More Numerous as an Image: emblema e extinção (C2)
The animal is now more numerous as an image than as a body, and the images are thriving. It appears on flags, on petrol brands, on the shirts of teams that have never seen a forest, and in each of these appearances it signifies power, which is a curious fate for a species that is losing. Wherever the emblem is strongest, the creature is scarcest; the correlation is close enough to be embarrassing. Something in the design of our sympathy prefers the sign to the referent. A photograph of the striped flank, lit from behind, produces in the viewer an emotion indistinguishable from concern and requiring nothing of him, and this emotion is then reported, to himself, as care. Meanwhile the actual animal is a large, hungry, territorially expensive carnivore that no landscape wants next door, and the countries obliged to house it are rarely the countries printing its likeness on their currencies of feeling. One suspects the emblem is not an appeal for the animal but a compensation for it — a way of keeping the idea of wildness in circulation while the conditions for wildness are quietly withdrawn. We shall be the first civilisation to complete an extinction without ever losing sight of the face.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A tese do texto se apoia na relação entre
- A) o uso comercial não autorizado da figura do animal e a ausência de repasse dos lucros aos países que arcam com sua conservação.
- B) a força ancestral atribuída ao tigre nas culturas antigas e o esvaziamento desse sentido nas sociedades industriais contemporâneas.
- C) o custo territorial de manter grandes carnívoros e a impossibilidade técnica de conciliar conservação com ocupação humana do solo.
- D) a multiplicação da imagem do tigre e o desaparecimento do animal, funcionando o emblema como compensação simbólica que dispensa qualquer ação efetiva.
- E) a fotografia como forma superior de conhecimento do mundo natural e o declínio da observação direta dos animais em seus habitats.