Introduction
This dissertation is concerned with exploring the nature of mediated familiarity in technical images (photography) and how a lack of consciousness towards this mediation impacts our interpersonal relationships, especially relevant today as much of our social interaction is based upon the sharing of technical images. This dissertation will posit that the lack of understanding on the abstracted familiarity with one another produced by technical images has led to a paradoxically equalised but divided telematic society and will identify public images (or personas) as the fundamentally misunderstood grounds for telematic social tension, and thus that the resolution of such tension will be found in encouraging engagement with public images that accurately infers their mediated nature. Looking at Pierre Bourdieu’s writing in Photography: A Middle-brow Art will introduce the popular cultural practice of photography as a recognition of its social function and ability to reintegrate social groups. From here we will move into two of Vilém Flusser’s essays, Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Into the Universe of Technical Images, to further elucidate the technical image’s propensity to facilitate social interaction as a direct function of its reproducibility and its subsequent capacity to create a playfully dialogic “telematic” society based on telecommunication, as well as engaging with Flusser’s understanding of the technical image as necessarily mediated from the concrete and how this mediation is concealed by virtue of the camera’s function and popular belief in the camera’s apparent objectivity.
After having laid down the key concepts surrounding technical images and their place in society, we will explore how well they are able to live up to their integrating potential in the
current age of social media, and will discuss the popularity of prank videos and paparazzi culture insofar as they act as ritual humiliation and evaluate how successful they are in creating a sense of harmony. It will be argued that, as this humiliation does not acknowledge the separation between the person and the image of the person being humiliated, it ultimately fails to induce telematic social harmony. To better understand the motivations behind this ritual humiliation, and how it fails to achieve its purpose, we will look at René Girard’s position on successful sacrifice as it appears in Violence and the Sacred, particularly his insight into how choosing the right victim for sacrifice is essential to the sacrificial rite working to reinstate social harmony. From here, it will be shown that celebrities’ public images possess the “double nature” crucial to sacrifice, explaining why they are so often the victims of public humiliation efforts, and the ways in which telematic society differs from the perfect sacrificial environment, namely in failing to support unanimity, will clarify how and why such attempts at sacrifice fail. Continuing from celebrities as highly-visible public personas whose double nature between bodily entity and image is, at least somewhat, recognised, we can then go forth into exploring public figures as foundational to a general understanding of the mediation present in all technical images, and will present comedy as a realm of interaction between public figure and public that acknowledges and plays with this mediation, thus rendering it better understood.
One. THE KNOWN
on photography as the separation between the unfamiliar concrete and the concrete familiar
“As if seeking to demonstrate that the real subject of photography is not individuals but the relationships between individuals.”
— Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Photography: A Middle-brow Art’
Figure 1: Massie Christmas photo from Twitter (Source: Forbes, 2022)
It used to be that the mention of a name evoked stories, tales of accomplishments, or notoriety. Nowadays, we see that names evoke faces, or rather, the other way around. As in Vilém Flusser’s account, our history (textolatry) – which replaced traditional images – has been usurped by technical images that encode the textual information. Traditional images (e.g. cave paintings) looked at the world and communicated concepts. Text looked at concepts and communicated a linear, consecutive structure of history. The apparatuses that produce technical images (e.g. cameras) were invented based on scientific texts, but output textual ideas encoded in images that are reproducible and editable (Flusser, 2000, pp. 1014). The apparatuses that produce technical images contain a programme, an unseen mediation. Such a programme, according to Flusser, contains the potential for all possible and probable images from the apparatus, and thus to create an “informative” image a photographer must enter into a state of playing with the apparatus and work against the probability of the programme in order to produce an improbable result (2011, pp. 87-94). So, to Flusser, all images that one would expect a camera to be capable of producing are not informative and are redundant. It is precisely such expected and “probable” images that form the basis of my interest in the cultural purposes of photography, both secret and apparent.
