Hopefully we have not all abandoned Ranciere before beginning here, but I've found some time to read the opening of it again for our nascent discussion.
First, to address Derek's apprehensions regarding Alexei's quotation, for comparison Elliot's rendering of the sentence is: "Through the rhetorical play of telescoped, independent propositions, it passes itself off as more than a tautology by identifying the general properties of universals with the characteristics of a technical device." (for those following at home this appears on pg. 2). To clarify, he cites Debray as an instance of a theory contrasting the Image against the Visual, the Other and Same (his jargon). Debray says, "The image here has its light in-built. It reveals itself. With its source in itself, it becomes in our eyes its own cause." As Alexei said earlier, "The typical, and useless, answer is to say that what differentiates the (artistic) image from reality is its mode of production. The former has a self-contained essence, something that is unique to its mode of production, something valuable in-itself." So Ranciere asserts that pointing out the technical properties of the image-producing device is tautological here. That a movie projector's source is opposite its projection whereas a TV's image is the only aspect of the projecting one normally encounters is obvious and belonging to the technology, the experience of the image's Other (I take it to be what the image represents here) has little to do with such technical distinctions. And related, again as Alexei said, "Simply put, technical elements do not exhaust the aesthetic concerns." >From here I am not entirely sure how this turned into a discussion about technical skill's role in art-object making. Neither Alexei's (first) commentary nor Ranciere's text bring it up, so I am object to something else. Consequently I question the thesis here, but for the reason I insist the medium is decisive. I do think watching TV and watching a film in a theater are qualitatively different experiences. This difference is socio-psychological to an extent, but, for one simple aspect of this difference apart from the customs and interactions involved in the process of and while sitting in a theater, on its own the magnitude of the screen alters the experience of that which is projected onto it. It is analogous to the difference between hearing a concert on the radio and attending it. In the case of the radio, the sound is compressed, frequencies are simply missing, even with a reliable receiver and a high-end speaker system, it will surely not even match a recording of it played off of CD with the same sound system. I consider music here because seeing musicians on a stage is not going to affect the sound, but the technical means producing that sound in the same room/hall as yourself, acoustics considered etc, of course do. My contention with this digression is that the image is affected, if for no other reason than the image's dependency on our experience of it for it to be an Image at all. It is not the essence of this series of scenes flashing on a screen, no matter how pixilated/distorted/unperceivable. More to the point, I do think artworks are not answerable to what they might represent nor are they exclusively presenting "content that is not subsumable by concepts" (borrowing Alexei's Kantian incantation). To avoid too much more repetition of Alexei's points thus far, once Ranciere provides an exposition of the current "regimes of imageness" ending with his account of art's movement from a representational regime to a non-representational one: "To resemble was long taken to be the peculiarity of art, while an infinite number of spectacles and forms of imitation were proscribed from it. In our day, not to resemble is taken for the imperative of art, while photographs, videos and displays of objects similar to everyday ones have taken the place of abstract canvases in galleries and museums. But this formal imperative of non-resemblance is itself caught up in a singular dialectic. For there is growing disquiet: does not resembling involve renouncing the visible? Or does it involve subjecting its concrete richness to operations and artifices whose matrix resides in language?" (pp. 7-8) The last statement summarizes his previous account of an image's constitution. Then comes the quasi-religious pronouncement, "A counter-move then emerges: what is contrasted with resemblance is not the operativeness of art, but material presence, the spirit made flesh, the absolutely other which is also absolutely the same." I quote all of this for preparation of (and hope that those without the book can follow if interested) his concept of hyper-resemblance. Opening the section "Image, Resemblance, Hyper-Resemblance" Ranciere argues that the separation of operations and technique to achieve first-order resemblance leads to a different order of resemblance: one that "defines the relation of a being to its provenance and destination, one that rejects the mirror in favor of the immediate relationship between progenitor and engendered: direct vision, glorious body of the community, or stamp of the thing itself." Further he characterizes