler – for whom the
human and technics are inseparable – employs the term ‘orthographic’ (evoking an exact, or
correct inscription) to interpret Roland Barthes’s theory of the analogue photograph (Stiegler
1996a: 23-35). Through the orthographic quality of the photograph, the past emerges with
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certainty in the present. The photo is thus immediately present, past and – as an intimation of
death to come – future.
Through the immediacy of the punctum (subjective sting) proposed by Barthes (Barthes
1980: 47-49), a bodily aspect emerges in relation to the image. This aspect is taken up by
Mark B.N. Hansen (cf., Hansen 2004b), who brings attention to embodiment in relation to the
digital image. The result of this investigation, as we shall see, is that through the work of
video artists in particular, the digital image is also an immediate embodiment, especially
when emotions are in play. The very separation of the image and its reception, Hansen shows,
is erased.
The Image and the Thing
In his 1925 summer semester lectures published in English as the History of the Concept of
Time (Heidegger 1992), Heidegger points out that a picture (image) is not a thing, so that
when looking at a postcard of the Weidenhauser bridge, the philosopher says:
What is now bodily given is the postcard itself. This card itself is a thing, an object,
just as much as the bridge or a tree or the like. But it is not a simple thing like the
bridge. As we have said it is a picture-thing. In perceiving it, I see through it what is
pictured, the bridge. In perceiving a picture, I do not thematically apprehend the
picture-thing (Heidegger 1992: 42).
Let us focus on the point, summarised by Heidegger, as follows: ‘In the consciousness of a
picture, there is the picture-thing and the pictured’ (1992: 42). The picture is not an entity in
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its own right, like the postcard. The picture (image) is the presence of the bridge in its
absence, as Sartre would say. Indeed, Sartre claims that to assume that the image is a thing
(like the postcard) and can be perceived is part of a ‘naïve ontology’ (Sartre 1989:51); it is to
be guilty of making the error of the ‘illusion of immanence’ (Sartre 2004:5), of assuming that
consciousness is a place. Perception is one thing, and relates to an encounter with an object –
with reality; the imaginary is quite another, and relates to an encounter with the image. Thus,
there is no object-thing on one side and image-thing on the other because the image is the
presence of the thing (the imaged) in its absence. The image has to do with mimesis only in a
very special and technical sense of making the imaged present.
The difference between what is effectively the image and the thing is an important step in
our deliberations because evoking Sartre’s notion of the image also situates quite clearly the
difference between medium and image. For example, in light of what we have uncovered so
far, we would have to say that a medium can be a thing and that this is what distinguishes it
from an image. Hans Belting, however, has claimed that ‘No visible images reach us
unmediated’ (Belting 2005: 304). And Belting adds: ‘Their visibility rests on their particular
mediality’ (2005: 304). For Belting, as for many commentators, the image and its medium are
inseparable,2 whereas I want to argue that the image cannot be reduced to its medium, even if
Barthes’s principle of ‘it has been’ in relation to analogue photography complicates this. The
question is: can we move from this insight, which tells us that the image is not a thing, to the
claim that the image is immediate? What would immediacy evoke here, given that the image-
1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations from French texts are my own.
2 Belting further says: ‘When we distinguish a canvas from the image it represents, we pay attention
to either the one or the other, as if they were distinct, which they are not; they separate only when we
are willing to separate them in our looking’ (Belting 2005: 304). For Belting and others, the image is
only separable from its medium in an analytical sense, not in reality. By implication, the image is the
strokes of paint on the canvas, plus the canvas itself. The representation can then be compared to the real
thing.
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thing (e.g., a photograph) is perceived, whereas an image is not? But even if the image is not
strictly speaking perceived, does it not rely for its impact on the medium-thing? In effect,
must we not agree that without the material medium there can be no image because it would
lack a form of incarnation? I shall, for the moment, refrain from further comment here in
order to return better prepared to respond later in the paper, particularly when we address the
issue of the image and time. Now, I want to examine other contexts where the issue of the
relation of the image to immediacy is directly or indirectly addressed.
Intellectualist Approach
In directing attention to immediacy as the chief aspect of the image (or images), we are going
against the current trend to conceive the image mediately, as the being of the medium itself,
even to the point where the image is an essentially intellectual product. Thus, in his well
regarded work, Jacques Aumont points out that ‘visual perception is an intellectual process.
