Echographies of Television - The Discrete Image

The Discrete Image

"The Discrete Image" is an essay by Stiegler about the significance of the invention of digital photography and digital cinema. He begins by stating that "the image in general" does not exist. The mental image (the image I see in my mind) cannot be separated from the image-object (a painting, photograph, etc.), and the latter is always inscribed in a technical history. Just as Derrida showed that there is no transcendental signified (no meaning) which can be shown to precede its inscription in a signifier, so too there is no "transcendental imagery" which precedes the image-object. If the mental image and the image-object cannot be opposed, however, they are nevertheless different, first of all because the image-object lasts while the mental image is ephemeral. But if there has never been an image-object without a mental image, even so, there has never been a mental image which is not, in some way, the return of an image-object.

Stiegler identifies three stages in the recent history of the image object:

• in the 19th century, the invention of the analog image, that is, photography
• in the 20th century, the digital image, that is, computer-generated imagery
• at the end of the 20th century, the analogico-digital image, that is, digital photography.

This third stage is part of a "systematic discretization of movement," a process of "grammatisation of the visible."

Great moments of technical innovation "suspend" a situation which previously appeared stable, and impose a new situation. Analogico-digital technology is one such moment, in which what is undergoing an intense evolution are the conditions by which we perceive and, therefore, the conditions by which we believe. This is because the digital photograph suspends a certain spontaneous belief which the analog photograph bore within itself: it calls into question what Roland Barthes called the "this was" of the photograph, its intentionality (in a phenomenological sense). Although it is possible to manipulate the analog photo, this is as it were an "accidental" possibility, whereas manipulation is the essence of the digital photo.

Nevertheless, the "accidental" possibility of manipulating the analog image is something which had already been increasingly undertaken by the mass media in recent years. The ability to do so derives from the fact that even the analog photo is a technical synthesis, and as such exposed to an irreducible potential for falsification. For this falsification to be effective, there must be an alteration of what was, but there must also be a belief on the part of the viewer in the "this was" of the photo. Today, however, with the analogico-digital photo, the conditions of this belief are diminished, leading to a general doubt, and one which affects, for example, democracy. This doubt must be doubled by another doubt, a positive, resolute doubt leading to new forms of "objective analysis" and "subjective synthesis," and therefore to a new kind of belief and of disbelief. The doubt and fear caused by the analogico-digital image is therefore also what would make possible this more knowing belief.

The destabilisation of knowledge caused by digitalisation may induce fear, but analog photography also caused people to be afraid: "in the first photographs, we saw phantoms." Analog photography is the result of a "contiguity of luminances," that is, light reflecting from an object strikes photosensitive film, which is then developed with the use of light, producing a photograph which I see when light reflects from the photograph onto my retina. There is a definite chain of light events, connecting the moment the camera records an image and the moment the developed photograph is seen. This is, in a way, a matter of the past touching me in the present, of something coming to touch me from out of the night of the past. With the digital photo, this chain is broken, or decomposed: there is a treatment involved in the production of the digital image, reducing the image to binary code to be manipulated and adjusted, which does not require this contiguity of luminances.

Digitalisation is a form of "discretisation": whereas the analog photo relies on the continuity of the chain of luminances, and the continuity of the way in which the spectrum is recorded, these two aspects become, in the digital photo, discontinuous. Reducing the image to binary code means breaking the spectrum down into discontinuous elements which can be treated in any way whatsoever. Yet the analogico-digital photo does retain something of the chain of light events which characterised the analog photo: insofar as it remains a photo. At the same time, however, there is no way for the viewer to know what aspects of the photo are actual records of a photographic event, and which parts have been altered, added, or subtracted, in a way completely disconnected from the photographic process.

Extending the analysis conducted by Walter Benjamin, Stiegler delineates three kinds of reproducibility which constitute three great epochs of memory:

• the reproducibility of the letter (first handwritten, then printed)
• the analog photographic and cinematographic reproducibility studied by Benjamin
• digital reproducibility.

The difference between the analog and the digital has traditionally been understood in terms of an opposition between the continuous and the discontinuous. The fact that the image has been understood as continuous in this sense is why it has been thought to resist semiological interpretation, which depends on the discreteness of the sign. But with the advent of the analogico-digital image, combining two kinds of reproducibility, it becomes clear that the image was always in a way discrete.

The production and realisation of images by an artist or filmmaker is a form of analysis, which treats images as discrete elements to be edited and assembled. The work of the spectator who puts this together in imagination as a "continuous" whole is a form of synthesis. That we experience the progression of images in film as a continuous movement is less the result of retinal persistence than it is of the spectator's expectations, which work to efface the editing. These expectations are always a question of the return of phantoms from the past: animation is always reanimation. Thus if the image is always discrete, it is so, as it were, discreetly, without drawing attention. But with digital technology it becomes possible not only to produce cinematic or televisual works in a new way, but to analyse and therefore interpret these in a new way—for example, to index images, camera movements, voices, etc.

In other words, digitisation "opens the possibility of new knowledges of the image." Discretising the continuous makes it possible to decompose the this was, and thus the spectator may come to have not only a synthetic but an analytic relation to the image. That this is possible is because the synthesis we make in our minds when we view an image happens according to conditions related to the technical synthesis effected by the recording apparatus. To view an image is to engage with that technical synthesis, and implies a kind of knowledge of the apparatus by the spectator that determines the conditions of the experience of spectatorship. So a change in the technical conditions of reproducibility will mean a mutation in the way in which a spectator synthesises an image. To each of the epochs of reproducibility corresponds three different kinds of belief. The fact that digitalisation makes very possible the representation of things which were never in front of a lens changes the conditions of belief, specifically the belief that photography is a matter of the return of the past in the present. As such, analogico-digital photography possesses a different spirit than previous photographic technology, because what the spectator knows about the image is that it has an uncertain relation to "reality": there is an irreducible non-knowledge inscribed in the spectator's knowledge.

Changes to the analytic capacities of the spectator inevitably produce changes in the way the spectator "intentionalises" imagery, that is, changes in spectatorial synthesis. This is similar to the way in which the alphabetisation of writing produced changes in the synthesis of language. It is the history and evolution of writing that made possible the critical and logical spirit which we attribute to language, and which we have until now not attributed to the apprehension of the image. Grammar claims to locate the rules of language, but as every language is always undergoing a process of becoming, and is never anything other than the sum of the "use" of that language by speakers, these grammatical rules can never be a matter of a "competence" which precedes those rules brought forth and invented in the course of linguistic performance. What this means for the analogico-digital image is that, as increasing analytical possibilities emerge from the technologies of the image, the descriptions and rules which emerge from these possibilities will at the same time mean the transformation of what is being described. The question is to know how to take advantage of these opportunities for transformation which will emerge from technological advances.

In other words, "the evolution of the technical synthesis implies the evolution of the spectatorial synthesis." As Derrida showed in relation to the sign, language is always already writing, a system of traces, composed of discrete elements. Stiegler proposes a similar hypothesis in relation to the image: "life (anima – on the side of the mental image) is always already cinema (animation – image-object)." Thus the evolution of both forms of synthesis, technical and spectatorial, occurs as one composed process, in what Gilbert Simondon calls a "transductive relation." The massive changes which will follow from digitisation are a chance to develop a "culture of reception." This is in contrast to the way in which Hollywood has taken up these changes: by opposing production and consumption, keeping analysis in the hands of the producers, and synthesis a matter for consumers. Changing this relation means creating a situation more like that of literature: one cannot read a work of literature without, in a sense, knowing how to write. A world in which the spectator will see the image analytically will also be a world in which "television" and "text" are no longer opposed.