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POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF TECHNICAL IMAGES OR ANYBODY CAN BE THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY
Abstract
The term technical image (according to the media theorist Vilem Flusser, its first form was photography, and the last form by now have been images projected in all possible forms of screens, monitors and displays, including holograms) can be understood as a term referring to the beginning of a new age, which is coming after the age of linear writing. Historically as well as ontologically, compared to the previous tradition, these technical images mean rupture, a breakthrough. Creating technical images was the necessary consequence of the link of texts to sensuously perceptible reality from which texts were abstracted earlier. Technical images have been an item of philosophers' interest since the time when W. Benjamin, a German cultural critic published the essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936), which is now commonly known. Unlike W. Benjamin, who focused on the theory of social and aesthetic issue of the original work and its copy in the age of serial reproducibility, Flusser concentrated on the technology of reproducibility of any work in the environment of so called new media which were just emerging. Just as Benjamin, Flusser recognized the first technically reproducible work in photography, however, unlike him (or the photography theorists such as - A. Bazin. S. Sontag, S. Kracauer), he used his analysis as a tool of prediction of the future society development. Vilem Flusser, a native of Prague and a media theorist, states in his three key texts Fur eine Philosophie der Fotografie (1983), has been translated as (Towards a Philosophy of Photography), Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Into the Universe of Technical Images, 1985) and Die Schrift: Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Script: Does Writing Have a Future? 1987) that technical images become a dominant cognitive metaphor of the contemporary society and that a new social culture is being formed in connection with their creation, distribution, transfer and consumption, where people are no longer grouping around specific problems, but around technical images. Such new social structure needs new criteria of analysis, it requires a new interpretive beginning. Flusser does not wonder how a medium is possible, but he deals with the consequences of the effect of one type of abstraction, namely technical images, on the contemporary society. The following text briefly analyses the dominant cognitive metaphor of Flusser's theory – the term technical image.
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