Consequently, the notion that there could be such a thing as ‘unmediated’, ‘spontaneous’
encounters with the visible, prior to the always necessarily historical and intellectual act of
looking, is a myth’ (Aumont 1997: 209). As will be seen in the engagement with Derrida
below, such an approach finds it impossible to dispense with immediacy altogether; it would
be in the fact of being immediately immersed in what Aumont refers to as the ‘historical and
intellectual act of looking’. Or, as Bernard Stiegler has emphasised after Husserl and
Heidegger: ‘Mortals are immersed from the start’ (Stiegler 1998: 204). They are immediately
in a ‘past they have not lived’, a past only accessible to them, mediately: that is, through time
as writing, as mediation (Stiegler 1996a: 69).
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Iconoclasm
The relationship between image and thing has been a constant source of debate in Western
culture. Not only Plato, but the iconoclasts in the Byzantine period throw light on how this
debate has been conducted.3 As a scholar of Byzantine culture, Marie-José Mondzain shows
that, with regard to iconoclasm, the (material) icon is visible while the (immaterial) image is
invisible. Moreover, the ‘image is eternal similitude while the icon is temporal resemblance’
(Mondzain 1996: 14). Here, it is tempting to see the icon as having a thingly character, while
the image does not. In other words, in contrast to the materiality of the icon, the image has no
material character. Moreover, says Mondzain, incarnation for the iconoclasts, did not mean
materialisation (Mondzain 1996: 124). The reason for this is that while the icon can be
incarnate in the flesh, flesh does not mean materialisation. Rather, the ‘idol’ is the entity of
materialisation. Mondzain goes on to add that things are more subtle than those represented
by binary oppositions, so incarnation does not imply either a ‘dematerialisation’ or an
‘idealisation’. In the philosophy of Nicéphore (iconophile philosopher, i.e., defender of the
image): ‘The visible is not sensible’ – is not related to sense perception (Mondzain 1996:
125). This is nothing short of Sartre’s position in our own day. And there is more which links
up with Sartre: ‘Incarnation, for the iconophile, is imaginary, it is the entry of the natural
image into the flesh of the visible image (inconicity)’ (Mondzain 1996: 149). Coupled with
the fact the image is the distribution of Christ and the word in the Trinity, we are reminded
that the image has always been a problematic entity in Western culture, shrouded by turns in
3 A full development of the historical context leading up to and surrounding Byzantine iconoclasm is available in the superb works of Hans Belting (1994) and David Freedberg (1989). In Belting’s terms, the Byzantine image is the image understood before its aestheticisation (ie, before it is conceived as an object, pure and simple).
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mystery and opprobrium.4 As if to add to its mystery, the icon is the kind of category ‘where
immediacy and meditation are by turns articulated’ (Mondzain 1996: 174). The icon is
immediate in its impact and a form of mediation when it is interpreted. We are, argues
Mondzain, despite differences in approach (despite rejection or acceptance), the inheritors of
Christian ‘iconocracy’. In other words the issue of immediacy and mediation, visibility and
invisibility of the image start there.
Being and Immediacy (Hegel)
In light of conceptualisations of the image as not being a thing and as invisible we can say
that Heidegger does not see the postcard (icon), but encounters the bridge itself – albeit, in its
absence. For Heidegger, in short, the image is the encounter with the bridge immediately –
without mediation, without, that is, any third element playing a role. For Sartre, the image is
the encounter of the imaged in its absence, which does not entail the image having any
material quality.
For his part, Hegel links immediacy to ‘that which begins’, which is essentially the
universal determining itself in its progress. The universal becomes the Absolute ‘only in its
completion’ (Hegel 1966: II 471-472). In sum, the immediate is ‘self-relating universality’
(472). Truth is immediacy as much as it is mediation ((479). The end of the Logic is the
return to the ‘pure immediacy of Being’ (485).
Such immediacy suggests that Being has always already begun, that there is no time period
(delay) in the beginning of Being – that there is no mediation. Thus Hegel speaks in The
Encyclopaedia Logic of the distinct as ‘in self-relating immediacy or of being’ (Hegel 1991:
178 §114).
4 Jean Baudrillard’s ‘evil demon of images’ (see Baudrillard 1987) is thus quite in keeping with this tradition, even though he opposes the ‘iconophilia’ of Sartre.
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Heidegger, astute reader of Hegel, as Kristeva shows , places immediacy within parousia
(presence); or rather, the ‘within’ is immediacy (Kristeva 1987: 39). To be ‘always already
within’ does not eliminate the original nature of such ‘being’ as ‘being within’, so that the
issue might be one of the original as opposed to the secondary. Certainly, this is the point of
much of Derrida’s philosophy.
