The theology of the image in television and emblem theories

Introduction

Despite the ongoing fascination today with visual formats generally, and particularly with any form of tele-vised image, whether disseminated through older platforms such as the common TV set or through current digital screens, there can be no doubt that all formats of mass imagery still raise concerns when assessing their impact on the formation of our intellect. Images are still less trusted to effect critical thinking and general enlightenment than text-based technologies, and this seems to be particularly true when educating the masses. Universities themselves could be cited as evidence of this prejudice when they expect scholarship on visual studies to be conducted and published as texts, not visual formats. Usually a doctoral thesis on Australian film or television is currently not to be submitted as film – it still has to be text.

The ongoing fear and fascination with mass image technologies, that slowly grew from the invention of photography between 1826 and 1834 and which began to engulf the debates about film at the beginning of the 20th century, found its discursive peak in the way critical intellectuals have addressed television since the 1950s. However, many of the critical tropes utilised in modern debates about mass imagery seem to revive similar tropes found in early modern times addressing mass imagery. There seems to be a theological prejudice at the core of these argumentative strategies, which has been driving the debate then as much as in the 20th century. And I doubt that 21st-century technologies have not been subjected to the same ‘theological prejudice’ I am going to address here.

However, this is neither the time nor place to extend my analysis of critical tropes into the digital realm. I also do not want to compare television as an institution, with all its minute distinctions and descriptions, to the emblem book as a similar institution in early modernity. I have chosen to exemplify the tropes by focusing only on television theories from seminal intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century to look into the sustained theological prejudices established in early emblem theories, that have either positively or negatively shaped our understanding of the link between the image, technology, and the general society.

It was the invention of print in the 15th century that had generated an enormously accelerated reproduction, proliferation, and dissemination of texts that eroded over time the theological monopoly on knowledge, which was restricted to the medium of text with the image as an illustrative servant to God’s word. Ironically it was the invention of print that also freed the image from being policed by words. For the first time since their usage on coins in the Roman Empire, more detailed images could be circulated among the people, first as broadsheets, which played a vital part in the development of the Protestant movement, then in emblem books along with their elaborate theorisation. Emblem books were produced for the purpose of ethical and moral instruction. The single emblem in those collections consisted of three formal elements. The first of these, the inscription, inscriptio, or motto is created as an aide memoire. The second element is a picture, or pictura. Originally woodcuts at first and later also using copperplates, they illustrate the moral message. Lastly a subheading, subscriptio, a poem beneath the image explaining and interpreting the details depicted.

The genre of emblem books became a bestseller in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly as its primary purpose was to aid the memory in moral education. During this time the emblem book was undoubtedly an essential mass medium, one that brought together word and image in new powerful ways. But looking back at emblem books from the 18th century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann had nothing but contempt for this mass medium:

There was once a time in the world, when a vast mob of scholars were so enraged as to eradicate all good taste. They saw in nature nothing more than a childlike simplicity and collectively attempted to make nature wittier. The young and the old began to paint devices and emblems, not only for artists, but also for philosophers and theologians; and one could hardly order a greeting without an emblem being added. One tried to make those works appear more learned through a subscriptio to clarify what they meant and what they didn’t mean. (Winckelmann, 1968: 128, my translation)

I quote Winckelmann’s remarks here because the type of argument he advances bears all the hallmarks of the 20th-century’s negative attitudes towards the medium of television. ¹ Lorenz Engell recently reminded us of a particular lack of theoretical interest in television from intellectuals precisely because it has been seen as a ‘predominantly commercially and mass culturally coined, hence an essentially trivial form’ (Engell, 2012: 14). Like Winckelmann, theoretical arguments about television have often stressed its mass appeal, childlike simplicity, and dangerous triviality and noted that its sophisticated technical standard is not matched by the same sophistication in producing ‘meaning’. The ‘image’ has been singled out as responsible for all things trivial and television found itself reduced to the status of an ‘image-machine’. However, television or its theory today is not yet on the brink of extinction.

