Page 123 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

IMAGE

dancers grotesquely capering on the wall of a cave in the light of the
campfire. Such ‘shadow-in-the-cave’ images of a reality that is
located elsewhere and beyond experience are all that humans can
hope for, thought Plato. Thence, a conviction took hold of Western
thinking that ‘images’ were opposed to reality, coterminous with
illusion.
The natural pessimism of intellectuals was force-fed with a strong
diet of self-loathing during the Christian era, when ‘image’ tended to
be associated with the ‘graven’ or ‘corporeal’ – that is, with the
trumpery and seductions of the flesh, attended by the temptations that
contemplative monastic writers had to conquer. Thinking about
‘images’ became focused on the visual, the fleshly and the seductive,
and on expressions of loathing for all that (and for women, who
unwittingly but literally embodied it). Images drove the poor monks
mad by luring then away from contemplation of the divine. Hence, and
curiously, Western tradition has insisted that the most corporeal and
self-evident things are ‘illusory’, while transcendent, metaphysical,
irrecoverable phantasms are regarded as real.
Contemporary media and communication studies, to say nothing of
politics, have inherited some of this confusion, regarding ‘image’ as
unreal, illusory, seductive, feminised. Anything that devotes time to
producing and maintaining its image in a professional way is
automatically suspect – the very language is inherited from misogynist
loathing of flesh – an image is ‘tarted up’, etc.
Less fatally, ‘image’ is nowfirmly locked into the visual register:
people worry about looks, not sounds, for instance, and rarely get
hot under the collar about the ‘portrayal’ of this or that group in
music. The concept of image has become a staple of art history and
cinema studies. This is a worry for film and television studies, for
the fixation with images as largely visual phenomena neglects the
complex interplay between sight, sound and sequence that screen
media exploit. As a result, otherwise astute analyses appear to have
been undertaken by people who are not clinically but culturally
deaf.
Despite the pejorative attitude of the philosophical and metaphy-
sical tradition, an image industry is nowwell established, from PR and
marketing specialists, spin doctors and pollsters, to fashion advisers
and stylists. No-one lasts long in public life, whether they are
politicians, entertainers, athletes or even philosophers and bishops,
without paying attention to their ‘image’.

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