Différance/Trace
Despite the ‘within’ of parousia as the (immediate) presence of being – despite the idea of
being as always already immediately given, Derrida would see a claim to the self-identity of
presence that cannot be sustained. Thus, instead of immediacy, difference as deferral evokes
‘a time period (délai), a lateness, a reserve, a representation’, thus, temporalisation and
spacing, with the result that nothing is absolutely present. This suggests in turn that nothing is
immediately present or given. Just as Hegel talks of the immediacy of Being and Heidegger
of the presence of being as immediate, Derrida proposes – at least by implication – that the
immediate is highly problematic. One reason would be that the immediate can never appear
without the mediate, or mediation, just as the origin, or the primary, is impossible without the
secondary.
On the other hand, we read the following passage in the chapter entitled, ‘La différance’: ‘il
[différence (sic)] est immédiatement et irréductiblement polysémique’ (‘it [difference] is
immediately and irreducibly polysemic’) (Derrida 1972: 8. Emphasis added.). The same word
(immédiatement) appears a little later when Derrida comes to explain the significance of the
‘a’ in différance: ‘la a provenant immédiatement du participe présent (différant)’ (‘the a
coming immediately from the present participle (différant [differing]) (1972: 8). Here, then,
is an indication of just how difficult it is to dispense with the notion of immediacy. But before
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thinking in more detail about the somewhat paradoxical point we have reached, note that
Derrida considers the sign (not yet the image – it is, after all, the era of Saussure (1970s)) as
evocative of presence deferred following the common definition of the sign as ‘representing
the present in its absence’ (1972: 9). The sign, then, becomes a deferred presence (la présence
différée). The sign defers the moment of the encounter with the thing itself – the latter being
the original presence. The sign would thus be a form of mediation – perhaps the form of
mediation par excellence. To question the secondary and provisional nature of the sign in
light of différance entails, as well as the impossibility of grasping différance in terms of the
sign, the consequence of undermining the authority of the presence-absence opposition
(1972: 10). In terms of the sign the thing itself (origin) is never entirely present (we only have
signs) nor entirely absent (we have signs). Moreover, a sign always evokes other signs and
entities other than itself, so there is never a pure sign-thing.
The upshot of all this is the trace. Rather than speak of sign as evocative of a ‘full
presence’, we speak, if we follow Derrida, of trace. The trace is marked as much by the past
(retentions in Husserl’s language) as the future (Husserl’s protentions). There is then no
present moment which is not at the same time ‘marked’ by both past and future. Trace (as
différance) also implies that there is no full presence. All that we have discussed here is
important for working out whether or not claiming that the image is an immediacy falls into
the difficulties set up by the notion of différance. But let us, for a moment, return to the trace
and immediacy.
The trace is not a presence and does not strictly speaking take place. It is rather ‘the
simulacrum of a presence’ and ‘erasure belongs to its structure’ (Derrida 1972: 25). In short,
the trace is not a substance and least of all a thing: ‘It is a trace and the trace of the erasure of
the trace’ (1972: 25). In short, the trace is not in itself perceptible, but can render things
perceptible. Trace is not an effect (a phenomenon) of a cause as it would be the precondition
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of cause and effect. The trace, then, is what does not appear as such, but is the condition of all
appearing. If the trace has always already done its work – behind our backs, as it were – and
even though, from one perspective, the trace is not an immediacy (in the sense of an
immediacy that by-passes mediation), the trace would nevertheless seem to be immediately
given, much as the time period of difference is immediately given. Consequently, there is a
kind of immediacy of the non-immediacy of the trace. We are not within presence but are
immediately within a presence that is yet to come – as in an immediate time lapse (délai), or
an immediate deferral, which would also be an immediate temporalisation. If, on the other
hand, we were to reject immediacy, the possibility of a deferral of deferral (= deferral
deferred), the time lapse of time (time delayed5), or the detour of the detour (detour detoured)
would result. That is, an inevitable infinite regress – ultimately uninteresting – would result,
or rather, does result.6 We thus cannot dispense with immediacy.
Image and Trace
I propose that the image approximates the immediacy of the trace (as temporalisation). The
image, as Sartre conceived it, is not a thing. It is not therefore perceptible but is the condition
of all perception. It is true, however, that for Sartre, the image is never present as such
because it is what renders present the thing itself. As Sartre says, when talking of Pierre: ‘One
should not therefore believe that I think of the picture “as an image of Pierre”. This is
reflective consciousness that reveals the function of the picture’ (Sartre 2004: 24).
Nevertheless, it would seem that the transparency of the image – as Heidegger also proposed
5 Bernard Stiegler, astute reader of Derrida, actually writes that because of the two meaning of
différer (to differ and to defer): ‘time is essentially a deferred time’ (Stiegler 1998: 231).