Probable photographs are the function of photography most familiar to us. Pierre Bourdieu discusses the capacity of photography to make unfamiliar objects seem familiar (i.e. close at hand) in Photography: A Middle-brow Art. In explaining our desire to photograph exceptional (unfamiliar) events – holidays, for example – he writes “one does not photograph something that one sees everyday” (1990, p. 34), because that would be redundant; and in a more practical way than Flusser engages with, as Bourdieu is concerned with class relations to photography (in 1960s France), so a documentary photograph of an already familiar object
is a waste of the familiarising power of the photograph. Though, Bourdieu points out that we can photograph a familiar object without it being , provided we consciously engage with our notion of the familiar as unworthy of notice: “The adoption of… the touristic attitude means escaping one’s inattentive familiarity with the everyday world.”(1990, p. 35). We can liken the benefits of adopting such an attitude to playing with a programme; by paying attention to objects that we have been conditioned (programmed) not to take notice of through repeated interaction, we more acutely perceive the nuances of our familiarity with the object. To refamiliarise oneself with a familiar object allows for a re-evaluation of the importance of that object, as Bourdieu observes with familial photography:
“Photographic practice only exists and subsists for most of the time by virtue of… the function conferred upon it by the family group, namely that of solemnising and immortalising the high points of family life, in short, of reinforcing the integration of the family group by reasserting the sense it has both of its self and its unity.”(Bourdieu, 1990, p. 19)
The idea here is that members of a family can, at times of separation or crisis, go to their photo album or camera roll and remember the joy to be found in the integration of the group, and thus value the group more and make greater efforts to maintain the group because of this. They are re-familiarised with “the high points of family life.” Photography allows us to capture an image of an object and bring it along with us. If it is stored in a digital space – for as long as we are carrying our camera with us or, these days, our phone – the photographs follow us at our sides, attached at the hip, like a Witch’s familiar. And, if we should choose to make the photographs more tangible, they share our living space with us, liable to sneak into our peripheral vision whenever we inhabit the space we have chosen to display them in.
“The familiar environment is that which one has always seen but never looked at because it is ‘taken for granted’.” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 34) To Bourdieu the familiar is the predisposition of the common place to go unnoticed to the degree of ignorance. In conjunction with Flusser’s account:
“We no longer take any notice of most photographs, concealed as they are by habit; in the same way, we ignore everything familiar in our environment and only noticed what has changed. Change is informative, the familiar redundant.” (2000, p. 65)
We again observe that the familiar is overlooked. That we tend to ignore the familiar is, to Flusser, an indictment on the familiar; it reveals the familiar to be “redundant” and thus unworthy of the notice or consideration that it is in want of. It cannot tell us anything new. But the familiar arises out of pattern and, crucially, comfort. It is born out of and inspires a sense of security: the meeting of expectations so perfectly so as to allow those expectations to slip out of conscious thought. To be accepted into someone’s mundanity is to be accepted totally. This is why propaganda is such a valuable tool of subduement; constant bombardment with the same images and ideas serves to desensitise us to them. Views on the value of the mundane and familiar as boring and “redundant” only invigorate interest in the question of why we feel compelled to make things familiar to us through photography. The answer is a sense of ownership. We are attracted to the object – for its beauty, its connotation, its abjectness – and we reach for it but find it immovable, illegal, or otherwise cumbersome, and so are content to familiarise ourselves with the image, the technical reproduction, for we can impress the image with our own reading, informing it in a way that is impossible with the object.
Said sense of ownership is attached to the familiar’s relationship to proximity. If familiarity is an encountering so often to the point of ignoring, it is because we have adopted that object that we keep encountering as part of our lives. The shops I pass on my daily walk are familiar to me because they are part of my walk. They are part of my experience and the experiencing of them belongs to me. Images are experienced: “If one wishes to… reconstruct the abstracted dimensions [of the image], one has to allow one’s gaze to wander over the surface feeling the way as one goes.” (Flusser, 2000, p.8). Because to see an image is to experience it, no one can have an interaction with an image that does not identify said interaction as personal, as belonging to the person. This identification-with is true of all media interaction, and is why an insult to a favourite piece of media can so easily be conflated with a personal attack. Due to technical images’ propensity to reproduce, it follows that a multitude of people experience a singular image, and thus share a sort of ownership over it.
