Jean Baudrillard - The violence of the image

Question : do some images, some exceptional images escape from this double violence -
that of the image and that done to the image ? Is it any chance to escape from the
hegemonic overflow of the visual surrounding as to recover the original power of the
image - the vital power of illusion ?

At first we will point at three forms of violence. The primary form is that of aggression,of
oppression, of rape and spoiling : the unilateral violence of the most powerful. Another
form is that of historical, of critical violence, the violence of the negative

and the transgression,of revolt and revolution (included maybe the violence of analysis
and interpretation). Both are determined forms of violence - effects that are related to
specific causes and to whatever form of transesendenese, be it that of power, of history or
of meaning.

These are, I would say, the violence of the first type and of the second type. But now we
have to deal with a violence of the third type, a very different one. More radical and
subtle : the violence of deterrence, of consensus and esontrol, of hyperregulation and
deregulation altogether - the violence of the virtual, a metaviolence in some way.
Violence of forced consensus and interaction, which are like the plastic surgery of the
social. Therapeutic, genetic, communica-tional and informational violence, but, first of
all, NEW the violence of transparency, which tend to eradicate, by the way of
prophylaxis, of physical and mental regu-lation, the very roots of evil, of negativity and
singularity (including the ultimate form of singularity, which is death itself). Violence of
a general extradition of conflict, of death. Violence which paradoxically puts an end to
the violence itself, and which therefore cannot be balanced except with radical dene-
gation, with pure abreaction to the whole state of things - a pure violence without object
anymore, without determination.

This is the typical violence of information, of media, of images, of the spectacular.

Connected to a total visibility, a total elimination of secrecy. Be it of a psychological or
mental, or of a neurological, biolo-gical or genetic order - soon we shall discover the
gene of revolt, the center of violence in the brain, perhaps even the gene of resistance
against genetic manipulation - biological brainwashing, brainstorming, brainlifting, with
nothing left but recycled, whitewashed lobotomized people as in Clockwork Orange. At
this point we should not speak of violence anymore, but rather of virulence. Inasmuch
that it does not work frontally, mechanically, but by contiguity, by contamination, along
chain reactions, breaking our secret immunities. And operating not just by a negative
effect like the classical violence, but on the contrary by an excess of the positive, just as a
cancerous cell proliferates by metastasis, by restless reproduction and an excess of
vitality.
That is the point in the controversy about the violence on the screens and the impact of
images on people's mind. The fact is that the medium itself has a neutralizing power,
counterbalancing the direct effect of the violence on the imagination. I would say : the
violence of the third type annihilates the violence of the first and second type - but at the
price of a more virulent intrusion in the deep cells of our mental world. The same as for
anti-biotics : they eradicate the agents of disease by reducing the general level of vitality.

When the medium becomes the message (MACLUHAN), then violence as a medium
becomes its own message, a messenger of itself. So the violence of the message cannot
be compared with the violence of the medium as such, with the violence-emanating from
the confusion between medium and message. It is the same with viruses the virus also is
information, but of a very special kind - it is medium, and message, agent and action at
the same time. That the very origine of its "virulence", of its uncontrollable proliferation.
In fact, in all actual biological, social or mental processes,virulence has substituated
violence. The traditional violence of alienation, power and oppression has been superated
by something more violent than violence itself : the virality, the virulence. And while it
was an historical or individual subject of violence, there is no subject, no personal agent
of virulence (of contamination, of chain reaction), and then no possibility to confront it
efficiently. The classical violence was still haunted by the specter of the Evil, it was still
visible. Virulence only transappears, it is of the order of transparency and its logic is that
of the transparency of the Evil.

The image (and more generally the s re of information) is violent because what happens
there is the murder of the Real, the vanishing point of Reality. Everything must be seen,
must be visible, and the image is the site par excellence of this visibility. But at the same
time it is the site of its disappearance. And that something in it has disappeared, has
returned to nowhere, makes the very fascination of the image.

Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real events.
In making reality, even the most violent, emerge to the visible, it makes the real
substance disappear. It is like the Myth of Eurydice : when Orpheus turns around to look
at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more exponential the marketing
of images is growing the more fantastically grows the indifference towards the real
world. Finally, the real world becomes a useless function, a collection of phantom shapes
and ghost events. We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato.

