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Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination
The three essays in Image , written by leading philosophers of religion, explore the modern power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological.
Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image , written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images.
Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.
Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image , written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images.
Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published September 20, 2021
About the author
Mark C. Taylor
52 books36 followersMark C. Taylor, Ph.D. (Religious Studies, Harvard University, 1973; B.A., Wesleyan University, 1968), is a philosopher of religion who chaired the Department of Religion at Columbia University 2007–2015. Previously, he was Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts), where he began his teaching career in 1973.
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September 14, 2026
This trilogy of essays is well balanced, with strong efforts by each contributor that play off each other without falling into repetition. The first essay by Taylor is a bravura survey of Western philosophy after Descartes, which rightfully circles around Kant and his account of the imagination. I found the distinction between comprehension and apprehension fruitful, and Taylor convincingly argues for the primacy of art in the human condition to bridge (but never close) the gap between the two. My only complaint is that I would like more detail on what an art of gathering pieces after the devastation of financialized and digitalized capitalism would look like.
Rubenstein's piece is a superior version of the argument in her book Astrotopia. Where that book felt more strident than supported, here her thesis is focused, fascinating, and devastating to the eschatological dreams of the technofascist ruling class. Rubenstein moves from the imagery of the space race and Tomorrowland to uncovering the logic of control that underpins such fantasies. She mordantly punctures the mealy-mouthed declamations of Musk and his erstwhile passenger Yusaku Maezawa at the press conference announcing the first proposed commercial passenger spaceflight, exposing the vapid aimlessness of their grandiose talk about taking artists to gaze upon the whole Earth from a vantage from which the environmental depredations of their sponsors is largely elided. She borrows categories from Nietzsche (the Apollonian) and Heidegger to show how "man as the measure" has meant that even hippie visions of saving the Earth issue from a colonizing logic that sees our teeming ecosphere as mere "resources" to be mastered and tended (perhaps ominously made plain in the title of the "Whole Earth Catalog"). Rubenstein throws cold water on the idea that the dominant Western culture can provide the tools to dismantle the master's house, and nods at uncovering other perspectives that won't simply replicate surburbia and billionaire command-and-control in spaaaaaace. It's a killer essay and I'm not sure what went wrong when it got expanded to book length.
The final essay by Carlson juxtaposes Levinas with Heidegger in an effort to uncover a social form of Being-towards-Death, with substantial assists from Nicholas of Cusa, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Roland Barthes. Carlson uses the hollow-face illusion of Cusa's mystical vision of God the Watcher to build out a sociality within the infinite look--the true vision must acknowledge that every individual is tracked by God's eye just as the viewer is, and thus is only fully realized in loving all as the subjects-objects of that same gaze. This comes with some neat ruminations on death masks and grief as the vehicle for moving from our own death as unthinkable to the deaths of loved ones as the heart of ethics--we come to fully love when we realize each beloved is themselves centering a web of relations of love that is irreducible to a single perspective.
Overall, this is an excellent collection of essays with a prismatic perspective on the meaning of "image" and imagination. I picked it up mainly as a fan of Rubenstein but each of the pieces makes a valuable contribution. Highly recommended.
Rubenstein's piece is a superior version of the argument in her book Astrotopia. Where that book felt more strident than supported, here her thesis is focused, fascinating, and devastating to the eschatological dreams of the technofascist ruling class. Rubenstein moves from the imagery of the space race and Tomorrowland to uncovering the logic of control that underpins such fantasies. She mordantly punctures the mealy-mouthed declamations of Musk and his erstwhile passenger Yusaku Maezawa at the press conference announcing the first proposed commercial passenger spaceflight, exposing the vapid aimlessness of their grandiose talk about taking artists to gaze upon the whole Earth from a vantage from which the environmental depredations of their sponsors is largely elided. She borrows categories from Nietzsche (the Apollonian) and Heidegger to show how "man as the measure" has meant that even hippie visions of saving the Earth issue from a colonizing logic that sees our teeming ecosphere as mere "resources" to be mastered and tended (perhaps ominously made plain in the title of the "Whole Earth Catalog"). Rubenstein throws cold water on the idea that the dominant Western culture can provide the tools to dismantle the master's house, and nods at uncovering other perspectives that won't simply replicate surburbia and billionaire command-and-control in spaaaaaace. It's a killer essay and I'm not sure what went wrong when it got expanded to book length.
The final essay by Carlson juxtaposes Levinas with Heidegger in an effort to uncover a social form of Being-towards-Death, with substantial assists from Nicholas of Cusa, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Roland Barthes. Carlson uses the hollow-face illusion of Cusa's mystical vision of God the Watcher to build out a sociality within the infinite look--the true vision must acknowledge that every individual is tracked by God's eye just as the viewer is, and thus is only fully realized in loving all as the subjects-objects of that same gaze. This comes with some neat ruminations on death masks and grief as the vehicle for moving from our own death as unthinkable to the deaths of loved ones as the heart of ethics--we come to fully love when we realize each beloved is themselves centering a web of relations of love that is irreducible to a single perspective.
Overall, this is an excellent collection of essays with a prismatic perspective on the meaning of "image" and imagination. I picked it up mainly as a fan of Rubenstein but each of the pieces makes a valuable contribution. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review