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is necessarily always also about the absence of the real thing.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence. John Berger

is not immoral, irreligious, but, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes . . . Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it. Roland Barthes

is not just an inert object but an animated being that exerts a certain force in this world. This force cannot be reduced to interpretation but must be taken up as a relationship that binds the image to the spectator, object to subject, a relationship that is transformative of the social context in which it unfolds.

W.J.T. Mitchell argues that we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects but as animated beings that exert a certain force in this world. Mitchell emphasizes that this force cannot be reduced to interpretation but taken up as a relationship that binds the image to the spectator, object to subject, a relationship that is transformative of the social context in which it unfolds. The 'complex field of visual reciprocity,' he writes, 'is not merely the by-product of a social reality but actively constitutive of it. Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the sign, or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language' (842-843).' (mahmood)

is our readiest instruments for abstracting concepts from the tumbling stream of actual impressions.

images are . . . our readiest instruments for abstracting concepts from the tumbling stream of actual impressions. They make our primitive abstractions for us, they are our spontaneous embodiments of general ideas (145). They also are 'just as capable of articulation, i.e., of complex combination, as words' (p93).

 transfixes and anesthetizes in a way that images of suffering, once seen in great quantity, starts one down the road of seeing more and more.

To suffer is one thing... another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.' Susan Sontag, On Photography

The necessary condition for an image is sight, Roland Barthes

is the form that history takes. History, to say it in reverse, history breaks down into images not stories.

For Benjamin, Marxism is a matter of images. Benjamin writes that Marx correctly secularized the representation of the messianic age in the image of the classless society. The classless society is an image, an analogy for the messianic age. Such an image, argues Benjamin, benefits the revoltuionary politics of the proletariat, in a sense reminiscent of Sorel's positive evaluation of the image of the general strike, worked over by Benjamin in 'Zur Kritik der Gewalt' (1921). 'History breaks down into images not stories,' he notes.

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