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The Pseudo-Context of the Processed Image
With the rapid march of digitization, fiber-optics and satellite
distribution systems, all media are becoming electronic. Because
of its early history of identification with voice and picture
formats, the broadcast style of electronics, particularly
television, with its concern for telling images, will enlarge
its domination of all communication content, whatever the physical
means of distribution. A further reason for this style of mixed
multimedia is the greater accessibility of images for broader
audiences of different language groups and of uncertain literacy.
In this context, then, we can look at the
modern electronically transmitted (and, increasingly, electronically
created) image as the unit of media distribution with the greatest
currency and, I shall argue, authority.
This authority of the electronic image poses
ethical and moral problems of profound dimension because of its
divorce from the language base of all ethical traditions, which
flow from spoken oral traditions and written canons, from the
Pentateuch to the Analects. It is significant that
at a common stage of development, religious traditions are suspicious,
if not condemnatory, of images, graven or otherwise.
Let us take a look at the modern status of
the image.
Simon Schama, Mellon Professor of Social Science
at Harvard, generally uses no verbal notes for his university
lectures. He does, however, have thousands of carefully prepared
slides of images which serve as the organizing thread for his
oral commentary. Schama is the author of the widely praised Dead
Certainties, which recounts the political power of Benjamin
West's dramatic painting of General Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham
outside Quebec City, dying at the moment of defeating the French.
Schama shows how this theatrically composed picture replaced
the reality of the General's death, and thus the significance
of his life and of the battle he fought, in the minds of generation
after generation of schoolboys to suit the political mythology
of the British Empire. Schama's writing illustrates the long
history of image as propaganda just as his teaching method demonstrates
the current ascendancy of image in the context of postmodern
intellectual life.
The current electronic image is of course
not confined to versions of the political poster. Sir Arthur
Eddington, the distinguished scientist who championed relativity
and whose career spanned the intellectually fecund turn of the
century, claimed that no scientific theory was comprehensible
if you could not build a model of it. Subsequent arcane formulations
of relativity and quantum mechanics defeated Eddington's criterion;
no model could have been built of them. They could be apprehended
only with the unimaginable precision of mathematical formulae.
But now, sixty years after Eddington's death, dazzling new computer
graphics programs can construct multicolored and moving models
of the most abstruse formulae, surpassing the wildest dreams
of Descartes. For such programs, the imaginative envisioning
of multivariate statistical information is comparative child's
play.
In many cases, computer imaging provides pilots,
surgeons, architects, machine toolmakers, heavy construction
supervisors, steel mill operators, high tech color printing operators
and an increasing number of technicians and professionals with
the only means for them to "see what they are doing."
Of course, the image most often is associated
with entertainment and propaganda, but my belief is that the
increasing use of images as the key to understanding complex
concepts, combined with the knowledge that many of the most powerful
and intelligent workers in our society use images to control
the real world of bricks and steel, is giving the representation
and the reproduction an authority that eclipses, in wild paradox,
firsthand, unmediated, eyewitness experience. People who may
be sceptical about television news often accept without question
what the display screen of their computer information service
tells them. And once something is printed or broadcast, it joins
"the great news database in the sky" [=satellite networked
computers]. By a strange process, the further one gets from the
reality, the more processed the information gets, the more authority
it assumes, a development satirically anticipated in E.M. Forster's
long-forgotten "The Machine Stops, " from The Celestial
Omnibus.
The virtue of the computer-processed image
is that it strips away the inessential to enable the surgeon
or engineer to concentrate on his single-minded purpose. The
vice of the media-processed image in covering politics, art,
education - most of the world in which we live and act - is that
it strips away the moral-historical context to leave the citizen-viewer
with Brute Event as Truth.
The heart-rending images of war-ravaged Kurds
may have mobilized international aid but could picture neither
the causes nor the culprits of the pain and so could not serve
as correctives. The true context of history, wrapped in value-laden
local languages, is replaced by the pseudo-context of media images,
drafted to meet the immediate needs of the powers that control,
or merely the convenience of technicians that operate, the electronic
media system.
This pseudo-context, in other words, is either
deliberately concocted by image-mongers and wordsmiths in the
employ of an interested party, like a government or powerful
corporation, or it is insouciantly dictated by cinematic cliche
taken from fiction. Both procedures sculpted Operation Desert
Storm, which was presented as (1) a desert campaign of World
War II, Hollywood-style, complete with tanks in the sunset, and
tearful homecoming, parades; and (2) the Nintendo War, a game
without victims or purpose. But there were no pictures of the
Mutlaa massacre: too reminiscent of Hiroshima or Dresden, too
historical.
So the moral and ethical challenge is to somehow
reintroduce values into the technological, and thus political,
contextualizing of processed images, to restore the dissected
and desiccated token to the water of life, to the moral universe,
the real world which permits us to be truly human.
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