Image War: Interview with Marie-José Mondzain

Translator’s Introduction

This interview with Marie-José Mondzain, conducted by Marie-Claude Loiselle, was first published in 24 images in 2015. Although several years have passed since its publication, the issues addressed therein are as timely and critical today as many of Mondzain's reflections on image, politics, history, and culture were relevant and insightful in their original contexts of expression and engagement. Despite the brevity of the discussion incurred by the interview format, one would not fail to ascertain in it a smooth fusion of philosophical perspicacity, profound philological learnings, aesthetic judgments, and a commitment to social justice. These qualities reflect a probing depth of thinking that is the signature of Mondzain's work for over forty years and is still growing. Indeed, inasmuch as the reality of image lies nowhere else but in its living on, the intelligence of what she says about visual culture, politics, and history hic et nunc will remain ever forceful in the very survivance of what she has said and will say on every occasion.

Before turning to the interview itself, a few words about Mondzain's understanding of image and its relation to subjectivity are in order. According to Mondzain, an image is not a visual object that one may or may not see. Set free from the rule of representational thinking, to which it has been held hostage since Descartes, an image for Mondzain is no more a moment frozen in the encounter between a subject and what lies in her field of vision. It is instead the product of mimesis where one thing, the copy, mirrors the other, the original, with varying degrees of verisimilitude. Recalling its meaning rooted in the venerable idea of icon (aikon), articulated first in Greek and biblical texts, an image, as Mondzain sees it, is essentially a void, a “crack in being,” as she puts it, that breaks open a space where the light first comes in, marking in situ an opening for presence. ¹ Having no form and displaying no figure, it is “the present's unreality (the true unreality of presence)” to use Mondzain's words again. ² Image, in other words, is not so much what is seen by the eye as that which houses the visible as it crosses the threshold of sense and appears as what is (to be) seen. Neither an object in the world, nor a picture in the mind, an image happens (s’passer) or takes (its) place. It is, we could say, an occasion, an event, of (something) becoming visible.

If image becomes, that is, if it comes to appear as a “crack in being,” as an unreality that, precisely for being unreal, is all the more true, then the image, insofar as it is an opening, ought to be understood as an unbarred agon wherein multiple forces, at once social, political, and psychological, converge and struggle to decide how the site is defined, that is, made finite, and through this definition, determine what the apparent image means. Indeed, open to all, not only is the image a “site of indetermination,” but, by remaining indeterminate, it also comes out as a battleground for controlling or policing this indetermination. ³ Conflict-ridden from start to finish, images appear and are then seen always as a function of the warring forces that they attract and to which they accede. Viewed from a different angle, since image is not and never will be an object, and moreover, since nothing can be known for certain that does not first become an object, an image cannot be known for certain either, its meaning always both in excess of and in want of what it is made to mean at each instance. ⁴ Much like what we unknowingly desire, images are questions, but of the kind that can never be answered once and for all. If they appear as phenomena, they are phenomena that can never be saturated. ⁵ An image is, in Mondzain's own apt expression, a “living fugitive.” ⁶

To know is to see. It is to grasp the object with the mind's eye. Accordingly, knowing oneself begins with seeing oneself. And to see oneself is to see it as an other—not any other among all the others that are seen, but a distinct and unique (self-)image with which the individual identifies and by which one grasps oneself to be self-same in continuing existence. It is in and through this self-imagination, an imaging performed by the self of itself, that the individual puts oneself into the world as a seeing-subject and, seeing oneself being seen by others in return, finds one's place in the world that is one of being-with, rooted, from beginning to end, in intersubjective vision.

