Giving up the Ghost
Anna Friz and Jason Rovito. ‘Giving up the Ghost: of Bachelard and the Bees.’ Iconotopoi / Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image), McGill University, Montreal, QC. December 4, 2008.
In preparing to approach the image as our object of inquiry, we proceed by asking: is it possible to study the image with lights dimmed? With our eyes closed? Must the image be conceived in exclusively visual terms? Would a multi-sensory approach allow us to explore dimensions of the image that are, ironically, obscured by its visual connotation? In pursuit of these questions, we turn to Gaston Bachelard’s hypothesis that the image is integrally related to the sensorium of the imagination, ‘the subject of the verb to imagine’—and its corollary: that the image can only be investigated phenomenologically, in its spatio-temporal function of pushing reality beyond itself.
To draw out the consequences of Bachelard’s hypothesis, and to thus explore the terrain of the imaginary image, we seek to perform a two-fold intervention-exorcism within the field of spectral ecology. First, recognizing that the spectrum is itself haunted by the visual connotation of the spectre which structures it, we seek to trace the historical manner in which the spectrum displaced the multi-sensory image of ether as an explanatory model of wirelessness. And, further, to interrogate how this transformation, which represents the usurpation of the visual image, has succeeded in obscuring the materiality of wireless systems through a semblance of invisibility—perhaps best expressed by the clichéd image of the ghost which has become associated with wireless media in both the popular and critical imaginaries.
Second, with this distorting visual image of the ghost temporarily exorcised from our understanding of wirelessness, we attempt to pursue the knowledge embedded within alternative image-spheres. Hence, we turn to the contemporary wireless myth in which the mysterious disappearance of large percentages of the bee population in Europe and North America has been attributed to the effects of electromagnetic pollution caused by increased mobile phone use. Though this theory has since been debunked (as theory), its stubborn persistence within the public imaginary provides us with an imagined image with which we can phenomenologically investigate the polluting effects of wirelessness upon the essential mobility of Bachelard’s category of the ‘aerial imagination.’