Malazan Empire: "Post-Image" Philosophy - Malazan Empire

Jump to content

Page 1 of 1
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

"Post-Image" Philosophy a new twist on cultural abstinence

#1 User is offline   Gust Hubb 

  • Necromancer Extraordinaire
  • View gallery
  • Group: High House Mafia
  • Posts: 1,487
  • Joined: 19-May 11
  • Location:Northern Hemisphere
  • Interests:Glass slides with entrapped bits of colored tissue
  • Around, just quiet....er

Posted 01 March 2015 - 02:42 PM

http://www.bbc.com/n...gazine-31656672





A Point of View: Has the world become too visual?
Posted Image Continue reading the main story Life in the 21st Century reached a point of visual overload, says Will Self.

I've started telling people that I've become "post-image". I try to say it in a normal tone of voice, but it doesn't matter how studied I am, the announcement still sounds absurdly portentous - rather like that moment in Robert Graves's I, Claudius when Caligula reveals he's become a god. Still, I suppose this is understandable, because there is something vaulting and divine about being post-image. Most of the people I've told about my elevation quickly drop the subject of images altogether. However, one or two pursue the matter, asking: What do you mean by that? And I explain I've reached a point in my life where I can no longer accept uncritically any image whatsoever - be it television picture, film frame, photograph, web page, advertisement graphic, drawing, cartoon or painting. When I say "accept uncritically", I mean I now refuse to take any image as necessarily representative of any existent thing, and furthermore I challenge the information which any image appears to be conveying. You see, I am indeed post-image.

With a major personal transformation such as this, one with severe implications for how I relate to the world, it's reasonable to ask: How did I get here? How have I become the sort of person who can interrogate a stick-man for several minutes before convincing himself it does indeed denote the gents' lavatory? Well, I concede, my relationship with images has always been problematic, inasmuch as I've found them deeply absorbing. I've also always experienced a slight repulsion - as if every time I approach the surface of the image, I bounce back. Nevertheless, I loved films as a child, and was well able to suspend disbelief in even the ricketiest of stage furniture. I loved painting and drawing too, and would while away hours in the British Museum sketching New Guinean shrunken heads or Japanese netsuke.

Continue reading the main story
Find out more
Posted Image
  • A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on BBC Radio 4 at 20:50 GMT and repeated Sundays, 08:50 GMT
  • Will Self is a novelist and journalist
Actually, I think the problem may have begun with drawing, because when I grew older I began to cartoon with some application, and ended up doing it professionally for a number of years. Cartoon and caricature represent - along with logos, symbols and pictograms - the point at which images begin to deconstruct, or, rather, the point at which their meaning is expressed semiotically rather than graphically. Knowing just how bushy a politician's eyebrows have to be rendered before they're sufficiently exaggerated to convey his fundamental eccentricity involves a particular skill - the ability to reduce the lineaments of the human face to a series of highly suggestive marks. No wonder cartooning styles are so particular to given cultures, and no wonder drawing cartoons makes you question images' ability to represent an objective view of the world.

Still, my cartooning career ended years ago - although clearly cartoons haven't. Rather, like the rest of children's literature they've upped stick-figures and marched into the adult world. In Japan adult cartoons have all sorts of sub-genres - including the pornographic, or hentai, versions of manga and anime. In France there's a long tradition of adult cartoon strips called bande dessinee, while in the English-speaking world we've coined the - to my ears oxymoronic - "graphic novel" to make the medium acceptable. I'm not going to charge adult comic readers with being infantile - or at least, no more infantile than the rest of us, because if there's one thing none of us can exercise mature control over anymore, it's our image-greed. We demand images with everything - text, certainly, must come with glyphs garnishing it, while even a main course of sound, be it music or speech, is now accompanied with a side-order of free imagery. This very radio talk has its own website, where you can look at an image of me while you listen. Alternatively, you could get out more.

