Scrambled images

Postmodern culture, for some, constitutes a crisis of representation because it is associated with a detachment of the sign from the referent, the'signifier from the signified, representation from reality, image from truth. At the deepest philosophical level this involves a dethronement of logocentrism (Derrida 1976 [1967]),.which l& not so much a happening as the revelation of a fault at the heart of the Western episteme. As Jonathan Culler (1976: 109) defines it, 'logocentrism involves the belief that sounds are simply a representation of meanings which afe present in the consciousness of the speaker'. According to Jaccjues Derrida, logocentrism privileges speech over writing and supports an untenable logic of identity (Lechte 1994). Writing itself is an act of meaning production and not just the transcription of word-thoughts. Moreover, it deploys various rhetorical devices, especially metaphors, to convey or, rather, construct meanings that are not demon-strably identical to their referent: the signified perpetually slides under the signifier. Thus, it is a significatory practice - and a slippery one at that -which brings into being, say, logical distinctions between, for example, what is inscribed as true or false. Any attempt to fix meaning and truth once and for all is in this way destabilized by Derridean deconstruction. Norris (1987), however, insists that it is mistaken to infer that Derrida.believes truth claims are impossible. Instead, such claims should be treated provisionally and the ruses of language must be reflexively understood. So, for Norris, then, deconstruction is not necessarily at odds with a realist epis-temology, which assumes, putting it simply, that there is a knowable real world and there are grounds for adjudicating truth claims. If this is so, Derrida differs from other poststructuralist thinkers, such as Jean Bau-drillard, who seek to refute any possibility of realist knowledge, however provisional and self-consciously methodological.

Derrida emphasizes writing yet it has become increasingly pronounced in contemporary discourse to stress the visual image over the word. There may be a realist warrant for doing so: for instance, since the invention of photography, as Susan Sontag (1979: 3) remarks, 'there are a great many more images around'. It is commonplace to say that we live in a predominantly 'visual culture' (Jenks.1995). And, as Roland Barthes taught, images, including the iconic images of photography, can be read like a language (Heath 1977}. Technologies of vision with enormous powers of image manipulation that are nowadays so much enhanced by digitalization are a privileged object for a great deal of postmodern cultural theory. The great theorists of modernity - the likes of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel -neglected the rise of technological media, the communicative apparatus of modern formations (Murdock 1993). Although) in latter-day theorizing, this neglect has met with some correction (for instance, J. B. Thompson 1995), poststructuralism and postmodernism have attained a commanding position in the theoretical study of recent,developments in communications media, especially computer-mediated communications.

There has also been, however, something of an 'anti-oc'ular' bias hitherto in French theory (Jay 1986); for example, in Michel Foucault's (1977) treatment of surveillance and in Guy Debord's (1995) critique of 'the society of the spectacle', which was originally published in 1967. For Foucault, Enlightenment vision became a means of oppressive power through the institutionalized panopticon, from prisons, to schools and workplaces. Clear-sightedness is indeed closely associated with modern reason but not inevitably for oppressive purposes (it is only too significant that when the eponymous hero of The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is arrested by Militarian soldiers his spectacles are smashed: Lukes 1995). For critics of modernity, though, it is Cartesian perspectivalism, the belief in all-knowing and all-seeing, that is objectionable. Yet, as Martin Jay (1992) argues cogently, there was more than just one 'scopic regime of modernity'. He identifies two further regimes in addition to Cartesian perspectivalism: Baconian description and Baroque vision. In Cartesian perspectivalism, the light of God, the a priori truths of mathematics and Renaissance rules of perspective were the all-revealing lenses of accurate vision. This excessive rationalism was countered, historically, by the Baconian tradition of empirical description, exemplified in Jay's account by the photographic precision of Dutch painting. These were two sides of modern science and visualization, the Cartesian and the Baconian, the rational-deductive and the empirical-inductive. Still, they were not the only scopic regimes in the- formation of European modernity: 'In opposition to the lucid, linear, solid, fixed, planimetric, closed form of the Renaissance.... the baroque was painterly, recessional, soft-focused, multiple and open' (Jay 1992: 187). Its philosophical affinities were with 'Leibniz's pluralism of monadic viewpoints, Pascal's meditations on paradox, and the Counter-Reformation mystics' submission to vertiginous experiences of rapture' (jay 1992: 188).

Jay notes that from a postmodern point of view, although he does not name it as such, the hierarchy of the scopic regimes of modernity is altered: Cartesian perspectivalism and Baconian descriptivism are downgraded and the Baroque's 'madness of vision' rises to the top. This is most evident in the shift from modern to postmodern urban design. He further remarks, however, that there may be a historical connection between the absence of Cartesian perspectivalism and Baconian description in Eastern cultures and 'their lack of indigenous scientific revolutions' (Jay 1992: 189). In this sense, these two scopic regimes do indeed represent the sway of Western modernity and are manifestly still doing so in recently modernizing cities around the world.

Scopic regimes are not just about imagery and theories of knowledge: they are also about technologies. Paul Virilio (1994 [1988]) insists upon this point in giving an historical sketch of successive logics in relation to 'visual and audio-visual prostheses' (1994: 6) 'and the emergence of the 'vision machine'. The age of 'formal logic' is associated with drawing and painting. The age of 'dialectical logic' is associated with photography and film. The age of 'paradoxical logic' is associated with video recording, holography and computers (Virilio 1994: 63). In that history, the relationship between the human being and the machine has reversed. Whereas earlier technologies extended the human being's capacities of sight and representation, later technologies are able to- see and represent for themselves. This involves 'the automation of perception' and 'the new industrialization of vision' (Virilio 1994: 59). Synthetic images can now even be created by machines for machines. Virilio thus invokes a nightmare of dehumamzation but with none of the glee of his 'theoretical anti-humanist7 philosophical compatriots, like Baudrillard. His is a grim view indeed. For Virilio, the development of the vision machine is closely connected to the conduct of war and, in modern communications, speed is of the essence, instantaneous communication accompanying the dissolution of the human(e) subject, something that happened in the conduct of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and was written about controversially by Jean Baudrillard.

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