For Lacan (1980: 80, 292) the ‘thing’ itself is the glance, not the object
that is perceived. In this sense, images that distort our perception of reality
are ‘real’ in themselves; they cannot be taken marginally. Reality in Lacan’s
work (1980: 56-77) will not be the referent that should be discovered and
domesticated using the filter of fantasy, because reality is also the filter
itself. In this respect, Gilles Deleuze believes that when things are replaced
by their image, the image becomes automatically self-sufficient, self-
referential and independent of the subject, in other words: an absolute. In
the image, the truth and the imaginary are, in some sense, indistinguishable
(Trifonova, 2004: 145). We need to ‘reconstruct’ our perception to manage
our understanding of the new technological image which has no trace in
reality. Indeed, our perception will need to get closer to ‘the artificial’
because this will be the perfect way to perceive (un)reality. In other words,
this is the replacement of the ‘original purity’ of perception with the
artificial/technological understanding of it.
Deleuze (2005: 163) designates the cinema of the last few decades a
cinema in which the image by itself produces fascination as ‘pure expression’,
a cinema of real falsification. His conception of cinema is similar to the idea
of knowledge in Plato: the world is a film that was there before the
perception of the human eye captured the images in celluloid, creating a
‘camera consciousness’. Indeed, it is interesting to use the allegory of Plato’s
cave to illustrate the knowledge of reality in cinema spectators when they
give ‘reality to a world without substance’ (Konigsberg, 1996: 1), and, being
immobile and passive in the dark, accept copies or simulacra for the original
objects. Plato (1992: 514-517) illustrates the human situation with respect to
knowledge of reality and what informs this by evoking the image of a cavern.
Within the deepest part of the cavern he depicts prisoners who have been
chained up since their childhood, and are able only to watch what is
presented before their eyes: a wall onto which the shadows of various objects
placed behind them, and therefore that they cannot see, are being
projected. In a situation like this, when a prisoner is released they perceive
the first shadows as more real than the direct objects they encounter. Only
once the initial pain is transformed into a clear vision would they begin to
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