Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age

Daniel Rubinstein, Daniel Rubinstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000699685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art contemporain

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age challenges orthodoxies of photographic theory and practice. Beyond understanding the image as a static representation of reality, it shows photography as a linchpin of dynamic developments in augmented intelligence, neuroscience, critical theory, and cybernetic cultures. Through essays by leading philosophers, political theorists, software artists, media researchers, curators, and experimental programmers, photography emerges not as a mimetic or a recording device but simultaneously as a new type of critical discipline and a new art form that stands at the crossroads of visual art, contemporary philosophy, and digital technologies.

1 The New Paradigm

Daniel Rubinstein

One way to begin to build the needed apparatus is to use the following approach: to rethink the nature of nature based on our best scientific theories, while rethinking the nature of scientific practices in terms of our best understanding of the nature of nature and our best social theories, while rethinking our best social theories in terms of our best understanding of the nature of nature and the nature of scientific theories. ¹

This book is about the formation of a discourse on images that has been waiting in the wings for some time. A wider context for the emergence of this discourse is the crumbling of a system of thought that is called metaphysics. That this linear and historical model of comprehending the world is being replaced by a new paradigm ushered in by a constellation of accelerated developments that can be variously described as ‘algorithmic’, ‘ecological’, ‘new-materialist’, ‘fragmented’, and ‘holistic’ is generally recognized. What is less well understood is how this departure from the representational discourse affects the photographic image. A belief still lingers in the ability of the photograph to represent people, events, and situations, in its power to aid recognition, memory, description, and archiving, as if these powers can be retained independently from the new discursive practices that are driven by algorithmic, neurological, and quantum models.

Perhaps it is because we are so used to placing great trust in photography’s ability to describe reality truthfully, to represent it faithfully, and to report it accurately that we grew accustomed to believing that these powers of representation and description are somehow outside the movement of history and time, giving us a universal power of comprehension that is immune to the failures of our own limited experience. In allowing ourselves to be persuaded that our cognitive skills place us above our own human, fallible, and mortal nature, we became a little like gods, and the ability to represent the world as a picture is for us more than a way of seeing – it became akin to theology, i.e. something larger than the finite trajectory of human life that bestows on it universal and eternal values of ‘truth’, ‘understanding’, and ‘knowledge’.

And yet, this understanding of photography as a reliable representational mechanism cannot be reconciled with what we now know about the world and ourselves. Briefly stated, these new understandings are: first, the centrality to contemporary culture of generative algorithms introduces elements of undecidability, randomness, and unpredictability into all aspects of life.² Second, new insights into the structure of the brain suggest that the higher brain functions (i.e. rationality) cannot operate independently from instincts, desires, and gut responses, overturning the Cartesian intuition that rationality and emotion can be split asunder.³ And third, the new conception of matter that is derived from quantum physics indicates that matter is not solid, independent, and self-contained, but can be better described as an entanglement between bodies and techniques, organic and inorganic, artificial and natural, mind and body.⁴

At bottom, these new models reject the foundational premises of the Western tradition: subject-object, image-thing, form-content, identity-difference, substance-essence. What replaces these notions is not a single unified theory but a constellation of loosely connected developments that reject the belief in the existence of an ‘objective reality’ that exists independently of our attempts to grasp, picture, modify, and analyze it. These developments are incompatible with the representational model of knowledge, which grounds truth in the ability of the mind to produce legible images of fixed and knowable nature. In every case, hierarchical structures of control-and-command give way to disjointed and fragmented processes driven by artificial intelligence, random and contingent assemblages, and automated models of decision-making.

Genealogy of Representation

The representational model is based on a two-fold principle that underwrites most knowledge systems of Western civilization. The first part is drawing a limit, a dividing line between two kinds of entities: theoretical (spiritual) and material (corporeal). This is a fundamental (but ultimately false) distinction between what something is and how it is described. The word apple describes a fruit with crisp and sweet flesh (

), but the word apple cannot be bitten into, even though both apple and

mean the same thing. Images and objects are forever conceptually separated and belong to different categories: images are clones of objects, never the other way around. There is no gray area, no twilight zone that permits the existence of entities that are part matter and part spirit. Form and content are not only conceptually separated, they are also defined in opposition to each other, so an image is that which is not an object and an object is that which is not an image. In the same way that Newtonian (classical) physics considers mass and energy as separate and categorically different entities, representation understands the image as absolutely and ontologically distinct from an object. The second part of the representation principle establishes a fixed standard that is shared by all the disciplines and all the faculties of human perception. For while representation admits that change happens, the one thing that never changes is representation itself. For that reason, there is a hierarchy and stability in the representational model that is universal, ahistorical, and eternal.