A wonderful model of this forced visibility is Big Brother and all similar programs,
reality shows, docusoaps etc. Just there; where everything is given to be seen there is
nothing left to be seen. It is the mirror of platitude, of banality, of the zero degree of
everyday life. There is the place of a fake sociality, a virtual sociality where the Other is
desperately out of reach - this very fact illuminating perhaps the fundamental truth that
the human being is not a social being. Move over in all these scenarii the televisual public
is mobilized as spectator and judged as become itself Big Brother. The power of control
and transvisuality has shifted to the silent majorities themselves.
We are far beyond the panoptikon, where there was still a source of power and visibility
it was so to say a panexoptikon - things were made visible to an external eye, whereas
here they are made transparent to themselves - a panendoptikon - thus erasing the traces
of control and making the operator himself transparent. The power of control is
internalized, and people are no more Lt victims of the image : they transform themselves
into images - they only exist as screens, ;or in a superficial dimension.

All that is visualized there, in the operation Big Brother, is pure virtual reality, a synthetic
image of the banality, producted : as in a computer. The equivalent of a ready-made - a
given transcrition of everyday life - which is itself already recycled by all current
patterns.

Is there any sexual voyeurism ? Not at all. Almost no sexual scenery. But people dont
want that, what they secretly want to see is the spectacle of the banality,which is from
now our real pornography, own true obscenity - that of the nullity,of insignificance and
platitude (i.e. the extreme reverse of the "There of the Cruelty"). But maybe in that scene
lies a certain form of cruelty, at least of a virtual one. At the time when media and
television are more and more unable to give an image of the events of the world, then
they discover the everyday life, the existential banality as the most criminal event, as the
most violent (in)actua-lity, as the very place of the Perfect Crime. And that it is, really.
And people are fascinated, terrified and fascinated by this indifference of the Nothing-to-
see, of the Nothing-to-say, by the indifference of their own life, as of the zero degree of
living. The banality and the consumption of banality have now become an olympic
discipline of our time - the last form of the experiences of the limits.

In fact, this deals with the naive impulsion to be nothing, and to comfort oneself in this
nothingness - sanctioned by the right to be nothing and to be considered and respected as
such. Something like a struggle for Nothing and for Virtual death - the perfect opposite to
the basic anthropological postulat of the struggle for life. At least it seems that we are all
about to change our basic humanistic goals.

There are two ways of disappearing, of being nothing, (in the Integral Reality, everything
must logically want to disappear - automatic abreaction to the overdose of reality). Either
to be hidden,and to insist on the right not-to-be-seen (the actual defense of private life).Or
one shifts to a delirious exhibitionism of his own platitude and insignificance - ultimate
protection against the servitude of being,and of being himself. Hence the absolute
obligation to be seen,to make oneself visible at any price. Everyone deals on both levels
at the same time. Then we are in the double bind - not to be seen,and to be continously
visible. No ethics,no legislation can solve this dilemma,and the whole current polemic
about the right to information,all this polemic is useless. Maximal information, maximal
visibility are now part of the human rights (and of human duties all the same) and the
destiny of the image is trapped between the unconditional right to see and that,
unconditional as well, not to be seen.

This means that people are deciferable at every moment. Overexposed to the light of
information, and addicted to their own image. Driven to express themselves at any time -
self-expression as the ultimate form of confession, as Faucauld said. To become an
image, one has to give a visual object of his whole everyday life, of his possibilities, of
his feelings and desires. He-has to keep no secrets and to interact permanently. Just here
is the deepest violence, a violence done to the deepest core, to the hard core of the
individual. And at the same-time to the language, because it also loses its symbolic
originality - being nothing more than the operator of visibility.. It loses its ironic
dimersion, its conceptual distance, its autonomous dimension - where language is more
important than what it signifies. The image too is more important than what it sneaks of.
That we forget usually, again and again and that is a source of the violence done to the
image.

Today everything takes the look of the image - then all pretend that the real has
disappeared under the pression and the profusion of images.. What is totally neglected is
that the image also disappears under the blow and the impact of reality. The image is
usually spoiled of its own existence as image, deyoted to a shameful complicity with the
real. The violence exercised by the image is largely balanced by the violence done to the
image - its exploitation as a pure vector of documen-tation, of testimony, of message
(including the message of misery and violence), its allegeance to morale, to pedagogy, to
politics, to publicity. Then the magic of the image, both as fatal and as vital illusion, is
fading away. The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images in order to abolish
meaning and the representation of God. Today we are still iconoclasts, but in an opposite
way : we kill the images by an overdose of meaning.

