Images we consume
I recommend that readers who have not yet done so read The advent of the sausage, the death of intuition before the present article, since this one is something of a sequel to it. Nothing strictly necessary, however.
Text revised, trimmed and updated on 10/14/2009.
It is hard to conceive, in these days when we are constantly assaulted by images, of a time when an image was a kind of uncommon, or even rare, article. We know that time existed — without mass printing methods, photography, television, etc. The technical mastery, or know-how, of image creation, in those bygone times, was in the hands and minds of artists. Therefore, to see an image there were few options, which at bottom were only one: to go where the images were. That is, to visit churches, prehistoric caves, museums, or the house of some fortunate collector or noble who could pay a painter for a portrait, for example.
An almost general characteristic is that the images in question were signs directly related to their dynamic objects, which in practice means: the nobleman’s portrait pointed to the nobleman in person, the landscape painting to a specific place, the church fresco to the biblical passage in question. If we also take into account the fact that, before the invention of the printing press, literacy and the use of the written code were the privilege of very few, we can get a more precise sense of the importance of the image in those times. By demanding of its observers a positioning — both physical and intellectual — the image (or imagetic code, per Flusser) concentrated within itself a great wealth of meaning, to be explored from several and diverse points of view. The imagetic code was, therefore, of a subjective nature and depended on a point of view, from which it could be interpreted. The number of possible interpretations is directly related to the number of points of view available to be chosen.
Of a rather different nature is the written code, or conceptual code. Compared with an image, a text is, in principle, poorer in meaning. First, because a text requires a prior structure, the alphabet, which is subject to a language — an important limiting factor. Then there is its objective, linear nature: it has a beginning and an end, goes from one point to another; one follows the linear reasoning to its end to then arrive at the synthesis, the conclusion. Although it can supply us precisely with a meaning or a message, the text is limited precisely by the concept to be transmitted, and does not contemplate other possible interpretations that escaped its “conceptual net”. It is in this sense that the image concentrates greater potential of meaning than the text: it can be explored from several and diverse points of view, and unfolded in multiple ways, being free of the alphabet, of language, and of the linear thread of the written code. This comparison is possible because it does not involve two codes of alien natures; texts arose from the need to explain images. Every text, however abstract, points back to an image. This fact was observed and noted several times by Flusser, as in the following passage:
“Western culture as a whole can be considered a progressive attempt to explain imagination (to explain images). And for this purpose linear writing was created, a code that allows denoting the imagetic codes and thus clarifying the point of view of imagination, making the images transparent again to the world of objects. This fact can be visibly ascertained in the first Mesopotamian tablets. There, the intention behind the gestures of linear writing becomes manifest. Isolated imagetic elements (pixels) are thus taken off the canvas to be ordered into a sequence of pictograms. The purpose there is to decode the two-dimensional images into one-dimensional lines, to submit them to a critique that enumerates, that counts.”
There is, then, what we shall call surface thinking (image): subjective, non-linear, and with great signifying potential, depending on the observers’ point of view. And there is also line thinking, characterized mainly by objectivity and linearity, characteristics that ensure the most effective transmission of a given message or meaning, which also means a limitation in the number of possible meanings and interpretations.
It is undeniable that surface thinking, in the 21st century, has become man’s main means of reading the world. However, it would be rather naive to suppose that the images we consume on our televisions and computers (the main tools nowadays), magazines, posters, photographs and other surfaces are of the same nature as the images produced by man up to the century before last.
Let us return to an example given earlier — the functioning of images as signs. We mentioned that images were more directly related to the objects they represented. And this is easy to observe, if we stay attentive to certain particularities of the images of our communication media. For example, when we see in a magazine some photos of a well-known sexagenarian actress, sporting a firm body of glowing skin, which we would expect to see on a woman in her thirties or younger: what does this image want to tell us? That the actress in question really possesses such a body? We will not be innocent to that point, especially considering the wide use of image-processing techniques and programs. If the photograph of this actress does not point to the woman in question, where is this photographic sign pointing? To an idea, a concept, or a network of concepts. In this particular case, the image of the actress replaces her — the only relationship we can have with this woman is with her image, and nothing more, which makes the concern with transmitting a perfect, desirable image understandable. For it is with the image, and with the concept to which this image points, that we relate.