Crucial to this dialectic, as Mondzain reminds us time and again, is the fact that between the one who comes to see and the same one who not only sees but also recognize herself as seeing, there persists a distance–a “constitutive separation,” as Mondzain calls it–thanks to which an autonomous individual comes into being through autogenic reflection. Thus is born the absolute, self-made subject, someone standing erect as a living, breathing being, capable of saying “I” vis a vis others and oneself as well in the world. If seeing oneself as an image is the precondition for becoming a subject, and if seeing image is “constitutive of any possibility of a subject's seeing anything at all,” then an image is something we can never not see; not only do we see images everywhere all the time, but we also see them all the clearer when they are least expected. ⁷ Images appear as a call, to which we respond. In so doing, we render the world and the things in it visible, even with our eyes closed. Admittedly or not, we are fascinated by images, enraptured, as we are, “in the infinite pursuit of the desire to see and the infinite satisfaction of that very desire.” ⁸ In this lies the power of image, its power over us as we are empowered by the light that comes from the image itself.

As indicated in the beginning, Mondzain is by all accounts one of the most esteemed art and cultural critics writing today, whose influences range far beyond her home country France and Francophone regions around the world. Language barrier and other possible reasons aside, it is regrettable that only a small portion of her works has been made available in English. To address this lack, we have translated this interview in the hopes that others will join the effort. The interview itself will demonstrate its value and determine the worth of our translating it. Finally, I wish to thank Philippe Gajan, the director of 24 Images, and Marie-Claude Loiselle, the interviewer, for granting us the translation permission. All the imperfections remain exclusively our own. ---Briankle G. Chang

Interviewer’s Introduction

Marie-José Mondzain is one of the figures in current philosophy who has initiated the most fascinating thoughts on the place of images in our world. Interested in the relationship between the subject and the image, she traces the genealogy of this relationship first to the Byzantine age, and from there—in her book Homo Spectator—further back to prehistoric times where she locates the birth of the spectator. ⁹ The philosophical and political questions she raises are fundamental to understanding how our societies were built and dominated by the power of images and their industrialized spectacles. This “iconocracy,” which has imposed itself as a mode of governance, is intimately linked to what can be called “phobocracy” that spreads ever-wider today: the reign of fear established by means of tyrannical imagery, which turns us into frightened spectators of the world. Questions of relevance evidenced by actual events extend naturally to touch upon the violence of images, such as those of September 11, 2001 (addressed in Mondzain's essay “Can Images Kill?”) and those around Daesh and the attacks in Paris in January 2015. ¹⁰ In her recent work, Images (a Suivre), Marie-José Mondzain writes that for her philosophy is like the art of tightrope walking. ¹¹ In light of what she does and will continue to do, we cannot doubt it. (Marie-Claude Loiselle)

24 images--Question 1: After having worked extensively on the Christian world, on the Byzantium iconoclasts, in particular, how is it that you go back, in Homo Spectator, to the birth of the spectator, which you situate 30,000 years ago, when man first inscribed on the walls of a cave an image of himself that lies outside himself?

Marie-José Mondzain: It happened quite naturally. I worked for many years on the crisis of Byzantine iconoclasm, seeking to learn how a view of the image was constituted, as well as a practice and the politics of the image, in the Christian Western world. I wanted then to identify, to analyze the reasons why the iconic foundations of the Christian doctrine of the image had been at the origin of the political, aesthetic, artistic choices of the Western world for more than two thousand years. It was deeply enlightening, and I discovered in proto-Christian thought a trove of reflections on the visible, the invisible, the gaze, creation, figuration… developing themselves little by little, then puting into crisis–until instituting a thought of the image which is at the same time open to the creation and to a political use of images–the most spectacular consumption whose effects we know very well today. The thought of the spectacle, in its relation to power, is a Christian heritage, and this is what I wanted to communicate and put across. But since practices of the image are also spread widely and since they can be found in all cultures, whether monotheistic or animistic, after having identified the specificity of Christian thought, I wanted to consider, from a much broader anthropological point of view, what relationship the very idea of humanity had with images. Among living beings, humans—a thinking and speaking species—appeared to me as an imaging species. The question was therefore the following: what place did images have in the history of this humanity, of this humanization?