Because representation is so deeply woven into the flesh of the Western subject it is more than a methodology, it is its methadone. Marx famously remarked that religion is the opium of the people, but he forgot to add that representation is their legal high. Indeed, the sociopolitical function of representation is not dissimilar to that of religion: both establish a hierarchy, a given-once-and-for-all order, an eternity of clones destined to repeat the same thing over and over again. It is not an accident that Immanuel Kant offers representation as the mechanism that will free men from the bondage of the Middle Ages, for representation holds the keys to a knowledge that does not require the authority of god, the priest, or the good book.⁵ However, representation is capable of this accomplishment because – like religion – it situates an external authority that men must abide by. Because it is invisible, tasteless and odorless, limitless and universal, representation commands respect as the law of the land, the totality that nothing is exempt from. As the basic premise of classical science, representation implies objectivity and disinterested observation guaranteed on the one hand by a clear-cut separation between the scientist and the object of study – so the scientist’s own material conditions do not affect investigation – and on the other by an assumed neutrality that allows the scientist to assert the universality of ‘his’ findings.⁶

Upheld by the conviction that the images and things belong to two ontologically distinct categories, the belief in the objectivity of representation reigned supreme until the appearance of photography in the 19th century, which presented metaphysics with an impossible conundrum: an image that is both distinct from and continuous with an object. According to the Platonic, Aristotelian, and even Newtonian models of knowledge, a chimera like this cannot exist. To say otherwise is to declare that mass and energy are somehow one and the same thing (as Einstein did in joining them as E = mc² – energy equals mass multiplied by speed of light squared – in 1905). Suddenly, the Platonic theory of knowledge – the 2,500-year-old fable of the cave (the sensual world is an illusion, true knowledge is accessible only to reason) – caved in, and the shadows on the walls of the cave started to mingle with objects as they appear in broad daylight. Plato’s cave gave way to the photographic exposure, which merges darkness with a flash of lightning in one techno-poetically enabled instant. Despite the superficial similarity between Plato’s cave and the photographic darkroom, photography suggested a radically different model of knowledge, for here the materiality of the photographic process is written directly into the image in such a way that the sensual and the rational, the process and the image, are fully entangled and indivisible. The conceptual, the physical, the social and the sensual are all mixed together in the outlandish moment of photographic exposure, overturning the metaphysical principle of the separate disciplines in charge of ideas (philosophy), matter (physics), society (ethics), and sense (aesthetics). The binary split between the conceptual and the material, which guaranteed the objectivity of the representational method, is destroyed by the photograph, for here the material and the conceptual are one and the same. In other words, the

is not more real than the photograph of an apple, for, at the last count, both

and apple are symbolic avatars of mass/energy. The fruit does not pre-exist its image, rather it comes into existence by the act of naming it. The image is raised to the dignity of a ‘thing’, and representation is revealed as a particularly persuasive conspiracy theory aimed at maintaining the fiction that ‘reality’ has an existence independent from our image of it. Through photography we come to appreciate the words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides (b. around 515 BC), ‘Thinking and Being are the same thing’.⁷

It is precisely because photography is both ‘thinking and Being’, i.e. an objectifying process and a material presence, that it is at one and the same time the fullest expression of the logic of representation and the very limit beyond which it cannot go. Photography does more than represent reality – it modifies our conception of the real as solid and intransient into a global network of self-replicating nodal points.

From Production to Information

It should hardly come as a surprise that photography can shed light on the deepest and most dramatic paradigm shift that befell Western society, because its invention coincides with the moment when said society moved from being invested in modifying the world (the problem of labor and machines) to being invested in information (the problem of thought and artificial intelligence).

Since its invention in the 19th century, the photographic image gave visual expression to the idea of ‘immaterial labor’ that is oriented not toward the modification of spatial-temporal reality (the world of work), but toward the production of information (data processing).⁸ It has done so by showing what happens to the real once it is placed inside a ‘black box’ – the photographic camera being its first instance and the prototype of all the black boxes that followed on from it.⁹

Whether a camera or a computer, a black box is a device with an input and an output. If you feed data into a black box, it will be output as information.¹⁰ Significantly, the kind of information that the black box outputs depends, not on the...