Why is it that most people are quite shocked at the representation of the world when they first see the Peters Map? Well, firstly it is simply because the Peters Map differs dramatically from the traditional Mercator Map we are mostly used to. But more than that, it is due to the fact that a map conveys a great deal of information in a manner that is visually comprehended immediately. Spatial representations and the relative size and position of various continents are understood on an instinctive level. This understanding is unique to images in general. “The significance – the meaning – of images rests on their surfaces. It may be seized at a glance.”(1) An initial instinctive unease the Peters Map creates is only deepened when one reviews the small accompanying illustrations of the inaccuracies of the Mercator Map. Those inaccuracies overwhelmingly demonstrate the bias of a northern, western, industrialized world view. Africa really is 14 times the size of Greenland, but they’re nearly the same size on the Mercator Map. Most people’s shock turns to disbelief that such an inaccurate and biased map is still the standard throughout the western world. “Few thinking people today would subscribe to a world-view of this kind … peering at Europe and North America through a magnifying glass and then surveying the rest of the world through the wrong end of a telescope.”(2) The Peters Map truly forces us to both literally and philosophically re-evaluate our relationship to the rest of the world – and all it took was one image and a few moments to effectively communicate that.

Communication really is the key word here. One of the bedrocks of civilization is the written word. In fact, we define the beginning of history as that time during the second half of the second millennium BC when linear writing was first used. All time previous to that is pre-history. However, as a form of visual communication, the image predates text and human history is intertwined with these two methods of communication and the implications for constructing meaning embedded within them.

Though both images and text are forms of visual communication, they use the specific capacities of the eye in different manners, some more efficient and effective than others. The eye has the ability to take in and synthesize a great deal of visual information from numerous sources at the same time. You need not trace the outline of every continent with your eyes on the Peters Map to understand that the shapes have changed. You even instinctively know which continents have become larger or smaller. In contrast to the gestalt-like comprehension of images, the efficiency of visual communication is under-utilized in text. With the written text, the eye is channeled into a linear progression of words; one at a time; one after another. Meaning is constructed progressively, each word combines in succession with others to assemble a final meaning at its conclusion.

This difference in use of the capacity of the eyes is well illustrated in a comparison between the two major sign languages: American Sign Language and The Language of the Deaf. American Sign Language translates individual written and spoken words into signs, which are strung together sequentially to construct meaning. A person using this language must use the same number of signs as words that would be used if they were speaking verbally. The ear, unlike the eye, can only hear one sound clearly at a time. But when communicating with the eyes, a person is not limited to receiving and understanding one discreet word at a time. The Language of the Deaf has signs that convey entire concepts and are heavily reinforced with body language and facial expression. The eye has the ability to comprehend and synthesize all the visual cues of the Language of the Deaf to construct meaning, but must methodically plod through individual sign after individual sign in American Sign Language.

Like American Sign Language, written text itself constructs meaning in discreet units. It is almost digital in the sense that you either use the word, or you don’t; it’s a one or it’s a zero. You can modify it with an adjective, but unlike an image, you cannot “take that verb and desaturate it by 15 percent.”(3) However, this rigidity serves it well, as there is little room for misinterpretation of meaning. While all written languages have dictionaries, there is no consensus on the hard and fast meaning of imagery and symbols. “Images are not ‘denoting’ symbol-complexes such as numbers, for instance, but ‘connoting’ symbol-complexes: images offer room for interpretation.”(4)

Czech theorist Vilém Flusser postulates that text and images are two opposing paradigms of communication. As the structure of our methods of communication determine our methods of constructing meaning, both images and text can be said to be paradigms of thought. Flusser identifies a few historical events as hugely significant in this dialectic of visual communication: Gutenberg’s advent of the printing press, the Enlightenment or general Age of Reason and the advent of photography, or, the technical image.(5)

Before the Enlightenment, the primary method visual information was conveyed to the illiterate masses was through images. The great Gothic Cathedrals in France are perhaps the most spectacular and successful medieval multi-panel screen installations ever created. The stained glass windows at Chartres and Reims are fantastically effective at communicating the Biblical information they were intended to convey.

In contrast, the printing press allowed texts to be cheaply produced and distributed en mass. Flusser argues that this laid the bedrock for the dissemination of empirical knowledge that was the Enlightenment.(6) With the beginning of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume saw themselves as leading humanity away from tradition and towards progress using linear, logical and empirical reasoning as their organizing principle. The sciences and then the social sciences revolutionized the way humanity saw and organized itself and this knowledge was disseminated from Europe to the rest of the world through the printed word.

In turn, by the 19th Century, enlightenment ideas had created a “movement towards compulsory public education” and this written word was now comprehensible to much of the masses as literacy grew and grew.(7) The tradition of the church, communicated in images, had truly been eclipsed by the primacy of progress and causal reason. This in turn, was driven philosophically and disseminated tangibly by the written word.

