Page 113 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Image

David Morgan

Moral policing and the power of images
Pictures and children
Visual epistemologies
Public opinion and visual persuasion
Hyperreality: the continuing menace of images

The status of images in the history of many religions and in modern media
is an embattled one and generally for a single reason: images are thought to
be untrustworthy—they lie, cheat, and steal. Whether in Socrates or in the
many critiques of images mounted by Jewish, Muslim, or Christian writers,
by Hindu reformers or by Marxist revolutionaries, suspicions circle around a
tenacious distrust of images (Latour and Weibel 2002). Images lie inasmuch as
they selectively tell the truth, exaggerating aspects of it, commonly distorting
what they portray into whatever priests, tyrants, or vendors want pliant
viewers to believe. Images dupe the unsuspecting, lulling them into views or
opinions that are untrue, cheating viewers of access to truth or power. And
images steal belief from words, the revealed medium of divine self-revelation
in the so-called religions of the book. As Socrates might have put it, images
rob belief in the logical procedure of discourse—the progressive movement
of intellectual inquiry from opinion to truth, cheating reason of its rightful
place in ascertaining the truth of a matter.
Yet the distrust of images presumes something deeper about them.
Images work their magic by a subtle and often irresistible effect on the body:
provoking fear, envy, pride, desire, obsession, rage—all the strong feelings
and passions that grip the chest or rise in the blood, creep over the flesh, well
up as tears in the eyes. Images appeal to and rely on the body. It is precisely
this that philosophers, teachers, moralists, clergy, and parents have resented
about the power of images. Images are understood to traffic in the body’s
energies and to threaten to overturn the strictures of thought and conscience
that moral authorities work hard to nurture and inculcate.
However, images do not wage a psychomachia in and of themselves. In fact,
they are the visible part of an entire apparatus, which consists of biological