Sun, look out for yourself!

This title of this post is the first epigraph in convolute Y [Photography]. It relates to the idea of perfect mechanical reproduction in the photograph. It is a warning to, as it were, the center of our universe, the ultimate source of light, which itself enables photography, a warning (by extension) to the represenative natural element in the hierarchies of governmental sovereignty, that photography, the machine, has achieved or is building toward its perfect reproduction, so that any essence the sun might possess is now able to be utterly duplicated, its copy not recognizable as a copy at all. So that this early promise of photography, perfect reproduciton, promises to obviate anything original, brining to humanity the supreme power of creation, even as it's true that this power is perceived through the prism of traditional modes of understanding, of exactly those same hierarchies. All this is exactly what's picked up in the second epigraph, "If one day the sun should sputter out, / 'Twill be a mortal who rekindles it.", again through technology and photography specifically giving this power of recreating or saving the world to the human. We no longer need the natural world: this is the core promise of the technological. And the photograph does this through representation. By this representation then we see through the dialectical image, that central idea, an artificiality at its root, a way that the human is introduced to obscure or replace the natural world. As transcendant as the dialectical image is, it is only so with this latent reality in mind, this produced quality. That "Genius of Industry" in the source line of the second epigraph is exactly the only pure substance of nature itself, since it replaces the deepest structures of the natural world. We have to remember here as well, in this context, how the Arcades Project is a type of camera, a producer of images through artificial means, though in this case a producer of dialectical images through text. We ask too what the sun might be that these textual images are replacing or duplicating? What world has disappeared that we're continually rebuilding?