SUPERFICIAL IMAGES

Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida have all argued that the dominance of vision in our culture has only served to separate ourselves from the world.  While I don’t agree with this premise, I do understand where they are coming from.

They see this separation in terms of technology and the meaningless replication of images.  Witness the continual bombardment of advertising images, social media images, photoshopped images that we endure every day.  Indeed, these vacuous images have triggered an alienation, separation and a loss of our humanity.

And the reason that there is this separation due to vision is that these images do not contain knowledge.  The images that we are bombarded do not contain societal knowledge.  There is no knowledge in them which we want to pass to the future.  So you can see why we are unplugging from our culture and humanity.  It all starts to look meaningless.

So let’s not throw the baby out with the bath.  The problem is not vision and the visual world.  The problem is knowledge, or lack thereof.  Images will engage and enrich us if they contain knowledge.  Knowledgeable images maintain our cultural bonds.  If an image is superficial, it does not add to our cultural knowledge.  Pretty pictures do not add to our knowledge.  Pretty pictures trigger alienation.

We need to continually demand that our images and drawings contain knowledge.  And we need to reject the ones that don’t.  In this way, we can maintain our humanity and our cultural ties with the world.