On the Status of Image in Digital Networks

Notes from a Political Uprising

Abstract

This paper results from a research project that intended to formulate a theoretical proposition about the modes and means of operation of images in digital contexts. Trying to follow a phenomenological path, the article focuses on the case of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman murdered in Iran during a political protest in 2009. The images of her death would gain wide repercussion, reappearing even in subsequent manifestations, especially of the Arab Spring. From this case – without, however, any pretension to generalize our propositions –, we seek to identify certain aspects specific to a kind of image generated and disseminated from the digital element. That image, to a certain extent an inheritance of electricity and technical reproducibility (W. Benjamin), and penetrating the most varied spheres of life with the explosion of digital technologies, would reverberate – in a more extreme mode – echoes of a crisis of perception already announced by the German philosopher. Hence, we ask: to what extent would the hypertrophy of these digital images give us a flank to glimpse even another relation with the images, a new way of accessing and perceiving them? How could we describe its modes of operation on us? Recognizing the vastness of the theme and the possible ways to approach it, this text seeks, through congruent notions of other authors, to problematize these dilemmatic issues starting, above all, from the notion of digital image as a kind of common “surface”, territory of sharing the feeling.