ABSTRACT
The impetus for writing this book is to account for the sensuous materiality of ‘image’. Despite its varied forms of embodiment, an image is distinguished by its evocation of surface as opposed to depth, of senses as opposed to signs. I suggest that ‘image’ marks out the material identity or a genre of ‘things’; it is about showing and the manner of how something is shown. The project veers away from the resolute tone of deeming an image of its representational being, as one would claim ‘this is an image of …’, inflecting its indexical status. Instead, I propose to explore the sensuous manifestations of ‘image’; and what's more, to probe the ways in which they partake in the making of culture. Indeed, as with all projects, the object of my enquiry is clarified with certain theoretical dispositions and temperaments. For instance, the accent on ‘image’ aligns with Roland Barthes’ writing on ‘punctum’ or ‘obtuse meaning’ which addresses the affective capacity of photographic images for issuing intimate forces that percolate an image, a body, and a historical time. As such, the identity of ‘image’ is installed in the manner a photograph presents a subject—an ‘imageness’ of the image. I see ‘image’ as something that invites a ‘brute fascination’, a mode of receptivity noted by Jean Baudrillard that's tied to the allure of modern media images—‘unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgements’ (Baudrillard, 1984: 27). 1 And I attach to ‘image’ by way of their sensuous address to the spectator, a relation akin to the American theorist Tom Gunning's attraction to early cinema, the exhibitionistic impulse of which ‘directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle …’ (Gunning, 1986 [1990]: 58). If early cinema epitomises ‘exhibitionistic confrontation’ as opposed to ‘diegetic absorption’, I conceive a general identity of ‘image’ based on its ‘exhibitionistic’ character (Gunning, 1986 [1990]: 58). This is to accord attention to the material efficacy of ‘image’ for addressing the act of showing and ‘making images seen’. 2 I also envision the book evoking a mood of enchantment which sees ‘image’ as less about copying the ‘real’ than enacting an actuality in its own terms. Thus, an ‘image’ is likened to an artifice, or art, which according to Jacques Rancière's image philosophy, marks ‘a turn of language that accentuates the expression of a feeling or renders the perception of an idea more complex …’ (Rancière, 2009: 6). Isn’t this also a criterion for marking out the identity of ‘image’, one that's based on their aesthetic capacity for enacting feelings and perceptions?
