Page 115 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

98 David Morgan

control the beguiling appeal of the arts of representation, Socrates proposed
the stringent regulation of musical and poetic enjoyment. The ideal was to
match a noble soul to a beautiful body (Plato 1992: 79). Most music, poetry,
and virtually all visual art, he regretted, failed to strike that all-important
balance between psyche and soma, tipping the favor instead to the body’s
unruly passions.
The Socratic critique has enjoyed intermittent revival over two millennia
and, as we shall see, informed several influential twentieth-century critics of
mass culture. However, in recent years scholars and critics have recognized
the embodied nature of seeing, inquiring into the body’s role in making
sense of film and other visual media (Sobchack 2004). W.J.T. Mitchell has
even argued that the term visual media is deceptive because it occludes the
important way in which film, painting, or television rely on the full range
of sensoria (Mitchell 2005). Film maker David MacDougall has written that
“we see with our bodies, and any image we make carries the imprint of our
bodies” (MacDougall 2006: 3). A complementary way of thinking about this
is that images see us, projecting themselves over the screens of our bodies,
the fleshy, dense surfaces that actively respond when, to use Roland Barthes’
provocative idea, an image punctures or pricks us with what he called its
punctum (Barthes 1981: 27). Such instructive studies suggest that what
Socrates and many others may find dangerous about images is precisely the
way they insinuate the body and its felt ways of knowing, its sensuous forms
of cognition, into the linguistic and rational spaces of controlled discourse—
theology, catechism, preaching, evangelism, teaching, philosophizing, and
scholarship.
Understanding the importance of images in modern media culture (and
in any historical epoch) means examining the fear of images, the practices
of their use, and notions of their power. Doing so will allow us to discern
various ways in which images have been situated within accounts of human
cognition as well as the construction of human values. The task is to recover
the embodied nature of seeing in the history of thought and practice regarding
mediation. In what follows, I attempt a sketch of the themes and something
of the historiography that might belong to such a project.

Moral policing and the power of images

Western philosophical and theological reflection on images has been
preoccupied with their truth and falsehood, which are expressed in Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam in terms of the singularly negative category of the
idol. In practice, it is very important to point out, each of these religions has
often departed sharply from the rigid theological standards that many of its
authorities and intellectuals have upheld as strictly representative of all “true”