Synopses & Reviews
With the emerging dominance of digital technology, the time is ripe to reconsider the nature of the image. Some say that there is no longer a phenomenal image, only disembodied information (0-1) waiting to be configured. For photography, this implies that a faith in the principle of an evidential force of the impossibility of doubting that the subject was before the lens is no longer plausible. Technologically speaking, we have arrived at a point where the manipulation of the image is an ever-present possibility, when once it was difficult, if not impossible.
What are the key moments in the genealogy of the Western image which might illuminate the present status of the image? And what exactly is the situation to which we have arrived as far as the image is concerned? These are the questions guiding the reflections in this book. In it we move, in Part 1, from a study of the Greek to the Byzantine image, from the Renaissance image and the image in the Enlightenment to the image as it emerges in the Industrial Revolution.
Part 2 examines key aspects of the image today, such as the digital and the cinema image, as well as the work of philosophers of the image, including: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard Stiegler.
Synopsis
Through an examination of key moments in the history of the image as understood in the West, and in analysing contemporary theories of the image, this book aims to challenge the notion of the image as a thing, or object. In looking at Plato 's ontology of the image, the image in Iconoclasm, the symbol and the image in the Renaissance, as well as the conception of the image as inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution, the book establishes the basis for how the image is conceived in 21st century society--a point in history when the digital image is beginning to hold sway.
Lechte will show that early conceptions were more in tune with the idea that the image is a way of experiencing the world than is the case in Western, mediatised societies of the last 50 years, where the image is treated as an object much like other objects. To demonstrate the fallacy of this position, the book undertakes a new analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre 's philosophy of the image. The argument is that no approach to the ontology of the image is adequate if it does not take into account key elements of Sartre 's approach to the image.