"Follow-Up" #3

SCENE

(from Baudrillard again--that Lucidity Pact)

     "In itself, the image is bound neither to truth nor to relaity; it is appearance and bound to appearance. That is its magical affiliation with the illusion of the world as it is, the affiliation that reminds us that the real is never certain... .
     And in this sense, unfortunately, one may say that images are rare--the power of the image being, most of the time, intercepted by all that we try to make it say.
     The image is, most often dispossessed of its originality, of its own existence as image, and doomed to shameful complicity with the real." (91)
     "This...murder of the image...lies in this enforced visibility as source of power and control, beyond even the 'panoptical': it is no longer a question of making things visible to an external eye, but of making them transparent to themselves. The power of control is, as it were, internalized, and human beings are no longer victims of images but rather transform themselves into images." (94)
     "This is the sign both of our ultimate transparency and our total obscurity." (95)
     "For the sign is a scene, the scene of representation, of seduction, of language: in language, signs seduce one another beyond meaning... . And the disappearance of this scene clears the way for a principle of obscenity... .
     No seduction, no representation: merely the integral coding of the body in the visible, where it becomes in fact definitively real, even more than it is really!" (69)
     "At this stage, the image is nothing but an operator of visibility--the medium of an integral visibility that is the pendant to Integral Reality, becoming-real going hand in hand with becoming-visible at all costs: everything must be seen, everything must be visible, and the image is pre-eminently the site of this visibility." (93)