this, "The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visible instead of the figures of discourse--this is what is demanded by the contemporary celebration of the image or its nostalgic evocation: an immanent transcendence, a glorious essence of the image guaranteed by the very mode of its material production." He goes on to present Barthes' concept of photographic images (his punctum/studium distinction) and interprets it as demonstrating that an image is a vehicle for a silent discourse and that precisely when it is silent the image speaks. He conceives of "the image as speech which holds its tongue." (pg. 11, paragraph before "From One Regime of Imageness to Another"). This is part of our experience of the image because the image is both raw, material presence and a "discourse encoding a history" (or at least in the case of Barthes' boyhood photographs). As I found I had hardly synthesized much that I read, I thought I would attempt to re-initiate this discussion even with more quotations and less synthesis, this will assuredly improve as I read on (and read ahead before I venture exegesis). What I find most unsettling at this point is that he seems to take this narrative of regime-change to be the case, that is, this last concept of the hyper-resemblant image to be the current model of image-making and reception. Some of this is good, I think his estimation of certain images, conceived under contemporary circumstances, as captured in the principle of a "reversible equivalence between the silence of images and what they say". Specifically I have in mind here the book I spent part of the weekend reading, Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. The reproduction of the photograph from Bergen Belsen amidst his first characterization of Le Strange, when "During the last War, the report read, Le Strange served in the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp at Bergen Belsen on the 14th of April 1945," --Image of Bergen Belsen covering two facing pages, bodies piled about this wood area, yet grainy and imprecise--" but immediately after VE-Day returned home from Germany to manage his great uncle's estate..." and on. After recounting Le Strange's progressive self-distancing, his demise and the carrying on of his house-keeper, the next section of narrative leads to his conjuring of Borges' Tlon. All of this I would hazard an analysis of for clarification, but the sheer interruption of that image, without a word of a more indeed is both the photograph and Sebald's narrative remaining silent, yet speaking to the unprepared reader, further elaborated in his passing reference to this story of the Uqbar encyclopedia article, in which a meticulous account of a fictional place can yet distort our understanding of the real world, positioned thus in a starkly realist literary work (as its interpretations of Dutch realist painting tangentially indicate) speaks over and again to what it is silent about. All of this is entirely too quick because I am rather tired now, but I think Sebald is exemplary here, his work is not hyper-resemblance, it is resemblance (he certainly provides the replica of reality), critically realist driven by memoir, art-criticism, travel guide, natural history essay...though it is also narrative in structure and readily accepting of its necessary illusoriness as such, it is still written as fiction. But it takes nothing to be illusion more than historical forgetfulness, the lack of connectedness between subject and history. -Brian -----Original Message----- From: Derek Allan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 7:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: The Fate of The Image Alexei RE;'1) Derek, we know that Ranciere maintains that art is not purely a technical or material endeavour. he says so: "He exchanges this tautology for something something more valuable by identifying, through a rhetorical play of telescoped and independent propositions, universal properties with the characteristics of technical device] (Fr. p 10, 1st section, 4th para)" So, much of the current conversation is pulling us away from the text in an unhelpful way.' I was simply responding to one of the propositions from Ranciere which you cited - which seemed to equate art with technical skill. As I said at the time, I did not follow the rest. As for the statement you cite which, you suggest, denies that proposition, what on earth does it mean? What is the 'tautology'? Not surely the proposition being denied. It may be wrong - I think it is - but it is not a tautology. And as for 'a rhetorical play of telescoped and independent propositions', I cringe when I read this sort of thing. Especially 'play'. I am so tired of that word. (Who do we have to blame for it? Derrida? ) Everyone 'plays' with ideas these days. As if explaining what art is were a kind of sophisticated game for bored intellectuals. And then the big finale: 'universal properties with the characteristics of technical device'. What on earth is that? What universal properties? And how can they have the 'characteristics of technical device'? And what are those characteristics anyway? Should we hope for an answer to any of that? I fear not.
