Iconoclasm as a Critique of the Digital Scopic Regime

Abstract

When faced with the diagnosis of a digital scopic regime defined by the ubiquity of images, iconoclasm emerges as a possible critical approach. By adapting what Spanish author José Luis Brea (2010) called “The three eras of the image”, this paper outlines three eras of iconoclasm. The first era defines iconoclasm as an act of destruction in the age of matter-images. Since Byzantium, iconoclasm has been understood as the destruction of images as-sociated with the plastic supports of iconic paintings, sculptures, and architecture, as well as the prohibition of their worship and the blocking of their material circulation. The second era describes iconoclasm as a montage procedure in the history of film-images. As a tech-nique, we would be facing a way of making films out of fragments that destroy the unity of the cinematographic image. In the third era, that of electronic-image, we are dealing with a contradiction regarding iconoclasm. On the one hand, images are now superabundant, to the point of their selfcancellation insofar as they become unconsumable: they are not many, they are infinite, ungraspable to any human gaze. Besides, in this iconoclasm turned system, the image loses its specific qualities, i.e. its aesthetic potential, and is impoverished to sur-veillance technology. On the other hand, at the end of the article, we trace perspectives to recover in the dialectic of iconoclasm its critical potential. Each era presents a case of local iconoclasm, allowing the exposition of the unequal north/south geopolitics immanent to the ocularcentric regime of modernity.