L’image du devenir : le monde en chiffres et la passion du monitorage

This article critically examines the iconic turn (Mitchell 2005) that characterizes a prominent part of studies in the humanities and philosophy. The screen is at the center of a visual epistemology. We would like to conceive of it first as the accomplishment of the semiotization of media, with its detachment from context variables and its nomadic nature. This means, secondly, that the screen promotes a radical emancipation from every external utterance protection, in other words, it becomes autonomous in relation to any need for implementation, beyond the technological constraints. And thirdly, it seems nevertheless to incorporate the logic of implementation to enable a new form of life in cultural identities through the offer of a universal semiotic field in relation to the activated language-games. However, while the screen is a medium for both images and texts imultaneously, promoting interconnections and translations, it also serves for a further exploration of some aspects of vision. Whereas voyeurism has been heavily themed in literature, the colder conduct of monitoring creates cognitive and emotional attachments to images that have hardly been explored. In particular, a chiasmus between the changeability of the image and the image of the changeability should be recognized in the monitoring. This seems to fuel the temptation to reduce the values of the social world to their algebraic operation, to a landscape of continuously changing numbers. Today, the problem is no longer an epistemological denunciation of the constraints of simulacra (the masks of social dramatization) or the ubiquitous presence of technological mediums; nor should we be concerned about reaffirming the finding – trivial nowadays – that the postmodern episteme is anchored in mechanical and digital reproductions. The problem is the characterization of a paradoxical dialectic between an informative image that fulfills the ideal of the panopticon, and an image that reflexively denounces its construction, its internal stratification, and its digital capability to reduce itself to a data set.