Monday 19 September 2011

Notes on "The Future of the image" by Jacques Ranciere

from the "Journal of Visual Culture": 

The image as currently conceived does not offer the possibility of critical insight, let alone political efficacy;
rather, it induces only a nostalgic desire for ‘a promise of flesh capable of dispelling the simulacra of resemblance, the artifices of art, and the tyranny of the letter’ (p. 8). This is not as desperate or dire as it seems: our eucharistic desire is symptomatic of an ‘aesthetic regime’ that has framed and organized the ‘distribution of the sensible’ around the concept of the
‘unrepresentable’ since the mid-19th century.
-Jae Emerling


...For by way of compensation [they] then received a new image-value, which is nothing other than the twofold power of aesthetic images: the inscription of the signs of a history and the affective power of sheer presence that is no longer exchanged for anything...
-Jacques Ranciere