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Chapter Three. Embracing the Image
- State University of New York Press
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IMAGES EVERYWHERE It is a truism to note that we live in an increasingly image-dominated society. This dominance of the image is integral to the society of enjoyment because it provides an avenue for the imaginary enjoyment that characterizes this society . The image allows subjects to imagine that they are complying with the command to enjoy, though the enjoyment that one derives from the image is only imaginary. In this sense, an emphasis on the image is symptomatic of the society of enjoyment because it provides the illusion of total enjoyment and freedom without the kind of enjoyment that might disturb the functioning of the social structure itself. Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. According to Mitchell Stephens, “the image is replacing the word as the predominant means of mental transport.”1 Or, as Roland Barthes describes it, “The image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image.”2 This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. Juliet Flower MacCannell points this out in her Regime of the Brother: “the modern symbolic has been displaced and modified by an increased power in the imaginary.”3 This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words. When we prepare to cross the street, rather 59 Chapter Three Embracing the Image than seeing a sign that says “walk,” we see an image of a person walking. When we turn on the computer, rather than typing in the name of the program we wish to begin, we click on an icon indicating the program.4 In these commonplace examples, the image is now doing the work that the word once did. But the turn from the symbolic order to the imaginary extends far beyond this kind of mini-revolution. We can see the effects of the prevalence of imaginary experience today not only in the ubiquity of television and video, but even more significantly in its effect on older art forms that must accommodate themselves to the imaginary if they are to survive in this video age. The novel is primarily a symbolic, not an imaginary, form. That is to say, it attests to the primacy of words because it uses words to form images. However, the contemporary novel has not been able to ignore the increasing power of the imaginary. Many novelists writing today are attempting to transform the novel, to create a narrative form that is somehow adequate to—or indicative of—this new subject matter. This kind of effort is apparent in the fiction of, for example, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, and Toni Morrison, as well as many others. But perhaps no novelist has taken this project as far as Don DeLillo, who has engaged it in some way in each of his novels, from Americana to White Noise to Underworld. DeLillo’s fiction grapples with the way in which the increased power of the image has transformed our existence. As one of the characters in his novel The Names points out: Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth -century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. It’s the filmed century. You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. The whole world is on film, all the time.5 What DeLillo’s character articulates here is that the turn to the imaginary changes our fundamental experience of the world. Events become imaginary even before they become images because events occur as ready-made images. DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), makes this structural priority of the image evident on the level of its form. In fact, the very effort of the novel to depict the prevalence of the imaginary betrays the structure of narrative, which is fundamentally a symbolic structure. That is to say, the...