by Fabio La Rocca
Gaston Bachelard’s claim that “the image can only be studied by the image” encapsulates the difficulty of theorising a phenomenon that is at once epistemic, symbolic and affective. If, as Georg Simmel argued, every epoch must be grasped through its “style,” then the current conjuncture is marked by a specifically oculocentric orientation. Postmodernity is less a discursive formation than a visual regime: a social order in which images proliferate, circulate, and mediate collective life.
The primacy of vision is not, of course, unprecedented. Simmel’s well-known analysis of “the glance” already pointed to the sociological force of the eye in establishing relations of recognition and distance. John Berger’s formulation that “seeing comes before words” (1972) further underscores the ontological priority of the visual. What distinguishes the present is the scale and density of visual experience: contemporary sociality is immersed in a continuous flood of imagery that both reflects and constitutes its “structure of feeling”.
Historically, Western thought often treated the image with suspicion. The iconoclastic tendencies of monotheism, reinforced by Cartesian rationalism, subordinated imagination to the categories of reason and consigned images to the domain of illusion or irrationality. Gilbert Durand and Michel Maffesoli have shown that this distrust was not incidental but structural: the imaginary was systematically excluded from epistemic legitimacy. Only with the crisis of positivist certainty — Bachelard’s “new scientific spirit” — was the image revalorised as a necessary dimension of thought. Durand, drawing on Bachelard and Jung, argued that the imaginary is not derivative but foundational: the reservoir of archetypes through which human cognition is organised.
This epistemological shift has profound implications. In the absence of stable “grand narratives”, images now function as collective operators of meaning. Maffesoli has described this process as imaginal reliance: the binding together of social groups through shared symbolic forms. Images do not merely represent reality; they enact it, producing bonds of belonging within what Maffesoli terms the “neo-tribal” configurations of postmodernity.
The phenomenological dimension of this process is crucial. Husserl’s definition of phenomenology as the study of what appears (phainomenon) locates the image at the threshold of consciousness, mediating between subject and world. Durand elaborates this function by emphasising the image as a “dynamic factor of mental rebalancing,” a psychosocial trace that conserves cultural memory. To engage with images, then, is to engage with the very conditions of appearing.
At the level of semiotics, the image also operates metaphorically. Charles Sanders Peirce recognised metaphor as a mode of meaning-production, and later thinkers from Goffman to Barthes extended this logic to the visual domain. Barthes’ analysis of an advertisement for pasta famously demonstrated that even a still image condenses entire semantic fields. The image is not a transparent reflection but a dense “visual metaphor” through which social relations are articulated.
Yet beyond representation, the image performs an act of monstration: it makes present, here and now, what it depicts. As Schutz and later traditions of interpretive sociology observed, everyday life is constituted by such immediate appearances. In this sense, images are not secondary but co-extensive with lived reality. They are affectively charged, generating what Jameson described as “intensities” — pre-discursive tonalities that orient collective experience. Rabot thus identifies the image as a “vector of sociality,” a medium that both encodes and enacts communal feeling.
This proliferation has provoked anxieties about excess, crystallised in the maxim that “too many images kill the image.” However, such quantitative critiques obscure the qualitative function of images as mediators. Henry Corbin’s notion of the angelic image, inherited from Islamic philosophy and integrated into the Eranos tradition, underscores this mediating role. For Maffesoli, the image occupies a mesocosm — an intermediate realm between microcosm and macrocosm — where social meaning is generated and sustained.
The technological intensification of image production and circulation (especially via digital media) has only deepened this condition. Images today constitute not an adjunct to textual discourse but a parallel system of knowledge. Indeed, as several authors have suggested, contemporary culture may be understood as a “fusion” of text and image into hybrid narrative forms. To ignore the visual is therefore to misrecognise the very texture of postmodern life.
The consequences are ontological as well as sociological. Edgar Morin (1982) insisted that the image simultaneously constitutes the real and the imaginary; it does not simply mediate between them. Valentina Grassi similarly argues that images are “founders of meaning,” indispensable to the production of social reality. Durand’s concept of the musée imaginaire (1996, after Malraux) captures this saturation of cultural life by images, which transform not only modes of representation but the very fabric of collective existence.
To speak of the “society of the image” is therefore not to lament a descent into spectacle but to recognise a structural transformation in the conditions of social knowledge. As Aristotle observed in De Anima, the soul “never thinks without an image.” In our own time, this insight acquires renewed pertinence: the imaginary is not a distraction from social life but its constitutive ground. To theorise postmodernity is thus to theorise the visual regimes through which meaning, belonging, and experience are enacted.
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