For now I simply claim that there is an evident assumption of a holy or unholy connection between imagery and mass media, repeatedly affirmed in the Renaissance iconoclastic discourse and in modern commentary on television. And at its core there seems to be an ongoing ‘theology of the image’, ² a distrust of images because they supposedly gain uncontrolled access to the masses. At the same time the image is regarded positively only as a specialist affair, from art photography and art films to cat-scans, pie charts, or fractal geometry. In this realm the image also retains a certain holiness. Before we get to a closer inspection of the discourses in question I should elaborate on what I mean by a ‘theology of the image’. Since Pope Gregory I (540–604) forged the topos of the image as a ‘book for the illiterate’ (scriptura laicorum), scholastic discourse has reiterated the function of the image as an appropriate medium for reaching the uneducated masses and as better suited for the art of memory than abstract words and possessing a stronger appellative character (Schnitzler, 1996: 20).

Criticism during the iconoclastic debates of the 8th century in Byzantium and the 12th and 16th centuries predominantly in northern Europe mostly focused on the intellectual inferiority of the image due to its ‘natural’ closeness to the body as a dangerous source of temptation or manipulation in comparison to the ‘word’ as spirit and proper medium for attaining a true Christian faith. ³ The fundamental difference between image as body and text as soul is a noticeably skewed version of the Pauline distinction between the letter as dead body and the spirit as life; in its simplicity this opposition appeals to the old hermeneutic distinction between surface and depth in interpretation. Applied to the image, we find in a plethora of arguments, which insist that there is nothing hidden in a picture, that everything is visible in its spatial truth while the true meaning of words can only be found hidden under the surface of their ‘material’ appearance. The image thus has always carried with it theological, political or ethical overtones, and from the perspective of media theory, the emblem book or television hardly stood a chance of being regarded as a techné of different forms, because their technical aspect has always been regulated by a superimposed ‘theological’ argument: and that argument carries a persistent ‘theology of the image’, which seems either to distrust or have ‘no faith’ in images because they manipulate the masses, or claims the image as a specialist medium for clerical or lay scholars.

Although this article is partly inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the holiness of the image, I will not be pursuing the idea of the image as a universal form beyond its particular material shapes, which Nancy has argued. Applying Derrida’s philological distinction of the stroke (‘le trait’) as unbridgeable gap between discourse and imagery and as first material marker of both (written letter and painted stroke, cf. Derrida, 1992: 23), Nancy has underpinned the self-reference of imagery with theological metaphors when describing the image as ‘passion’ not ‘form’ (Nancy, 2005: 11), ‘violence’ (p. 11), ‘evidence of the unseen’ (p. 26), its truth as ‘self-revelation’ (p. 40), while at the same time insisting that the image is not ‘religious’, that is, the image is connected to the sky (firmamentum) and the earth, not to ‘heaven’ and earth (pp. 16–17). The image is holy because it separates ‘itself’ from us, whereas religion consists of rituals attempting to connect us. Nancy’s subtle theological deconstruction of the image as not ‘speaking’, as non-discursive yet ‘self-evident’ (p. 26), means that the image can no longer simply be seen as an ‘illustration’ of a discursive truth. But posited as a universal concept beyond its specific form, the various material shapes of the image also become less relevant. And in this respect Nancy’s arguments reiterate a certain theology of the image, albeit in the form of a subtle theological deconstruction of the way in which we write about images. In contrast, this article is particularly interested in how the specific and material aspects of the image have been repeatedly instrumentalised in the theoretical discourses about emblem books and about television as mass medium.

Iconoclasts: Karlstadt (1522) and Postman (1985)

To understand the quite complex and prolific discourses about mass imagery in the Renaissance and in modernity, I start with two of the most vitriolic and successful but also intellectually most ‘transparent’ treatises: Neil Postman’s iconoclastic essay Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Andreas Karlstadt von Bodenstein’s infamous iconoclastic treatise Von Abtuhung der Bilder und das keyn Bedtler vnther den Christen seyn sollen [On the Removal of Images, 1522].