Borgès'fable on " The People of the Mirror :he gives the hypothesis that behind each
figure of resemblance and representation there is a vanquished enemy, a defeated
singularity, a dead object. And the Iconoclasts clearly understood how icons were the
best way of letting God disappear. (but perhaps God himself had chosen to disappear
behind the images ? Nobody knows). Anyway,today is no more the matter of God : We
disappear behind our images. No chance anymore that our images are stolen from us, that
we must give up our secrets - because we no longer have any. That is at the same time the
sign of our ultimate morality and of our total obscenity.

There is a deep misunderstanding of the process of meaning. Most images and

photographs today reflect the misery and the violence of human condition. But all this
affects us less and less, just because it is over signified. In order for the meaning, for the
message to affect us, the image has to exist on its own, to impose its original language. In
order for the real to be transferred to our imagination, or our imagination transferred to
the real, it must be a counter-transference upon the image, and this countertransference
has to be resoluted, worked through (in terms of psychoanalysis). Today we see misery
and violence becoming a leitmotiv of publicity just by the way of images. Toscani for
example is reintegrating sex and Aids, war and death into fashion. And why not ?
Jubilating ad-images are no less obscene than the pessimistic ones) But at one condition
to show the violence of publicity itself, the violence of fashion, the violence of the
medium. What actually publishers are not able even to try to do. However, fashion and
high society are themselves a kind of spectacle of death. The world's misery is quite so
visible, quite so transparent in the line and the face of any top-model as on the skeletal
body of an african boy. The same cruelty is to be perceived everywhere, if one only
knows how to look at it.

This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be
- death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view.
And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and
abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of
a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what
does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.

Murder of the image, crushed by overinformation, oversignifcation,overreference.

Murder of the secret of the image, drowned by hypervisibility, by unconditional
transparency. In "Leaving Las Vegas", we look at a very charming blond girl pissing and
talking on and on, perfectly indifferent to what she is saying and doing. A perfectly
useless scenery, but which ostensibly testifies that nothing will escape from the minion of
the fiction and the reality, that all is assigned to a ready-to-see, ready-to-act, ready-to-
enjoy. That is transparency to force all the real in the orbit of the visual (not even
representation : pure visually). And this is obscene. Obscene is all what is unnecessarily
visible,without desire and without effect. All what usurps the so rare and so precious
space of appearances.

The last violence done to the image - the very final violence - is the technological one :
electronic and comp terized, synthetic images issued from numerical combination,
combined and reworked on the surface of the screen. It is the end of the imagination of
the image itself. of its fundamental illusion, because in the syntheticoperation the referent
no longer exists, and the real has not even time to take place as it is immediately
produced as virtual reality. No direct capture of the picture anymore, no presence of a
real object in an irrevocable moment and face-to-face, which constitutes the magic of
photography and of the image generally as acting, as singular event - last glimmer of
reality in a world devoted to hyperreality. Nothing left in the synthetic image of this
"punctual" enactitude, of this "punctum" in time (to quote the expression of Roland
Barthes) which is the caracteristic of the analogous image. While the photo testfile of an
absence that something really took place, but according to Barthes now went away for
ever ,today the photo, the genuine analogous photograph,would rather testify of a
presence,of an immediate presence of the subject to the object- what does not happen
anymore in the computerizing of images. Ultimate challenge to the synthetic order which
is now overwhelming us. The relationof the image to its referent raised already a lot of
problems,those of representation. But when the referent is out of the field,and there is
actually no representation anymore,when the real object has disappearedinto the technical
programming of the image,when the imageas pure artefact does not reflect anyone or
anything, and does not even go through the phase of the negative - can we still speak of
an image ? Are in fact televisual, numerical and virtual images images at all ? Our real
world of images will soon cease to enist,and our consumption of images itself will be
virtual.
If the image - as Plato says - is the confluence of the light emanating from the object and
of the light emanating from the eye, then we will soon neither have an object nor an eye,
and thus no images anymore.

The same problem for thinking. In the field of artificial intelligence, the thought does not
even have time to formulate itself. Maybe the computerization of the image is the perfect
mode of the image. And just the same : the computerization of thought would be the
achievement of thinking. But just because of this, it is at the same time their total
denegation. In the very perfection lies the violence of synthetic images and artifical
intelligence. A perfect enorcism of the real, as infant malady of virtuality - a perfect
enorcism of thought, as infant malady of brainengineering - a perfect enorcism of the
image as infant malady of the visuality.

