A deluge of images

...Words engage us in another way, one which calls on a different range of responses...

...So many of the arguments over such things as the Mapplethorpe exhibit and the limits, or lack of them, on the distribution of pornography deal with subject matter: is this photograph or that movie or book offensive or not...

...Although many languages have "high" and "low" dialects, and the vernacular was considered for a while inferior to Greek or Latin, language of some sort was always a common possession...

...What does "offensive" really mean...

...The image was, compared to our time, a relatively rare thing, and had a focus and deliberate significance: it was meant to elevate, to remind the viewer of something that mattered to all...

...Arguments on this set of subjects typically gather around the question of free speech: what are its limits, and should there be any legal limits at all...

...Happiness, regarded as a right, is what most of us hope for-not joy, which we do not understand-and we find happiness impossible to obtain...

...This is not to say that there are not different ways of showing...

...The image comes to us in a way at once direct and ambivalent...

...Images, on the other hand, were crafted by the minority capable of doing so, usually for religous reasons...

...My own feeling is that both the violence and the drug abuse that pervade our culture have a lot to do with this deluge...

...but the effect of words, and of depiction in images, differs...

...Words were produced by everyone and had more to do with dailiness...

...Before the broadside, before the possibility of the secularization of the image, there were stories, some of them frightening, some amusing, some obscene, some edifying...

...Words did have a sacred form, corresponding to the icon, in the Bible and in the prayers sung at churches and in synagogues...

...With the coming of the poster and the broadside and the newspaper, images could be used to mock or challenge as well as elevate, and images produced for amusement alone-the disposable image-became more common...

...With the invention of the printing press and, later, movable type, pictures and books became more available and the use of the image broadened and became, in a sense, more secularized: now it was not only the sacred, the agreed-upon important things, that images represented...

...Think of the time before the printing press and movable type...

...I don't think we are sufficiently aware of how radically different the past few centuries have been, with regard to images and the power they have in our lives, from all the rest of human history, and how different in tum the past few decades have been from those centuries...

...The phenomenon is too new, and we are all too entangled in it...

...A description in a novel of the acts shown in the most controversial Mapplethorpe photographs would affect us differently, and less immediately, than the images themselves...

...They may both lie, in their ways, but they affect us differently...

...My concern here is not really with law, but with culture...

...If I tell you that a man murders his lover's mother and tosses her head into his lover's lap, in my telling I will offer a distance and (either through a cold, factual description of the deed, or by employing a tone of outrage, or of terrible glee) an interpretation...

...There were jokes...

...they are produced to sell us products and politicians, and to move us at every level from the humorous to the erotic...

...there were no illustrated books-for that matter, in most homes there were no books at all...

...Still, a perception, however dim, of the power of the image and this relatively recent shift in what images have meant, combined with a fear of our inability to see where it will lead, may be the reason so many people worry about things like X-rated videos, the controversial Mapplethorpe photographs, the shallow-ness of political television advertising, and the banality of television programming...

...isturbing reality...

...For there seems to me to be a distinction which, whatever the law does about these things, we have often failed to take into account...

...they always had a common and secular, as well as sacred, use...

...My own prejudice is in favor of a libertarian approach-the alternatives seem more dangerous than tolerance...

...Should something terribly offensive be censored, or the subject of boycotts...

...We are ordinarily more helpless before images, more passive...

...so do the unreal expectations so many of us have for how life ought to be, and the desire to make things more simple and uncomplicated than they ever can be...

...Images in the lives of most people were encountered as part of the common culture-on the walls of churches or temples, or in some important public areas-and in some cultures (Islamic and Jewish) the representation of the human image was forbidden...

...The most ancient, sacred role of the image is now its least frequently encountered manifestation...

...I can't say what, if anything, the law can or should do about any of these things, and don't have much hope that law can deal very well with any of our most important problems...

...While the image has undergone a steady evolution, and its role has changed, the word has remained a more constant thing...

...The power of the image, a power as established in us as the ability to see, is commonly debased and cheapened and manipulated, and at the same time the power of the image to move and mold us is more powerful than at any other time in human history...

...If I show you the action itself, on film or in photographs, your reaction will be significantly different (though I assume you will disapprove of the deed in any case...

...In Christian homes there might or might not be a cross or an icon...

...An image has a halo of possible associations, combined with a direct presence...

...The reactions may often be inappropriate or hysterical, but the worry is grounded in a disturbing reality...

...But because language is one of the essential things about being human and is common to all of us, the word had a less circumscribed, more unfettered role than the image...

...language- except perhaps the immediate language of the curse, which is a kind of verbal blow- strikes us less directly...

...This is, no doubt, one of the reasons pornographic movies and photo magazines have aroused more controversy, at least in recent years, than pornographic novels...

...Images reflect every sort of fantasy and aspiration...

...While there is a major difference between the written word (it is more like an image) and the spoken word, language of either sort carries its own interpretation in a way the image does not...

...The past few decades have seen the development of photography, cinema, videocas-settes, and the presence of television in varying degrees of concentration everywhere throughout the world...

...Discussions of pornography frequently concentrate on subject matter (understandably), but they slight crucial differences between the visual image and the word...

...We don't yet know what effect the glut of images, the storm of impressions drenching us from our earliest days, will have over the long haul...

...Occasionally, especially in the case of architectural decoration, it was intended to amuse...

...The story says, "This is what it was like," where the photo says, "this is what it is...