Three Ages of Iconoclasm: Actions, Procedures and Screens Against Images

Abstract

Given the structural diagnosis that we define as screen-centric, that is, a scopic system characterized by the ubiquity of screens in our daily lives, iconoclasm emerges as a possible critical action. In dialogue with a variety of contributions from different disciplines, this paper seeks to account for the contradiction we face when thinking about iconoclasm against digital images. On the one hand, today, images, due to their excess and overabundance, become self-canceling: the contemporary visual system works in an iconoclastic way insofar as it generates a hypervisuality that becomes unconsumable for any human being. On the other hand, we trace within this same saturated regime of screens the coordinates to recover the critical potentials stored in the historical movements of iconoclasm. To this end, we periodize iconoclasm by transposing what José Luis Brea called three eras of the image. We then conceptualize the three eras of iconoclasm: as gestures of destruction of the images-matter; as montage procedures in film images; and as a technological system in e-image.