The first evidence is the recognization that animals do not make images even though we recognize their ability to emit signs that constitute a “language.” They might have dreams, but they cannot figure out what they are. Interested in the gestures of figuration, of production, I see two given directions to take: the first is called phylogenetic and the other ontogenetic. Phylogeny considers humanity in its specificity, constituted and constituting because of its capacities of production, creation, and fabrication of intersubjective signs, among which are images. From an ontogenetic point of view, it is a question of asking how the little human, from birth, maintains a rapport with the outside world that may or may not involve imaging and symbolic operations.

So, in paleontology, on the one hand, and in pediatrics, child psychology, and child psychiatry, on the other, we observe the harmonious or painful evolution of the child from its nascent state–sometimes even during intrauterine life. Is this “infant” an imaging subject? Psychoanalysis, for more than a century now, has taken up the question of the image in its relation to the stages of subjectivation. What relationship do speaking subjects have with images–but also with non-speaking or blind subjects–from birth? There is a great temptation to make a connection between phylogeny and ontogeny and to consider the newborn child as the archaic model of the childhood of humanity in itself. I will not adopt this very ideological hypothesis, always suspected of being inhabited by the fantasy of origins.

What interested me, on the contrary, was to consider the constitutive maturity of the images produced thirty thousand years ago, since they are the oldest known and are recognized to this day. Faced with this production, I considered the relationship of small children to imaging operations quite differently since it was a question of locating signs of maturation and of a developed or hampered aptitude for symbolic operations. The relationship to the image is inextricable from any clinical observation that moderates the psychological suffering in a child.

24 Images--Question 2: In “Can Images Kill?” you write that characteristic of what you call the “Christian revolution” is the appropriation of the power of the image, for the first time, by the Church in order to extend its domination.

Marie-José Mondzain: The “Christian Revolution” comes very late in the history of humankind. Images were made long before Christians made use of them. There is something that struck me and that is that the relationship today between the considerable production of what we call images and the power of the spectacle in the extension of its methods of exercising power on a planetary scale is the subject of an inseparable fixation. I think Christian thought was the first to theorize this question. Christianity could have managed its relationships to images as the Romans and the Greeks had done before, without ever worrying about anything more than the relationship between political operations and artistic operations. Only philosophy has been able to inquire about the illusion of the sensible world and the unreality of images. But this suspicion in no way affected the production of paintings, decorations, monuments, and statues. It had to wait for Christianity before the image imposes its sovereignty and this on the basis of a political and philosophical crisis.

24 Images--Question 3: You have shown clearly that what gave birth to the Christian world has been perpetuated even in the current context of spectacular images that impose a submission of the gaze to the order of belief, of religious belief.

Marie-José Mondzain: Yes, and this domination has imposed itself on a planetary scale. If there are fierce opponents to the Christian Western world, it is Daesh and a certain radical Islamic world–--more or less fanatical Islamizing fundamentalists who one might think would dismiss all that comes culturally from the West. However, they are ready to dismiss and to destroy everything, except for images, especially those of destruction. They are absolutely captured, conquered, and are ever more experts in the spectacle of their acts as devotees, in their power, their violence, and their desire for supremacy. One would like to rule with images. This is why the analysis of the different imaging regimes is absolutely necessary.

24 images--Question 4: You wrote that September 11, 2001 marked the end of the domination of the “Western empire of the visible,” insofar as the attacks in New York revealed that others could appropriate image as weapon. However, when Daesh today seizes on spectacular procedures that borrow from Hollywood codes, is it putting an end to the Western domination of the image or is it rather participating in it and, in an almost paradoxical way, extending it further?

Marie-José Mondzain: Daesh has fully embraced it, and, above all, it addresses its adversaries in the language of its adversaries. Its representatives are quite capable of holding a double-talk by seeking, on the one hand, to convince their followers or their disciples that fidelity to the Quranic injunctions requires unmistakable rigor, in a literal radicalism which leads them to denounce any use of the image concerning their own culture (as was the case with the cartoons), and at the same time to fight, on the ground of their war and their political ambition, in the lexicon of their adversary, namely, that of audiovisual dictatorship. I have watched a lot of the images made by Daesh, which range from brutal, elementary videos filmed on cell phones by clumsy hands, to perfectly scholarly and staged objects. They know their “trade” very well, and they are very concerned with the dissemination of these images and the utterly terrifying effects they can have. And this terror is really their major weapon. To reign via terror is simply to reign. I would argue that ecclesial thinking, according to which one cannot govern without images, is today global. Let us not forget either that the reign of terror only legitimizes the police reign of security. The “phobocrats” are everywhere.

