Echographies of Television

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Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (French: Échographies de la télévision. Entretiens filmés) is a book by Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. It was originally published in France in 1996, by Éditions Galilée. The English translation by Jennifer Bajorek was published by Polity Press in 2002.

Echographies of Television discusses a number of subjects, but the overall theme concerns the impact of technological acceleration, and in particular the social, political and philosophical significance of the development of digital media.

Contents

[edit] Contents

The book consists of three parts.

  • Artifactualities. This section is by Derrida, and consists of excerpts from an interview with Derrida published in the French journal Passages in 1993.
  • Echographies of Television. This section forms the bulk of the volume and consists of Stiegler conducting an extended interview with Derrida. The interview was filmed by Jean-Christophe Rosé under the auspices of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, on December 22, 1993. The interview was originally intended for broadcast on television, but this never took place.
  • The Discrete Image. The third section consists of an article by Stiegler, which was first published in Art/Photographie numérique. L'image réinventée (Aix-en-Provence: Cyprès, 1995).

[edit] Artifactualities

In "Artifactualities," Derrida begins by stating that "to think one's time" means, more than ever, thinking how this "time" is artificially produced, an artifact. He argues that "actuality" is always a matter of "artifactuality," involving selection, editing, performativity, and thus amounting to a "fictional fashioning."[1] Derrida therefore argues that we must develop a "critical culture" concerning this production of actuality, but he immediately appends three cautions to this statement:

  • the need to recall that despite the "internationalisation" of communication, ethnocentrism still predominates in the form of the "national"
  • advances in the domain of "live" broadcast and recording give the illusion of an actuality which is not produced
  • the artifactuality of actuality must not be used as an alibi, by concluding that therefore nothing ever happens and there is nothing but simulacrum and delusion.[2]

What is least acceptable in the media today, he argues, is to take one's time, or to waste time, and hence what is perhaps most required is to effect a change in the rhythm of the media.[3]

Derrida then asks what it means to be concerned with the present, or to do so as a philosopher. It may be a matter, he notes, of in fact being untimely, of not confusing the present with actuality. One must, on the one hand, take one's time, hold back, defer, while, on the other hand, one must rush into things headlong, urgently—one must be both hyperactual and anachronistic.[4] Derrida has never thought there to be an opposition between urgency and différance. If différance involves a relation to alterity which is a form of deferral, it is nevertheless also, and for this reason, a relation to "what comes," to the unexpected, to the event as such, and therefore to the urgent. We cannot oppose the event, which is the very possibility of a future—we only oppose those particular events which bring things which are not good. The performativity of the event exceeds all anticipation or programming, and hence contains an irreducible element of messianism, linking it to justice (here distinguished from law), as well as to revolution.[5]

Between the most general logics and the most unpredictable singularities comes "rhythm." If, for example, we could know in advance that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were doomed to failure, the pace and rhythm at which this occurred could only be understood retrospectively, taking into account causalities which had been previously overlooked, such as the way in which the fall of the Berlin Wall was immediately inscribed in a global telecommunications network.[6]

Politics must retain a sense of the unanticipated, of the arrival of the absolutely unexpected, the absolute arrivant. A politics which loses all reference to a principle of unconditional hospitality is a politics, Derrida argues, that loses its reference to justice. This may mean, for example, that it is necessary to distinguish a politics of immigration from a politics of the right to asylum, because the former presumes the equivalence of the political and the national (immigration policy is a matter for the nation-state), while the latter does not (since, for example, motives for immigration, such as unemployment, may fail to conform to immigration requirements, but nevertheless are a kind of dysfunction of the nation, if not indeed the indirect result on poor countries of decisions made by wealthy countries).[7] On this basis, Derrida provides a critique of the way in which borders are conceived by Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French National Front.[8]

It remains necessary, Derrida argues, to take up the battle fought by Enlightenment philosophy against the "return of the worst." As a struggle against return, it is a matter of a "law of the spectral," of spectres, ghosts, and phantoms. It is a matter of understanding that what comes back is on the one hand what must be fought against, and on the other hand irreducible, originary, and necessary. Thus when we are striving to remember the worst (for example, the complicity of the French state for the treatment of Jews during World War II), we are striving to recall the victims, but this means also to call them back, not just for the sake of a present, but for an ongoing struggle, and thus for a future.[9]

All this is a question of spirit and of inheritance. There is more than one spirit, and thus when we speak of spirit, we choose one spirit over another, affirm one injunction or interpretation over another, and thus take up a responsibility. To inherit is to reaffirm an injunction, but to take it up as an assignation to be deciphered. In so doing, we are what we inherit. We must decide, and we can only decide, on the basis of what we inherit, but these decisions are also the transformation of what we inherit, and therefore always also involve invention.[10]

Derrida concludes by stating that he does not believe in the return of Communism in the form of the party, yet he does believe in the return of critiques which are Marxist in inspiration and spirit. This new International without party, which does not accept the imposition of a new world order, must be more, Derrida argues, than a matter of being able to take the time to read Marx slowly and carefully, now that "Marx is dead." In this sense, it is a question of more than simply the elaboration of critiques.[11]

[edit] Echographies of Television

[edit] Right of Inspection

In "Echographies of Television," Stiegler begins by noting that Derrida, in agreeing to record their interview, asked for a "right of inspection." He asks Derrida why he did so, and what this would mean in the era of television and "teletechnologies."[12]

[edit] 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.[13]

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."[14]

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.[15]

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.[16]

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 into my field of vision. There is a definite chain of light events, connecting the moment the photograph was taken 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.[17]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Derrida, "Artifactualities," in Jacques Derrida & Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 3.
  2. ^ Ibid., pp. 4–6.
  3. ^ Ibid., pp. 6–7.
  4. ^ Ibid., pp. 8–10.
  5. ^ Ibid., pp. 10–13.
  6. ^ Ibid., pp. 16–7.
  7. ^ Ibid., pp. 17–8.
  8. ^ Ibid., pp. 18–20.
  9. ^ Ibid., pp. 22–4.
  10. ^ Ibid., pp. 25–6.
  11. ^ Ibid., pp. 26–7.
  12. ^ Stiegler, "Echographies of Television," in Derrida & Stiegler, Echographies of Television, p. 31.
  13. ^ Stiegler, "The Discrete Image," in Derrida & Stiegler, Echographies of Television, pp. 147–8.
  14. ^ Ibid., pp. 148–9. Note that most translations of Stiegler prefer "grammatisation" rather than translator Jennifer Bajorek's choice, "grammaticalisation." Stiegler describes grammatisation as follows: "What I call grammatisation is the process by which all the fluxes through which symbolic (that is, also, existential) acts are linked, can be discretised, formalised, and reproduced." Stiegler, Mécréance et discrédit 1. La décadence des démocraties industrielles (Paris: Galilée, 2004), pp. 65–6, n. 1. For evidence indicating why "grammatisation" is a preferable translation, see Stiegler, De la misère symbolique 1. L'époque hyperindustrielle (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 113.
  15. ^ Stiegler, "The Discrete Image," in Derrida & Stiegler, Echographies of Television, pp. 149–50.
  16. ^ Ibid., pp. 150–2.
  17. ^ Ibid., pp. 152–3.