The Future of the Image

“My title might lead readers to anticipate some new odyssey of the image, a trajectory from the aurorean glory of Lascaux’s paintings to the contemporary twilight of a reality devoured by media images and an art doomed to monitors and synthetic images. But my intention is otherwise. By examining how a particular idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are linked in those apocalyptic discourses that bear the contemporary era’s zeitgeist, I would like to pose the following question: are we referring to a simple, univocal reality? Do not exist under the same name of ‘image,’ multiple functions the complex interlocking of which constitutes the labor of art?”

The five texts gathered here raise questions about the nature of the image and the labour of art. The above excerpt comes from the first one, the text-lecture “The Future of the Image”, which also gives to the book it’s title. In the second text, “Sentence, Image, History”, Godard’s “Histoire(s) du cinema”   serve as a basis for questioning the relationship between the power of words and that of the visible. On the third one, entitled “Painting in the Text”, Rancière attempts a shift in the discussion, examining modern aesthetic discourse’s history and production. In the fourth text, with the title “The Surface of Design,” graphic arts, poetry, dance, and industrial design are approached through a paradoxical question: “what resemblance is there between Stéphane Mallarmé, a French poet writing “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” in 1897, and Peter Behrens, German architect, engineer and designer who, ten years later, was in charge of designing the products, adverts and even buildings of the electricity company AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft)?” Finally, in “Are Some Things Unrepresentable? “, the critical question is posed from the beginning: “The issue raised by my title does not call for a straightforward yes or no. Instead, it bears on this question: under what conditions might it be said that certain events cannot be represented? Under what conditions can an unrepresentable phenomenon of this kind be given a specific conceptual shape? Obviously, this line of inquiry is not neutral.”