24 Images--Question 5: The relationship to these spectacular images remains a primary relationship. It is ultimately the same as the one we have in the face of all these images that seek to make us totally captivated by Hollywood (and their clones). You also pointed out how the entertainment industry has gradually wiped out the viewer's resources in reading images…

Marie-José Mondzain: The criticism that I have made with regard to television, audiovisual media, and all communication technologies has led me to discern a considerable depletion of resources and visual creations. I have located signs of the collapse of our gaze on images in their very production. This concerns the relation to time, the practice of flows, the unbreathed, apneic nature of the world of images. Your magazine is called 24 images and it already bears an index to time. Whoever is interested in images engages in meditation and action on time. Audiovisual industries are veritable strategies of visual bombardment that are governed by the uninterrupted acceleration of flows.

24 images--Question 6: Strategies of submission to the image…

Marie-José Mondzain: Yes, it is about taking power by undermining the temporal breathing of gazes. There is no more rhythm and images are marked with the seal of immediacy, completeness, and a total absence of an off-screen in a general acceleration. We can analyze these images with great precision to show that television streams and communication industries follow strictly military procedures: those of bombardment. It's a shipwreck of the gaze, as children I worked with after the tsunami in Japan told me. “We are drowned by the images of the flood,” they told me. This shipwreck of the gaze is what we must fight against by supporting as much as possible creative and emancipatory practices that put the gaze in situations worthy of the spectator subject. When I wrote Homo Spectator, my concern was on recognizing the fact that without images there is no longer any subjectivation, while considering that we will impede the freedom and the dignity of the spectator when the images become the ballistic instruments of “see all” and “show all.”

Homo Spectator offers a critical view where, starting from the Chauvet Caves, I trace a path through which I question myself on the relationships between images and words, ending with the question of power and authority. This is an attempt to convey a conviction: the images that speak for us take power instead of granting it to us. There is therefore a dictatorship of the visual and the cry of alarm that I am launching consists in pleading for a world of images that instead leads the subject toward speech, the gaze toward distinction, the body toward breathing, and the community of spectators to a bond, the fraternal bond or, at the very least, the social bond. I co-ordinated a book called Seeing Together and that was the goal of this endeavor–to understand how image-makers take responsibility for creating community. Seeing together is also thinking together and living together; it therefore becomes the condition for talking together beyond conflicts and connections.

24 Images--Question 7: Does the entertainment industry, which seeks to establish an ever greater fusion of the image to the viewer, not suddenly erase all the connections among the spectators themselves? Do we not find a correspondance between this negation of the emancipatory principle of separation, which gave birth to the spectator, and the desire for an almost fusional unity, the return of which, as we can see, is increasingly marked in our societies, where the figure of what is other and foreign is presented as a threat to this unity?

