Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Between the power of enunciators and the power of discourses... 223 were contributions to the study of the new mediatization, what characterizes our time is that, as we have just illustrated with the example we have chosen, a large part of the discourses pub- lished on social media networks take up images from the mass media and vice-versa. And in that coming and going, contempo- rary images, that is, those specific to our time, coexist with oth- ers that become contemporary, but in which the languages ​and devices of the mass media have left their traces. The inexistence of a general theory of image that may apply to the study of discourses that contain images generated by different dispositifs, languages, and media was noticed al- ready in the era of mass media and, as we will see shortly, it is an observation that is still valid, even in the age of digitization. Let us remember what Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1990 [1987]) ex - presses in her remarkable book The Precarious Image (of the photographic dispositif): […] If we want to understand what distinguishes the photographic image from other images, we must abandon the idea that there is an image ‘in itself’ that only undergoes minor changes depend- ing on the dispositifs that produce it. Christian Metz observed as early as 1970 that studying the image does not necessarily consist in looking for the ‘image system, the unique and total system.’ Its relevance is always de rigueur (p.11-12). For this reason, the way to study the photographic im- age, for Schaeffer, was to know the specific dispositif that gen - erates 7 it and the lateral knowledge that the subjects mobilize for each one. In this case, the dispositif is iconic-indexical, and the lateral knowledge is about the world, that is, about the enti- ties (for example, a strawberry) and the arché (that is, about the technique: to recognize that an image is photographic implies an understanding that between the adhering and the adherer there is an existential, indicative relationship, guaranteed by the dispositif that has captured a luminous situation through a pho- 7 Inversion of priorities, then: the image will not be the original data of the de- scription, but must be detached from its technical assumptions” (SCHAEFFER, 1990 [1987], p. 12)