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I’m finally getting around to posting notes about “The Future of the Image,” a lecture panel at Columbia University last week featuring visual theorists W. J. T. Mitchell and Jacques Rancière. For an academic lecture, the place was packed–I arrived 15 minutes early and got one of the last seats. Many people were forced to stand just outside the auditorium and watch.

Aside from the fact that Rancière’s English made him difficult to understand (and moderator Jane Gaines kept calling Tom Mitchell “Tim!”), it was a great event. Below is the first part of my notes, paraphrased from what I understood of Rancière’s talk.

Jacques Rancière said…

…There are two catastrophic opinions about image and reality that are popular today. The first says that nothing is real anymore, because all of reality has become virtual, a parade of simulacra and images without any true substance. The second says that there are no more images, because an “image” is a thing clearly distanced or separate from reality–because we have lost the distance that enabled us to discern between images and reality, the image, as a category, no longer exists.

Actually, these opinions are different readings of the same phenomenon: the distance between images and reality has collapsed. To understand what any of this means, it’s important to figure out what an “image” actually is. Artistic images give us two things: they give us their status as a copy (their relationship to reality) and their particularly visual materiality (rather than discursivity or textuality). As copies, they are capable of both enhancing and dismissing anxiety [presumably via subject matter, then knowledge that they aren’t “real”]. They themselves are empty of meaning or feeling, but function as a set of displacements and substitutions in the minds of viewers. So we must think of them in terms of the operations they perform.

In particular, we must remember that representation was never about the realistic reproduction of anything. Instead, representation has always been governed by a set of rules, about what is or is not appropriate to represent. New images always take the form of a new regime of the representable and unrepresentable. The future of images seems to be a regime in which nothing is unrepresentable–which doesn’t mean that images or reality will disappear, but simply marks a new kind of imageness.

We might think of this in terms of looking at past examples of new imageness–for instance, the rise of photography. Photography carried out a new form of representation framed by literature itself, capturing the aesthetic of the prose poem. While Baudelaire is famous for denouncing photography, his prose poems appear to anticipate its eventual function in their early verbal version of the snapshot. Photography [like one of Baudelaire’s prose poems about people in a window that Rancière read] leaves the look mute and allows space for a multiplicity of meaning.

The phrase “the end of images” originates in a positive modernist strategy of replacement, a desire to take the images of the past and put something better in their place. That approach didn’t work, but the phrase still hangs in the air, and now it evokes something scary. [Namely, the two catastrophic readings the speech opened with.] The future or fate of the image shouldn’t be understood as a narrative with an end point, but rather as a realm of different possibilities; this speech (and Rancière’s book, The Future of the Image) is an attempt to chart a topography of the possibilities of imageness, and thereby avoid dour (and false) proclamations about the end of images and reality.