ABSTRACT
The visible is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.
(Jameson 1990:1)
Western society has become increasingly reliant on images to disseminate its dreams of material well-being, a dependence summed up in the term ‘ocularcentric’ (Mirzeoff 1999; Rose 2001). In ocularcentric societies the dominant tests of truth, the everyday metaphors by which understanding is commonly acquiesced or questioned, reference the eye – I see (what you mean); what is your view? (Jay 1993) – an orientation that privileges images in popular discourse but not in education. Thus, despite their omnipresence, or perhaps because of it, there is a real fear of images within educational institutions, of a ‘medieval return’, a descent into illusion and hyperreality, the ‘adman’s’ dream of the perpetual circulation and consumption of imaginary desires (Baudrillard 1989). This iconophobia is grounded in ancient and persistent beliefs about the nature of the image, or rather, the fear that the image can come to replace the thing to which it refers, a surrogate reality, an untruth. In contrast, words are valorised differently and more positively. For example in the gospel of St John the word is unassailably elevated: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (1:1) a revelation in which the word reaches its apogee; neither a substitute for reality nor a confirmation, the word is reality; Logos in perpetuam. This pre-material, absolute status is one that the poor mimetic image must never be allowed to attain; for, so the iconophobe claims, if the ‘untruths’ of appearance come to dominate consciousness the ‘higher realities’ of metaphysics or critical theory will be as nought. Given this fear, western ocularcentrism is something of a paradox, one that has historically produced an ambivalence towards the image.
