Page 265 - Contribution To Phenomenology

258 DON IHDE

Europeans with or without feathers. They take shape in pseudo-Renais-
sance style, and while one may recognize the accoutrements of dress, it
is hard to determine what is distinctive about the "native." The exact
parallel naivet6 occurs in the earliest Japanese reproductions of Wester-
ers—prints of Perry's ships and sailors in Japan, look Japanese. Indeed,
the more realistic paintings of Catlin and Remington in North America,
follow the invention of photography. And the ultimate painterly reproduc-
tion of photographic (quasi-)realism is itself, "photo-realism."
This quasi-realism of respresentation is also a kind of mediated
immediacy which is enhanced by the literal immediacy of image
availability. The photo, the fax, the television tape, can be reproduced,
disseminated, and broadcast today in quasi-"real time." We note this in
a particularly poignant way in times of crisis. Watching the Gulf War,
very little was coming through. What there was was highly selected. And
it was repeated—but overall, it always appeared as "immediate" and as
if "one were there."
I have characterized the "realism" of image technologies as quasi-
realism, and the immediacy as quasi-immediacy. This is because all
technologies are non-neutral and transformative of any object referent. I
shall not here develop anything like a full phenomenology of this, but
several features can easily be pointed up: (a) images are "framed." Thus
they are focally selective, and they leave out or cover over what lies
outside the frame, (b) Images transform both space and time. Optical
technologies reduce depth of field, flatten the referent. Watching a sports
match on television makes the background player seem immediately
behind the foreground player—the space is a kind of "Cartesian" space,
but that is not accidental since Descartes took much of his geometry of
space from optical technologies, (c) Image time is repeatable, reversible,
transposable—as is its space. The movie "flashback" technique, or reverse
time, as in ''2001, A Space Odyssey'' tracing its narrative backwards into
the infancy of the voyager.
Image space-time is malleable. Its "realism" is equivalent to its
"irrealism." We have seen this vividly in the technical virtuosity of
contemporary science-fiction films—but the same celebration of mal-
leability—to which is added a kind of associative fragmentation of
narrative—is hyperpresent in "MTV." Here images are juxtaposed, short-
Uved, in a kind of associative bricolage, (This bricolage will become a
significant factor in what follows.)