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We live in an image culture, a world in which images are so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. It is said that the image has surpassed the word as the dominant mode of communication. It seems preposterous to suggest that in this modern, digital, visual culture, we might still feel the ancient, bewitching pull of images, the instinct that images possess an uncanny power or danger. Surely, this view of images is archaic; it resembles the view that motivated both idolaters and iconoclasts in earlier, supposedly more primitive, cultures. Yet I believe this ancient view of images is alive and well (although we don't acknowledge it) in the modern and ­supposedly rationalistic world of contemporary First Amendment law. In my view, First Amendment law consistently and unthinkingly favors text over image, and it does so for reasons that bear a remarkable similarity to the reasons that motivated iconoclasts throughout the history of religious and secular struggles over images.In this chapter, I explore a variety of free speech doctrines to establish that First Amendment offers greater protection for verbal as opposed to visual forms of ­representation. Curiously, this consistent preference for text over image is buried in the doctrine; assumed and almost never acknowledged, its real-world implications are dramatic. I then show that the First Amendment treatment of images echoes the approach to visual imagery that animated the biblical prohibition on graven images and the historical, religious impulse to destroy images. The view of images that motivated iconoclasts, the perception of images as invested with magic powers or indistinguishable from what they represent, persists unrecognized in contemporary First Amendment law and theory.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_8

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