One Of The Marks Of Our World Is Perhaps This Reversal: We Live According To A Generalized Image-repertoire. Consider The United Sates, Where Everything Is Transformed Into Images: Only Images Exist And Are Produced And Are Consumes ... Such A Reversal Necessarily Raises The Ethical Question: Not That The Image Is Immoral, Irreligious, Or Diabolic (as Some Have Declared It, Upon The Advent Of The Photograph), But Because, When Generalized, It Completely De-realizes The Human World Of Conflicts And Desires, Under Cover Of Illustrating It.

-Roland Barthes

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One Of The Marks Of Our World

Roland Barthes

One Of The Marks Of Our World Is Perhaps This Reversal: We Live According To A Generalized Image-repertoire. Consider The United Sates, Where Everything Is Transformed Into Images: Only Images Exist And Are Produced And Are Consumes ... Such A Reversal Necessarily Raises The Ethical Question: Not That The Image Is Immoral, Irreligious, Or Diabolic (as Some Have Declared It, Upon The Advent Of The Photograph), But Because, When Generalized, It Completely De-realizes The Human World Of Conflicts And Desires, Under Cover Of Illustrating It.

Topic

Ethical Questions

Our World

Desire

The Photograph Is An Extended, Loaded Evidence — As If It Caricatured Not The Figure Of What It Represents (quite The Converse) But Its Very Existence ... The Photograph Then Becomes A Bizarre (i)medium(i), A New Form Of Hallucination: False On The Level Of Perception, True On The Level Of Time: A Temporal Hallucination, So To Speak, A Modest (o)shared(i) Hallucination (on The One Hand 'it Is Not There,' On The Other 'but It Has Indeed Been'): A Mad Image, Chafed By Reality.

Reality

Hands

Mad