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This chapter deals with the universe of technical images, which for the past few decades has been making use of photographs, films, videos, television screens, and computer terminals to take over the task formerly served by linear texts—that is, the task of transmitting information crucial to society and to individuals. It considers a cultural revolution whose scope and implications we are just beginning to suspect. It argues that technical images are inherently different from early pictures, or “traditional” images. To support this contention, this chapter introduces a model that clarifies the difference in ontological position between traditional and technical images. This model shows that technical images and traditional images arise from completely different kinds of distancing from concrete experience. Whereas technical images are observations of objects, traditional images are computations of concepts. The first arise through depiction, the second through a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost its faith in rules.

This chapter discusses an emerging way of life based on the hypothesis that we concentrate our attention more and more on our fingertips, a hypothesis that can be confirmed in the ubiquitous sight of the relevant gesture: pressing buttons. More specifically, it examines the meaning of technical images and what they indicate. There are various kinds of technical images, and each seems to have a particular meaning. Photographs, for example, seem to mean scenes in the environment, films seem to mean events in the environment, and there seems no foreseeable limit to the potential meaning of computer-generated images. Because technical images are projections, because they point one direction from the projector toward a horizon such as headlights and lighthouses, they must be decoded not as representations of things out in the world but as signposts directed outward. What technical images show depends on which direction they are pointing. As they currently surround us, technical images signify models and instructional programs.

This chapter explores the interaction between technical images and people. Technical images are not mirrors but projectors that draw up plans on deceptive surfaces, plans that are meant to become life plans for their recipients. People are supposed to arrange their lives in accordance with these designs. At least that is the way technical images function now, giving rise to a social structure in which people group themselves according to technical images rather than problems. Such a social structure requires new social criteria, a new sociological approach. Classical sociology begins with people, their needs, desires, feelings, and knowledge, and divides society by relationships between people, for example, into groups such as families, nationalities, or classes. The relationship between technical images and people, the interactions between the two, are the central issues of the coming cultural criticism, and all other issues are to be grasped from this point. Two examples of this interaction, one of a film and the other of a television program, are discussed.

This chapter summarizes the main themes explored in this book concerning the automation of the processing of technical images and what a future telematic society would look like. It briefly explains what technical images are, from what level of consciousness earlier pictures arose, and from what level of consciousness technical images arise; how we can turn particles that are invisible, incomprehensible, and imperceptible into images; if technical images are actually mosaics and not really surfaces, how we can regard them as pictures and what these calculated and computed mosaics actually mean; how technical images function as models and how they are distributed to have such power over society; whether it is possible to reorganize the images’ fascistic, totalitarian circuitry; how we can make images dialogically and why anyone should participate in such a dialogue, when the result is not his own work but the work of an anonymous group; and telematic dialogue as a school for creativity and freedom.

This chapter discusses trends noticeable in contemporary technical images such as photographs or television images. In the process, it raises the prospect of a future society that synthesizes electronic images. Seen from here and now, it will be a fabulous society, where life is radically different from our own. Current scientific, political, and artistic categories will hardly be recognizable there, and even our state of mind, our existential mood, will take on a new and strange coloration. This is not about a future floating in the far distance. We are already on its cusp. Many aspects of this fabulous new social and life structure are already visible in our environment and in us. We live in a utopia that is appearing, pushing its way up into our surroundings and into our pores. What is happening around us and in us is fantastic, and all previous utopias, whether they were positive or negative, pale in comparison to it. This chapter should be read as a critique of the present rather than the projection of a fantasy into the future.

This chapter explains how technical images disperse society into corners that are distributed according to a structure that radiates outward from the center. A technical image radiates, and at the tip of each ray sits a receiver, on his own. Each technical image (except for film) is received as the end point of a ray, as a “terminal.” These rays (channels, media) structure the society as a magnet structures iron filings. The society, spread apart by the magnetic fascination of technical images, is indeed structured. Media form bundles that radiate from the centers, the senders. The structure of a society governed by technical images is therefore fascist, not for any ideological reason but for technical reasons. As technical images presently function, they lead on their own to a fascistic society. This social structure began to appear only a few decades ago, breaking through the previous social structures and causing social groups such as families, nationalities, and classes to fall apart. This new social structure can be seen as a transitional phase in the rise of a new culture.

This chapter suggests that technical images are on an entirely different level of consciousness compared to prehistoric images, and that among them life proceeds in an entirely different atmosphere. Visualization is something completely different from depiction, something radically new. According to the suggested model of cultural history, we are about to leave the one-dimensionality of history for a new, dimensionless level, one to be called “posthistory.” But in order to live, one must try to make the universe and consciousness concrete. Technical images arise in an attempt to consolidate particles around us and in our consciousness on surfaces to block up the intervals between them in an attempt to make elements such as photons or electrons, on one hand, and bits of information, on the other hand, into images. Apparatuses must be developed that grasp the ungraspable, visualize the invisible, and conceptualize the inconceivable. The danger that lurks in automation, namely, that the apparatus will continue, even when the intended result has been achieved, to unintended results, is the real challenge to the producer of technical images.

This chapter discusses apparatuses for visualization that operate according to principles of chance and necessity (the principles that govern probabilities) and also operate automatically. What is at once ghostly and enticing about envisioning with keys is that technical images are phantoms that can give the world, and us, meaning. This chapter considers the power to do such visualization, distinguishing it from the imagination of traditional image making that preceded it. It shows how surfaces emerge and how a visionary power is expressed in these surfaces that would never have been possible before the invention of keys. Technical images are envisioned surfaces computed from particles. A closer look at technical images shows that they are not images at all but rather symptoms of chemical or electronic processes. After explaining what envisioning is and how it can be achieved, the chapter concludes by describing the current cultural revolution.

