Age of the image

It seems unbelievable today that Socrates, considered to be the founding father of modern philosophy, was once a strong opponent of the written word. Writing is merely an image of the living, breathing discourse of human beings and was not to be trusted with important matters such as memory and learning, he believed.

Obviously, the irony is not lost on anyone. Without the written word, Socratic thought and dialogue would have been interred with his bones, instead of being immortalised in theory, ideology and poster art. However, that is missing the wood for the trees. Socrates may have been worried about a new technology, as writing was at the time, but more than that, he feared that the written word would rob conversations of their natural dialogic ability.

Was he wrong? Ask anyone who has studied the transition of oral to written cultures and they would all agree that this is not an unfounded or irrational fear. Such was the power and sway of writing over the human mind in the early years that the printed word became god.

Ancient cultures that were predominantly oral treated the speech as divine. In India, Vach and Saraswati are divinities in charge of speech and wisdom. Among the Greeks, Peitho is the goddess of persuasive and seductive speech. The power of speech was a divine gift in these cultures, a belief that wound itself into stories, myths, proverbs and aphorisms. Even today, a pundit is referred to as a man who has Saraswati on his tongue.

And, is the written word now ceding ground to the image? A photograph is no longer equal to a thousand words. The comparison is void of meaning as the image is the message.

Nothing illustrates this better in the Indian context than the spectacle of elections. In the ongoing Bengal elections, for instance, the mobile phone is the new rally ground where the posters of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as Durga and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a flowing beard reminiscent of Rabindranath Tagore campaign tirelessly, covering millions of minds, daily.

While hate speeches and rash promises continue to pepper the election thali, words have become mere garnish in this spectacular display of image politics. When the Election Commission banned Ms Banerjee from campaigning for a day, she didn’t waste much time issuing press releases or petitions; instead, Ms Banerjee crafted the perfect image. She sat on dharna — under the statue of Mahatma Gandhi with a black scarf functioning as a mask and a canvas on her lap. On a wheelchair, her foot in a cast, paintbrushes by her side, she painted silently while the photograph made its way across the length and breadth of the state. Without flouting the ban imposed upon her, she had managed to do just what she had been asked not to.

Hers is not the only example. The image has been the central force driving nearly every public event, street revolution and political campaign, across the world.

Consider, for instance, the Capitol Hill attack by Donald Trump supporters. They were not satisfied with just storming the bastion of “evil”; they had envisioned an image and they came dressed for it. A man with a painted face and horned headgear, another with a batman’s outfit and many others with capes and tails got prominent display in mainstream media. The image is as important — if not more —  than the action.

There is no stopping the age of the image, just as there was no stopping the age of writing, which bulldozed its way through, despite being opposed by one of the finest and most formidable intellectuals of all times. Socrates invoked not just a fear of the unknown but also ancient divine wisdom to make his case.

In the Phaedrus by Plato, Socrates tells his disciples a story about the Egyptian god Theuth who, legend has it, discovered numbers, geometry, astronomy and much else. But his biggest contribution was the discovery of writing. One day, the god Theuth visited Thamus, the king of Egypt and advised him to disseminate the art of writing to his people. It would make Egyptians wiser and improve their memory, the god told his king. But Thamus was not impressed, because he said, writing increases forgetfulness rather than memory. Instead of internalising and understanding things, students will rely on writing as a potion for reminding and will simply sip at the cauldron of ideas without thinking about them. Was he unwise to oppose the god? Maybe and maybe not. But he could do little to keep the written word away from his people.

The spectacle of the image is here to stay. If we are to learn from the past, as a recent book (Photography and Belief by David Levi Strauss) points out, it is time to embrace the image. More images can lead us closer to the truth, just as a diversity of voices and words facilitates better understanding of ideas and people.