In the domain of the image

In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

– Don DeLillo, (2016) Mao II, p.27, Pan Macmillan.

Some three years ago we envisioned a project concerning the shift from text to image. We were both involved and invested in the new venture of The Video Journal of Education or VJEP [https://visualpedagogies.com/video-journal-of-education-and-pedagogy-2-2/] that had a strong brief for video education, not simply education through videos, but rather a reflection of a watershed change of industrial media from print and text to the moving image. It seemed clear that there was already a major disruption to school culture as new generations of learners grew up with the ubiquitous presence of new social media based on dynamic global media featuring the image rather the word. This shift in the media landscape we thought was a major transition to a different culture from images received via movies, television and photography, heralding a change in the way younger audiences received and searched for information. We also noticed a shift the ways learners communicated with others – often in spaces outside of formal education – picturing themselves, and their experiences, sharing photos and favourite images gleaned from other contexts as sources of positioning and orienting the lives of themselves and others.

There has been a huge literature now produced referring to these changes which, while they can be seen in part as a result of the introduction of new social web technologies, also indicate fundamental philosophical and cultural changes that have impacted consumer and popular culture as well as education. New computer and camera technologies such as Photoshop, imovie (and so on) have given everyone the means to generate, edit and transmit images across dynamic and connected virtual spaces. The image now dominates public and political discourse, and also how we control our own self-images and present them to the world. From Guy Debord’s (1967) Society of the Spectacle and Marshall McLuhan’s (1967) The Medium is the Massege to Baudrillard’s (1981) Simulacra and Simulation, and then to a wide range of critical media studies in the age of the internet (eg., Fuchs, 2011) theorists have sought to gain a purchase on the interrelationships between reality and society through the role and function of symbols. Today increasingly we have witnessed the ways in which digital platforms have become ‘central to the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content’ (Poell, 2020). In essence platformization is a software that allows communicate and sharing of data across systems and is seen as the key to digital transformation. It is a recent development that is linked to ‘platform capitalism’ and to the creation of global social media platforms such as Facebook.

Our original ‘think-piece’ – intended as the precursor to this issue – entitled ‘Ten theses on the shift from (static) text to (moving) image’ was published in the Open Review of Educational Research in 2018 (Peters et al., 2018) as a part of a collective writing project. In it we presented ten theses for a philosophy of the moving image as a starting place for promulgating a philosophical discussion which we reproduce here as part of the introduction to the essays that follow (Peters et al., 2018, pp. 59–62):

1. The concept of text and textuality are deeply embedded in the practices of education and the humanities since the invention of writing as ‘mark-making’. Models of textual analysis abound and structure our disciplinary practices. Linguistics, lingusitic philosophy, semiotics, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis constitute the main forms of textual analysis and critical reading in the humanities. By contrast, ways of critically examining the image have lagged behind these textual methodologies.

   Outside of art history and films studies there are few accepted methodologies for analysing the image or for recognizing its role and importance in visual culture. Since we are now not only contemplating the static image in relation to text, it is to the notion of the moving image that we now seek inspiration also.

2. The text is still the ruling cultural and academic paradigm. Textual analogues define consciousness, the mind, the unconscious, society, and culture. Science is comprised of discourses and we are presented with text-based understandings of reality that call upon the subject to navigate between text and life. To this day knowledge is predominantly text-based and exchanged, stored and retrieved in texts of this nature. The text dominates our ways of thinking and interpreting the world in philosophical thought. Education is primarily rule by the text – at least in traditional realms of inquiry.

3. The shift from text to image defines our visual culture. This migration from the text to the image is enhanced through new digital technologies. One marketing expert notes that ‘Between Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, consumers share nearly 5000 images every second of every day. Add in Pinterest’s estimated 40 million users and even SnapChat’s meteoric rise, and it’s clear, a shift is afoot – a desire to share what matters most in pictures rather than words’.[1] This increasing density of images constitute the new visual web and builds on earlier discussions of visual media by the likes of Innes (1951), McLuhan (1964) and Baudrillard (1994).

4. Rorty (1979) discusses the ancient conceit that the mind has an eye with which it inspects the mirror to argue that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation is optional and arbitrary. That it is static and therefore retrievable by all has marked the dominance of rationalism and received truth over many decades. Philosophy has for too long been dominated by Greek ocular metaphors that makes a separation between contemplation and action – the seen in the absence of the seeer (Bakhtin, 1990). While Bakhtin seeks to exploit the surplus of seeing offered by ‘other’; Rorty wants to replaces this vocabulary with a pragmatist conception that eliminates this contrast, arguing a historical epoch dominated by Greek ocular metaphors may, we suggest, yield to one in which the philosophical vocabulary incorporating these metaphors seems as quaint as the animistic vocabulary of pre-classical.

