What Should We Remember?

JACQUES ELLUL'S PROPHETIC STATEMENT ON SEEING VS. HEARING

I came across this while preparing for a research paper. This excerpt is taken from The Humiliation of the Word, pages 122-124. Ellul may impress some people as just a hater of images in general; however, the intent of his book is not to attack the visual/imaginative, but to recover the lingual/auditory. Approach with an open mind and with patience.


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When a person is concerned with taking pictures, however, he worries about the choice of scene to be preserved (an option that separates out one piece to be remembered from the overall scene). Thus we become locked entirely into the visual problem alone. We abandon any effort at overall impression; what might have been an authentic experience is reduced to mere spectacle. Furthermore, even if you are a specialist, you become preoccupied with manipulating and fussing with the camera; the lighting and the search for the best angle lock you into a technical exercise that radically blocks out any intellectual process or reflection, the offering of yourself to the wind, the sea, or the flow of people. Even more, these concerns prevent the surging of deep exaltation in the presence of something unique; if you are a Christian, you are prevented from thanking God. No, the camera is in command. You no longer really see anything; you look at and hunt for what you are going to photograph.

When the picture is finally taken, notice that all travelers suddenly lose interest in everything else: the job to be done has been taken care of. What else could they possibly do in the midst of the ruins of the Parthenon? Suddenly they wonder what they are doing there. Once the memory has been frozen on film, they are suddenly bored. The picture diminishes enormously the experience of a trip; it externalizes it, prevents internalization, and concentrates everything on the "visual souvenir."

Looking at the picture later recalls "memories": a certain gesture or word spoken. That is all there is. It recalls no deep perception. This is obvious when one listens to the talk and conversation of people who show slides of their trips. Everything is reduced to superficialities. Just as the process of picture taking hacked off one piece of the overall reality that was to be lived, in the same way the picture, once shown, obliterates the living memory.

Memory is part of my total life. It appears and disappears, depending on the transcription of a whole world which I have assimilated and which is part of me. It is not just a product of memorization, but a progression dependent on the basis of my relationship with the reality integrated into my culture and my total experience of life. Every memory is like a many-sided and multicolored cube in an enormous mosaic.

Pictures prohibit this movement and this return. They deal with the "picturesque," which will always be the most superficial. Here sensitivity is directed to a spectacular view and nothing else. And seeing it again causes the rebirth of false memories that are purely superficial and utterly useless. Such pictures serve no good purpose.

I can just hear the angry shouts: "You know perfectly well that you forget! Pictures serve to remind you... without pictures, you will forget that you went to..., that you saw the mural of La Parisienne at...." What an enormous error! What deserves to be remembered—whatever has been lived deeply—is engraved in my being and in my memory. It changed me and made me a new person.

What about all the things I've forgotten? For it is certainly true that I have forgotten thousands of places, faces, and paintings. The things I've forgotten are simply those that meant nothing to me, those I did not live, which were just empty curiosities that remained foreign to me. They offered me nothing of value, no truth. In this case, what good is it to preserve such things on scraps of paper? I was dumbfounded by the mountains on the horizon. What picture could do anything for me? And if all I saw was a spectacle, why bother to remember it? Pictures are just an effort to prove that we really went somewhere!—that we really made the trip.

Here we have reached an essential aspect of images: in the modern identity crisis, in the midst of technical change and dispersion, images give us some certainty that we exist. Pictures assure us of our past; leafing through a picture album makes me certain that I have lived. The picture becomes the substitute for something living, just as images always do. It is the elimination of the personal and existential relationship with the world, cutting oneself off from the milieu, from other people. And it is the means of not being subject to the impact of anything new. It is also the dreamed-of substitute in terms of a false, frozen reality that takes the place of the inability to face life.

This is very symptomatic of technique: it prevents us from living but gives us the strong impression that we are living, assuring us that we are really alive! "After all," they say, "look at these faces; look at your friends. Freeze up that happy, marvelous moment: the child playing, the child looking up at you. Rediscover the faces of your dear departed ones...." What a lie. Either you loved them and their faces are engraved in you, woven into your thought, your worldview, and your daily experience, or you did not love them. In that case, what good are pictures? What good is it to hang on to these faces from a given moment, these expressions on shiny paper or film, if you do not have their absence burning within you?

Their absence is neither filled up nor ensured by looking at this picture. No, let's not have pictures of dear ones who are no longer with us. We should say with the poet (whose name I won't mention, since he isn't in fashion!): "Since the game is over, put down the cards; throw them away." The picture of these faces is a lie I tell myself, believing that I cared about these people, whereas no trace of them is left in me. It is another lie based on something visual: an image. What could you say about these people you loved? What language would be appropriate? What truth did you live because of them? What did you go through together? What of that remains with you? If you remain silent, the picture is nothing but an illusion. And if you can talk about these things, the picture should be thrown away.


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Again, it is easy to miss the point here and to think that Ellul is simply a cranky old man annoyed with modern visual culture. But the hyperbolic language (I don't actually think he's too adamant about throwing away pictures of departed loved ones) is meant to shake people out of stupor, to realize the attitudes underneath our frequent activities that we are unaware of. And in our age, it seems that we are losing more and more of the ability to hold important things in our hearts, to agonize over and to love without ceasing. 

Writing more than two decades before the advent of Facebook, Ellul's prophetic voice still rings relevant today.

Cryptic Update

INTO LIGHT OR SIN I PLUNGE

Naivety;
Hope;
Fear;
Love;
Pain;
Grit;
Reality;
Taken together, tortures
but awakens, liberates—
resurrects.