Echographies of Television discusses a number of subjects, but the overall theme concerns the impact of technological acceleration, and in particular the social, political and philosophical significance of the development of digital media.
He argues that "actuality" is always a matter of "artifactuality," involving selection, editing, performativity, and thus amounting to a "fictional fashioning".
The performativity of the event exceeds all anticipation or programming, and hence contains an irreducible element of messianism, linking it to justice (here distinguished from law), as well as to revolution.
If, for example, we could know in advance that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were doomed to failure, the pace and rhythm at which this occurred could only be understood retrospectively, taking into account causalities which had been previously overlooked, such as the way in which the fall of the Berlin Wall was immediately inscribed in a global telecommunications network.
[7] On this basis, Derrida provides a critique of the way in which borders are conceived by Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French National Front.
[11] In "Echographies of Television," Stiegler begins by noting that Derrida, in agreeing to record their interview, asked for a "right of inspection".
[12] Derrida responds that if he did so, he did not imagine such a right would be effective, and that it is difficult for intellectuals to adapt to the conditions of television, even if they must also not cut themselves off from a public sphere dominated by that medium.
It may be a matter not of fighting today against teletechnologies but rather so that they are able to make more room for different norms, those of intellectuals, artists, scientists, etc.
[15] Stiegler asks Derrida about his term, "artifactuality," which indicates that the construction of "actuality" passes through the artifact or the artificial, that it involves a selection.
[20] Nevertheless, the "accidental" possibility of manipulating the analog image is something which had already been increasingly undertaken by the mass media in recent years.
The ability to do so derives from the fact that even the analog photo is a technical synthesis, and as such exposed to an irreducible potential for falsification.
Today, however, with the analogico-digital photo, the conditions of this belief are diminished, leading to a general doubt, and one which affects, for example, democracy.
Reducing the image to binary code means breaking the spectrum down into discontinuous elements which can be treated in any way whatsoever.
[23] Extending the analysis conducted by Walter Benjamin, Stiegler delineates three kinds of reproducibility which constitute three great epochs of memory: The difference between the analog and the digital has traditionally been understood in terms of an opposition between the continuous and the discontinuous.
The fact that the image has been understood as continuous in this sense is why it has been thought to resist semiological interpretation, which depends on the discreteness of the sign.
That we experience the progression of images in film as a continuous movement is less the result of retinal persistence than it is of the spectator's expectations, which work to efface the editing.
But with digital technology it becomes possible not only to produce cinematic or televisual works in a new way, but to analyse and therefore interpret these in a new way—for example, to index images, camera movements, voices, etc.
To view an image is to engage with that technical synthesis, and implies a kind of knowledge of the apparatus by the spectator that determines the conditions of the experience of spectatorship.
As Derrida showed in relation to the sign, language is always already writing, a system of traces, composed of discrete elements.
Thus the evolution of both forms of synthesis, technical and spectatorial, occurs as one composed process, in what Gilbert Simondon calls a "transductive relation".
This is in contrast to the way in which Hollywood has taken up these changes: by opposing production and consumption, keeping analysis in the hands of the producers, and synthesis a matter for consumers.