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The Reign of the Image
Alan Rowan
In the 21st century the image, now mostly in digital form, reaches into every aspect of human life. It represents a shift in human culture on a par to the invention of the printed page, something which led to huge social and cultural change as people not only gained access to ideas, information, and knowledge that previously was out of their reach, but also encountered for the first time a world in which there emerged a multiplicity of opinion and perspectives on almost every aspect of lived experience.
It was the beginning of the end of the so-called “grand narratives” that had organised and deciphered human life (e.g., religion, the class system, etc.) and today we can draw the conclusion. Jacques-Alain Miller states it with great clarity when he writes, “In place of transcendental terms of structure, coming from an autonomous dimension, prior to experience and conditioning it, we have the primacy of practice. Where there was transcendental structure, we have a pragmatic, and even a social pragmatic.” (1) In other words, we live today within and through our networks that are bound together by routines and inventions, whereby, to again quote J.-A. Miller, “Everything now becomes a question of arrangement. We no longer dream of an outside. There are only trajectories, arrangements, and regimes of jouissance.” (2) This is the context in which the image now reigns within our post-modern era, one in which what we can call “the civilisation of the image” has definitively arrived.
Of course, this rise of the image, or what is also called visual culture, did not occur all at once. First came photography, invented in 1822, which brought, as Barthes states, a new object into the world: “in the photograph … the relationship of signified to signifiers is not one of ‘transformation’ but ‘recording’ … the scene there, captured mechanically, not humanly.” (3) In other words, the indisputable referent of the photograph is the object which appears in it (at a precise moment) and when we perceive it, we read it without the need for a code which might decipher it. Here the subject is directly addressed and persuaded that “this existed.”
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[1] Miller, J.-A., “Six Paradigms of Jouissance,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 34, 2019, p. 65.
[2] Miller, J.-A., “Milanese Intuitions,” ibid., p. 98.
[3] Barthes, R. (1964), The Rhetoric of the Image, in ImageMusic-Text, ed. S. Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1987, 2nd Edition, p. 51.
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