Posted Image Japanese anime cartoons have "marched into the adult world" Not that this will necessarily help you to escape imagery, which throughout the 20th Century infiltrated the urban environment in the form of advertising and road signs, and which now positively pullulates - a building site would seem naked stripped of its hoardings depicting perfectly scrubbed yuppies sipping cappuccino; no taxi, bus or train is unadorned with illustrated public or commercial information and graffiti; no pigeon-bedizened nook or barbed cranny is without its impetigo of stickers bigging up rock groups or rock-bottom sales. Even if you go for a solitary walk in the countryside, when you sit down on a bench to take in the view, you'll probably be distracted by a discarded crisp packet at your feet, with rippling across its slick crinkles an image of the crisps it formerly contained. We live in one of the most densely inhabited and anthropogenic landscapes in the world - which means everywhere we look we see either images we have made, or things that have been made in our image.

Posted Image Even away from the city, there is little escape from visual bombardment Yet if the aim is total coverage, such physical images are a pretty crude method of achieving it. In Terry Gilliam's dystopic film, Brazil, the protagonist flees the city only to end up driving along a road that's completely walled off by a continuous barrier of advertising hoardings. This image - for image it is - seems absurd, not because it's implausible (on the contrary, we laugh at it because of our shocked recognition) but because imagery long since took a different evolutionary path, opting to parasitise directly on the human mind, rather than troubling with its perceptual objects. What are film, television, and now the internet, if not means of introducing imagery directly to the brain? We don't need the entire physical world to be blanketed with imagery - although this is what we desire - because simply by placing a small screen in our visual field, we're reassured that should this be required, it's capable of conveying global coverage. Nowadays the reassurance usually takes the form of a smartphone which we keep in our pocket, where, like Pandora's Box, full of all humanity's misfortunes, it whines softly.

Posted Image More from the Magazine Posted Image Piccadilly Circus and Times Square are poised for a billboard overhaul. But where are the world's "best" billboard locations?

Where is the world's busiest billboard site? (November 2014)

Posted Image Britain's dubious status as one of the most CCTV-surveilled societies in the world is, of course, part of our image addiction. The Queen is said to insist on being visible in public, observing that "I have to be seen to be believed", and in recent decades this aspect of her majesty has been liberally bestowed on her subjects, for now we too find it hard to believe we exist unless we're caught on camera. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and You Tube - there's a plethora of social media sites geared to the display of images, and in order to keep these supplied people roam the streets, cameras in hand, snipping them out of the bigger picture. Hundreds of billions of photos are now taken every year. Surely, under such conditions of industrial image-production my refusal to either pose for, or look at them becomes understandable?

Posted Image One friend - significantly, a film-lover - went on the offensive when I told him I was post-image: "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "After all, as a fiction writer you're constantly manufacturing images, albeit ones made from words." There's a certain degree of truth in this, but I'd argue the sort of images literature trades in are more allusive than visual ones - the figuration and the thing figured bleeding into one another, except in what I term "constructed metaphors", the kinds preceded by "as if", "like" and other signposts. In fact, several years before I became post-image I'd already begun to purge such imagery from my prose on the grounds that it sounds dreadfully contrived to the inner ear. Now I realise it was just my way of rejecting the dagger I saw before me, the one which made Macbeth opine: "Mine eyes are made the fools o' th'other senses / Or else worth all the rest."

Posted Image Macbeth: "Mine eyes are made the fools o'th'other senses, or else worth all the rest" I'd like to claim, naturally, that to be post-image is to be part of a vanguard engaged in a principled rejection of the way our culture hasn't simply privileged the visual, but made vision worth far more than all the other senses. I'd like to say that in rejecting the image I'm also rejecting the entire distinction between appearance and reality that bedevils Western thought, imposing on it all the other divisive dualisms of God and Man, flesh and spirit etcetera. However, I'm afraid the truth is probably reassuringly dull - we didn't have a television when I was a child so I grew up listening to the radio, and even though my parents got one when I was in my teens, I now appreciate that I never really, um, got the hang of it.
"You don't clean u other peoples messes.... You roll in them like a dog on leftover smoked whitefish torn out f the trash by raccoons after Sunday brunch on a hot day."
~Abyss

2

#2 User is offline   Gust Hubb 

  • Necromancer Extraordinaire
  • View gallery
  • Group: High House Mafia
  • Posts: 1,487
  • Joined: 19-May 11
  • Location:Northern Hemisphere
  • Interests:Glass slides with entrapped bits of colored tissue
  • Around, just quiet....er

Posted 01 March 2015 - 02:47 PM

As someone in a profession entirely based on images (pathology), the thought of being "Post-Image" fascinates me. While the article doesn't elaborate on how to practice this philosophy, I how such a life style would look (or I guess in their case, not look).