6 Deconstruction often revels in the kinds of paradoxes referred to claiming that these confirm the
folly of wanting to arrive at a destination too quickly, of getting to the point too quickly. Indeed,
Derrida’s critique of Lacan in The Postcard is that Lacan believed too much in the certainty that a
letter would always arrive at its destination (albeit, the wrong one on occasion).
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– gives rise to the actual presence of the person/thing. This seems to be reinforced by Sartre
in talking of Pierre as present in his absence, so the image becomes a ‘quasi-person with a
quasi-face’ (Sartre 2004: 22). And again: ‘the portrait has a tendency to give itself as Pierre in
person’ (2004:22). The same point is made even more strongly and insistently in Sartre’s
description of the image of Charles VIII in the Uffizi in Florence:
The dead Charles VIII is there, present before us. It is he that we see, not the picture,
and yet we posit him as not being there: we have reached him ‘as imaged, ‘by the
intermediary’ of the picture. One sees the relation that consciousness posits in the
imaging attitude between portrait and subject is magical. Charles VIII is at one and
the same time over there in the past and here (Sartre 2004: 23-24).
In sum: ‘We do not think in our unreflective consciousness, that a painter made the portrait,
etc. The first bond posited between image and model is a bond of emanation’ (2004: 24).
Emanation, of course, is presence. The fact of presence engendered by the image is magical.
Pierre – and Charles VIII – is present through the image. The presence of Pierre is the
immediate confirmation of the working of the image. Only in reflective consciousness, when
one steps back, as it were, does the image also become a thing.
How can we possibly speak of trace and its temporality in such circumstances? It just
seems, as many would expect, too sophisticated a notion for Sartre’s approach. Not only this:
but the being present of Pierre also entails an interpretation (it is Pierre – not Roger) – a
mediation, in short, not an immediacy. Pierre, after all is Sartre’s ‘friend’. There are,
according to one’s interpretive judgement, more or less realistic photos of Pierre. This must,
then, be a ball game very different from that of ‘trace’.
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But are things really as we have just characterised them? When Sartre looks at then speaks
of a portrait of Pierre in a photo, or when Heidegger speaks of the Weidenhausser bridge in a
postcard, both are speaking after the event of the image. In other words, the recognition
(mediated experience) of Pierre or of the bridge is made possible through the image (the
immediate), but these are not as such images. The further implication is that a semiological
approach cannot give access to the image for two reasons: First, because semiotics is
essentially sign-focused, a fact which introduces the code and convention and an image
cannot be reduced to a sign; it is, as Barthes once said of the photograph: without a code;
second, because semiotics is centred in reflective consciousness, which means that it works
primarily at the level of the symbolic, it is unable to grasp the immediacy of the image.
It is true, however, that Sartre does not always do justice to the case that he is making.
Thus, when attempting to specify exactly when it is a question of Pierre as image, Sartre
employs the statement: ‘This is Pierre’ (2004:22) – a cognitive statement – as an indicator
that one is dealing with an image (not the painting or photo as material entity), whereas such
a presentation of Pierre implies that an image is a visible, symbolic entity rather than being
‘beyond’ visibility. The utter transparency of the image entails that the symbolic is pushed to
one side. Indeed, perhaps the most illuminating way of expressing this is to refer to Georges
Bataille’s notion of eroticism. Eroticism evokes the continuity of beings, continuity in light of
discontinuity (the symbolic). Discontinuity refers to the identity of a separate being.
Continuity refers to the striving for the erasure of borders (for ‘oneness’). Eroticism and
transgression are on the side of continuity (Bataille 1986: 11-25; 63-70). Although Sartre
himself referred to this as a mystical vision, I am suggesting that it is simply a turning aside
of the symbolic and that this is the unstated, unthematised, tendency of Sartre’s notion of the
image as magical.
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The Image as Temporal Object and Orthographic Moment
An experience of presence thus appears to accompany an experience of the image. From the
point of view (if one can speak in this way) of the trace, the image is simultaneously presence
and absence, where the absence would render to us an impure, non-simple ‘presence’.
Ontologically – philosophically – trace is a powerful notion given that an image, whatever
else it might be, is not the thing itself. Or, as we intimated earlier, the trace is both ‘retention’
(past) and ‘protention’ (future), to recall again Husserl’s terms. This has led Bernard Stiegler
to refer to the cinematic image as a temporal object, the quintessential incarnation of trace. As
is known (see Lechte 2007), Stiegler bases his idea of a temporal object on Husserl’s notion
of melody: in order for a melody to be retained, each note (the present note) is heard in
conjunction with both the note that has passed and the note to come; there is no possibility of
appreciating a melody by hearing one note at a time – in isolation, as it were. In hearing a
melody, therefore, there are no pure notes, in the sense of one note being absolutely present.
