ABSTRACT
What do we see when we look at a fuzzy image? Searching for the clear image somehow concealed within a fuzzy image equals denial and is the same as not seeing at all. Fuzziness ignores the common conception of the image and transcends the world of visual representation. It loosens the bond between a picture and the thing represented. It transforms the image as a mimetic replication by relaxing reality’s grip on the image and breaking with the logic of imitation and documentation. If there is an agreement between the image and reality, fuzziness is the iconic gesture that gives notice of its withdrawal, opening the image and providing an entrance for the imagination’s intrusion. It is a visual mode for the simulation of the possible that is not only conceivable but retains rudimentary elements of the logic of the real. At the same time, it safeguards the image against being merely arbitrary and a pure construction by maintaining a degree of similarity. The fuzzy image hovers on the dividing line between representation and the dissolution of mimetic correspondence with the signified. It creates indeterminacy and ambiguity comparable to the relationship of images, masks, idols and sculptures to reality in pre-modern and primitive cultures. They do not represent, yet would be misinterpreted as mere fantasy. It appeals to the imagination to complete images, which are, by nature, incomplete and it prevents this process from ever being completed. Breaking the bond with the referent while simultaneously maintaining rudimentary similarities with it requires a great deal of attention on the part of the spectator. It draws the gaze into a sphere of undecidability that leads to disorientation, rattling it through insecurity, captivating and enthralling it. The dispersed gaze (der zerstreute Blick) that Simmel, Benjamin and other theoreticians of modernity considered symptomatic for the present is ill-equipped for the fuzzy image and will not find access to it. Rather, it is Wittgenstein’s dawning of an aspect (Aufleuchten eines Aspekts) 1 that seems best able to capture the image bathed in fuzziness. It requires a wandering view that is also searching and, furthermore, language. What is intimated in the fuzziness of a picture is fugitive and can be fixed only through narrative and interpretive language. More than the sharp image, the fuzzy image is empty without the absconding content being translated into linguistic structures. The fuzzy image is more lively and unpredictable than the sharp image, but this life is a potentiality and dependent on the imagination’s active involvement and linguistic transfer. Jorma Puranen: Shadows, Reflections and all that sort of things 17, 2001. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203363898/02274742-73d9-48a8-8aaa-4512272d1377/content/fig16_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
