Fragments of an Infinite Memory by Maël Renouard

Author:Maël Renouard
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

8

I have the impression, when I look back on it, that my childhood took place in an era of the scarcity of images. Such a characterization would have seemed odd or even inconceivable at the time, for we already believed ourselves to be overwhelmed by a quantity of images never seen since the beginning of the world. And yet how rare they were in comparison to the overabundance we now have at our fingertips. We had to wait for them: wait for the films that were shown once on television and shown again only many years later; wait for the magazines that, once a month, brought a cargo of images that seems meager indeed, now that we can find on the internet, for every object and every desire, about as many images as we could wish. Images were a luxury that demanded patience. When we had one in our possession, we treasured it; we cut it out, pasted it into an album. From time to time, we went back to it and dreamily gazed at it for a long while. This relative scarcity of images had even made them into a kind of schoolyard currency—a currency now considerably devalued through overinflation. Today, images come one after another, devour each other, replace each other pitilessly, as if to outmatch the boundlessness of our desire.

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Psychopathology of digital life, 4.—B. confides in me: “When I came into a little money, I thought I would finally buy myself some vintage watches, a country house, a 1970s Peugeot coupe. I looked at a lot of listings on eBay and leboncoin. I found a certain number of things that corresponded more or less exactly to what I had in mind. And I saw so many images of objects I desired that I became satiated. Fundamentally, I had found what I was looking for: images of these things, to my heart’s content. Delving into my past, I realized that, for me, the ultimate goal of possessing an object had often been its aesthetic transfiguration into a series of images that represent it in its full glory, as at the office of my childhood doctor, whose walls were decorated with photographs of his yacht majestically leaning into the wind. I envied him; but today I tell myself that what I must have envied, at least as much as pure and simple ownership, was the fact that it could prolong itself in images, for images are the true place of aesthetic experience and pleasure. And so, since I had all the images I wanted, why subject myself to the—intermediate and tedious—stage of possession? In the end, I didn’t buy any of it.”

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Psychopathology of digital life, 5.—Also from B., some time later: “I just got back from a long trip to Tunisia; I saw cities, shores, and ruins; I didn’t take a single photograph. I told myself, more or less consciously, that I could find on Google Images as many representations as I liked of the places where I went, with an ease directly proportionate to the beauty of the place.

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