These images are not like the paintings we cited at the beginning of the text: they cannot be unfolded infinitely by the public. On the contrary: these images reach us with a specific and well-delimited purpose. Reason no longer represents the way we analyze and decompose images, but rather the way these images are built. It is a kind of prostitution of the imagination, which is being used in a complex, scientific, extremely rational manner for ends that currently contribute to the perpetuation of a market based on stupidity and ignorance: advertising and mass culture. The image, instead of mediating the man/world relationship, replaced the world and imprisoned man within its images. That is why advertising can be so successful: it does not sell objects, but ideas associated with them. Yet this fascination with images is not exactly new; advertising exploits a rather old human tendency, known for millennia. Flusser makes a note in this direction, considering the emergence of the written code:
“It was against this idolatry of images, as a therapy against this double alienation, that writing was invented. The first writers in our tradition, such as the prophets, knew this when they set themselves against the idols and their creation. And so did Plato when he announced his hatred for what we today call the ‘plastic arts’. Writing, historical consciousness, rational thought were invented to save the human species from ‘ideologies’, from hallucinatory imagination.”
Thus, the great novelty of the return to images does not reside in the fact that they move or glow. One characteristic of the new images is that they originate in a pre-planned message that becomes image. Taking also into account a basic principle of Communication Theory — the higher the level of information, the smaller the audience to be reached — we can imagine what level of information is transmitted in the images of mass media. Furthermore, another important characteristic of the images we consume today is that physical displacement has been practically nullified: it is no longer necessary to move in order to access images. Going to a place to see images denotes action, a choice — when we go to an art exhibition, for example. There is contemplation, reflection, the eventual dialogue with someone accompanying us: room to look from different points of view, and to unfold the image into multiple meanings.
But the fact is that we also consume, and heavily, the images that move inside those boxes in our homes. The moving image is the best resource for annihilating any possibility of critical reflection. The rapid succession of diverse images is addictive and manipulative, for it allows an idea to be diluted across a great amount of time. That is how a telenovela can turn a below-mediocre script into a cinematic production lasting months. The structure, which is practically the same for all telenovelas, remains hidden, while the parts are rapidly revealed and superimposed. Thus is created the illusion of different structures, which is a good reason for many people to keep watching telenovelas even knowing they are “all the same thing”. The televisual image is a one-way street — there is no possibility of responding directly to the content received. We are capable of spending hours before it, pressing buttons — the illusion of a relative power of choice. But the behavior toward television often extends to all images — the images through which we read the world and are programmed. We lose contact with facts, and replace them with images. But this passive reaction to the new conceptual images was predictable, and indeed predicted, by Flusser. As was its positive counterpart:
“We have two alternatives. The first possibility is that imagetic thinking does not succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking. This will lead to a generalized depoliticization, to a deactivation and alienation of the human species, to the victory of consumer society and to the totalitarianism of mass media. It will look very much like current mass culture, even more so, in fact, and elite culture will disappear forever. And that is the end of history in any meaningful sense the term may have. The second possibility is that imagetic thinking succeeds in incorporating the conceptual. This will lead to new types of communication, in which man will consciously assume the formalistic position.”
This new type of behavior is, however timidly, emerging. Recombinant culture, which has found a most powerful ally, the Internet, and some cases of street art are two good examples of actions that regurgitate the bombardment of images in their own way, returning them to the circuit with their meanings recycled. It is true that the cultural industry and governments are on the move to turn the Internet into the new television, and street art is being co-opted by museums and galleries so it too can be consumed as art. But, apparently, a new kind of imagetic consciousness is emerging, and it will hardly be smothered by measures aimed solely at maintaining obsolete markets. Or so we hope. In any case, it is in this endeavor that “visual artists” may be useful: creating images that give back to the public the possibility and the pleasure of contemplating, admiring, reflecting and criticizing. Art educators, instead of repeating to their students all the prolix verbiage of art history books, could gradually point to the images that are part of these students’ daily lives and analyze, together, the nature of these images. Certainly, the pleasure found both in contemplation and in the exercise of critical reasoning will diminish the general disposition to passively swallow the sausage-images we daily consume.