Formidable article de Nick Rombes sur l’image avec ce questionnement central : Dans notre commerce quotidien et parfois quasi maladif avec les images, dans ce rapport à la fois nauséeux et en même temps de quasi dépendance rétienne, il y a la hantise de l’image qui revient toujours, sa disparition rendue impossible par les archives. La matière même de l’image digitale, par son absence de « stigmates », d’altération entre l’original et la version courante (quelle version? le double, la troisième reproduction, la nième reproduction) rajoute encore plus à cette hantise.
It is not, perhaps, the idea of replication that frightens today (after all, reproduction lies at the essence of who and how we are) but rather that we are continually haunted by images because they are so easily archived and dispersed. Surely, there is no escape from the tyranny of images now. They literally do not go away, or disintegrate upon duplication. Efforts to disengage ourselves from them are met with accusations of bad faith or, worse, nostalgia. David Thomas—of the Cleveland proto-punk rock bands Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu—has said the problem with music on the internet is not only that it is disembodied, but that it is no longer fragile: “The problem I have with it [music on the internet] is the lack of the object. I think the object is very important. . . . Because the object, the fragility of the object lends weight to the art contained within it�? (Left of the Dial online mag, 2). If the original was gauged against the degradation of second, and third, and fourth-generation copies (and so on) of the analogue, then the digital leaves no obvious traces or clues about how far removed it is from the original. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, 100_0499 a novel about people who are raised to serve, ultimately, as living organ donors for their counterparts, Kathy the narrator discusses the desire for the donors (not clones exactly, but humans created to provide harvested organs for their doubles) to meet their “possibles�?: “Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life. This meant, at least in theory, you’d be able to find the person you were modeled from�? (139). The interplay between models and originals becomes a sort of shell game; at some point what does it matter, since they’re both the same, anyway?
