ABSTRACT
We have not done with the end of history, or the ends of art. We will be getting back to both. But before we do, a story or two. The first starts a long time ago. An old fable relates how humans have learned to mediate their relations to a world they don't feel themselves to be fully of, or belong to. According to the fable the first, pre-historical ‘media’ were images: two-dimensional, magical surfaces made up of interdependent elements that tempted the eye to wander between them, finding significance in everything and investing significance wherever it would. Patterns projected upon the landscape and the sky. Shapes scraped in the earth or indelibly incised upon a body. Or else, more lastingly as we have already seen, hand stencils and animal drawings on a cave wall, still visible to latecomers such as ourselves thirty thousand years or so later. What happened, though, or so the fable tells us, is that these images came to stand between human beings and the world. They came to stand ‘for’ the world, hallucinations of a world that was only ever ‘over there.’ So it was that, five or six millennia ago, a new technology– writing– was invented to explain the images. In the language of the fable, writing would transcode the two-dimensional surface into the one-dimensional line. Put slightly differently, it would translate the mythical and magical repetition of the same that occurred in images into the linear sequence of one thing after another: a way of rendering the world historically– as process, as ‘becoming.’ As if translation of the seen into the said could be a means of restoring images to the world that they were supposed to have been images of. A way, of sorts, of going home. As it was, though, magical thought crept into writing too. Soon enough texts no longer disenchanted, nor did they elucidate. They became too beautiful and true, they became too interesting in themselves– or too interested in themselves– not least when specialists of all sorts had to be called upon to explain what the writings were saying, to explain to people what their own writings were saying about themselves. Writing, then, came to stand between people and the world just as images had done, with the result that out of the critical and scientific thinking that writing generated another sort of image emerged. At the peak of the modern industrial age, just as literacy and the historical consciousness that went with it were becoming common in some parts of the world, so-called technical images or ‘techno-images’ were being developed. For example, around the mid-nineteenth century photography was invented, producing images that did not need to be decoded by specialists, whose significance appeared immediately on their surface, thereby trumping the opacity and exclusivity of texts and restoring images to daily life. Or such was the idea. This too, however, involved a kind of magic– this time of tricks and illusions and manipulative sleights of mind. Photography– not just the camera itself but the whole photographic universe, including the distribution, reproduction and reception of photographic images– came to function as a mysterious ‘black box,’ a sort of automatic apparatus in relation to which humans worked not as translators anymore but as functionaries, turning the apparatus around and about, playing with the apparatus creatively for sure, learning to exhaust its possibilities, but essentially feeding information in and taking product (‘images’) out, without really knowing what was going on inside the box to make the process work.