There are only notes as a mélange of retentions and protentions.
Stiegler takes up the same point in relation to cinema as a temporal object: thus, in order to
grasp the narrative of a feature film, or to follow the trajectory of a documentary, the viewer’s
perception of the coherence of a present image is based on the retention of past images and
the anticipation (protention) of future images. As with present notes in a melody, a present
cinematic image will also be a mélange of retentions and protentions. This then gives the
cinema image its status as trace. It also, at the same time, gives, Stiegler argues, an insight
into the structure of consciousness. Consciousness is cinematic.
Consequently, it would seem that with Derrida/Stiegler and Sartre we are faced with two
very different conceptions of the image: one, in sum, as a magical experience of continuity,
the other, as trace.
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Let us elaborate further on this issue by referring to Stiegler’s interpretation of Roland
Barthes’s engagement with photography in La Chambre claire (Barthes 1980), which, as is
known, Barthes dedicated to Sartre’s Imaginaire. According to his reading of Barthes, the
principal insight in La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida) is that the production of a
photographic image is the result of an ‘orthographic’ process (exact, or correct, recording or
inscription), which entails that the object photographed must truly have been there: it
becomes the ‘it has been’, as Barthes puts it. In the photographic recording process, this is
the one thing that cannot be doubted. As an orthographic moment, says Stiegler, part of the
past is reconstituted. A photograph cannot be taken after the event; it is necessarily and
essentially simultaneous with the event itself. There is an immediate coincidence of what is
photographed and the photo itself. The light that is reflected in the image in the past is the
same light that makes possible the viewing of the photo in the present. As analogical – as an
orthographic entity – a photograph thus coincides materially (i.e., chemically and luminously)
with what is photographed so that the photographed entity can be simultaneously past and
present. In this way photographs give access to a past that ‘one has not lived’, the past as the
‘already-there’, to use phenomenological terminology (Stiegler 1996a: 78).
With the image of Lewis Payne in La Chambre claire, Barthes discovers something new in
the punctum (subjective sting, or prick, of a detail). The latter has ceased to be reducible to a
detail and has become Time itself: the ‘it has been’ as noema becomes the punctum as time:
‘This new punctum, which no longer has a form but an intensity, is Time, it is the lascerating
impact of the noema (‘it has been’), its pure representation’ (Barthes 1980: 148). Then after
contemplating the photo of Lewis Payne, Barthes says: ‘In giving me the absolute past of the
pose (aorist), photography says death to me in the future tense’ (1980: 150). It is the trace:
past/present/future in a single image. This seems to mean that the past is not given absolutely
as a past present. On the other hand, the photographic process captures the play of light (=
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object), ‘directly’, that is, immediately, without any delay. As Stiegler notes, Barthes sees the
photograph as an immediate transcription and thus ‘emanation’ of the real and so becomes the
embodiment of the speed of light. Temporally, the photograph, as an orthographic process,
brings the past into the present, but it also evokes the future through the future anterior: the ‘it
will have been’. In effect, there is no ‘it has been’ that does not also give rise to an ‘it will
have been’. Thus, the central significance of the photograph of Lewis Payne: ‘He is dead and
he is going to die’.
Unlike Deleuze – who never really analyses the image as such – Stiegler shows that despite
the photographic image being reducible to a series of poses, it is not simply a timeless, frozen
moment immediately given. On the contrary, we also have a moment of presence
differed/deferred. Barthes, however, is engaging in a further deferral in so far as he is relating
his experience for a readership: this is not equivalent to the lived experience as such.
Moreover, Barthes translates feeling into symbolic form: thus, in looking at the image of
Lewis Payne, time, Barthes reports, becomes the punctum. To say this, clearly, cognitively, is
not the same as living/experiencing the punctum. Is this then a case of the symbolic as
mediation imposing itself over immediacy?
