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Image-Times, Image-Histories, Image-Thinking Catherine M. Soussloff “And what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface.”1 Derived from the Latin, i.e., imago (f. noun) and imagines (pl.), the terminology and the concepts adhering to “image” have both fascinated and perplexed scholars, most of them philosophers, psychoanalysts , and historians of religion, art, and film. To explore these etymologies today, however, seems superfluous since the term has an expanded significance in all media studies and practices, including computer technologies, digital and analog photography and film, television , and video. While the conceptual intricacies associated with the image and its cognates in the Western tradition stretch back to ancient Greece and have led to a wide discrepancy of views regarding both the ethical and aesthetical value of images, the technological background of and for the image has a more recent, and a more securely historical foundation, accounting for the current fascination with the image. While no account of the image in today’s rapidly expanding image-world can be definitive, no discussion of the image should be considered adequate without an understanding of the conceptual issues invoked around its name in the past. I begin here with image-technology and the image-world in order to return to the conceptual issues with the present firmly in place. All of the newer image-technologies commonly referred to today are visual, because the bulk of our experience with them begins with their appearance on a computer, television, monitor, movie screen, or with the aid of a variety of camera imaging apparatuses. Image-technologies construct and serve virtually every aspect of society today: arts, entertainment, education, business, science, and medicine. Images produce and construct knowledge; they have been naturalized into a global culture for generating and monitoring information. Any description of the image or of the discourse that surrounds it today must account for this pervasiveness of visuality—a fact which makes the image-world possible. Miller 3 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:49 PM Page 145 The technologies presently associated with the factual omnipresence of visuality in our world can be historically situated in the West beginning with the invention of photography c. 1840.2 Indeed, as Susan Sontag stated so clearly as early as 1974, the analog technologies of the image—photography and film—have been seen as both congruent and synonymous with the modern era.3 Sontag thought that the image and historical time, or chronology, converged at the very end of the nineteenth century, after the adolescence of the new photographic technologies. According to her, a new concept of time, and therefore of history, adheres like super glue to the image-technologies of modernity. She wrote: “In the real world something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the imageworld , it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.”4 Society’s and the individual’s relationship to the past, present, and future transformed as a result of the photographic image. This new relationship to the image also meant that clear distinctions had to be made between the image in modernity and the older traditions of visual representation that had formerly constituted the history of art: drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Although Sontag did not make the point explicitly, the birth of both moving picture film and the X-ray in 1895 account for the time– image match; the thing or state of being she termed the “image-world.” The photographic visualization of the inside of the human body began with the invention of the X-ray in 1895, which scholars have understood as an image on the threshold; between the inside and outside of subjectivity, or between interiority and exteriority.5 However, images could not constitute a world, or a worldview, without both the visualized medical body and the body in motion determined by the companion invention to the X-ray: motion picture technology. Clearly, then, a comprehensive and ultimately useful theory of the image must have room for the altered relation to time and space the image-world inaugurates. Film theorists have long understood the importance of such a conceptualization for their medium. Gilles Deleuze went so far as to establish a chronology for film history based on the earlier era of “the movement image,” and the post-World War II era...

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