Yesterday, POBICS held the first meeting about some image's papers and books. It was a first approach because next week we will hold another gathering in order to carry out a deeply discussion.
In this first meeting, we several extracts from three books: 1) "De la Investigación Audiovisual", by M. Jesús Buxó; 2) "Compendio de Fotografía para Uso de Sociólogos", by Sylvain Maresca and Michaël Meyer; and 3) "La Antropología Visual", by Ana Martínez Pérez.
-Images as scenario
-Images as a "affective" action, and not a comunication function.
-Images and ebola.
Comments and ideas were intermingled for all the questions, so we offer a joint remark about the seminary:
We can't consider images within the classical Jakobson theory. Indeed, images have its own meaning without textual or discursive process. As Deleuze says, we are affected by images, and they "enter" (or cofunction) with our personal universe of meanings. We capture some ideas and we translate it from a indistincton zone (similar to the Agamben conception but upgraded with our own meaning). This indistincton is shaped by the image and us, and from it emerges a new knowledge or affection. And that is the scenario idea we manage.
In this sense, images are not a classical (inter)mediator quasi-objects, but a more complex issue. To think images as a ubiquitous stuff that are connected with some other elements in concrete moments is not enough. However, we can say that a image was a mediator after we analyse them, that is, in a second moment (and not previously). Then, an ebola image has acted as mediator if we can describe and go over the network that enacts (or "make sense") to that ebola image; but not before it occurs.
Photo Credit: lettawren
I think that one of the most interesting meanings of mediation -at least in Latour- have to do with the creation of something new after the process of displacement, the invention of a 'link that did not exist before and that modifies agents'. Images offer the opportunity to re-think this process of modification, as its 'actuality' is in fact a mediation: it is not ubiquitous (in the sense of eternity), but local; it has however a mediated existence; image is present in all places of a configuration in which image itself can be captured and that create links between different agents.
ResponderEliminarWe agree with you,Jorge. Images mediate, but we have to refuse terms like "between", because that mediation is not a two agents relation. And is so interesting your proposal about the creation of a new links. That makes me think this is the origin of a new enactment, the most interesting term in ANT currently (almost for us). A good idea could be analyse what kind of agents are constituted within epidemic images ;)
EliminarIt is interesting at the same time, I think, that the term "between" talks about the agency of two entities... Between... from "by two each" (http://goo.gl/Bryb06). In fact, it is not a two agent relation, but a process that is part of the activity of two agents.
EliminarAnother question about images could be about the possibility of an account of them without the process of perception. I am just reviewing a texto of Whitehead about his theory of perception. Perhaps it could be interesting as He talks that this process is not a human or animal property, but of actual entities in relation.
See you.