CULTURE

The Rise Image of Culture

The Rise Image of Culture

Introduction

It is accurately those concealed tales in the going likeness that stimulate detractors like NYU lecturer Mitchell Stephens. In The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word, Stephens contends that the going likeness boasts a promise therapy for the “crisis of the spirit” that afflicts our humanity, and he is passionate about the detail that “the likeness is restoring the phrase as the predominant entails of mental transport.” Stephens envisions a future of discovering through synecdoche, utilising vivid and condensed images: “A half second of the Capitol may be sufficient to show the government government; a fast shot of a white-haired woman may comprise age. The part, in other phrases, will be exchanged for the entire in order that in a granted time span of time it will be likely to address a bigger number of wholes.” He extracts approvingly the proposition of video controller Ridley Scott, who declares: “Film is Twentieth Century Theater, and it will become twenty-first- 100 years writing.”

Perhaps it will. But Stephens, like other boosters of the likeness, falls short to accept what I will misplace as well as gain if this transformation succeeds. He states, for demonstration, “our descendants undoubtedly will still discover to read and compose, but they undoubtedly will read and compose less often and, thus, less well.” Language, too, will be “less accurate, less subtle,” and publications “will sustain a little, elite audience.” This, then, is the future that prompts celebration: a world where, after a century's effort to make literacy as amply accessible as possible—to make it a device for the masses—the proficiency to read and compose is one time afresh returned to the elite. Reading and composing either become what they were before prevalent education assess of privilege—or additional antiquarian preoccupations ...