5. In Downcast Eyes Jay (1993) demonstrates the ubiquity of visual metaphors that permeate Western languages often in occluded and dormant forms and imbue our cultural and social practices. He comments that exosomatic technologies (the telescope and microscope) have extended the scope and range of vision to encourage an ocular-centric science. And he cites the philosopher Mark Wartofsky who provides a radical cultural reading of vision arguing all perception is a result of changes in representation. Jay’s argument is that contemporary French thought is ‘imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era’ (p. 14).

6. The pervasiveness of metaphors of light and sight in classical Greek works can be readily seen in Homer (Tarrant, 1960) and Plato who uses the sun as a metaphor for ‘illumination’ and indicates that the eye is peculiar among sense organs in that it needs light to operate. The classical Greeks have been called ‘people of the eye’ because they favoured the visual sense that extended to their most fundamental concepts such as the distinction between knowing (being seen) and contemplation. It is thus to notions of the ‘self’ and its (now) collective orientation in an era of the moving image, that we turn. As Burri (2012) reminds us, we need a new logic to explain ‘the self’ in contemplation of ‘the social’; and a new materiality of images that grants them such presence in the social milieu.

7. Heidegger was influential in providing an account of the metaphysics underlying Greek philosophy in terms of vision and visibility. As Backman (2015) explains Heidegger’s account of Western metaphysics ‘is rooted in a metaphysics of presence’ (p. 16). Being means presence and ‘seeing’ is a means of grasping what is there to paraphrase Heidegger. Backman explains: ‘Seeing is the paradigmatic metaphysical sense because it affords a particular kind of access to being as present’ (p. 16). In an era of social media such access is unfathomable.

8. Rorty (1979, p. 263) describes the history of philosophy as a progressive series of problematics, or ‘turns’, beginning with medieval philosophy and its concern for things, enlightenment philosophy and the concern for ideas, and last, contemporary philosophy – the so-called linguistic turn – and its concern for words. We might hypothesize the next shift from words to moving images while at the same time as signalling the incapacity of modern philosophy and education to cope with this shift and an unprecedented emphasis on the emerging new power relationships between seeing and being seen that exceed Debord’s (1967) earlier emphasis on the spectacle and moves us to the orienting role of image in an era of social innovation.

9. The semiotic landscape infused with moving images is the basis for visual culture and the younger generation seem both more attracted to and more adept at engaging with visual media that replaces word and print as the central information medium. Popular culture is on the rise in this domain, as are trends towards performance, satire and ‘post-truth’ that blur conventions of reality in the service of modern technologies that provide forum for the exploitation of manipulation and the unleashing of unmasked creativity. From an educational standpoint, however, learners need to learn how to ‘read’ and ‘engage’ with the un-real, and to become critical participants in this new socially networked society with so much potential, and so much risk. As Peters (2010) asks ‘can the dominance of the image over text really deliver on the promise of a critical approach to pedagogy?’ (p. 46).

10. The ‘pictorial turn’ is already upon us: ‘A picture holds us captive’ (Wittgenstein, 1953) Investigating the later Wittgenstein on visual argumentation Patterson (2010) writes ‘although visual images may occur as elements of argumentation, broadly conceived, it is a mistake to think that there are purely visual arguments or, for that matter, that existing arguments are adequate for this new era of thought, in the sense of illative moves from premises to conclusions that are conveyed by images alone, without the support or framing of words.’ In this statement is the seed for an educational philosophy of the moving image.

The papers in the special issue that follows pick up on these theses – both in terms of philosophical thought and its methodological potential for some of the most burning educational issues of our era concerning representation and perspective. Taken together they posit the necessity of increased vigilance concerning the power of the image, challenging the taken-for-granted nature of the gaze brought about by the uncontested absence of critical thought; setting forth a series of inter-visual, destabilising and expanded frames of reference and scrutiny. In so doing they seek to reconfigure pedagogical responses to the image through engagement with a series of disruptions, spatial sensing, ‘blinks’ and impasses that variously call for a conceptual pause or critical distance between the image and it’s meaning(s). Their collective quest is to optimistically set forth a series of challenges or potential remedies that seek to reveal the image as a scapegoat for non-critical engagement concerning received knowledge. In so doing they open up possibilities for conceptual entanglements that invite rich critique or semiotic layering – often beyond what is literally see-able to the human eye, thus collapsing frames that create unhelpful silos between seeing, feeling, sensing, intuiting and thought in pedagogical engagement with the image.

