The Critique of the Image... Is the Defense of the Imagination

From The Book:

It's proven more and more true every day that images matter, that it's images that are making the political changes that we see happening around us possible. Focusing on what those images are, and how they work, and how they can be changed to work otherwise, is not a side issue anymore, it s a necessity. And trying to separate real politics from mere aesthetics is a mistake. It matters what we imagine to be possible. Change can only happen if we imagine things differently. –David Levi Strauss

To pass into an image or have an image pass into you has to be one of the most fascinating possibilities in a human life. For Nietzsche, this is what the Dionysian moment (as in Twilight of the Idols) is all about, and for Walter Benjamin otherwise a very different thinker to Nietzsche this is what occurs with watching movies, as well as with the child gazing into the colored illustrations in children s books. –Michael Taussig

I prefer to call it the age of show, during which the eye becomes dependent on interface rather than imagination. I want to call attention to the beginning and end of a scopic epoch characterized by the wedding of the gaze to the image. Their bonding began to be loosened two hundred years ago. New optical techniques were used to remove the picture of reality from the space within which the fingers can handle, the nose can smell and the tongue can taste it, and show it in a new objective isometric space into which no sentient being can enter. We are threatened by the emergence of an epoch which takes the show for image. –Ivan Illich
It's proven more and more true every day that images matter, that it's images that are making the political changes that we see happening around us possible. Focusing on what those images are, and how they work, and how they can be changed to work otherwise, is not a side issue anymore, it s a necessity. And trying to separate real politics from mere aesthetics is a mistake. It matters what we imagine to be possible. Change can only happen if we imagine things differently. David Levi Strauss --Back cover blurb

To pass into an image or have an image pass into you has to be one of the most fascinating possibilities in a human life. For Nietzsche, this is what the Dionysian moment (as in Twilight of the Idols) is all about, and for Walter Benjamin otherwise a very different thinker to Nietzsche this is what occurs with watching movies, as well as with the child gazing into the colored illustrations in children s books. Michael Taussig --Back cover blurb

I prefer to call it the age of show, during which the eye becomes dependent on interface rather than imagination . I want to call attention to the beginning and end of a scopic epoch characterized by the wedding of the gaze to the image. Their bonding began to be loosened two hundred years ago. New optical techniques were used to remove the picture of reality from the space within which the fingers can handle, the nose can smell and the tongue can taste it, and show it in a new objective isometric space into which no sentient being can enter. We are threatened by the emergence of an epoch which takes the show for image. Ivan Illich --Backcover blurb