Image, perception, and signs of personhood: semiotic and phenomenological reflections on flesh, experience, and the signature of the self

In this essay I examine ways we are confounded in our habits and practices of “seeing” both self and other in a technologically visual culture of instant and constant digital photography, having been seduced by the seeming accuracy and “truth” of still images since the advent of photography early in the 19th Century. Foucault notes that the role of sight/vision/seeing as a form of experiencing truth receded during the enlightenment – and then re-appeared in modernity. As such, a once-discarded foundation for knowing re-appears with the increasing prominence of the photograph. Our current era has stylized and commodified this mode of “seeing” and “expressing,” and “influencing” as yet another performative style. In this context, I will examine the imago (a Jungian concept, appropriated from the history of biological science) of Self and ego identity. My thinking will follow insights from Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Bergson, Nancy, and Lacan.