We know that what we call the corporation (Texier wrote) first appeared in Europe’s Middle Ages, signed into law by the Pope in AD 1250. It was conceived as a legal persona ficta — a ‘fictive person’ that had many of the attributes of a real person. It was capable of owning property, for example, of suing and being sued; at the same time, it was bodiless, invisible, free from human infirmity and the ravages of time. Conceived as such, the corporation was almost identical to contemporary ideas of angels. According to medieval religious doctrine, angels too were immaterial, ageless, capable of acting like human beings but bound by neither substance nor time; the corporation, an entity which we imagine as a uniquely secular creation, a paragon of reason and common sense, in fact began its life as an offshoot of a Christian myth.
Today, though we no longer believe in angels, we still regard the corporation as a higher order of being. It is composed of ordinary people, but it transcends them; semi-divine, it floats above our messy and contingent reality. Of all the corporations, it is the bank, which produces nothing tangible, which trades only ever in the virtual, that remains closest to pure spirit, and thus sits at the top of the hierarchy, equivalent to the Thrones and Dominions. Whatever it does, we are ready to forgive; or rather we assume that what we see as sins are instead mystical transactions beyond our understanding. We have an instinctive feeling that these dark angels, of us and yet above us, must be protected and appeased — to the extent that we allow them to predate on the material world, feed vampirically off our very reality, leaving us to live among their detritus. We do this because we want to be like them, because we ourselves aspire to the condition of persona ficta: free from reality’s contingencies and humiliations, insubstantial, unchanging, inviolable, endlessly apart.
Yet how does a person become a persona ficta? How can one simultaneously turn fully inwards and make oneself abstract? Perhaps these two operations are less exclusive than we might think. Humans have always used stories to order reality. Now, however, technology allows unprecedented quantities of reality to be turned into story. Reality thereby becomes secondary; just as the banks use the underlying only for what can be derived from it, life becomes merely raw material for our own narratives.
The building block of these narratives is the image. The image operates by delimiting reality, placing boundaries around it, removing its connections and context; in short, by enslaving it. It presents the results, however, as a concentration or apotheosis of reality. The image is the derivative of the self; can it be mere chance that the rise of financial capitalism has coincided with the proliferation and incorporation of the camera into almost every facet of the Western world? The camera’s promise is that the moment can be subordinated — deferred, stored, experienced at our leisure. Life and the living of it have, for the first time in history, become separate. In recording our own reality — that is, in simultaneously experiencing and deferring experience — we pass from the actual into the virtual.
Every age dreams of defeating death: this is our chosen method. By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode — what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is the culmination of our experiences in a way that we — biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions — can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself, just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.
Who is with us, in this recursive heaven where time has been defeated? No one: the modern heaven is one of perfect isolation. We are not there either. The transcendental or sempiternal self bends over his screen, in correspondence with a forever-echoing past, leaving a present that is closed off, superfluous, from which (and this is the real meaning of the fantasy) we are exempted. That is our transcendence of death: to achieve a death-in-life, a stasis, a replacement of ourselves with a duplicate whose only function is to relay the past to the future; to conquer loss with a virtual repleteness, to extinguish the present by making ourselves comprehensively elsewhere.
After my father died, I found a cache of old family photographs in the apartment. There were hundreds of them, thousands even; I brought them back to Dublin and, whenever I had an hour free in the evening, began to archive them — feeding them into the scanner, transmuting them into digital form, though I could never decide whether this was to make it easier to look at them, or so I wouldn’t have to look at them again.
My father was a blacksmith — with a hammer, an anvil and a forge, just as you might find in a novel of Alexandre Dumas. When I look at his picture, I’m still surprised to see he was not a tall man, nor even especially brawny; close my eyes and he’s transformed instantly to the giant of my childhood, the black-browed ogre in his fiery cloud of sparks who thrilled and terrified me even when he was snoozing in his chair.
His father was a blacksmith, and his father before him. That was almost a century ago, when our town was a village and Paris still a murky chimera far beyond the horizon; by the time I was born, the forge lay quiet three days a week and my father had to supplement his income by teaching metalwork at the technical college nearby. He didn’t care; on the contrary, he took great pleasure in the idea of himself as a throwback, an obstacle, a misshapen stone jamming up the smooth machine of modernity. My father thrived on attrition. In his time he had been a Maoist, a Leninist and a Trotskyite, but this was only so much misdirection. What he believed in was dwarfed by what he didn’t believe in. Progress, improvement, the perfectibility of human nature — to him, these were the great myths of our time, used to dispossess the poor and the gullible just as religion had in the past.
Certainly in our town it was easy to disbelieve in progress. It was a ramshackle warren of building sites, warehouses, and shops in which everything seemed already old. The dominant landmark was a disintegrating magasin général, a huge concrete grain store overlooking the canal that had lain empty for decades and was now a magnet for taggers, who had transformed it into something iridescent and otherworldly. You could follow the canal all the way into the city, but we rarely did. Paris was the city of modernity, and the home of the greatest of my father’s many bêtes noires, Baron Haussmann. Before Haussmann came along, it sounded like people in Paris spent most of their time rioting; if they weren’t rioting, they were erecting barricades. ‘But how can you put a barricade across that?’ my father would lament, gesturing at the Boulevard de Sébastopol and its four lanes of traffic.