As might be anticipated from the philosopher of technics, there is no image that is
independent of the technology, or medium, that makes its incarnation possible. There is, in
short, no image in general (Stiegler 1996b: 165). The photographic image receives its allure
from photography, as the painted image receives its allure from the medium of paint. Viewed
in terms of Barthes’s essay, it is the medium (analogue photography) that brings the past into
the present. This is very different from Sartre’s approach. For him, there is an image in
general and the medium becomes entirely incidental. Whether we see an image evoked by a
photograph, a painting, a caricature, or even words on the page makes little difference to the
working of the image for Sartre. Each medium, equally, is the registration of the thing in its
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absence. This should now be understood as a limitation in Sartre’s approach. For Barthes, by
contrast, only analogue photography is able to do justice to the noema of the photographic
image: ‘it has been’ – time itself. Only analogue photography, where there is a continuous
relation between the photographic process and the real (or rather, where the photographic
process itself is an integral part of the real), can be an ‘emanation’ of the past itself and thus
the bearer of the uncanny sense of imminent death. Everything would thus seem to be in the
technology and not in a transcendental image. It is as though the photograph were a kind of
time machine capable of transporting the viewer into the past (Barthes calls it a ‘bizarre
medium, a new form of hallucination’ (Barthes 1980: 177. Barthes’s emphasis.)). Not only
this, but as time (borne in the medium of the photographic process) is now the punctum (=
sting, or prick, of immediate impact, like being pierced by an arrow), the medium is the
experience of immediacy: ‘with Photography, my certainty is immediate’ (Barthes 1980:
177). This again recalls the trace. Even more: the medium (light marking a chemically
prepared surface) is, in this analogue technology, essentially a process of immediacy: it
happens at the speed of light. Strictly speaking this process of immediate impact cannot
ultimately be named; it is external to the symbolic order, properly speaking. As Barthes puts
it: ‘What I can name cannot really prick me’ (Barthes 1980: 84). What can be named cannot
be absolutely unanticipated and contingent (as is the punctum). The punctum, then, has about
it the unpredictable quality of chance: ‘Through the photo the chance of the punctum pricks
me (me point)’ (Barthes 1980: 49. Barthes’s emphasis.).
To summarise: with the punctum, the medium and immediacy coincide and the image
becomes time as such. It is clear also that the punctum connects to, and impacts upon the
body: the body as affect. It is to this theme to which we now turn in our effort to clarify the
role of immediacy in the digital image.
16
Embodiment as Medium
When Barthes encounters a photographic image, or when the spectator confronts the cinema
screen, is it simply a matter of the content of the image impacting on the viewer? Or, on the
contrary, is it a two way process, where the image would trigger effects in the
viewer/spectator, in both a bodily and cognitive sense (assuming for the moment that these
can be separated)? For his part, Mark B.N. Hansen argues decisively that it is a matter of a
two-way process, and that those (like Deleuze in his philosophy of the cinema image, where
images become disembodied) who do not allow for the viewer input in relation to images risk
reviving a tired Cartesian separation of mind and body. Let us say, then, that the punctum is
precisely an example of the kind of two-way process to which Hansen is alluding, and which
he has called ‘embodied reception’ (Hansen 2006: 298). For the Barthesian concept entails
that, without the slightest premeditation, a detail of the photographic image can immediately
trigger an effect in the viewer, an effect that cannot be gleaned – as one might do in terms of
classical pedagogical theory – from the image itself. In short, viewer reaction cannot entirely
be ‘read off’ from the image itself.
Addressing this issue, Mark Hansen’s approach is to bring us up to date on the nature of
‘medium’ in relation to the image. Thus, Hansen writes:
The multitude of contemporary critics who focus on the medium – and on media (that
is, medium in the plural) – as part of an objective domain or thing-world that is
autonomous (or potentially autonomous) from the world of human action and
communication simply fail to take stock of this difference. They fail, that is, to
recognise that the medium, and mediation as such, necessarily involves the operation
of the living, the operation of human embodiment (Hansen 2006: 300).
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And he adds:
The medium, we might say, is implicated in the living as essentially technical, in what
I elsewhere call ‘technical life’; it is the operation of mediation – and perhaps also the
support for the always concrete mediation – between a living being and the
environment. In this sense, the medium perhaps names the very transduction between
the organism and the environment that constitutes life as essentially technical (Hansen
2006: 300)
Medium now ceases to be ‘artifactual’ and becomes an ‘environment for life’ (2006: 301). As
an ‘environment for life’ – as culture, for example – the medium is immediately given. It is
an immediacy for the human in the sense that the technical (in Stiegler) exists in a
transductive relation with the human. That is, the human and the technical are co-original:
they come into being simultaneously. The human cannot be defined separately from technics
because technics is part of what it means to be human. This is illustrated by the apologia of
Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus, as analysed by Stiegler. It was Epimetheus who was
given the responsibility of allocating qualities to all living creatures. However, he left humans
until last in the distribution and ran out of qualities. So while the animal is self-contained
requiring nothing technical or cultural to be what it is, humanity is human to the extent that it
requires a supplement (a ‘what’) to be ‘who’ it is (Stiegler 1998:185-203).
