War and the (Un)imaginable: Between Power and the Reality of Technical Images

The paper examines the (technically reproducible) „atrocious image“ within discourses commenting on the tendency of such visuals to affect the viewers’ imagination and memory and their ability to make sense of and retain in their minds (representations of) „exceptional events“ such as war. The text analyses the theoretical circumstance that the affective potential of the „atrocious“ gives rise to many „iconoclastic“ debates about the ethical risk involved in the production, dissemination and consumption of technical images representing „transgressive moments“ – those „imagining“ death, torture and all manner of other ‘atrocities’. The aim is to discern what these debates miss, namely that the locus of misunderstanding is conditioned by the premise that photography and cinema have a disproportionate (compared to other media) power over people’s imaginations, and thus over the social as such. This power is tied to the uses of and prejudices about the apparent ability of a medium in a particular historical period to capture the truth of events and reality in general. In this sense, the article attempts to show that as contemporary audiovisual culture changes, the boundaries of old arguments about the affective potential of technical images must be reconsidered, as they have begun to lose their power and verisimilitude because they are easily falsifiable and increasingly function as a form „image speech“ for private individuals.