Is the decontextualized photograph the privileged semiotic marker of our time?
Is our generation witnessing the end of phonocentrism? Phonocentrism (which also goes by many other names, such as phonologism, logocentrism, and so forth) is the doctrine that the spoken word is privileged over the written word. This doctrine was popularized by Derrida (perhaps Derrida even originated the idea; I don't know).
While I don't wish to be dismissive of Derrida's views, it helps to makes sense of the idea of phonocentrism if we understand that Derrida comes from a Jewish cultural background, and the Jews often found themselves squaring off against Christians who contrasted the living spirit of Christ with the dead letter of the Jewish law. Throughout Western history the Jews were presented as legalistic and obsessed with the letter of the law, while Christians were presented as a people who had risen above vulgar slavishness to the letter of the law and who had recognized a higher law. Derrida sought to overthrow this cultural stereotype.
It is, today, almost difficult to imagine the spoken word or the living presence being privileged over the technological artifact. Since the advent of telephone technology, the living presence of the voice has been heard at one remove, and it would be difficult to say where this living but disembodied voice lies in the hierarchy of privileged words. In fact, the development of telecommunications is a phonologically disruptive event, and this disruption is only gaining with the availability of the cell phone, the rise of social media, and the spread of mobile computing technology.
A new kind of phonologism is emerging that privileges not the spoken word, but the image, which is assumed to be pristine and virtually beyond corruption -- that is to say, we are seeing the rise of eikonocentrism. Platforms such as Tumblr, where you are now reading this, and Instagram are primarily venues for the sharing of images. Twitter, which began as a text-only exercise now fully integrates images, and these three websites together constitute a fairly substantial portion of total internet traffic. This is what people are looking at. And why not? After all, is not a picture worth a thousand words, and do not images speak for themselves? Why even include a single line of text and explanation when the photograph tells us all that there is to know?
Derrida himself expatiated on the nature of photography:
"In the opening (or “aperture”) to light and to what is supposed to be an object, photography does not do everything. (The question of) “matter” remains—however many quotation marks we put around it—precisely as a remainder that cannot be reduced to a given substance, nor even to the onto-logical presence of a present-being, on, or of an object (the present-at-hand, Vorhandenes), whether it be the object in front of the lens (the photographed thing) or the object-support of the print, the photograph that one holds in one’s hand or before one’s eyes and of which multiple copies can be made." (Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, Jacques Derrida, Gerhard Richter et al., pp. 12-13)
Here Derrida almost sounds like an object-oriented philosopher (though, to be sure, the echo of Heidegger is never far in the background with Derrida), which is ironic, given that post-modernists like himself have been highly critical of the idea of the subject, while others have theorized the abject, so that one must wonder at Derrida's insistent invocation of the object in this passage.
But is it not the object that is the telos of the decontextualized photograph-as-signifier? Is not the photograph ultimately a stand-in, a proxy, for some inaccessible object? The photograph is a variable for which we can substitute, salva veritate, any object whatsoever. The "selfie" is that class of variables for which we substitute the image of ourselves as object. Thus the central signifier of the age of Internet-enabled communication is the apotheosis of objectification, up to and including the self-executed objectification of the self, i.e., the subject willingly objectifying itself. Is this not the death of the subject prophesied by post-modernism?