We must be careful to understand that when we become familiar with and experience a photograph of an object, we are becoming familiar with and experiencing the image of the object, not the object itself. The technical image of the object may be as concrete as the object – we can become familiar with a physical photograph through proximity to it, and we become familiar with the idea and concept of the object through experiencing the image –but both of these familiarities are decidedly mediated between the object and the image. Mediation is what happens in technical imaging programmes. As summarised by Flusser in Into the Universe of Technical Images, “The intention of [taking a photograph] is to make particles into two-dimensional images, to rise from no dimensions to two dimensions,… from the most abstract into the apparently concrete.” (2011, p. 21). This “rising” between abstract and concrete is the familiarising power of photography and, as more programming is needed to produce higher quality photography, this is an increasingly deceptive mediation:
“The ‘more genuine’the colours of the photograph become, the more untruthful they are, the more they conceal their theoretical origin.” (Flusser, 2000, p. 44). Flusser also points out the difference in visibility of intention in traditional versus technical images, another concealment due to the mediation of the apparatus’ programme:
“With traditional images, by contrast [to technical images], the symbolic character is clearly evident because… human beings (for example, painters) place themselves between the images and their significance. Painters work out the symbols of the image ‘in their heads’ so as to transfer them by means of the paintbrush to the surface. If one wishes to decode such images, then one has to decode the encoding that took place ‘in the head’ of the painter.” (2000, p. 15)
Opposite this, with technical images there is a battle between the symbolic intentions of the photographer and the picture-making programme of the camera medium, to the point that the intention of the photographer is unable to be decoded, unless their intention is as Flusser suggests for making informative images, i.e. deliberate play against the programme (2000, p. 46)). Thus, Flusser posits that, as technical images are reproduced and shared amongst people, this will eventually lead to a “telematic” society where “everyone, everywhere, is at the same time” (2011, p. 80) and idea-generation is based on playing with images by editing them; a simultaneous, worldwide “dialogical net” (2011, p. 116) where images come and go from one’s “terminal” to another’s with no author and as many editors as experience the image (2011, p. 96). We can see that much of our socialisation now is mediated by telecommunications – with a preference for technical imaging (social media, video calls) –and that our emerging telematic society appears at once more integrated and more controversial than ever. So in what ways are we misapprehending our approach to integration
in a telematic society, and in which ways are we getting it right? One key misapprehension is our ignorance to the concealed encoding and mediation present in technical images: “Human beings cease to decode images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world ‘out there’.” (Flusser, 2000, p. 10). This inability to decode the abstraction between unfamiliar object and familiar image creates tension in social relationships when the unfamiliar object is a person, and affects the ability of photography to reinforce the integration of social groups.
Two.
THE RENOWNED
on public humiliation via photography as a method of re-familiarising society with itself
2: Anita Ekberg shoots paparazzi, 1960 (Source: @CarkWithaM on Reddit, 2024)
“Sacrifice is a social act, and when it goes amiss the consequences are not limited to some ‘exceptional’ individual singled out by Destiny.”
— Rene Girard, ‘Violence and the Sacred’
Figure
In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard demonstrates that the function of ritual sacrifice is to bring harmony back into the community after tensions arise. Sacrifice acts as a soothing balm to prevent the threat of cyclical violence: vengeance begetting vengeance to the point where each culprit is indistinguishable from the other, as they act with the same motivation (revenge) to the same end (violence) (Girard, 1979). Cyclical violence can tear through social groups with ease, and within the scale of societies observed to practice sacrifice (i.e. small), is a terrifying prospect; a disease that contaminates all capable of such violence, thus leaving the members who cannot fend for themselves to do so. Girard posits that sacrifices function as a “booster shot” (1979, p. 290) to vaccinate against this disease.
According to Bourdieu, the social function of photography – much like sacrifice – was to reaffirm the unity of a social group through repeated ritual. This is based on his observations of the cultural position of photography with the peasants of France in the 1960s.
“Because the family photograph is a ritual of the domestic cult in which the family is both subject and object, because it expresses the celebratory sense which the family group gives to itself, and which it reinforces by giving it expression, the need for photographs and the need to take photographs (the internalisation of the social function of the practice) are felt all the more intensely the more integrated the group and the more the group is captured at a moment of its highest integration.” (1990, p.19)
Bourdieu writes, “The arrival of the domestic practice of photography coincides with a more precise differentiation of what belongs to the public and what to the private sphere.” (1990, p. 29). But, with Flusser’s insight that technical images create a telematic
society that is ever-present and ever-public, we see that an individual whose relationships and experiences are so mediated and shared with others is “profoundly socialised” (2011, p. 64). The reproducibility of images has not more clearly defined propriety by making people sort their images into appropriately private channels, rather it has ensured that images will be shared between and beyond channels and dialogued upon by viewers unintended by the original photographer. For example, a satirical paper may appropriate an image from a scientific magazine, thus causing those two channels to leak into each other dialogically: the purpose of the channels is not to confine the images but to document one iteration of all possible encodings of the image.
The innate quality of technical images – that they are used to communicate and must be shared to do so – is an overlooked (familiar) function, certainly in this day. Increasingly, our main form of connection is via telecommunications, specifically technical images: in order to prove our humanity to each other through our ability to judge aesthetically. Though telecommunicated text is also part of telematics, there is worth in showing that even in our scientifically-programmed spaces online, we have seen the shift in preference from linear, text-based historicising to constant, image-based dialogue happen again: chat rooms added profile pictures, then Facebook – with its private spaces and images that illustrated text – was usurped by Twitter and Instagram (the first which promoted instantaneous and simultaneous dialogue and the latter which focussed on the supremacy of still images to communicate) , and now to TikTok with incessant, multiplicitous channels of dialogue and in-jokes and “brain rot” (Oxford University Press, 2024) in the form of videos. If we look at these examples we see again that shared technical images are publicly-owned. The cultures these platforms support become more and more blasé about divulging personal information, to the point that sharing private or humiliating moments has become almost
ritual.
