Let’s try again.
At one level an image can be regarded as a type of signal. This is in terms of conceiving the signal in the general sense of something that behaves like a sign – that works to communicate something at a spatial and temporal remove, that serves as an intermediate carrier of some field of meaning. But we are also very aware of a more specific sense of the term. The signal represents the electronic form of a message – its encoding, storage and transmission. In this sense the image is not a subset of the signal, but rather something that passes into a signal in order to be communicated. Very importantly, the signal is not the image itself. It represents rather a passage away from visibility – a representation in other terms. Strictly speaking, to conceive the image as signal is to suspend the semantic character of the image. It is to focus on the image as information, as something that according to Shannon’s famous conception, can be statistically determined – that takes shape in terms of a measure of entropy, of message undecidability. The image-signal then is the image as quantitative description rather than as holistic apparition.
So here we are less concerned with imagery as such (in its capacity to appear) than with the flow of imagery. It is in this sense that the multiple flows of imagery converge to form a single current – the image as signal. Whereas Debord was fundamentally concerned with the social relation of commodity-consumption, disengagemet and passivity that the ‘society of the spectacle’ entailed, the concern with signal is a bit different. It is less about contrasting truth and illusion, authentic and inauthentic life, than about recognising a new energetics, a new physics of image-based cultural being. Flying in the face of the first law of thermodynamics, it is though the image-signal is a form of energy that endlessly proliferates and grows, that encounters no natural limits. Drawing upon the second law of thermodynamics, it as though expansion, proliferation and pollution are the natural entropic attractors of the image-signal.