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operations interlaced with epistemological templates and the practices of
social institutions. Images do not merely symbolize these unseen dimensions
of personal and collective identity. They are the material interface with
them—surfaces that turn seeing into feeling and vice versa. Images do this
on the model of the most important surface in human experience: the face.
Rather than a symbol linked arbitrarily to a referent, the human face is better
characterized as the thick surface of the invisible interior, the countenance
that bares the hidden heart of things. As such, images are over-determined,
regarded as the face of a social or cultural body. “Heads of state” are more
than arbitrary signifiers. They are the living faces of the states or nations they
lead. We want to believe faces because we assume that they are organically
connected to heart and will. Human beings—like many mammals—look
at eyes, mouths, and other facial features and at the gesture of the head
for vital information. In doing so, they are often able to discern intent and
disposition in potential allies or foes. Faces are not texts to read but sites of
revelation, the place to witness truth as it happens, or even before it does.
Faces are the place where abstraction and feeling become visible. As such,
they are the physiological origin of images. Faces are the thick surface that
makes images sentient disclosures. It is probably a biological inclination for
human beings to look at images as if they were faces and bodies with tactile
interest for our own faces and bodies, as if they were beings looking back at
us (Elkins 1996; Guthrie 1993).
Vision is a carnal way of knowing, and that is just what bothers the
detractors of imagery. Feeling, memory, and abstraction are thoroughly
intertwined. Emotions enhance memory formation and learning. Human
imaging studies have shown that vision is routed through two discrete
neurological systems—one that relies on the visual neocortex, which enables
awareness; the other through a more ancient midbrain system that is not
connected to awareness, though it is linked to the amygdala, which governs
emotional response, especially fear, which obviously finds its way quickly to
consciousness, though often as an indeterminate sensation in search of an
object. This visual system does not include reason or conscious reflection but
informs involuntary reaction to perceived threats (Thompson and Madigan
2005: 175). The two systems may interact when I watch a horror film—one
system instinctively directs my fear while the other resists the urge to flee.
I tell myself “It’s only a movie,” but the more primal response urges me to
think otherwise: the image I see is the real thing. I compromise by perspiring,
biting my nails, and hunkering down in my seat.
Western thought about representation has generally traced its origins
to Socrates since Plato’s Republic develops a distinctive account or, better,
interrogation of representation. There we find what has remained an enduring
suspicion: images indulge the passions and therefore threaten reason. To