But with the democratization of literacy came its reaction: the hermetic text, filled with specialized nomenclature and undecipherable by the general public. It was at this time, the advent of photography – and thus technical imagery – attempted to perform a number of roles. First, to re-introduce images into daily life; second, “to render visible the subliminal magic inherent in cheap texts”; and third, to render hermetic texts imaginable.(8) Flusser makes a number of familiar arguments positioning images and photography firmly within the postmodern tradition, but in none does he argue that technical images have succeeded in fulfilling any of their three intentions. Indeed, images have regained the informational value once reserved solely for text, but their meaning and context are surrounded by so much ambiguity, it necessitates the question: who pulls the strings?

While images have undermined the notion of object-value in exchange for bolstering the notion information-value, they have not re-introduced traditional images into daily life. Rather, they substitute traditional images with endless reproductions, eventually creating an image-saturated world of copy upon copy, where there exists no original, echoing Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra. In fact, Flusser goes on to argue that the world of post-historic, technical images is almost entirely controlled by a powerful hegemonic “apparatus”.

Photographers are functionaries of an apparatus which, if analysis is extended back far enough, reaches into capital, corporations, politics and economics, a nested series of black boxes each governed by an elite of functionaries who nonetheless are prisoners of their own apparatus.(9)

This is where the hegemonic proportions of this apparatus begin to become clear: even those working against the power structures of the apparatus, end up working within it, and thus supporting its continued dominance. But this is also where Flusser begins to sound paranoid.

While there is no denying that nested powers have vested interests, to believe that there exists some sort of overarching overt coordination between powers political, economic and ideological seems a stretch at best. Even to say that the hegemonic co-ordination is inherent to our society and no individual player can change it is a bit over-deterministic.

However, in identifying this image apparatus, Flusser links communication and the goals of so many theorists – true human emancipation. It is obvious that images communicate in ways entirely different from the written word. Where text is the embodiment of linear reason, images have the ability to inform with great depth in an instant: Gestalt. While one must be literate to understand the written passage, the great majority of images can be read (with varying degrees of success) by anyone. You need not be wholly familiar with all the cultural vernacular that appears in a photograph to understand it. Familiarity with the collective image bank that invests meaning in images will help to read a photograph with greater depth, but it is not a prerequisite.

In linear thinking, only the complexity of over-determination allows anyone to be free: we act as if we were not conditioned because the causalities operating on us are complex beyond our understanding. But in the spatial (surface) logic of the image, everything is based on chance, and any order is circumscribed by entropy which subsumes every improbability into probability. In such a realm of existential absurdity, where could freedom lie?(10)

Flusser posits that photographers and image makers lie at the center of this struggle for freedom. If, in making images, photographers can demonstrate the deterministic nature of both the apparatus they use and the social structures that give it meaning – in essence, allowing the audience to see the strings that control the puppets - then they have succeeded in asserting a degree of autonomy. However, as much as this apparatus serves the hegemonic powers-that-be, it also constitutes the superego dictionary, our collective image bank, that informs the symbols we use to communicate. This allows us to navigate the entropy of the surface logic of the image. To break free of this apparatus entirely would be to sacrifice any agreed upon meaning – no matter how ambiguous – in the language that is imagery.

Sources

1.) Cubitt, Sean, Review of 4 Vilém Flusser Books, Leonardo Digital Reviews, MIT, Apr. 2004.
www.mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/reviews/apr2004/flusser_cubitt.html
2.) Flusser, Vilém, Towards A Philosophy Of Photography. European Photography, Göttingen, West Germany, 1984.
3.) Peters, Arno, Peters Atlas of the World. Longman Group, Essex, England, 1989. (this is the source for all the imagery accompanying the paper.)
4.) Polidori, Robert, Metropolis. Metropolis Books, New York, 2004.

Endnotes

(1) Flusser, Vilém, Towards A Philosophy Of Photography. European Photography, Göttingen, West Germany, 1984. Pg. 6.
(2) Peters, Arno, Peters Atlas of the World. Longman Group, Essex, England, 1989. Pg. 6.
(3) Polidori, Robert, Metropolis. Metropolis Books, New York, 2004. Pg. 142.
(4) Flusser, Vilém, Towards A Philosophy Of Photography. European Photography, Göttingen, West Germany, 1984. Pg. 6.
(5) Ibid. Pg. 9.
(6) Ibid. Pg. 13.
(7) Ibid. Pg. 13.
(8) Ibid. Pg. 13.
(9) Cubitt, Sean, Review of 4 Vilém Flusser Books, Leonardo Digital Reviews, MIT, Apr. 2004.
www.mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/reviews/apr2004/flusser_cubitt.html
(10) Ibid.