The Totalitarian Society of the Image

UHD, 2024, 13:49
Music: Ian Mikyska

The film is the third part of a trilogy about representation, art and politics. Signatures of Certain Things dealt with the role of artworks and art institutions in society. The film asked the question of who art is actually for. In the second part, titled Commodity Catalogue, the author addressed the commodified nature of artworks and the question of whether anything meaningful and critical can still be expressed in an environment defined by the all-pervasive power of money. The last part was meant to be a synthesis of the two previous ones. Instead, it reveals the contradictions of artistic analysis, which do not fall into a clear position of political action, but become a symptom or a curse.

Script:

The Oracle

There are many techniques of divination, mostly forgotten today. Some of them are still practiced, and there are also new techniques being invented by which the continuity of power can be maintained. The most established oracle today is the amorphous network of networks. For a small fee, it offers answers to absolutely everything.

We are not far from the truth when we say that we live in a controlled society dependent in its very essence on flash divinations, a million times faster than those from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The internet – or rather the complex of corporate platforms it has become – is a monster of divination that has only a single, ultimate function to which it submits everything. Abstractly expressed, this is unstoppable accumulation – the accumulation of capital, of course.

Why should we ask about our future? The future, after all, is not mysterious in any way; for anyone. The future is clear – it is our death, and it is unavoidable. A banal discovery? No desires can be fulfilled, even though all the oracles try to convince us otherwise. Satisfaction will never arrive, yet we cannot resist the production of promises.

The silent imperative of accumulation, hard to stop in and of itself, now rules over everything and absorbs everything into itself, including hope. It’s a new form of religiosity that interprets everything, permeates everything, and can be used to justify anything.

Neither will this humble dissenting film, which searches for possibilities of expression through its declared resignation, move anything or illuminate anything. It, too, will be absorbed. It will become, at best, one of the prophecies, uploaded somewhere in the server room of the new Delphi – at worst, it will be lost in the indistinguishable mass of digital data.

Our Future is Our Death

Conscientiously practicing religious rituals under the supervision of capital is, of course, a reasonable activity. Heresy is not to be forgiven, apostasy leads to failure and ultimately to a repentant reintegration. The survival of outsider sects merely maintains the false expectations of real and possible alternatives.

Today more than at any point in the past, the rationality of this dogma is comprehensible to anyone, and it offers the promise of the fulfilment of all desires in this life, not after death. There is only one rule: pleasure can only be realised individually and success and failure are then up to each of us. If someone fails, they cannot lay the blame on anything or anyone but themselves.

Common sense tells us that death is a pleasure for no one; that it ruins everything. Death is therefore the greatest enemy of the fulfilment of desires.

The Absolute Enemy

To say that we live in one of the worst possible worlds is a dissenting opinion voiced by outsiders. In this world, you see, there are no alternatives – even the most promising ones have failed. There is nowhere to turn.

It is the call of death that remains as the absolute enemy of this accumulative self-propelled movement. Death is essentially the only strong and revolutionary voice calling for the cessation of this movement. The call sounds from the future and rings out: we will all die in the end, so it is unnecessary to wait. This is death’s declaration of war.

Such a war arising from absolute hostility knows no limits. It always leads to one side or the other being labelled criminal and inhuman; absolutely worthless. The logic of worth and worthlessness is consistent and demands continually new, continually deeper discrimination, headed for total annihilation.

Is it therefore possible to join death; to follow it as an army in a war? What would absolute victory look like? And absolute defeat? An absurd idea, or the perfect revolution?

Forced Choice

Let us assume that absolute hostility is reserved for death as it calls to us from the future. But the revolution does not arrive; it has no recruits. It is hard to even consider it, as death is constantly being discredited under the ceaseless barrage of propaganda. We are constantly hearing: Death is death, after all!

Of course, no one wants the totalitarian future that death offers us. Refusing means accepting the current hegemony per se, without alternatives. It’s a forced choice. The very possibility of thinking differently is thus eliminated.

Is not the rise of contemporary fascism based on an adoration of uniformity and a discrediting of radical ideas? The fascist decision for order is born in the rejection of other perspectives.

The truth does not consist in a single perspective, but neither does it lie in multiple perspectives. The site of truth is the gap, the transition dividing one perspective from another. We are more likely to find it in distortion or in the gap itself.

The Totalitarian Society of Images

Let us consider the production of digital images, one of the principal manifestations of the great oracle.

This is a manifestation of the common social logic of the movement of accumulation. Various configurations and connections between processes of exchange and production spin ‘round and ‘round in the clearly mysterious process of self-expansion, also known as accumulation. The derivate of such movement is propaganda justifying the system in itself.

Two trends are manifest in digital image production. One heads towards a dialogical, perfectly telematic society of producers and collectors of images, that is, a society of freedom. The second leads to a centrally programmed society of recipients and managers of images, that is, a totalitarian society.

Both trends coexist in the same reality, the former enclosed in the latter. This means that we have long since been living in a totalitarian society, but to divert attention in conjunction with the established propaganda and marketing strategies, we point a finger at totalitarian societies elsewhere.

The Curse

This film, of course, is propaganda too, relativising shared values and scaring us with death. A stylised black-and-white, lightly grainy format was chosen to make it more attractive. Content that is slightly confusing, slightly offensive, and, for some, slightly boring, packaged into a conciliatory and elegant artistic form. Simply another digital image product.

But as Carl von Clausewitz, the master theorist of war, reminds us: Elegance can often become idiocy, which is not as easily forgiven in war as it is in art. Art has the advantage of still being haunted. Whether it is stupid or brilliant, beautiful or ugly, it remains here, like a curse that constantly renews itself.