As we see with the enjoyment of shows such as You’ve Been Framed (1990) and of prankbased content, humiliation like a partial sacrifice is a fantastic social bonder. The outcome of the partial sacrifice (a momentary loss of face) less permanently affects the victim; we come together to laugh at the victim until there is another victim to laugh at, thus the sacrifice cannot be considered a “full” sacrifice. Much of this content comes from footage that may have, at first, been personal and private (such as home videos) but has been deemed funny enough to warrant sharing. Humiliation is desirable to reproduce as it reaffirms social links: its attractiveness is rooted in its relatability and capacity to encourage empathy. A related type of content is the relatively long-standing trend for family bloggers (Abrams, 2023). Everyday household moments (often involving children) are captured for the purpose of entertainment and to capitalise on the fascination that other people have with discussing the different ways of living or navigating familiar problems as a tool of human connection. What used to be the big moments of private family life are now customarily public: pregnancy tests, proposals, first words, weddings, emotional reunions. These moments are shared to cultivate a public image of ourselves for the insistently unabashed telematic society to the end of proving our humanity to each other, like an intricate captcha. For celebrities, as old-hat victims of this impossibility of privacy in mediated society, the staple-moments of their life have long been appropriated, to the extent that their criminal trials are consumed like mini docu-series.
We sit within a web. Much of our society and socialisation is now mediated by technical images (the web is still being expanded, and once we do reach a truly global network, we shall see much the same as is already present in our experience of telematic socialisation, though the turnover for trends will be even faster for the greater reach of dialogue – especially
due to the technology working towards instantaneous translation) and so we can consider ourselves to be part of an, almost completely, telematic society. That is to say that, where the telematic web is already established and has grown upon it cultures and its own language, we do see that privacy is impossible due to reproducibility. We are a massive social group of public images unbound by physical distance.
Part of this telematic social group are the images of celebrities. Because every interaction in a telematic setting is an interaction of images – images of concepts, models, of people – all available images of persons are necessarily included in this social group. But here we see the wrinkle that is symptomatic of an equalising, telematic society stretching like a membrane over multiple, physically separated societies where class is still very much present, for celebrities’ bodily selves enjoy the comforts afforded by their prominent status. Celebrities, as we all do, have one foot in the in-person society based on proximity, and another in the telematic space, but their veneration adds that extra level of distance, and their noticeably elevated status highlights their double nature of being within and without. They are part of our telematic society, but we cannot relate to them as easily as others like us, who do not face the burden of high visibility. Such visibility renders them as close at hand and, seeing their “intimately alien, strangely mine” (Archer and Robb, 2022) quality, we are less convinced of their integration in society.
The phenomenon of celebrity is inseparable from technical imagery. In order to be considered a celebrity, one must have public recognition. Nowadays, us commoners have access to facial recognition technology that allows us into our phones, our bank accounts, as easily as breathing, because the programme has been made familiar with our image. For celebrities, a kind of facial recognition to the end of alleviating labour has always been
included as a perk of their status; think skipping queues, exclusive clubs, the awe that inspires offerings. As recognisability is an onus of photography, it is no wonder that the proliferation of both technical images and celebrities coincide. Of course, fame existed before the invention of photography, but in the historical age it was names that bore recognition. Image has usurped name from the frontman position, and it is now the face that recalls (encodes) the name. Celebrity was not born of the technical image, but in our increasingly telematic society, it can no longer survive without it.
We might then conclude that the public masses of the telematic society, as part-owners of all public images, see celebrities’ images as splitting from the group and – identifying in photography, as Bourdieu did, the capacity for reintegration – attempt to bring the celebrity back to us. But as the celebrity is higher, upon a pedestal, the bringing back to us inevitably constitutes a bringing down, a fall from grace. It is not the “high points” or the “good moments” that we seek – for such images would only push the celebrity further away – but instead ritual humiliation, hence the paparazzi machine and the constant bombardment of images proclaiming to show a celebrity at their worst, and why said “worst” often just appears as “normal”.
Wherever strife and social tensions are present, sacrifice offers an outlet to the violent urges of vengeance and fear. Crimes are settled, brought to justice, with a controlled bloodshed that will suffer no reproach, for it is agreed upon as the preferable solution (Girard, 1979).
The key to this mystical, cleansing bloodshed free from fear of retaliation is, according to Girard, in the choice of sacrificial victim. There are three main criteria the sacrificial victim must fulfil in order to render the ritual successful: They must be innocent of the crime; They must be unanimously agreed upon as a worthy victim; They must have qualities of the
Double. The criterion of the double is reflected in much of the preparation and procedure of sacrificial rites, and so will be our main point of investigation into the relationship between sacrifice and celebrity in telematic society, but unanimity and innocence will be discussed later for their presentation as obstacles in said relationship. The concept of the “Monstrous Double” is discussed in depth throughout Violence and the Sacred. Blow-for-blow conflicts, where each side loses it singularness to a repetitive cacophony of retribution, showcase a dissolution of differences, and make each side appear as a double of the other. The double is understood to be at the centre of all violence and, as such, close-knit societies take its connection to violence and use duplicity like doses of a vaccine to ward off catastrophic outbursts of uncontrolled violence (Girard, 1979, p. 289).
The double is also behind mimetic rivalry which is a common source of fatality (Girard references Greek tragedies), and is the phenomenon of a Subject looking up to a Model to inform his desires, but by the very act of desiring and aspiring to obtain the same object as the Model, inadvertently dethrones the Model from the elevated position, resulting in the dissolution of their differences in a battle for the object (1979, p. 146).
Mimetic desire and the Subject-Model relationship that precedes it is obvious in celebrity. The Model in mimetic desire functions as a role model, and it is through the previous modelling of social behaviours and aspirational attributes that the Subject has come to look up to the role Model and copy the Model’s desire for the Object (Girard, 1979, p. 145). We can see this same mimetic desire in celebritydom, with celebrities’public images as Models, the public as the Subjects, and brands and trends as Objects. (There has emerged a lower calibre of celebrity that focuses on the capacity of telematic society to inspire such mimetic desire: influencers. I refer to them as being of a lower calibre for while they, too, rely on
telematic channels, inspiring mimetic desire is their main function, whereas for celebrities it is incidental). However, such mimēsis does not evoke offence in the Model nor murderous intent in either party. The difference is the mediated familiarity of telematic society. The images that are engaged with by inspiring copying does not offend, nor usurp, because the reproducibility and copying is a function of the technical image. Furthermore, any group action to completely dispel (“murder”) a public image by ignoring it is impossible because of the width of telematic society, and an individual grievance with a celebrity over shared desire for an Object cannot reach the celebrity’s image because it is too far away. The part of the rivalry that begets violence is that both the Subject and the Model feel a reduction to the same level as their differences are dissolved (Girard, 1979, p. 146). To have a blow-for-blow mimetic rivalry with a celebrity would either have to take place publicly, on the stage of telematic society, and as it would occur between two mediated images would be a mediated conflict (the difference between punching someone in their face or beating them in a combat-based video game; a difference of catharsis). Or, it would have to take place inperson, which would necessitate that the mediated relationship is broken and the celebrity no longer exists as a public image (i.e. as a Model) to the Subject. So a member of the telematic public cannot have a true mimetic rivalry with a celebrity, which confirms the presence of the mediation between them. The mimetic desire that can prove so problematic to in-person relationships acts as a saviour that enlightens us to the specific, distanced familiarity we have with celebrities, despite their recognisability to us. Such familiarity allows us to experience modelled, mimetic desire without opening us up to the dangers of conflict and cyclical violence. When choosing a sacrificial victim, Girard observes that it is important that they “bear a resemblance” (1979, p. 11) to the subject that they are substituting for. This can be visual,
like in cases where a sacrificial animal is dressed in clothing of the subject, or it can be more theatrical, like when the King of Incwala engages in the ritual performance of transferring his “silwane to a cow, thus transforming the animal into a ‘raging bull’, which is then put to death.”(Girard, 1979, p. 110). Some connection has to exist between the guilty party and the substitute victim. In celebrities, their public images resemble them but are separate from them literally, physically; for the image exists in digital space, virtual space, and takes up the cognitive space in one’s mind that would be afforded to the unmediated person if one knew them sans technical interference.
The perfect sacrificial victim also has a “double nature” of existing between the human and the divine (Girard, 1979, p. 271). Such a balance has to be manipulated for the purpose of the ritual, either through revealing or manufacturing a paradoxical nature. The perfect victim is, at the time of sacrifice, presented as being both native and foreign to the society; unfamiliarity and divinity go hand-in-hand, as an elevation to the divine is inevitably a plucking-out of humanity. Girard explains the importance of the victim being seen as both inside of and outside of the community by presenting that, in order for the sacrifice to be successful, the victim has to be seen as exterior enough not to warrant a “champion”, but interior enough so as to still affect the society. It “can be likened to fire: too near and one gets burned, too far away and one gets nothing.” (1979, p. 269).
Double nature – human but divine, inside and outside society – encapsulates the celebrity position well. Celebrities, who exist as part of society (they converse, work, buy) but also float beyond society (they differentiate the “general public”), fulfil Girard’s doubled criteria for sacrificial victims. By the technical images that sustain them, they are put into a position of pseudo-familiarity with us. The public image is a sort of ritual mask that is put by the
greater society onto the individual as opposed to the individual putting it on themself, much like in observed sacrificial rites. But the public image mask is not as consciously placed as those in said sacrifices; it takes intentional thought and effort to consistently identify the limits of the illusion. The red-carpet poses and witty junket moments are not the mask, such acts are merely symptomatic of it, like an irritation rash from sweat trying to alleviate extreme heat. The mask is the telematic medium itself. Celebrities are, essentially, perpetually dressed-up in just the right clothes for a victim of ritual sacrifice. Though celebrities appear to be good choices for sacrifice due to their in-and-out nature –the double-ness that is inherent to their status – any genuine attempt by the society to fully sacrifice a celebrity is inevitably unsuccessful. It’s worth noting that, as it is not the physical body but the public image that we have access to, it is the public image that we attempt to sacrifice. As the image is a bloodless form, the sacrifice is bloodless too; it does not take the shape of bloodshed and physical violence, but of de-platforming. “Cancellation” is the manifestation of sacrifice-for-the-sake-of-social-harmony in the telematic society. As sacrifices of celebrity must be sacrifices of their public image, any attempt to bring the physical body of the celebrity into the process (such as through doxxing, for example) are fundamental misunderstandings of the mediation of technical imaging and often indicative of opportunism within practitioners. True cancelling would result in the public image being completely exiled from telematic society. If an individual was seen as disrespecting public etiquette they would be ousted from the telematic society (but not their physical one), much like by a bouncer at a club. However, it is important to note that “true cancelling” (i.e. cancelling that is more than an attempt) is not possible, as sacrifice of a public image necessarily fails both in achieving social harmony and in facilitating the removal of the image from publicity, for it lacks two of Girard’s key criteria: innocence and unanimity.
The guilty party is not to be sacrificed, for ritual sacrifice is intended to prevent the recurrence of violence, not to suppose to present the last eye in a chain of eye-for-eyes (Girard, 1979, pp. 17-21). (Though, Girard does allow for “sin” in the sacrificial victim, as long as guilt of that sin is shared by the whole community (1979, p.203)). In terms of cancelling, the party to be cancelled is seen as the sole guilty party of a crime by those attempting to cancel them.
“Crimes”susceptible to cancelling are not crimes which would hold up as such in court, else it would be a judicial matter and there would be no value in resorting to pre-judicial methods.
“Crimes” in cancel culture are crimes of public indecency. When someone with a platform that affords them high-visibility in the telematic society – so someone whose image has been reproduced often – is seen to be using their platform to cause harm to members of the social group, the penalty is to dethrone them, to confiscate their platform so that the might stop causing disorder. It is the call to withdraw attention so that the telematic platform, sustained by the particles of viewership, crumbles away at the base and topples. It is the perceived misuse of the platform that is being punished, but punished by direct action. The public image that caused the harm is the one the cancellers endeavour to destroy, thus, not only the guilty party but also the weapon is involved in the sacrifice, which then undermines the very intention of sacrifice as it opens a debate on whether the punishment is a just and proportional response, whether the action deserved punishment at all, the ethics behind cancelling, etc.: controversy instead of harmony. If such a fumble of sacrifice is motivated by the urge to strengthen any social bond, it is the bond of moral-superiority that the courts of opinion feel over each over. We have Girard’s dissolution of differences, and cyclical violence is born of a failed sacrifice.
Three.
THE RENOUNCED
on the limits of cancelling a public image and the sacrifice of authors
Figure 3: Andy Warhol’s Prince, 1984 (Source: San Antonio Report, 2019)
“Copying makes all authors and all authority superfluous and so puts creative inspiration to the test.”
— Vilem Flusser, ‘Into the Universe of Technical Images’
We see that “cancel culture”, for its insistence on exiling the perceived culprit, is ineffective as a form of sacrifice. Though, we might expect it to be possible to utilise the perfectly doubled nature of celebritydom to induce social harmony through ritual if we were to consciously choose an image of an “innocent” celebrity to take the place of victim. This in an un-juridical telematic society could theoretically serve to bond and bring about peace if observed periodically, as non-juridical societies found it to. However, this is not the case, as a crucial criterion of effective sacrifice still goes unfulfilled and, in fact, cannot be fulfilled in telematically-mediated social groups. A global, cerebrally networked society is incapable of unanimity.
There emerges a conjoined culture in telematic society, but it is surface, that is to say based on an equalising dissemination of available media (and therefore experience of media) as opposed to an agreement of judgements. Shared culture does not presuppose unanimity. If we take, for example, the non-telematic societies we live in, we can observe firsthand that shared experience and ways of life does not agreement make. Of course, in societies that practice sacrifice, it is only agreement on the worth of performing the sacrificial rite that influences the effectiveness of said rite (Girard, 1979, p. 94), but our nontelematic, juridical societies these days are too wide-spread and too far-removed from the origins of ritual that the necessity for concurrence on such an extreme event is not felt, and so such concurrence cannot be amassed. Telematic society is vastly wider (though it may appear more closelylinked via mediated familiarity) than even non-telematic ones and ideally encapsulates all connected minds in simultaneous and everlasting dialogue. It is the reach of such a society that facilitates such a constant overturn and exchange of ideas and allows for informative dialogue. If total agreement could finally be guaranteed, dialogue would be unnecessary. There would be no controversy, because there would be no conversation at all. It is clear that
such unanimity is a ludicrous expectation except in cases of small groups practicing extreme actions. It is precisely their unanimity and their objection to repudiation that puts their actions in the extremism category. Many societies today, concerned as they are with freedom of expression – and for their exponential incorporation of telematic communication – cannot support unanimity. Unanimity is the antithesis of a telematic society. As such (and observable in instances of attempted cancellings) it is groups who already share views, are already integrated, that descend upon a public image with calls to sacrifice it – feeding the view of cancel culture as a sort of digital gang violence epidemic – and it is only those individuals who observe the sacrificial ritual and rescinded their attention. The contention then becomes that those members of society who do not look away are funding the continued harming of society; a splitting into factions as opposed to achieving harmony. Telematic society is fantastic at supporting factions, subcultures, and micro-identities (because it exposes to all people the infinite range of human experience and thus can allow social connection through the merest similarities) but this is in direct opposition to the structure and desired effect of sacrifice. Thus, telematic society exposes that cancel culture is merely attempted and failed sacrifice.
This is an example of how the structure of telematic society can be seen to sow discord and fail to curb violent urges, as observed through the lens of celebrity. Through the same lens, we have observed where the nature of technically mediated socialisation serves to prevent violence in situations that would otherwise, according to Girard, expect it, i.e. mimetic desire and that we found the distance between public images and in-person bodies to be too great to support rivalry. Copying takes on a different role in Flusser’s predicted telematic society, and we are currently experiencing a crucial juncture where this copying
comes into power but faces resistance.
Just as celebrities act as remnants of ritual sacrifice, and magnifications of all relationships (Archer and Robb, 2022) which have been mediated by technical images, so too do they act as portents, as foghorns, for the coming world and its lack of authors. From a literal and visual perspective, one could say much on the contemporary practicing of plastic surgery, which favours a racially ambiguous standard of beauty that morphs characteristic “desirable” features from across the world and dissolves the differences between them, optimising a programme of visual culture for finding the most “ideal” size and shape of a given facial feature. The ever-increasing mass of people eligible for the celebrity status of high visibility more broadly and prolifically disperses this standard through technical images and thus reinforces it. But this is only an account of the unoriginal (so called because of its lack of specific origin) visual culture on the physical body.
So too can we see the effects of globalised, cerebral jointness in visualisation through the “appropriation” of a celebrity’s public image. The desperate, grappling bringing-closer of familiarisation can feel, to the celebrity, like a home invasion – that the public is taking something that belongs to the celebrity for their own. But the celebrity is not the author of their image, or at least not the sole one. By the public image’s very technicality, it has always existed only by virtue of being a collaboration, a dialogue between the celebrity and the public. In terms of play it is a blank canvas in much the same way as a doll. This tension of ownership in celebrity public images is symptomatic of the awkward in-between stage we currently stand at in Flusser’s prediction of a playful and free telematic society: we are seeing the loss of accreditation, of authors, due to our society being so mediated by technical images, but it is not yet accompanied by the foreseen allowance to change modes from labour to play. Work (in all senses) remains a capitalist commodity, and thus the
disappearance of ownership and credit is not met with rejoicing but with fear, for to go uncredited for one’s work in such an economy is, necessarily, to starve. Such tension can be seen in the recent copyright issue over Warhol’s Prince [Fig.3]. The Andy Warhol Foundation lost to the original photographer of the image, Lynn Goldsmith (The Guardian, 2023).
As proper sacrifice is impossible in a telematic society, we must find a more agreeable form of connection between all public images and all receivers of these images; a way of connecting that simultaneously acknowledges the inherently public nature of technical images whilst allowing to each person their right to a private existence (a space un-lookedon, un-dialogued-upon), and which plays with the tensions of two such states of interacting with the world. Play is the end Flusser foresees in telematics. But, for the time being, where accreditation for creations means money to live off of, we must adjust our expectations towards play as work. A sort of work that is aware of its image, and its image as a collaboration between the surface the image is projected onto and those doing the projecting, and that plays in such a dialogue, tests new ideas and formats and angles, and takes stock of the response and informs the greater programme through it. Such playful work comes most naturally to the arts, particularly the realm of comedy.