This chapter predicts a scenario in which chamber music can serve as a model of social structure for the coming telematic society. The scenario involves a fabulous universe, that of technical images, and a fabulous society, that of cybernetic dialogue, as well as a fabulous consciousness, that of making music with the power of imagination. In this scenario, people will be in contact with one another through their fingertips on keyboards and so form a dialogical net, a global superbrain that will radiate an ever-expanding, self-renewing, and self-concentrating aura of technical images. Artificial intelligences will be in dialogue with human beings, connected through cables and similar nerve strands. Chamber music will serve as a model for dialogic communication in general, and for telematic communication in particular. This chapter considers chamber music in relation to cybernetics, along with the similarities and differences between chamber music and telematics.

This chapter focuses on the role of imagery in the teaching of singing. Technical imagery is mostly of value if it is associated with already established, repeatable functional freedom. After the singer has learned to coordinate breath management and proper laryngeal and resonatory responses, an image may be useful in unifying those functions. The superimposition of imagery on the student beforehand may bring more confusion than assistance. Imagery should not be part of the first steps in teaching the technical coordination of the singing instrument. Singing, with its initially complex elements of vocal timbres, text, and the whole ambiance of performance, is highly personal. The singer will very quickly develop personal, functional imagery. Attempting to superimpose one's own physical imaging on another person is generally less than successful. Especially in the early phases of voice teaching, technical imaging should be used with caution.

This chapter focuses on telematics, a technology that would enable the current discursive circuitry of technical images to be reconfigured into dialogical circuitry. The word “telematics” is new, an amalgam of telecommunications and informatics, but the principle to which the new name refers is far older, in fact, just as old as the technology of calculating and computing particle elements, a product of the first half of the nineteenth century. If people turn to telematic technology to use it for conversation, rather than to be distracted by it, technical images suddenly change character. From the standpoint of communication, every social structure is characterized by a collaboration between discourse and dialogue. This chapter argues that we should not close our eyes to the telematic revolution, that it contains possibilities for real dialogue of unprecedented richness. It also discusses the relationship between discourse and dialogue in general.

This chapter describes a telematic universe where technical images will govern the experience, behavior, desire, and perceptions of individuals and society. More specifically, it considers the meaning of “govern” when no decisions need to be made and where administration is automatic and, in a telematic society, whether it still makes sense to speak of government, of power and the powerful. One immediately confronts the curious pairing of the words “government” and “Regierung.” Because both concepts are concerned in some way with opposing chance, they are regarded in dictionaries as translatable from one to the other. But in fact, government means “steering” and the German word Regierung means “judgment.” Both government and Regierung, along with the related concepts Macht (power), herrschen (to govern), and domestication, are, in essence, informatic concepts, and it appears that they will fully achieve their meaning only in a telematic society.

This chapter discusses the use of instruments called “keys” to grasp the mass of particles that are neither visible nor graspable nor comprehensible. There are two types of keys: the “productive” key, which sends messages, and the “reproductive” key, which receives messages. The first type is an instrument for making the private public, the other an instrument for making public matters private. Often the keys are not isolated buttons but make up keyboards, offering a selection. By observing how images are synthesized on a computer screen by pressing keys, we can recognize the miracle of mechanical button pressing as well: it is the miracle of calculation followed by computation, the miracles to which technical images owe their existence. This chapter also considers the difference between human and artificial intelligence, between information that is produced intentionally and automatically, as well as the status of human freedom with respect to writing with a typewriter.

This chapter focuses on scripts and their impending demise in the face of the informatic revolution, suggesting that they will give way to more functionally coded image instructions. Scriptwriters write texts that are not directed to a publisher, and through him to readers, but rather to producers of film, television, and radio, and through these to viewers and listeners. They stand on slippery ground lying on a steep grade that forms a bridge between the uplands of literary culture and the abyss of the culture of technical images. A script is a hybrid: half of it is still a text for a drama to be staged, and so in the lineage of Sophocles, and the other half is already the programming of apparatuses and as such an ancestor of programs calculated automatically by artificial intelligences. From the standpoint of the past, the scriptwriter is the playwright; from the standpoint of the future, a not quite fully automated word processor. Scriptwriting amounts to a betrayal of the spirit of writing. Scripts are written in the way of digital codes.

This chapter focuses on apparatuses and functionaries that calculate and compute instructions as instructed. Technical images are currently connected so that their senders are at the center of society, places from which the images are broadcast to scatter and disperse the society. They are precarious places. When you approach them, whether to take part (to join in the broadcasting) or to criticize (to remodel the circuitry), they present themselves as illusions. It appears that no one and nothing lies at the center of contemporary society: senders are nothing but those dimensionless points from which the media bundles stream. But this does not mean, as many cultural critics assume, that instead of farmers, the proletariat, and the middle class, we now have a new class before us, namely, functionaries. Functionaries are not a social class. Our way of life, our ideology, is not that of functionaries but that of receivers. Senders control us not because we serve them but because they serve us.

This chapter explores how information that is unpredictable and improbable can be generated in a dialogic society. The problem of information generation looks as if it suddenly appears from nowhere like a miracle. Hence the concept creatio ex nihilo; hence the belief in a creator god; and hence the veneration of creative people such as the so-called artists. The problem of generating information must be lifted out of this mythologizing context to grasp the revolutionary possibilities of a telematic society, a true information society. Only then can we realize that information in the world and information in general is generated by synthesizing previous information. In other words, the production of information is a game of assembling existing information. And if information is synthesized from previous information, there must also be an opposing process, namely, information analysis, replacement, and disinformation. It is dialogue, a controlled game of chance, that makes it possible for information that is already stored to be combined in all possible ways to produce new information. Separate pieces of information appear in the course of the telematic play, that is, single, constantly revised technical images.