The Dialectical Image: Kant, Marx and Adorno

Abstract

For the intellectuals, the philosophers and the priests, the Word has always been favoured over the Image. Since Plato’s parable of the cave of shadows helping to enslave the credulous, the Image has been associated with in-authenticity, manipulation, the transient and contingent, the feeble-minded and the masses. There has been a theological dimension to this distaste for the Image. For Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, the Image, which is by definition a finite thing, is singularly ill-equipped to represent something as infinite as God (Hobbes 2006: 34–35); hence the prohibition on Graven Images in the Jewish religion. The Word, by contrast, seemed to belong to the Mind, not matter that could decompose; it was Universal, not particular; its written manifestation belonged for a long time as the exclusive property of the ruling classes. In this context the Image threatened in effect to transfer the property of the ruling class — its cognitive concepts and moral ideas — to the masses in a form they could master. For Benjamin, this was one of the implications of the increasing mechanical reproduction of art in the 20th century: ‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition […] in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced’ (Benjamin 1999a: 215).