Bad fate for the image (and for thinking, and for the real in general !),but at the same time
the chance, for the genuine photographic image, of a pathetic success, as it happens now,
of an artificial resurrection, as for an animal species about to disappear. Maybe it is, in
this symbolic murder of the image, an ironical revenge for the murder of the real by the
image. The whole dimension of techni-cal, economical and aesthetic values, fashion,
market and speculation are drowning the image under their flood.

The specificity of the image is that it is in some way a parallel universe - another world,
another scene, in two dimensions - not to confuse with our universe in three dimensions,
our real universe, the world of representation. This dimension less makes its magic and
its power of illusion. All what reintegrates the image in the third dimension is a potential
violence done to the image. Not only the spatial dimension of relief and stereoscopy, but
even that of movement, of time (in the movie), or that of meaning and message - all that
reintegrate the image in our world and destroys it as a parallel world.

Even worse is the absorption of the image in what we would call the Fourth Dimension -
that of the Virtual and the cybernetics. We usually believe that every additional
dimension is a plus, but on the contrary, every additional dimension annihilate the former
ones in their singularity. The third one annihilates the two-dimensional world, that of the
image. As for the Fourth, it annihilates all the others, included the threedimensional
world of representation. It is a strange game. .-The new world (the Brave New World) of
the virtual is a world of Integral Reality. And a world of integral reality has no place for a
parallel universe, like that of the image. Then here is the final solution for image and
imagination.

Something else very dangerous for the image as a paralle-universe is the fact that our
whole actual universe itself is becoming image. We have to do with a general conversion
of our real world in image, the most vulgar form of visibility - and then how is any
parallel universe to be distinguished at all - how can the image save its singularity in a
world entirely turned into image?

Now the question, the crucial question is :is there still a chance, a real chance for the
image to escape this double violence, the one it exerts and the one it endures, in order to
find the original power of the image again - the Evil Genius of the Image? Images that
resist the violence of information and communi-cation, to recover, beyond all
signification and aesthetic diversion, the pure event of the image?

Resist the noise, the perpetual rumour of the world, through the silence of the image.
Resist movement, flow and acceleration through the stillness of the image. Resist the
moral imperative of meaning through the silence of signification. Above all, resist this
automatic overflow of images and their perpetual succession. Recover the "po-ignant"
detail of the object, the "punctum", but also the moment of acting, of taking the picture,
immediately passed, and always nostalgic. Opposite to the flow of images produced in
"real time", indifferent to this other dimension of the becoming-image of the object : the
time itself. The visual flux of actuality does not know anything but change, it does not
know the concept of becoming, which is radically different from change : in this flux the
image does not even have time to become image (as in the sphere of information thought
has hardly the chance to becoming-thought).

In order for the image, and for the object, to emerge as such, it has to be put in suspense,
in suspense of meaning, in suspense of the tumulluous operation of the world, it must be
captured in the single fantastic moment which is the first encounter, the surprising
moment, when things are not yet aware that we are here, when they have not yet been
arranged by analytical order, when our absence is not yet fading away. But this instant is
ephemeral : we should not be present to see it. That does in a sense the photographer,
hidden behind his lens, himself vanishing, himself disappeared. For this is the price of
making objects appear : the disappearance of the subject.

In this rule of disappearance and transparency as a secret rule of the image, this one has a
close connection to theory. It is the silent consecration of all that which, having achieved
itself in the discourse, must now metamorphose itself in something else. And the image is
the most beautiful of the metamorphoses of the discourse.. It has basically nothing to do
with it, but it is as if it had preceded it in an earlier life. Anyway, the theory itself, when it
reaches its extrem limit, has no open face anymore - it becomes its own masque. It keeps
the outlook of analysis, but it has secretly transfused to the other side, to the side the
phenomena, of which there is nothing to say anymore. In this moment, the image appears
with all its phenomenal power. The photographic image is born out of this phenomenal
intuition of the world, following the analytical intuition - not as transcription, but as
transmutat: of theory. That is,at least,my own eperience of the photographic image as a
transtheoretical object. Not as an artistic or realistic activity,but as a becoming-image of
the object,as becoming-image of the thought,as symbolic terminal for the analytic
process,together with its resolution into an object existing for its own - neither real nor
objective as soon as it becomes an image,the object raises no problems anymore,it is the
immediate solution to whatis perfectly insoluble from the point of view of analysis
Mutation, metamorphosis, anamorphosis maybe - poetictransference of the analytical
situation : the "punctual" which is at the core of the image becomes the "contrapunctual"
of the theory.