The Uncertain Image

Ulrik Ekman, Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Kristin Veel, Ulrik Ekman, Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Kristin Veel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429787973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Education

Citizens of networked societies are almost incessantly accompanied by ecologies of images. These ecologies of still and moving images present a paradox of uncertainties emerging along with certainties. Images appear more certain as the technical capacities that render them visible increase. At the same time, images are touched by more uncertainty as their numbers, manipulabilities, and contingencies multiply.

With the emergence of big data, the image is becoming a dominant vehicle for the construction and presentation of the truth of data. Images present themselves as so many promises of the certainty, predictability, and intelligibility offered by data. The focus of this book is twofold. It analyses the kinds of images appearing today, showing how they are marked by a return to modern photographic emphases on high resolution, clarity, and realistic representation. Secondly, it discusses the ways in which the uncertainty of images is increasingly underscored within such reiterated emphases on allegedly certain visual truths. This often involves renewed encounters with noise, grain, glitch, blur, vagueness, and indistinctness. This book provides the reader with an intriguing transdisciplinary investigation of the uncertainly certain relation between the cultural imagination and the techno-aesthetic regime of big data and ubiquitous computing.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Creativity.

The uncertainty of the mass image: logistics and behaviours

Sean Cubitt

Abstract

The question of uncertainty raised in this special issue raises issues for the image as truthful, the truth that viewers can claim to find in images and the ethical dimensions of truth. By tracing some key changes in the history of photography, this paper demonstrates that the mass production and especially mass storage and distribution of images create a new condition for the image. This condition asserts that the purpose of the totality of the mass image as it now exists in databases is a mode of truth which alters earlier ontological, epistemological and ethical claims for certainty. Rather than propose a return to the humanistic privilege of the individual image, the paper suggests that a new politics of truth is demanded by the new condition of the mass image.

Agency

Uncertainty enters the image as uncertainty about its standing as image. A phenomenon may hover uncertainly in perception, as when we momentarily mistake a mural for a vista (Bellion 2011). Sometimes the ambiguity resides inside the image, as in an Escher print (Henderson 2013). It may arise in the un clarity of an image's relationship with representation (Chave 1994, 602). A profound disturbance occurred, with the invention of moving images, both in the impact of succession on the once trustworthy constitution of the image as entire unto itself, and as a troubling non-identity of the projected image with its support (the projection or display screen). Undoing the identity of the image with itself, the moving image created multiple temporal affordances. Photography seemed at first, as pencil of nature, to anchor the image in the pro-filmic present of its making, but Benjamin's (2003a [1939]) 'dynamite of one twenty-fourth of a second' shattered that brief instant of co-temporality, revealed the trauma on which it was based, and undermined not only the indicative mood of photography but even the subjunctive mood of painting. There is no limited class of images that are in some way uncertain: all images are uncertain. 'The Uncertain Image' is, then, tautological: uncertainty is the condition of any image today, and has been at least since Edison and the Lumières shattered the integrity of stillness, and perhaps since Niepce replaced the presence of the image to its viewer with the promise of its presence to its referent.

Already in this account it is possible to descry a history of uncertainty in the earlier development of the mechanized image. Niepce's first exposure at Grasse in 1826 only appears to us the record of a sunlit courtyard because we know that that is what it is, but any prolonged viewing already begins to unsettle that certainty. Motion photography makes obvious what had always been the case with photography: that it rips an instant away from the flux of time, injures time's flow, scars the moment in slicing it with the blade of the shutter, carving it off from the body of the world. Cinematography is an attempt to heal that cut by adding another picture, and another, in emulation of time's flow, but instead repeats the slice that initiated the damage. Instead of suturing instants together, each cut inflicts another wound. Portraiture required long minutes of study and cohabitation of artist and subject, carrying the breath of the living into the time of making. Photography broke that compact with its Augenblick. Bazin (1967) is here incorrect: the seizure of the instant which he believed was the heir of an ancient hope that images might preserve life instead deprives the living of life. Cinematography is the attempt to return life to the stilled; but in doing so it deprives stillness of both its proximity to the cohabitation of sitter and portraitist, and the co-presence of the unique image with its viewing. Ever since, every still image is uncertain because the privilege of wholeness that it claimed is exposed as illusory by the existence of a neighbour technology whose task is to heal its traumatic excision from the flowing wholeness of the world. After cinematography, there is neither wholeness nor uniqueness: any instant is necessarily merely one among millions. The certainty it derived from co-presence vanishes with the revelation that its claim to completion is imaginary. In trying to complete the image isolated in time, cinematographic multiplication of images only revealed the incompleteness of the single frame. At the same time it proved that its own effort to mend that absence through proliferation was doomed to endless supplementation with no hope of completion. Until now.