Postman’s essay sets out to rescue American public discourse, which relies on the written word, from its greatest opponent and danger, television. And it is the ‘nature’ of television, which supposedly represents a threat, precisely because Postman reduces it to a picture-machine:

For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. (Postman 1985: 7)

Karlstadt’s treatise (1522) is also quite radical about what can be expected from the image. And like Postman his arguments have a strong apodictic and normative flavour. Karlstadt starts by demanding all images and idols be removed from religious services because they deceive us (Karlstadt, 1911 [1522]: 3). Karlstadt is adamant that all evil is a result of imagery. What Leonardo da Vinci, referring to the new technique of the perspective, emphatically calls a ‘divine science’, Karlstadt calls a ‘science of the devil’ (p. 14). Referring to the first commandment, he demands that there should be absolutely no images in God’s house and that the pure medium of the ‘word’, as the sole medium for proper judgement, be reinstated (p. 4).

What is so evil about displaying imagery on the altar? Contemporary readers would have fully comprehended the allusion to the altar as the place where religious relics are kept (thus functioning as the main repository), and the altar’s holiness is further emphasised as the place of the celebration of the sacrament of the Last Supper. Reading the altar in light of Jesus’ life of suffering must have been Karlstadt’s intention, because he criticises the image’s inability to explain the suffering of Christ. Karlstadt criticises here the Gregorian topos of the image as a book for the illiterate by attributing ‘the same honour to the image God gave the word and speak of the image as the laymen’s book’. To accept the image as a book for the illiterate would be to give into the devil (p. 8). The only thing an image might teach us is a superficial look at what Jesus’ ‘physical sufferings’ were (p. 9), but every image of Jesus on the cross fails to explain the ‘why’. The image is no more than ‘wood, stone, silver or gold’ (p. 11). That is, in a nutshell, what separates the image from the word. It is dead material, a body without spirit. Karlstadt’s altar, it appears, is Postman’s television screen: ‘It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails’ (Postman, 1985: 95). Faith is still being broadcast from the most holy of places: the television screen as altar. This is how Postman’s writing monitors the image: We should not mistake the image as a ‘window to the world’ (p. 108). ⁴ True suffering cannot be understood through televised imagery; we are entertained but we stay ignorant, our senses are tickled but our mind sleepwalks dangerously.

Despite convincing research pointing out that the arguments of iconoclast and iconodules are not as clear-cut and opposed to each other as has been often assumed (cf. Schnitzler, 1996: 31–2), there are still lines of demarcation that can be drawn with confidence. For example, Hieronymus Emser and Martin Luther strongly rejected Karlstadt’s iconoclasm. Emser rather elegantly points out in a semiotic theory avant la lettre that images no less than words are signs that signify, and thus words like images can only signify Christ’s suffering and that only the interpreting mind will be able to fully comprehend what this suffering means. ⁵ Luther also directly refutes Karlstadt’s iconoclasm, describing it as a false interpretation of the Bible. Images, according to Luther, are only ‘evil’ if they form the basis of the worship of other gods, but images that already exist to ‘serve’ us in remembering God are as neutral as other media in holding God’s image and memory in our ‘hearts’ (Luther, 1890 [1524]: 151). ⁶

Television theories and theories of the emblem book

It didn’t take long for television to be put on notice by leading intellectuals. Similar to the not always clear-cut schism between iconoclasts and iconodules in the Renaissance is the ambivalent role of the image in the theoretical discourse on television. Two of the most iconic intellectuals of the 20th century illustrate these differences in nuce: Theodor W. Adorno and Marshall McLuhan. Both had a strong common heritage in questioning the philology of philosophy and vice versa, both were second-generation figures of their respective schools, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Toronto School of Media Theory, and both seem to take the same point of departure with their negative vision of modern industrial society. McLuhan, for example notes in his ‘Mechanical Bride’ that

a huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines. Listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything other than supine consumers of processed goods. (McLuhan, 1967 [1951]: 21)

