I dream of an image…by Jean Baudrillard

Consider the literalness of the image. The image is not related to the truth. It is related to appearances. Hence its magical affiliation with the illusion of the world-as-is – an affiliation which reminds us that, whatever its content, the real (like the worst) is never a certainty and that, perhaps the world may do without the real and the principle of reality. I believe that images affect us immediately, well ahead of, at an infra-level to representation, at the level of intuition, of perception. In that sense, an image is always absolutely surprising. Or at least it should be so. Sadly, because of that, we can say that images are scarce. The force of images, most of the time, is cut off, deflected, intercepted by everything we want them to say for us.

So you can see there is a blur in the real. Reality is not focused. The world-as-is cannot be brought into focus (which makes it very different from the real world). Bringing the world into focus would refer to objective reality, so-called reality on the side of the objects, that is to say bringing it into focus on models of representation – as it happens when we bring the lens of the camera into focus on the object, aiming for absolute precision of the image. Fortunately, this definitive level of precision is never achieved. Full control through verification and identification of the world cannot be achieved. The lens displaces the object. Or the other way around. In any case, there is displacement.

There is an aphorism by Lichtenberg that speaks of “tremor.” Indeed, all gestures, including the most assured, begin with a tremor, like a fuzziness of motion. And there is always a trace of it left behind. Without that tremor, that fuzziness, when a gesture is purely procedural, when it is brought into perfect focus, we have something of the order of madness. So, genuine images are those which attest that tremor of the world, whatever the situation or the object: pictures of war, still-life compositions, landscape, portrait, art, and documentary. At this point, the image is something that belongs to the world, it is a part of its becoming, it participates in the metamorphosis of appearances. The image is a fragment of the hologram of the world. Every detail of it is a refraction of the whole. A nice metaphor for this is found in the movie entitled The Student of Prague. After selling his image to the Devil, he breaks up the mirror of representation (that is his lost image). Only then does he find his genuine image, in the shards of the mirror – and he dies.

The purpose of a photograph is not to document the event. It aspires to be the event itself. Logic will claim that, first, there is the event, first comes the real, then only will the image appear, to document it. Sadly, this is what happens most of the time. A more poetic sequence intends that the event has never taken place in an absolute sense, that it remains in some way a stranger to itself. Something of this strangerness survives in every event, in every object, probably in every individual. This is what the image must account for, or “develop” so to speak, and for this to be developed, the image itself must remain, in some way, a stranger to itself. It ought not to reflect itself as medium; it must not take itself for an image. It ought to remain a fiction, an echo of the irresolvable fiction of the event. The image must not be caught in its own trap; nor should it let itself be trapped by the feedback loop. The worst part for us today is the impossibility of seeing a world without feedback – so as not to have it recaptured, raptured, filmed, photographed, before we can even see it. That is lethal not only for the “real” world, but for the image itself, since, if everything is an image, the image is nowhere, at least as an exception, an illusion, a parallel universe. In the visual flow of events in which we find ourselves submerged, the image itself does not even have the time to become an image.

Can photography be an exception in the face of that outpouring of images, can it restore them to their initial power? To do so, the clatter of the world must be suspended; the object must be grasped at the only moment of true magic, the first contact, when things have not yet sensed our presence, when absence and vacuum have not yet evaporated …. In fact, it is necessary for the world itself to act out the role of the photographer – as if it had the possibility to appear to us outside ourselves.

I dream of an image that would be the automatic writing of the singularity of the world – after the Iconoclastic dream of Byzantium. The Iconoclasts held that the only genuine images were those in which the divine figure was immediately present – as in the veil of the Holy Face – an automatic writing of the singularity of the divinity, of the face of Christ, without any interference from the human hand. I have a dream of an immediate calque, like the reverse image of the negative in photography. The Iconoclasts rejected violently all other images, human-made icons that, according to them, were mere simulacra of the divine, acheiropoiesis.5 Similarly, we, modern iconoclasts, might reject all those images that are mere simulacra resembling the real, or an idea, an ideology, whichever truth. Most images are of that type, but virtual images even more so. They resemble nothing. This is exactly it. What is cheiropoietic? What is acheiropoietic? Isn’t the act of photography in this sense properly acheiropoietic? Automatic writing by virtue of light, without interference from the real or the idea of the real? Such automaticity would make photography the prototype of the literalness of a world from which the human hand has disappeared. The world as self-generator, radical illusion, pure trace, with no simulation, no human interference, above all without truth. If there is a product par excellence of the human mind, a cheiropoietic product, it has got to be the truth, objective reality.

Have we not had, ever since the beginning, the profound fantasy of a world functioning without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, exempt of all human intervention, the all too human willpower? What is so immensely pleasurable in poetic language, in le mot d’esprit, is to see language operate by itself, in its materiality, its literalness, without being mindful of meaning. This is what fascinates us so much. The same thing goes for anagrams, anamorphosis, the “figure hidden in the carpet.” Does not photography also operate as a means of revelation in both senses of the word in French – it develops, technically; and it reveals, metaphysically – “the figure in the carpet”? Italo Calvino wrote: “The lesson of a myth is in the literalness of its narrative. Every interpretation impoverishes the myth and strangles it. Better to meditate on each detail patiently, never abandoning its figurative language.”

Even dreams, in their psychoanalytic versions, lose their literal character. They fall prey to meaning and interpretation. Dreams, however, like myths, are cunning. They contest, like language in general, what we want them to signify. There is a cunning of literalness that goes against analytic exegesis and that resuscitates ever so subtly (is this not the secret of literacy?) the world-as-is, a world which is, literally speaking, only what it is.

These are the stakes nowadays. We are being faced with a new fundamentalism, a genuine fanaticism that, with the help of all the data provided by all the technologies, is taking us further and further from the literal and material world, further and further from a truly literal world, off toward a world technically “real.”