At many points in its history, photography has been on the brink of revolutionizing the very concept of the image; and yet the old still maintained its place. The true revolution of the image occurs only in its annihilation. The photographic image lost its aura first through reproducibility, a second time through supplementation in film and now once more in mass production and mass circulation. Digital media accelerate the proliferation of images by abbreviating processing time and speeding up and massifying distribution: the supposedly privileged optical realism of photography and cinema was already uncertain. The era of the image's domination of culture is over: the media that define us now are spreadsheets, databases, and geographical information systems: the dominant media, the media of domination. The photographic image had its brief moment as dominant metaphor for the empiricist science of the nineteenth century as presumed recorder of phenomena. Today a photographic record of a unique event is only one instance in a vast aggregation of data whose relational extrapolations overwhelm the evidence of a single moment. This is the condition of the mass image.

The fifteenth century technics of perspective and cartography (Alberti's De Pictura appeared in 1432; the Fra Mauro Map in 1450) shared a fundamentally temporal structure: one voyaged across or into their products, and in their development they became integral to the colonial project as itself a mastery not only of space but of the future (Rabasa 1993; Mitchell 2002). Photography and data visualization in the early nineteenth century held to a different aesthetic, one of truth. Certainly, maps and paintings allowed a certain realism: portraits were praised for their likeness to the sitter, and merchants relied on maps for navigation. But they had the quality of tales told: one made allowance for the teller. Both the automation of depiction in photography and the correlation between display and arithmetic in graphs promised an objectivity no longer mediated by a human narrator, though there is a subtle distinction in their truth-claims. Data visualizations—graphs, charts, diagrams— offer themselves as certain, reducing photograph or film to the uncertain status of mere anecdotes. From classical antiquity, geometric diagrams evidenced a world too pure to exist in reality but whose axioms could be proved by pure logic. Architectural plans described not-yet existent engineering which, once realized, proved the drawings right. Nothing proves the truth of potentially mendacious photographs except an uncertain claim that the conjunctures they picture once occurred, but with no evidence beyond fading memories and crumbling archives.

Yet there are reasons to believe that photography and data visualization (most obviously in the form of cartography) both derive from the same history of printmaking and light processing, and share a similar liminal status between certain and uncertainty. The suffix shared by photography with scientific instruments (phonograph, seismograph and spectrograph) indicates a collapsing distinction between writing and drawing which evidences a change in the idea of agency. These various graphings are no longer done by humans but by non-human others: light, sound, seismicity and spectra. Cartography belongs with perspective because of theological agency involved: the view from heaven and the sacred geometry of the vanishing point established the identity of the divine and the ideal human as subjects who see and for whom the world displays itself. Data visualization shares with photography the principle that something other than a white, male, all- powerful God or that white, male aspirant to the throne, the demi-god, Man, does both the seeing and the rendering of things seen. In photography, and cinematography after it, the world makes itself visible to someone or something who is neither the ideal Man nor the demiurge of Creation. On the principle of scientific instruments, especially those of the nineteenth century, the world inscribes itself without God or Man.

From truth to ethics

Galison (1997) makes a distinction between image and logic as two principles of scientific observation. In his account of nuclear science, Geiger counters are 'logical'. They give statistical accounts of massive numbers of individual events, no one of which is closely observed. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the kind of capture of a unique event now familiar from CERN's Large Hadron Collider is in his vocabulary an 'image'. Logical instruments offer truth about the general condition of a measured situation; the image offers the truth of a single instance, the same form as the photograph. We can never tell whether the unique event captured by photos or by instruments like the LHC is typical or entirely one-off. Confusing the two is a characteristic of propaganda, where an instance is labelled as a type. The central claim of photographic realism, where it runs counter to propagandistic abuses of the image, is that a photograph catches the truth of an unrepeatable moment in space and time. But today we face a new challenge to this ontology, not from a collapse of the supposed indexical relation, but because of digital distribution. The corollary of Cartier-Bresson's moment juste is, as Godard might have said, juste un moment. The contemporary photograph, hurled into massive online databases, is no longer unique: it is just another occurrence among millions, billions.

