At this point, before I will expose in greater detail historical and theoretical considerations about the image, I must present my personal intuition of what an image is. Why is the question of the image so urgent, so complex, so burning? Why has it been crucial all along yet never resolved? The question of the image is always, first, my – as in one’s own – question of the image or the question of my image, the question of self-image (l’image de soi). The first image, the primary image on which the whole edifice of a person is built and to which all the other ones reflect, respond, echo, bounce, partake, the invisible image at the basis of human nature, the image that allows for development, for being and existing, the awareness of oneself is an image of oneself in the world. I have an image. I am an image. This image is also immediately the image in the eye of someone else. Thus to have an image is to be in the image, there is a reciprocity – the baby in the mother’s gaze – and there is a necessary appearance – as being is appearing. Thus, it is not about Descartes’ solitary soul aware of its own existence or me myself thinking but about the other, the existence of another one than me. The question of the other is the question of the eye of the beholder in which I reside. The self-image is the precondition for any scheme, hence the condition for constructing an identity, a consciousness and starting to relate to the world and to others. The question of the image is a question of self-presentation in one’s eye and in the other’s, thus it is bound to be complex, psychological as well as philosophical, and it is subject to discord as opinions are always very subjective. In an age when the self-image has gotten its own term, the “selfie”, when she no longer reside in one’s imagination, consciousness or unconscious, but is surrounding oneself, looking back at oneself and being looked at by million other viewers at once, it is obvious and comprehensible that the relations have changed and need new interpretation.(1) These analyses must take into account continuity with tradition because, if the context and the technics are new, images have been around since ever: the term, as well as the variable “thing” (chose) it denotes, have always been there. Neurosciences come to my rescue: “Images can be conscious or non-conscious. Non-conscious images are never accessible directly. Conscious images can be accessed only in a first-person perspective (my images, your images).”(2) I see myself seeing.
My understanding of the image as an articulation implies that the image is the building brick of our existence, the puzzle piece of our reasoning. By articulation I don’t mean a simple joint but an articulated component, more like a hinge, the interlocking form that composes thought in its fundamental activity. It is like the super understructure that is reliable to make this activity not only possible but to develop it and extend it further. This means that if images are fundamental for the formation of thoughts in the early stages of development together with other senses in a holistic manner, they do not stop to be of use when language appears contrary to what is often implied. Language is another form of expression that coexists and acts on other senses including sight. The question of the image is fundamental for me because it belongs to the micro and the macro, to the infinitely intimate and to the infinitely universal, because it is in the same time a question of society and a question of psychology. It is thus assuredly why it’s such a tough and moot subject, one that reveals as much affect as effect, as much emotional as rational.
The image is the world according to Bergson. I agree: the image, it is my body.(3) It is with her and through her that I construct myself psychologically and emotionally as well as intellectually. She is my deepest self, my being. I am not what I think but what I see in front of my eyes, lids open or closed. I conceive myself. I conceive the world. I am in the gaze of my mother, in the gaze of my father, in my gaze and in the one of others. This image is composed of images; this faceted mosaic is my most intimate me. I can only perceive the world from this very image and not just form my senses. This image that makes me be (qui me fait être), she is the first articulation, the piece of the puzzle to which all the other will attach. The image is thus the first relation: the founding stone, she is consciousness. Its value for knowledge is thus absolutely intrinsic because it is thanks to her that the cognitive processes and processes of acquisition can take place. But because she is unique and emotional, she does not allow the ontological distance, rational and dogmatic, that the text, a code, can have. It is for this reason that it is easier to converse in words than in images. Rationality and objectivity are the attributes of text, which responds with docility to rules and norms (grammar, orthography, syntax, etc.), whereas the image does not recognise any such constraints; she is untamed and spontaneous. Of course formats, layers and frames can be applied to the image too and she will play along but it is not in her own nature. Images can follow syntactic and semantic readings but these are grids that are applied on top of them and don't belong to them. Just like Vasari exhorted his pupils to form an image according to linear precepts, this is artificial. The image is organic, “sentie, ressentie, pressentie” felt, experienced, foreboded through the entire body.
