Re: [-empyre-] Re: TechnoPanic

[Sean Cubitt <scubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

>
I've been thinking about this - without success. I think it is the  
grand gesture of 'the contemporary image' (this of course may not be  
Herzog's words / accurate translation). To the extent that there as A  
contemporary image, it is of course totalitarian. But there is no  
single image.

A difference between analogue recording of light and digital  
generation of same is that the temporalities are different. As  
Barthes says, recorded images always point towards the past; digital  
images, perpetually corruptible, towards the future they have yet to  
become

The crisis of representation arises when we fetishise representation.  
As digital images teach, it is not representation but communication  
that is at stake. The attempt to seize, as "the image" the  
necessarily fragmented condition of the world as if it were an  
aesthetic and complete Whole is justly in crisis because it is the  
adminisrtative ideological solution to the impossibility of living in  
a present torn to shreds by the conditions of contemporary capital

s

> the image always has a tendency towards the totalitarian. Hence Werner
> Herzog speaks of the inadequacy of contemporary images. I was  
> speaking about
> technopanic in terms of a simplification - a reducibility - of  
> metaphysical,
> general concept making, to the example, to the image, to a popular  
> form,
> where it founders, because of an irreducibility, and a complexity,  
> which
> credits a Repraesentationskrise with a certain actuality as an  
> event and
> which problematises - in the most abjectly historical sense - the  
> retinal
> (Duchamp), the illustrative (Bacon)... image making, whatever the  
> medium be.
> >
> simon taylor
> www.squarewhiteworld.com
>
>
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