Adorno’s criticism of television as image-machine remains within the parameters of his all-encompassing critical theory. But while television is regarded as just another victim of the industrial complex, he also describes it as its perpetrator. Television supposedly closes the only remaining gap in the ‘visual realm that the culture industry does not yet control’ (Adorno, 2009a: 52, my translation). In turn it is the television image that accounts for all trivialities and immediate dangers. In contrast, language is still entrusted to guide us to critical awareness. Critical discourse according to Adorno remains our last hope of seeing through the mechanisms of consumer society. And the televised image is particularly dangerous because it directly enters our private sphere, and its immediate status of intrusion not only destroys any possibility of building up a critical distance towards the capitalist system (p. 54) but also furthers dangerously the ‘dehabitualisation’ from language (p. 58). While Adorno ascribes similar dangers to the film image, one fundamental difference he emphatically identifies is that, in comparison to film, the image formats in television are characterised by their breathlessness (Adorno, 2009b: 67). Much as Friedrich Schiller at the end of the 18th century had condemned the novel as the illegitimate sibling of the proper literary genre of the epos, Adorno’s argument reinforces within the realm of technical images the distinction between legitimate images, which adhere to the theoretical framework of aesthetic autonomy, and illegitimate images, which follow heteronomous interests. And just as the image in general is deemed inferior to the word, so the brevity of televised visuality is regarded as inferior to the ‘lasting’ artistic imagery of films.

McLuhan also analyses the different technical forms of imagery. He analyses film and photography as ‘single images’, which allow them to be assessed within the traditional framework of aesthetic theory, preserving the new status of the image in television by differentiating it from film and photography. The image in television fires ‘light impulses’ at the spectator; its image is tactile and is the result of ‘light through’ not of ‘light on’. It resembles a ‘plastic’ much more than a filmed image. As a result, the spectator ‘unconsciously’ creates the televised image in the form of a ‘mosaic’ (McLuhan, 1964: 313). ‘With TV, the viewer is the screen’ (p. 313). In McLuhan’s rhetoric, television is then counted among the ‘cool media’, which through its paucity of data naturally involve the spectator to a higher degree than hot media, such as print (p. 319). The analogy between the mosaic and the image in television allows McLuhan to further ascribe the qualities of the mosaic to the televised image: both are ‘discontinuous, skew, and non-lineal’; they address the tactile sense, for which everything is ‘sudden, counter, original, spare, strange’ (p. 334). In this fashion, the televised image gathers ‘alternative’ aesthetic qualities and acquires intellectual value contrary to Adorno’s verdict. Adorno’s argument generally bears the structural hallmarks of the ‘protesting dissent’ of the iconoclast discourse, while McLuhan’s description cherishes the sensory qualities of the image for a higher purpose, the ‘harmony’ of all creatures, which was the initial reason given for writing Understanding Media.

Both types of argument – the blindness of the televised image in critical theory and the ‘magically’ enlightened image in media theory – have found their revenants. In a similar fashion to Adorno, Anders (2009 [1956]) and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1988) have put forward the view of the image as an inferior but forceful medium that undermines our society, much as Neil Postman has argued. Umberto Eco has likewise questioned whether the image in television has done more than simply open up a window onto itself: ‘Finally we could argue that the spectator is thrown back onto himself, as he is confronted by a form of television which talks about nothing else than itself, denies the law of transparency, and thus the contact with the outside world’ (Eco, 1985: 11–12, my translation). Pierre Bourdieu, moreover, implicitly condemns the image as the main vehicle of television that intellectually undermines critical thinking and criticises the ‘heteronomous’ intellectuals who have given up their responsibility to enlighten society, leaving the journalistic field of mass media vulnerable to interests other than their ‘own’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 25, 90).

On the other side of the divide, McLuhan forms the point of departure for a more moderate to positive evaluation of the televised image. Critical television studies by John Fiske or John Caldwell have attributed less importance to the image as a technical form and aligned the function of the image with that of the ‘word’. If the image is seen as problematic, for example, since it is only ‘reinventing the stylistic wheel’ (Caldwell, 1995: 6), it is at the same time described in the neutral terms of a ‘structural inversion’ of ‘narrative and discourse, form and content, subject and style’ (p. 6). In this context Richard Dienst has undertaken one of the most positive intellectual and theoretical evaluations of television. Adapting Gilles Deleuze’s approach to film, Dienst attempts to guide his own epistemological approach to the televised image by linking ‘theoretical images […] with images produced through the machine itself’ (Dienst, 1994: 10).

But on either side of the discursive factions, it seems quite clear that the technical image in each case creates the point of departure for intellectual enquiry. While Adorno and others try to save discourse with iconoclastic arguments, McLuhan and others seek to embrace the technical image by suggesting that its qualities are not dissimilar to those of discourse. Borrowing a term from Bruno Latour, we could call the latter an argument of iconoclash, which Latour understands as a moment of hesitation, caused by the fact that we do not know whether a particular form of the image is destructive or constructive in nature (cf. Latour, 2002).

Vilém Flusser has tried to bring both sides together in his concept of the techno-image. Photography, film and television, he suggests, build the new codes of our world. They overcome traditional concepts such as time and space to demand new categories through which we understand, evaluate and experience this new world of techno-images. These techno-images program our new world. Were we to cling to our old methods of philosophical analysis, we would certainly be led towards catastrophe, caused by a state of ‘mass alienation’ and ‘mass insanity’ (cf. Flusser, 2003: 49). The interface between apparatus and operator, who has taken over the role of the medieval monk, has become too complex for us to disentangle, Flusser asserts (p. 152). But while the mass images of television are dangerous and can drive us into the abyss, specialist techno-images such as x-rays or CAT scans might offer us a glimmer of hope, since they are ‘readable’, even if only by specialists (pp. 148–50). The problem here is that these specialists are not yet capable of applying their expertise when it comes to the understanding of mass images. These continue to be ‘magical’ and ‘opaque’ (‘magisch’ and ‘undurchsichtig’), not because of their technology but because of our set ways of perception, which still mixes up the traditional with the new codes. Indeed, the specialist no less than the ordinary viewer takes the film for a novel or a piece of theatre (p. 177).

Flusser’s ‘theology of the image’ thus reiterates both sides of the discourse: one, that we still do not have the means beyond specialist training to address the contemporary danger of mass belief in the veracity of the televised image; and two, that even specialists are insufficiently trained to overcome the dangers of mass manipulation and mass insanity.

If we look at the arguments of how the image is described as either an essentially negative or positive part of television, they appear to share some striking similarities with emblem theories of the Renaissance. First, the assessment of the image in relation to knowledge or in regard to its pedagogical (critical) function for society is fundamentally defined either by its inferiority, similarity or superiority to language and discourse. Second, the image is always discussed within a paradigm of traditional imagery and its respective hierarchy. Just as television discourse contrasts the televised image with the ‘art’ of photography and film, so too contemporaneous emblem theories set the emblem either against other technical forms of the image, such as the hieroglyph (des peintres mysterieuses), the enigma (des peintres obscures), the chiffre (les lettres du nom d’une personne), the coat of arms (des peintres de la valeur), the ‘devises’ (des peintres ingenieuses) and the ‘impress’ (des medailles) (Menestrier, 1662: 5–12); or the hierarchy refers to canonical forms of imagery in general (referred to as ‘figuratis imaginibus’) such as the symbol, the enigma, or the hieroglyph. In this method of classification we often find that the emblem is etymologically defined as ‘intarsia’, that is, like a ‘mosaic’ (Holtzwart, 1968 [1581]: 7).