The first of these, by A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpau, takes the reader through an optimistic expository concerning appropriation and iconicity in contemplation of the image. Commencing with Ranicere’s concept of ‘imageness’ the author examines a series of images from indigenous culture that invite alternative forms of sensorial and affective engagement. A series of cultural narratives are presented as Engles-Schwarzpau builds a case for images as cinematic icons that can either activate or impoverish self-determination depending on the ways they are appropriated. When contemplated as a relational encounter ‘under the right conditions’ she argues that these images the promise and possibilities of lives to come.

Under a different set of conditions, Peter Pericles Trifonas calls out the inter-visual gestalten of visual encounter. He advances a semiotic methodology to identify and explain schematic relationships between interconnected hierarchical perceptual variables (colour, shade, shape, texture) and sensing, empathic encounters. Together, he suggests, they orient the directional tensions of the image which is unconsciously received as a whole. Only when these viewings are attached to more intentional visual indexes that allow the viewer to juxtapose elements of the visual text and assimilate these to other texts beyond their culture, is a more intensional and extensional response possible.

Joff Bradley also critiques the loss of critical distance through the notion of epokhe as a suspension of judgement that contemplates the scale of the image and its relationship within the wider cosmos. With the philosophical aid of Virilio, Bradley expands on Deleuzian treatment of technophilia to advance the idea that the presentation of manufactured images offers a one-dimensional ontology (what Bradley calls a philosophy autism) that, in the absence of scalar awareness, may lead to collective hypnosis and ocular aphantasia (an inability to draw one’s own mental images). Bradley contends that this problem calls for urgent attention in consideration of the Anthropocene, and calls for a reflective slowing down in encounters with the images and their reconfigurations in order to make space for ethical, critical and divergent epokhe – as a pedagogy of the image.

Creating space for alternative viewing is also evident in Carl Mika’s paper which draws our attention to what he invokes as ‘the giddying abjection of Porangi’ that draws us to an essential destabilisation of certainty. Mika articulates such abjection as a form of madness which acts to catapult the thinker into creative spaces and processes where all things are interrelated and co-constituted. What is revealed as a consequence, suggests Mika, creates image encounters that may be fleeting, revocable, moderated, perhaps even self-mocking – calling for perceptive self-conscious engagement. Such encounter holds particular sway when considered against the colonised nature of Maori thought in Western education today, and Mika provides us with the example of ako as a case in point.

In a further antidote to the colonising gaze, Asilia Franklin-Phills and Laura Smithers perform a critical mapping of film which they describe as a pedagogy of cinema. Summoning the notion of ‘impasse’ the authors put ‘affect’ to work in responding to a conceptualisation cruel optimism that denies black queer Americans access to the ‘good life’. Impasse takes film content as a terrain of possibility by delaying the negative effects of received compilations in order to reclaim their affects. Circling back on possible and potentially enacted futures, Franklin-Phills and Smithers show how decentring dominant narratives in thoughtfully selected films holds promise for an explicit interface with antiblack pedagogies as queer praxis.

Also privileging a primordial, alternative viewing, Jayne White & Mikhail Gradovski engage in a historical and intercultural examination of Suprematism, after Kazmir Malevich. As a source of philosophical inspiration Suprematism seeks to exceed the production of the image as representation or copy through an encounter with non-objectivity. The authors cast a pedagogical gaze over this legacy, inviting further scepticism concerning the absolute by collapsing signification and form in favour of cosmic movement and flight. Promoting sensations of engagement, the authors further liberate the image from its see-er – emphasising co-creative engagement with the materials and techniques of the image rather than any received representation or truth. It is in this conceptual break that new realities for engagement are borne.

Each of these papers, in various ways, signal a continued and growing dissatisfaction with the use of the received image in education as a means of reception or promotion of certain ideology. They keep good company with many of the many articles now produced in VJEP where images are granted their fuller expression in Open Access visual scholarship. Together they forge a difficult but sorely needed methodological path towards pedagogical criticality through more intentional, ethical engagement with the image as a co-constituted event. For the most part, they do so with great optimism concerning the power of the image, alongside its many risks in the wrong hands. While we are not proposing a return to the hegemony of text in this conception, we are pressing towards a much more critical stance that exceeds the unyolked image and brings the viewer to account for what they are able to see, what they do not see and the visual excess that is proffered through these and other methodological viewings. The obligation is no longer for the producer of the image alone although their intentions must also be scrutinised in promoting deeper levels of insight. The papers in this issue invite further dynamic couplings – across space, time, culture, and ontology. The methodological insights that arise on this basis and emphasised by the authors in this issue provide some important philosophical advances that offer potential to deepen these encounters and, in so doing, setting forth new kinds of pedagogies of and for seeing as a source of political and social justice, critical inquiry, accountability and ethical engagement. Given their ubiquitous presence in the lives of learners today, we think this is a timely contribution indeed.