Published April 16, 2023
Part 2: Thinking About Images
The following is Part 2 of a series reflecting on my post from May 2013, The Spectacle of the Real.
If you have not read The Spectacle of the Real, I encourage you to do so before reading this series in sequence.
The Power of Images is the Introduction and Part 1 of The Spectacle of the Real: 10 Years Later.
Am I the Center of Existence?
Images can be a powerful source of orientation to the situations and contexts that we live in. The problem is that they do not represent reality with 100% accuracy. For some people, it is such a problem that they freely believe that there is no such thing as reality. There are a host of both philosophical and psychological reasons why they see it this way. Most of them begin with the notion that the individual is the center of reality or that reality is rather a social and mental construction that I create to make sense of the world. This is the fruit and the trap of Cartesian understanding of being with its principle, Cogito ergo Sum, “I think, therefore I am.”
My experience is the opposite. “I live, therefore, I think.” As a result, all knowledge references that which exists apart from me yet is connected to me. Let me explain it this way.
”Existence precedes experience.
Reality transcends existence. As a result,
self-awareness follows an existential awareness and leads to personal situational awareness.”
In other words, true knowledge is not an intellectual construct but rather an embodied experience of the world.
The reason that I took us down this little excursion in philosophizing is that we need to understand our relation to the world in order to understand our encounter with images. Edward R. Tufte, in his book, Envisioning Information, writes,
“Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. All communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must now take place on a two-dimensional surface. Escaping his flatland is the essential task of envisioning information - for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands.”
An Authentic Picture?
The cover picture of The Spectacle of the Real is of a group of Afghan freedom fighters - mujahedin- in their riverside camp in Chitral, NWFP, Pakistan. I took this picture in late June 1981 as a member of a team of refugee workers traveling the mountain region of Pakistan seeking refugees from the Soviet/Afghan war.
A couple of days before this picture was taken, we were in a mountain valley south of Chitral, that was a route that these men would take in and out of Afghanistan. We were about a half mile up the trail when we heard the sound of a helicopter, and then almost simultaneously, we saw a Soviet gunship fly over our heads.
You could not gather any of that background experience from the above picture. These guys look tough. They could be just a bunch of street toughs in any urban environment or a bunch of Central Asian guys hanging out after playing soccer. These young men were militant warriors defending their land against an invading force. Our group, a mix of American, British, and Pakistani civilians, was welcomed into their camp because we were not the invading force.
The reality of the context matters. It makes the story told by the person who took the picture an authentic one. If, however, reality does not matter, then the image could be used for propaganda purposes. This is why the provenance of images and their connection to reality is so vital for understanding who we are in the complexity of the world we live in. If we don’t know the source of the image or the person using the image, then we can be trapped by the possibility that this picture is a simulated event being used to create an alternative awareness of reality.
This is the essential postmodern existential problem. Reality has been emptied of authenticity. Objectivity is subjective. Nothing can be known for certain. Ultimately, everything is permitted because truth is not a transcendent representation of reality but a personal perception. “I perceive, therefore, I am.”
In our postmodern moment, the grounds for knowing oneself are no longer external to the self but wholly internally self-referential. The further this atomizing of human personality takes place, the more difficult it is to know what is right, good, and beautiful in the world. Even worse, all difference and the people who are represented as the Other are, by default, considered a threat to my sense of identity.
Human community, then, no longer has a basis in reality. Instead, human interaction is a form of transactional exchange. We trade likes so that our appearance validates our sense of identity. Instead of being a living, breathing human being in a relationship of respect, trust, and mutuality with other human beings, we become a brand image to commodify and monetize.
Ultimately, this leads to the emptying of meaning and the realization that we are alone, adrift in a sea of context-less images that we feel as longing and ennui without resolution.
This is a pretty bleak scenario. How should a person respond? It begins with recognizing who we are as persons. If this feeling of meaningless were an accurate state of human life, we would never know it to be this way. The fact that we know something is wrong is the signal that reality is not “nothing,” but rather the context in which we live our lives.
The Journey of Direct Experience
Reality can be discovered through direct experience. You take a trip to a place that is new and interesting. You see something that causes you to be curious. You want to know more. You look for YouTube videos. You buy a book. You plan a return trip because something changed within you. Your existence was touched by an encounter with the real world.
Images are not the truth but a representation of an awareness that we have from our direct engagement with someone or place.
Over the past decade, I have traveled considerably all over the world. One of the reasons was to visit historic places that were the subject of curiosity or had a family connection.
I went to the memorial to the lost and missing of the Battle of the Somme during The Great War at Theipval in Eastern France.
The memorial honors the 72,395 soldiers who died during the battle of the Somme and whose bodies were never recovered.
I went to Nuremberg, where Hitler created a spectacle for all the world to see.
I went to the Dachau work camp outside Munich.
Even visiting places where the horror of war is real, it is not a direct experience.
With my oldest son, Troop, I attended the 150 anniversary of the Battle at Gettysburg of the American Civil War. My great, great-grandfather was wounded on the first day of battle. I and my family are here because his regiment was at the front of Pickett’s charge on the third day. We spent the three days with descendants from both sides of the war.
What did I learn from these experiences? You have to recreate the event as a spectacle in your mind. You never truly know what it was like to be in those places at the moment history was being made. The only difference is when there is a direct relational connection to the event.
At Gettysburg, there is family. At Nuremberg and Dauchau, no connection. At Theipval, my first time there, I met some British military retirees from the Chelsea Pensioners Home in London.
They come a couple of times a year to honor the men from their units that were lost and never found. On this day, they brought a brass band that played British military songs off in the distance. It added drama to the stories they told me. Of all The Great War sites in France, it is my favorite because these military veterans connected me to the men who served a generation before them and to whom they honored that day. The reality of the loss of the men in the battle of Somme took a step closer to reality.
When the image is combined with a direct connection to the event, reality slips into view. No longer is the event an abstraction. It has a concrete reality that beckons us to treat it with respect.
The problem that we all face is that most of the images that we receive have no direct connection.