Ghost in the Wire

First, the notion of an "immediate image" is problematic to me, as there is no image that would be immediate in any ontological sense, sense immediacy is the very thing denied by the advent of the image itself. This isn't to say that, thanks to the ubiquitous speed of digital/telecommunication technologies, that the speed with which these images manifest and proliferate may not appear to be simultaneous to and coterminous to the event. But even in this temporal sense, I think "immediacy" a limited word choice; these faster images are not in fact unmediated are precisely overdetermining in their mediation in that they often precede (conceptually and narratively) the events or objects they de-pict.

Second, there is a specificity to the mediation at work in language and images, and the differences between the two mediations is pretty vast. The critique of mediated democracy, the one so fearful of an overblown image-economy, takes the specific differences into account in a rather limited fashion. Images are fragmented, they void the possibility of interaction or saying, and they proliferate into a meaningless void, and so on and so on. I'm paraphrasing rather liberally here, but the point is that images are chastised for their singularity precisely in that images deny the sort of democratic opportunities afforded under political economies structures on other, more participatory forms of media (like speech). But if we take these specific political limitations of images seriously, we have to seriously reconfigure not just how these images play within political discourse. We have to also consider how these images are playing within our critical apperception, and in so doing, we need to ask ourselves: how can images that function through an inflationary, prolific, and yet artificial sense of immediacy, that refuse participation, and that produce such a fragmented polity somehow be so open, engaged, and easy to appropriate within our critical theorizing of them?

The answer, of course, is that images are precisely not narrative devices, and as such are always in the process of being appropriated by narratives not of their making. In effect, images are constantly being vitiated in their uniqueness through an act of critical or political or journalistic appropriation. Whatever the take, we cannot help but provide the caption to the image, which has as its more fundamental nature a decontextualized and distracting event. This is why Benjamin is still the first go-to thinker of the image: he was the first to recognize that the mechanical image, the reproducible image, produced a fundamental distraction, that this distraction included within it a politics, and that this politics of distraction was actually a good thing, precisely because it disrupted the hegemonic thrust of the narratives that function in a far more repressive fashion.

Just a thought. A few more, courtesy of something I wrote a couple of years back, more generally about questions of time and democracy.

One must begin to think about the ebb and flow of media time, and that critics and theorists that want to intervene in the current political climate need to learn to negotiate these different rhythms, rhythms markedly different from the rhythm of learning and academic thought, which is still today governed by the time of the printed word, or even more specifically the printed book. Media are everywhere, and, if we approach that the technics of these media as originary (rather than ancillary, as in Plato; debased as in Heidegger; or as a mystical, expository essence in Lacan), the task is not to reject or sublimate these media, but to negotiate them. Sylviane Agacinski agrees: "We cannot abstractly define the information techniques or public space naturally appropriate to democracy; we can only define the ways of making democracy vital using those means proper to each epoch."

At the same time, and this goes hand-in-hand with learning to negotiate with media, critics and thinkers must begin to assess the limitations and consequences of different ways of attempting to negotiate—an assessment that I have tied consistently to the delimitation of the spectral. How one theorizes the spectrality mediation carries with it profound political and ideological implications. At an obvious level, these theories, if actualized, tell us how to respond to these media, how to behave and navigate the terrain they have cleared for us. These behaviors have political consequences, to be sure. Should Neil Postman or Jerry Mander succeed in persuading readers or audience members to avoid the evil auguries of television, to expel or exorcise it, that success will (presumptively) lessen the force of the news cycle, the pervasiveness of sitcom culture, the diminution of brain wave activity produced by the cathode ray tube, and so on. This success will be hard pressed to be repeated with everyone – there will always be the specter of media to deal with – but even if limited to a few solitary individuals, it nevertheless carries with it effects both personal and political. The problem is that these effects may not always be beneficial. For on a less obvious level, these successes reinforce notions of human essence, an essence that continues to divide, despite technological advances and philosophical research that call such divisions into question, human from animal, cultured from uncultured, and knowledge from information.

Responding to these costs may not be a matter of choice or of permission. Like it or not, engage them or not, we nevertheless inherit them as our history. Iteration and citationality being what they are, these negotiations will in part structure the thinking of those technics (and their politics) in ways unforeseen by those engaged in the negotiations. Which is why what is needed as a supplement to these negotiations is a critical appreciation of inheritance, one that no longer presumes that the historical and philosophical thinking of technics can be approached passively, but that instead recognizes that all inheritance, chosen or not, "is an active affirmation, it answers an injunction, but it also presupposes initiative, it presupposes the signature or countersignature of a critical selection. When one inherits, one sorts, one sifts, one reclaims, one reactivates" (Derrida).

As always, it is a question of costs, and of course when it comes to politics the stakes are pretty damn big. But the biggest downside may have little to do with politics and a lot to do with the roundabout consequence of preserving a view of subjectivity that continues to think its political interactions as being constituted by an ideal and free of technicity. The problems associated with this preservation seem to me relatively obvious (in our take on disability, on immigration, on what counts as participation). Agacinski once again: the "issue is not one today of deploring the perverse effects of the media, but of rethinking and especially of revitalizing democracy in the era of its mediatization. An external struggle 'against' the media is not possible because there is no longer any exterior..."