Technics is thus the medium of the human (of life). But ‘medium’ cannot be reduced to the
media – to media artefacts, as is the case in the work of Friedrich Kittler (Kittler 1999).
Rather, the medium is, as we have noted, the environment in which humans live – the means
other than life through which humans are human, as Hansen puts it. Humans live in a medium
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(technics) as fish live in the medium of water, even though, in seeing the fish one does not
see the water.
It may seem that we have strayed from the theme under discussion: the image as
immediacy, but in order for immediacy to have any real purchase it is necessary to have a
clear grasp of medium and mediation. On this score, while we can well appreciate the
punctum as time (the past that wounds me) and as an immediacy in analogue photography,
other forms of the image are not so easy to explain in such terms. For Stiegler, this simply
means that it is not possible to speak about the image in general because each image is
beholden to its mode of incarnation in technics (= medium). ‘The medium is the message’, to
reiterate McLuhan. Interaction is the key. As we shall see, things come to a head in Hansen’s
theory with the emergence of digital technology.
Taking up Kittler’s view that digital technology entails that there is no longer a phenomenal
form of the image – only unconfigured, disembodied information – Hansen proceeds to argue
that such a situation throws the emphasis onto the process of human embodiment in a new
way. Lack of the digital’s material incarnation is not a loss, but an opportunity, an opportunity
taken up by, amongst others, VR (virtual reality) artists. Now, the image can only be
embodied at the level of the receiver and not at the level of the sender – the latter always
having the problematic form of a ‘one-way street’: the receiver was always a passive receiver
and not an active – interactive – part of the process. It is in this context that one can
appreciate Hansen’s leaning towards Donald M. McKay’s theory of information (Hansen
2006: 298). For McKay, Claude Shannon’s physicalist theory of information was a one-way
circuit: what was put in was – if noise was eliminated or kept to a minimum – was what was
received. There is no meaning because no receiver activity can be accommodated. McKay, by
contrast, argues that interpretation is an ineliminable part of the system, and that therefore the
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receiver (whether physical or biological) is always part of the process. Interactivity – or even,
performativity – is thus always part of the information process.
The principle of interactivity is explored and analysed by Mark Hansen in his appreciation
of the work of the video artist, Bill Viola (Hansen 2004b: 584-526). Also included in
Hansen’s commentary is Douglas Gordon’s work, particularly 24 Hour Psycho, which, as the
title suggests, is Hitchcock’s masterpiece slowed down to two frames per second (in lieu of
24) with the aim of making previously imperceptible (but not necessarily non-experienced)
aspects of the film available for scrutiny. Gordon’s work, then, is, in the field of film and
video, the first to throw the emphasis of the film experience onto the affective response of the
viewer to images rather than on the inscription of images in the spectator’s mind – a process
orchestrated by the director. The latter effect is characteristic of Deleuze’s ‘time-image’,
where it is still a matter of the image being inscribed into circuits of the brain rather than the
brain and affectivity providing a creative, emergent, response to the provocation that is the
image, or images. In short, everything is in the reception. As Hansen argues in commenting
on Gordon:
Accordingly, the time-image Gordon foregrounds is one that must be said to occur in
the act of reception and, more specifically, in the concrete activity performed by the
embodied viewer-participant as he or she grapples with the specific problematic
staged in the various works. Contrasted with Deleuze’s conception, Gordon’s work
thus relocates the time-image from a purely mental space contained, as it were, within
or between the formal linkages of a film to an embodied negotiation with the
interstice or between-two of images that necessarily takes place through the affective
experience of each specific viewer-participant. For this reason, Gordon’s work
exposes the fundamental limitation of Deleuze’s conception of the cinema of the
20
brain: the isomorphism between the cinema of the time-image and the contemporary
brain (Hansen 2004b: 592-593).
If it can be said, too, that the emphasis on reception takes immediacy to a different plane than
the one we have been used to, this is because reception becomes the very basis of access to
the image as such. For, at least at the level of affectivity, the image is immediately embedded
in its reception, so that there is an absolute coincidence between sender and receiver with
respect to the images in play.
