Virtual Images, Actual Reality, Ways of Seeing

This post (and the comments) over at the Constructive Curmudgeon taps into an idea I've been stewing about for awhile. It links up with a question fundamental to my current way of thinking: do digitally-created images have moral consequences?

If images have moral consequences, then it seems that there needs to be an acknowledgement of the kind of ontological reality of these images. It's fairly uncontroversial from a philosophical angle to argue that digital torture is problematic because it still resembles something in the non-virtual (real) world. This correspondence view of matching images to their referents seems to make sense. A kind of realism is necessary in order to draw meaningful (i.e., non-relative) moral conclusions. If we adopt the correspondence view, then it is equally uncontroversial to make a moral judgment about digitally-generated child pornography.

But what I want to point out is that outside of philosophical circles, realism and correspondence are not necessarily the primary ways of reading images. In fact, positing a correspondence between images and referents is viewed as relying on a parochial way of "seeing" the image--in particular, from a white, male, western perspective. Even if we acknowledge the limitations of correspondence views, saying "Yes, I am aware that the tradition locates correspondence as priveliged, but I'm going to use it anyway," can we transcend the limitations?

My film theory professor posed this problem to me in her comments on my term paper. If we emphasize a visual-epistemological system that holds to correspondence first and gender or culture second, are we limiting (or worse, ignoring) the insights of feminist or anti-colonialist film theory? How do we integrate these ideas to build a full-orbed interpretive framework?

All this (rambling?) points to the issues of (a) resuscitating a correspondence view as a meaningful way of seeing the world--a position which in fact may not need resuscitating, and (b) developing a correspondence view that translates to adequately accomodate more than it's often given credit for.

Helpful discussions of the relationship between digital images and correspondence (or "perceptual realism") are by Stephen Prince. See especially his "True Lies: Digital Images, Perceptual Realism, and Film Theory," and "Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator" in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).