Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804761388 ISBN 13: 9780804761383

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? Releasing the Image understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jacques Khalip is Associate Professor of English and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is the author of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (2009). Robert Mitchell is Associate Professor of English at Duke University and author of Bioart and the Vitality of Media (2010).

Jacques Khalip is Associate Professor of English and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is the author of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (2009).Robert Mitchell is Associate Professor of English at Duke University and author of Bioart and the Vitality of Media (2010).

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Releasing the Image

FROM LITERATURE TO NEW MEDIA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6138-3

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................................viiContributors.....................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Release—(Non-)Origination—Concepts ROBERT MITCHELL AND JACQUES KHALIP.................................................11. "Self-Generated" Images PETER GEIMER.........................................................................................................272. Cézanne's Certitude JEAN-LUC MARION.....................................................................................................443. Nymphs GIORGIO AGAMBEN.......................................................................................................................604. From Fixed to Fluid: Material-Mental Images Between Neural Synchronization and Computational Mediation MARK B. N. HANSEN.....................835. When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound VIVIAN SOBCHACK..............................................................1126. Imaging Sound in New Media Art: Asia Acoustics, Distributed TIMOTHY MURRAY...................................................................1377. Three Theses on the Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, Bio-politics) CESARE CASARINO...............................................................1568. On Producing the Concept of the Image-Concept KENNETH SURIN..................................................................................1719. The Romantic Image of the Intentional Structure FOREST PYLE..................................................................................18110. Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN..........................................................................20411. The Tongue of the Eye: What "Art History" Means BERNARD STIEGLER............................................................................222Notes............................................................................................................................................237Index............................................................................................................................................281

Chapter One

"Self-Generated" Images

PETER GEIMER Translated by Michael Powers

1. "Not by man's hand"

One normally encounters the term "self-generated images" [von selbst entstandene Bilder] in scare quotes. Such quotation marks are, as a rule, a means of establishing distance. One writes down a term and yet flanks it at the same time with quotation marks in order to make clear that a certain measure of precaution concerning the statement should be preserved. Quotation marks are insignia of inauthenticity, rhetorical separators, or—as Jacques Derrida formulated it—"speech act condoms, to protect our language from contamination." In the case of "self-generated images," the unreasonable demand from which the scare quotes protect us exists in the presumption that an image (or a plurality of images) without any identifiable causation could be generated of its own accord. The image that "generates itself" seems to be a monstrosity, a non-thing [Unding], if one assumes that people produce images; that is, that images do not come into being absent an intentional act but are rather the results of conscious or unconscious intentions. Here, in this essay, this term will also be handled less as an empirical statement or historical finding, and more—like the quotation marks that accompany it—as an indicator of a problem area in image theory.

In Homo Pictor, philosopher Hans Jonas contends that "[t]he external intention of the maker lives on as intrinsic 'intentionality' in the product—the intentionality of representation, which communicates itself to the beholder." This stream of intentionality is suspended in the case of self-generated images. The effects of an authorship that has become problematic take center stage whenever terms such as "automatically," "randomly," "naturally," or "self-generated" images are utilized: there, where a subject, a motif, a conscious or an unconscious intention is typically at work, a void emerges, and the need to elucidate this latter is provisionally occupied by the formula "self-generated." Who or what the possible cause may be remains undetermined at first—the only certainty being that no person was involved. In this respect, speaking of a "self-generated" image is, as a general rule, a negative discourse: it signifies who is not worth considering as the producer of the image, and marks first and foremost an absence.

In what follows, I will briefly discuss an early image-theological application of this concept, in order to then develop a more extensive examination of the "autonomy" of photographic image practice. The Byzantine image tradition is well acquainted with acheiropoietoi, images not made by hand. It has been said of these images that they either miraculously generated themselves or arose through mere contact (with the countenance of Christ). Here already there are indications of an interest in the conditions of origination surrounding images. The question is not (or at least not exclusively), what does the image in question make visible? but rather, first and foremost, in what manner did the visible materialize? Both aspects, visibility and visualization, are inseparably interconnected to one another. The observation or veneration of the image draws life from the knowledge concerning its special mode of production; more specifically, from the knowledge concerning how it purportedly did not originate, through manual intervention. As Georges Didi-Huberman writes, it deals with "traces of the divine," whose meaning rests upon "non-contact of humans."

No medium is more strongly implicated in this idea of automatism than photography. The first photographic images, produced in the 1830s, made use of this notion of self-generating images, here serving as a rather suggestive interpretive model: "[I]t is not the artist who makes the picture," noted William Henry Fox Talbot, the pioneer of photography, "but the picture which makes itself." Once again, emphasis is placed on the absent intervention of the hand; again, the void initiated by the unique methods of production is occupied by supernatural and miraculous figures. The visibility of the image is ultimately bound to the specifics of its visualization. Photography, writes Talbot, is a "little bit of magic realized—of natural magic.... A person unacquainted with the process, if told that nothing of all this was executed by the hand, must imagine that one has at one's call the genius of Aladdin's lamp."

Later variations on this theme show that such an understanding of photography should not be explained solely in historical terms, that is to say, as a consequence of interaction with a new medium that is still unusual and in need of explanation. According to Mary Ann Doane, the negative definition of photography was applied as early as Peirce's meditations on indexicality. As is well known, Peirce classified photographs under the "index"...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804761388
• ISBN 13: 9780804761383
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 286
• Herausgeber: Khalip Jacques, Mitchell Robert, Agamben Giorgio
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland