prelude
Vilém Flusser once observed that the omnipresence of technical images is not merely a shift in representation but a profound restructuring of reality itself: “Humans forget that they produced images to orient themselves in the world; they can no longer decode them and instead live subordinated to them” (Flusser, 1990). This inversion, where images command rather than serve, marks the threshold of a transformation not only in how we see but in how we exist.
1. towards a hauntology
When we engage with others through the flickering light of a screen, we cannot help but feel the haunting sense of an absence. (Tertiary retentions). Digital images seem to lack the fullness of reality, as though virtuality diminishes the objects, events, or presences it depicts. This sensation of loss may be less a defect than a sign of epochal change. Flusser invites us to consider the possibility that this loss is symptomatic of the obsolescence of older conceptions of the world. What appears to be a diminishment might instead be the hinge upon which a new vision of reality, and a new way of being, begins to unfold.
In E.M. Forster’s prescient “The Machine Stops” (1909), we find a chilling vision of this shift. His characters live in isolated cells, interacting only through the machinery of communication. The protagonist, Kuno, pleads with his mother, Vashti, to meet him in person. She refuses, claiming her virtual tools suffice: “The machine is much, but it is not everything; I see something like you on this plate, but I do not see you” (Forster, 2019, loc. 64). This lament resonates today, especially after the pandemic thrust so many into the virtual domain. The screen mediates our contact but also impoverishes it. What is lost is not merely touch or the immediacy of presence but the natural signals—the subtle rhythms of voice, gesture, and breath—that constitute the texture of human intimacy.
Unlike the tangible reflection in a mirror -which is in the same space with my body, so analogically connected-, the digital image belongs to another order. It is no longer bound by the light and space of the physical world but constructed from binary code. As Flusser explains, the digital image is not an extension of the body, (as we could say the mirror image is) but a translation into abstract, manipulable data. This dislocation creates a “non-dimensional” reality where, as Alessandro Baricco notes, continuity gives way to a sequence of leaps: “Perhaps it counts seconds… or even fractions of a second, but then it stops counting and jumps to the next number” (Baricco, 2019, loc. 257). Analog to digital. The virtual body, therefore, becomes not a reflection but an algorithm—a second body untethered from the laws of empirical space-time.
2. plastic identities
Walter Benjamin, writing long before the digital age, lamented the loss of the “aura” in mechanically reproduced art. For Benjamin, the aura resided in the “unique presence” of an object, the interplay of its physical closeness and historical distance: “The manifestation of a distance, however close it may be” (Benjamin, 1973, p. 24). Mechanical reproduction, he argued, ruptures the object’s connection to its origin, severing the temporal and material threads that imbue it with depth. Similarly, the virtual image dispels the aura of physical presence, reducing its unsettling depth to a surface that is light, ephemeral, and unanchored. Or perhaps more accurately, anchored in another way, which merits special consideration:
This shift is not without its compensations. The digital body, while abstract, possesses a strange autonomy. It can transcend the limits of physical space, appearing simultaneously across distances, and it can outlast the fleetingness of the present, lingering as a recorded fragment of its creator. Yet it also carries new constraints: glitches, desynchronizations, and distortions become its defining properties, as intrinsic as weight and voice are to the physical body. In this sense, the virtual image is not merely a shadow of the self but an extension into another dimension, where identity stretches and transforms.
3. the dust of hades
The Greek imagination tethered all images to the underworld. Born of the dark union of Aether (ether) and Gaia (earth), images oscillated between materiality and immateriality, carrying with them a numinous depth. Flusser, however, declares that technical images do not belong to this lineage. They are not the offspring of matter but of code, “symptoms of chemical or electronic processes” rather than impressions of the tangible (Flusser, 2011, p. 35). Their origin is not the dust of Hades but the abstraction of numbers. This absence of aura is not a failure but a feature of their new order—a symptom of their independence from the material and historical constraints of traditional representation.
The digital image thus inaugurates a new regime of imagination. Where natural images depend on physical encounters and historical sedimentation, technical images emerge from a universe of pure abstraction. As Flusser notes, they are “deposits of information” that require an imaginative leap to interpret, for their meaning is no longer given but constructed (Flusser, 2011, p. 18). In this sense, the rise of “techno-imagination” marks a decisive break with the linear, historical thinking that has shaped human consciousness. Instead, we are called to embrace a visionary mode of thought, one that finds meaning not in depth but in the play of surfaces.
coda
Michel Foucault once wrote that “man” is a fleeting figure, destined to disappear like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea (Foucault, 1989, pp. 421-422). The pandemic’s acceleration of virtualization may well be the tide that begins this erasure. The simulacral world of digital images blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, challenging the very foundations of identity. We lament that the more connected we are to the virtual, the more disconnected we become from the real. Yet this lament itself may be outdated, as the virtual invites us to question—and perhaps to transcend—what we have long assumed to be human.
In the digital image, we find both a rupture and a possibility. It dissolves the certainties of space and time, reducing the world to a shimmering lattice of data points. But in doing so, it opens a new horizon of imagination. Flusser suggests that this abstraction might lead us back to the concrete, as we learn to see through the illusions of depth and recover a world newly filled with meaning. To live in this posthuman age is to dare to imagine—to pull the concrete from the abstract, as we stand on the cusp of becoming something altogether new.
The long version of this text (in Spanish) may be found as: Krebs, V.J. 2020. “Imagen posthumana” en: Elena Battaner& Juan Alonso (Eds.). Covid 19. Humanidad e Incertidumbre. ASRI. nº 19: Págs. XX. Eumed.net-URJC. Recuperado de http://www.eumed.net/rev/asri/
Synchronicity23's Blog 