Page 127 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

110 David Morgan

Baudrillard does not accept the simulacrum on its own terms but describes
it to deploy it in a critique of the unscrupulous deceptions of capitalism.
“Capital” emerges as a raving beast, “a monstrous unprincipled undertaking,
nothing more” (Baudrillard 2001: 176). One wishes that his account of the
evolution or, better, devolution of the image were not so strongly driven
by an internal logic because it fails to do justice to the far richer and much
less tidy historical record of images and visual practices. Nevertheless,
Baudrillard’s critical intuition diagnoses a keen loss of the image as face in
consumerism. The body to which advertising images refer is not the viewer-
consumer’s body or anyone else’s but a digital concoction designed to trigger
a fantasy body that exists in a capitalist gaze of envious desire.
Though parents, politicians, and moralists will continue to lament the
visual allure of sex and violence, it is important to recognize the power of
film and television to return the body to the image, to make the screen an
interface, a countenance or thick surface in which the senses may command
a substantive role in the construction of the felt world. Implicit in the fear
of images are notions of their power, of their relation to the structure of
thought and feeling, and of the subtle but compelling linkage of human
bodies to one another and to social bodies of various kinds. One task for
the study of images in religion and media is to make visible the network of
submerged assumptions that do so much to make seeing what it is and, very
commonly, what it is not.

Notes

1 Boorstin 1992. The book originally appeared in 1961 under the title The Image,
or What Happened to the American Dream.
2 Boorstin parallels this judgment: “Pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in
geometric progression” (1992: 33).