from Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction · 1 December 06 by Ray Crowley
VI
[..] as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
tags: philosophy, photography, simulacra, theory
from Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange & Death (1976) · 1 December 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 2, The Order Of Simulacra
The Three Orders of Simulacra
There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance:
1. The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the ‘classical’ period, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution.
2. Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era.
3. Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase
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The Tactile and the Digital
[..]Digitality is among us. It haunts all the messages ans signs of our society, and we can clearly locate its most concrete form in the test, the question/answer, the stimulus/response. All content is neutralized by a continuous process of orchestrated interrogations, verdicts and ultimatums to be decoded, which this time no longer come from the depths of the genetic code but still possess the same tactical indeterminacy – the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter in the cycle of the question/answer, the bit or the return of a minuscule quantity of energy/information to its point of departure. This cycle merely describes the perpetual reactualization of the same models. [..] Everywhere supply devours demand, the question devours the answer, either absorbing and regurgitating it in a decodable form, or inventing it and anticipating its predictable corroboration.
tags: digitality, philosophy, simulacra