Through the Technological Lens!

In his 1972 essay “Requiem for the Media”, Jean Baudrillard describes the potential for communications media to be satirized/deconstructed without substitution of another media or theory in its place: “Graffiti is transgressive, not bcause it substitutes another content, another discourse, but simply because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of non-response enunciated by the media. Does it oppose one code to another? I don't think so: it simply smashes the code”

This notion fits closely in with the discussion of media technology's inherent (forgive me) “mediating” effects, which naturally - technologically - alter the way in which their subjects are presented and consequently perceived. In the discussion in “The Light of the World” of aesthetic technology and the role of the cameraman we see the assertion that the technologies themselves have these complex relations to those things which they signify, dependent not only on their methodological and technical apparatus but also on their situation in society: “All technologies are at once technical in the most limited sense (to do with material properties and functioning) and also always social (economic, cultural, idealogical).” (83). This reminds me, to some degree, of Heidegger's “Question Concerning Technology”, and the notion that the essence of technology is nothing technological; rather its essence lies closer to the concepts of enframing and challenging-forth. Of course, Heidegger was not referring to the technologies we consider today to be modern, but I imagine the argument extends nicely, explaining the 'subjugation' of the photographic subject through the glass/social lens and the privileging of white people through media technology.