Agnes Heller proclaims comedy’s “preeminent involvement with the present” (Ngai, 2020, p. 58). Comedy is observational of current culture, constantly reevaluating the worth of passé societal structures (Ngai, 2020, p.74), and always reevaluating cultural comedic formats, overturning and building on itself. At the casual level, most jokes are told without credit. If one were to tell a ‘Knock-Knock’ joke to another, the other would not assume the teller to be the originator of the joke, merely the sharer, and still would not be likely to enquire as to the writer, from a joint lack of interest in knowing and lack of expectation that the reteller would care to know themself. We see this in broader play, too: games are reproduced
in schoolyards across the world, and are often built upon, adapted to each physical and mental environment, but the identity of the “genius mind” who first came up with the game (if such a mind did exist: it was likely multiple minds, and multiple groups of multiple minds relatively simultaneously and separately) is a non-issue. What matters is the fun, how entertaining it is and, ultimately, how well it facilitates connection between the players. At the professional level of comedy, it is still necessary to give credit for material as it is an economic commodity of work. The “right” person has to get paid, otherwise it is fraud. But comedy pushes the boundaries of credit and dialogue often. Comedy relies on expected subversions of culturally understood techniques. Comedians can use timely pauses and other non-contact nudges to point the audience towards the punchline whilst never saying it; they can riff on a comedian’s style or portrayed views whilst never mentioning a name. “We were all thinking it!” is one of the ways comedy reintegrates society, especially if the “simultaneous thought” brings to light an implicit bias or digs into areas of quiet shame.
Ritual humiliation works best in a culturally connected but controversial society by letting the public humiliate themselves and be joined in the relaxation of understanding that they are not alone, that they are integrated. We have already seen the power of the public humbling an individual elevated by high-visibility, but in comedy (though the highly-visible individual is still elevated, by stage and microphone) said individual humbles themself as well as the audience. They ingratiate themselves by being relatable, by telling embarrassing stories that are either mundane (and thus harmonising for their commonality) or outlandish (that evoke a harmonious sigh of relief from the audience that it did not happen to them).
As global society is intrinsically united but increasingly incapable of unanimity – not birthing a solitary perception but an apparent overview made up of lots of singular particles coming together (Flusser, 2011, p. 116) to seemingly create an observable surface (Flusser, 2011, p.
33) of ideas, i.e. global culture – comedy strives to prove and capitalise on such a unification. There exists within comedic audiences an integral understanding of persona, that the bodily person on stage is playing up to their public image, creating and editing it always, and an understanding of the play involved is vital practice for our socialisation with primarily public images. It brings to light the differentiation between the body of the person and the image of the person which, though they look and sound alike, are separate in their degrees of visibility and mediation (publicity). To conflate the two is like mistaking a set of twins to be the same person. Such a mistake is more likely if one never sees the two separations in the same room at the same time, as leads to the confusion between person and public image, but is a mistake nonetheless. The aspect of play in comedy, the implicit and sometimes explicit pointing-to of separation between person and persona, is equivalent to the twins acknowledging the fact that they’re twins; the acknowledgement of the ease in mistaking a double.
Twins appear in Violence and the Sacred as the monstrous double, as harbingers of strife and rivalry and dissolved differences (Girard, 1979, pp. 56-58). In a mediated society such as ours, such fears are baseless, for rivalry between public images is ineffective. So the acceptance of twins as only an apparent double – as double but separate, similar but not the same – is crucial to a harmonious and accurately perceived space of interaction. We can see twinness in double acts, of which comedy boasts many, but that also appear in the forms of musical duets, dance partners, etc. (There is also no need to limit the number to two – for instance choirs also stand as an example – other than ease of illustration of the point). The twinned is seen in any endeavour where two (or more) bodies can be seen to produce a singular piece of published work. When we experience such works, when attention is shared equally amongst the bodies and no one persona stands out above the other/s, we come to
see the physical makers as part of a collective whose images are entwined into one. Our brains are forced to acknowledge the image as separate and mediate from the body. Public names, as sub-sections of image, are revealed as such too: Morecambe and Wise, Fred and Ginger, Fry and Laurie, French and Saunders, (Cain and Abel) etc. We relate their name to their image and thus to our familiarity with them, so to recall their name out of order (e.g. Laurie and Fry) is distinctly uncanny and unfamiliar. Though the order would not usually matter when referring to two separate people so named, it does matter in this case because it is referencing a single, shared public image, and is equivalent to referring to Wood Victoria or Mercury Freddie. (Of course, both Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry have separate public images in their own right, too attached to projects such as House M.D. or QI which only further illustrates the attachment to Fry and Laurie as if it were one name and one persona).
