The Reign of the Image

Alain Rowan

In the 21st century the image, now mostly in digital form, reaches into every aspect of human life. It represents a shift in human culture on a par to the invention of the printed page, something which led to huge social and cultural change as people not only gained access to ideas, information, and knowledge that previously was out of their reach, but also encountered for the first time a world in which there emerged a multiplicity of opinion and perspectives on almost every aspect of lived experience.

It was the beginning of the end of the so-called “grand narratives” that had organised and deciphered human life (e.g., religion, the class system, etc.) and today we can draw the conclusion. Jacques-Alain Miller states it with great clarity when he writes, “In place of transcendental terms of structure, coming from an autonomous dimension, prior to experience and conditioning it, we have the primacy of practice. Where there was transcendental structure, we have a pragmatic, and even a social pragmatic.”[1] In other words, we live today within and through our networks that are bound together by routines and inventions, whereby, to again quote J.-A. Miller, “Everything now becomes a question of arrangement. We no longer dream of an outside. There are only trajectories, arrangements, and regimes of jouissance.”[2] This is the context in which the image now reigns within our post-modern era, one in which what we can call “the civilisation of the image” has definitively arrived.

Of course, this rise of the image, or what is also called visual culture, did not occur all at once. First came photography, invented in 1822, which brought, as Barthes states, a new object into the world: “in the photograph … the relationship of signified to signifiers is not one of ‘transformation’ but ‘recording’ … the scene there, captured mechanically, not humanly.”[3] In other words, the indisputable referent of the photograph is the object which appears in it (at a precise moment) and when we perceive it, we read it without the need for a code which might decipher it. Here the subject is directly addressed and persuaded that “this existed.”

Film followed, and with it the era of spectatorship, whereby the subject engages with a narrativized image that both blurs the lines between fantasy and reality and simultaneously obscures the ideological capture of the subject by the moving image. A key dimension of this was the birth of mass propaganda and alongside this the hidden persuaders of the advertising world. From the 1950’s, and with the invention of television, this power entered every home.

Finally, with the invention of the digital image/smartphone, the screen and image (e.g. selfies, etc.) became a primary and always present point of reference for every human being. To get some idea of the magnitude of this shift in culture, one can note some startling statistics. For example, American adolescents between the ages of 11 and 14 years spend on average nine hours per day on screens, while for 8- to 10-year-olds this figure is six hours.[4] We can also measure the impact of the power of the image on women's bodies. Indeed in 2022, the per year number of adult American women undergoing cosmetic surgical procedures stood at 1,498,311 which indicates that over the next ten years approximately 11% of adult American women will have undergone cosmetic surgery.[5]

Lacan investigated the function of the image in human life at a number of points in his work, ranging from the crucial role of seeing (broadly understood) and its psychic effect in the Mirror Stage, to the presence of the gaze, whereby the scopic drive object appears under the formula “to-be-seen.” He also insisted that visual space has singular effects, even when there is a shared visual object, which he formulated by stating, “You never look at me from the place from which I see you.”[6] In other words, the perceived has a signifying structure for each subject.

The Mirror Stage introduces a structuring image in the life of the infant, an act of identification by which the infant acquires a unified body, a One-body, whereby the I/ego emerges as a consistency albeit in “a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other.”[7] This point is crucial as it points to how the Imaginary is mediated by the Symbolic from the start via the Ego Ideal, meaning ongoing identifications emerging in the social bond. Thus, if the ego gives to the subject a consistency (absent in psychotic de-realisation) it is also a consistency that is subject to continuous modification. It is precisely at this point that the contemporary subject gets caught within a tyranny of self-improvement where the image reigns and that late capitalism fully exploits. In other words, the master signifiers of today say to the subject, “be more, do more, have more,” an ideality that functions alongside, as Lacan said, a modern superego that says “Enjoy!” Here the reign of the image and the flywheel of capitalist consumption merge, displacing the subject of desire towards jouissance.

Lacan engaged with the reciprocity of “to see” and “being seen” stressed by Merleau-Ponty, but with his concept of the gaze introduced something very different, namely, the non-localisable psychical experience of a drive object not limited to the look of the other. He takes an example from Sartre of a voyeur who hears a rustling sound that disturbs his act of seeing, leading to an experience of shame (quite different from the experience of an exhibitionist). Here Lacan says the subject experiences a being seen by the Other that involves drive satisfaction, in this example exposed, or in paranoia and as its object, menacing.  This “to-be-seen” of the scopic drive is also what is present for the porn addict who may be puzzled by his compulsive and repetitive watching but actualises a “to-be-seen” of drive satisfaction/jouissance that occludes subjective implication. To a lesser extent, isn’t this what contemporary subjects complain of as “doom scrolling”? [8]

References

[1] Miller, J.-A., “Six Paradigms of Jouissance,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 34, 2019, p. 65.

[2] Miller, J.-A., “Milanese Intuitions,” ibid., p. 98.

[3] Barthes, R. (1964), The Rhetoric of the Image, in ImageMusic-Text, ed. S. Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1987, 2nd Edition, p. 51.

[4] https://dataprot.net.statistics.

[5] https://www.plasticsurgery.org, 2022 ASPS Procedural Statistics Release (approximately 90% of all such procedures are undertaken by women).

[6] Lacan, J. (1978a), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller., trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1981, p 103.

[7] Lacan, J. (2006b), Écrits., trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton & Co., p. 76.

[8] “Doom scrolling” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2020. It designates the activity of mindlessly searching web pages/social media, especially for negative content, something that can trap the subject in a perpetual cycle of outrage and anxiety.