Strikingly, scholarly discourse about the image in emblems knows of no technical predecessors of the new ‘medium’. Instead all emblem theories resort to the etymology of the emblem as ‘intarsia’ when attempting to find a predecessor. The lack of historical authority might have forced the discourse on emblems to simplify the image for the purpose of discursive control. Generally, the image in the ‘new’ medium of the emblem is viewed as being simpler as it is ‘clearer’ in reference to reason than other, older images (cf. Sandaeus, 1626: 170). This assessment coincides with the overall moral orientation ascribed to the genre of emblem books. And within this educational paradigm we now find similar positions compared to the discourse on 20th-century televised images.

Early emblem theory, for example Taurellus’ Emblemata-Physico-Ethica, discusses the image as purely serving the educational and philosophical purpose of the genre; the image is described as epistemologically inferior, like the poetic word compared to philosophical discourse (cf. Taurellus, 1602: 9). Later, for example in Harsdörffer’s extended theoretical commentary on emblems dispersed throughout his oeuvre, we find many passages giving text and image the same weight in fulfilling the emblem’s purpose of providing moral orientation to society. And finally, in the late Jesuit emblem theories of Baudoin and Menestrier, we see greater emphasis given to the intellectual value of the image. Baudoin still discusses the image as an essential and ‘telling’ part of the emblem, albeit more in technical terms, comparing it in particular to the role of the image in the impress or the devise (cf. Baudoin, 1977 [1638–9]: preface). But it is Menestrier, who first advances an image theory as media theory avant la lettre. Not only does he regard the image as essential and superior in comparison to the textual parts of the emblem, ⁸ but, like Richard Dienst, he also tries to organise the whole spectrum of knowledge to be captured in a theory of imagery: no longer is the ‘tele-vised’ image used to explain the medium of the emblem, the emblem is to explain how our theoretical understanding depends on images themselves: ‘All arts and all sciences are the workings of images’ (Menestrier in Allut, 1856 [1684]: 67, my translation).

Conclusion

A holy or unholy trinity of mass culture, image and technology seems to have captured a certain form of discourse, which ascribes either purity or impurity to the image as its centrepiece. It doesn’t seem to make much difference whether the ‘object’ is an emblem book or television. If we were to break off one element, the aspect of mass culture or the notion of technology, for example, the discourse about the image seems to shed its theological qualms.

The reason cannot lie with the image itself. Beyond the classical reduction of the image to serving to ‘illustrate’ abstract thought as text, we are well aware of a critical tradition of images within images, so-called meta-images, which present a critical commentary within pictures about pictures since the 16th century (cf. Stoichita). For that reason alone, we may suspect that one tenacious cause for a persisting theology of the image is located within discourse itself. The self-ascribed intellectual qualities of the written word in comparison to the image (concrete versus abstract, simultaneous versus linear, entertaining versus academic, image versus text) form an obvious self-image of discourse as superior to the qualities of the image itself. However, such reservations in relation to the image from the written perspective betray the cause of the ‘word’ as much as they try to protect it from ‘other’ media. Ever since Friedrich Nietzsche and subsequently Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man or Jacques Derrida reignited the inevitable and uncontrollable figurative side of language, written discourse is constantly reminded of its ‘figurative’ qualities, which stand in the way of a purely logical epistemology as much as they invalidate the attempts to keep the ‘illogic’ of the image under discursive control. The word (logos) by persisting in a theology of the image thus only partly protects itself from itself. It might be time to take away from imagery the aspect of a supposedly unfettered fascination in the uneducated in order to be educated not only about images through text but also about texts through the image. Max Weber in his famous comment on modernity as a continuing ‘disenchantment of the world’ was ‘naturally’ referring to texts and numbers as the primordial mediums to establish ‘the truth’ as we know it; today we should also ask whether discourse should not trust the image as a genuine form of knowledge, so that images can play their own part in the ‘disenchantment’ of the world.