Marie-José Mondzain: Yes of course. The fusional bond with the image is clearly totalitarian. Many people imagine that the fall of communism can be seen as the end of totalitarian states. It is not so. This is indeed the end of a certain construction of totalitarianism, but to imagine that, facing this, we can boast of living in democracies is completely wrong. We are more and more caught up in webs of constraints of a new totalitarianism, in which the calls for resistance are not merely present, effective, but also require that we think differently about the opposition to the Whole. An opposition to visual totalitarianism and a dictatorial whole. We must plead for the multiple, the multiplicity against the unity and the totality, but also for the smallest in the face of the fascination with gigantism. Today there is a real addiction to amplitude, to greatness, to massification. In fact, one of the most common words among young French people to express pleasure taken wherever it is: “it's huge.” To believe that the bigger it is, the stronger it is, the better. Addiction to the maximum which, like any addiction, never gets enough. A multiplex is better than a small movie theater. And we no longer eat those little ice cream sticks that we called Eskimos, but you need a kilo of popcorn served in buckets. It is necessary to overstuff and our bodies become the barrels of the Danaids. There is a kind of incontinence regarding what is giant, large, superabundant, and colossal, which is part of the paradigms of neoliberalism. Everything that is quantitatively huge has supplanted what is simply qualitative. This is why we consume too much, we see too much, and we throw away too much. Everything is excessive. There is a total loss of the true energy of excess, about which Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille testify and which they defend in the name of an entirely different economy, that of gift and expenditure. The policy of excess is done in the infinitesimal. In the withdrawal, the reduction, and the infinitesimal. We have to think politically about the resistance to totalitarianism and the effectiveness of resistance in the multiplicity of infinitesimal forces against the unity of the colossal.

24 Images--Question 8: You wrote that fascism today no longer operates by spreading death through industrial means, but by creeping into the peace of homes to bring about an aesthetic of profit and well-being. But doesn't neofascism still operate on the basis of fear? We find ourselves more and more, from year to year, in a world dominated and controlled by fear. And the images, and the cinema as well, participate in that…

Marie-José Mondzain: Yes, of course.

24 images--Question 9: So what is it that distinguishes fascism today from that of the 1930s, which was also built on a diffusion of fear?

Marie-José Mondzain: I think that both Nazism and fascism were ideologically constructed by means of an economic theory supported by the theses of racism. One faced a frightening and criminal ideological construction. What strikes me about the current situation, however, is actually the total lack of ideological construction. We are in the midst of a kind of amorphous dissemination of drive-like energies. It is true that fascism also made use of pervasive drives that instrumentalized through indoctrination in order to cultivate blind conviction. However, I see no one today, among the opponents of freedom and thought, who truly needs to develop a doctrine. In France, there was a short while ago a minor media event around a book by a journalist, Éric Zemmour, who is supposed to have brought together all the traditional themes associated with the right: xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. Everyone thought that we had found in him a theorist of the French situation! While it is a collection of formulas reaped and recomposed with a bit of journalistic talent under the guise of criticism, it is a defense of neoliberal nationalism that strokes the rich and the poor alike, allowing them to believe they were in the same boat. He plays the role of the comforter-servant. For me, these are ad hoc elaborations stemming from a strategic opportunism that borrows themes, which otherwise are very common in theaters, entertainment circles, show business, television, etc. We are faced with a kind of neopopulism; I am just saying out loud what everyone else is thinking quietly. This “uninhibited” neofascism is insidious because it permeates everyday life without having to build anything new. It ravages the relations of communities, of undiscriminating association, the doctor-patient relationship, the teacher-student relationship, the police-citizen relationship, etc. All these relationships allow themselves to be insidiously contaminated in order, ultimately, to glorify individual profits and class communalism.

We are given from time to time a moment of democratic carnival, a sequence of “as if,” as was the case in January in the demonstration “Je suis Charlie/I am Charlie.” A whiff of a few hours of organized and televised solidarity. And, in the weeks that followed, a massive uprising against censorship and freedom-killing bills took place after four million people found themselves in the streets to defend freedoms. But it was but a show of consensus hardly inhabited by any real and active awareness of the freedom of expression and creation. It was gregarious jubilation under the sign of mourning, not under the sign of freedom. I would even say that freedom is far more damaged after the past two months. The assaults therefore succeeded.

24 Images--Question 10: With the addition of a reinforcement of the obsession over security.

Marie-José Mondzain: Yes, the curators are asking to ensure the safety of the spectators; everyone is afraid…We have gone up a degree in fear, and not at all in collective solidarity or freedom. I call this insidious neofascism. We pay for words and we also pay for demonstrations.

24 images--Question 11: Ten years ago you wondered who is this spectator coming to be in the process of being transformed by technologies, industry, and finance, but today we can wonder who is this spectator coming to pass in the process of being transformed by that fear.

