The Image-World Summary and Analysis

The concluding chapter of the text often relies heavily upon philosophical developments made in prior chapters. The central consideration of the chapter concerns the interplay between reality and images of reality. The text presupposes the rather flimsy paradigm that at some supernatural or metaphysical level images are, or become, or supersede reality. The only particularly supportive evidences offered for this supposition is that some primitive tribes view portrait photography as an aggressively invasive form of "soul-stealing" and that some philosophers—namely Balzac—writing shortly after the advent of photography considered photographs to be somehow permanently invasive of the process of reality. Setting aside this flaw of logic, the chapter develops the relationship between reality and images in interesting ways.

The text asserts that modern society prefers images to things—in fact, the text posits that this...