English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

In an execptionally short essay (2 pages) Geoffrey Batchen, who teaches the history of photography at U. New Mexico posits that there is a critical difference between analogue and digital photography that I think is extremely interesting when considering rhetoric and truth claims.

Some quotes:
"Let's Begin with a basic proposition: what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). And let's test it against another: this embodied type of vision is what is at stake in the current shift from photographic to electronic media." Essentially, a photograph exists because an object existed, light touched that object then touched chemicals on paper and left an imprint of, not the idea of the object, but of the object's physical presence. (See also Andre Bazin's The Ontology of the Photographic Image and Walter Benjamin's, well, lots of Benjamin).

"Photography has never provided us with the truthful appearance of things, but it has guarenteed, through the magic of contiguity, the possiblity of a direct emotional empathy across an otherwise insurmountable abyss of space and time." Big claim, but even if we don't buy it, the possibility of making this claim certainly has implications on visual rhetoric.

And here's the pay-off:
"Psychologically speaking, the digital has no haptic purchase on history and declines to proffer the substitution anxiety of the fetish." So does this mean that visual rhetoric has to undergo an ethos overhaul when it goes digital and what are the pathos implications?