Image

Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination is part of the Trio series from University of Chicago Press, in which three scholars—in this volume, Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson—collaborate to address some important theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies.  Here, as Carlson notes in the introduction, the three extended essays “could be read as revisiting . . . Martin Heidegger’s contention that ‘the fundamental event of the modern age’ is ‘the conquest of the world as picture’” (1). The intersection of image and technology at the heart of Heidegger’s thinking about technik (technology) serves as the inspiration for these essays, though only Carlson’s concluding essay extensively uses Heideggerian thought and analysis to make his case.

The first essay, Taylor’s “Gathering Remains,” starts with a lengthy summary of Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K (Simon & Schuster, 2016), the story of billionaire Ross Lockhart. Lockhart is a primary investor and participant in a project in which people pay to undergo “cryonic suspension” until some future time when medicine and technology are able to revive them and give them eternal life. Referencing contemporary “high priests of technology” such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk, among others, Taylor sees Zero K as “a quasi-documentary account of the present disguised as a post-apocalyptic fiction set in the near future” (30) and wonders what philosophical thoughts and beliefs inform the dream of the New Age that Bezos and others are promoting.

To answer that question, Taylor recites an intellectual history that starts with the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant and “ends” with a vision of our technological future that Taylor calls “religious”: it is merely “the latest version of the ancient quest to flee decaying bodies and a confining world in order to gain immortality in a transcendent otherworldly realm not plagued by pain, suffering, and boredom” (64). Finding such a vision not only mistaken but dangerous (72), Taylor goes back to Kant, specifically to Kant’s notion of “imagination” in Critique of Judgment, which “operates at the edge, along the boundary of comprehension and apprehension” (89) and “fashions that which cannot be reduced to an antecedent logic articulating the order of things” (101). This points to an “aesthetic turn” (85-106) in which works of art (poiesis) and particularly images, which “cannot be translated into concepts or completely coded without remainder” (83), hold the promise of returning us to ourselves in both mind and body.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is less sanguine about images and imagination. In a cultural survey that ranges from the mid-20th century “space race” (and its 21^st century reignition by Donald Trump and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk) to pop culture (be that Disneyland or musicians such as Sun Ra, John Lennon, and David Bowie) to the humanist vision of Archibald MacLeish and the concerns of environmentalists, Rubenstein’s essay “Above Us, Only Sky” highlights the duplicity of images and the imagination. The images that animate her analysis are “Earthrise” (1968) and the image of the earth commonly known as “Blue Marble” (1972), both NASA photo; her account of the imagination emerges from, among other things, John Lennon’s “Imagine.” On the one hand, given the way in which these images and this understanding of imagination are deployed, Rubenstein finds that the dream of global unity that these images are meant to inspire is a mask for the age-old project . . . of ownership and control (126). On the other hand, she finds that this detached view of the world covers up the messiness of life lived on the ground, in the place that we live (132). This leaves Rubenstein to conclude her essay with the lament of the doomed hero from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (1969): “Planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do” (cited on 172).

Rounding out the collection is Thomas Carlson’s “Facial Recognition,” which, while standing on its own, attempts to pull together some of the from the previous essays. He begins with Emmanuel Levinas and his view that it is the face of the other—freed from any specific context—that is ethically significant and calls me to responsibility. Levinas therefore has a positive view of modern technology (exemplified by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space) insofar as it uproots us from any particular situation in which we are placed, allowing us to encounter the face of the other. In light of Rubenstein’s essay, Carlson wonders whether Levinas was not overly optimistic, and asks how things stand today in the interplay between technology and the face, wherein we hope to see each other and our distinctive humanity (191). What he notes is that today we “find the face captured and exploited, and endlessly replaced or exchanged, within . . . technological frames that threaten to efface its singularity and thus muffle its ethical call” (196). This observation, echoing Heidegger’s thinking on technology, opens the way for what follows: a largely Heideggerian analysis that draws on a wide range of Heideggerian texts and builds on Heidegger’s “thinking of the heart,” which was the ultimate focus of Carlson’s perceptive and enlightening With the World at Heart (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Such a thinking, which “would disclose, and attend to, the frailty of things in their uniqueness and the mortality of persons in their singularity” (198), is connected to our understanding of things, our being-with-others, and being-towards-death. What is perhaps most remarkable in Carlson’s analysis is how he brings this discussion back to a consideration of images and the imagination through a discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of the imagination in his 1929 book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (including his remarks on photographs of death masks). From that discussion Carlson finds that the presentation of any image entails a withdrawal or disappearance, given our finite, mortal temporality which Heidegger equates with the power of imagination (241). Thus, the themes of the two previous essays are brought together in the realization that “every image is, in the end, not just a kind of mask but a kind of death mask ...a self-showing that hides itself and a self-hiding that shows itself” (241).

Wide-ranging in its analyses and thought-provoking, Image is an important book for anyone interested in where our humanity lies amidst all our modern technology.

Robert S. Gall is professor of philosophy and religion at West Liberty University.

Robert Gall

Date Of Review:

November 30, 2022