Creating mediology

A little while ago the news of an academic doctoral defense became a real media-event in France: the Sorbonne debate of Regis Debray’s thesis on mediology. It was the Debray himself, as well as his topic, that attracted this much attention to the event. The reason for this curiosity is obvious, when we consider the many abrupt changes in his life that Regis Debray had undergone, shifting from philosophy—he was a much privileged “normalien”—to professional revolution, arm in arm with Che Guevara, and being imprisoned for five years—to state politics, as personal advisor to the French president (1981–88)—to a return to philosophy and writing six new books in six years.

However, the real center of interest was focused on the new discipline, called mediology, that Debray has ventured to create in Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident, delineating its boundaries and trying to first explore this chosen field. Such an ambitious enterprise necessitates a well-founded methodology. Besides clear concepts and trains of thought, we expect the presence of convincing arguments that support the proposed logic. Are these arguments here? Can we rely on them? This is the big question of Debray’s bold theorization. The serious doubts we feel from beginning of this book obviously don’t exclude our respect and interest for the impressive amount of footnotes and all the formal signs of scientific research. From the scriptures to the literature of advertisement, from the Greek classics to the last communication technologies, plenty of references are accumulated. Alberti and CD-ROM sweetly meet on the pages of this new book. But in the course of reading this book, our gaze also has to pursue an ambiguous history.

Extensive, rich descriptions fill the unfolding chapters. We are given a whole survey of the metamorphoses of the image. The book follows the collective beliefs and technical revolutions that have constantly changed its status and power, function and impact of the image, from the magical to the artistic, only to arrive at a stage of the merely economic. Wasn’t the era of images just a short parenthesis—Debray wonders—between the times of idols and our recent times of the visual, a notion as vague and unfathomable as the vibrating waves and dots on a video monitor? Entering a new epoch, called the videosphere, leaving behind not only the Guttenberg-age, but also such achievements as the cinema, the digital revolution, he suggests, has changed our whole civilization. The moment of farewell has arrived.

Debray starts with the assessment that the birth of the image is related to death. The need or hope to transcend death brings about a substitute for the dead, a kind of embodiment. Whether sculpted or painted, the image substitute serves as mediation between the human and the divine, between the visible and the invisible world. The symbolic linkage happens between these two realms, but relies on the existence of a community. To represent means rendering present what is absent, for many, replacing the disappeared one. The symbol always stands for something, beyond itself. Since, originally, it has been an object of action, of reuniting things for the sake of recognition; it therefore has to be an operation, a ceremony.

Later, through thousands of years, images brought people into a system of symbolic correspondence between social and cosmic orders, transmitting messages before writing could serve them. We all know the iconophobia of the religions and the iconoclasms of the heretics; they are rather understandable. Too much power lay in these presences and irresistible magic calling for adulation, replacing the official icons taught by dogma. The spiritual premise had this ambiguous role: depriving the spectator from free, uncontrolled pleasure, willing to shape it according to its predetermined rules, avoiding the “dangerous” domain of the material. However, the development of imagemaking, the unstoppable force that imbued the object with...