In context:
Why pursue all this? Isn't it just about pictures? But images have power, they are used to control. All of us still have 'primitive' thoughts about images and their individual power over us. I sometimes think of the Second Commandment - very clear in the King James's English version: 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above,or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.' [Exodus 20:4, KJV] What did Moses know that we don't? It isn't discussed today.
Two old and respected religions have a prohibition on images (if the Middle East were truly 'fundamentalist' is wouldn't have television), but these aspects of religious life are never discussed. Islam has only recently been taken over by images (television). There weren't that many before. Its art is abstract, derived from natural forms, and influenced European Modernism through the arabesque.
The pull between idolatry and iconoclasm is something I know about. I have it myself. What would a world without images be like? But don't images help us see the world? Earlier in this book, I made a diagram trying to explain the history of the lens. Does the lens have relationships with power? If one sees that the camera was almost a secret until 1839, and that the Church had social power (controlling pictures), one can also see its power began to decline with the manufacture of cameras, and social power followed the lens into the 'media'. We now have a new revolution. Millions more cameras have been made (even on phones now) and the distribution of images is changing. The continuum is the mirror and lens. Exciting times were in the past as well.