As a thinking being, a photographer, a philosopher, a writer, I constantly negotiate from my image with my image all the other images. It is thus, the image is the articulation of thought, is at their source, for me, while always and simultaneously referring to other images that preceded and will succeed her. My image is what allows me to be in dialogue with the world, it is she that forms constellations, she that spruces up (ressurgit), she that hides and reveals. It is through her because she is complex and multiple that connections can take place. With the image, there are no linguistic obstacles: nothing is lost in translation. My image is made of appearances, of visibles and invisibles; it is what I see of me in the world, what the world sees of me. When the image is facing me, is looking at me, this is exactly what it means. She is also my consciousness outside of my body and as such affects me. How can the image be at once in another site and in me simultaneously? If, according to Emanuele Coccia, the image is what exists outside itself, it means that in order to be me, I must also be outside myself. This happens on the surfaces of things and in the eyes of the beholder, since the primary conditions, the default context is the existence of a world and the presence of the other. We are not alone in a void. What Coccia calls the “metaxu” is what I would call the “fasciae”: the environment in which images habit and which links beings to the world, the inside to the outside. Thus the image is something metaphysical but altogether completely immanent. She is at the heart of things and beyond: she partakes of one world, of a quantic world in which objects are linked outside of classical laws, which are the ones of the text. If the question of the image has become so fundamental today, it is also because we are getting closer to her every time. Or because she has changed and is becoming much closer to reality, so that now we can finally clearly understand that images are reality and not its representation.
In truth, there is no origin. It is the written form of language that makes possible the concept of an origin and that has invented the origin along with the invention of history. The image is not at the origin of anything; she is simply there before being, before seeing. In the image there is no beginning, no end: she is not pretending to be the alpha and the omega. There is simply always something else before, thus there is no origin of thought to be searched for nor found but an evolution, a development, a suite. There is always beginning. The image is thus everything we have ever seen and are seeing independently from medium or support, the image-object being only one type of image amongst others. And amongst the infinite and incessant flux, the act of image is precisely this: the blink of an eyelid, the “click” renewed at each moment, the “it is” always here and now, that forms appearance and life as we know it. The image is intimately linked to the perceiving subject, who is in turn perceived.
All is very simple. It starts from a feeling, an intuition that what I am being taught isn’t quite right, there’s a glitch, something doesn’t match how it works out for me. This leads me to the conviction that images (and not texts) are at the core, the fundament of the thinking process. Images allow thoughts to form, to elaborate, to complexify. Thus I need to look around me to find it historically and philosophically. I need to understand and to verify this personal conviction. Indeed many discuss images in lots of interesting and novel ways but somehow those discussions are always fragmented around artefacts and hindered by the text barrier. In the first and second part of my research, I explore how others before me have understood the image and I discover a lot of fascinating propositions, lots are really good but also often contradictory. This puzzles me first until I realise that it is only normal, since it is such a complex and multifarious subject often based on religious bias, cultural prejudices and historical misconceptions. This leads me to refining my understanding of what is at the start a heuristic way and for this I must step into history of writing and psychoanalysis and neurosciences. Once it is clear, although perhaps not so much “how” it works but that “it does”, not just because it works for me but for many others, I can apply it to make sense of the status of images today and explain how they are finally “out there” like they are “in here”. The last part can thus focus on the actual “technical image” per se as defined by Flusser and what difference she makes. How she works on a micro-temporal level, how she forms the collective unconscious, how models must change consequently. How we must let images resurface to guide us, inform us as in supply us with form, deform us as in make us become different. How we must unlearn and get back to some essential phenomenon of practice. One thing is certain in this very personal quest, if my studies in photography and art history, my practice of photography and my work with contemporary art have nourished, and still do to some great extend on a regular basis, my knowledge and curiosity for images, I have come to realise that their inherent theory do not bring any answers. This is why I have turned to philosophy, to neurology and psychology in an attempt to distance myself form the object and concentrate on the thing, on the image as a thing. Una cosa mentale.
(1). In this section the image will have a feminine gender ; she is me and I am her.
(2). Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1st ed (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 318.
(3).Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit., 10. “L’image: c’est mon corps.”