“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”— Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique
“I would like to die painting a nude. There is so much to disclose with pleasure. Our eyes are like hands, searching in the dark for fruit, a head of hair, breasts, a perfect sphere, another hand, a window which opened will let in the air from a night landscape; only the dark we search in is the white of our paper or canvas. Maybe it is for this reason that we see as differently from other people, as the blind feel. We seize on the essentials so as not to be deceived.”
— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel
Everyone is after their ‘look’. Since you can no longer set any store by your own existence (we no longer look at each other - and seduction is at an end!), all that remains is to perform an appearing act, without bothering to be, or even to be seen. It is not: 'I exist, I’m here’, but 'I’m visible, I’m image — look, look!’ This is not even narcissism. It’s a depthless extraversion, a kind of promotional ingenuousness in which everyone becomes the impresario of his/her own appearance.
The 'look’ is a kind of minimal, low-definition image, like the video image or, as McLuhan would say, a tactile image, which provokes neither attention nor admiration, as fashion still does, but is a pure special effect without any particular meaning. The look is not exactly fashion any more; it is a form of fashion which has passed beyond. It no longer subscribes to a logic of distinction and it is no longer a play of difference; it plays at difference without believing in it. It is indifference. Being oneself becomes an ephemeral performance, with no lasting effects, a disenchanted mannerism in a world without manners.
- Jean Baudrillard, screened out (trans. Chris Turner) 2002
