2 August 2009: "Is it time 2 ‘retire’ ur digital camera?"

This post is about the libidinal economy. The crux of Carles's analysis in this post comes in x-axis of the chart he posts to illustrate an apparently off-handed comment about the relation of ubiquity to inauthenticity: "Because so many digital images exist, posted in places like facebooks, blogs, twitpics, and flickrs, all images became less meaningful." The chart depicts a power-law curve, with the x-axis meant to represent meaning. What is significant is the way in which Carles scales meaning numerically, suggesting that meaning can be quantified on a scale from 0 to 3. Covert references to the trinity aside, this quantification of qualitative experience negates the point the chart is meant to illustrate, which is that the sheer quantity of images has devalued them, that quantity itself, as a concept, militates against significance, with raw bulk ontology rendering a nuanced phenomenology implausible if not impossible.

For Carles, the question is not "how much is too much?" but "what is 'muchness'?" How do we experience meaning without it bearing the imprint of our rationalizing, calculating utilitarian age? Can their be degrees of meaning? Or is ranking experiences in such a way a way of eradicating them, supplanting their substance with the sameness of the numeric code. Meaning, Carles implies, may be a binary function; an experience either has meaning or it doesn't; the analysis of the content of meaning can not be quantified, or enumerated, as it were.

The digital image, at once existing as a facsimile of a memory and a piece of digital code, sits at the fault line between quantity and quality, between being and not being a mere number. Its status remains liminal even as it becomes commonplace. The hallmark of a digital artifact is that it doesn't degrade as it is replicated; the hallmark of memory is that it gets distorted with the pressures of the present as it is recalled to consciousness. At this nexus lies the opportunity for a new kind of depth psychology, facilitated by the mind observing itself being observed in digital images, in the comparison of a memory with the perfect image of what has been falsely recollected, albeit from the scopophilic perspective of a single lens, a unitary gaze. In rehearsing complaints about the digital camera, Carles notes that "We all thought ‘we can capture as many moments as we want, snap all of our friends, and never forget anything for the rest of our lives" but we found instead that as we multiplied our ersatz memories as images, we jeopardized our ability to manufacture memories that could reconcile us to our present condition, thus aggrieving the wounds of the dasein. Being-in-the-world and being-at-hand fall into needless contradiction, burdening the fragile self with misrecognitions of itself in misremembered mises-en-scene that threaten its very tenability. Are we what we have photographed? What we thought we photographed but did not? Are we more coherent in the photographs we wisely deleted? Carles concludes nihilistically that "because so many digital images exist, there is no point in even taking a picture." Representing (re-presenting) reality as apprehended from a particular self's constrained perspective no longer serves the social whole, the idea that the totality of an historical moment is a compilation of all the possible digital photos that could be taken at that given moment by any and all ontic positionalities is disputed, along with the methodological particularism that animated it. Carles, usually careful to remain on the sidelines of such internecine disputes among philosophers, here rises up to administer a slap at the analytical brethren among his tribe.

Confronted with the poverty of the image and the confusion in creates between being and knowing, between quantity and quality, between thought and feeling, Carles posits a radical iconclasm:

I seriously think I’m going to ‘destroy’ my point-and-shoot camera [via putting it on ebay] and using money to buy ‘marijuana cigarettes’ and ‘cocaine bumps.’

Perhaps the irresolvable philosophical conundrums are best solved through oblivion...