There is a lot of truth behind the concept of visual inundation (much like the sound inundation that has been discussed before, especially in relation to large cities). However, in my view, the rapid shift to an image based world is a good thing (a picture is worth a thousand words after all).

I am sure I will elaborate in the course of this thread, but what do you all think? Are we accelerating toward visual saturation? Is it a good thing?
"You don't clean u other peoples messes.... You roll in them like a dog on leftover smoked whitefish torn out f the trash by raccoons after Sunday brunch on a hot day."
~Abyss

0

#3 User is offline   nacht 

  • Mortal Sword
  • Group: Malaz Regular
  • Posts: 1,046
  • Joined: 16-April 10

Posted 01 March 2015 - 09:27 PM

In the cocoons of the Matrix, the eyes are probably open.
0

#4 User is offline   Nicodimas 

  • Soletaken
  • Group: Malaz Regular
  • Posts: 2,058
  • Joined: 28-August 07
  • Location:Valley of the Sun
  • https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XbGs_qK2PQA

Posted 02 March 2015 - 01:37 AM

Not at all, If I want to get away..I just go hike in Northern Arizona, Utah, Colorado...I think people should get out the city more and get into nature, people seem to be happier if you do this more often.

Also my current goal is to fill as much of my walls of place with images...atm.
-If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone
0

#5 User is offline   Andorion 

  • God
  • Group: Malaz Regular
  • Posts: 4,516
  • Joined: 30-July 11
  • Interests:All things Malazan, sundry sci-fi and fantasy, history, Iron Maiden

Posted 02 March 2015 - 02:33 AM

I am not sure, I understood everything about the article. I do however think that the authors PoV comes from living in a particular landscape. In India, you will get an insane mix of visual imagery bombardment, but there are many stretches where you will get nothing. Again instead of the planned, orchestrated visual bombardment of billboards, you may get unplanned, chaotic random images as well. I could not relate to the author at all when he said

Quote

for now we too find it hard to believe we exist unless we're caught on camera. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and You Tube -


Maybe because I am not on Twitter, Snapchat, or INstagram, and am an (in)famously sporadic Facebook user.


I do agree however, with his idea of the over-privileging of the visual. One of my friends recently completed some research in sociology, where his dissertation topic was "Smell in everyday life'" where he sought to demonstrate how we ignore smell as a sense in relation to sight and sound. He showed how a lot of things, from memory to intimacy, mood to a sense of security are governed by smell. A paper he presented on this topic to a conference of a national sociological organisation was very well received.

Maybe not coincidentally, he only has 30% vision, due to a childhood neural problem, that withered away his optic nerves.
0

#6 User is offline   masan's saddle 

  • Emperor
  • Group: Malaz Regular
  • Posts: 979
  • Joined: 17-February 09
  • Location:masan's horse

Posted 02 March 2015 - 10:12 AM

Very interesting post and article, the commodification and fetishisation of imagery is fascinating and has become such an integral part of modern life that unlike yourself, most people don't seem to even notice anymore. I'm not sure how much reading you may have done around the subject but a pretty good introductory book about image manipulation within the art world and it's subsequent impact on the viewer is John Berger's "Ways of Seeing". I think it was also turned into a BBC series at some point. You may also want to take a look at Guy Debord's 1967 critical work "The Society of the Spectacle",
" All that was once lived has become mere representation...,the decline of being into having and having into merely appearing...., the Spectacle is not a collection of images rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images".
His basic premise is essentially that human perception, society and ultimately existence has become degraded by the false relationship between people and their commodities and the role modern imagery (semiotics) and its lack of clarity and truth plays in this.
Apologies for not doing the quote thingy properly, I have'nt posted for years and can't remember how to do it !
Now all the friends that you knew in school they used to be so cool, now they just bore you.
Just look at em' now, already pullin' the plow. So quick to take to grain, like some old mule.
0