To the extent that a photograph attains certainty through its reference to a unique event, it already encounters an ontological problem, because what it captures is not things but their appearance, not 'being' but 'being-there', which already splits the unity of the object it portrays. Moreover, a unique event is not a thing or an assembly of things. Ecological thought and informatics both presume that events occur as connections with and through differences between things, forces, activities and times, so that the unique event, to the extent that it is one, must be thought of as a construct abstracted from a more complex conjuncture. The alternative model of the Geiger counter that gauges a single average from vast numbers of events gives us a number representing the statistical probability of an event occurring, but no knowledge about the individual events it counts. This does not produce a doubt about the connection of either image or measurement with the event it gives an account of. The ecological principle of the connectivity of all events with one another in the vast intertwining of the world includes their intertwining with both kinds of instrument. It does however raise again the question about who sees in the place of the previous guarantors of truth, God and Man, and what they make of these pictures that the world makes of itself. In both forms there are truth claims, one probabilistic, one concerning the unique event, and each produces its own uncertainties.

Truth is not only an epistemological category but an ethical one. The dominant ethics in contemporary society argues for the ethical supremacy of the majority over the minority: the greater good for the larger number. But this already assumes that the probabilistic is always superior to the particular, since the unique event by definition occurs only in the minority of cases. It also permits acts that are unethical by any standard if they lead to the greater good. Such is the case with the infamous Abu Ghraib images. Those photographs of tortured individuals revealed a horror in the heart of the US occupation of Iraq, and, we dutifully hope and believe, put an end to the worst of the horrors they depicted. But as both Sontag (2003) and Scarry (1985) argue, the people who took and circulated these images did so in order to shame the people being tortured. Their continuing circulation continues the system of torture the photographers worked in. It may be for the greater good, but further dissemination keeps the torture alive for the poor souls who endured it. Adorno (2000, 138) argued that 'the compensation promised by civilisation and our education in return for our acts of renunciation is not forthcoming'. The sacrifice demanded by consequentialist (majoritarian) ethics rewards neither those who sacrifice nor those on whose behalf the sacrifice is made. If anyone benefits, they are diminished by their profit. An ethical system that condones the misery of even one person is not ethical at all. The myth of the greater good accepts and condones hurt and degradation in the interests of a system which is unethical because it thrives on pain.

In his Politics (1962) from the second half of the fourth-century BCE, Aristotle proposed that the political should be the debate over what constitutes the Good for all of us. Happiness, however defined or described, is in this view the goal of politics and, following Adorno's argument, belongs to everyone, not just the majority. In the age of environmentalism, we should say that the happiness embraces not just everyone but everything: not just humans but the world that we inhabit, that frames us and that we remake constantly. The political is the radical demand not just for an end to suffering but for happiness for all.

Our problematic of certainty and uncertainty relates to two possible virtues, those of certainty itself as a positive value, and that of truth. We have seen however that truth may come in varying degrees of certainty, and it is clear that some forms of uncertainty are in themselves delightful. Aristotle and Adorno's arguments suggest that if the goal of photography is some form of certainty or truth, it is only virtuous if that form contributes to happiness.

Images make it possible to experience happiness, even in the darkest times, precisely through the uncertainty born of their failure to produce union between image, appearance and being. Images negate what they represent: the unhappiness of the world that confronts them as referent. Mass photography produces a vast number of ostensibly happy images, but representations of happiness are not happiness itself. Pornography is only an extreme instance of the advertising tactic of relentless representation of happiness (though see Paasonen 2007 for a more complex reading). Such positive affirmation of the world is a double negation: denying the existence of unhappiness while at the same time denying the power of the image to negate what it portrays. In order to propose happiness as alternative to the unhappiness we inhabit everyday, images must negate the world in order to produce pictures that are more startling, richer, surer, more filled with meaning and more desirable than that. Even images of unhappy events attempt to heal them: this would be the counter-argument to censure of the Abu Ghraib images. An image seeks out some form of good—beauty, empathy, desire and, in the case of Abu Ghraib images, justice. The art of images is to propose something other than what they show. Picturing an unhappy condition proposes a condition other than the one it encounters.

The non-identity of the image is its particularity. A photograph is a noun, indeed a proper noun: the precise name of an occurrence which it transfigures by extracting it from the tedious everyday. By separating it, it gives it a name. What we look at and prize is not the truth of the moment but the capacity of the moment to be otherwise than it is. By taking the world as it falls in front of the camera lens and seizing that moment, photography abandons the truth of the world—that it is an unhappy place—and instead snatches at how it might be or become other. In the darkest times, that is the nearest ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The uncertainty of the uncertain image
• 1 The uncertainty of the mass image: logistics and behaviours
• 2 Thumbnail images: uncertainties, infrastructures and search engines
• 3 Uncertainties of facial emotion recognition technologies and the automation of emotional labour
• 4 Ambiguous Physiognomy
• 5 Hatsune Miku: an uncertain image
• 6 Creative Control: digital labour, superimposition, datafication, and the image of uncertainty
• 7 After the Anthropocene: the photographic for earthly survival?
• Index