"Follow-Up" #9

From Baudrillard’s the intelligence of evil, or the lucidity pact again:

"The peculiar role of photography is not to illustrate the event, but to constitute an event in itself. Logic would demand that the event, the real, occur first and that the image come after to illustrate it. This is, unfortunately, the case most of the time.

         A different sequence demands that the event should never exactly take place, that it should remain in a sense a stranger to itself. Something of that strangeness doubtless survives in every event, in every object, in every individual. This is what the image must convey. And, to do so, it must also remain in a sense a stranger to itself; must not conceive itself as a medium; must not take itself for an image; must remain a fiction and hence echo the unaccountable fiction of the event; must not be caught in its own trap or let itself be imprisoned in the image-feedback." (99)

"There is a haziness about the real.

         Reality is not in focus. The bringing into focus of the world would be ‘objective reality,’ that is to say, an adjustment to models of representation—exactly like the focusing of the photographic lens on the object. Fortunately, the world never comes definitively into focus in this way. "(98-99)

"We must then strip away, always strip away, to get back to the image itself. Stripping away brings out the essential point: namely that the image is more important than what it speaks of, just as language is more important than what it signifies. "(98)