Visuality and the Image

I've been thinking a lot these days about images and visual content. Projected images on a screen are now a common feature of church worship, as is PowerPoint; universities are turning depts of art history into visual studies; memory scrapbooking is big business; and then there's my own blogging.

Part of philosopher Derrida's early project was analyzing the visual dimension of language - it wasn't just an instrumental carrier of information - tending in the process to idealize Chinese script as non-phonetic, possessing the quality of an image: ie do you read, voice, or view kanji?


In contrast, part of Surrealist painter Miro's work focused upon the linguistic/poetic dimension of painting. 'I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.':

And part of Michael's learning sees letters and numbers like drawings; it's all pictures to him, at this point.


If we live in the age of the image, not the word - a staple of over 40 years of cultural criticism - how does this development impact Christianity, often considered a "religion of the book"?

A sympathetic read of multi-media shows in church argues that this is really a return (long-awaited) of art over and against a rationalistic faith too indebted to the Enlightenment and, thus, modernity; in some ways, buying into Feuerbach's and Marx's 19th c. arguments - marked by the invention of the camera and the grand old moviehouses- that religion (and ideology) was a projection.

I wasn't around before Immanuel Kant, but somehow the projected images and the visible copyright logo of "praise" anthems sung to electric guitars doesn't feel like much of a return to me. SMS and email do not strike me a return to the word either (although I have a friend who thinks about a "theology of fonts," it's definitely a return to the keypad).

My understanding of modernity is that it is not a removed phenomenon that can be gone over with a highlighter, but comprehensive (including the person doing the highlighting), so that EVERYTHING (social institutions, personal experience, human identity, as well as, critiques of modernity) - are all marked - differently, perhaps, but marked - like siblings exhibiting different traits of the same parents. So the cold rationalist, as well as the emotional romantic, gets it right; part way, at least.

So what is the current obsession with images "getting"? Not sure, but I'm persuaded that, as one critic suggests, "Images...are the new opium of the people." Religious illumination has been replaced by media.

I'm talking to myself here. I have never known life to be so meaningful except when watching a movie - the coherence, the exhilarating experience of totality, a world that can be known and mastered, a sense of closure.

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In times past, the natural world was called the "Book of God's Works," in contrast to the "Book of God's Word." What we now call "nature" signified and "spoke" meaning; possessing, in that broader sense, language:

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world." Psalm 19

So, "tree" - whether a word on a page or represented image or actual cedar - are all dialects of a common and profoundly metaphysical language. When the Gospel of John begins, "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God...", he wasn't talking about learning your a, b, c's. (Pope Benedict XVI's claim that "God is Logos - Meaning, Reason, Word.." is an interesting statement at this juncture).

The issue isn't between image versus text, but images and words (and trees) that "speak" versus ones that don't, which is, strictly speaking, the definition of an idol:

What profit is the idol when its maker has carved it,
Or an image, a teacher of falsehood?
For its maker trusts in his own handiwork
When he fashions speechless idols. Habakkuk 2: 18-19

The image power of contemporary media seems tied to rootlessness, lack of context; the ability to transport without sending, to intensify experience without the body. Certain religious illumination uses images as "speech"- they become part of the mind, consciousness, and (hopefully), the will. The logic of sacrament.