Roland Barthes described photography as the “emanation of the referent.”1 Representation constitutes the essence of photography. An object that once was there reflected light rays that affected the film. Photography preserves quasi-material traces of the real referent: “It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself.” The image and its original are “both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish … which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.”2
For Barthes, the truth of photography is that it is inseparable from its referent, as if by destiny. The photograph is bound to a real object, which it represents as the emanation of the referent. Its hallmark is love and fidelity to this source. Photography does not stand for a realm of fiction or manipulation; it occupies the realm of truth. Accordingly, Barthes speaks of the “stubbornness of the Referent.”3 Camera Lucida orbits around an almost invisible photograph of the author’s mother in a sunroom. She is the referent, first and last—the object of the writer’s mourning and his work of mourning. She is the guardian of truth.
Barthes clearly had a painting by René Magritte in mind—Ceci n’est pas une pipe—when he wrote: “By nature, the Photograph … has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe.”4 But why did he claim truth so emphatically for photography? Did he sense the coming of the digital age, which now is detaching representation from real reference, once and for all?
Digital photography radically calls the truth of photography into question. It is putting a definitive end to the time of representation. Digital photography marks the end of the real. It no longer points to a real referent. As such, digital photography approaches painting once more: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. As hyperphotography, it presents hyperreality. Now the real is present only as a quotation—in fragments. Digital photography collects and connects quotes from the real and mixes them with the imaginary. In this way, it opens a self-referential, hyperreal space wholly disconnected from reference. Hyperreality represents nothing: instead, it presents.
The crisis of photographic representation has a political corollary. In The Crowd, Le Bon observes that parliamentary representatives are the flunkies [Handlanger] of the working masses. Political representation in this form still is strong. It actually advocates for the interests of the working classes. But now, as in the realm of photography, political representation is becoming massively unbalanced. The system of political economy has become self-referential. It no longer represents citizens or the public sphere. Political representatives are viewed no longer as agents of the “people” but as agents of the system. The problem lies in the system’s self-referentiality. The contemporary political crisis could be surmounted only if there were a way to tie it back to real referents—human beings.
It used to be that the masses could organize in parties and unions that were animated by an ideology. Now, the masses are falling apart into crowds of individuals—in other words, alienated, digital hikikomori who do not participate in discourse or constitute a public sphere. The counterpart of the self-referential political system is isolated individuals who do not act politically. Any political we that might be capable of Action, writ large, is falling apart. What kind of politics—what kind of democracy—is still conceivable today, given that civil society is vanishing, given the mounting egoization and narcissification of human existence? Would it take some kind SmartPolicy to make elections, campaigns, parliaments, ideologies, and conventions unnecessary—a digital democracy in which the like button replaces the voting ballot altogether? What need is there for parties today if everyone is a party him- or herself—if ideologies, which once formed a political horizon, have crumbled into countless individual opinions and matters of personal preference? Is democracy conceivable even without discourse?