As if to clinch the point, Hansen looks at Viola’s Passions series videos (Anima (2000),
Delarosa (2000), Quintet of the Astonished (2000), The Locked Garden (2000), Observance
(2002)) (still images from these works are reproduced in Hansen 2004b: 585-586; 587-588;
612; 618; 624-625), the result of the artist having shot video footage of people in various
emotional states at very high speed and played them back at normal speed.7 Hansen’s point is
that the emotional intensity of the images cannot be separated from the emotional intensity of
the response. This emotional intensity, Hansen calls ‘life’ – otherwise: embodiment,
affectivity, passion. Just as Bataille’s notion of continuity8 erases boundaries, so affectivity
can be characterized in terms of a similar property. With affectivity, it is never a straight-
forward matter of image-affect on one side being communicated to a receiver on the other.
On the contrary, once again, sending and reception are immediately inseparable. In Hansen’s
words: ‘what his [Viola’s] work sets into correlation is not an object and a consciousness so
much as two modalities of living presence itself qua the meeting of subject and world’
(Hansen 2004b:616). In sum: ‘the very distance separating the image from the spectator
collapses’ (Hansen 2004b: 617). New digital media thus manage to tap into the affective
7 For Anima, one minute of shooting time gives 81 minutes of play-back time. (Hansen 2004b: 587) Quintet of the Astonished, one minute of shooting speed gives 16 minutes of play-back (Hansen 2004b: 612).8 Already noted in relation to Sartre’s approach to the image (see above p. 12).
21
aspect (= life) of experience, an experience which, ironically, is rooted in the process of
continuity (affectivity) rather than the discontinuity that is the hall-mark of the digital. Such
continuity – such affectivity – cannot be perceived, let alone objectified. It is lived. It is the
very living of the image itself:
Viola’s videos might be said in fact to overgrammatize [grammatization = all forms of
inscription] life, to capture it in a form that cannot be apprehended through normal
perceptual means but only through the modality of affectivity that is life. In short,
they bring us face to face with life and, in so doing, call forth our own vitality as the
medium for experiencing life. In the process, moreover, they break the time barrier
that until now has restricted media to the task of reproduction, for the life that Viola
captures is not in real time but is, literally, faster than real time’ (Hansen 2004b:620).
With the move to the absolute primacy of reception (but not of perception) we have arrived
at the final phase of our deliberations on immediacy and the image. It is a phase that Hansen
argues is more insightful than either of the approaches of Gilles Deleuze or Bernard Stiegler
on cinema precisely because their theories ultimately privilege, according to Hansen, mind
over body, the content of the message/image as communication over its reception – that is,
over embodiment and affectivity. Can we really leave things here? To go further into an
evaluation of Hansen’s approach would take us too far a field. There is, however, the issue of
the aesthetic dimension of the image as aisthesis9 that needs elaboration and illumination, as
there is the question of the fact of digital technology within which – or in relation to which –
the body becomes the site of the activation of affect. To what extent can experience as affect
also be an aesthetic experience? Stiegler takes up this issue in a discussion of aesthetics and
politics and links the poverty of aesthetic experience to what he calls ‘symbolic misery’
9 Aisthesis is variously translated as sensation and as perception, but could also be linked to affect.
22
(Stiegler 2004: 17-40, especially 33). Hansen has responded sympathetically to this point (cf.
Hansen 2006: 305). But prior to this he effectively dismisses aesthetics and art,
conventionally understood: ‘Let me posit that this emphasis on the dynamic coupling of body
and image (or intensive space) is the defining aesthetic feature of VR’ (Hansen’s emphasis.
2004: 167).
It is my view that we cannot allow things to rest there, as far as an aesthetic of the digital
image is concerned. For it effectively reduces aesthetic experience to digital experimentation
without adding anything more.
Aesthetics as the Connection Between Experiment and Experience
Overall, the aim – in addition to what Hansen has achieved – would be to explore the link
between digital art as an experiment (quantitative aspect) that gives way to experience
(qualitative aspect). Here, we can follow the current French meaning and the English
etymology of ‘experiment’ as experience. As is known, the term, experience (a trial or severe
test) is of religious origin. Digital art, it is thus hypothesised, is essentially experimental, and
therefore inevitably connected to experience and experience, in the fullest sense, is aesthetic
(aisthesis).
This focus on ‘experience’ also connects with Julia Kristeva’s work, where she points out,
in her essay on Proust, that in the religious and philosophical tradition of hermeneutics,
experience is a ‘co-presence with Being, when it is not a fusion with God’ (Kristeva 1994:
239).10
10
23
We want, then, to take an experiential and experimental approach. ‘Experience’ and
‘experiment’ become the terms that can guide a new approach to the image aspect of digital
art. In short, the art side of the digital can lead to an entirely new approach to visual digital
art, one that highlights the quality involved, an aspect so far mired in neglect.
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24
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