#7 User is offline   HiddenOne 

  • Mortal Sword
  • Group: High House Mafia
  • Posts: 1,174
  • Joined: 29-May 10

Posted 03 March 2015 - 02:12 PM

That was a good article, GH, thank you for bringing it to us for consideration. I would have to agree that we are being visually overwhelmed in our society, and I don't think it's good for many of us.
HiddenOne. You son of a bitch. You slimy, skulking, low-posting scumbag. You knew it would come to this. Roundabout, maybe. Tortuous, certainly. But here we are, you and me again. I started the train on you so many many hours ago, and now I'm going to finish it. Die HO. Die. This is for last time, and this is for this game too. This is for all the people who died to your backstabbing, treacherous, "I sure don't know what's going on around here" filthy lying, deceitful ways. You son of a bitch. Whatever happens, this is justice. For me, this is justice. Vote HiddenOne Finally, I am at peace.
0

#8 User is offline   LinearPhilosopher 

  • House Knight
  • Group: Malaz Regular
  • Posts: 1,795
  • Joined: 21-May 11
  • Location:Ivory Tower
  • Interests:Everything.

Posted 04 March 2015 - 03:01 PM

An interesting read, though i find the article lacking in 2 ways. the first being how does one live in a post image fashion (very few examples) and what does one obtain by being post image? (do i become an even weirder person at parties by become this) Is there some transcendental revelation that occurs? Do i become a virtuous being by being post human? etc. You can't have an article on a point of view, fail to ask these questions, and call it a "philosophy".


" I've reached a point in my life where I can no longer accept uncritically any image whatsoever - be it television picture, film frame, photograph, web page, advertisement graphic, drawing, cartoon or painting. When I say "accept uncritically", I mean I now refuse to take any image as necessarily representative of any existent thing, and furthermore I challenge the information which any image appears to be conveying. You see, I am indeed post-image."

Correct me if im wrong but isn't this a given in our society? Given we predominately depend on our eyesight in day to day living people use images as means of communication. In our society that communication occurs in the form of convincing someone. Burgers in fast food commercials strike me as one example. Given that people are trying to sell us things (ideas. goods, serive etc) it goes without saying we ought to be critical of what is to be communicated to us. But outside of this marketing context is this point of view even neccesary? Do i have to critizie every image i see in a movie to determine it's correspondence to the real thing? Does a movie's lack of correspondence with a "real" thing take anything away from it?

If the title of what you're saying sounds pretentious maybe you ought to use a different prefix.

"
I'd like to say that in rejecting the image I'm also rejecting the entire distinction between appearance and reality that bedevils Western thought"
By your earlier admission, of there being a difference between an image and whether or not it has a correspondence with an existing object, your entire train of thought is FOUNDED upon the idea of dualism. You cannot admit there there is a discrepancy between an image and it's correspondence with an existing or unexisting thing, and reject dualism between appearance and reality.


in short brings up some interesting facts, but the manner in which it is explained leads to be desired.


edit: i suck at formatting these posts ughhhh, if a mod finds a better colour scheme for this post go ahead and modify it. Whenver i click the white option my text becomes invisible when editing it QQ

This post has been edited by BalrogLord: 04 March 2015 - 03:04 PM

0

#9 User is offline   D'iversify 

  • First Sword
  • Group: Malaz Regular
  • Posts: 647
  • Joined: 07-October 10

Posted 06 March 2015 - 07:45 PM

Sorry, no escape from the Hyperreal Post-Modern Labyrinth of Images (watch out for minotaurs).
I am the Onyx Wizards
0

Share this topic:


Page 1 of 1
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

1 User(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users