Jacques Ranciere-Future of the Image

“”Image” therefore refers to two different things. There is the simple relationship that produces likeness of an original:not necessarily its faitfull copy, but simply what suffices to stand for it. And there is the interplay of operations that produces what we call art: or precisely an alteration of resemblance……The images of art are operations that produces discrepency, a dissemblance. Words describe what eye might see or express what it will never see; they deliberately clarify or obscure an idea. Visible forms yield a meaning to be constructed or substract it. A camera movement antcipates one spectacle and discloses a different one. A pianist attacks a musical phrase “behind” a dark screen. All the relations define images. This means 2 things. In the first place, the images of art are, as such, dissemblances. Secondly, the image is not exclusive to the visible. There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly words. But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them. The visible can be arranged in meaningful tropes; words deploy a visibility that can be blinding….”

Jacques Ranciere- The Future of the Image, Page 7 , Published by Verso

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