Today, images [Bilder] are not just likenesses [Abbilder] but also models [Vorbilder]. We flee into images in order to be better, more beautiful, and more alive. Clearly, we are enlisting not only technology but images, too, in order to drive evolution forward. Yet could it be that evolution is fundamentally based on illusion [Ein-Bild-ung]—that the imaginary plays a constitutive role in evolution? The digital medium is bringing about an iconic reversal that is making images seem more alive, more beautiful, and better than reality itself. Reality, in contrast, strikes us as defective: “Looking around at the customers in a café, someone remarked to me (rightly): ‘Look how gloomy they are! nowadays the images are livelier than the people.’ One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: only images exist and are produced and consumed.”1
Likenesses that depict an optimized reality destroy the original, iconic value of the image. The real takes them hostage. That is why, despite—or precisely because of—their massive influx, images now are iconoclastic. After they have been made consumable, they destroy the semantics and poetics of the image, which offers more than just a likeness of the real. Images that have been made consumable have been tamed. Such domestication makes their inherent madness [Verrücktheit]—the displacement that defines them—disappear. In this fashion, they are stripped of their truth.
The so-called Paris syndrome refers to an acute psychic disturbance that affects mainly Japanese tourists. Victims suffer from hallucinations, derealization and depersonalization, fear, and psychosomatic symptoms such as dizziness, sweating, and a racing heart. These reactions are catalyzed by the marked difference between the idealized image that travelers have beforehand and the reality of the city, which fails to measure up. Presumably, Japanese tourists’ compulsive—practically hysterical—tendency to take photos represents an unconscious defense reaction aiming to banish the terrifying real by means of images. As ideal images, beautiful pictures screen off tourists from dirty reality.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window illustrates the connection between the shock of the real, on the one hand, and the way that the image screens off and protects the viewer, on the other. The similar sound of rear and real underscores this point. The window opening onto the courtyard is a feast for the eyes. Jeff (James Stewart) is a wheelchair-bound photographer; he spends his time sitting at the window and feasting his eyes on the comical goings-on in the neighbors’ apartment. One day, he thinks he has witnessed a murder. In turn, the man he suspects notices that Jeff has been observing him in secret. At precisely this moment, the man looks at Jeff across the way. This uncanny gaze of the other—indeed, this gaze from the real—destroys the visual feast that the photographer has been enjoying. In due course, the suspect—the uncanny real—breaks into Jeff’s apartment. The photographer tries to blind the assailant with a flash—that is, to banish the man into the image and repress him, as it were. But the attempt fails. The attacker is indeed a killer, and he throws Jeff out the window. With this, the rear window becomes a real window. Fortunately, all ends well in the final sequence: the real window changes back into a rear window.
In contrast to Rear Window, the danger of an irruption of the real—and the other—does not exist for digital windows. Digital media screen us off from the real more effectively than film does. They are based on a generalized imaginary. The digital medium creates more distance to the real than analog media. That is, less analogy holds between the digital and the real.
We are now producing images in enormous quantity by means of digital media. Such massive production can also be interpreted as a reaction of defense and flight. What’s more, a mania for optimization is occurring, too. When faced with reality, which strikes us as something imperfect, we run away into the realm of images. Today, we do not enlist religion so much as technologies of optimization in order to confront the reality of bodies, time, death, and so on. The digital medium is defactifying the world.
The digital medium knows nothing of age, destiny, or death. Time itself is frozen: it is a timeless medium. In contrast, the analog medium suffers from time. This aspect takes the form of passion. Discussing photography, Barthes writes:
Not only does it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages. … Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes.2
Barthes links photography to a form of life in which the negativity of time plays the constitutive role. In contrast, the digital image—the digital medium—represents the corollary of a mode of “life” in which growing and aging, birth and death, are all erased. Permanent presence and an enduring now [Gegenwart] are its hallmarks. The digital does not blossom or gleam: the negativity of wilting is inscribed in budding, just as the negativity of shadows lies within glancing light.