Marie-Jose Mondzain: He is a coward, scared of his nextdoor neighbor.

24 images--Question 12: This fear also transforms his gaze as a spectator. You spoke in Homo Spectator of the courage of art that has been lost. But the courage of art and the courage of the spectator go hand in hand. The question is how to reconstruct the gaze and the place of the spectator, which also engages criticism. We see the same lack of courage on the side of those who talk about films and images. Everyone finds themselves caught in this fear that blinds us.

Marie-José Mondzain: Yes, of course. At the Observatory of Creative Freedom by the League of Human Rights, an artist, Sylvie Blocher, put up a poster titled “For security, let's remove the spectators.” I have looked at this issue of phobocracy, that is, government by fear. Those who govern us are afraid and protect themselves from their fear by enforcing a security policy. And to be able to make a security policy reign, it is necessary to promote the reign of terror. So nothing serves a security policy as much as a terrorist. It is a machine that feeds itself. Terrorism is all the more effective when it is backed, I might say, by a security policy, which is itself inspired by the fear of those in power who are always in fear of losing it. They must therefore maintain the neoliberal system to the maximum of its strength and dictatorship, of its amplitude and weight. People are afraid of democracy. Jacques Rancière wrote this book on the hatred of democracy (Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, Translated by Steve Corcoran, New York: Verso, 2007). For my part, I would rather call it phobocracy: the terror of seeing popular egalitarian and emancipatory forces emerge and operate in reality. For they terrify big businesses.

24 Images--Question 13: This ties in with the question of the spectator's solitude. In this type of gathering all the cards playing for the façade of there being an “all together,” there is again a desire for fusion which, however, only accentuates the separation and the isolation of each.

Marie-José Mondzain: The radical distinction made by Hannah Arendt between isolation and loneliness in the collection of lectures titled “Judge” is very beautiful. Loneliness is a fact; we are deeply alone. Society is made from the creation and the knotting of the bonds among separate, solitary individuals. Isolation is the impossibility of this link; it is what makes the one who is alone come out of isolation only through communitarianism, filialism, or some kind of fusional gathering. So the more forces of isolation there are in a society, the more communitarianism will offer artificial links as a way to escape it. Dictatorships reign over the uniform mass of isolated people. Emancipation has its source in the lonely energy of those who unite in struggle.

24 Images--Question 14: In your recent book, Image (à suivre), there is a beautiful expression that struck me; you speak of image as a “living fugitive.”

Marie-José Mondzain: For me this is very important. What can really be called an image never lets itself be grasped, frozen, or captured in its presence or in its meaning. It appears and it disappears. If there is no oscillation between appearance and disappearance, what remains then are the captive images, those which are sunken in the net of a speech, as in propaganda or advertising, and in the off-screen of absence. The image operations are operations which are in continual displacement and which in turn summon the movement of the subject. Since the viewer is not held back by the image and cannot retain the image, there is an uninterrupted flow of movement. It remains all the more free and mobile, as the image itself does not capture it, does not overtake it. In order for the image not to overtake the movement, it must also not be held immobile, and the viewer is thus no longer held frozen either. That's why my latest book is all about addressing this issue. The image maker is always in charge of the viewer's movement. It is necessary to reject the capture. Images can captivate and seduce, but never capture.

24 Images--Question 15: We come back to the starting point, that is to say, to the gap created between image and self, which gives birth to the viewer. In this pursuit, this gap is never closed. However, from the moment when this is abolished, when there is fusion and capture, can we say that there is no longer a spectator?

Marie-José Mondzain: And there is no more movement either. To keep this gap open is to keep pursuing it. This is the Eleatic paradox, if we think of Achilles and the tortoise, of the arrow and the target. The Eleatic regime of thought is a capital moment in the thought of images. This is the paradox of an infinite gap, which can never be closed. So the viewer will never be overwhelmed by an image that is not there to satisfy him but to revive him in his desire to see. This is how I see things in the infinite pursuit of the desire to see and the infinite satisfaction of that very desire.